R. Scott Clark at Heidelblog republished a piece by Keith Evans recently that discussed Mike Cosper's The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill and the appeal of wolfish leaders in churches.
Evans published his piece on August 23, 2022 which meant he could not have heard the entire series as Mike Cosper and company dropped their Dan Allender episode in the series ...
... on August 26, 2022 and there's assuredly one last wrap-up "where are they now" episode coming along.
I thought the CT series was going to actually be done with Episode 12 ("Aftermath") and yet here we are nearly a year later and the truly final episode has not yet hit. So it goes.
There has since been time for Matt Chandler to make it into the news for taking a leave of absence. The history of Acts 29 since David Nicholas started it and it was co-opted or taken over by Mark Driscoll and his allies has been one of the most opaque parts of Mars Hill related history over the last twenty years. We're actually hardly any closer to having a very full story of Acts 29 now than the initial PR CT published. Cosper said there were/are as many stories about how David Nicholas departed from Acts 29 as there are tellers to tell the stories. So did none of them want to go on record? But I digress.
Over time I have noticed that Mark Driscoll's conversion and calling accounts fix him firmly in what some historians and scholars regard as the realm of American Redoubt. That Driscoll cited Doug Wilson as a formative influence is a given within the history of Mars Hill but it's a given not nearly so readily accepted by some of Doug Wilson's supporters. Within R. Scott Clark's wing of American Reformed Christianity both Doug Wilson and Mark Driscoll are considered wolves. This is a pedestrian observation to me as a Christian but it is a potentially important thing to note for non-Christians and perhaps particularly for liberals, centrists and progressives. Apart from the hype machines of industry Christianity actual clergy were not uniformly on board that men like Mark Driscoll or Doug Wilson were legitimately trained, ordained and installed as clergy within the Reformed traditions. If you're not already Reformed I won't bore you on Labor Day weekend with the minutiae of all that.
One of the things I remember over the last twenty years was people would talk about how smart Mark Driscoll was or is and how well-read in theology he was. Twenty years ago I would have had that impression as an impressionable twenty-something. Okay, maybe closer to thirty years ago. Twenty years ago I told Mark to his face that treating all non-Calvinist soteriology as though it were automatically Pelagian was intellectually dishonest and misleading. He said, "If you really study it, they're basically all the same", as in if you "really" studied all the non-Calvinist approaches to soteriology they're all Pelagian. Now if, as it turned out, Driscoll was steeping himself in someone like John MacArthur then, okay, I could see how peddling false dualisms might be what Mark was going to do (and boy would I ever see him go on to keep doing that!) But even someone like R. C. Sproul could distinguish between Pelagian and semi-Pelagian (Sr., not Jr.).
But where did Driscoll get his penchant for thinking in artificial binaries if he didn't come to it naturally? Eventually I'd read Doug Wilson books. I've read Heaven Misplaced and it's a big "what if we thought as if ... ?" in which the two alternatives are dispensationalist premillennial/futurist Secret Rapture cultural isolationist panic and optimistic triumphant postmillennialist culture-building. As an amillennial partial preterist I chose none-of-the-above. I still remember one day after church at Mars Hill where a friend told me he had to explain to a guy (a guy who would become a pastor at Mars Hill, no less) that I wasn't a heretic for being amillennial partial preterist--it just meant I'd read theologians and biblical scholars who aren't American! The friend said he had to explain to this future MH pastor bro that Wenatchee The Hatchet's view is not only not heretical but one of the historically most normative eschatological views in the history of western Christianity.
But it wasn't just Mars Hill that was a place with leaders who present trumped up dualisms. Even if it was in his nature to use scabrous either/ors and even if Mark Driscoll openly extolled using reductio ad absurdum arguments in debates, he still had to get this from somewhere. He made no secret he was influenced by Doug Wilson.
Over time I have read a few books by Wilson and even more books by Mark Driscoll and while their respective fans may really believe these guys are theologians my own understanding of them is they are self-help gurus who tether their self-help products to culture war mandates. They peddle a Social Gospel that isn't recognized as a Social Gospel because of its red-state bona fides rather than blue-state bona fides. The observation isn't even remotely original and I didn't come up with it, it was a point made by Dan over at City of God blog while it was online. It was, and is, a very on point observation.
Take Wilson, he spent the last year or so writing to "Dawson", a literary fiction, a composite of some kind, about the birds and the bees. What Mark Driscoll and Doug Wilson both have a penchant for is cranking out piles of free online content that is then re:packaged and re:published in book formats that will be purchased by their ... generally self-selecting audiences.
That's the "Dawson" edition, the "Darla" edition is still in process. People who read No Quarter November for free the last few years can go buy up the print editions of those blog posts if they like. But, in fact, quarter was and is given. Doug Wilson didn't name Nadia Bolz-Weber by name or Shameless by title. He did his nudge, nudge and wink, wink implicative did-you-see-the-news implication thing. I know of at least one pastor who wrote on record that Bolz-Weber was "a digusting publicity seeker" I, of course, made my thoughts known about Bolz-Weber being Driscoll 2.0 for blue state voters a few years back.
Now here's the thing, I have an idea what these types of people are doing selling self-help books. They're selling scripts of adulthood. They are not the sorts of people I would regard as theologians or pastors so much as self-help gurus who use Christian jargon to peddle what are finally Americanist ideals and variants on American civic religions. That many people are adrift and not sure how or even if they can do the "adulting" is not hard to observe about the United States over the last twenty years. The United States has exported its manufacturing base, financialized its economy, embraced tech and all of these things have intensified gaps between haves and have-nots.
Theoretically the older right and older left can agree on these things and Freddie deBoer was surprised that he got very sympathetic readings of The Cult of Smart from evangelical Christians. I am not surprised. I liked his book because he made a case that extolling higher education will not bring back the unskilled labor market and there's no soft-pedaling the reality that dumb kids will not be "made" smart by forcing them through more schooling. I'm not a Marxist but I don't have to a Marxist to appreciate Adorno's complaints about the constraints of pop music as a product mediated by the culture industry even as I contend Adorno was catastrophically wrong with regard to the real limitations. Marxists can be brilliant at cultural diagnosis, as an older friend told me in college in the 1990s, but they crash and burn with their pie-in-the-sky embrace of global socialist revolution when they could be trying to solve real world problems.
Men like Doug Wilson and Mark Driscoll seem to be trying to peddle scripts of adulthood that I considered dubiously outdated even while I was still at Mars Hill and mostly happy about it. I don't see any real reason to stay tethered to the nuclear family paradigm and it's not even historically normative over the last three centuries of Native America familial life, for instance. Extended families have been far more the normal globally and historically. So a guy like Driscoll or Wilson shilling a script of adulthood doesn't strike me as someone who's really talking about theology.
I read Heaven Misplaced a while back out of curiosity. It's nothing more than a "what if we acted as if postmillennialism is true?" Labor in culture on the surmise that a future utopia in which the last enemy to be conquered is death? Main Currents of Marxism, Doug, mentions early on how Hegelian historicism is a secularized variant of millennialist eschatology and Hegelianism is a precursor to Marxism. In other words, the postmil bros like Doug Wilson see commies as the great deceivers because of a narcissism of small differences. For those of us who have been amil the whole idea of postmil utopianism sounds like a recipe for a planned bloodbath whether it's a Fifth Monarchist kind or an October Revolution kind. That doesn't mean there can't be grisly political scheming from and in other metaphysical paradigms. Catholicism managed to become plenty corrupt despite formally damning postmillennialism. Jeffrey Burton Russell's got a great little book called Order and Dissent in the Middle Ages that gets into that if you want to read a primer. Catholics have known about postmil would-be revolutionaries imagining they will change the planet for nigh unto a thousand years.
Wilson may really believe his postmil beliefs are a healthy alternative to Secret Rapture panic and paranoia but I have yet to see that that's the case. I take the United States to be in decline but I don't think it's in free-fall. I don't think Atlanticism is going to remain the world-ruling paradigm it has been since the Cold War. The sun can set on the American and British empires alike and the world will not end, even if cataclysmic world-ending scenarios are what Westerners imagine when they struggle to think through where the West is allegedly taking the world.
As I get older I have become more grateful that I providentially befriended Christian friends from Africa. Because when people like Wilson or Driscoll bloviate about the demise of Western Christendom it can seem as though they forget that Christianity began in Asia and spread to Africa as it moved throughout the Roman empire. Augustine, Cyprian and Tertullian were African bishops. The whole idea that white Western Europeans needed to introduce Africans to Christianity can seem more than just daft with this kind of history in mind.
Heaven Misplaced is all the more striking to me as pretending at eschatology because of other things I've read over the years. I didn't come from Wilson's book seeing he'd made a competent or coherent case for millennialism, it was just an invitation to imagine what kind of culture-making we could all do if we Christians thought this way. Well historically Lutherans have been amillennial and last I checked Johann Sebastian Bach didn't need a postmillennial motivation to write all his music. William Byrd was a recusant Catholic and wrote an astonishing and lovely body of musical work. Was Dostoevsky a postmil? As if. Who went to the trouble of saying we shouldn't even interpret the millennium as a literal stretch of time? Several books by Crawford Gribben let me know it was Augustine of Hippo who proposed that, and many of the continent Reformers.
If I compare Heaven Misplaced to Richard Bauckham and Miroslav Wolf delivering beatdowns to Moltmann for his eschatology, to pick a non-random example from my reading this year, the Wilson book is nothing more than a high school commencement motivational speech given to young men and women who are probably expected to get married by 19 and have babies by 20 to 22 and are then tasked with imagining how they can "change the world". I can't think of it as serious theology or serious cultural studies. It not only doesn't reverse the problem that Mark Noll famously described as The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind it may double down on staying the course.
But let's say that postmils do make positive contributions to the humanities and sciences. If so, fine, but what has never been successfully argued that I've ever seen is that such a "worldview" is a necessary precondition for contributions to the humanities and the sciences. If anything Christendoms West and East cumulative argue against such a silly notion. What is more, having personally participated in and witnessed much of the rise and fall of Mars Hill the very history of that church suggests to me that had Mark and other elders actually endorsed and taught anything remotely like postmillennialism or theonomistic anything Mars Hill might have sputtered to a halt in 2004.
No, Mark Driscoll's variation was telling people to "go upstream and influence culture". Cosper has recounted how Mark told some people behind the scenes that they would or could eventually own the city of Seattle. Reportedly, at least, Doug Wilson has similar ideas. Institutional capture is not the same as institution building. While not exactly full quiverfull I have also gotten a sense that culture warriors of the red-state variety may not even realize secular lefties pioneered homeschooling options as alternatives to state-funded political indoctrination (not that that's how homeschoolers tend to be viewed in THIS century ... ) More to my real point, Christian culture warriors seem more trained to have and homeschool the babies to change culture than they have demonstrated the cultural capital to make contributions to culture that anyone outside their niche communities even talk about.
A somewhat remarkable example here in Puget Sound is music. Mars Hill was around for the better part of twenty years and had a lot of bands and now? The church is gone and the entire Seattle arts scene more or less never discussed Mars Hill in anything other than vitriolic terms. Mars Hill, if it had a cultural footprint at all, was so stringly intra-Christian it as though it never existed between 1995 and 2015 and I say that as someone who was once a member, attended regularly, volunteered in a variety of ministries, and intermittently documented its peak and demise from about 2010 to 2015 and, obviously, sometimes still have things to say about them.
What bother me about evangelicalism in its conservative and progressive forms, and by extension exvangelicalism is, and I know I'm putting this too broadly, they all want the clincher of a status win in cultural prestige rather than doing the far more tedious thing of doing something. It's easier for evangelicals left, right and center to talk about "engaging culture" but the focus of the engagement culminates in a concern about cultural prestige. Since Richard Taruskin's death I've thought about this a bit and the impulse permeated the Cold War superpowers and I have called it "worldview vindication". It's rampant in Soviet and U.S. discourse on the arts if you go back and read documents from the 20th century and it's rampant in evangelicalism and in mainline denominations. Yet as I've read music history on classical and jazz and rock and pop from different times in the Cold War and from U. S. history I have noticed that churches ... I could be inviting controversy by saying white churches ... tended to cluster around for or against reactions to cultural shifts. Black churches, on the other hand, seemed more directly engaged in navigating the conflicts and complementary possibilities of getting highbrow and lowbrow musical genres to coexist in a shared liturgy. So, yeah, I just went there. One of my frustrations with secular musicological work is so many scholars of progressive and conservative convictions seem so set on acting as if church music was irrelevant to any for-or-against regarding Matthew Arnold style art-religion that some possible breakthroughs can't start happening. There, I've done my personal soapbox thing for a few sentences.
What I am struggling to get at is Christians who do the culture war thing do not seem to be thinking about how what they do, what they argue about and what they argue for will be a blessing to people at large rather than a world class "I pwned you" world vindication for their ideas over against all alternatives. I've just read too much of the Cold War diatribes from Soviet and Western arts polemics to want to repeat all that stuff. If I am going to have a possibility, by the grace of God, to have a conversation or write something or compose or do whatever to provide possible future options for composers and musicians who are tired of the scholastically entrenched highbrow/lowbrow battles in history and historiography I hope that if I come up with something it will be an idea that can be useful to people who share none of my metaphysical beliefs. In other words, when I see efforts that happened on both sides of the Iron Curtain to synthesize jazz and classical traditions that tells me that musicians were struggling to broker a synthesis in spite of the obvious differences between the capitalist and the communist; the religious person and the non-religious person; and all the color lines that invariably come up in discussions of jazz.
It has also occurred to me that for such a fusion to happen Americans might need to at some point consider jazz urban pop music that became global as far back as the 1920s. Was Estonian jazz "real" jazz as understood by American music journalists? Longtime readers know I'm the son of a Native American dad and a white mom. Sasha Harmon has written a few books on Native Americans in the Pacific Northwest and there's a tradition of inter-tribal and inter-racial marriage going back generations. That there were white separatist enclaves that came to the PNW is beyond dispute but that's not the whole of our history. The older I get the more I realize that I don't enjoy being pigeonholed into an American history in which the "only" stuff that matters either comes from New England or the South and whose cultural scripts and battles are presumed to define everything on the West Coast. Maybe because I've grown up on the West Coast nearly all my life and picked up a fondness for anime, Toru Takemitsu and a bit of Asian cinema I just never entirely warmed up to Atlanticism. I came of age not assuming that either Russia or China or Japan were necessarily enemies even if we got closer to a shooting war during the Clinton years at some points than seemed good to me at the time but once again I digress.
i've touched on this in the past but there's a Presbyterian tradition among the Nez Perce. It's probably way more mainline PCUSA than readers of Heidelblog might like but it can serve to underscore a point regarding men like Doug Wilson and Mark Driscoll--these guys who act and talk like they're Reformed don't even seem to be able to tip their hats to the fact that Native Americans have had a Calvinist tradition in the Pacific Northwest since before the Driscoll clan moved from Montana to Seatac or Jim Wilson did the church thing. The whole idea that in order to be a good Calvinist or a solid Presbyterian you have to draw on the southern Presbyterian tradition is an absurd non-starter in the Pacific Northwest.
It's been eight years since Mars Hill shuttered and what did its leaders achieve? Justin Dean didn't want to talk to Mike Cosper and I have friends who did not go on record. I get that. I didn't go on record myself. I have concerns and criticisms of the sprawling and diffuse series Cosper has put together. On the other hand, having any account, no matter how disorganized, on the history of Mars Hill that isn't curated down to the minute by Mark is still a starting point. If historians and scholars want to tackle a more thorough history of Mars Hill Wenatchee The Hatchet is around and will consider helping. I let myself get quoted in Johnson's book, for instance.
Mark used to say that at Mars Hill we did all sorts of things because we loved the city. Ah, yes, and where is he now? Scottsdale or thereabouts. maybe Mark convinced himself he loved the city when what he loves his own legacy and the legacy he wants to put together for his family. He's got his kids in ministry employment at The Trinity Church now. One of the delicate points that thinkpieces at blogs can overlook is that if you think Mark Driscoll is a wolf or that Doug Wilson is a wolf then you have to deal with the reality that wolves have cubs. What we don't know for sure is whether the cubs are like their father. It's possible, it may be probable but Jonathan was not like Saul any more than the sons of Samuel were like Samuel. Eli was not a good man but depending on the commentaries you read he was more eager to repent than his sons were.
Jesus did not tell his disciples to go make converts and officiate weddings. He taught them to make disciples. Culture warriors are not necessarily Christians just because they want to take back American for Jesus and that reverse-engineered Jesus can be a blue-state Biden or a red-state Trump without betraying the "higher" value of still being American Jesus. This is a point that I am not sure exvangelicals and progressives will always fully appreciate. Star Trek has always been imperial integration propaganda even if it is of a JFK/LBJ variety. Aaron Sorkin is not less jingoistic than Rush Limbaugh, he just demonstrates the American supremacist hegemonic entitlement complex in a blue state way. I wrote years ago about how Americans would rather make movies about the end of the world than imagine a world that Americans won't save.
If you enjoy animated films the sheer frequency with which universe-ending catastrophes come up becomes a punchline in Teen Titans Go vs Teen Titans. Go Robin talks to his team mates near the end of the film as follows:
Robin: You know what the best thing is about multiversal imperilling crossover events?Cybor: What?Beast Boy: Don't ask him! That means he'll explaaaiin.Robin: They only happen once a year, which means we've got nothing to---[Darkseid shows up immediately, voiced by Weird Al Yankovic]...Raven: I'm out.
And there we have a punchline in a superhero cartoon for kids about how you should only have to save the entire multiverse once a year. If all you ever saw of cowboy films was John Wayne stuff you might never guess there's Blazing Saddles. Well, of course, superheroes have that going to. What self-designated gurus tend to tell you is that an entire genre bears the moral weight of the failure or success of an entire civilization whether they're conservative ranters or socialist realists. Somehow both of them managed to think throughout the 1930s through the 1950s that jazz was the musical poison of light music that needed to be suppressed but I'm hoping to not go all the way down that rabbit trail!
It's one thing for journalists and scholars to lament the saturation of American pop culture with superhero adventures but the facts on the ground for those of us who enjoy those stories is that universe-ending Endgame stakes have become a punchline within the genre. Or take a long-ago episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer where the title character tells her mom, "I have to go save the world .... again!" The humor comes from how Buffy is "chosen" to save the world but sees it not as an entitlement but as a grievous annoyance that gets in the way of her being an ordinary teenager. Hollywood doesn't have room for ordinary teenagers or ordinary anything.
After decades of having seen the rise and fall of Mars Hill I am not convinced the scripts of manhood and womanhood the likes of Mark Driscoll and Doug Wilson prescribe are plausible. The "Dawson" and "Darla" that Doug Wilson writes to might as well be Peter Parker and Gwen Stacy.
Perhaps the thread that sews wolves together is that they have a penchant for self-help guru-hood that permeates their work more than theological reflection. In my own experience pastors and theologians and teachers study to show themselves approved and also do so in ways where they give you the tools to do the same. They are disciples of Jesus who instruct people how to be disciples of Jesus. Wolves keep shilling self-help books who have all the answers for the here and now. Their scripts are super and if you don't or can't or won't live up to them that's probably your problem, not the problem of the self-help guru.
3 comments:
"Wilson may really believe his postmil beliefs are a healthy alternative to Secret Rapture panic and paranoia but I have yet to see that that's the case"
More prosaically; if your belief is that the rest of the world is going to hell, but you - in your little cultural redoubt - will be safe and live on to see better days, how different is that to the idea of the Rapture really? I suspect this is one of those cases where it's actually quite hard to be counter cultural and truly escape the dominant narratives in your society.
Perhaps what Wilsonian variants of postmil would have us accept is the idea that their version of the ideal society will fan out and redeem the entire world. Whether that quasi-Presbyterian variant on Manifest Destiny comes from Doug Wilson or Woodrow Wilson seems moot to me as I have conspicuously rejected postmillennialism.
I suspect a Wilsonian will argue that there's a literal, physical difference between a Rapture Ready dispensationalist waiting for the Secret Rapture to remove them from California and moving to Moscow, Idaho but your point about the self-rapturing of probably socially conservative Christians out of California is noted. :) IF they were really optmillennialists why don't they just all stay exactly where they already were to be salt and light? We know there are a variety of reasons and that's where the teeth of your question are. If the American Redoubt folks "raptured" themselves out of California to Idaho over the last sixty years they aren't necessarily showing by that exodus they are more optimillennialist than the alleged pessimillennialism of the Hal Lindsey types.
Of course people moving when they find circumstances intolerable is going to happen but most people don't feel obliged to couple that exodus with a supposedly optimistic eschatology they announce to the world that seems to fly in the face of what their actual flesh-and-blood actions suggest they really think about their odds of transforming culture actually are.
Post a Comment