There’s something else about Mark Driscoll’s conversation with Carey Nieuwhof that needs mentioning. Driscoll told Nieuwhof, as quoted above, “ … I’m not going to say I’m Jesus and I’ve never done anything wrong you know.” that’s a hasty transcript on the punctuation side.
The thing is, having read
Mark Driscoll’s two big post-Mars Hill Church book releases through Charisma
House I was struck by the ways in which Mark Driscoll compared himself to Jesus
or compared Jesus to himself.
Now let’s take a visit back
to Spirit-Filled Jesus and see
whether or not Mark Driscoll hasn’t had moments where he did write as though he
knew how it felt to be Jesus carrying His cross to the place of the skull. Fair Use precedents being what they’ve been,
I think it’s necessary to ask whether or not Mark Driscoll can consistently say
“ … I'm not going to say I'm Jesus and I've never done anything wrong … .”
Spirit-Filled Jesus
Mark Driscoll
Published by Charisma House
Copyright © 2018 by Mark
Driscoll
ISBN 9781629995229
(hardcover)
ISBN 9781629995236 (ebook)
LCCN 2018029899 (print)
LCCN 2018034467 (ebook)
Page 85
Religious neat nicks, who
were more conservative than God, regularly attacked Jesus in public. They would
wait for a crowd to surround Jesus, and then pick a fight, start an argument,
or try to incite a riot. Quite frequently Jesus had to make a run for it
because things got so dire that He was in real danger. This harassment included
threats of legal action and culminated with Jesus being falsely arrested,
tried, and convicted of a crime so heinous that He got the death penalty. How
would you respond if you were beaten beyond recognition, stripped nearly naked,
and hung up to bleed before a cheering crowd while your mom stood there crying?
Jesus had a constant parade
of people who drained His life energy. Crowds followed Him wherever He went,
wanting Him to answer their questions, cast out their demons, heal their
infirmities, fix all their problems, pay their bills, and be their friend.
Jesus had no assistant to schedule any of this nor any office for them to come
to, so they just followed Him around like a swarm of mosquitos continually
buzzing day and night wherever He went.
Driscoll writing that Jesus’ followers were like a swarm of
mosquitos may tell us a lot more about how Mark Driscoll views followers than
how Jesus was said to have viewed the crowds.
Take Matthew 9:36 (NIV) which says of Jesus “When he saw the crowds, he
had compassion on them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep
without a shepherd.” Even when Driscoll
attempted to make Jesus seem able to relate to “you” or to “us” he couldn’t
find a way to do that without comparing the crowds who followed Jesus to
mosquitos.
When on page 108 of Spirit-Filled
Jesus Driscoll wrote “Jesus was constantly overwhelmed with people who
wanted to get and stay close to him.” it’s as though Jesus had a finite amount
of life energy to spare, despite being God incarnate. On page 117 the concept of life energy
officially showed up, in a passage where Mark Driscoll described how Jesus
handled His critics:
People always wanted to
take Jesus’ time to argue, debate, and criticize. These people did not want to
learn; they wanted to fight. They did not want to be changed by Jesus; they
wanted to use Jesus. These people wanted to have the same argument over and
over, and Jesus ignored these kinds of people. Occasionally He would devote a
bit of time to rebuke them but did not waste His time on people who were not a
good investment of His life energy. The same is true for each of us. Some
people are amazingly good investments of time and energy. Others, however, are
exhausting and never gain much if any relational momentum.
That Driscoll waxed working class about the Jesus who had a dad
named Joe who swung a hammer for a living is easily attested by books and
sermons but it continues to surprise me how extensively Mark Driscoll’s
presentation of Jesus seems to have been mediated through Mark Driscoll’s own
life and times. He seems unable to
describe the relationship between God the Son and God the Holy Spirit without
making reference to himself.
Pages 99-100
In God’s providence, as I
write this sentence I am sitting on a plane flying to New York with Grace on
the thirtieth anniversary of our first date. We are spending a few days to
celebrate together. Since the day we met, we have lived life together.
The Bible says that though
we are two, we are in fact “one.” Practically this means that all of life is
lived together and all emotions are experienced together. Grace has literally
been a means of God’s grace in my life. She helps me process what we experience
in life, and without her devotion to me, my emotional life would be darker and
more despairing.
Jesus and the Holy Spirit
did life together a bit like Grace and I, although they did it perfectly. They
did everything together, experienced everything together, and responded to
everything together. The Holy Spirit kept Jesus emotionally healthy, and now He
comes to bring the emotional health of Jesus to you. Some people struggle to
think of how the Trinity operates, but once we understand that the three
members of the Trinity live together relationally and emotionally, it makes a
lot more sense.
That’s a breath-taking passage, Mark Driscoll comparing two Person
of the Trinity to himself and his wife. A
more striking passage would show up later, in which Mark Driscoll shared that
he knew the path Christ walked as He carried his cross to Golgatha:
Page 146
… The cross, or possibly
only the crossbar, was likely a roughly hewn piece of splintered timber
weighing upwards of a hundred pounds. Dripping blood, sweat, and tears, Jesus
was shamefully forced to carry His cross through town.
I’ve walked the path Jesus
did, and it was a narrow path filled with people shopping. In today’s world it
would be like being forced to carry your cross through a shopping mall during
the busiest shopping season, weeping and bleeding while children stare in
horror. Jesus was so beaten and His body so broken that He fell under the
weight of the cross. …
Even for me,
having chronicled the life and times and people of the former Mars Hill Church
the messianic self-pity of those words are breath-taking. Whether it has been through an implicit
comparison of Jesus and His father to Mark Driscoll and his own father Joseph
Driscoll; or through writing about Jesus as though His disciples were a swarm
of insects following Him around as Driscoll seems to implicitly or even
explicitly view followers online; or through transforming Jesus’ emotional life
into one of judicious self-disclosure only to those who are considered good
investments of His life energy; to explicitly likening Jesus’ relationship as
God the Son with God the Holy Spirit to his own marriage; and finally to
discussing Christ’s Passion explicitly in terms of “I’ve walked the path Jesus
did”, Mark Driscoll has demonstrated over the years that it may be he is
incapable of even talking about Jesus without at some point describing a Jesus who
seems weirdly similar to Mark Driscoll, a Jesus who has been reverse-engineered
to be the skeleton-key solution to Mark Driscoll’s problems as a self-selected
public figure and media user.
So we can see Mark Driscoll said the following in conversation with
Carey Nieuwhof:
Mark Driscoll: (about
29:47) You know, 18 years things ebb and flow, different issues blow up
and different groups have an issue. And some of that I'm not going to say I'm
Jesus and I've never done anything wrong you know.
Carey Nieuwhof: Yeah,
yeah, yeah.
Mark Driscoll: And so, but
in that it just kind of ebbed and flowed but most of it was internal and it was
theological in nature around the issue of transgender-ism and same sex marriage
and a lot of what was the energy behind it was ultimately against bible
teaching.
Yet anyone who read Spirit-Filled Jesus would be hard-pressed to
not pick up all of the ways that Mark Driscoll’s first major book published in
the wake of the Mars Hill closure showed us a Mark Driscoll habitually willing
to implicitly and explicitly compare himself to Jesus, right down to the path
Jesus took carrying His cross to the place of the skull.
For those who haven’t read Spirit-Filled
Jesus there’s a passage near the end of the book that requires a discussion
all its own.
2 comments:
I also notice Mark's disdain or even contempt for the people who wanted to be with Jesus all of the time and how that was entirely inaccurate (he spent an incredible amount of time teaching and healing) bus also lined up exactly with Mark's eventual unavailability to his own church and his refusal to have Mars Hill help the homeless, poor, etc. "We're not good at that"
Maybe because they had nothing Mark needed? Like mosquitos.
Yeah, that seems like a tell as to how Driscoll views "the crowds" over against what the Gospels tell us. Mark describing Jesus as making good investments of His life energy looks ridiculous when we consider that the Gospels say Jesus chose the path that led to the Cross.
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