Pray Like Jesus: Learn to Pray to
God as Father
Mark Driscoll and Ashley Chase
Copyright © 2021 by Mark Driscoll
and Ashley Chase
Charisma House
ISBN 978-1-62999-926-5
ISBN 978-1-62999-927-2 (ebook)
When God is called Father in the
first three Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke), the word is always on the lips of
Jesus. Again, this is not commonplace in ancient religions but rather a
revolutionary understanding of the nature of God that Jesus taught us, starting
with his first disciples. Page 92
The
book of Acts itself demolishes this canard in chapter 17:28 by describing the
Apostle Paul’s invocation of the Stoic poet Aratus in his address to the
Athenians at Mars Hill. You might think that a preacher who named the first
church he planted after the Mars Hill mentioned in Acts would get this basic
point right, but now we have to do a little excavation on the Stoic poet named
Aratus.
Who
was Aratus? Here ya go, there’s a definition
you can pursue but for our purposes the salient point is the following:
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Aratus-Greek-poet
…
One
verse from the famous opening invocation to Zeus became even more famous because it was
quoted in the New Testament (Acts 17:28): “For ‘in him we live and move and
have our being’; as even some of your own poets have said, ’For we too are his
offspring.’”
Let’s
see what John Calvin had to say about Paul’s citation of half a verse from the
Stoic poet Aratus (who lived from c 315 BCE to 240 BCE).
Keep in mind bold emphases are added while italics are original:
https://www.ccel.org/ccel/calvin/calcom37.v.vi.html
Acts 17:26-29
26. And hath made of one blood all mankind to dwell upon all the face of the earth, and hath appointed the times before determined, and the bounds of their habitation. 27. That they might seek God, if peradventure they may grope [after] him, and find him, though he be not far from every one of us. 28. For in him we live, move, and have our being; as certain of your poets said, For we be also his generation. 29. Therefore, seeing we be the generation of God, we must not think that the Godhead is like to gold, or silver, or to stone, graven by the cunning cogitation of man.
...
Certain
of your poets. He citeth half a verse out of Aratus, not so much for
authority’s sake, as that he may make the men of Athens ashamed; for such
sayings of the poets came from no other fountain save only from nature and
common reason. [emphasis added] Neither is it any marvel if Paul, who spake
unto men who were infidels and ignorant of true godliness, do use the testimony
of a poet, wherein was extant a confession of that knowledge which is naturally
engraven in men’s minds. The Papists take another course. For they so lean to
the testimonies of men, that they set them against the oracles of God; and they
do not only make Jerome, or Ambrose and the residue of the holy fathers,
masters of faith, but they will no less tie us to the stinking [vile] answers
of their Popes than if God himself should speak. Yea, that which more s, they
have not been afraid to give so great authority to Aristotle that the apostles
and prophets were silent in their schools rather than he.
Now,
that I may return unto this sentence which I have in hand, it is not to be
doubted but that Aratus spake of Jupiter; neither doth Paul, in applying that
unto the true God, which he spake unskillfully of his Jupiter, wrest it unto a
contrary sense. [emphasis added] For because men have
naturally some perseverance of God, 300 they
draw true principles from that fountain. And though so soon as they begin to
think upon God, they vanish away in wicked inventions, and so pure seed doth
degenerate into corruptions; yet the first general knowledge of God doth
nevertheless remain still in them. After this sort, no man of a sound mind can
doubt to apply that unto the true God which we read in Virgil touching the
reigned and false joy, that All things
are full of joy. Yea, when Virgil meant to express the power of God,
through error he put in a wrong name.
As
touching the meaning of the words, it may be that Aratus did imagine that there
was some parcel of the divinity in men’s minds, as the Manichees did say, that
the souls of men are of the nature of God. 301 So when
Virgil saith concerning the world, The
Spirit doth nourish within, and the mind being dispersed through all the
joints, doth move your whole huge weight, he doth rather play the
philosopher, and subtilely dispute after the manner of Plato, than purely mean
that the world is supported by the secret inspiration of God. But this
invention ought not to have hindered Paul from retaining a true maxim, though
it were corrupt with men’s fables, that men are the generation of God, because
by the excellency of nature they resemble some divine thing. This is that which
the Scripture teacheth, that we are created after the image and similitude of
God, (Genesis 1:27.)
The same Scripture teacheth also, in many places, that we be made the sons of
God by faith and free adoption when we are engrafted into the body of Christ,
and being regenerate by the Spirit, we begin to be new creatures, (Galatians
3:26.) But as it giveth the same Spirit
divers names because of his manifold graces, so no marvel if the word sons be
diversely taken. All mortal men are called sons in general, because they draw
near to God in mind and understanding; [emphasis added] but because
the image of God is almost blotted out in them, so that there appear scarce any
slender lines, [lineaments,] this name is by good right restrained unto the
faithful, who having the Spirit of adoption given them, resemble their heavenly
Father in the light of reason, in righteousness and holiness.
For
people who want to read a self-help book called Pray Like Jesus they potentially
don’t care about all the above. They
should. Mark Driscoll claiming that,
when Jesus taught about God as Father, He was being revolutionary is not only an
exaggeration it’s an exaggeration shown up by the Apostle Paul’s invocation of
Aratus as a poet who observed that humans are God’s children. Aratus died
centuries before the birth of Christ and if was truly “revolutionary” for Jesus
to have taught we can think of God as our Father because, in Mark Driscoll’s
rhetorical flourish, nobody thought of God that way before, then how was it
possible for the Apostle Paul to quote Aratus at all? Aratus could not have conceived of every
human as in some way the offspring of Zeus and wouldn’t have written down that
phrase in a poem on astronomy that would then be taken up centuries later by
the Apostle Paul in his address to the Athenians recounted by “Doctor Luke” (as
Driscoll has called him) in the book of Acts.
So
there we’ve got two apostles, Luke and Paul, testifying against Mark Driscoll’s
claim in Pray Like Jesus. Throw
in all the prophetic oracles in which Israel and Jacob are described as Yahweh’s
son and the whole assertion Mark Driscoll has made becomes even more
ridiculous.
It’s
worth remembering that way back in 2007 Mark Driscoll was claiming that the
Targum Neofiti supposedly presented Jews centuries before Jesus affirming the
Trinity.
https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2016/02/mark-driscoll-ministries-has-old-mars.html
http://markdriscoll.org/sermons/trinity-god-is/
Starts about 23:00 in
[https://realfaith.com/sermons/trinity-god-is/ 1-28-23]
]
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2013/12/warren-throckmorton-keeps-tabs-mhc.html
http://marshill.com/media/doctrine/trinity-god-is
Now, what I want to share with you now is super exciting to me ‘cause I’m
a total – I’m kind of a geek. And I really like – I really like the Bible and I
like learning things I did not know. And I learned something this week that I
did not know. It comes from Dr. Gerry Breshears, who’s a dear friend of mine
and my co-author on Vintage Jesus and some other books. He’s the head of
theology at Western Seminary in Portland. And what he showed me was – he sent this
to me, it’s called the Targum Neofiti. It’s from roughly 200 years before the
birth of Jesus Christ.
Now, let me tell you what a
targum is, okay? A targum was an accepted Jewish translation and reading of the
Old Testament, okay? And the Jewish scholars would translate, read the Old
Testament and they would write them down as accepted targums. Now this targum –
again, think is through – is 200 years before the birth of Jesus, more than 200
years before the Christian church in its present form came into existence, 500
years before something we’ll get to call the Council of Nicea where the
Christian theologians officially declared the doctrine of the Trinity as true
orthodoxy. Hundreds of years prior, here is the Targum Neofiti.
Genesis 1:1-2, it
declared, “In the beginning, by the Firstborn” – who’s that? That’s Jesus.
That’s the same language we find in the New Testament. Paul says that Jesus is
the image of the invisible God, and he is the firstborn – that’s preeminence.
That’s prominence. That’s rulership over all creation. “In the beginning, by
the Firstborn” – Jesus – “God” – that’s the Father – “created the heavens and
the earth. Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface
of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.” I can show
that there were Jews who were waiting for the coming of Jesus Messiah who loved
and studied the Bible – 200 years before the coming of Jesus interpreted
Genesis 1, the opening line of the Bible, and Genesis 2 to be Trinitarian. That
the Father through Jesus Christ, the preeminent firstborn Son, along with the
Holy Spirit created everything. Trinitarian.
To all that the scholars Robert Cargill, Christian Brady, and
Scott Bailey could be said to have replied "No", "No" and "Hell
no" respective to their usual blogging tones. Brady, in
particular, as an Aramaic targum scholar, has been in a good position to point
out that Driscoll (and Breshears) claim the rabbinical commentary on Genesis
was written in the second century BCE when it is generally accepted as written
in the second century CE. I.e., 2 centuries BC is four centuries too
early for something scholars agree was written in the 2nd century AD, for folks
who are old school. Driscoll opens out the gate misrepresenting (at best)
or lying (at worst) when the commentary on Genesis was written.
Brady closed his friendly post with:
Feel
free to offer other comments on the video. For the first time
I have actually left comments on a YouTube video because I think this is so
egregious. And for those who don’t know me as well and to be open and clear, I
do believe in the Trinity, I just abhor bad sermons and errors. [emphasis
mine]
That Driscoll's been recycling stuff is hardly a surprise,
even if he at one point warned from the pulpit against those guys who only have
a few years' worth of preaching in them, move on, and start recycling
content. But, even if we take the most generous approach here about his
time away to get "healed up", he had time to cut out some of the most
ridiculous, dishonest and irresponsible pseudo-scholarship in works published with
his name on them. Simply not providing a transcript of the sermon
(anymore) is not the same as having retracted stupid pseudo-scholarship and
admitting you said garbage that proved you didn't know what you were talking
about.
Perhaps the shame of
being shown to be so incompetent got to Driscoll and Breshears because if I
understand correctly neither of them have been touting the discredited claim
that Neofiti demonstrated trinitarian ideas existed in at least some Jewish
thinking about Genesis centuries before Jesus’ birth.
But this gets to a
self-pwn that would have applied to Mark Driscoll’s claim if he hadn’t quietly
shuffled the Neofiti nonsense away. How’s
that, you may ask? If the Targum Neofiti really had shown that Jews thought of
Yahweh in trinitarian terms centuries before Jesus was ever born then Jesus
teaching people to pray to God as Father was certainly not revolutionary and
couldn’t have been. As it stands I’ve shown with a little help from John Calvin
and the text of Acts by way of historical allusion to the didactic poetry of
Aratus that Mark Driscoll’s claim about Christ in Pray Like Jesus is
squashed on its own terms. It’s not that
Christians don’t believe there are things unique about Jesus as the Christ. The Swiss Reformed pastor Emil Brunner wrote
a whole book called The Mediator about that about a century ago. By trying to make Jesus seem more “revolutionary”
than even the scriptures themselves depicted Him as being Mark Driscoll is
going for an inspirational self-help “eureka” moment that shows he is still, as
one person put it somewhere, using the Bible as a sock-puppet that can be made
to say whatever he wants it to say.
But even the Book of Acts itself shows that Mark Driscoll's claim in Pray Like Jesus is false, as Paul told the Athenians, "as even one of your own poets has said `we are all his offspring'."
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