This post is the transcript of the message by Rob Nash presented at the Jewish-Baptist Dialogue March 2 at the Atlanta Food Bank. The event was co-sponsored by the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship of Georgia and the American Jewish Committee of Atlanta.

You’ve given me an impossible task tonight—but not for the reasons you think.  Obviously, I speak today as a Baptist and so I only speak for myself. By the time I finish my remarks today, every Baptist in the room will have disagreed with me at some point if not with my entire presentation.  We Baptists are both blessed and cursed by this reality.  No Baptist can really speak for any other Baptist.  No Baptist church can tell another Baptist church what to believe, think or do.  Bill Clinton is Baptist, Jerry Falwell was Baptist, Martin Luther King, Jr. was Baptist, Charles Stanley is Baptist.

When you get right down to it, it is truly amazing that we can make any absolute pronouncements about anything having to do with what Baptists think or believe, much less have dialogue with folks of other faiths about stuff we don’t even agree about. 

Nevertheless I plunge ahead.  We are talking together about the light we shed—the nature of that light or mission that gives meaning and purpose to our traditions and what helps and hinders that light or mission.  For Baptists that means going back to our roots as a tradition, roots that many Baptists today are generally ignorant about. 

We have far more in common with our Jewish brothers and sisters in our early history than most people realize.  And while no one has ever sought to exterminate us, they have certainly sought to brutalize and persecute us because of the very real threat that we presented to “a Christian America.”  We are a divided people now with some of us clinging tightly to our historic origins as a people who stand for religious freedom and the separation of church and state, and others of us having departed so far from those origins that we insist that “Almighty God does not hear the prayer of a Jew” and that we yearn for the U.S. to become a Christian theocracy.  We’re a confused people.  For that I am truly sorry.  Our inability to remain true to the principles upon which we were founded have serious impact upon the lives of non-Baptists because of the power that the Christian right (composed of many misinformed Baptists) has in this country.

The truth is that we have believed . . . ardently . . . in the voluntary principle of religion.  Many of us continue to believe this and certainly all of our ancestors believed it, insisted on it and were generally imprisoned, beaten and tormented because of it.  Many of us today believe we cannot be truly Baptist unless we continue to affirm it.  It is our historic conviction that a freely chosen faith is the only valid faith.  I would argue that we are the true heirs of that early Baptist identity.

The earliest Baptists waged a holy war against religious tyranny, battling any and all who would usurp the place of God by declaring that he or she understood the mind of God and could compel religious belief by declaring what God thought about anything.  Thomas Helwys took on the king of England and Parliament.  John Clarke, Obadiah Holmes and Roger Williams did battle with the Puritan establishment in New England.  These folk insisted that compulsion in religious belief went against the most basic theological ideals of the Christian faith and ought to be absolutely avoided if one was to live life in the light of Christ.

We really cannot speak of Baptists and the light we shed or the mission and purpose of our faith unless we understand Roger Williams, that separatist Puritan, some-time Baptist and founder of the Rhode Island colony.  For me, reading Williams’ Bloudy Tenent of Persecution about once a year helps to re-focus my sense of the Baptist understanding of Christian mission or the light we shed.   The book was not widely read in the seventeenth century (given the fact that Parliament ordered all copies burned) but it came to have a remarkable influence upon religious liberty and the separation of church and state, particularly in the United States.

Williams couldn’t tolerate compulsion in religious belief, saying it was tantamount to requiring “an unwilling spouse . . . to enter into a forced bed.”  He detested the fact that people who did not believe in God were forced to add the words “so help me God” to public oaths.  He said that the Massachusetts colonists had stolen the land from Native Americans who ought to be adequately compensated for it.  By 1635, he had been expelled from Massachusetts Bay and, in time, he would wind up in Naragansett Bay where he did purchase land from the original inhabitants and eventually establish Rhode Island.  He published The Bloudy Tenent  in 1644 in London.

Williams freed God from the human mind as much as any other human being, and certainly more than most any Baptist.  Williams argued that all persons should be free from forced conformity in religious belief because only in this way can we receive truth from whatever source God utilizes to send it to us.  For this reason, I believe that Williams provides the foundation for a true understanding of the Baptist sense of mission or the light and purpose of our faith.

If we truly understand the nature of our mission or the light we seek to shed, then we Baptists must admit that the mission in which we participate is not my mission or Christian mission or the mission of any particular group of people, even Baptists—rather, it is the mission of God.  This mission is initiated and sustained by God.  We Baptists and you folks of the Jewish tradition share a powerful story—it is the story of the creation.  We can all affirm based upon Genesis 1 and 2 that God created the universe with intentionality and purpose.  Chaos existed—formlessness, void, darkness.  Into this void, God brought order.  God had reasons for doing such a thing.  God didn’t undertake it accidentally.  God didn’t wake up bored and decide to have some fun.  No . . . God created intentionally and purposefully.

So what is this purpose?  In some ways, it is the height of presumption to try to express it.  As a sinful and fallible human being, I cannot ultimately understand or grasp the mind of God and so therefore I cannot make any absolute statements about God’s mission in the world.  If I do make such absolute statements, then I have usurped the place of God and thus provided absolute proof of my own sinful state.  Many Christians and Baptists generally ignore this reality and will gladly share with you exactly what God’s purpose is—they seem to have a better handle on it than they probably ought to have.

I can only say that it has something to do with a powerful, vast and inexpressible love.  It is first expressed in God’s relationship with Israel in the Hebrew Bible.  This documents the possibilities and challenges that come in the love relationship between the human and the divine.  There is suffering and redemption, tears and joy, frustration and accomplishment.  This love is then embodied in Jesus Christ.  In Jesus we see a concrete expression of this love, a translation of it into human history.  He is, for us, a gift from God (a revelation, if you will) that enables us to see what real love looks like and how it acts, and the impact that it can have when it is fully expressed in the world.

For us, Jesus expresses the nature of God’s mission in the world—what it looks like when it is lived out, how we should pattern our own lives in working alongside God in that mission.  His is a mission of justice.  His is a mission of reconciliation.  His is a mission of grace and mercy in the context of a world full of hatred and venom.  The mission calls us to come and die—i.e. to take up our crosses daily by embodying in our own lives the love of God to such an extent that we desire the good of others more than we desire our own good.

In this sense, it really isn’t much fun to work alongside God’s mission in the world.  Many of us Christians and Baptists get this completely wrong—we think it makes life fun and easy and God works everything out for us.  All we have to do is believe certain doctrinal formulations about Jesus, and we are “saved.”  Faith becomes mental assent to doctrine and thus is twisted and distorted.  Mission becomes convincing others to make a similar mental assent.  Over time, we lose our way.  We believe ideas about Jesus instead of following in the way of Jesus.
I used to have those smart students at Shorter College in Rome, Georgia when I taught religion there.  You know the ones.  They would raise a hand in class and say something like, “Dr. Nash, but what do you think about what Paul says in Romans 5:6?” (As if I had any idea what Paul says in Romans 5:6).

So I started responding like this—“You must think I read the Bible.”
And the student would say, “You don’t read the Bible?” (confirming what he already thought).
And I would say, “No and I would suggest you not read it either because if you keep reading the thing and you keep doing what it says to do then it is gonna kill you.  You’re gonna die.”

Contrary to public perception among most Baptists and Christians, the mission of God is not about personal salvation and heaven and pie in the sky by and by.  The mission of God is about here and now.  It is about expressing the love of God like Jesus expressed it—in the daily grind—with hurting and broken people who need some sense of meaning and purpose in life and who have no earthly idea where to find it.

I spent this past weekend in New York City with some of our field personnel who work in the city.  In fact, they work about two blocks off Times Square.  A group of folks with HIV/Aids met us for dinner on Thursday night.  They are part of a Bible Study held over at Harmony House where they live.  They’d suspended the Bible Study so I could take them to dinner.  I watched a group of them get out of a cab in the snow and make their way into the restaurant.  They were leaning on each other.  Some were too weak to really be out in the mess.  A couple of them had canes.  You could tell one man and woman were sweet on each other.  Two of the guys were obviously in a long-term committed relationship since one of them could tell me to the day just how long they had been together.

They told their stories to me.  One guy had been in Attica prison for 40 of his 59 years.  One was hooked on crystal meth.  Another couldn’t even say what he’d done to get himself into whatever mess he had been in.  They were broken.  I don’t know what I expected to feel as I listened to them.  Previously, I would have assumed that I would feel a bit superior to them.  My life is certainly in better shape than theirs at this point.
Or is it?  For I must confess that their honest sharing of their pain and brokenness transported me to the broken places in my own life.  For them, it was the love of God that was saving them, expressed not in some heaven yet to be, but on an earth that had once been hell and that had now become hope.  They talked of God . . . but more than that, they clung to God.  God’s love had somehow reached through all the haze and dark to find them and hold them.  Somehow, the light had gotten through.  And, for them, that light had to do with God and with the meaning and purpose that God had somehow brought into their lives because of their own willingness to receive it.

What interferes with the shedding of this light or mission?  If I am perfectly honest (and I really hate to say it in this group given who is here and all of the progress that you all have made)—but, here goes . . . if I am perfectly honest, then the groups that really hurt the shedding of our light or mission in the world are Christians and the church . . . and certainly the Baptists. There are two words I’d love to get rid of when it comes to my understanding of God—the first word is the word “Christian” and the second word is the word “Church.”  These words confine our perceptions of God, restricting us to boxes.  God is about something that is bigger than the church and Christians.  We just can’t seem to grasp this.

I’d really love to be able to free God from all that—to maybe pull off what Roger Williams managed to pull off so long ago.  God is much bigger than any of us ever imagine God to be.  In Christ, I see the light of God.  That light compels me to love as Christ loves me.  I follow Jesus—I see in Jesus the love of God.  That love compels some folks with HIV/Aids to care about each other and find some meaning and purpose in the midst of the challenges of life.  That love compels groups of people to get together to worship and to work with the homeless and the sick in their communities.  It drives some folks away from this country to other parts of the world and compels them to use their gifts and abilities to make a difference.  It drives people from other parts of the world to my doorstep to minister to me.

What helps us shed that light?  Well, here is where I’m glad it is in the hands of God.  I’d hate for God’s light in the world to ultimately depend on me and my perceptions of it.  I’d hate for God’s light in the world to ultimately depend on Christians and the church.  I taught world religions at Shorter and often took students to visit mosques and synagogues just to break down some of that fear of otherness and difference.  After one Saturday service at a synagogue, the rabbi agreed to answer questions from the group.  One student raised his hand and said, “Do you ever try to get Gentiles to convert to Judaism?”  The rabbi responded with the traditional answer:  “When a Gentile first comes to me saying he or she wants to convert, I tell them they must be crazy and send them off.  I do the same thing the second time.  But if the idiot comes back for a third time, then I say okay and we begin the conversion process.”

Wouldn’t it be something if Christians should be that discriminating—and not just let any Tom, Dick, Harry or Betty in?  I can only imagine that if we had tighter membership rules, then we might actually wind up with people who really understood the mission and purpose of our faith and who actually helped it more than they hindered it.  I have a feeling than it would really help on a Sunday morning when a person wanted to become Christian if the pastor of a Baptist church would say, “What?  Have you read the Bible?  Do you know what it means to be Christian?  Are you ready to take up your cross daily and follow in the footsteps of Jesus?  And are you ready to do it here and now?”

Some would go.  But some would stay.  And those who stayed would get it.  And that would make all the difference.