a Larry Osborne conversation with Mark Driscoll from 2016: Part Four: By 2012 Mark Driscoll began to share irreconcilable accounts of his personal history

In spite of the emphatic accounts Mark Driscoll gave about what changed in Mars Hill governance and why, there began to be a problem that eventually emerged in 2012.  The problem emerged in the context of the promotional campaign to promote Mark and Grace Driscoll’s book Real Marriage. 

To put things in the plainest possible terms, it turned out that Mark Driscoll could give statements that could not be reconciled at any level between what he said in his book and what he was saying to reporters while promoting his newest book:

http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2012/januaryweb-only/mark-driscoll-sex-marriage.html

Interview by Katelyn Beaty and Marlena Graves/ January 5, 2012

...

Is there tension in teaching sexual purity before marriage while encouraging frequent and wonderful sex within marriage?

M: No, and for us, we sinned, quite frankly. We were virgins when we met and were sleeping together as high-school boyfriend and girlfriend. Then Grace came back to Christ, and I came to Christ in college, so we had to stop sinning sexually. I'd say if we both could go back and rewrite history and change one thing, that would probably be the thing we would change. [emphasis added] But we did repent and met with our pastor. And then we did get married, between our junior and senior years of college

Real Marriage
Mark and Grace Driscoll
Copyright (c) 2012 by On Mission, LLC
Thomas Nelson
ISBN 978-1-4002-0383-3
ISBN 978-1-4041-8352-0 (IE)

Page 7

Neither Grace nor I was a virgin when we met, and before long we were dating and sleeping together, which continued even after she went off to college while I was finishing high school. [emphasis added]

page 9-10
To be honest, fornicating was fun. I liked fornicating. To stop fornicating was not fun. But eventually Grace and I stopped fornicating, got engaged, and were married between our junior and senior years of college.

I assumed that once we were married we would simply pick up where we left off sexually and make up for last time. After all, we were committed Christians with a relationship done God's way. But God's way was a total bummer. My previously free and fun girlfriend was suddenly my frigid and fearful wife. She did not undress in front of me, required the lights to be off on the rare occasions we were intimate, checked out during sex, and experienced a lot of physical discomfort because she was tense. [emphasis added]

...
Before long I was bitter against 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. [emphasis added] I loved Grace, but in the bedroom I did not enjoy her and wondered how many years I could white-knuckle fidelity. ... We desperately needed help but didn't know where to turn. Bitterness and condemnation worsened. 

That Mark Driscoll really believed that God owed him doesn’t seem like it needs to be disputed.

But only one of the following stories can actually be true.  If Mark and Grace Driscoll were not both virgins when they met as claimed in the Christianity Today interview then the statement in Real Marriage that neither of them were virgins has to be false. Just as obviously, if the “we were virgins” was true then the technicality on which that could be considered true was not explicated.  One of these two accounts would be false by dint of the alternative. Mark Driscoll boxed himself into a corner in which questions about the basic credibility and accuracy of his story about whether he was or wasn’t a virgin when he met Grace Martin had to come up, and in which it became necessary to guess that at least one of the two accounts had to be false.

During 2012 there was apparently enough renewed attention to and questions about Mars Hill governance that a webpage addressing that topic was published.  We’ll turn to that momentarily and when we do we’ll see a name that has been recurring in this account of Mars Hill.