The Diocese of Dallas met for a leadership day last week, and it was fabulous. Full disclosure: I'm biased. I have great colleagues in this diocese, and we don't see each other enough. I enjoy the opportunities we have to share time together. Even before we get to whatever's on the docket for a given gathering, our time holds the gift of spiritual kinship and community.
That said, last Friday's agenda was especially great. In the first presentation, Dr. Lauren Whitnah of Nashotah House brought insights from key figures of the Middle Ages to bear on the church's charge, today, to remember God's love for us and grow in love for those around us. In the second presentation, Dr. Kristen Deede Johnson of Wycliffe College drew from scripture and Augustine to help us find a way forward in an age of anxiety, anger, and fear. What Dr. Johnson shared toward the end of her lecture was both new and a blessing to me. I share it here in the event it may be one or both for you, as well.
Dr. Johnson shared with us that the term "Great Commission" only appears in Christian thought and conversation in and after 1840. That's right, 1840! Prior to that time, Matthew 28:16-20 was used to think about the presence of Christ (lo, I am with you always), baptism, and the Trinity, but the verse wasn't understood as marching orders for the Church until around 1840. Wilder yet, the phrase "Great Commission" doesn't appear in Bible headings until the Schofield Bible in 1908. That's right, those bolded headings in your Bible didn't come with the original, so they're always a kind of editorial nudge.
So, the connection of the Great Commission to Matthew 28:16-20 wasn't made official until 17 years before my Granny was born. Who knew? Interestingly, and significantly, the advent of the Great Commission roughly parallels what my former theology professor called the "invention" of rapture theology between 1840-1850. To repeat, the first 1800 years of the church did not have either a Great Commission or a rapture.
The latter was not news to me, but the former was. Moreover, that both came into being about the same time turns out to be not accidental. Rapture theology, as characterized by Dr. Johnson, holds that things will get worse and worse until Jesus comes to save a remnant at the end, and then the end happens. Very often, this way of thinking about the earth and salvation results in a kind of resignation to the demise of the material world. Perversely, this kind of thinking sometimes leads Christians to devalue things like creation care and justice work on the basis of their faith. If you can't do anything to avoid the sad truth that it'll all go to hell in the end, cut your losses and make sure you can at least get as many folks to heaven as you can. (In fact, a small minority of Christians believe in making things worse in order to bring about the end more quickly.)
All of this is an important background for the Great Commission. In the light of a rapture-style worldview (it only gets worse and things here are not of lasting importance), the Great Commission becomes a well-intentioned attempt to get as many people off the sinking ship as possible, before it all goes down. An extension of this logic develops in the 1940s via the Navigators, when the language of multiplication relative to discipleship is introduced, again for the sake of getting as many as possible off of the sinking boat of the world.
A brief timeout.
Dr. Johnson wasn't saying that evangelism or discipleship are bad things (she's a big fan of both - as am I!). What she was saying is that this largely disembodied, gnostic framework for understanding evangelism and discipleship is a pretty recent innovation. Prior to the formalization of these developments, salvation to heaven and work to improve material conditions on earth - for people and all of creation - were understood to be of one cloth. Indeed, the founding president of my alma mater, Wheaton College (nicknamed "the Harvard of Evangelicalism"), was a dedicated abolitionist. Under Jonathan Blanchard's leadership, Wheaton College was a part of the Underground Railroad, because talking about freedom in Christ was of one piece with working for the freedom of slaves on the earth. But the late 1800s saw a kind of separation of salvation from the soil, and the conceptualization of the Great Commission was one of the ways this separation was affected.
As a kid, Matthew 28:20, a portion of the Great Commission in question, was the closest thing to a favorite, or "life", verse I ever had. It remains so today, "Lo, I am with you always." This verse seems to me to be the promise on which our faith depends. On which it all depends. The God of all things has chosen not to be except to be God with us. And we discover this determination most fully in the person of Jesus.
But the logic of multiplication that I later discovered within some strands of the Christian faith seemed to suggest a kind of growth for the sake of growth that was both circular and primed for scarcity. The job of disciples was to make disciples and there could never be enough. But what was the content of discipleship? In other words, if the world were to be all joined to Jesus, what would be the quality and character of the life God's People would share? These questions haunted me. And not less when I came upon the work of the Rt. Rev. Dr. David Zac Niringiye, Assistant Bishop of Kampala in the Church of Uganda. In an interview with Christianity Today's Andy Crouch, he said,
We need to begin to read the Bible differently. Americans have been preoccupied with the end of the Gospel of Matthew, the Great Commission: "Go and make." I call them go-and-make missionaries. These are the go-and-fix-it people. The go-and-make people are those who act like it's all in our power, and all we have to do is "finish the task." They love that passage! But when read from the center of power, that passage simply reinforces the illusion that it's about us, that we are in charge.
I would like to suggest a new favorite passage, the Great Invitation. It's what we find if we read from the beginning of the Gospels rather than the end. Jesus says, "Come, follow me. I will make you fishers of men." Not "Go and make," but "I will make you." It's all about Jesus. And do you know the last words of Jesus to Peter, in John 21? "Follow me." The last words of Simon Peter's encounter are the same as the first words.
Can we begin to read those passages that trouble us, that don't reinforce our cultural centeredness? Let's go back to Matthew 25 and read it in the church in America, over and over. Who are Jesus' brothers? The weak, the hungry, the immigrant workers, the economic outcasts. Let's read the passage of this woman who pours ointment over Jesus. Let's ask, who is mostly in the company of Jesus? Not bishops and pastors! The bishops and pastors are the ones who suggest he's a lunatic! Who enjoys his company? The ordinary folk, so ordinary that their characterization is simply this: "sinners." Can we begin to point to those passages?
Yet this ability to read different passages, to read the Bible differently, won't happen until people are displaced from their comfort zones. I thank the Lord for deep friendships he has given to me beyond my comfort zone, beyond my culture, beyond my language. Until that happens, we will all be tribal, all of us.
Come, follow me, and I will make you. This is the promise of Jesus for the People of God. Not that we would be saviors to others, but that God would make all things new, brought together and healed, strangers into friends, of one Body and belonging, in and through Jesus our Lord.
I'm trying now to land this wandering reflection, and the potential landing strips are many. I'll settle, then, on 3 and ask your help to grow the list from here:
- History helps us recognize innovations. For example, Christian care for the earth is not a hippie innovation, as I have been sometimes told, but a return and repair of an innovation (separating salvation from soil) that occurred in the faith before any of us came along.
- Reading with others, especially different others, helps us identify invisible cultural assumptions that may be blocking our full participation in the invitation of Jesus.
- We should always seek to read the Bible as one. So that Go, make is read alongside, Come, follow, and, maybe most importantly, Love one another, just as I have loved you.
