Evangelism

Say nothing about discipleship

eejoseph, , , ,

Theologians and many Christians have been calling Matthew 28:19-20 the Great Commission, and a precious few seem to have given the text a sober reflection.  If you think that all Christians have to go into all the world, doing the thing unveiled in Matthew 28:19-20 you are drinking your soup with your nose.  If you believe that the church exists to make hellbound proselytes then we can call you scribe, Pharisee and hypocrite (Matthew 23:15).  I want to expose the illiterate experts’ juvenile quest for commands to support the obsession for ways to Lord it over God’s people.

Eyeballing the text

The idea that believers can pray and approach Bible reading and acquire optimal accuracy was never a serious  road for anyone desiring the office of a bishop.  Once an aspiring bishop realizes that the church and its literature did not stake out ground in the 19th century the much more effective means of reading and understanding the Bible became attractive.  Bishops of most denominations are required to learn biblical Hebrew and Greek.  Biblical studies are juvenile and shallow as long as translations of the last 400 years are the materials in hand.

Grab a grammar hammer not a seer peer

Not even when the witness is authenticated by signs and wonders the most important knowledge in the pipeline is still the text of the New Testament, and the closer one gets to the early manuscripts the healthier the doctrine.  So when evangelism gets described using a model from the life of Messiah Yeshua we have to initiate a rescue using the grammar of the Greek New Testament.

Parts of speech: participles and imperatives

Imperatives are the forms of verbs that we use to (a) tell someone what to do or (b) ask someone to do something.  There is only one imperative in Matthew 28:19-20, yet all the verbs are treated as imperatives.

  • Go: a participle, a secondary tense in the sentence
  • Teach/disciple: the true grammatical imperative
  • Baptizing: a participle, a secondary tense in the sentence
  • Teaching: a participle, a secondary tense in the sentence

Punctiliar versus Linear

Punctiliar and linear kinds of action are clearly contained in the aorist and present tenses respectively. We make a genuine meme of these two types with a dot “•” and a line ‘-“.  They represent respectively a finished action and an ongoing action. It is a lazy mentality that wants to conflate the verbs of Matthew 28:19-20 into a package that ignores discipling.  That is the avoidance of textual reality that enables a commitment to a kind of evangelism that serves discriminatory practices exactly as James and his Pharisee allies brought to bear on the church as she began her mission to the Gentiles. 

Sign them up

First, by taking the aorist matheteusate as a foil for indoctrination.  The punctiliar action of matheteusate cannot be contained in teaching a prospective convert the doctrines of the apostles. To make a disciple in one action has to be the act of enrollment. We can sign them up or make them just like us and worse.

“Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, because you travel around on sea and land to make one proselyte; and when he becomes one, you make him twice as much a son of hell as yourselves”. (Matthew 23:15)

Using the text before understanding its parts

The present participles for baptizing (baptizontes) and teaching (didaskontes) are not simply separate actions from enrolment. Participle 101 tells us that they are verbal nouns.  They define a condition; they also describe something in the same way an adjective does.  how the enrollment proceeds.  The text, after its constituent parts are properly accounted for brings us to a different conclusion than “Teach all nations, baptizing them… teaching them…”. We have to admit that the goal of Christian outreach – the application of heavenly authority (Matthew 28:18) –  is neither baptism nor teaching.

The opening participle should be treated as the fundamental framework in which discipling all nations takes place.  Having gone into the places we are sent we are to make disciples of all nations, by baptizing them and teaching them.

Vocabulary of verse 19

  • Teach is from matheteuô, which does not mean “give lessons”, and it is not describing the kind of things that happens in a classroom. 
  • Baptizing is from baptizô, its meaning is clear
  • Teaching is from didaskô, its meaning is clear from the cognate noun didaskalos

Christian outreach is not grounded in making proselytes, but in opening the door to a relationship with God the Father through faith in  the crucified and risen Christ.  It is futile to teach unbelievers, persons who have not confessed and believed in Christ.  The looming problem with teaching unregenerate persons the priorities of Christ is that they are incapable of receiving or understanding the things of the kingdom.  There are simply too many rabbit holes involved when one teaches the things of God’s Kingdom to someone who is not enrolled as a believer or follower of Christ.

Surely we recognize that Christ taught his disciples by parables, and we can see that immediately after the resurrection of Christ the disciples still had not grasped the meaning of his death and Resurrection.  So we can scratch the evangelism model that says (a) first show people you care by meeting their earthly needs (b) teach them the doctrines of the church and (c) baptize them (=accept them into church membership).  You can see how all of this avoids the critical intersections of Messianic Majesty.  Nothing is said about Christ dying and rising from the dead, or that grace by means of faith alone brings the lost and condemned into the family of God.  If our fishing or reaping evangelism is to have a face of success it cannot be making proselytes twice as bad as the fishers or reapers

Disciple-making Fancy Grade

  • Set him up as a learner: enrol him
  • Baptize him
  • Teach him what Christ  commanded

Harvest time triad

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In two of the four Gospels we find a saying about harvest time conditions with reference to gathering people to Christ. The saying in Matthew 9 and Luke 10 and defies our habits of saying yes and meaning no.  This saying is not one to dicker with.  The popular evangelism pep talk does not work. Those soul winners who have reengineered conversion routines will find no socket in the harvest time proclamation for plugging in their membership drives. 

Then He said to His disciples, “The harvest is plentiful, but the workers are few. (Matthew 9:37) “Therefore beseech the Lord of the harvest to send out workers into His harvest.” (Matthew 9:38)

And He was saying to them, “The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few; therefore beseech the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into His harvest. (Luke 10:2)

Unmistakable interpretation clues

Men … de (μεν . . .  δε) is a construction in New Testament Greek that identifies a contrasting pair of propositions or conditions.  In English it corresponds precisely with “On the one hand… on the other”.  Men is seldom translated and de comes out in translation as “but’.  So in our example from Luke chapter 10 and Matthew chapter 9 the contrasting conditions are plentiful harvest and few workers.

Here are two examples of the full translation of men . . . de as “on the one … hand but on the other”.

The gift is not like that which came through the one who sinned; for ON THE ONE HAND the judgment arose from one transgression resulting in condemnation, BUT ON THE OTHER hand the free gift arose from many transgressions resulting in justification. (Romans 5:16)

23. The former priests, ON THE ONE HAND, existed in greater numbers because they were prevented by death from continuing, 24. but Jesus, ON THE OTHER HAND, because He continues forever, holds His priesthood permanently. (Hebrews 7:23-24)

The harvest triad verse and men … de sentence.

The triad designation is my own effort to insist that the appearance of the word for harvest – θερισμός – three times means that this saying should be treated as harvest doctrine.

ἔλεγεν ⸀δὲ πρὸς αὐτούς· Ὁ μὲν θερισμὸς πολύς, οἱ δὲ ἐργάται ὀλίγοι· δεήθητε οὖν τοῦ κυρίου τοῦ θερισμοῦ ὅπως ⸂ἐργάτας ἐκβάλῃ⸃ εἰς τὸν θερισμὸν αὐτοῦ. (Luke 10:2)

There are two clauses [thought blocks] in the verse making up one sentence.  The first clause addresses the situation,  namely plentiful harvest and few workers.  Separating the plentiful harvest from the few workers destroys the men . . . de construction.  That is an example of doing violence to the text.

Try separating Christ dying in the flesh from his  being made alive in the spirit as another men … de construction framed the Lord’s reconciling death.  If Christ and all humans are spirit beings this saying by Peter is pure hogwash.

Problem and solution

For Christ also died for sins once for all, the just for the unjust, so that He might bring us to God, having been put to death in the flesh, but made alive in the spirit; (1 Peter 3:18)

This harvest time saying does not leave a lot of room for people to deny the problem or find workarounds for the solution. Even with that kind of clarity – big harvest, few workers, pray – there is the problem of ignoring what harvest means.  Do not keep saying that harvesting is evangelism, is whatever we do to proselytize.  You cannot turn working with ripe fruit or grain into plowing, planting seeds, watering the plants, or pruning.  It is sheer madness to do so.

What does a plentiful harvest look like?

Finally, let us examine the dimensions of the problem and the solution. If the Lord was saying 2,000 years ago that fields were ripe for harvest, we can conclude that Christians have spent the last 2,000 years acting as if our task is divided into planting seeds, watering crops and do some weeding and applying fertilizer? Does not harvest mean gather the ready produce? The first example of harvest in the church was on the day of Pentecost when Peter’s preaching resulted in 3,000 souls added to the body of Christ.  The plentiful harvest, the Lord of the harvest and the unfinished harvest are beckoning.