Conversion to what? Conversion from what? The unanswered questions of ‘Great Commission Baptists’

The Southern Baptist Convention begins its annual meeting tomorrow in Baltimore. The SBC, Jonathan Merritt notes, is the “largest Protestant denomination” in America, with about 16 million members.

Thirty years ago, that last sentence would’ve been perceived as fightin’ words. Who you calling a denomination? For Baptists from any of our many conventions and associations, the d-word has long been an epithet — a pejorative accusation aimed at those who have forgotten what it means to be Baptists.

But the SBC has become increasingly hierarchical, formal and, well, denominational ever since the transformation and takeover by so-called conservatives began. The SBC’s former Baptist polity — always an oxymoron — made such a takeover impossible. So seizing control of denominational structures also required those “conservatives” to first create such structures. They couldn’t seize the throne until after they first established the existence of thrones to be seized.

That’s one of the strangest and most revealing things about Merritt’s interview with prominent Southern Baptist David Dockery. They both use the d-word so casually and matter-of-factly that it seems like we’re reading about an established state church somewhere with an ecclesiastical hierarchy, magisterium, and college of cardinals. And maybe we are.

I suppose that’s part of what makes the SBC’s annual meeting more newsworthy and consequential than the anarchic, non-binding gatherings of their more Baptist-y cousins.

Dockery is an interesting guy. He’s theologically “conservative” in the sense that he shares all the required theological “stances” of white evangelical theology, but he’s not a belligerent culture warrior from the Mohlerite wing of the SBC. Dockery hired my former Evangelicals for Social Action colleague David Gushee to work with him at Union University, and you can hear echoes of that perspective in this interview, even to the extent of his repeating one of ESA’s old slogans (“We need not only focus on what it means to become faithful Great Commission followers of Christ, but also Great Commandment followers of Christ who are called to love those around us”).

But in this interview, as in the SBC as a whole, the Great Commandment still seems like an afterthought to the Great Commission.

For those who don’t speak evangelicalese, that’s missionary talk and evangelism talk. It’s a reference to Jesus’ final commission to his disciples in the Gospel of Matthew (and, interestingly, only Matthew):

All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you. And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.

Again, if you’re not familiar with evangelicalese, you may not immediately recognize that references to this “Great Commission” have little to do with the actual content of Jesus’ actual words there in Matthew. Jesus charges his disciples to do four things: Go, make disciples, baptize, teach. Funny thing, though, is that this isn’t what white evangelicals usually mean when they cite the Great Commission or when they propose renaming the SBC “Great Commission Baptists” as a way of playing down the denomination’s Confederate origin. What “Great Commission” almost always means, instead, is convert — evangelize, proselytize, saved the unsaved, rescue sinners from Hell.

Here is Dockery discussing the Great Commission imperative for the SBC:

Many of us across SBC life have not recognized well the rapidly changing cultural context in which we now find ourselves, perhaps best typified by the Pew study on “the rise of the Nones.” Secondly, I think, we are all probably unaware of the incipient universalism that dominates the thoughts of many in our congregations. The combination of these two factors means that the reality of the lostness of those all around us has somehow disappeared from our thinking and thus the urgency of Great Commission efforts has taken a backseat.

I am also somewhat certain that the ongoing tensions in our midst and the ways that we have at times failed to demonstrate Christian love and unity with and toward one another in our own denominational context have not always been helpful for some in the watching world around us. In the days to come, we will need to trust the Lord to grant us much wisdom in our evangelistic outreach and strategy, courage and faithfulness in the sharing of the gospel, and sensitivity to the ways that we relate one to another within our SBC world and, also, to the changing context and culture that we have been called to serve at this time.

Clear away the throat-clearing chatter in there and the focus comes to this: “evangelistic outreach and strategy … the sharing of the gospel.”

That gospel, again, is a separate thing from the greatest commandment and a separate thing from “everything that I have commanded you” — from the Sermon on the Mount, the sheep and the goats, and all the rest. But take all that away and what is left? Once we decide that the vast majority of what we read in the Gospels is something separate from and different than “the gospel” we are sent to share, then what remains to be shared?

Conversion. But that isn’t an answer. That’s just a turtles-all-the-way-down evasion of the question.

“Conversionism” is one of the defining characteristics of white evangelicalism — part of the famous “Bebbington quadrilateral” that attempts to define this amorphous stream of Protestant faith. But conversionism is an empty set, a cipher, a blank slate. It is meaningless unless we can first answer two unasked and unanswered questions: Conversion to what? And conversion from what?

The very act of asking those questions highlights how impossible it is to separate “evangelistic outreach and strategy” and “the sharing of the gospel” from all that other stuff relegated to an optional bonus package of yesbutofcoursealsotoo the Great Commandment to love God and neighbor (and therefore to love enemy, and outcast, and stranger, alien, widow, orphan, prostitute, publican, poor, oppressed …). Asking those questions illuminates how very wrong things can go when we start trying to get people into Heaven instead of trying to bring Heaven to people.

Dockery makes this clear when he warns against an “incipient universalism” that undermines the “urgency” of conversionism. Such urgency, “courage and faithfulness” can only exist, he argues, if we truly appreciate “the reality of the lostness of those all around us.”

That, you’ll notice, is Dockery’s implicit answer to those questions above. In a word, Hell. This is what he means by “the gospel” — being saved from Hell. This is what people must be converted from and what people must be converted to: to not going to Hell.

Dockery cannot imagine any reason that a universalist would find the Great Commission compelling. If no one is really in peril of being eternally “lost” to everlasting torture in Hell, then why should we bother following these final instructions from Jesus?

But again, Dockery’s argument only makes sense if we regard talk of the “Great Commission” as a bit of white evangelical jargon unrelated to the actual words that Matthew’s Gospel actually attributes to Jesus. Jesus doesn’t mention Hell. Jesus tells his disciples to make more disciples, and to “teach them to obey everything that I have commanded you.” Hunger and thirst for justice. Turn the other cheek. Lend without seeking repayment. Forgive as you have been forgiven. Love your enemies. Feed the hungry, tend the sick. Take the side of the prisoner and the outcast and the oppressed. Jubilee jubilee jubilee.

That’s either urgent or it ain’t. And Hell has got nothing to do with it.

Here’s a simple thought experiment for David Dockery and for all those who share his concern that “incipient universalism” undermines the gospel. Ask yourself, is this true for you, personally? If you somehow were to learn, with certainty, that there were no such thing as Hell, would you personally cease to be a disciple of Jesus? Would you renounce your own baptism and turn your back on everything that Jesus commanded his followers to do? Would you lose your zeal for the Great Commission — the actual Great Commission there in Matthew? What would actually change in your faith — the content, substance and daily experience of your faith — if it turned out there was no Hell?

Or, to put it even more bluntly, is escape from Hell really the main reason you decided to follow Jesus?

I suspect it wasn’t. I hope it wasn’t.