The double standards of vulnerability in Mark Driscoll’s spiritual warfare teachings--more thoughts on Episode 8 of The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill

Of necessity a podcast can only be so long.  Mike Cosper recently alluded to Mark Driscoll regarding women who wanted to befriend his wife as threats, without necessarily quoting Driscoll directly in Episode 8 of The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill.

https://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/podcasts/rise-and-fall-of-mars-hill/mars-hill-podcast-mark-driscoll-demon-hunting.html 

For those who want to know what Cosper was alluding to, here you go:

http://download.marshill.se/files/MH%20Audio/2008/20080205_the-devil_sd_audio.mp3

 

February 5, 2008
Pastor Mark Driscoll
Part 2: The Devil

49:58
How about this one? Idle gossip and busybodying. 1 Timothy 5:11-15. THIS one is amazing. Ladies this one is especially for you. Some of you say, "Oh, it's not me." Yeah, it is. 1 Timothy 5:11-15, "but refuse to enroll younger widows for when their passions draw them away from Christ they desire to marry and so incur condemnation for having abandoned their former faith.  Besides that they learn to be idlers"

Women learn how to make a lot of free time. Going about from house to house. Well now it would be from email to email and from phone call to phone call. Technology makes idle busybodying far more effective than ever.

And not only idlers but also gossips. They like to talk about people. How are you doing? What are you doing? And this isn't sisterly accountability, this is "I need to know what everybody's doing because I like to know what everybody's doing and then I can tell other people what other people are doing and then I can say, `Hey, you need to pray for so-and-so.' and I can make it sound spiritual so that when I'm gossiping and busy-bodying I'm doing so in a way that seems really Jesus-like." And busybodies, they need to know what everybody's doing. They need to know what everybody's doing, saying what they should not. So I would have younger widows marry, bear children and manage their household, right? Stay busy, and give the adversary (that's Satan) no occasion for slander. For some have already strayed after Satan. Hmm.

A woman who's a gossip and a busybody; a woman who has to put her nose in everybody's business and knows what everybody's going on; know what they're doing, she's working with Satan. Now I know most women would say: "No, no, no. I'm not Satanic, I'm concerned. I'm not Satanic, I'm an intercessor. I'm a prayer warrior. I'm not Satanic, I'm an accountability partner.  I'm not Satanic, I'm a concerned friend."  Okay, you're a Satanic intercessory prayer warrior accountability partner concerned friend but just start the whole list with "Satanic" so that we don't misunderstand your job description. 

Now there's a difference between someone inviting you into their life and saying, "I want to be friends, I want to have an accountable  relationship." and you pushing yourself into everyone's life, okay?  I'll tell you, in the history of Mars Hill, I mean, I have had to put up a firewall, a moat, guard dogs, and a high wall with barbed wire on the top, and snipers behind it, around my wife. There are certain women who, they just need to know what Grace is doing and they are determined, they say things like, uh, "Hey, we need to have dinner with your family." [slight chuckle] No you don't. "Hey, we need to have coffee." No you don't.  "Hey, phone number." What? Nope. "Email." Nope.  Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope.

"Oh, come on." Nope.
"But I thought you were our pastor."
I am and my first lesson is to tell you you're Satanic.
"Oh, come on, in our last church the pastor's wife [sob] she was my best friend and I got to talk to her all the time."
Well, she was Satanic, too.  Give me her number, I'll call her and tell her. We'll help her out.

You ladies KNOW these women. Right? How many of you ladies know these women? They will try first with the hyper-spiritual, "Oh, praise the Lord! I'd love to pray for you. Let's get together. Let's do Christian community. Let's go to heart." If you decline, then they emotionally manipulate, [inhales, sobbing voice], "I thought we were friends, I thought you loved me. I don't have anybody to talk to." It's all manipulation. It's FEMALE manipulation.  Some of you ladies, right now? You think, "I can't believe he said that." It's all true. It's Satanic, Satanic.

Paul says, "Don't be a busybody, stay busy." Right? Your husband, your kids, your family, your home, Jesus Christ. You got things to do.

Busybodies stay busy inserting themselves into everyone else's life. In some churches there are certain women, if you call them, they'll know everything that's going on because, somehow, they know everything. There's a difference between being a woman who is invited into someone's life for friendship, prayer and accountability, and a woman who emotionally manipulates and is pushy and is sometimes hyperspiritual and demanding and forces herself in because she's a drama queen and has to be at the center of all the drama. That is a Satanic woman.

You need to believe that and the worst thing you can do is accomodate her. Okay, we'll have you over for dinner once. And then, the next month, it's "Okay, buddy, we haven't been together in a month. We need to get together again. I'm sure a lot has happened in your life and I don't know what it is and I need to know because I need to know everything. I have a God complex of omniscience. I want to know everything about everybody." And what you find with these people, Paul says, they tend to be gossips, meaning you don't just talk to them, then they talk to other people.  "Well, did you know their marriage is struggling? Did you know that she's depressed?  Did you know that  she's post-partum?  Do you know that, sexually, her husband's impotent?" These are the conversations I've heard in this building. Really?

Sometimes womens' ministry is the cesspool that this kind of activity flourishes in. Some have asked, "Why don't you have womens' ministry?" The answer is we do, but it's, you have to be very careful, it's like juggling knives. You put the wrong women in charge of womens' ministry, the drama queen, the gossip mama, all of a sudden all the women come together, tell her everything, she becomes the pseudo-elder  quasi-matriarch; she's got the dirt on everybody and sometimes the women all get together to just rip on their husbands in the name of prayer requests. Happens all the time. Happens all the time. We have worked very hard so that the women who teach here are like Wendy Alsup who I really love and appreciate and respect. She's not like that. It is not that no woman should lead, that no woman should teach, that no woman should in a position of authority over other women  under the authority of their husband, Jesus and the elders it's just that the wrong women tend to want it. The wrong women tend to want it and they tend to want it for the wrong reasons. And sometimes it's the humble woman, who isn't fighting to be the center of drama, control and power; who doesn't have to be up front; she's usually the one who is most capable and qualified.  

And for you single men as well I would say be very, very careful because if you're on staff at Mars Hill  (everything I say sounds terrible, this will just be added to the pile) there are certain women who will tell you, "I want to marry a pastor." Really? You should want to marry a Christian who loves Jesus, loves you, loves your kids should God give them to you. I've lectured enough Bible colleges and seminaries, the young women who come up and say, "I want to marry a pastor"  my immediate default question is, "Are you a gossip? Are you a busybody? Are you a drama queen?" "No. No, I feel called to serve the Lord."  Well, you can serve the Lord without being called to be a pastor's wife in fact, take it from me, it's easier to be a woman and serve the Lord than being married to a pastor.   You single  guys, you gotta be careful, man. There are some women, they want to marry the pastor so they can be the center of power, authority; they can be the first lady; everybody knows them, everybody wants to be their friend, everybody wants to tell them everything; and they can be the center of all the drama. Run for your life. Run for your life. Run for your life. It's Satanic.

See?  I need you women to really search your own heart. Are you Satanic? Is this still part of your flesh, this sick desire in you to know everybody's business? I'm not saying you don't have friends but how much are you on the internet? How much time do you spend emailing? How much time do you spend crying and freaking out and knowing everybody's business and on the phone and having to meet with people because, "Did you know so-and-so did such-and-such and so-and-so is feeling this way and did you--?" Are you the center of LOTS of activity? Why? It's Satanic. It's Satanic. I think I've made my point. 

Something Cosper noted is that whereas with the sins of men Mark Driscoll defined them as concrete actions, Driscoll’s approach to the demonic in women was far more nebulous, far more apt to fit into nebulous dispositions. I might go a step further and cite Driscoll’s accounts of his family feeling they were under spiritual attacks and propose that there was a time of undifferentiated ego mass in the family, a family that huddled together psychologically and emotionally in response to the perception of spiritual attacks in a way that can come across, to me, as paranoid. Look, I grew up Assemblies of God. I had become familiar with spiritual warfare but I came away with a sense that unless you were high-handedly sinning in some egregious way the odds of you being demonized were pretty low. I had also gone through some phases of Christian fads without having volunteered for them and so when I heard Mark go on in 2008 about demons I was not disposed to renew my membership.  After so many years of joking about charismaniacs it seemed he was secretly more charismaniac than some charismatics and Pentecostals I knew of. 

 

It also seemed strangely controlling and paranoid that Mark presumed just about any woman who wanted to befriend his wife was satanic and I balked at his claim that having a womens’ ministry was like juggling knives.  

But there was another, weirder and deeper and creepier paradox about Mark Driscoll bloviating about gossip as the vice of women.  Just how much personal information about women was Mark volunteering in these hours of spiritual warfare instruction? It sure seemed like he was luridly forthcoming about intimate details of traumas in the lives of women the like of which he rarely ever disclosed about himself.  It began to seem there was a severe double standard with Mark Driscoll about the level of material he would divulge about women as a ministry illustration compared to what he was willing to divulge about himself. 

After so many years of Mark Driscoll regaling members about how happily married he was the claims in Real Marriage were unsettling, even disturbing.

http://download.marshill.se/files/2004/02/08/20040208_1-timothy-3-1-7_sd_audio.mp3

Part 6:1 Timothy 3:1-7

Preached February 08, 2004

 

... I love my wife. I've been totally faithful to her. I'm a one-woman man. I met her at 17. I married her at 21. I've been chasing her ever since.  I'm quicker than she is, so I'm happily married.  You know, things are good. I just am. I love my wife. I adore my wife. I enjoy my wife, you know? ...’

 

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.  

 

So it seemed Mark Driscoll was saying that his previously care-free and fun-loving girlfriend had transformed into his frigid and fearful wife.  But then we can read the following from a newer book.

 

Win Your War: Fight in the Realm You Don't See for Freedom in the One You Do 

Mark and Grace Driscoll 

Charisma House (2019) 

ISBNs 9781629996257 and  9781629996264

 

Pages 87-89

 

On our first date, I (Mark) was nervous. We were teenagers in high school, and I was smitten with Grace and knew her dad was a pastor. Driving in my first car, a 1956 Chevy I bought with money I earned at my first job, I had to work up the courage to park the car and meet her parents. Grace’s family lived on a cul-de-sac, and I drove the loop many times until I finally mustered up the courage and pulled into their driveway.

 

Years later, after we had been married and had a few children, I got stuck on yet another cul-de-sac. I had not forgiven something in our past. Grace had apologized and repented, but I nursed my pain and continued to hold a grudge. Years had passed, but I continued to pull the painful past into the present. Like a relational archaeologist I would dig up the issue over and over, revealing that I had not forgiven her nor buried it with Jesus’ death for our sin. As a result our disagreements fell into a well-worn groove with both of us driving in circles until we were exasperated.

 

Before Grace and I met we both had unhealthy, unholy, and unhappy dating experiences. As a result, when we started building a relationship in high school, we were both a bit beat up. I did not fully realize it at the time, but I made an inner vow to myself as a non-Christian. Grace also had made inner vows that the enemy used to form a wedge between us.

 

Within a few years I came to Christ and we were getting married as Christians while still in college. The first years of our marriage were fun. We were broke, but glad to be together. Before long we had planted a church and welcomed our first child into the world. Soon the other kids came as well.

 

We loved each other, but there was something between us. We were faithful to one another, studied the Bible, served in ministry, and tried to grow in our relationship with Christ, but we would very quickly get stuck. This happened numerous times, and when it did, we would go to the same place emotionally over and over and over. Resentment continued to build and cause hurt.

 

When we were kids, Grace had unknowingly violated that inner vow I had made as a non-Christian. As adults that ow from years prior was causing pain and problems for us both. God helped us work through this challenge and we’ll share how later in this chapter.

 

Okay … so back in Real Marriage Driscoll referred to how his fun and free girlfriend had turned into his frigid and fearful wife, yet in Win Your War Mark Driscoll claimed the first few years of marriage were fun.  The most plausible explanation for these discrepancies might simply be that Mark and Grace Driscoll were selling a self-help book about marriage and sex where they had to recount the raw realness of what they struggled through that qualified them to instruct you when they were writing Real Marriage, but for the more recent Win Your War the new approach was to share how they had no idea in this new topic how to cope with things because nobody had given them the wisdom they needed (just like the Christian counselors were mainly useless in Real Marriage before). If we grant that the trope rules the message then there isn’t necessarily any tension between these accounts as could appear at first reading. 

But for those who have read Driscoll books over the last two decades there’s something curious about these inner vows.  Driscoll discloses his inner vow as having existed. What could it have been that Mark Driscoll wasn’t willing to forgive his wife for from their shared past?  Well, with Driscoll books at hand we have basically one plausible possibility.  First we’ll look at the vomit-inducing nightmare story as recounted in Mark Driscoll’s 2006 book.

 

Confessions of a Reformission Rev
Mark Driscoll, Zondervan 2006
ISBN-13: 978-0-310-27016-4
ISBN-10:0-310-27016-2

page 122-123
My family also started coming under spiritual attack. At one point, my daughter Ashley, who was only a few years old, started having a really bad attitude. [emphasis added] Despite days of repeated discipline her behavior did not improve, and I was befuddled as to why.  Late one night I went in to check on her, and she was still awake. I asked her why she was not sleeping, and she began to cry but refused to tell me. I prayed over her, and eventually she told me that for days she had not slept because "bad angels" kept showing up in her room, saying bad things about Jesus and pulling her hair when she tried to sleep.  They scared her by saying that if she told me, they would kill me.  She had been acting up for a few days because she was sleep deprived, and I had been disciplining her sternly because I was worn out and on edge.  I broke down and wept openly for the first time I can remember in my adult life and held my daughter, praying over her and repenting to God for allowing the Enemy to drive a wedge between my daughter and me. 

... During this difficult season, I was burned-out, overworked, out of shape, stressed, and had picked up a nervous twitch in my eye along with ongoing acid reflux and high blood pressure. I was not sleeping much, and my sleep was often interrupted due to stress that kept me awake, thinking. I would also often wake up after a prophetic dream or spiritual attack to pray strategically, which only contributed to the fatigue.  [emphasis added] But thanks to growing insights on how to win spiritual battles, I was optimistic that we would weather the storm and that the church would survive.

So during this period a few years after Ashley's birth Mark Driscoll was run ragged physically and emotionally.  The church had been booted from its older location and was essentially being run from the Driscoll house for about two years in a row.  This is mentioned, perhaps, in the fundraising film God's Work, Our Witness.  That's the set-up of physical and mental limits.  This would have been well before the Earl building or getting what has now become the Ballard campus.  So by Mark Driscoll's account his health was at a low ebb during this period when he and Grace were hosting the church from their house. All of that background leads up to ... :

from page 122-123 (continued)

Then I had the worst experience of my whole life.

I went to bed one night hoping to get caught up on sleep. In the middle of the night, I had a prophetic type of dream that was like other prophetic dreams I had previously except it did not include Scripture that clarified its meaning, because it was from Satan. I cannot go into great detail about the dream because it would impugn the character of someone else. Something horrendous happened to this person that I was not present to witness. But my dream was the equivalent of a horrifying film that showed me every gruesome detail of the worst day of their life. I was not present for the sin they committed, but I told them about my dream later and they confirmed the very graphic details that I saw.

The dream was so vivid that I felt sick and woke up just in time to run into the bathroom and throw up in the toilet. I went downstairs and spent the rest of the night sitting on the couch, staring blankly into the dark and asking God to allow me to do anything but be a pastor. I just wanted to be done with ministry and do something, anything, that would not kill me before I turned thirty. [emphasis added]

For weeks, I watched the mental film every night as I tried to sleep. I knew it was an accusation but could not get it to stop, and so the torment continued night after night (Rev 12:10b). Not knowing what to do, I withdrew from God and my wife and threw myself into my work to keep my mind occupied with something else.  I sometimes worked all night just so that I would not have to go to bed and watch the nightmare yet again.  

Then we can look at the following passage from Mark and Grace Driscoll’s 2012 book: 

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

page 11-12

... One night, as we approached the birth of our first child, Ashley, and the launch of our church, I had a dream in which I saw some things that shook me to my core. I saw in painful detail Grace sinning sexually during a senior trip she took after high school when we had just started dating. It was so clear it was like watching a film--something I cannot really explain but the kind of revelation I sometimes receive.  I woke up, threw up and spent the rest of the night sitting on the couch, praying, hoping it was untrue, and waiting for her to wake up so I could ask her. I asked her if it was true, fearing the answer.  Yes, she confessed, it was. [emphasis added] Grace started weeping and trying to apologize for lying to me, but I honestly don't remember the details of the conversation, as I was shell-shocked. Had I known about this sin, I would not have married her. But God told me to marry Grace, I loved her, I had married her as a Christian, we were pregnant, and I was a pastor with a church-plant with young people who were depending on me.

 

Whereas in the 2006 account the nightmare clearly occurred years after Ashley was born in the 2012 account Mark referred to a nightmare that happened before Ashley was born.  Yet the waking and puking and desperately hoping what he saw in the nightmare wasn’t true only to describe that it was confirmed as the truth is the same. 

In his 2006 account Mark Driscoll even referred to the nightmare as some kind of satanic attack and not some kind of prophetic dream of the sort he said he’d had. 

The common denominator is that whenever it happened, after the nightmare happened, Mark Driscoll began to have a newly strained relationship with Grace.

 

It is in light of all the above that we should revisit Mark Driscol’s 2008 teaching on bitterness as part of the ordinary demonic.

 

http://marshill.com/media/spiritual-warfare/the-devil
February 5, 2005
Mark Driscoll
Part 2, The Devil
about 34:10

The way bitterness works, as well, is bitter people are prone to blame their bitterness on the person that they perceive offended them. Amy Carmichael. she's a missionary, her little book If, she gives this great analogy she says:

If I have a glass filled with sweet water and I bump it, what comes out? Sweet water. She says if I have a glass of bitter water and I bump it, what comes out?  Bitter water.

All that sin against us, perceived sin against us, or bitter envy and selfish ambition by us reveal is what's already in our heart. The bitterness is IN there, and someone or some thing spilled it. And bitter people will say, "Look what you made me do. You made me sin, you made me gossip, you made me angry, you made me bitter, you made me fight, you made me run into conflict, you made me sin in my anger. Look what you made me do." And the answer is, "I didn't make you do anything. That was what was in your heart." I just bumped you.

about 45:00

What he says is, if you're a Christian and God, through Jesus Christ, is not bitter with you but forgives you then you must use the Gospel in your relationships to forgive other people. You have no reason to be bitter with them. In being bitter with them what you are saying is, "I refuse to use the Gospel for my relationships. I refuse to allow Jesus to do anything." And when you say that you ARE saying, "I am inviting Satan instead."

 

So Driscoll has cumulatively testified that he had made some kind of inner vow; Grace Driscoll had unknowingly breached the conditions of Mark Driscoll’s inner vow; and because of that breach Mark Driscoll became bitter and unforgiving toward her in a way that would entail, in light of Mark Driscoll’s own teaching about bitterness and the demonic, that he no longer saw her through the Gospel but through Satan. 

 

Mark’s never confessed to having a satanic view toward his own wife as such and who would expect him to?  But if he is consistent with his teaching about bitterness as demonic and we look at his own various statements about his relationship with his wife on the issue of bitterness and unforgiveness then we are forced to contend with the fact that Mark Driscoll’s disposition toward his wife for an unspecified period of time was what he would call (in anyone else) a deeply satanic disposition of bitterness and unforgiveness.  Grace Driscoll had breached the condition(s) of an inner vow she couldn’t have known about and Mark Driscoll, it seems of his own account, held that against her. 

 

I’m going to make this point as starkly as possible, if Mark Driscoll harbored demonic unforgiveness and bitterness toward his wife why on earth did he think he was qualified to counsel anyone at all about marriages at Mars Hill Church?  Does he really think the satanic bitterness he harbored against his wife wasn’t going to work itself out in the ways he counseled all the women he said tended to show up in “demonic counseling”:

http://marshill.com/media/spiritual-warfare/the-devil
February 5, 2005
Mark Driscoll
Part 2, The Devil

… (01:09)

And my experience has been that those who really do have demonic activity, warfare, opposition, tend to be people who love and serve Jesus and are called for his kingdom purposes. So it seems very simple but you think about it. Let's say you're a general and you run an army. You are going to send your soldiers after those who are most strategic on your opposing team. If somebody's already on the field of battle and near death you're not gonna send a soldier to waste a bullet to eliminate them. They're gonna die.

There are others in life who are self-destructing. They're killing themselves with drugs, alcohol, sex. The world and the flesh is doing its work. There's no need to send a demon after them. They're gonna self-destruct. What I tend to find is people who struggle with the demonic, not entirely but often, are those who really do love Jesus. We see Jesus being tempted and opposed by Satan and demons regularly in his life and ministry. We see him [Satan] attacking Adam and Eve. What I find curious in that, as well, most of my demonic counseling work has been with women. I can't explain that. Paul says that women are the weaker vessel. Maybe that's the case. It says that women are more easily deceived. I know that most feminists don't like those verses. If that's true then it means that those women who don't like those verses are deceived [chuckles] which is kinda funny. And within that I find that it's interesting to me, just an observation, that Satan didn't even show up and attack Adam until he was married. [emphasis added] That sometimes, I believe, Satan really loves to attack families, Christian couples that are called for ministry.

 

Cumulatively, however, it now seems impossible to evade the question as to whether Mark Driscoll was deceived as to how fit he was to be counseling anyone, let alone women, about the demonic if he was harboring bitterness against his wife for what, according to Win Your War, was an unknowing breach of an inner vow he’d made.  So he didn’t consciously know he made an inner vow as a non-Christian that was influencing his life? Are we by now supposed to assume that the numbers were big enough on baptisms and weddings that the state of a man’s heart toward his wife couldn’t possibly disqualify him from pastoral counseling? 

 

If you have read Win Your War take note that Mark Driscoll never says what his inner vow even was. We are told that Grace Driscoll unknowingly broke a condition in some inner vow Mark Driscoll made but we aren’t told what she did to break a condition of that inner vow he had.  Mark and Grace Driscoll go through a litany of stuff that signals you may have made an inner vow and negative consequences that can have.

 

On page 90 of Win Your War the Driscolls wrote: 

…

8. We have a hard time not seeing our vows as equal to God’s laws.

Everyone should submit to God’s laws, but no one is obligated to submit to our vows. We are not God and are urged, “Do not add to his words or he may rebuke.” When we elevate our vow alongside God’s Word, we demand that other people obey us like God.

 

9. We punish people who break our inner vows.

Disobedience to our inner vows unleashes some sort of punishment on others to make them pay. In abusive relationships this can be cultlike, where one person take the role of cruel god and rules over another with vows that are demonic strongholds.

 

Do Mark and Grace Driscoll know this from firsthand experience or is it just some generalization they picked up somewhere or nowhere special? How about page 91 for a continuation?

 

10. An inner vow opens the door to the enemy

The inner vow is a entry point for demonic harm because the vow is in some form or fashion a lie. The Bible is clear that just like a dad has kids, Satan is the “father of lies.” The lie under an inner vow is that it will protect you. Like all lies this is demonic and delivers the opposite of what it promises.

 

In light of the demonic danger of inner vows, it is not surprising that the Bible warns against them. Jesus says, “I say to yu, Do not take an oath at all . … Do not take an oath. … Let what you say be simply `Yes’ or `No’; anything more than this comes from evil.” … 

So inner vows are demonic entry points and Mark Driscoll had an inner vow. He nursed bitterness against Grace for years and has taught that choosing bitterness over forgiveness is choosing Satan over the Gospel.  Okay, who can answer the question of what Mark Driscoll’s inner vow was based on nothing but what he’s written in his books?  Anyone?  What did Grace Driscoll say or do that could have unknowingly broken the terms of Mark Driscoll’s inner vow, whatever the vow was?  

Cumulatively we learn a bit about Mark Driscoll because he’s told the world so much about himself but the level of disclosure about women is striking.  It is as though in the name of being a counselor Driscoll sees himself as having the liberty to share far more intimate and even salacious details about the women he has met, up to and including his wife, than about himself.  There are exceptions, perhaps, in Death By Love but I mean to discuss those accounts some other time. 

But it turns out, in fact, I have to mention Death By Love because near the end of Episode 8 of The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill Jen Smidt shared something that reminded me of the book.  The first thing that sprung to mind was that though the book was published in 2008 with Gerry Breshears as co-author Mark Driscoll recounted that he had basically finished Death By Love back in 2006. 

http://www.theresurgence.com/md_blog_2006-09-19_its_always_something_at_mars_hill_church

https://web.archive.org/web/20061025035511/http://www.theresurgence.com/md_blog_2006-09-19_its_always_something_at_mars_hill_church

October 1, 2006 is the ten-year anniversary of the church that I had the privilege of founding in Seattle when I was twenty-five years old. We started as a Bible study about the size of an average Mormon family. Over the years, God has been gracious to us in one of America’s least Christian cities, where there are more dogs than Christians. 

For ten years we have gotten virtually nothing but very positive media coverage. I've worked hard behind the scenes to make sure we were presented as we are and not used for some subversive agenda. To date, we've gotten good press from ABC Television, NPR, Mother Jones magazine, Christianity Today, and others. 

…

We are still giving 10 percent of our money to help lead the Acts 29 Church Planting Network. I’m still writing a lot, including a book titled Death by Love on the subject of the cross that is nearing completion. This week we did a free training about preaching for nearly a hundred pastors in our area and the guys ate a lot of meat for lunch. We captured my lecture on preaching and will vodcast it in chunks here on this site free of charge, as always, before too long. We’ve also upgraded our cameras to high-def so that the free stuff we do give away through Resurgence and Mars Hill will be as high quality as possible in an effort to help equip as many people around the world as possible on our dime. 

We’re also moving as fast as we can to increase our ability to do biblical counseling. Our recovery groups for drugs, alcohol, and sexual addiction are maxed out and growing all the time. Perhaps our most encouraging ministry is happening with our Grace Groups for people who have been sexually abused. This is an epidemic in our church and the number of folks who have been molested and/or raped is almost overwhelming. Hundreds have been helped or are getting help and hundreds more need help from the sin that has been committed against them. Many of the most affected are dear friends and it has been quite a heavy-hearted journey to hear that the people I love as a pastor and friend have been so horrendously violated before coming to our church. 

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So what was Death By Love?  It was basically a chain of letters Mark Driscoll said he wrote to people he’d met in ministry to whom he shared an atonement theory he believed was germane to their experiences. On page 13 of the book Driscoll was explicit that each person to whom a chapter was devoted was someone he encountered in pastoral ministry at Mars Hill.  I mention it because Mike Cosper mentioned in Episode 8 of his podcast the following about the aftermath of Jen Smidt’s counseling encounter with Mark Driscoll: 

https://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/podcasts/rise-and-fall-of-mars-hill/mars-hill-podcast-mark-driscoll-demon-hunting.html 

58:53

Part of what’s grotesque about the story came afterward. It started with a letter she received from Mark, a thoughtful, heartfelt pastoral letter about her story and about the power of grace in her life. Then, about a year later, without having asked or even told her, she found out he’d included it as a chapter in a book. 

For years I have been nagged by a question about whether or not anyone mentioned in Death By Love had a chance to give their consent for their stories to be shared.  Mark Driscoll was clear the people were from Mars Hill, and he may have changed names, but I was at Mars Hill from about 1999 through 2009 in terms of attendance and  a couple of the stories sounded like friends of mine and I couldn’t shake the sense that Mark was using the stories of friends and fellow believers as grist for a mostly pointless book about atonement theories?  Why pointless?  Because there are countless books that explain atonement theories that don’t spill the most intimate secrets and traumas of church members shared in pastoral counseling sessions just to make a point. After hearing Episode 8 it was hard for me to shake the impression that the book for which Smidt’s story might have been used was potentially if not probably Death By Love. 

One of the things that has become clearer across Driscoll’s books and sermons is that however much he and his fans tout his eagerness to defend women from traumatic experiences a significant part of his brand as a celebrity preacher has come from leveraging stories of the trauma of women to position himself as a guru capable of saving them. He has made a point of making sure when it comes to emotional and relational vulnerability and confession the shoe is basically never on the other foot.  He might allude to how he dreaded female manipulation but has not been forthcoming about why he would fear it or when that fear began.  He might say that gossip is a unique sin to women while peddling books in which his tales of pastoral counseling and delivering people of demonic oppression traffics in what he would call, from anyone but himself, unbridled gossip.