Category Archives: Emerging Church

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.

Are the “New Calvinists” Reformed?

Posted by on March 30, 2009 9 comments

Time Magazine ranks the “New Calvinism” as number three on the list of the top ten ideas changing the world. This is actually a self-applied term by the Mark Driscoll crowd, and basically it names a movement within the emergentish sector of evangelical Christians (i.e. middle class white people in their twenties and early thirties) toward a few theological emphases. Basically it amounts to an enthusiastic propagation of a strongly deterministic account divine providence and predestination, strong advocacy for a hierarchical theology of gender roles both in the church and home, and a zealous missiology.

One of the key adjectives for this group is the label “Reformed.” They take great delight in affirming their distinct status as the new heirs of the Reformed tradition. They love Spurgeon, Edwards, Calvin, and any and all things Puritan.

However, a look at the theological conflicts within the Presbyterian and Reformed churches in America reveal something interesting. Within actual Reformed churches there is massive infighting over what counts as truly being “Reformed.” Within the more conservative denominations there is a strong surge towards reasserting the Reformed confessions of the sixteenth century as the definition of what it means to belong to the Reformed tradition.

In short, in response to various theological developments, particularly related to Pauline scholarship, there is a massive resurgence of a rigid confessionalism as the definition of Reformed identity. And on the one hand, this is fairly reasonable, I think. After all, if you want the adjective to have an meaning as a moniker it has to have some concrete content. However, if the Reformed confessions are taken as a stable criterion of what counts as being “Reformed”, then the irony is that the New Calvinists are not Reformed at all. Key Reformed distinctives, like infant baptism, Christ’s Eucharistic presence, the threefold pattern of ministry, etc. are not embraced by the New Calvinists.

So, what we really have in this new movment is not actually a rebirth of “Reformed theology” in any historically meaningful sense. What we have is a typically evangelical gerrymandering of historical sources designed to support a few key theological commitments, namely to a strong theology of determinism and gender roles. So, the interesting question to be asking, then, is not “Why is Reformed theology making a comeback?” becuase it, in fact is not. Rather the interesting question is why is there such a substantial evangelical undertow attracting people to a strongly deterministic doctrine of God and rigidly defined gender roles?

Are you really a Christian Hipster?

Posted by on March 7, 2009 12 comments

The recent Christian hipster like/don’t like list seems to hit close to home for many of us, especially me. However, to my mind the list may be a bit flawed in that it pretty much includes any Christian under 35 who isn’t a party line conservative evangelical. Not being a standard evangelical should hardly relegate you to the status of Christian hipster. And there’s a few things that are noticeably left out, which are, too my mind pretty quintessential to the definition of Christian hipsterhood.

One of these is dress. How one dresses is perhaps the most fundamental feature of being a Christian hipster. The author makes reference to “dressing a little goth”, but this is just innacurate. Christian hipsters in particualr belie this description. The order of the day is tight, expensive jeans, huge and odd sunglasses, non-perscprition eyeglasses, discheveled hair, a variety of sweaters and tight t-shirts, all that hopefully give the appearance of originating from a thrift store.

Also, I would hope that anyone who would love Hauerwas and Willimon’s Resident Aliens would completely hate God’s Politics, which is an utter peice of old-school theological liberal sentimentality combined with politically progressive rhtetoric. And I’ve never ever met a Christian hipster who’s a fan of Teilhard de Chardin. Reading someone like that is just too much work for a Christian hipster. To be a Christian hipster you kind of have to have read Blue Like Jazz and pretty much nothing else, and think that this one book by Don Miller encapsulates the truth of your Christian existence.

So at any rate, I can’t help but wonder if this list really shows us, not what Christian hipsters look like, but what nearly all young non-conservative evangelicals look like. Which isn’t to say it isn’t still a somewhat arresting list, just that it is really about a much wider group than it purports to be.

Are you a Christian Hipster?

Posted by on March 4, 2009 20 comments

Brett McCracken hits a little too close to home with this list, as Andrew Sullivan wryly observes. I think some of this may be a little dated, but I found a lot of myself in here I’m afraid. The stuff about quasi-Catholicism among hipster Christians was brilliant in my book. I think however that I should be able to exonerate myself from the charge of being a Christian hipster in that I had to go look up David Sedaris on Google to figure out who he was. Hopefully that and the fact that I drink a lot of tap water will be my salvation.

Things they don’t like:

Christian hipsters don’t like megachurches, altar calls, and door-to-door evangelism. They don’t really like John Eldredge’s Wild at Heart or youth pastors who talk too much about Braveheart. In general, they tend not to like Mel Gibson and have come to really dislike The Passion for being overly bloody and maybe a little sadistic. They don’t like people like Pat Robertson, who on The 700 Club famously said that America should “take Hugo Chavez out”; and they don’t particularly like The 700 Club either, except to make fun of it. They don’t like evangelical leaders who get too involved in politics, such as James Dobson or Jerry Falwell, who once said of terrorists that America should “blow them all away in the name of the Lord.” They don’t like TBN, PAX, or Joel Osteen. They do have a wry fondness for Benny Hinn, however.

Christian hipsters tend not to like contemporary Christian music (CCM), or Christian films (except ironically), or any non-book item sold at Family Christian Stores. They hate warehouse churches or churches with American flags on stage, or churches with any flag on stage, really. They prefer “Christ follower” to “Christian” and can’t stand the phrases “soul winning” or “non-denominational,” and they could do without weird and awkward evangelistic methods including (but not limited to): sock puppets, ventriloquism, mimes, sign language, “beach evangelism,” and modern dance. Surprisingly, they don’t really have that big of a problem with old school evangelists like Billy Graham and Billy Sunday and kind of love the really wild ones like Aimee Semple McPherson.

Things they like:

Christian hipsters like music, movies, and books that are well-respected by their respective artistic communities—Christian or not. They love books like Resident Aliens by Stanley Hauerwas and Will Willimon, Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger by Ron Sider, God’s Politics by Jim Wallis, and The Imitation of Christ by Thomas a Kempis. They tend to be fans of any number of the following authors: Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy, Wendell Berry, Thomas Merton, John Howard Yoder, Walter Brueggemann, N.T. Wright, Brennan Manning, Eugene Peterson, Anne Lamott, C.S. Lewis, G.K. Chesterton, Henri Nouwen, Soren Kierkegaard, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Annie Dillard, Marilynne Robison, Chuck Klosterman, David Sedaris, or anything ancient and/or philosophically important.

Christian hipsters love thinking and acting Catholic, even if they are thoroughly Protestant. They love the Pope, liturgy, incense, lectio divina, Lent, and timeless phrases like “Thanks be to God” or “Peace of Christ be with you.” They enjoy Eastern Orthodox churches and mysterious iconography, and they love the elaborate cathedrals of Europe (even if they are too museum-like for hipster tastes). Christian hipsters also love taking communion with real Port, and they don’t mind common cups. They love poetry readings, worshipping with candles, and smoking pipes while talking about God. Some of them like smoking a lot of different things.

Christian hipsters love breaking the taboos that used to be taboo for Christians. They love piercings, dressing a little goth, getting lots of tattoos (the Christian Tattoo Association now lists more than 100 member shops), carrying flasks and smoking cloves. A lot of them love skateboarding and surfing, and many of them play in bands. They tend to get jobs working for churches, parachurch organizations, non-profits, or the government. They are, on the whole, a little more sincere and idealistic than their secular hipster counterparts.

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.

Donald Miller at the DNC: The Reactive Poltics of Evangelicalism

Posted by on August 26, 2008 43 comments

Davey has helpfully pointed us to a rather bizarre occurrence at the Democratic National Convention, namely the closing prayer by fellow Portlander and author, Donald Miller. Miller many of us know from the wildly successful book Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligous Thoughts on Christian Spirituality. This book has, in many ways, come to be cast as the quintessence of the sensibility of so-called emerging church. Miller’s actual writing is really not  bad. It is funny, whimsical, and sometimes insightful. It is the bane of all memoirs to appear self-consumed (how could they not?) and as such, I certainly don’t fault Miller on that score. However, one must pause to think about the oddity of a fellow like Miller being asked to offer a closing prayer at the DNC. Since when did major political parties start seeking out those perceived as emerging Christian bohemeian hipster types to chaplain their events? What is going on here?

Miller, like Jim Wallis and others among the “evangelical left” (a term I use with trepidation — clearly it could be taken pejoratively, but we need some sort of workable descriptor) are central among those whose vote the Democratic party is courting. Obama’s current surge of seemingly indestructible popularity is largely grounded in his appeal to young social justice-oriented people, many of whom are inclined towards the spirituality and thinkers associated with the emerging church.

Miller claims, on his website that his prayer at the DNC is part of “sending a message to Washington that no single party has the Christian community in their pocket.” This echoes Jim Wallis’s tired rhetoric about how both the left and the right are misguided, but pretty much everything about the left is actually pure gospel and the right is irredeemably diabolical. However that is not the point I am interested in.

I suppose it is not a horrible thing to let Washington know that Christians cannot be absorbed by one political party, but how is that message really all that good? The implicate of Miller’s message seems to be that Christians as a whole are not the political capital of the Republicans, rather, depending on what kind of Christian you are, you can be the political capital of either the Democrats or the Republicans. (I’ll leave aside the question of whether or not Wallis and Miller really want to send that message at all.  I suspect they’d far rather have all Christians be voting Democrat than have Christians voting against one another.)

The real question that is going unasked here is how is it a good thing if Christianity is so plastic as to be easily circumscribed within the architecture of either the Democratic or Republican parties? Why would the fact that Christians are no longer of the same mind about which political party to get in bed with be a good thing? Its as though Wallis and Miller are reveling in the fact that finally some of us Christians are different than the religious right and are able to express that difference by opposing them through the apparatus of the Democratic party. What is ultimately the point of rejoicing for Miller and Wallis is that Christians are finally dividing from one another over the causes they find important.

My point in this is not to suggest that things were better when evangelicals were almost universal expected to vote Republican. Surely they were not. However, the kind of political imagination that delights in the fact that finally new lines are being drawn along political lines and Christians are falling on both sides of them is surely not a very Christian way of thinking. It is agonistic and divisive all the way down. Certainly there are issues that must be divisive for the sake of truthfulness (cf. 1 Cor. 11:19), but I don’t think this is at all what is going on here. This has far more to do with the sort of identity politicking and social self-branding that has become fetishized in late-capitalist culture. What is ultimately important to Miller and Wallis, or at least the sort of spiritual-political sensibility that they have come to represent, is that they be differentiated from the Religious Right, this barbarous Other which they despise. What is crucial for them is all the trappings that come along with their differentiation from this Other. Their politics are reactive from begining to end. Thus, if praying at the DNC stands in opposition to praying at the RNC then that is clearly the move to be made. By making it Miller brands himself the certain sort of religous-political persona with whom the current culture of disaffected evangelicals have come to identify. The notion that it might be just as problematic for two political parties to have sectors of Christianity in the pocket as one is not really a consideration.

All of this points to a fundamental problem with the evangelical ethos in the United States from which the emerging church movement springs. Evangelical identity, at least in the U.S. is so utterly determined by the American political imagination and the capitalist economy which grounds it, that it is unable to express or realize itself except through the political-economic architecture of America, regardless of what political subdivision it finds itself in. It is part of the fabric of evangelical identity to be beholden to a certain notion of what meaningful political existence means, namely good citizenship, responsible participation in the “public sphere” for the sake of ordering society towards the relative good. As such, any and all forms of evangelical religious practice must by definition take their  bearings and derive their intelligibility from their participation in the American political apparatus which is constituted by late-capitalism.

Thus, the whole capitalist superstructure — upon which Democrats and Republicans feed like pilot fish upon an whale — constantly absorbs any and all evangelical political action into itself. It doesn’t matter to the capitalist structure whether or not evangelicals are in the pocket of one party or two in the least. As long as evangelicals remain within the orbit of their historic ethos they will always be seamlessly enfolded in the capitalist tapestry. Donald Miller praying at the DNC says absolutely nothing whatsoever to allay or contrast the captivation of evangelicals to the rhetoric of the religious right. It makes absolutely no difference to it whatsoever because it simply occupies an opposing nodal point within the binary antagonisms which make up the fabricated antinomies that run the capitalist order. Insofar as evangelicals, emergent or not continue to simply take their place on either side of the given polarities of micropolitics, they will continue to remain satiated subjects of capitalist discipline.

The only truely theopolitical form of Christian witness in the world will be one that is not caught up in the binary oppositions that obtain in contemporary political discourse. By remaining within the polarity of action and reaction, Christian politics is endlessly determined by the political logic of the civitas Cain rather than the civitate dei. Christian politics can only truly be Christian when it is not determined by the cycle of action and reaction that establishes the agonistic order of the earthly city. For Christian politics to be truly Christian they must be, at their very core, nonreactive. The peace of the city of God is in no way determined, constituted, or defined by the agonism of the earthly city. In the same way the translation of human bodies out of the body of Adamic death into the body of Christic life in baptism is in no sense determined by the powers of domination. Baptism is the translation of bodies into the realm of gift-giving and receiving, a realm which is not determined by the logic of violence that underwrites the reactive nature of all earthly politics.

Of course, there are many objections that could be lodged against the positing of this nonreactive theopolitical alternative that I have just hinted at. Surely all churches and all Christians are always-already circumscribed within the violent agonistic logic of the earthly city. Simply to pretend that we inhabit a pristine paradise of gift is nothing more than the construction of fictions, is it not? To this I can only say no. And I can say this on no basis other than the promisory reality that lies at the heart of the gospel. To be sure the line between the earthly city and the city of God runs through each one of us, but that by no means entails that we should settle down and break off our pilgrimage toward Jerusalem simply because we are not there yet. To inhabit the city of God is not to inhabit a stable defined space which we could counterpose with the earthly city. The city of God is the company of pilgrims who journey eschatologically through the present age, bearing within themselves the firstfruits of the age to come. We live not by the stability of something given, but in the instability of promise and gift. The nonreactive politics of the pilgrim people of God is not a total system which could supplant the earthly city or which is free from the violence of the earthly city. It is rather the proclamation, expectation, and experience of the apocalypse of God’s gift which breaks into the totality of the earthly city opening up spaces of infinite peace in which real human life can and does take place in the midst of this present world. What we are called to believe is that this sort of thing really happens. And such a belief cannot be inferred from the logic of prior sequences of events. What we are called to, as Craig Hovey has helpfully pointed out is not the stability of prediction, but the insecurity of promise.

To live in that promise would be to inhabit a space in which we are willing to do that hard work of problematizing our attempts to easily participate in the political binaries of this present age. To live in light of the Trinitarian future of promise and gift is to live in the realm of inutiliy, in which our political practices are likely to look like utter foolishness. But what else would we expect when the criterion of political intelligibility in our world is based on the very structure of reaction that the Christian order of peace calls into question?

It may be that I have finally drifted too far afield from my initial questions about the political and theological logic of Miller’s participation in the DNC. Ultimately  the question revolves around political content of the gospel. Insofar as we allow the promisory imagination of the gospel of Christ to be circumscribed by the political logic of the earthly city we are failing to truly embody our theopolitical calling as the ekklesia of of the triune God. And in so failing we become simply another branded commodity to be bought, sold, and fetishized in the ubiquitous market of global captitalism. I fear that Donald Miller, by casting in his lot where he has may have done just that. It is my hope that ultimately the call of the pilgrim people of God will be sweeter and more alluring than the apparent utility false polis and the cool trappings of insidious agora of this age. And I think that hope is not ill-founded.

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?

Why is Mark Driscoll Interesting?

Posted by on June 3, 2008 12 comments

My post excoriating Mark Driscoll’s idolatrous concept of Jesus has skyrocketted to my most-viewed post ever written in a mere two weeks.  It has also garnered some responses around the blogosphere, some of which I may respond to at some point.  However, what I find intriguing is how, in two weeks a post on Mark Driscoll’s lunacy could become the most popular post on my blog.  What is it that makes nutty figures like him major topics for discussion?  I suppose people intent on polarizing things will always bring discussion out of the woodwork, but I find that unfortunate.  As long as the most interesting theological discussions are ones that are radically polarized, I fear we won’t have that many good discussions.  They may be fun (and important), of course, but ultimately I doubt they are the conversations that really, really matter.

However, in light of all the discussion that was had over that post, and the amount of stuff by Driscoll that I’ve read in light of that discussion, I am more convinced than ever that the Jesus he preaches and the ministry he oversees is a blight on the gospel which is tragically leading people into lives of bondage and death rather than the liberation of the gospel.  In light of this, stay tuned for more posts about his books which I’m painfully continuing to digest so as to speak more clearly to the issues that are raised by his sub-Christian theology and ministry.

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.

Problematic Words

Posted by on May 11, 2008 21 comments

There are certain key buzz words among evangelicals, particualrly emergey-types that literally make me want to perpetrate extreme violence on anyone I hear saying them.  And sadly, every now and then I find some of them escaping my own lips.  So, if you find me too harsh, just realize that much of what I am about to say is as much self-loathing as others-loathing.

So, here are quintessential evangelical phrases that if you say around me may very well result me suddenly unleashing all my wrath upon your kneecaps:

“I’m just looking for someone to ‘do life’ with me.”

“I’m searching for something real, you know, something raw, authentic, you know?”

“What we really need is authentic community.”

“We need to strive to be more intentionally missional.”

“We’re not Christians, we’re Jesus-followers!”

“Jesus was Green!”

“Everything must change.”

“We totally need to hear each other’s stories…like I need to hear your story and you need to hear my story.  We need to just hear, you know?  Each other’s stories.”

“We’re all about radical discipleship.”

“Our home communities are where the church really happens.”

What else is there?  Come on folks, lets do life and be authentic together as we think of more annoying emergentisms!

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.

Reflections on Evangelical Blogs (2)

Posted by on May 1, 2008 75 comments

While I don’t mean to just pick on the evangelical blogs, I cannot help myself on this one.  So, please indulge me.  In another post over at Pen and Parchment, another, umm, winning post leads off with this salvo:

Have you noticed it? Do you feel small? Do you feel inadequate to have opinions anymore? Do you feel a heavy hand upon your head? Do you feel demeaned, disenfranchised, demoted?

That is what it is beginning to feel like to be an Evangelical.

The post proceeds to then decry the “new elitism that is sweeping Christianity” in the form of all things characterized by words such as “emergent, post-colonialism, post-conservative, post-modern, post-fundamental, post-Christian, and the like.”

Now, I’m all for lambasting the emerging church.  Hell, one of the most central things about being a hip, cool, cutting-edge Protestant Christian these days entails making fun of the emergent church.  Today its far, far cooler to point out the goofiness of the whole emergent thing that to actually be part of it.  But I digress.  The author of the post in question, however, clearly isn’t trying to be cool.  Rather he has a persecution complex.

Indeed, it seems that, in fact, being an evangelical is the hardest, most courageous thing possible in a country where the, ahem, President is a rabid evangelical (among being rabid about other things), and where there has never in history been a president who did not claim the label of “born-again Christian” (yeah, even Kennedy).  But, no seriously, it’s hard to be an evangelical.  You have to endure the persecution of not having your religion publicly taught by the government, of trying to figure out where to gas up your SUV, and oh, there’s the agony of biting one’s nails over the constant fear that maybe, just maybe, Hilary Clinton will get the nomination.  Being an evangelical is hard.  Seriously.  It is.  Yeah.

In contrast to the rather pedantic pontifications of these sorts of blogs, I really don’t see how it takes any courage whatsoever to be an evangelical in the United States today.  You can be an evangelical and style yourself as whatever kind of person you want, lead whatever kind of life you want, spend money however you want, vote for whomever you want, and well, pretty much do anything however you want.  One can legitimately claim to be an evangelical and create themselves in any way they wish.  Evangelicalism is, by and large, a specter, not a substance; it is an echo, not an identity.  Its infinitely plastic nature allows those who would claim that label to pretty much say and be whatever they want and feel totally justified in their evangelicalness.  And yet it is touted as some noble vocation, some persecuted minority who is under some sort of massive repression.  Maybe I’m beating my head against a wall here, but I still have to pause and wonder sometimes how a religious movement that has influence at all the highest levels of government, whose very ethos defines the whole American project can somehow come to see themselves as a persecuted minority.

What I think is most interesting is the way in which I think evangelicals actually know that this whole persecution complex they have is nothing more than a construct.  Deep down I think they know that thier identity’s are self-constructions, that they are more American than Christian, and that they aren’t satisfied with the shallowness that attends so much of evangelical life.  And this sort of deep-seated insecurity produces the kind of reflexive combativeness that is seen in the post quoted above.  Suddenly it becomes absolutely necessary to slap down anything that might be a threat to the fragilely constructed edifice of evangelical identity.  Even something as fragmentary, faddish, and, well, evangelical as the emergent church!

The Emergent Church

Posted by on February 24, 2008 2 comments

No, I don’t mean the current buzz word amongst western evangelicals for their version of how to coordinate a worship service.  Actually, ironically enough, this term, as far as I can tell was first used in 1980 by Johann Baptist Metz as the title of one of his books on political theology.  The Emergent Church is a trenchant critique of Metz’s constant enemy which is “bourgeois religion”.  In fact, his book bearing this title was intended to be titled “Beyond Bourgeois Religion”, but apparently the publisher wouldn’t go for that.

Regardless, I find it at least a bit ironic that the first book to be titled “The Emergent Church” would be a critique of bourgeois Christianity when the contemporary phenomenon that bears the same name is almost exclusively a phenomenon of the Christian bourgeoisie in the West!  Here’s a quote from the book:

“Did not Jesus himself incur the reproach of treason?  Did not his love bring him to that state?  Was no he crucified as a traitor to all the apparently worthwhile values?  Must not Christians therefore expect, if they want to be faithful to Christ, to be regarded as traitors to bourgeois religion?  True, his love, in which everything at the end was taken from him, even the whole majesty and dignity of a love which suffers in powerlessness, was still something other than the expression of a suffering with others, which the the unfortunate and oppressed, out of sheer solidarity.  It was rather the expression of his obedience, and obedience that submitted to suffering because of God and God’s powerlessness in our world.  So must not Christian love in following after Christ continually strive toward that same obedience?

Against Confessional Diversity

Posted by on November 30, 2007 15 comments

A common impulse in the face of the division of the Christian church is to look for unique pearls of distinctly Christian wisdom and beauty in the various different traditions of the Christian faith.  In so doing, we construct some notion of the divergent streams of the Christian faith as different and uniquely beautiful tributaries of one Christian stream, each of which has its own “distinct contribution”.  It is a common, and I think, profoundly modern liberal sentiment that each and every stream of the Christian tradition possesses shards of the Christian wholeness which should be appreciated and appropriated by the truly pious and refined Christian.

This tendency can lead one from a liberal sentimentalism about all roads leading the same place, or an ultramodern ecclecticism which plunders all the various traditions of their interesting bells and whistles for the sake of creating some new, perfect kind of church.  This is a particularly evangelical and American proclivity, exemplified, for example in Brian McLaren’s book A Generous Orthodoxy.  His egregiously long subtitle proclaims that he is a ”missional, evangelical, post/protestant, liberal/conservative, mystical/poetic, biblical, charismatic/contemplative, fundamentalist/Calvinist, Anabaptist/Anglican, Methodist, catholic, green, incarnational, depressed- yet hopeful, emergent, unfinished Christian.”  I will leave aside the obvious stupidities of such a cumbersome proclamation.  If people don’t realize that the concept of an “Anabaptist/Anglican” makes no sense whatsoever, I won’t be able to convince them of it.

The point is, however that this impulse to skim elements off the top of the various streams of the Christian tradition assumes that the existence of all these traditions is a fundamentally good thing.  That is the proposition I wish to call into question.  This is not to say that the church should not bear within herself the fullness of human diversity and culture.  Rather, it is to say that the various “traditions” of the Christian faith are only intelligible in the context of the church’s history of schism and division.  As such they are not goods to be celebrated, but the result of sin for which we must strive to repent.

The stains and scars of schism have left no part of the church untouched.  Roman Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, Protestantism, Anabaptism, all confessional streams of Christian fellowship have been shaped into the distinctive bodies that they are through their complicity in schism and division.  As such, the wholeness for which the Christian church longs will not be found by trying to figure out what distinctly Roman, Eastern, Reformed, Lutheran, or other such traditional distinctives we can all embrace.  Rather, the wholeness and unity to which we are called in Christ will only be realized when all Christians come together in the most abject posture of repentance and penitence.  There will be no reunion for the Church without repentance.  And they way toward such repentance is not to look for how we can all appreciate our distinctiveness as specific ecclesial bodies, it will rather be found in the abandonment of such distinctives in weeping, confession, and prayer.  How that might come about, only God knows.  But the Triune God is the one who calls things into existence which did not exist, who declares that those who were formerly no people are now the people of God, the one through whom the things that are nought bring to nothing the things that are.  Therefore I have hope.

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