at Mere Orthodoxy Jake Meador on the Evangelical echo chamber "Reading with big Eva", a reminder that the plagiarism controversies of past contributors to the TGC could already be proof of the insularity of the scene's readers

https://oldlife.org/2016/05/31/the-new-calvinist-safe-space/
...  This is a big difference between New Calvinists and Neo-Calvinists. The latter read widely, try to learn from the best scholars in a variety of fields, and have confidence that challenging reading material will not destroy a reader’s faith. In other words, Neo-Calvinists understand the merits of the Pulitzer Prize. New Calvinists cultivate a safe space shelf of books.

So would the difference between a Neo-Calvinist and a New Calvinist be a question of whether or not you're excited that you can read pdf versions of Brunner for free and refusing to read anyone connected to the neo-orthodoxy movement?  The terminology can be fuzzy but what's less fuzzy is the concern about how insular the YRR movement has shown itself to be.

http://www.alliancenet.org/mos/postcards-from-palookaville/could-big-eva-face-a-trump-moment#.V1xmIeKTWUl
...    Big Eva organizations such as the Gospel Coalition [emphasis added] have self-consciously sought to drive and thereby control the small-r reformed world by buying up the talent and overseeing who gets to speak, what gets said, who gets reviewed, who is in, who is out.   Other groups, as I have recently pointed out, have become businesses, making big sums on gospel products and the performance of orthodoxy before the adoring home crowd.  And the small pool of names that populate the leadership of all the Big Eva organizations indicates an establishment elite which ultimately shares a common interest in protecting each other’s brands.  The chances of internal reform seem remote.

Nowhere is this problematic culture more evident than in the (non) fall-out from scandals.  Numerous big names have been caught out: plagiarism, bullying, cover ups, adultery, Ashley Madison – you name it, they’ve done it – yet, just like politicians, they offer quick repentances and make come-backs in the time it takes the rest of us to make a cup of tea. And small, hard-core activists are always available to form a hashtag-wielding mob and rubbish any nay-sayers as hypocrites, legalists and worse.   The potential for a leadership dangerously detached from the people and insulated from legitimate concerns of the constituency who ultimately bankroll the operation of Big Eva seems to be being realized before our eyes. ....

By now there seems little reason to doubt that Trueman has read and heard that a dangerous detachment of the upper leadership of Mars Hill from the people, and that this leadership was insulated from the legitimate concerns of the constituency who ultimately bankrolled the existence of Mars Hill, was a thing.

So with preludes like that in mind we get to Jake Meador's recent post on the evangelical echo chamber. 

https://mereorthodoxy.com/evangelical-echo-chamber/
...
This, then, is the chief problem with narrow reading of the sort that many evangelicals have traditionally practiced, often at the encouragement of influential leaders like Challies. When we read narrowly, only from publishers and authors that bear the (ironic) nihil obstat of Big Eva, we can easily develop an impoverished imagination. We are narrow, shallow individuals who need to be deep and broad. [emphasis added]

Certainly, we could get along decently by reading everything we can get our hands on by John Piper, Tim Keller, and Al Mohler or, thinking of the next generation, Matt Chandler, Kevin DeYoung, and Russ Moore. Indeed, I’ve been richly blessed by my reading of several of those authors. There’s nothing wrong with reading these more prominent, widely known evangelicals and as prominent, widely known evangelicals go, these men are some of the best. (color emphasis added for foreshadowing)

Meador didn't set out to take note of the plagiarism controversies that erupted from within the new Calvinist scene but it's worth highlighting this practical shortcoming that can happen if a community's reading becomes too insular and the publishing standards too lazy.  It wasn't THAT long ago that Kevin DeYoung praised a book co-authored by Doug Wilson that ended up discontinuted because of "negligence and gross incompetence" that was highlighted by a blogger.

https://blogs.thegospelcoalition.org/kevindeyoung/2015/11/05/book-briefs-21/

Douglas Wilson and Randy Booth, A Justice Primer (Canon Press, 2015). I thought this was a book on social justice, economics, and big picture politics. It’s actually a book about how the Bible would have us judge each other (or not) in the mad, mad world of blog warriors and internet vigilantes. This book is full of refreshing wisdom. I hope it reaches a wide audience. And if you already know that Doug Wilson is a good-for-nothing scoundrel (and I don’t know him personally and do strongly disagree with him at times), then that’s an indication that you really need this book. [UPDATE: It seems that portions of the book were plagiarized, which, while not changing the nature of the content, cannot help but affect one’s opinion of the book. I hope Wilson and Booth will respond to the evidence presented in the link above. NEXT UPDATE: The book has been discontinued by Canon Press because of “negligence and gross incompetence” resulting in plagiarism and improper citation.]

Nor should that incident be seen in isolation because Kevin DeYoung didn't just praise a book that ended up discontinued in the wake of a plagiarism controversy, he was also explicitly named as someone to be sent a galley proof of Mark and Grace Driscoll's Real Marriage, as documented here at Wenatchee The Hatchet from a document sent along late last year.  It's also worth pointing out that John Piper's Desiring God ministries gets named.

http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2015/12/a-blast-from-past-mark-grace-driscoll.html#more
...

Galley proofs - Desiring God with John Piper, Purpose Driven Network with Rick Warren, Life Church with Craig Groeschel, Perry Noble, James MacDonald who runs Walk in the Word Radio and Harvest Bible Chapel, Justin Taylor and Kevin Deyoung of the Gospel Coalition, Mark Dever of 9 Marks, CJ Mahaney and Joshua Harris of Sovereign Grace ...

What's curious about the plagiarism controversies that erupted in connection to authors with Gospel Coalition connections has been that evangelicals who might otherwise have insisted that the New Testament documents can't have been pious forgeries or that there's no such thing as Q and that the pastoral epistles had to have been written by Paul all of a sudden assert another premise for the benefit of contemporary authors, that there's no such thing as intellectual property and that ideas can't be owned.  Well, who has said that intellectual property claims as claims about labor and their results that could be pertinent in a judicial context, were necessarily claims to be "ownership" of ideas?  If you start with a pejorative definition of what intellectual property even is then of course it's not a surprise if you take a light-hearted view toward allegations of plagiarism by saying that really, copyright shouldn't exist. But that won't change the history of plagiarism scandals in which authors who have contributed to the Gospel Coalition, specifically Mark Driscoll and Doug Wilson, have been embroiled over the last ... three years.

Would the evangelicals who swim in the Gospel Coalition pond have such a sanguine view about the basic idea of intellectual property or honesty in documentation if this were a discussion about the ethics and public statements of Clinton or Trump? 

Jake Meador's concerns seem legitimate and I would say that the history of plagiarism scandals connected to authors who have had Gospel Coalition connections and/or reviews should be considered as a proof of how insular the scene has had to be for these plagiarism scandals to have ever occurred.  Remember, the Driscoll marketing plans for Real Marriage included requests that some big names in the YRR movement get galley proofs.  If the names mentioned didn't get galley proofs they're more off the hook; but if they got galley proofs and the plagiarism controversy in 2013 happened for Mark Driscoll anyway then it might be a testament to how insular the reading habits of the YRR crowd have been if they got galley proofs of Real Marriage and no red flags at all came up for them that maybe the first edition of Mark and Grace Driscoll's 2012 book needed more footnotes and citations.

So I'd say Meador raises a good point and I'll take it a step or two further by suggesting that the plagiarism controversies that have erupted in the young, Restless Reformed/aka New Calvinist scene should have already told us just how insular the scene's reading has become.

POSTSCRIPT
For folks who might be new to Wenatchee The Hatchet, lest anybody imagine this is just a complaint about the insular echo chamber of people who can be dubbed Religious Right ...

http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2016/06/jonathan-merritt-sounds-off-on-gospel.html

The immediately previous post was dedicated to how Jonathan Merritt's friendly words about Rachel Held Evans, who has taken what I consider to be no more than publicity stunt stands against men like Mark Driscoll and Doug Wilson, constitute a comparable echo chamber for what could be called the Religious Left.  Having finally gotten around to reading Jacques Ellul's Propaganda I think the explanation for both cases is that propaganda of both sides has entrenched both in ways that are toxic and unhealthy but there's the rest of this year's blogging if you want to read about how I think Ellul's discussion of propagandists and propaganda can explain our current politics and the entrenchment of the celebrity Christians.

Jonathan Merritt sounds off on The Gospel Coalition and mentions Rachel Held Evans, who two jerks in a row publicly objected to guys with books that were in plagiarism controversies she never brought up

I suppose it has to be granted that Jonathan Merritt would have to bring up Rachel Held Evans in a discussion of how The Gospel Coalition handles social media.

http://religionnews.com/2016/06/06/the-gospel-coalition-and-how-not-to-engage-culture/
...
You may not agree with popular blogger Rachel Held Evans, for example, but she is no troll. She’s a New York Times bestselling author of numerous books and more than 100,000 people follow her on Twitter and Facebook. But Evans was blocked by TGC when she questioned a post on their site that used rather alarming language to discuss sexual intercourse.

The article quoted controversial pastor Douglas Wilson: “the sexual act cannot be made into an egalitarian pleasuring party. A man penetrates, conquers, colonizes, plants. A woman receives, surrenders, accepts.” Evans countered that the statement was offensive and degrading to women and triggered images of rape and sexual violence. Later, prominent theologian Scot McKnight called on TGC to remove the post, arguing it “inculcates justified violence” against women.

TGC’s leaders would have done well to listen to her. She was expressing legitimate concerns and Douglas Wilson has also praised the “unexpected blessings of slavery” and admitted that he believes LGBT people could be executed in certain circumstances. Instead of listen, TGC blocked her on social media. (The original link to the article is now disabled. The author later apologized for posting the quote, but the link to the apology is also now disabled.)

Evans was not the first person to be stiff-armed for speaking up. Not by a long shot. Most people who have been blocked by TGC say they were punished for questioning the coalition’s disastrous defense of Sovereign Grace Ministries, a prominent Calvinist ministry that was embroiled in a sexual abuse scandal. TGC personalities connected to SGM continued to express support and friendship for those involved with the scandal even as it became clear that Sovereign Grace leaders were complicit. Many who questioned TGC’s stance were blocked. Some who merely used Twitter handles such as #istandwithsurvivors were similarly punished by TGC.
...
Not being much of a fan of Doug Wilson myself, Calvinist though I am, for Evans to protest Doug Wilson seems like the progressive equivalent of shooting fish in a barrel.  If she'd set her sights on Tony Jones' treatment of his ex-wife that would be a bit more impressive.  Sustained and careful critique of someone who you consider on "your" team is more difficult to pull off and requires both more care and at times more forceful argument.  At the risk of pointing out what might already by obvious to regular readers, I'm not just writing that as though I've got no personal experience.

But Merritt's mention of Evans makes it impossible for me to ignore something.  Evans has a history of calling out guys who've been in the Gospel Coalition orbit for being bullies and while that's salutary in its way ... it highlights that in neither case did that public posturing actually accomplish anything.  In fact in the cases of both Mark Driscoll and Doug Wilson we're talking about guys who ended up embroiled in plagiarism controversies that were brought up not by Rachel Held Evans but by conservative Reformed types, whether Janet Mefferd in her on-air conversation with Mark Driscoll in 2013 or Rachel Miller at her blog in 2015.  Evans was sounding off on how Driscoll and Wilson were guilty of the thought crimes progressives have largely always thought those guys were guilty of in any event but which, let's remind everyone, is still stuff that, however unsavory it may seem, is protected speech.  It was from within the Reformed scene that these guys got trouble over books that were regarded as having problems that amounted to copyright infringement issues.

Driscoll's books have been amended as has been documented by Warren Throckmorton.  A Justice Primer has been withdrawn.  Now if Evans herself weren't part of the celebrity Christian train ...
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2016/02/rachel-held-evans-takes-aim-at-donald.html
https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2016/01/29/president-obama-announces-more-key-administration-posts
Rachel Held Evans, Appointee for Member, President’s Advisory Council on Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships

Rachel Held Evans is a Christian blogger and the author of Faith Unraveled, A Year of Biblical Womanhood, and Searching for Sunday. In addition, Ms. Evans speaks at retreats, conferences, universities, and churches across the country. She has been featured on NPR, Slate, The BBC, The Washington Post,  The Huffington Post, CNN, The View, and The Today Show, and in 2012, she was named one of Christianity Today's “50 Women to Watch.”  Ms. Evans received a B.A. from Bryan College.  
See, her piece about Donald Trump was another case of shooting fish in a barrel from a progressive camp.  So she doesn't like Trump.  I don't like Trump and I consider myself a moderate actual conservative on both politics and Christian doctrine.  Whether it's Trump or Sanders there's two candidates in play this year that appeal in a big way as populist agitators to angry white reactionaries and radicals.  It doesn't mean I have to like either of them and so I don't like either of them.

If Evans spent less time shooting fish in barrels like Mark Driscoll or Doug Wilson or Donald Trump she could do the more difficult work of levelling an internal critique.  If there's something in our age that seems badly overdue it's passing judgment on our insiders instead of fixating on the punditry of taking shots at the people just about anyone could work out we already disagree with. 

Rachel Held Evans has the right to disagree with guys like Trump and Driscoll and Wilson as much as she wants.  That the Sovereign Grace Ministries situation was a fiasco seems pretty much beyond dispute but I haven't remarked much upon it because that's all stuff that happened on the other side of the country and I had enough stuff that I felt needed documentation over here in the Seattle area I figured I'd focus on that.  And to make a nasty point about it, I'm also not the sort of celebrity Christian who feels obliged to sound off on headlines and controversies just to stay in rotation.  I've been trying to phase out things Mars Hill these last two years and Driscoll just insists on staying in the spotlight.  It's kinda lame, and it would be better for his spiritual health to step away from ministry (for a long time to get that help the Acts 29 Board said he needed back before Darrin Patrick had to be removed ... ).  But he's not stepping away from ministry.

And, unfortunately, it seems that Evans in her own way can't resist taking on these right wing Calvinist bros who are also seeking the spotlight.  Did Evans discover any citation problems in Mark Driscoll books?  Did she break the story about Result Source?  Did she find enough evidence of plagiarism that Wilson and Booth had to retract a book? 

http://www.worldmag.com/2016/04/consider_the_source
...
It was actually a software check that first unearthed the plagiarism in A Justice Primer—but not Canon’s software check. Rachel Miller, the blogger who found and reported the book’s citation problems, bought a copy of A Justice Primer on Amazon, and then noticed sections that seemed plagiarized as she was reading. She typed up the sections and ran them through Grammarly’s plagiarism detection software.


No, obviously.  But she's been able to get some props for sounding off on guys she would have sounded off against for probably just about any other occasion.  I happen to think Dan Savage is a jerk and I disagree with him on a variety of things but there's no point in sounding off about him 99.99% of the time.  I didn't agree with a lot of what Christopher Hitchens said and wrote in his career.  But I still read him and I don't for a second believe the fantasy that he had thoughts of converting to Christianity.  Hitchens could read Solzhenitsyn and appreciate the man's moral courage while never agreeing with the man's Christianity.  Long ago Hitchens said that the people that annoyed him weren't the obviously fundamentalist types a la Doug Wilson but the self-identified liberal/progressive Christians. 

Merritt  wrapped his piece as follows:
...
But we can also learn about something by providing negative answers, rather than positive ones. We can get at how one might do something by describing how not to do it. Here’s a start:

• Constantly criticizing outsiders while only listening to insiders … is how not to engage culture.
• Shutting out dissenters who challenge your beliefs, content, or ideas … is how not to engage culture.
• Operating in a pattern of isolationism, tribalism, and egotism … is how not to engage culture.
• Refusing to answer difficult questions about your organization’s practices … is how not to engage culture.

TGC blogger Kevin DeYoung writes that there are two kinds of Christians: “those who like to rebuke and do it often and those who are scared to rebuke and never do it.” Considering TGC’s behavior, perhaps DeYoung should add a third: Christians who love rebuking others but can’t handle it themselves. And in a world where society is watching Christians carefully, the last one may be the most damaging of all.
It's not really that clear to me how Rachel Held Evans doesn't fit into that checklist, just in a different way that the bros at the Gospel Coalition do. One team's crusader is another team's troll and it's not a foregone conclusion just because Merritt says Evans isn't a troll that she can't possibly be a troll; if anything we're looking at two macho man pastors in a row where Evans did the public sound off and somebody else got the guys on the ropes over books while Evans was dissenting from views that are technically still protected speech under the First Amendment. 

What was Evans' thing?  Mark Driscoll's a bully, stand up to him.  Doug Wilson has said some creepy stuff about slavery and women.  Even Carl Trueman, probably nobody's idea of a liberal on doctrine or politics, thinks Doug Wilson's said some stupid, indefensible things.  It means something different coming from people who would ostensibly be in the same Reformed tradition than from a self-identified liberal on politics or religion.  It gets back to that "criticizing outsiders" thing.  Evans could sound off on how Tony Jones treated his ex-wife any time now, or is being in an advisory role to the Obama administration and promoting her writings too time-consuming?  Can Evans say that she's never, ever blocked anybody?  How did she take to Alastair Roberts' critique of her 2012 book?  Is Merritt absolutely certain Evans couldn't fit into his checklist in ways not unlike people who write for The Gospel Coalition?

The Gospel Coalition does have an awful lot to answer for.  Earlier this year Wenatchee The Hatchet published a document in which the Driscolls asked that people at The Gospel Coalition get galley proofs for Real Marriage. Driscoll specifically requested that galley proofs be sent to Justin Taylor and Kevin DeYoung.  That'd be the Kevin DeYoung who praised A Justice Primer as a great book discussing, "It’s actually a book about how the Bible would have us judge each other (or not) in the mad, mad world of blog warriors and internet vigilantes."

Does Kevin DeYoung want to say anything about that withdrawn book now? Did he get a galley proof of Real Marriage?

Merritt could be missing the boat altogether here because what might be happening with The Gospel Coalition, if they stay this course, could be what happened with Mark Driscoll--there's a point where if you're too combative and domineering and too protective of your brand you end up alienating not the people who already can't stand you (i.e. the Rachel Held Evans types of the blogosphere) but even the sorts of people who, on paper, would be in your corner. 

http://www.mortificationofspin.org/mos/1517/now-im-really-confused-about-complementarianism#.Vp0M5mf2a70

I know that sounds cynical. But I have been an observer of these things for too long to believe otherwise. The Reformed(ish) Industrial Complex is too insular and self-protective. It is too sensitive to anything that sounds like critique. It is too committed to its own promotion. Early on I suppose I was too sanguine about the rise of the YRR movement. I assumed that holding to reformed doctrine would guard us from unwise practice and the celebrity culture that was so much a feature of broader evangelicalism. I was wrong. [emphasis added]

Those words mean something different coming from Pruitt than they would from an Evans or a Merritt.  Progressive Christians have every right to complain about conservative Christians here but it wouldn't be altogether bad for them if they asked themselves whether their own celebrities have behaved in terrible ways.  It seems both camps would benefit from more unstinting internal critique than the merry-go-round of adducing "lessons" from the team we all agree we don't want to play nice with as it is.

some back and forth on ESS, EFS and stuff like that in the wake of the Byrd/Trueman sound-off, Ware and Grudem weigh in, Trueman has responses

For the folks keeping track of the blogosphere since Aimee Byrd and Carl Trueman discussed the subordination of the son in complementarianism in the United States, there's been some responses from Bruce Ware and Wayne Grudem to which Trueman has some responses.  Excerpts below:

http://www.reformation21.org/blog/2016/06/god-the-sonat-once-eternally-g.php
Bruce Ware
...
positing an eternal relation of authority and submission among the Trinitarian persons does not conflict in any way with this orthodox heritage, because the issue here is how the three persons function as Father, Son, and Spirit, not whether one has a nature that is superior to or inferior to another (the latter, of course, is flatly denied). At the ontological level, there is absolute equality of deity as all three share fully in the one and undivided divine nature. But at the functional level, in the roles that each carries out, they can be - must be! - distinguished from one another. To take the most obvious example, only the Son - not the Father, nor the Spirit - embraced the role of becoming incarnate. So, yes, while there is an inseparability of operations among the Trinitarian persons, this does not, and cannot, mean that the Trinitarian operations are not distinguishable from one another. Distinguishable, yet inseparable - this is not only consistent with the pro-Nicene heritage, it is demanded by Scripture.
 
Third, one of the ways Scripture presses the distinction among the roles of the Trinitarian persons is by highlighting the ultimate authority of the Father, and the willing submission of the Son and Spirit, in all that God does
...
God the Son, then, is both God and Son. As God, he is fully equal with God the Father, in that both Father and Son possess fully the identically same and eternal divine nature. As such, the equality between the Father and Son (and Spirit) could not be stronger - they are equal to each other with an equality of identity (i.e., each possesses fully the identically same divine nature). As Son, the Son is always the Son of the Father and is so eternally. As Son of the Father, he is under the authority of his Father and seeks in all he does to act as the Agent of the Father's will, working and doing all that the Father has purposed and designed for his Son to accomplish. The eternal Son, God the Son, is both fully God and fully equal to the Father, while he is fully Son and eternally in a relationship of Agent of the Father, carrying out the work and implementing the will of the Father in full submission and obedience to all that the Father has planned. God and Son, i.e., fully God (in nature) and fully Son (in person)--this is who this Second Person of the Trinity is as Hebrews, John, and the New Testament declare.
 

Fourth, none of this glorious Trinitarian theology is being devised for the purpose of supporting a social agenda of human relations of equality and complementarity. I do believe there is intended correspondence, indeed. But that is a far cry from saying that we are "reformulating" the doctrine of the Trinity to serve our social purposes. God forbid! Let God be God, regardless of what implications may or may not follow! And may our sole aim be to know the true God through his self-revelation in Scripture--the one and only true God, who is God only as he is Father, Son, and Spirit.
- See more at: http://www.reformation21.org/blog/2016/06/god-the-sonat-once-eternally-g.php#sthash.2cqUn1N2.dpuf

http://www.mortificationofspin.org/mos/postcards-from-palookaville/a-surrejoinder-to-bruce-ware#.V1nvcWf2a70
...
In his response Professor Ware argues that the Bible teaches eternal functional submission. I have never doubted or denied that that is what he and others think the Bible teaches. Nor do I doubt that there are historical precedents for this position.  Nor, incidentally, do I reject as anti-Nicene the idea that the relational ordering within the Trinity has any significance for the economy – the medieval era contains fascinating debates within the boundaries of Nicene orthodoxy on why the Son and not the Father became incarnate, for example (and I use it only as such -- this is not an endorsement) Aquinas, Summa 3a.3.8.  I simply deny that contemporary notions of EFS are compatible with the nature of the relations as understood in Nicene orthodoxy as defined in 381 and since then held by the church catholic.
 
Nicene Trinitarianism involves a host of commitments – to divine simplicity as classically articulated by Gregory Nazianzus, to the unity of the divine will, to inseparable operations and, of course, to eternal generation.  Repudiation or revision of any one or more of these involves a revision of the whole and thus ceases to be Nicene Trinitarianism.
 
And while I am happy to hear that none of this is driven by identity politics, it does raise one more question.  Even if we were to grant that Nicene orthodoxy is wrong and Bruce Ware is right --- what does any of this have to do with male-female gender relations?  The answer, I believe, is nothing at all.
http://cbmw.org/public-square/whose-position-on-the-trinity-is-really-new
...
Who was claiming that I had denied the Nicene Creed of 325 A.D. and the Chalcedonian Creed of 451 A.D.?  It was none other than my friend Carl Trueman, professor of church history at my own alma mater, Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia (M.Div., 1973). Apparently, even Westminster Seminary itself had made a mistake in awarding me an honorary Doctor of Divinity degree in 2011!

http://www.mortificationofspin.org/mos/postcards-from-palookaville/a-rejoinder-to-wayne-grudem#.V1nyWWf2a70
...
To respond: I accuse no-one of rejecting the Nicene Creed of 325, as he states (at least in the version of the post available at 13:52 on Friday).  Nicene orthodoxy is actually defined at Constantinople in 381.  I simply state that those who get rid of eternal generation and speak of eternal submission are outside of the bounds set by 381 -- which is the ecumenical standard of the church catholic, albeit in the West subject to the revision at Toledo.
 
If Nicaea 325 is the standard of Nicene Trinitarianism with which he and Bruce Ware are operating, then I understand why they think an appeal to the homoousion is sufficient.  But history and the church catholic say otherwise.  Eternal generation etc. etc. are also of critical importance, as Constantinople 381 indicates.

***
While I "could" write some stuff about this I've got other things I'm mulling over. 

6-27-13, Mark Driscoll talks about distinguishing "a case study" from gossip, it shouldn't be a personal attack that throws someone under the proverbial bus

A few years back Mark Driscoll had some kind of subscription-only set of vodcasts for aspiring and established leaders.  What was originally subscription/permission access only has been going up at Mark Driscoll Ministries for everyone to consider.  So since it's up there, there's a particularly interesting vodcast from June 2013 in which Driscoll for some reason, inspired by a recent conversation as he recounted it in the vodcast, to field the question of how you can distinguish between a "case study" and gossip.

http://markdriscoll.org/sermons/how-to-learn-from-failure-without-gossiping/
How to learn from failure without gossiping
June 27, 2013

0.20ish
What's the difference between gossip and a case study. In every organization (this could be your business, this could be your ministry, this could be your church) um, you're going to have SOME seasons where something REALLY works and you want to use that as a case study. And that's usually not very controversial or debated. "Hey, this worked. It went well. We need to really learn from that. Let's pay attention to that. Let's see what it is we can extract from that so we can continue to have success."  

Other times things go poorly, badly, negatively. Mistakes are made, failures are made ... and I need you to know, as a leader, though this is discouraging, this can be difficult, it's inevitable. The more decisions you make, the more mistakes you're gonna make. Make ten decisions? You're going to make one mistake. You make a hundred decisions, you make ten mistakes. You make a thousand decisions, you make a hundred mistakes. You make a MILLION decisions, you're gonna make 100,000 mistakes.

So the longer you're in leadership and the more decisions you make, the more mistakes you're going to make and the question is, "Can we LEARN from those seasons, those mistakes, those decisions," whether those be mistakes, or maybe sins that WE'VE committed or that others have committed or that a group of leaders or a team has made a bad decision and sent the organization in the wrong direction and there are complications as a result of that, when those things happen, let me submit this to you--those are enormous opportunities for learning and growth for leaders in the organization and for the organization as a whole. And also, those things need to be captured and remembered so that as new leaders are coming in and being raised up they don't continue to make the same old mistakes that they  learned from those seasons and sometimes from those failures sins and errors.

And so the question is, though, how is that not gossip?

There's sometimes where you have to, as a leader--and I'm not talking here about publicly--sometimes you do need to do so publicly. Let's say there's someone who commits a horrible sin and they're in leadership, you know, adultery, drug addiction, massive stealing from the church or something of that nature then that may need to be known to the people in the church so that everybody's aware of what's going on.

But let's say it's not something that rises to that level. It's not something that is even, necessarily disqualifying, that you would fire someone for this. It's just a mistake. It was an error.  It was something that was just blown. It was just wrong. It wasn't executed right, whatever the case may be.
This is where you take those case studies and you share them with the other leaders in a way that is more private; you're not trying to create a lot of drama or have everyone, you know, involved in the process but you're asking, "Okay, what can we learn from this?" 

03.28
Sometimes the best way is when the person or persons involved are humble and godly and they say, "Well, let US tell the story of our failures, our mistakes, our errors, the things we did wrong, and let us do that in a way that heps the rest of the team learn from our errors." In an ideal world that's the case because, well, that's certainly not gossip. That's someone being humble and helping train other leaders through their failures. That's a good thing.

Other times, the doesn't want to talk about it or the person disagrees or the person leaves the organization or the person is no longer in leadership. Then the question is, can we still use those scenarios as case studies? And the answer is you CAN, I would encourage you, don't make it personal and don't necessarily share names or all the particuilar details unless it is absolutely required because the goal is not to throw somebody under the proverbial bus but to ask, "Well, what principles can we extract from this experience?"

But let me submit this to you--we have to learn from our mistakes, our failures, our errors and the Bible gives us evidence of this. The Bible is not primarily a leadership book. That's not its primary intent. But God does work through leaders and so the Bible has a record of a lot of the wins and losses of various leaders. And the Bible does present certain leaders' failures and sins as case studies. 
I'll give you some examples, we know that Adam blew it as a leader and it's not because Adam told us, it's because Moses told us. We know for example, as well, that David blew it and we know that because it's not just David who tells us, others record that in scriptures, though David also does confess to that in one of the psalms were he acknowledges his own adultery and murder. ...
...
05.51
Nehemiah had two guys, that were REALLY against him, Sanballat and Tobiah. And they were enemies and critics and opponents of him, though they would be affiliated and associated in some degree with God's people. And the Bible tells us about them as a negative case study of how sometimes bad leaders oppose good leaders. 

...
06.21
We read as we move into the Gospels, of Judas Iscariot as a case study, one who is stealing from the ministry of Jesus and is just trying to use Jesuse for his own mission and is not on mission with Jesus and he ultimately becomes the one who betrays Jesus.  Judas doesn't tell us that. Judas doesn't write his memoir and tell us, "Well, here's what I've learned." Instead the authors of the Gospels tell us about the failure of Judas as a leader so we can learn from that. ...

08.15ish
...
What does this mean? It means the Bible gives us permission to have case studies. And the same Bible that says "Don't be a gossip" gives a LOT of case studies.

09.30ish
...
If we're not attacking someone, throwing them under the bus, and sort of blame-shifting everything to them and just telling the story of a case whereby we can learn from it than I think we're being biblical, and we're following the pattern of the Scriptures. I think we have plenty of precedent.   

The first thing to notice about this ten minute presentation (if you watched the whole thing) is that Mark Driscoll poses the question, "What is the difference between gossip and a case study" and he says that it's not gossip if it's not a personal attack on somebody but otherwise does not really answer the question. He basically said that so long as it's not a personal attack and you're not throwing somebody under the bus that you're wasting opportunities to have case studies in instruction by not talking about things. 

So in a way this wasn't just a non-answer, it was basically saying that anything that didn't name names could probably work.  Sometimes you'd name names in the case of really bad sins.

There's something kind of weird in the middle of these asides into biblical tales of failures of leaders.  Driscoll mentions Nehemiah but not to mention any of Nehemiah's failures but to mention that bad leaders opposed the good leader.  Ditto Judas Iscariot.  These were case studies of bad men opposing the good man, which seems unrelated altogether to the topic of how "you" will fail in ministry.  The Bible is, to be sure, full of stories of leaders who failed and how they failed, but Driscoll gave no practical or useful advice on how "you" could really discern the difference between what he called a "case study" and gossip.

But notice that in this ramble that the stand-out asides and case studies are not necessarily a parade of leaders and their failures.  Adam, David, Peter.  But then the Nehemiah cases aren't cases of Nehemiah's failures but of people who opposed Nehemiah.  Judas is brought out as a case study of a failure but as another example of a false or oppositional force. 

Driscoll doesn't do much to lead by example in talking about his own failures in this clip.  He gave a rambling theological rational for why it's okay to use "case studies" that aren't gossip without explaining what that threshhold might be that, once crossed, delineates a case study from gossip. If you don't take advantage of stories of mistakes it's like a great expense with no return on the investment.  So mistakes, not necessarily yours, can be great case studies.

Well, let's turn out attention to that interesting admonition that when you talk about something like a bad moment or a bad decision in the history of a church ministry that you don't use personal attacks and that you don't throw somebody under the proverbial bus.

After all, a bit more than a whole year earlier, on June 18, 2012, Chrise Rosebrough broadcast audio from Mark Driscoll's 2007 talk:
http://www.piratechristian.com/fightingforthefaith/2012/06/18/mark-driscoll-wants-a-mountain-of-dead-bodies-behind-mars-hills-bus

http://004f597.netsolhost.com/Vision/10%20Throw%20Them%20Off%20the%20Bus%201.mp3
http://joyfulexiles.files.wordpress.com/2012/06/preaching-paul_edits1.mp3
October 1, 2007

... Too many guys spend too much time trying to move stiff-necked obstinate people. I am all about blessed subtraction. There is a pile of dead bodies behind the Mars Hill bus and by God's grace it'll be a mountain by the time we're done. You either get on the bus or get run over by the bus (those are the options) but the bus ain't gonna stop. I'm just a, I'm just a guy who is like, "Look, we love ya but this is what we're doin'."

There's a few kind of people. There's people who get in the way of the bus.  They gotta get run over. There are people who want to take turns driving the bus. They gotta get thrown off cuz they want to go somewhere else. There are people who will be on the bus (leaders and helpers and servants, they're awesome).  There's also sometimes nice people who just sit on the bus and shut up. They're not helping or hurting. Just let `em ride along. You know what I'm saying? But don't look at the nice people who are just gonna sit on the bus and shut their mouth and think, "I need you to lead the mission." They're never going to. At the most you'll give `em a job to do and they'll serve somewhere and help out in a minimal way. If someone can sit in a place that  hasn't been on mission for a really long time they are by definition not a leader and so they're never going to lead. You need to gather a whole new core. [emphasis added]

I'll tell you what, you don't just do this for church planting or replanting, you know what? I'm doing it right now. I'm doing it right now. We just took certain guys and rearranged the seats on the bus. Yesterday we fired two elders for the first time in the history of Mars Hill last night. They're off the bus, under the bus. They were off mission so now they're unemployed. This will be the defining issue as to whether or not you succeed or fail. [emphasis added]

The two guys, as can be easily established by local history and reportage, were Bent Meyer and Paul Petry.  A fuller timeline of what happened is over here:

https://joyfulexiles.com/timeline/

On November 8, 2007, Mark Driscoll wrote a letter to explain recent events, chief among them being a controversial pair of terminations amidst a restructuring of Mars Hill.  The terminations of Bent Meyer and Paul Petry from pastoral office at Mars Hill was made known earlier in 2007 and Driscoll obliquely addressed the matter in a lengthy letter:

https://joyfulexiles.files.wordpress.com/2012/03/elders-response-to-questions-11-9-07.pdf
A letter from Pastor Mark Driscoll
November 8, 2007
from pages 4-5 of the 142 document
...
Sadly, it was during the bylaw rewriting process that two of our elders, who curiously were among the least administratively gifted for that task, chose to fight in a sinful manner in an effort to defend their power and retain legal control of the entire church. [emphasis added] This included legal maneuvering involving contacting our attorney, which was a violation of policy, one elder who is no longer with us disobeying clear orders from senior leaders about not sharing sensitive working data with church members until the elders had arrived at a decision, which has caused much dissension, and that same elder accusing Pastor Jamie Munson, who was the then new Lead Pastor of Mars Hill, of being a deceptive liar in an all-elder meeting with elder candidates present, despite having absolutely no evidence or grounds because it was a lie. This was heartbreaking for me since I have seen Pastor Jamie saved in our church, baptized in our church, married in our church, birth four children in our church, and rise up from an intern to the Lead Pastor in our church with great skill and humility that includes surrounding himself with godly gifted older men to complement his gifts.To make matters worse, this former elder’s comments came after my more than one-hour lecture in that meeting based on a twenty-three-page document I gave the elders as a summary report about what I had learned from the other pastors I had met with in addition to months of researching Christian movements. I had just explained the cause of the pains we were experiencing as a leadership team as largely tied to our growing number of elders and campuses, as well as ways that my research indicated men commonly respond by sinfully seeking power, money, preference, control, and information as ways to exercise pride and fight for their interests
over the interests of the team, church, and mission of Jesus Christ.

The elder who sinned was followed up with following the meeting by a rebuke from a fellow Executive Elder, but repentance was not forthcoming. To make matters worse, some vocal church members ran to that elder’s defense without knowing the facts, made demands upon the elders, acted in a manner that was not unifying or helpful, and even took their grievances public on the Ask Anything comment portion of our main website for my forthcoming preaching series. Of course, this was done under anonymous names to protect their image in the eyes of fellow church members while maligning the elders publicly. Some church members even began accusing the other elders of grabbing power and not caring for the best interests of our people, which is nothing short of a lie and contradictory in every way to the entire process we were undertaking. [emphasis added] It broke my heart personally when amidst all of this, a member asked me on behalf of other members if the elders really loved our people. Now having given roughly half my life to planning for and leading Mars Hill Church, the questioning of my love and the love of our elders, some of whom even got saved in our church, for our people was devastating.

Today, I remain deeply grieved by and for one man [emphasis added], but am thrilled that what is best for Jesus and all of Mars Hill has been unanimously approved by our entire elder team because I do love Jesus and the people of Mars Hill. Furthermore, my physical, mental, and spiritual health are at the best levels in all of my life. Now having joy and working in my gifting I am beginning to see what a dark and bitter place I once was in and deeply grieve having lived there for so long without clearly seeing my need for life change. My wife and I are closer than ever and she is the greatest woman in the world for me. I delight in her, enjoy her, and praise God for the gift that she is. She recently brought me to tears by sweetly saying, “It’s nice to have you back,” as apparently I had been somewhat gone for many years. Our five children are wonderful blessings. I love being a daddy and am closer to my children with greater joy in them than ever. In short, I was not taking good care of myself and out of love for our church I was willing to kill myself to try and keep up with all that Jesus is doing. But, as always, Jesus has reminded me that He is our Senior Pastor and has godly other pastors whom I need to empower and trust while doing my job well for His glory, my joy, and your good.

The past year has been the most difficult of my entire life. It has been painful to see a few men whom I loved and trained as elders become sinful, proud, divisive, accusatory, mistrusting, power hungry, and unrepentant. It has, however, been absolutely amazing to see all but one of those men humble themselves and give up what is best for them to do what is best for Jesus and our entire church. In that I have seen the power of the gospel, and remain hopeful to eventually see it in the former elder who remains unrepentant but to whom my hand of reconciliation remains extended [emphasis added] along with a team of other elders assigned to pursue reconciliation if/when he is willing. Furthermore, sin in my own life has been exposed through this season and I have also benefited from learning to repent of such things as bitterness, unrighteous anger, control, and pride. As a result, I believe we have a pruned elder team that God intends to bear more fruit than ever. This team of battle-tested, humble, and repentant men is now both easy to enjoy and entrust.
A lot of quoted text, but it seems important--it seems really strange Mark Driscoll would insist in the summer of 2013 that when you talk about the failures of leaders that you not make anything that could be a personal attack and that you not bring something up to throw somebody under the bus.  One of Mark Driscoll's more infamous utterances was about how there was a pile of dead bodies behind the Mars Hill bus and how, by God's grace, there'd be a mountain before they were done. 

Driscoll also remarked that you either got on the bus or got run over by the bus, those were the two options but the bus wasn't gonna stop.  Well, the bus isn't exactly running NOW, is it?  And Driscoll said of two guys, two guys who were the first to get fired in the history of Mars Hill (itself a claim that seems to be of dubious reliability), that "they're off the bus, under the bus. They were off mission so now they're unemployed."

If it seemed as if that was a lot of fairly specific talk about guys being thrown under the bus for being off mission and that these kinds of crisis moments would define whether you succeeded or failed in ministry; if it seemed that there was a lot of personal attack and under-bus-throwing, this 2007 period isn't really a time Mark Driscoll has ever looked back upon and said, for the record, that there was anything he didn't do well.

Back in 2013 Driscoll talked about how as long as you don't name names and don't use personal attacks and don't throw somebody under the bus you've got a wealth of case studies.  About ... 19 months ago nearly every former pastor of Mars Hill who participated in what turns out to have looked like a simple kangaroo court against Meyer and Petry wrote a public letter of confession.

http://repentantpastor.com/confessions/letter-confession-bent-meyer-paul-petry/
Sunday, November 2, 2014 
 

Dear Paul and Bent, we want to publicly confess our sin against you regarding events that took place at Mars Hill Church back in 2007. We were wrong. We harmed you. You have lived with the pain of that for many years. As some of us have come to each of you privately, you have extended grace and forgiveness, and for that we thank you. Because our sin against you happened in a public way and with public consequences, we want to make our confession public as well with this letter.  ...

The list of signatures includes just about everyone who was in eldership at Mars Hill but conspicuous by their absence are the names "Mark Driscoll" and "Jamie Munson". 

If Mark Driscoll thought it was a good idea to say that you should preach and teach from things you learned from your own mistakes in that 2013 vodcast it seems as though the vodcast became more of a rambling exposition on how it was okay to use other peoples' failures as case studies.  It even briefly mutated into a rumination on bad guys who opposed good guys in biblical narratives.

Well, Driscoll boasted in 2007 that two men were fired from Mars Hill and that they were "off the bus, under the bus".  Driscoll also made a point of saying he felt personally grieved by and for "that one man", whose identity was fairly readily identifiable to maybe a thousand of us who were at Mars Hill as Paul Petry.  It's hard to shake the sense that when in June 2013 Driscoll decided to lay his advice on leaders he was speaking in some sense as a complete hypocrite, someone who had shown he had no problem making the discussion of a failure or a conflict a matter of personal animus on the one hand and doing so in a way that made it impossible not to recognize who was involved on the other. 

But Driscoll was confident in saying that if you're convinced that someone in church leadership has effectively stolen from the church and sinned in a grievous and disqualifying way that the people need to know.  So at one level, it could be that Driscoll has to deal with the fact that some people thought he did things seriously amiss enough to file a complaint about it.  And, of course, who knows whether that will get anywhere.  Whether or not it does, Mark Driscoll's case that anything that's not "gossip" can be a "case study" is something people who would consider attending his church should keep in mind.  It turns out that if you were a man who in a moment of anguish shared with Mark Driscoll you'd learned something horrible was done to your child by a relative ... well, Mark Driscoll can explain it all himself, since he did it back in May 2016.


http://markdriscoll.org/it-seems-unjust-that-god-would-have-christ-pay-the-punishment-for-another/
...
Interesting, however, is the proclivity of people to reverse their position when the proverbial shoe is on the other foot. What I mean is this: when I sin against someone, I want them to accept me forgive me, and let me off the hook, because that is what sinners want. As long as we view the cross only from the perspective of sinners, this is all we will see.  However, when we or someone we love is sinned against, we cry out for justice because that is what victims want. For example, a father who learned that his young daughter had been sexually abused by his brother told me he "wanted blood." [emphasis added] This, precisely, is the perspective of God, who has never sinned against anyone but is continually sinned against by everyone ...

And when's the last time Mark Driscoll saw that father?  When's the last time, if ever, he saw that daughter?

I fully affirm penal substitutionary atonement as a component of the atonement Christ secured for Christians at the Cross (plus christus victor, christus exemplar, expiation, propitiation, ransom, etc).  But it still seems tasteless beyond words that Mark Driscoll decided to trot out the confidence of a father who learned his child was sexually abused by his sibling and use this as some kind of "gotcha" point in favor of substitutionary atonement. To clarify, I think this kind of rhetorical flourish is nasty even if this were trotted out as a defense for atonement as expiation.  If adult church members give some limited permission to share some or even all of their story that's one thing, but it's another thing to use a story about the sexual abuse of someone else's kid as a moment to stump for just one atonement theory. 

Don't bother commenting about your distaste for PSA.  Even a Pelagian has to contend with the fact that if God gave us all free will some adults choose to rape children and God, knowing all and making everything, gave them that free will.  If you think free will is so important for the good that you choose to do that that's why God allows adult men to rape children that's your theodicy.  The start of the Book of Job shows us that God knowingly and willingly lets children die, so this isn't something that can be waved off by folks who think that somehow free will (however you define it) means God's not responsible.  Not even God in the book of Job says He's not responsible in any way for what He lets happen, what he tells Job is "You're not God, so you can't really tell me what to do, can you?"

Mark Driscoll hinging dubious theological or interpretive points on stories about children isn't exactly unheard of.  He built up a climax to his tendentious take on Esther by appealing to a story he had with Ashley Driscoll rather than anything in his master's degree in exegetical theology.  It's one of the things he does that, frankly, I admit gets me a bit angry.  For a guy who has spent so many years talking about how he wants to protect women he's had no problem parading the shame of women and girls who have been straight up abused to make doctrinal points he could have made in some other way.  Penal substitutionary atonement is more readily explained if I talk about how Christ chose to bear the punishment I deserved to save me.  Why bring up a girl who was a victim of sexual abuse just to "prove" that when the shoe is proverbially on the other foot people want justice.

Sometimes it feels like when Mark Driscoll talked about the distinction between "gossip" and a "case study" that he wasn't able to answer the question because if he actually answered it he might have to be accountable for whether he'd lived by that answer in his own pastoral conduct. 

Well, here we are in 2016 and virtually every man who was on the elder team at Mars Hill in 2007 has come around to consider the way Meyer and Petry were treated to have been ghastly, sinful, and sinful enough to warrant a public apology, retraction and request for forgiveness.  Meanwhile, if Mark Driscoll's still on message, he's been grieved by and for that one man where he avoided naming names.  If the 2013 June vodcast was any indication, that kind of vagueness was so that it wasn't "gossip" but could be a "case study".  And the practical "lesson" that it seems we have to learn here is that when it comes to avoiding "gossip" while considering anything that's not a personal attack or throwing someone under the bus, it would seem that we've got a case where Mark Driscoll's instructional axiom could boil down to "Do as I say, not as I do."

HT commenter chris e, Carl Trueman on eternal subordination of the son and complementarianism in the New Calvinism

a number of lengthy excerpts will suffice here.

http://www.alliancenet.org/mos/postcards-from-palookaville/fahrenheit-381#.V1cN_2f2a70
...

And when it comes to submission in scripture, the explicit New Testament model for such in marriage is the relationship of the incarnate, crucified Christ and the church, not that of the Father and Son in eternity.  Paul’s choice of analogy would seem most significant.

So why, I wonder, have the Diva and I been slapped with the ‘downgrade’ label for distinguishing women teaching Sunday School from women holding ordained office and preaching, while the eternal submission of the Son to the Father is deemed quite acceptable – as long as it serves New Calvinists in their proposals about gender?  And this issue is not some cranky Old School Presbyterian distinctive we are talking about—it is the Nicene faith of the catholic church.   Could it be that it is the tastes and priorities of contemporary conservative evangelicalism which have been subject to the real downgrade?

The leaders of the organizations which represent New Calvinism have weathered storm after storm, from Driscollgate onwards, by maintaining a firm grip on the mainstream New Calvinist media, by licensing just enough criticism to reassure concerned onlookers, and by stoic public silence in the face of numerous scandals and controversies.  But this one is surely too big and the stakes are too high. ...

The leaders of the organizations which represent New Calvinism have weathered storm after storm, from Driscollgate onwards, by maintaining a firm grip on the mainstream New Calvinist media, by licensing just enough criticism to reassure concerned onlookers, and by stoic public silence in the face of numerous scandals and controversies.  But this one is surely too big and the stakes are too high.  It has to be addressed.  We are not here dealing with the rogue actions of some boisterous celeb preacher in a Mickey Mouse tee-shirt; this is a specific form of theology which is deeply embedded in the very foundations of one of the movement’s professed central distinctives.  The New Calvinist leaders need to speak up, and they need to speak up now.

Indeed, the question which the leadership of the various groups associated with New Calvinism -- the Gospel Coalition, CBMW etc. -- must answer is simply this: do you consider Nicene orthodoxy to be a non-negotiable part of your movement’s beliefs?

links to parts 1 and 2 at Aimee Byrd's Housewife Theologian guest writer posts on how eternal subordination of the son is a trinitarian heresy some complmentarians embrace

http://www.alliancenet.org/mos/housewife-theologian/is-it-okay-to-teach-a-complementarianism-based-on-eternal-subordination#.V1XTwGf2a70
http://www.alliancenet.org/mos/housewife-theologian/reinventing-god#.V1XTb2f2a70

You've possibly seen part 1 earlier.  Part 2, very directly titled "Reinventing God" went up yesterday.

Emil Brunner on theology as a primarily negative and critical discipline, and some more thoughts on what some call watchblogging

https://archive.org/details/mediatorastudyof013169mbp
published in 1934

The Mediator: A Study of the Central Doctrine of the Christian Faith
Emil Brunner, translated by Olive Wyon, The Westminster Press
COPYRIGHT, MCMXLVII, BY W. L. JENKINS
From Preface to the German Edition
pages 14-15
...
It is the duty of the theologian to examine the spiritual "food-values" of the faith which the Church offers to the world in her proclamation of the truth—to distinguish the true from the false. The theologian is unable to do this if he does not know the taste of the genuine spiritual food ; theology without faith is impossible. But the function of theology is to criticize and eliminate; it is not positively creative. It therefore requires a mass of intellectual activity which, when its subject matter is taken into account, may often seem like the profanation of a holy thing. [emphasis added] Yet the reproach of profanation should be levelled not at the theologians but at those who make this work necessary, because they confuse the language of faith ; those who—more or less deliberately—offer other "substances" in the guise of scriptural truth. Theological critical work is therefore not intended for edification, but, if it is done in the right way, it is most necessary and valuable. The Church needs to use theology as a check, in order to protect herself against "food-poisoning," and against the acceptance of worthless and deceptive "food substitutes." [emphasis added] Theology cannot herself create the Divine Food of Life, but she can render yeoman service to the Church, and to the cause of God on earth, by exposing the poverty-stricken condition of Christendom.

The whole purpose of a reminder is to render itself superfluous. ...

One of the things that I can't forget a certain nobody trying to tell everybody about somebody who cribbed somebody else's catchphrase was tweeting that nobody ever built a monument to a critic, supposedly.  Critics became this magically pernicious category of people who needed to be ignored at all costs or who needed to exist for the sake of a persona presented to the public.  Negative publicity was as essential to the persona as positive publicity. In fact ... well ... we can get around to what that guy said about how fantastic free advertising via positive or even hostile press coverage could be later.

The point here is to observe that while some guys who take to blogs to lament how critical some bloggers can be, particularly on theology may say that "criticism" has its issues, we can say it does.  But Brunner's proposal about theology was that it was of necessity a critical enterprise.  If a Mark Driscoll were to dismissively tell the "nerds" to not get obsessed on what this or that Greek word might mean or should mean in a given context it could sure seem as though a Brunner would say that's the actual concern of theology.  To frame things in Driscollian parlance to not talk about the significant range of meanings in Greek or Hebrew or Aramaic in a biblical manuscript would be like married life without Driscoll's much-touted "date night".

But even among those who have no love for Driscoll there can be some unhappiness about the idea that a lot of what could be entailed in responding to someone like Driscoll involves mountains of unavoidably "dull" examinations of biblical texts, doctrinal concepts and their histories, and things of that nature. Driscoll's potential future success depends on people being lazy enough in doctrine and scriptural study to not want to do the study themselves but to be bothered enough about it to accept Driscoll's instruction as an adequate substitute for gaining said knowledge themselves. 

Ten years ago I was more or less happily participating in life at Mars Hill.  Over the last ten years I came around to a different set of convictions and feelings about the direction of the place.  Much of what Mark Driscoll would present as suitably spiritual food now seems to me like an endorsement of food substitutes.  But as Phoenix Preacher put it a few years ago, on paper, Driscoll's basic soteriology looks fine.  The devil in the details is in the realm of other instruction such as applied ecclesiology or theological claims connected to gender.

Driscoll himself at one point seemed to recognize that theological activity involves a sustained critique of those whose doctrinal positions you consider deviations from historic Christian faith.  For a guy like Mark Driscoll who spent the last twenty years more or less cultivating the persona of "I'm not some candy-ass therapist" before deciding to be a surrogate "father figure" it's impossible to plausibly claim that to do the work of theology means never making any critical assessments.  His blog post last week on the types of "religious" people paradoxically yet unavoidably embodies precisely the kind of sweeping categorical judgment he seems to prefer people not engage in unless he's doing it.

Now perhaps we can take a little detour.  A weekend ago I went and saw Whit Stillman's Love & Friendship, a very lively adaptation/rewrite of Jane Austen's Lady Susan. There's a moment where Lady Susan (played marvelously by Kate Beckinsale) is lecturing her daughter Frederica about the absolute imperative of observing the Fourth Commandment.  The daughter is simultaneously skeptical that she's about to be crow-barred by her mother's rhetoric into agreeing to something she's pretty sure would be wrong but duty-bound to respect her wishes.  And along the way Lady Susan's determined invocation of the Fourth Commandment stops short of ever explaining what that is. 

In a later scene Frederica is at church and ends up talking with a clergyman there who clarifies that the Fourth Commandment is observance of the Sabbath.  When Frederica remarks that she got the understanding it was "honor they father and mother" the clergyman cheerfully remarks (and I paraphrase):  "Oh.  ... yes, in the CATHOLIC numeration of the commandments it's totally the Fourth but we PROTESTANTS regard `Honor thy father and mother' as the SIXTH Commandment."  What Austen's story sent up was the sort of domineering steam-rolling parent who uses a misremembered and misapplied passage from the Bible as a parental trump card to rhetorically force her child to agree to something the child considers morally objectionable.  But owing to the educational neglect of said child she simply has this gut level feeling something's wrong but hasn't been trained in biblical literature sufficiently to know what that wrong thing is. Her mother finds that ignorance the most advantageous thing of all for the time it lasts.

And that could be a thumbnail sketch of the history of Mars Hill at many levels.  To be sure it's not possible for Mark Driscoll to be as glamorous, charming or attractive as Kate Beckinsale's Lady Susan or as enduringly funny as anything that was penned by Jane Austen.  That much would potentially be obvious, but the relational dynamic of the "parent" to the "children" can seem all too comparable. 

Since Driscoll's push toward starting a new church that will start off (it seems) with an ideal goal of two services; since Driscoll's been eagerly bringing back content from a decade ago with a few revisions here and there that slice out mentions of what was once Mars Hill; and since over time it seems that what he's determined to bring back about precepts of spiritual warfare and pastoral counseling seem, to me at least, indisputably ideas and content that are food substitutes rather than spiritual food, well, I think Brunner's right--theological study may be an inherently critical enterprise but one we can ill afford to abandon.