Category Archives: Mark Driscoll

Putting all Questions to Rest

Posted by on September 22, 2009 43 comments

If there were any doubt it is gone now. If there was even the slightest question that Mark Driscoll is simply rabid misogynist who’s boarderline psychotic, this quote clears all that up. There really are no words for this kind of mindless stupidity:

Without blushing, Paul is simply stating that when it comes to leading in the church, women are unfit because they are more gullible and easier to deceive than men. While many irate women have disagreed with his assessment through the years, it does appear from this that such women who fail to trust his instruction and follow his teaching are much like their mother Eve and are well-intended but ill-informed. . . Before you get all emotional like a woman in hearing this, please consider the content of the women’s magazines at your local grocery store that encourages liberated women in our day to watch porno with their boyfriends, master oral sex for men who have no intention of marrying them, pay for their own dates in the name of equality, spend an average of three-fourths of their childbearing years having sex but trying not to get pregnant, and abort 1/3 of all babies – and ask yourself if it doesn’t look like the Serpent is still trolling the garden and that the daughters of Eve aren’t gullible in pronouncing progress, liberation, and equality.

Mark Driscoll, Church Leadership: Explaining the Roles of Jesus, Elders, Deacons, and Members at Mars Hill, Mars Hill Theology Series (Seattle, WA: Mars Hill Church, 2004), 43.

As I said, there really are no words. This sort of juvenile and petulant  hatred of women speaks for itself. Driscoll really doesn’t give a shit about the Bible or “what Paul said.” He just is desperate for power and control over women. Its very sad that some people consider this bastard a pastor who has something to contribute to the church. He’s nothing more than a parasite who preys on the weak and opposes the Gospel at every turn. Hopefully more people will grow to see this and the cancer that is Mark Driscoll may go into remission.

Thanks to Rachel for pointing me to this horrible quote.

Why John Piper is Dangerous

Posted by on August 20, 2009 171 comments

A while back a commenter asked me to do some sort of incendiary write up about John Piper like I’ve done a few times about Mark Driscoll. One would think that it would be much harder to write such a critique of Piper because he is far more personable and, by all appearances, charitable. Driscoll is a rapacious frat boy who can’t stop flapping his trap. Piper is a pastor. It’s a good deal easier to see the absurdity of Dirscoll’s theological and social views when he preens about how often he gets oral sex from his wife and hosts mixed martial arts fights that supposedly tell real Christian men how to be. He’s patently ridiculous in almost every way. Its all theatrics and megalomania. With Piper however everything is different. Piper is measured, sensitive in speaking, and by all appearances, fairly humble. He’s far, far more palatable, personally and pastorally than Driscoll.

However, this is precisely why John Piper is far more dangerous than Driscoll. Piper’s pastoral manner renders him far more subtle, more believable, more seductive. Whatever else I may say about Driscoll at least he lives the absurdity of his theology out to nth. Piper however is able to project calm compassion and thoughtfulness onto his preaching and teaching in a way that many find appealing who woudl be immediately put off by Driscoll. This is why Piper can get away with saying the most utterly insane things. Like his recent claim that the tornado touchdown that hit a Lutheran church in Minneapolis was God’s judgment and warning to the denomination to stop their proposed initiative to allow gay clergy.

If someone like Driscoll or other more obviously crazy evangelicals like Pat Robertson were to say something like this they’d immediately be called on it (remember Falwell’s whole thing about how the gays, lesbians, and secularists made God bring about 9/11?). But Piper’s defenders flock to him when he proclaims this sort of insanity. And its all because of the image he projects of being the sensitive, strong, measured, and humble pastor.

Driscoll is an obvious yapping wolfling. Piper is the quintessential wolf in very authentic-looking sheep’s clothing.

This Doesn’t Bode Well

Posted by on August 12, 2009 30 comments

It looks like the über-Reformed emerging mega-churches have decided to create their own personal seminaries to train clones of their head pastors. Mark Driscoll, John Piper and others are all working towards creating degree-granting institutions that are part of their massive churches through which they will train pastors to go out and replicate the founding mega-churches and their pastors. What’s interesting to me about this whole thing is how open they’re all being about their attempts to create clones of themselves and their churches:

Many aspiring pastors are willing to forgo the prestige of attending an established seminary to obtain “the specific theological focus that most church-based seminaries offer,” said Tim Tomlinson, president of Bethlehem College and Seminary.

“The church-based theological seminaries like ours are more intent on offering a theological and philosophical worldview that is consistent with the teachings and writings of the well-known pastor-theologian with whom the seminary is affiliated,” Tomlinson said. “This seems to have a growing appeal to a growing number of students.”

The plan is explicitly one of direct indoctrination into the thought of a specific leader. This isn’t theological education. It’s theologically fascist and will only have a negative effect on the church’s mission. The blatantly arrogant self-promoting (and now self-duplicating) demagoguery that is coming from these Driscoll-Piper types is really quite extraordinary.

The Catholic Mark Driscoll

Posted by on June 11, 2009 11 comments

Funny, in all the blogs I’ve done about Mark Driscoll’s antics I’ve never thought that his craziness might be embodied in non-Protestant traditions. However, apparently American Catholics have a similar iconic figure in the person of one Christopher West. West has, apparently made a career out of propagating JPII’s Theology of the Body and holding it up as the ultimate sex manual for Catholic Christians. He got particularly well known for comparing the Pope to Hugh Hefner in a Nightline interview in which he seemed to argue that the Hefner and JPII, together, rescued sex from prudish Victorian sensibilities. He, like good ole Driscoll refers to the Song of Songs as “the Bible’s centerfold.”

To his credit, West doesn’t seem to be as belligerent as his pomo fundamentalist cousin; but certainly no less sex-obsessed. I can’t help wondering though, if this passionate frenzy about sex among strongly conservative church leaders does more to fetishize sex than anything that ever happened under the tyrannical regime of Victorian sensibilities.

I mean, seriously, JPII and Hef aren’t even talking about the same thing when they talk about sex! The notion, so present in these sorts of circles, that a central duty of the church is to make sure that all its married parishoners are having fireworks going off in the bedroom every night seems to me to indicate the degree to which we’ve all bought into the kind of sexual obsession that creates the problems of frustration and fantasy in the first place.

Why the hell can’t Christians just let sex be ordinary?? That would be something radical.

Why do Evanglicals Care More About Cussing than the Treatment of Women?

Posted by on June 3, 2009 52 comments

The pomo darling boy of the super-reformed emerging church has recently drawn the ire of some of his fellow conservative, driscoll-thumb-400x270reformed evangelical friends. Mark Driscoll has long been known for his regular practice of cussing from the pulpit and engaging in many, many quite explicit sermons about (marital) sex. He has often said that the Song of Solomon is his favorite book of the Bible. In a lot of evangelical circles that are antagonistic to the perceived liberalism of the emerging church, Driscoll has been something of a poster-child for a while. Here we have a younger pastor who dresses cool, is “culturally relevant” and who’s still militantly conservative, insists that men must exert authority over women in every context, and who holds unswervingly to Westminster-style reformed theology.

However, I guess Driscoll’s theological and political allegiances aren’t enough to keep him in the good graces of the conservative evangelical literati. His regular sermons about sex, which often consist of straight up commands to the women of the church to perform whatever sex acts their husbands might desire have not been well-received by the likes of John MacArthur and John Piper. What’s interesting, though is what particular transgressions this outrage has been directed towards.

Most everyone is talking about the fact that the problem with Driscoll is the inappropriateness of his language. Its just not okay for you to be talking explicitly about sex and cussing from the pulpit. That’s the downbeat of the current backlash, and that’s the central issue that has framed the current debate among evangelicals that run in these circles. To his credit, MacArthur (who I generally despise, at least theologically if not personally) has put is finger on the more troubling issue here. Namely that Driscoll’s sexual explicitness is all deployed in the interest of coercing women to fulfill whatever sexual whims their husbands might have. As MacArthur rightly points out, Driscoll’s regular sermons on what the Song of Song has to say about sex always ends up pointing out “obligatory acts wives must do if this is what satisfies their husbands, regardless of the wife’s own desire or conscience.” This is the real problem, people.

Lest anyone think Driscoll is being misrepresented here, listen to just a couple quotes from one of these sex sermons: “Ladies, let me assure you of this: if you think you’re being dirty, he’s pretty happy. Jesus Christ commands you to do this.” This is misogyny sexual domination at its worst. From the pulpit we have an evangelical pastor ordering the women in his church to perform any sex act a husband might desire because, after all, Jesus commands this. In the Song of Songs. I guess.

What’s so disturbing about all this is the way this little kerfuffle is being framed as simply a problem with inappropriate language. The Victorian sensibilities about what is proper verbal etiquette among evangelicals trump the rampant exploitation, degradation, and misogyny that this allegedly Christian pastor is perpetrating on thousands of women on a weekly basis. This is a disgrace. A filthy, sickening disgrace.

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.

Mark Driscoll, the Church, and Family Idolatry

Posted by on July 14, 2008 52 comments

In a recent interview, Mark Driscoll makes the following comment describing how he understands the relationship of priority between the nuclear family and the church:

“There is no office such as pastor’s wife or pastor’s children and I work very hard to ensure that our family remains our top priority over the church. Too many pastors put their ministry above their family and their wives and children get active in the church just so they can be close to their husband/daddy which is tragic. We have a normal fun family life and by God’s grace my wife and kids love Jesus, me and our church.”

This, to my mind, is perhaps the most clear articulation of the kind of idolatry of the family that is common among evangelical Christians in America today.  For a lengthy clarifying discussion of this whole issue, please see this conversation between Craig Carter and myself.

For my part, Driscoll’s comments are perhaps the most horrifying thing I could expect to hear from the mouth of any pastor about the priority of the family.  It turns out that the Catholics have something going about clerical celibacy after all!

The problem with Driscoll’s statement is not just that its the standard conservative line, or that it is the battle cry of the Dobson’s and Robertson’s of contemporary evangelicalism.  The problem is rather the sort of moral universe that such comments presuppose.  Driscoll reifies the dominant notion that “natural” institutions like the family simply are the moral norm which have value in and of themselves merely by vritue of their existence.  The ethical vision of the New Testament, by contrast, is constituted by a radical interruption of all such “natural” conventions of morality and social life.  The scandal of the ethic of Jesus and the early church is precisely that all the commonly accepted priorities, allegiances, and social formations of this age are radically disrupted by the apocalyptic erruption of the advent of Christ in death and resurrection.

Bonhoeffer serves as a far better guide to the nature of the apocalyptic ethics of Jesus when he states:

“So people called by Jesus learn that they had lived an illusion in their relationship to the world.  The illusion is immediacy.  It has blocked faith and obedience.  Now they know there can be no unmediated relationships, even in the most intimate ties of their lives, in the blood ties to father and mother, to children, brothers and sisters, in marital love, in historical responsibilities.  Ever since Jesus called, there are no longer natural, historical, or experiential unmediated relationships for his disciples.  Christ the mediator stands between the son and the father, between husband and wife, between individual and nation, whether they can recognize him or not.  There is no way from us to other other than the path through Christ, his word, and our following him.  Immediacy is a delusion.”

“But it is precisely the same mediator who makes us into individuals, who becomes he basis for an entirely new community.  He stands in the center between the other person and me.  He separates, but he also unites.  He cuts off every direct path to someone else, but he guides everyone following him to the new and sole true way to the other person via the mediator. … Those who left their fathers for Jesus’ sake will surely find new fathers in the community, they will find brothers and sisters; there are even fields and houses prepared for them.  Everyone enters discipleship alone, but no one remains alone in discipleship.  Those who dare to become single individuals trusting in the word are given the gift of church-community.  They find themselves again in a visible community of faith, which replaces a hundredfold what they lost.”  (Discipleship, 97-98)

Too much of the contemporary evangelical church wants to rush to conclusions about having happy family, a comfortable life, a stable career, and personal security.  There is this angst amongst Christians when the inversion of Christ’s call is talked about too much.  Instead we flee quickly to the promises of abundant life that are given in the gospel as if they legitimated our current aspirations and dreams.  However, the promise of abundant life, as Bonhoeffer understood is nothing other than the complete annihilation and recreation of our current ideas about the good life.  What we need is not satisfaction, not the assurance that we can have it all.  What we need is the eviscerating call of the Crucifed and Resurrected One who demands that we follow in the path of his kenosis, and so, giving up everything, and only thus, gain everything and more.

The Biggest Threat?

Posted by on June 4, 2008 55 comments

So, I’ve posted a few critical articles on Mark Driscoll lately, and as I’ve said before, I believe that his theology and practice is sub-Christian and a major threat to the gospel and its embodiment in the world.  However, this leads me to wonder, who do we consider the greatest threats to the gospel within the broad scope of the Christian community today?  What teachers, pastors, or theolgians do we find to most unhealthily problematize the gospel?  I’m curious to see who people might identify.  So, I pose the question, who, among today’s Christian teachers and preachers do you consider to be the most dangerous to the mission of the Christian gospel in the world today?  And why?

Be a Man!

Posted by on May 19, 2008 39 comments

Little did we all know it, but apparently males are being systematically excluded from the Christian church.  Yes, contrary to all appearances, it seems that the reason that churches in America today lack innovation and energy is because the men are being excluded.  Mark Driscoll tells us why (with some visual aids, thankfully thrown in by somebody from YouTube).

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fSrZVF3FEUQ]

More on Mark Driscoll

Posted by on May 13, 2008 3 comments

In light of all the discussion about my post on Mark Driscoll (and why his theological beliefs don’t really allow him to worship Jesus), allow me to commend to you a very interesting, and at times painful article by Lauren Sandler that was done on Driscoll and his Seattle-based evangelical empire in Salon magazine.  You may also be interested in her book, Righteous, which is a pretty interesting social ethnography of the contemporary Christian youth culture.

Who Can Mark Driscoll Worship?

Posted by on May 9, 2008 134 comments

I really shouldn’t have expected anything distinctively sane from a magazine called ‘Relevant‘.  That was a huge mistake, and one that I can assure my faithful readership I will never make again.  The magazine as a whole is committed to pedantically insisting that Christians can, pretty much be cool too, if they just try hard enough.  Personally, I find this idea completely insane.  Out of all the people I’ve ever met I have yet to meet someone who is clearly a Christian who is able to fill out all the aspects of coolness that are demanded by our culture.  But I digress.  My point in all this was merely that I should have expected something as stupid, insipid, and sophomoric as this from Relevant Magazine.

In a multiple-person interview that originally ran in early 2007, Relevant Magazine asked seven questions to various evangelical church leaders about what the most important challenges to the evangelical churches in a America are at this time in history.  The answers vary from the utterly boring, to the sadly uniformed, to the sort of ok, to the downright ridiculous.  Mark Driscoll’s answers however, were in a class of their own.  In response to the question “What do you see as the greatest challenge for young Christians in the next 10 years?” he responded:

There is a strong drift toward the hard theological left. Some emergent types [want] to recast Jesus as a limp-wrist hippie in a dress with a lot of product in His hair, who drank decaf and made pithy Zen statements about life while shopping for the perfect pair of shoes. In Revelation, Jesus is a pride fighter with a tattoo down His leg, a sword in His hand and the commitment to make someone bleed. That is a guy I can worship. I cannot worship the hippie, diaper, halo Christ because I cannot worship a guy I can beat up. I fear some are becoming more cultural than Christian, and without a big Jesus who has authority and hates sin as revealed in the Bible, we will have less and less Christians, and more and more confused, spiritually self-righteous blogger critics of Christianity. [Italics added]

I am of course most interested in Driscoll’s comment that he is unable to worship someone he can beat up.  Strangely enough this would seem that he is unable to worship Jesus.  As John Howard Yoder pointed out in reflection on John 1, the proclamation that the Word became flesh “does not simply mean that God became tangible.  It means he became weak, undignified, vulnerable.  The power behind the creation came among us in such a way that we can hurt him.”  The whole reality of Jesus is as one who makes himself vulnerable, who puts himself at the mercy of the forces of sin and death that we have unleashed upon the world.  Driscoll is almost certainly right, he could indeed beat up Jesus, and if he saw him, I’m afraid he probably would!

The real Jesus, the Jesus who makes himself vulnerable, thereby revealing the nature and reality of God from all eternity as love is not nearly exciting enough for Driscoll.  His Jesus is a kaleidoscopic amalgamation of Chuck Norris, Bruce Willis, and a cadre of mixed martial-arts welterweight champions.  If Jesus is not an ass-kicking man’s man who changes his own oil, wins bar fights, and ropes cattle, he certainly is not worthy of Driscoll’s worship.

What is ultimately so revealing about this whole statement is not so much that is shows clearly that Mark Driscoll is insanely insecure about his own male identity – though it certainly shows that with sublime clarity.  What is revealing about this quote is how it shows the bombastically western notion of masculinity that defines large swaths of evangelicalism.  For Driscoll anything less than the assertion that God himself is a gun-slinging son of a bitch makes one into a wuss who deserves nothing more than ridicule.  Driscoll lives in a world of binary oppositions.  You either have to be a cage fighter ready to beat the shit out of anyone who so much as glances at your girlfriend, or you are a pot-smoking hipster pinko who does nothing but surf the net on a Mac all day and drink organic microbrews.

It’s a wonderfully simple world of black and white simplicity that Driscoll lives in.  And what makes it really great is that he gets to live at the very tip top of this world’s power structure (maybe just below his Jesus character, pictured to the left).  He is the last of the true Christians.  In a world of effeminate losers toting Derrida around in their beer-stained man purses, Driscoll is standing in the gap, fighting for truth, justice, and of course, the American way.  It’s a world where everything is stark, everything is simple and God is remade comfortably in Mark Driscoll’s masculine image.  Wallowing in his self-aggrandizement, Driscoll makes certain to let everyone know that he is one of the 25 most powerful people in Seattle according to Seattle Magazine (as advertised on the site for Driscoll’s new book).  Just about everything he says or does seems like a plea: “Goddammit, I’m a man!  Am too!”

What makes the world of Mark Driscoll so fascinating is not just that it insane (which it is), or that is so obviously the product of western culture rather than the Bible or the Christian tradition (which is clear).  What is interesting about it is how utterly obvious it is that this world is a complete fabrication.  I cannot imagine anyone looking for a moment at the stuff that Mark Driscoll spouts and not immediately realizing that this guy is obviously freaked out by the world and is doing everything that he can to construct an alternative reality for himself and other like-minded people to live in.  In Mark Driscoll’s world Jesus actually did come to kick the Romans’ ass (or we wish he had) and he calls us to be iron-pumping, football heroes who slam nerds into lockers and date the hottest girl on the cheerleading squad (without having premarital sex of course).

In other words, Mark Driscoll is Wally Cleaver from Leave it to Beaver. Or, more accuarately, he is Wally after his freshman year of college.  He’s wised up enough to know that he better be able to beat people up, and force his point in order to keep himself above the morass of pagan decadence in this evil world, but hasn’t yet awoken to the fact that his world, which he thinks is divinely ordained, is in fact, a culturally produced schizophrenia.  It is the death throws of a handfull of white western males who are consumed with the terror of the knowledge deep down that they are no longer in control of American culture and history.  And this is precisely why Mark Driscoll is pathetic.  In spite of all his bombast and goofy machismo, he is, in the last analysis a very sad, lonely person.  That’s how you get when you have to construct your whole world.  The very things that could bring him liberation are the very things he sneers at.  Living out of control, embracing vulnerability, allowing oneself to be put into question, these are the very things that he cannot stomach.  They are far too effeminate and girly for a man like him to countenance.  They are marks of the hippie Jesus that Driscoll could never worship.  However they are the very shape of the salvation offered in crucified, murdered Jesus.  Driscoll is rejecting the very things that could set him free in his attempt to make Christianity distinctive.

His loss.

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