Daily Archives: February 27, 2009

Thank You, Mark Driscoll

Posted by on February 27, 2009 28 comments

Less than one year ago I wrote my most popular post of all time. The post that asks the age-old question, “Who can Mark Driscoll Worship?” It sits at 134 comments (which a couple months ago I finally felt I had to close–all horses must be pronounced dead eventually) and nearly 10,000 views. In some sense, I feel like Mark did me a solid on this one. My rather acerbic critique of him has catapulted me into the best blog stats I have ever known. Since the day of its publication, I don’t know that my post on him has ever not been in my top five for the day. If you Google the guy’s name, my post comes up about fourth or fifth, for goodness sake.

Anyways, Driscoll is still at his shenanigans in Seattle, much to the detriment of the body of Christ (seriously, that’s what I believe, folks). Here’s a snippet from a recent article that was done on him and his church in the New York Times:

Nowhere is the connection between Driscoll’s hypermasculinity and his Calvinist theology clearer than in his refusal to tolerate opposition at Mars Hill. The Reformed tradition’s resistance to compromise and emphasis on the purity of the worshipping community has always contained the seeds of authoritarianism: John Calvin had heretics burned at the stake and made a man who casually criticized him at a dinner party march through the streets of Geneva, kneeling at every intersection to beg forgiveness. Mars Hill is not 16th-century Geneva, but Driscoll has little patience for dissent. In 2007, two elders protested a plan to reorganize the church that, according to critics, consolidated power in the hands of Driscoll and his closest aides. Driscoll told the congregation that he asked advice on how to handle stubborn subordinates from a “mixed martial artist and Ultimate Fighter, good guy” who attends Mars Hill. “His answer was brilliant,” Driscoll reported. “He said, ‘I break their nose.’ ” When one of the renegade elders refused to repent, the church leadership ordered members to shun him. One member complained on an online message board and instantly found his membership privileges suspended. “They are sinning through questioning,” Driscoll preached.

Now, as my friend and fellow conspirator, Adam has rightly noted, the author here is pretty naive, and simply wrong about some facts in regard to John Calvin. However, regardless of her shoddy Calvin exegesis, the stuff that is coming out of Driscoll’s mouth these days just gets more and more comedic. It’s like he’s becoming his own walking caricature nowadays. It’s literally a “sin” in his mind for the elders in his own church to question his agenda(s)? Wowie. This is the epitome of of the worst possible instantiation of Protestantism. Here we literally have someone setting himself up as his own pope–and an ultramontaine pope at that!

Could Mark Driscoll become the first pope to ever fight in the gladiatorial games of our current coliseums? Time alone will tell I suppose. I for one welcome the constant increase in Driscoll’s antics. The more insane he becomes, hopefully the more he will lose his influence and the horrible damage he has done to so many people, especially families and women will be lessened. But I suppose I owe him my thanks for boosting my blog stats. Hopefully this post gets no hits. That would be a good sign.

The Church as Apocalyptic Event, Baptism, Eucharist, and Discipleship

Posted by on February 27, 2009 1 comment

Continuing this series of responses to Steve Long‘s queries about “filling out” some of the details of what conceiving of the church as apocalyptic might mean, here is his third question:

Would [an understanding of the church as apocalyptic event] acknowledge the necessity of the relation between baptism (and thus a commitment to a life of discipleship) and the Eucharist?

The first point–which has been made in other ways in regard to the first two questions–is that an apocalyptic conception of the church places its primary emphasis on the centrality of God’s prior action in Christ singular historicity. What is central about an apocalyptic conception of the church is that it seeks to consistently bear witness to the radically interruptive and transformative action of the Trinitarian God in and for the world. As such, the supreme characteristic of the church is its struggle to adjust their vision, as it were, to the radical new world that God has wrought in Christ. And apocalyptic conception of the church requires us to think the church in distinctly responsive and active terms, because the church lives “after the event”, seeking to discover what it means for us to live in light of the great transformation that God in Christ has effected.

So, bearing that in mind, baptism and Eucharist name gifts of the Christ’s Spirit to the church, through which the church shapes its life in a manner fitting to the great transformation of the world in the apocalypse of Christ. Baptism is a sign of the new world that has been created in Christ, through the singular outpouring of God’s Trinitarian agape. Baptism is the gift of Christ’s Spirit who, in the midst of our own contingent histories, translates us into Christ’s own singular historicity by drawing us, in baptism, into God’s own radical love. From an apocalyptic perspective, the strongest possible connection between baptism and discipleship is drawn. For, baptism names the Spirit’s action of drawing us into Christ’s own apocalyptic victory over the powers, effecting liberation for slavery and death. As such, baptism is fundamentally our pneumatological induction into what Christ has apocalypsed–the transfigured creation in which God comes to dwell with humankind and be their God. Being such an induction, baptism translates us into a whole mode of life, the life of being engrafted into God’s radical love. The admonitions of the New Testament often follow these lines: “Welcome one another as God in Christ has welcomed you” (Rom 15:14).

Now, in regard to the connection between baptism (and the life of discipleship) and the eucharist, there is much to say indeed. The first thing to be noted is that from an apocalyptic perspective, the Eucharist’s quality as anamnesis is of the utmost importance. The Lord’s Supper is fundamentally an act of remembrance of Christ’s historical action for our salvation. The Eucharist is the constant embodied remembering of God’s singular apocalypse which is our salvation. As such the  Eucharist remembers and reenacts Christ’s own dispossessive love for us unto death, the same love into which we are inducted in baptism. The Eucharist constitutes our continual reimmersion into the agapeic pattern of Christ’s life into which we are called as disciples.

Moreover, the Eucharist is also to be understood as a modality of Christ’s presence to the church. As such it recalls Christ’s promise to be with his disciples to the end of the age (Matt 28:20) in their missional vocation to proclaim the gospel. Thus, Christ’s Eucharistic presence is helpfully understood as his empowering accompaniment, in the Spirit of his missional church. In the Eucharist, Christ abides with his church through the Spirit, leading the church in its missional vocation to embody the radical love of God. From an apocalyptic perspective, Christ’s real presence in the Eucharist is not separable in any sense from his promise to, through the Spirit, accompany and empower the church in its missional encounter with the world.

So, what, in a nutshell is the connection between baptism and Eucharist? In baptism we are inducted in the radical love of God, in which our lives are reshaped according the cruciform image of Christ. In the Eucharist Christ we remember the agape of Christ into which we have been inducted in baptism, and Christ himself, through the Spirit is present to us in the sacramental act, accompanying us in our missional vocation to embody the irruptive and transformative agape of God in all the world. There is certainly a great deal more that should be said about the sacraments and their relation to apocalyptic, but for now, I hope this at least begins to shed some light on how we might understand some key aspects of their connection.

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