It’s good that a recent NY Times article has drawn attention to the unending evangelical idolatry of marriage and family and their correspondingly shameful treatment of single pastors, and especially of single women pastors.

Well known theological hack and neocon ideologue, Al Mohler gives us a rather striking display of his own idolatrous and anti-biblical views on the matter saying that “if [students seeking to enter the ministry] remain single, they need to understand that there’s going to be a significant limitation on their ability to serve as a pastor.”

It seems to me that the Apostle Paul believed the exact opposite of the shit that Mohler’s spouting here (1 Cor 7:28-38). Funny how explicit rejection of the clear teaching of the NT can be made to go hand in hand with blustering proclamations about inerrancy. Add it to  the laundry list of evangelical self-contradictions I guess.

Its been a while since I’ve indulged in something linking to a movie review, but this is just too damn good to pass up. Drew McWeeny’s review of the latest Twilight schlock is just utterly fantastic:

Here’s where I have a problem.  I don’t care if they get married or not, because in this film, “get married” is just code for “now we can do it.”  Their marriage isn’t about building something together or creating a family.  Their marriage isn’t about time they’ve spent together and time they want to spend together.  It’s all hormonal.  It’s all impulse.  Bella Swan is defined as a character purely by who she wants to sleep with, and I don’t care if she actually consummates the act or not.  This movie is driven from start to finish by the real estate between her legs, and if that sounds blunt or harsh, good.  I want it to sound ugly, because I think it is ugly.  Deeply ugly.  She’s the weakest, most dependent lead in a film that I can imagine.  There is nothing interesting about Bella aside from her desire for these two boys.  It is a narcissistic teenage fantasy taken to a disturbing depth.  Nothing in the world of these movies matters beyond the resolution of whether or not Bella is going to bone Edward.  And when.  And how.  And whether she’s going to bone Jacob as well.

There is talk of love, but there is nothing like love in these movies.  These are not stories about love.  They are stories about infatuation, temporary teenage madness.  And, hey, man… I may be ancient at this point, but I remember what it’s like when you’re a teenager and everything feels so important, and I’ve seen films that get that frenzy just right and they still manage to feature real character work and stories that are interesting and actual events.  You can make a great movie about the rush of teenage love.  You can use it as a backdrop for all sorts of stories.  But for that to be the thing that holds us as an audience, we have to believe that there’s something behind it.  I have yet to see anything in any of these movies that would connect these characters beyond narrative convenience.

Bella doesn’t love these men because of things they have done together.  Instead, everything they do together is because they “love” Bella.  It’s a pissing contest.  And both of the guys are just as poorly defined and as grotesque as Bella in what they represent.  Edward is her “dream man,” and as depicted in the films, he’s basically a control freak who treats her like an object to possess.  He lies to her.  He manipulates her.  He is unable to tolerate her interacting with anyone else.  Ladies… if you have a chance to marry a man who acts like Edward while you’re dating, do it.  And then you can look forward to broken bones and mysterious bruises and a slow and methodical separation from friends and family until you exist only for him.  Which is obviously what you’re looking for, right?  Ooooh, romantic.

Or if Edward’s love isn’t the right kind for you, then maybe you can get lucky and earn yourself a Jacob.  A guy who is hot enough that he knows you will love him, and if you don’t, then it’s just a matter of time.  After all, look at his abs.  He doesn’t offer anything more substantial than Edward in terms of emotion or support, but he does have those abs.  He’s also got body heat, so obviously he is a better choice for Bella.  He has one scene where he actually tells her that he has not imprinted on her as a mate, as is the way with his kind, but that doesn’t matter.  We’re still supposed to believe that this is important, that this struggle over this pathetic, empty dishrag means something.

I love women.  I love all sorts of women.  And because I love real women, actual flesh and blood human being that happen to have a slightly different arrangement of chromosomes than I do, I despise these movies.  I hate them for what they offer up as a value system.  I hate them because there are girls who mistake their own chemical response to the male leads in the movie as an actual affection for the story that’s being told.  They invest on the surface level, and in the meantime, there is this poisonous cancer, this vile insidious message that’s being sold to them underneath.  I hate these movies because they tell girls that this is their value in the world.  Who you bang defines you.  You are worth your vagina and nothing more.  You are who your man is.  That is all.

I just want to point out that this is the first time that the categories of “awesomeness” and “Things that make you want to gouge your eyes out with your pinky, shove scalding hot pokers in your ears, and repeatedly slam the door of a 1950s-vintage, American-made sedan on your head” have become unified in one post.

H/T: Brad E.

Daniel Larison rightly gives Novak a skewering over his recent tirade of stupidity on the ever-further nauseating First Things blog:

One of my commenters pointed me to this bizarre item* by Michael Novak at one of the blogs at First Things. Novak writes:

We again need such Christian realism. Such tough-mindedness. The most dreadful war of all time is just ahead of us, is already well begun. Many of us want to save the Christian Holy Places, and Israel, too–our best ally in the world, the creator of the most economically creative and democratic society in its region.

Fulfilling this desire will not be easy in the next twelve months, fateful months, clock-ticking months. If the nuclear capacity of Iran is not destroyed before functioning nuclear weapons are in their silos or other weapons platforms, the whole world will experience blackmail.

To make an object lesson, one nation in particular is on notice that it is listed as first for destruction.

How will we live with ourselves if Israel is annihilated with nuclear bombs? How will we survive? How will our understanding of the Word of God survive, if the fleshly, tangible heart of Jewish and Christian faith is obliterated?

He goes on to urge a war of aggression against Iran to “prevent” the absurd fantasy of the Iranian destruction of the Holy Places. It is bad enough that Novak invokes Niebuhr (!) in support of this mad call for unprovoked, unnecessary war, but when he says that the “most dreadful war of all time is just ahead of us, is already well begun” we can safely say that he has lost all touch with reality. WWII remains the most dreadful war of all time, and nothing on the horizon even remotely compares to the loss of life and destruction that occurred in that war. So there is nothing realistic at all about Novak’s “Christian realism,” and neither is there anything Christian about it if that word is to have any connection to the teachings of Our Lord.

Even under very broad interpretations of just war theory, there cannot be a just war when the other party has inflicted no grave, lasting injury on us. By definition, preventive war cannot be just, and yet it is most certainly preventive war that Novak and other advocates of attacking Iran demand. War is sometimes necessary and permitted for the restoration of peace. There is no justification for destroying what peace exists to satisfy our irrational fears of a deterrable and containable threat. There is no conceivable justification for initiating hostilities to attempt to stop the potential future acquisition of a weapon that the other state is very unlikely to use against us or our allies. To start a war for such a reason would be a crime against God and man.

What would make such a war even more unjustifiable is the improbability of success: a war against Iran might delay an Iranian bomb, but it would not eliminate Iran’s nuclear program and it would almost certainly make the acquisition of such weapons an even higher priority to deter future attacks. Meanwhile, the consequences of such a war could be very bad for U.S. forces in Iraq, Afghanistan and the Gulf states, as well as for Israel and our Gulf state allies, to say nothing of the potential damage it would do to the global economy and the hardship and suffering it would inflict on the Iranian people. Thousands and perhaps tens of thousands of people would die, many more would be injured and displaced, and our government and the governments of any states that helped us would obviously be implicated in yet another illegal war. Beyond the loss of life and resources, the damage to our national reputation would be staggering.

Novak warns against the “blackmail” that will follow if Iran acquires a nuclear weapon, but the only one engaged in a sort of blackmail here is Novak. He would exploit the emotional and religious attachment Christians naturally have for the Holy Places to inspire support for massive, unnecessary bloodshed. The message is quite clear: if you treasure the sacred places where God revealed Himself, you will endorse my monstrous proposal, and otherwise you probably don’t really care about these places or the revelation itself. The proposal is horrible, and the manipulation being employed to advance the proposal is simply despicable.

As for the Iranian threat, Novak is simply wrong. The “whole world” will not experence blackmail from Iran. Most likely, no other state will experience anything of the kind. It is possible that Iranian nuclear weapons could push other states towards nuclearization, in which case the danger would be an arms race and not Iranian “blackmail.” That would be undesirable, but it would not be worse than the regional conflagration that an attack on Iran would cause. Israel’s nuclear arsenal will ensure that Iran would never attempt a nuclear first-strike against Israel.

For that matter, Jerusalem is also considered holy in the eyes of Muslims. I have no idea how Westerners can claim to “know” that the Iranian government would be so moved by religious apocalyptic fervor that it would engage in suicidal nuclear warfare, but they also seem remarkably certain that the holy status of Jerusalem in the eyes of Muslims somehow doesn’t really “count” and will be tossed aside at a moment’s notice. We often see this selective reliance on the beliefs and statements of people in other states. When Ahmadinejad or some other figure of authority in Iran makes demagogic, bellicose statements against Israel, these statements are regarded as essential for understanding the thinking of the Iranian government. On the other hand, when their politico-religious authorities say repeatedly that they regard the use of nuclear weapons as abhorrent, we are supposed to dismiss these statements automatically.

* That is, it is genuinely bizarre, but it’s actually sadly predictable and normal for many of the people at First Things.

If you read Novak’s whole post it’s simply too extraordinary for words in terms of its gargantuan absurdity. He evokes all these emotions about how precious and amazing it is to be able to pray and meditate on the same hill where Jesus gave the Sermon on the Mount . . . precisely for the purpose of urging Christians to utterly and completely violate the content of the Sermon itself. What matters to Novak is us being able to posses the geographic space where the Sermon allegedly happened, but he doesn’t give a fuck about the Sermon itself. After all if some country might potentially pose a threat to a piece of land where Jesus maybe preached “Love your enemies” our true and righteous response should be to launch a war of aggression against such types, right?

This guy is a sub-Christian joke who recommends immoral, illegal, and inhumane actions for the sake of a crude and insipid ideological platform. Fortunately if exponents of this political program are as stupid, clumsy, moronic, and dottering as Novak, I imagine people will be able to more easily just laugh and ignore them.

Watching (d)evolution of the lumbering organism that is First Things is certainly interesting. One of the latest developments in this conservative bazaar is the recent addition of a group blog by evangelicals. The lineup is rather interesting, consisting of the sort of usual suspects one might expect to see on a blog by politically conservative evangelicals (i.e. plenty of the Biola types). However, when you starting looking though the posters more deeply, and some of the posts, things start to look quite odd, considering the deeply Catholic nature of First Things.

To take the most extreme example, at least one of the posters on this new blog is ardently anti-Catholic. Like, extremely so. Think rabid fundamentalism meets the New Calvinism meets a loud person with an IQ of around 75 and you’ll have a slight idea of what we’re dealing with here. What are people like that doing posting on the same site as David Bentley Hart and Rusty Reno? It boggles the imagination.

But if you really think about it, all the pieces fit. At the most fundamental level the “first thing” which this publication concerns itself is simply  neoconservatism. And really nothing more than that.  To be sure there are exceptions that prove the rule, and occasionally a good article or post peeks its head through the quicksand, but the fact remains that at a basic level as long as you’re a political conservative, nothing else matters at First Things. You can be an Ultramontane Caesaropapist or a Fundamentalist who thinks the pope is the antichrist as long as you’re both glad to be conservative together.

As such, I submit that First Things is only serving to perpetuate what they so often deride: the privatization of religious and theological convictions. For them, the most central claims of the church’s life and doctrine are swept aside so that all can come together in the embrace neoconservative ideology, the master story that supersedes all religious and theological trivialities. Oddly enough, this predominately Roman Catholic publication actually offers a goofy and contrived alternative form of catholicity, namely that of neoconservative ideology. It is conservatism rather than the faith of the church that will bind us together in common mission, concord, and purpose. Truly a bizarre, though not unpredictable ideological development. A publication dedicated to theology’s public importance has ultimately become nothing more than the obviation of theology itself. As such all we have left is a half-baked neocon ideology in the ruins of what was once a sort of okay publication.

Then just follow the link for even more awesomely horrible details:

Really this stuff is beyond comment. I’ve actually never seen anything in this category. To get the full effect, make sure to move the mouse cursor over everything in the picture and see the writer’s little captions explaining what it is and what it means. My favorite:

“U.S. Constituion: Inspired of God and created by God-fearing, patriotic Americans.”

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.

In light of some of the requests that surfaced in my last post on the danger that John Piper poses to the church and its mission, I’ll be posting, over the next little while a few reflections on precisely how his theology is dangerous and false. First off, one of the central issues arising from John Piper’s doctrine of God, which he gets from Jonathan Edwards, is the claim that God requires sin and evil in order for God to be fully manifest and glorified. Without sin and evil, God’s glory would be veiled and incomplete. In his famous book, Desiring God, Piper approvingly quotes the following segment from Jonathan Edwards’s Concerning the Divine Decrees:

It is a proper and excellent thing for infinite glory to shine forth; and for the same reason, it is proper that the shining forth of God’s glory should be complete; that is, that all parts of his glory should shine forth, that every beauty should be proportionably effulgent, that the beholder may have a proper notion of God. It is not proper that one glory should be exceedingly manifested, and another not at all.…

Thus it is necessary, that God’s awful majesty, his authority and dreadful greatness, justice, and holiness, should be manifested. But this could not be, unless sin and punishment had been decreed; so that the shining forth of God’s glory would be very imperfect, both because these parts of divine glory would not shine forth as the others do, and also the glory of his goodness, love, and holiness would be faint without them; nay, they could scarcely shine forth at all. If it were not right that God should decree and permit and punish sin, there could be no manifestation of God’s holiness in hatred of sin, or in showing any preference, in his providence, of godliness before it.

There would be no manifestation of God’s grace or true goodness, if there was no sin to be pardoned, no misery to be saved from. How much happiness soever he bestowed, his goodness would not be so much prized and admired.…

So evil is necessary, in order to the highest happiness of the creature, and the completeness of that communication of God, for which he made the world; because the creature’s happiness consists in the knowledge of God, and the sense of his love. And if the knowledge of him be imperfect, the happiness of the creature must be proportionably imperfect. (Concerning the Divine Decrees, 528, emphasis added. On page 350 of Desiring God)

Piper follows this quote up with his own hearty approval: “God is more glorious for having conceived and created and governed a world like this with all its evil” (p. 351). Think on this quite carefully. For Piper God’s glory would be incomplete without all of horrors that have taken place in the history of the world. Every instance of death, suffering, murder, rape, torture, and mutilation—God needs them. God wants them to happen because without them, he would not be fully glorified. And God’s own (monadicly conceived) self-glorification, for Piper God’s sole and utter goal in the world.

Obviously this theology is deeply incoherent and does not square with Scripture, or the church’s traditional teaching concerning evil (for Augustine and most of the church after him evil is privation, not something that could “add” to the display of God’s glory). But what is worst about it is its pastoral and ethical consequences. A God who needs evil to be himself will surely garner a people who have no interest in stopping evil or comforting those who suffer. Indeed, as the Scripture explicitly tell us to imitate God (Eph 5:1), this theology implicitly encourages Christians to perpetrate violence and suffering against those who are seen to deserve it (whether or not Piper would endorse this is not the issue—his theology logically demands this conclusion whether he admits it or not).

As such, it is vital for us to see and recognize that the God proclaimed by Piper and his ilk is a false God. An idol that desperately needs to be dethroned. The omnipotent demon that Piper worships is not the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ and the sooner all Christians realize this the better off we will all be.

H/T: Arni Zachariassen

Politics is direct involvement in democratic partisan activity with the goal of changing the law so as to facilitate either social service, social action or both. The Church and clergy should stay out of politics and Christians should participate as individuals in existing parties or through Christian parties.

This has got to be one the most naive and asinine definitions of politics ever to be written, even from the ranks of fundamentalists. Apparently politics only happens in democracies between partisan political parties. Aren’t we lucky that America came along and invented politics, kids?

And the fantastically contrived dichotomy between “the Church” and “Christians as individuals” is something I really wish people would see the stupidity of. If individual Christians are the real political agents and the church needs to quietly stay out politics, then why don’t we just fess up and admit that we don’t really think the church exists at all? If the church is not a social and political body then it is nothing. Or at least nothing like what Scripture indicates about the church.

Don’t even get me started on “Christian parties.” This has got to be the most mind-numbingly ridiculous construal of the role of Christianity in politics that I’ve read in ages. Sigh.