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Denying the Great Commission:
“Whoever believes in the Son of God has the testimony in himself.
Whoever does not believe God has made him a liar, because he has not believed
in the testimony that God has borne concerning his Son. And this
is the testimony: that God gave us eternal life, and this life is in his
Son. Whoever has the Son has life; whoever does not have the Son
of God does not have life.”
In the May/June 2005 issue of, Horizons: The Magazine for Presbyterian Women, Dr. W. Eugene March, the A.B. Rhodes Professor Emeritus of Louisville Theological Seminary published an article titled, “The Bible and Our Non-Christian Neighbors”, where he briefly set out his theological and biblical case explaining why he believes that Christians need not share the Gospel of Jesus Christ with our non-Christian neighbors. In his article, Dr. March used both reflections from his analysis of history and several biblical illustrations as he offered a theological analysis of our present cultural context and as he proposed his response. To not only his underlying conclusions but to his analysis of history and the Bible itself, I offer this response. In the process of making his arguments, Dr. March makes a number of assertions that not only trivialize our history and distort the Scriptures themselves, but he also denies the foundational principle of our faith: namely that Jesus Christ calls all who follow him to, “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.” (Matt.28:19 ESV) Dr. March first does great injustice to the history of Presbyterian evangelism and missions in his article. After outlining his view of history, Dr. March asserts that Christian missions have been largely unsuccessful and imperialistic at best. He paints a picture of missionaries as being tools of imperial powers at worst and naïve destroyers of culture at best. After belittling the efforts of most of the missionaries in our past in this dismissive manner, Dr. March then asks the central question of his essay: “But does the faith or the Bible actually require the conversion of all humankind for the church to be faithful to its calling?” To answer this question Dr. March briefly mentions both Matthew 28:19 and John 14:6 and then dismisses them with a wave of his pen, “…much of the Bible suggests another stance”. With that particular hermeneutical principle Dr. March trots out the old, tired, modernist warhorse: the assertion that Bible is a conflicted jumble of opinion, with some things that are the Word and some that are just words. In doing so, he violates a foremost assertion of Reformed theology, namely that the Bible, in all 66 books, is nothing less than the Word of God. As the Westminster Larger Catechism answers in classic terms: “The scriptures manifest themselves to be the word of God, by their majesty and purity; by the consent of all the parts, and the scope of the whole, which is to give all glory to God; by their light and power to convince and convert sinners, to comfort and build up believers unto salvation: but the Spirit of God bearing witness by and with the scriptures in the heart of man, is alone able fully to persuade it that they are the very word of God.”Apparently to Dr. March, there is a conflict within the Bible as to sound doctrine and right teaching about Christian living. To Dr. March it seems that the Bible has been reduced to a set of conflicted authors, divided in witness and confused in principles. But this is not the view of the noble and historic Reformed principle of Sola Scriptura (Scripture Alone). In his lack of willingness to deal with the “whole counsel of God” (Acts 20:27), Dr. March strays outside the bounds of not only Reformed theology, but Protestant faith. After then dismissing the words of Scripture that conflict with his main point, Dr. March then jumps into some Isaiah (to refute the words of Jesus!), as he attempts to illustrate his view of God’s call to be at peace with all faiths and nations. This then gets us to his main text—the Good Samaritan parable of Luke. To Dr. March, the parable of Luke 10 is a text that tells all how to behave towards one another, irrespective of religious outlook. Citing Ruth and I Corinthians 13, he briefly outlines that we are called just to love everyone and seek peace…and leave it at that. His central idea is that God is calling all peoples, of all nations and religions to the “peaceable kingdom”. For him, this is the Good News for all faiths. The question for Dr. March is: does this parable of Jesus (or anything else in the Bible for that matter) refute Jesus’ claim elsewhere in the Gospels that all are called to repent and believe in the nearness of the Kingdom---the very Kingdom that Jesus himself ushers in? Can you have a peaceable kingdom without Jesus Christ as the center? Do the biblical calls for justice, calls to peacemaking and calls for reconciliation really conflict with the exclusive claims that Jesus makes of himself and his mission? (See John 3, John 16, etc.) Dr. March chooses to think that these exclusive claims of Jesus in the Bible in regards to salvation are in conflict with what Dr. March calls the, “implicit message of the Bible that all the world belongs to God, the gracious and loving shepherd of all”. This may be a message in the Bible, as we confess that God alone is sovereign Lord of the creation, but where is this in conflict with evangelism? In the previous two thousand years, no Christian teacher has ever concluded that the Great Commission of Jesus Christ to his disciples, paired with the exclusive claims of the Lordship of Christ, conflict with God’s sovereign purpose for humanity or God’s love for the world. However, Dr. March makes this claim, however subtly. Thankfully he fails to prove his case with either the Bible or reason. The problem here is that what Dr. March is proposing in his essay is in conflict with not only the whole counsel of God speaking in the Bible by the illumination of the Spirit, but he is also in conflict with our entire Reformed confessional theology. Dr. March proposes an elitist, unbiblical version of faith, one that denies any reading of the Bible that would have us make truth claims or offer our Savior to anyone else of another faith or worldview. It seems that Dr. March would have the Church become a club for Christians only, while the rest of the world chooses its own path. This is a refutation of everything that we have ever held to be true and it would lead us to our demise as a true Church -- the Body of Christ. Yes, in offering the Gospel to others we might offend. Yes, we
might even be killed for doing so, as so many of our brothers and sisters
are suffering as they share this Good News in other places even now.
However, Reformed Christians believe that God is working out God’s will
in this world through the Church and that by God’s grace, His precious
chosen ones will be found and come to faith in Jesus Christ as Lord and
Savior…each and every one of them. We are not the initiators of this,
we are the participants-- as God works out God’s sovereign will in and
through the Body of Christ, as we are a light to the world and messengers
of the Truth.
*The Rev. Toby L. Brown, is Pastor of First Presbyterian Church, Cuero,
Texas
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