I have felt pretty alone in attempting to discuss the early Acts 29, David Nicholas, Mark Driscoll and what seemed to be a PCA connection (that last part was just not on my radar because I'm just me and only have so much energy and attention).
I'd hazard a guess that from Driscoll's side of things his earlier influences were John MacArthur and Doug Wilson (clearly if the men served on a panel together representing a rightwing perspective on censorship and the arts in 1992 ... ). David Nicholas didn't seem to come along until a few years into the life of Mars Hill. Cosper seems to have shortchanged us by not saying just how many people he talked to who had accounts of how and why Nicholas and Driscoll parted ways within Acts 29. What is clearer is Nicholas founded and bankrolled Acts 29 and Mark Driscoll kinda was there to take it over.
Now podcasts are slogs and I'm not much for them. Hart does, however, raise an interesting point that the conservative evangelicals (if they can be called that, and probably can) who stormed the Capitol Jan 6, 2021) did not wield as much power to as much pernicious effect as the Dulles brothers did (one of whom was a ruling elder in a mainline Presbyterian church) during the 1950s. Hart's point may be overstated but it's something that intersects with a point I have been making here at this blog, that there's a sense in which the contemporary religious right is easy to scapegoat because they aspire to have the cultural and political power the mainlines actually had in the last century and slowly lost. The mainlines have been dealing with their complicity and responsibility for the Indian boarding schools in different ways but it's worth reiterating that it was the mainlines and not the fundamentalists who worked with the state to "save the man by killing the Indian". Being the son of a Native American I put my cards on the table, there are mainliners who seem to find it too easy to look at the Religious Right as wanting to seize power and wield a kind of quasi-theonomic influence as though it were going to happen. A more forceful case the mainlines could make might be to say "We backed Manifest Destiny and now we're spending time owning all the sin and atrocity that came with that and conservatives want to try for that now?" A few of them do, obviously.
Now regarding Nicholas and Driscoll, my theory (and contention) has been that Mark became exactly as "Reformed" as he thought he needed to be in order to accept, in good faith (such as he had it) money and support from David Nicholas.
By now, after so many decades, it seems relatively safe to say that Mark Driscoll has never bothered to articulate a theology of ecclesiology. He's not exactly Baptist or he'd have congregational rule (which his possibly one-time buddy James MacDonald seemed to think was an ecclesiology developed by Satan), but Driscoll likened congregational rule to having the inmates run the insane asylum. Why? No particularly compelling reason .. it might be a case where however jack Catholic Driscoll was he didn't stop to think that he may have picked up some ideas about the suitability of top-down episcopal ecclesiology from ... somewhere.
I think, so far, that the influence of conservative Baptists makes the most sense of what Driscoll has actually shared in his writings than a PCA connection, which is tangential, if potentially interesting. Nicholas' support may have arrived just as Antioch Bible Church, the church that sent out Driscoll with Moi and Gunn, may have balked at backing Driscoll as he went William Wallace II on the unmoderated Midrash but, alas, nobody's around to confirm more details about that volatile transitional period at Mars Hill from 2000 to 2002.
So, contra Presbycast, Antioch Bible Church was the church that sent out Mark Driscoll and company. The Leadership Network played a role. Cosper's episode on Acts 29 sought to correct Mark Driscoll's misrepresentation of Acts 29 as his own brainchild. So although I can appreciate why Reformed pastors and theologians have their concerns about the PCA, having been part of Mars Hill from late 1998 through 2008 ish, what Nicholas did happened to line up with what Mark Driscoll wanted to do.
By the time a donor at the reported level of Jon Phelps was around Mars Hill perhaps it was possible for Driscoll to feel he wasn't beholden to external accountability? Phelps was name-checked in acknowledgments from Radical Reformission in 2004. It's too easy for watchdog bloggers to invoke All the King's Men with a "Follow the money" claim and then just leave things at that. Who has attempted to even map out where money supporting Mark Driscoll and Mars Hill came from? Is that even feasible?
Hart points out that he hadn't even heard of Spanish River Church.
One of the things I want to come back to that Cosper dealt with was a rift between Driscoll and Nicholas on whether to pursue church planting (Nicholas) or church assimilation (Driscoll). In Driscoll's approach already existing churches who wanted to join up with Acts 29 could do so and were welcomed. Nicholas, in Cosper's report, wanted church planting to be church planting, not simple assimilation of applicants who had already gotten off the ground with a church plant.
At 1:52 in the podcast DG Hart pointed out that Driscoll had not, apparently, been a member of a church and then tried to plant a church, which Hart contends not even Joseph Smith tried to do. Driscoll has not let on the extent to which he was raised Catholic. However nominal that Irish Catholic faith may or may not have been he has shared in his post-2014 writings that there are charismatic Catholics in his family by way of his mother and a grandmother. In other words, we can't be sure how not-churched Mark Driscoll ever really was because any guy who could joke that he didn't want to be a pastor because that was the alcoholic gay guy like the priest in his parish was clearly can't be "not churched" to keep going back to that joke that he alluded to in the fundraising film God's Work, Our
Witness. This gets back to one of the perennial challenges about writing or discussing Mars Hill and writing or discussing what is written or said about Mars Hill and Mark Driscoll, we have a lot of people who haven't read what he's cranked out in the last twenty years sufficiently to know how slippery he has been about how not-churched he really was. Cosper's portrait is so incomplete that it could lead people to think Spanish River Church had a bigger role in the history of Mars Hill than anyone as yet can prove that it had in comparison to Antioch Bible Church or Leadership Network.
Hart's on to something about how if someone else tackled the Mars Hill story that might be a compelling alternative to or supplement to what Cosper has done.
I can confirm a couple of people said Mark said he couldn't respect Piper as someone to submit to because Piper's church wasn't as big as his. It's not just that Driscoll can be shown plausibly to have said such things it's that he made a point of saying so to multiple people.
Hart's comment about the role of the PCA and "Big Eva" being unacknowledged as a significant contributor to "Big Eva" is interesting. I'm not sure what I could contribute to such a question since I attend a PCA church but am not sure how much PCA influence can be said to be part of Mars Hill history. It seems as though from Driscoll's side he'll say he's Reformed in some fashion but New Calvinism seems to have been an affiliation of convenience for him that he's dropped , sort of, since 2014. And yet Pray Like Jesus has footnotes to a work by Arthur Pink ...
4 comments:
I've found Hart's readings interesting and useful, but latterly mainly as a means to organise my own thoughts.
So to that extent I'm not sure how much I would believe any of his pronouncements; even on the "Big Eva" point, the YRR world was - at the end of the day - fairly small in the grand scheme of things, so I'm not sure it shows that the PCA has any particular sway in the wider evangelical world. There's a lack of awareness here too on the extent to which the wry detachment is only possible because the OPC inhabits a niche relying on a historical legacy that's gradually unwinding and a wider context allowing plenty of transfer growth. And maybe they are immune - for structural reasons - to the kind of abusive leadership documented by Cosper - but in other contexts (SGM/Trueman/Pruitt) they surely failed surely failed to spot it. Did city centre churches really benefit from 'broken windows policing' ? That's a somewhat gladwellic reach at this point.
I suppose the mainline/Manifest Destiny connection is there, though evangelicals as a distinct group started to emerge only really in the post war era - and there was plenty of Manifest Destiny post the southern strategy that was relatively well endorsed - one of the few side benefits of having a father who collected old issues of magazines like the Readers Digest was that I got to see the various strong men that had been lionised by various parts of the church during the cold war.
yeah the broken windows policing comment seemed weird to me.
Brad Vermurlen's book made an interesting and plausible case that YRR was not a numerically significant movement in terms of growth relative to any other subculture within evangelicalism (whether the progressives, neo-anabaptists, neo-Calvinists or new Calvinists (and Vermurlen deserves some credit for distinguishing clearly between those two types of Calvinists)). New Calvinism cumulatively comes across more as a movement within the Baptist scene and, bringing back R Scott Clark, the cases against Doug Wilson being historically Reformed seems to moot how PCA the YRR has ever been to begin with and, on the other hand, Keller's role in the New Calvinism is basically a case of "one".
If anything, if I have to speculate wildly, we might be on firmer scholastic grounds with the James Collins work on exorcism and deliverance ministries in evangelicalism and fundamentalism converging into the work of Clinton Arnold and raise some questions about the role premillenial dispensationalism has had in spiritual warfare concepts vs postmillenialism (there ARE postmil authors on spiritual warfare but Collins has noted they seem few and far between compared to dispensationalists).
Or as Steve Hays used to tell me, the OPC was so perfectionist on doctrine their missions work was negligible at best and their numbers suggested that they were "too good" at doctrine, but then Steve, however conservative he always was, had a more open and positive stance toward Pentecostals (which is what I still was when we first met) than can be typical in conservative/old line Presbyterianism from what I can tell.
Well, it does make you wonder if the actual numerically significant move over the last few decades was somewhere else entirely and we might read about it in 20 years time when some new theological move emerges.
That's where Brad Vermurlen's Reformed Resurgence was an interesting read because Vermurlen pointed out that there was no measurable growth in the New Calvinism that wasn't matched by the neo-Anabaptist or progressive evangelical scenes. New Calvinism was apparently virtually a non-entity compared to the numbers of mainstream/traditional evangeilcalism, let alone any variation of Pentecostalism. But Vermurlen argued there was a resurgence of a kind in the sense that the New Calvinist thought leaders and institutions were unusually good at wielding social media and mass media to create the effect of a resurgence, even if in terms of real numbers there was no resurgence at all, and Vermurlen was a stickler that a resurgence had to be a numerical growth greater than competitors within the field of broader evangelicalism. Internet Monk's "The Coming Evangelical Collapse" seems to have been confirmed by Vermurlen's concluding thesis that New Calvinism seemed to have a "resurgence" mainly because Anglo-American evangelicalism has been disintegrating and in disarray, against which the consolidation of New Calvinism looked like a strong movement.
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