Mark Driscoll on the ordinary demonic, not enough sex in marriage (from the removed Spiritual Warfare 2008 teaching)

Should you have the primary source materials referred to in this blog post you can compare what is written here to what you have access to yourself.  Wenatchee The Hatchet tries to make a point of carefully citing primary sources.  So we're about to discuss at some length, for educational and journalistic purposes, some material that used to be available for public consultation until about a week ago.

http://marshill.com/media/spiritual-warfare/the-devil
February 5, 2008
Mark Driscoll
Part 2, The Devil

It used to be there but is no longer, and the content from the series has been something I've meant to blog about for a few years.  MHC took all that content down but since it's still handy for those who downloaded it, we can proceed anyway.  One of the most striking things about reviews of Real Marriage that were published in 2012 was the complete lack of any larger narrative/historical reference point for the content of the book.  It is that broader context we'll attempt to survey in a handful of posts.  I've discussed the juxtaposition of Mark Driscoll on bitterness as a demonic foothold and his resentment of his wife for the lack of sex in the marriage as just the subject of bitterness. 

But it's equally important to stress that about 10 minutes into this lecture Driscoll bracketed off not-enough-sex-in-marriage as an essentially separate category that didn't necessarily overlap with bitterness.  He touched ever so briefly on 1 Cor 7 and then proceeded. 

... How many of you would think that a couple that doesn't have enough sex is experiencing demonic spiritual warfare? It's true. How many Christian marriages divorce?  Well, statistically, more than those who are not Christian. When non-Christians can work it out a rate that is more successful than Christians that would indicate to me that Satan has really found a way to climb into bed between a husband and a wife and, in one way or another, cause devastation.

When I'm meeting with a couple and one of them, maybe it's the husband, says, "Well, my wife's not being very nice to me so I'm gonna deny her sex and until she's nice to me I'm gonna withhold it." 
That's demonic.

The wife who says, "You know, I'm just never in the mood and, you know, I know you love me and we have a decent marriage and there's no reason I shouldn't have sex with you, but, I'm just not in the mood or, you know, I don't feel like giving it to you until you give something to me and it becomes a bartering chip in the relationship." That's demonic.

That's demonic.

To be sure, there are sex addicts in marriage who are unreasonable in their expectations of their spouse but what I'm talking about is the common situation where one person in the marriage wants to be intimate more often than the other and they're rejected, they become bitter,  Satan comes in and feeds that bitterness, baits the hook of their flesh with the temptation of the world, and all of a sudden Satan puts in front of them images and people and opportunities to lead them astray and to destroy everything.

It doesn't make anyone a victim. It doesn't make anyone a victim because we all of our own choosing choose sin but it does mean you're giving Satan an opportunity to literally sleep between you and your spouse. ...

So there were are.

Now from Real Marriage


Real Marriage: the truth about sex, friendship and life together
Mark and Grace Driscoll
Thomas Nelson
copyright (c) 2012 by On Mission, LLC
ISBN 978-1-4041-8352-0
PAGE 9-10
Before long I was bitter agaisnt God and Grace. It seemed to me as if they had conspired to trap me. I had always been the "good guy" who turned down women for sex. In my twisted logic, since I had only slept with a couple of women I was in relationships with, I had been holy enough, and God owed me. I felt God had conned me by telling me to marry Grace, and allowed Grace to rule over me since she was controlling our sex life.  PAGES 14-15
Although I loved our people and my wife, this only added to my bitterness. I had a church filled with single women who were asking me how they could stop being sexually ravenous and wait for a Christian husband; then I'd go home to a wife whom I was not sexually enjoying. 
... We still disagree on how often we had sex (I [Mark Driscoll] was bitter, and she [Grace Driscoll] was in denial, which skews the perspective), but we both agree it wasn't a healthy amount to support a loving marriage.

page 164

... As with many things in marriage, communication is key. When I cam to the conclusion that the cure for a lot of my moodiness was having more frequent sex with my wife, I simply told her. Yes, it's that simple. For years when I would endure depression, I tried to talk to Grace about it. Her natural inclination was to want to have long talks about our feelings toward each other, and I know that connecting with her like this is important. But sometimes I was just too frustrated and ended up blowing up and hurting her feelings.  The truth was I wanted to have more frequent sex with my wife, and we needed to discuss how that could happen.

... For a wife, sex comes out of a healthy relationship, whereas, for a husband it leads to one.
So as we've seen Mark Driscoll recount for himself he made a case that more frequent sex with his wife cured a lot of his moodiness and depression.  That's the positive variation. The diabology articulated in the now removed 2008 Spiritual Warfare series asserts that those who withhold sex from their spouses are being demonic.  So it would appear that Driscoll had developed both positive and negative reinforcement approaches on the matter of someone getting as much sex as was wanted from the relationship.

Now one of the things I noted was disturbing about Real Marriage was what neither Mark nor Grace Driscoll pointed out about Grace's health.  What's striking is that Driscoll actually went to quite some length in his book Death By Love to explain precisely the details that never made it into the Driscollian narrative in Real Marriage discussing how much Mark resented and was bitter toward Grace over a lack of sex. 

DEATH BY LOVE
Copyright (c) 2008 by Mark Driscoll and Gerry Breshears
Published by Crossway Books
PDF ISBN: 978-1-4335-0423-5
ISBN-10: 1433501295
ISBN-13: 9781433501296

page 164

My wife, Grace, and I love Gideon and thank God for him often. My wife is petite, and I have a big head, which resulted in C-sections with the birth of each of our children. Having endured one miscarrage and four C-sections, Grace was ready to be done with pregnancies. But I was not yet ready to do anything to prevent God from giving us a child. So, we left it in God's hands and we were given Gideon, whom I affectionately refer to as Guppy, for being the youngest, and as Flip Flop, because at a very young age he decided he only wanted to wear flip-flops on the wrong feet for the rest of his life.  To her credit, Grace often gives me a hug and thanks me for not stopping at four children, because Gideon has been an absolute blessing and a joy to our family.

A grand total of five C-section deliveries and one miscarriage.  Now whether those C-sections were what a relative has referred to as "bikini" cuts or "taun taun" cuts isn't clarified by Mark Driscoll.  But to some degree it doesn't matter.  The physical trauma of five C-sections and at least one miscarriage in a set of five children birthed over roughly one decade meant that the Driscolls were having children roughly once every two years. 

Let's highlight something from page 166

page 166
... For example, before I met Jesus I was guilty of sexual sin. I was sexually active prior to marriage and also occasionally looked at pornography. But because Jesus died for those sins and saved me from them, I have been able to put those sins to death. As a result, you were brought into a family where your mom and I truly love one another and have been faithful to one another in every way.  We know that apart from Jesus , dying for our sin, sin would have killed our marriage. You would have been either raised by a single mother or trapped in a home of sin and bitterness, marked by unrest and hostility between your mother and me, if it were not for Jesus' death on the cross.

And yet the opening chapter of Real Marriage highlighted that a home full of sin and bitterness marked by unrest and hostility seemed to be precisely what had been going on until maybe some time around 2006.  That it appears to have been dealt with in some sense before Gideon's birth could be inferred but as a certain Old Testament figure once warned, he who is putting on his armor should not boast as he who has taken it off.  The battle isn't over yet and it's always possible to lose.  It's always possible to fail no matter how great the beginnings seem to be.  That was something Driscoll mentioned a time or two from the pulpit about marriage.

But people who have attempted to get some understanding of what the Driscolls, and Mark Driscoll in particular, state about sex and marriage and the demonic have, well, it's possible no one else has even attempted to address this topic before because no one outside of Mars Hill could even realize there is a cumulative narrative to consider, cumulative testimony by Driscolls to set out and consider. 

For instance, let's consider what Driscoll said in part 2 of the Spiritual Warfare series about sexual sin as idolatry.

1:10:30ish
... People who commit sexual sin, they are worshipping the body, they're worshipping nudity, they're worshipping parts of the body, they're worshipping the pleasures of their body. They're worshipping the appearance, touch, taste, sight, smell of someone else's body, sexual sin is idolatry. It's worshipping creation rather than creator.

Idolatry is still, technically, in the domain Mark Driscoll considered the ordinary demonic.
But anyone who has read Romans 1 may note that the idolatry precedes the sexual sin.  Driscoll's taxonomy of ways to sin sexually, virtually by definition, excludes whatever is mutually agreed upon in marriage.

Getting back to Real Marriage:
page 111

The worship of anyone or anything other than the God of the Bible is by definition idolatry. Idolatry happens when a good thing (like sex) becomes a god thing (like adultery) which is a bad thing.

page 121

... I (Mark) tended toward sex as god. I was a newer Christian who had accumulated most of his knowledge about sex from culture, locker-room talk, and sinning sexually with a few young women. ... For her [Grace] I was too much sexually. For me she was too little sexually.  We made very little progress for many years until we had spent a considerable time talking through our sexual history and beliefs ... .

[Grace] His drive seemed to get stronger the less we had sex, and I wondered if it was an idol to him or if that was normal for men. I later realized it was partially a real physical need.

Well, while the implied narrative from Mark Driscoll is that he tended to view sex as a god in the past and the implication in the book was that this was no longer the case there is simply no reason to take this implied potential narrative as necessary.  If Driscoll made an idol of sex in the past there's nowhere in the entire book Real Marriage where there is any significant explanation of when Mark Driscoll, if he made a god of sex, stopped making a god of sex. By developing positive and negative reinforcement ideas, one that more frequent sex would cure his moodiness and depression and the other being that withholding sex from a spouse is actually satanic, Mark Driscoll seemed to accumulate a made-to-order theology that could virtually ensure his wife would eventually have as much sex with him as he wanted.  Or at least that seems like the best explanation of the accumulated teachings of Mark Driscoll and Grace Driscoll on the subject of sex in marriage.

Along the way it is worth noting that the Driscolls do not clearly articulate that it's possible to have an idolatrous approach to sex within marriage.  Or, to be more blunt, conventionally defined sexual immorality is taken reflexively to be idolatry but there's no corresponding proposal that it is possible to idolize sex even within a strictly monogamous relationship.  If Mark Driscoll actually made sex into a god there's simply no compelling evidence through which we could ascertain when it stopped being an idol for him.  If anything, the bulk of his teaching on sex in marriage might lead a listener to imagine that a great deal of theological thinking ranging from gender roles to spiritual warfare revolved around making a case for more sex within married life and this may have happened in spite of at least four births and a miscarriage before the birth of Gideon Driscoll. 

Now here's something else to bear in mind.  While there's been a scrubbing of all the pre-2008 preaching Mark Driscoll has done; and while there has been selective scrubbing of material from 2008 (Peasant Princess) and 2009 (1 & 2 Peter) there's still plenty of evidence reflecting what Mark Driscoll thinks about sex and its role in defining the value of life.  Want a sample? 

http://marshill.com/media/esther/jesus-has-a-better-kingdom
Jesus Has a Better Kingdom
Pastor Mark Driscoll
Esther 1:10–22
September 21, 2012
about 8:39 into the sermon.

Number two, men are castrated. Men are castrated. I’ll read it for you. “He commanded—” and these guys got names. “Mehuman—” That’s kind of a rapper name, I was thinking, like, ancient Persian hip-hop artist, Mehuman. That’s how it’s spelled. “Biztha.” Sounds like a sidekick. “Harbona, Bigtha.” That’s my personal favorite. If I had to pick a Persian name, Bigtha. Definitely not Littletha. I would totally go with Bigtha. “Abagtha, Zethar and Carkas.”

Okay, a couple things here. The Bible talks about real people, real circumstances, real history. That’s why they’re facts. It’s not just philosophy. Number two, if you ever have an opportunity to teach the Bible and you hit some of the parts with the old, crazy names, read fast and confident. No one knows how to pronounce them, and they’ll just assume you do.

Here are these guys. So, you’ve got seven guys, “the seven eunuchs.” What’s a eunuch? A guy who used to have a good life, and joy, and hope. That’s the technical definition of a eunuch. A eunuch is a man who is castrated. Proceeding with the story before I have to fire myself.

So apparently Mark Driscoll thought it'd be great to joke that because they were castrated men eunuchs were men who used to have a good life, and joy, and hope.  Apparently in Mark Driscoll's Bible Isaiah 56 didn't make it into the canon.  If Mark Driscoll tended toward making sex a god, an idol, and at any point he had a change of heart it's simply not possible to establish when that happened.  The first and simplest reason, at this point, is that thanks to Mars Hill Church obliterating all the pre-2008 sermons Mark Driscoll preached (which would have included the slightly notorious 2007 Scotland sermon and a 2002 sermon that used to be part 20 of Proverbs called "Lovemaking"), it's not possible to figure out when and where such a change in trajectory might have happened.

But the second and more troubling reason is that even if all that content were still up there on the internet for consultation you might still find it impossible (as I have, at least) to pinpoint any point at which Mark Driscoll stops making jokes that suggest, as he so directly did in his quip about eunuchs in the Esther series, that guys who can't have sex that gets women pregnant used to have a good life, and joy, and hope.  As some people have put it, many a truth can be veiled in jest.  Mark Driscoll's jokes from the pulpit may tell us more about what his actual beliefs in practice are than propositional statements.  Then again, the direct propositional statement that a spouse who withholds sex from his or her spouse is being demonic seems pretty impossible to misinterpret.