Saturday, May 13, 2023

Mark Driscoll's jokes on the parallels between demonic attack and menopause in light of decades of sharing stories of the demonic attacks he says he and his family have faced

As longtime readers will know I have done journalistic blogging on a set of topics over the years and while there's not so much of it here in 2023 I have also not said "I'm done". 

There are times when jokes can invite investigation. Back on May 3, 2023 Mark Driscoll tweeted the following status updates
:

Pastor Mark Driscoll

@PastorMark

We over-spiritualize things sometimes. Before you pray for deliverance, maybe do an inventory of your health and your circumstances first. Menopause and hangovers have the same symptoms as demonic attack 🤷‍♂️😂

Last edited

4:49 PM · May 3, 2023

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It would seem he liked the joke so much he tweeted it twice. The second time around he included hangovers so that menopause didn't show up by itself.

 

https://twitter.com/PastorMark/status/1653909545159376898

 

Pastor Mark Driscoll

@PastorMark

We over-spiritualize things sometimes. Before you pray for deliverance, maybe do an inventory of your health and your circumstances first. Menopause and demonic attack have the same symptoms 🤷‍♂️😂

4:48 PM · May 3, 2023

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This post is not really about whether or not it got funnier the second time. 

As any exegetical and textual study tends to go, we start with the first word. When you read enough commentaries on Pauline epistles exegetes can find weighty matters in the simplest of words. We can do likewise and note that the first word Driscoll opened his tweets with is the word "We".  We can over-spiritualize things sometimes. It's been a custom in Mark Driscoll's public discourse to use a kind of royal "we".  "We" do this or that.  As Driscoll jokes go that is the "we" set up for a punchline that revels in comparing symptoms of demonic attack to things Driscoll implicitly trusts his audience knows he hasn't experienced, such as menopause or hangovers. He may well have experienced hangovers but his joke seems to leverage the surmise that he has never been drunk. 

But in what way do menopause and hangovers share symptoms with "demonic attack"?  This is not a rhetorical question. Depending on who is getting possessed and when the symptoms of demonic attack or possession are substantially different.  Not so long ago, actually, I finished reading this book by Brian Levack.

https://www.amazon.com/Devil-Within-Brian-Levack-ebook/dp/B00BQZ1UI4/
ASIN ‏ : ‎ B00BQZ1UI4
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Yale University Press; Illustrated edition (April 22, 2013)
Publication date ‏ : ‎ April 22, 2013
https://www.amazon.com/Devil-Within-Possession-Exorcism-Christian/dp/0300114729/
ASIN ‏ : ‎ 0300114729
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Yale University Press; First Edition (April 23, 2013)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 346 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 9780300114720
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0300114720

Levack pointed out that the symptomology of demonization is very different for Catholic and Protestant demoniacs. The shortest way to describe the differences would be to say that Catholic demoniacs act out in sexually transgressive ways and sometimes use physical violence and speak in languages they aren't supposed to know. Protestant demoniacs show an aversion to Bibles, prayer, scripture, and Levack's thumbnail sketch summary would be roughly Catholic demoniacs act out sexually transgressive behavior and Protestants do not, opting instead for blasphemy. Depending on the context, as Kathleen R Sands noted in her biographical sketch of the formerly Catholic Robert Brigges who became Protestant, sometimes people in possession trances talk about possible planned political assassinations, which was something the Elizabethan court couldn't help but take an interest in. 

So when Mark Driscoll joked that menopause and demonic attack have the same symptoms someone who has done any reading on the history of exorcism and demonization among Catholics and Protestants has to ask, "Mark, do you mean Catholic menopause or Protestant menopause?"

What's more demonic attack is just one way of describing things. Brian Levack has contested the viability of retroactively reading demonic possession states as signs of mental illness.  For instance, if multiple personality disorder has been dropped as a diagnostic category how can you go back to historical sources of events from the sixteenth century and claim so-and-so had multiple personality disorder? The category doesn't exist any longer?  Historians can't retroactively diagnose mental illness categories that may not even stay in the DSM.  

For another matter, and this is a point Levack says should make historians cautious about deploying modern taxonomies, how do you account for group possessions and multiple people experiencing demonization? There were cases of group possession, such as a case of nuns who all displayed symptoms of demonization that Brian Levack discussed in his book. After Catholic authorities investigated the situation and interviewed subjects Levack pointed out that a common thread among the possessed nuns was an allegation that they were being sexually exploited by their abbess.  In Levack's survey of Catholic investigations into demoniacs he pointed out that the Inquisition tended to take a hard, skeptical stance to most claims of possession and accusations of bewitchment. 

Levack has highlighted the contrast between popular imagination and historical record regarding Catholic investigations of demonization. Even by the seventeenth century Catholic authorities began to connect the symptoms of demonization with abuse by higher ranking clergy. Anglican clergy were even more hard-nosed in their skepticism.  Levack presented a number of case studies which suggest that Catholic clergy began to piece together that symptoms of demonization could indicate sexual abuse was happening in convents and monasteries. Levack also highlighted that in Catholic traditions the line between beatific visions and demon possession could get blurry.  Sometimes a beloved saint might think they were visited by an angel of light and ended up displaying demon possession episodes. If Driscoll wants to joke that demonic attack and menopause have similar symptoms, there's a tradition in Catholic teaching that "God showed me" and "a demon possessed me" can blur together. If a Catholic mystic had a vision and then began to spout of heretical dogmas that retroactively contradicted any otherwise saintly aura the saint had with his/her experience. 

Between Francis Young and Brian Levack's recent historical studies on Anglican cessationism the person least likely to think you're experiencing demonic attack is an Anglican priest. Both Catholic and Anglican top brass are skeptical about exorcism because the history of self-designated experts on spiritual warfare is full of self-aggrandizing incompetent and abusive crackpots who have no business being in ministry and can't be trusted. Mark Driscoll once claimed he read every book he could on spiritual warfare and demons. My take has been he read every self-help book on spiritual warfare he could get his hands on. He probably hasn't read any books on the historical of exorcism as legal or judicial tradition but, to be fair, some of those books have only been published within the last ten to fifteen years.  

Now back to Mark Driscoll's royal "we". 

One of the more memorable examples was a post about how "We even lie about our lying" Mark Driscoll published back on Nov 23, 2013. For those who don't remember the post he went through a litany of methods to deceive and then wound things up to a numbered list.

...

If you’ve read this far, I’m certain the Holy Spirit has convicted you of lying somewhere, sometime in your life. I’m guilty. We’re all guilty. But if we know it’s wrong, then why do we do it? Here are six reasons.

  1. We lie to avoid negative consequences for ourselves.
  2. We lie to create or protect an illusion of who we are.
  3. We lie to get what we want.
  4. We lie to remain in control of a situation.
  5. We lie to punish someone else.
  6. We lie about someone to be accepted by someone who despises them.

In short, we lie because we want to be God. We want to establish our own standard of truth. We want to control our own life and its outcomes. We want to look good.

...
But while Mark Driscoll said "I'm guilty. We're all guilty" on the subject of lying has he ever said he's lied about stuff?  Yes, once, decades ago when he said that when he was a teenager he lied about his age so he could get a job.  Since so many of the Mars Hill era sermons have been purged or redacted and become inaccessible I am forced to rely on my own past documentation on this matter.  If you can, on your own, find the following sermon you can verify whether or not this was preached by Mark Driscoll back on October 28, 2001.

Part 5 of Proverbs
Pastor Mark Driscoll | October 28, 2001
...
It comes to the point where I’m 15 and I wanna get a car. I said, “Dad, I need a car.” He says, “Good. Go get some money.” I said, “Okay, fine.” So, I falsified my birth certificate, I lie about my age, and I get a job at a 7-11 selling lotto tickets and liquor and cigarettes to people that are twice my age. I was not a Christian, so – I shouldn’t have done it anyways, but I wasn’t a Christian. And so, I’m 15, working at a 7-11 selling stuff. And I make a decent living, and I buy my first car, a 1956 Chevy that I should’ve never sold. That’s a whole other sermon. And – and so I’m 15, driving myself to work without a license, because I gotta go make money to pay for my car. [emphasis added] Okay? And again, I was not a Christian. Okay? So, I’m not saying, “Thus sayeth the Lord.”

And I realize that, since I was young and I was strong, I could make more money. And so I started dinking around trying to figure out where to make more money. And I find out that guys in unions make a lot of money. And – at least compared to me working at the 7-11. And I got tired of getting robbed and held-up, too. ‘Cause if you run a 7-11 behind a Déjà vu, somebody’s gonna put a gun at your head. And after a couple of those, you realize, “For minimum wage, I’m not taking a cap. You know? I’m not gonna get shot for, like, a pack of cigarettes. I’m not gonna do that.” So, I lied about my age. I falsified my birth certificate again, and told them I was 18. Got a job working long-shoring down on the docks in Seattle. And I would go throw 100-pound sacks of peas, and unload trucks, and work hard. And they paid me tremendous money. [emphasis added] At the time, it was like $10.00-something an hour. This was, like, in 1986 or ’87 or something. And I’d work 40 hours a week, and over-time was double-time. And none of the guys would wanna work over-time. Usually it was on Friday, ‘cause they had to get containers out, and those guys all wanted to go to the topless club.
So there's that one time.  If telling lies opens you up to demonic influence then any time Mark Drisscoll lies he's opened himself up to demonic attack.  So, to pose a specific question, did Driscoll ever admit to lying in an interview with Christianity Today?  Long ago someone pointed out that Mark Driscoll claimed he and Grace were both virgins when they met each other in a CT interview despite the fact that Real Marriage and the Driscolls' testimony in just about any other setting established neither of them were virgins when they started dating.

It may be more telling of who Mark Driscoll is that he said "we even lie about our lying" than the bromides the bro has about why people lie. It's an old saw, of course, but Fyodor Dostoevsky had one of his characters say, if memory serves, that a man who has lied to himself stops being able to tell the truth to others. 

I am aware that some men might say to all of this, "So what? Is that a big deal? Didn't Driscoll say he wasn't a Christian back then when he got his first job?" There are two answers to that objection. The first is that Driscoll said he was an altar boy as a kid so his faith was not so nominal he couldn't pass muster as an altar boy in his Catholic years. 

https://web.archive.org/web/20161202180532/http://markdriscoll.org/4-ways-artistry-can-become-idolatry/
http://markdriscoll.org/4-ways-artistry-can-become-idolatry/
September 30, 2013
...
An arty, jock, altar boy

I was raised Catholic and served for a few years as an altar boy while attending Catholic grade school.  I've got an artistic bent. I like architecture, interior design, music, visual arts, etc. Growing up I was an odd mix: a jock who played a lot of sports, a fighter who got in more than a few brawls, and an artist who liked to sketch, draw, and experiment in various mediums. I appreciated the artistry of the Catholic Church. Stained glass, paintings, colors, icons, statues, candles--it was all quite beautiful.

Some Catholics are born-again, Jesus-loving Christians. I was not one of them.  I was a spiritual religious guy until Jesus saved me at the age of 19.  ...
So he was apparently just Catholic enough to serve as an altar boy in grade school before he hit puberty and, by several of his accounts, decided he didn't want to do that priesthood thing. But he had also said in some earlier accounts that if you had asked him back then if he was a Christian he would've said he was.  In his Patheos blog he even went so far as to write the following:

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/markdriscoll/2017/12/mary-always-virgin/
...
 
Both my father’s and mother’s sides of the family have historically been Catholic. I was born in a Catholic Hospital and baptized in a Catholic Church as a baby. I also attended a Catholic school where I served as an altar boy assisting the priest with mass. My grandmother was a devout woman who joined an order of lay nuns after my grandfather passed away.
 
My experience with the Catholic Church has always been positive. I was not a Christian devoted to Jesus while attending mass growing up, but that was my own responsibility and not the fault of any person or organization. I simply did not have much interest in learning more about any faith. [emphasis added]
...
So he wasn't a Christian in the evangelical Protestant "born again" sense, but he was Christian enough to be an altar boy.  I think the best way to explain this is to say that Driscoll's memories of his childhood are perhaps emotionally selective. An altar boy is not in ministry in the same way a megachurch preacher Protestant is and perhaps Mark Driscoll in his Protestant years is like many a Protestant who thinks Catholics aren't Christian or, more pointedly, that the kind of Catholic he was wasn't really a Christian.  

Nevertheless, there's no version of Mark Driscoll that wouldn't know what lying is or that lying is a bad thing.  Yet apart from a sermon anecdote about allegedly falsifying his own birth certificate to get a job he has not been swift to admit for the record that he's lied about other things. Despite all that ... "we even lie about our lying."

Having actually read Win Your War, and having had to sit through four hours of him talking about spiritual warfare because I was once a Mars Hill Theology Response Team volunteer, Mark Driscoll's menopause joke seems really weird.  Why?  Mark Driscoll and family have a history of describing themselves as having come under spiritual attacks.  Mark Driscoll recounted in a lengthy 2008 seminar on spiritual warfare that he had had experiences growing up of uncanny presences or inexplicable incidents.  In 2006 he published Confessions of a Reformission Rev.

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

 

From Chapter 5, Jesus, Why Am I Getting Fatter and Meaner (350-1,000 people)

[this period is described as starting in the fall of 1999 and goes to a bit before the winter of 2002]

Page 121

During this time, I also saw an increase in spiritual attacks. A number of people started scheduling meetings with me to explain horrific demonic attacks they were experiencing. I also started getting a number of prophetic dreams from God to help me make important decisions that saved our church.

 

Additionally, I started getting random words of knowledge. The first I ever got came years prior while I was hosting the radio program because Lief was on vacation. A man I had never spoken to before called in from the Midwest to complain about the state of American Christianity and proceeded to rip into the hypocrisy in his own church.  I rebuked him for committing adultery on his wife and said he hated his church because he came under conviction there for being an adulterer, and unless he dumped his girlfriend and repented to his wife, God would deal severely with him. I can still remember just staring at the microphone in front of my face, wanting to take back the words that I had just sent out around the country. There was a long silence, and then the man broke down and confessed by words as truth.

 

Up to this point, I had been basically a theological cessationist and a fan of fundamentalist straw-man attacks on charismatic Christians. It wasn’t until some years later, however, that I came to see the cessationists’ interpretation of 1 Corinthians 12-14 as the second worst exegesis I have ever read, next to that of a Canadian nudist arsonist cult I once did some research on.

 

I also had not really believed in Satan or demons, spiritual warfare, or the use of certain spiritual gifts with more than a head knowledge that essentially ignored these things as part of my ministry. Now I was operating for the first time in my life with spiritual power, insight, and authority. …

 

Page 122

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. 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 much 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 whole 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.

 

It was clear that I needed to better understand the supernatural and demonic side of ministry. So I spent a few months reading every book I could find on Satan, demons, and spiritual warfare. I met with older pastors who were wise in these areas. I also studied every occurrence of this issue in the Bible, trying to get a handle on what I was up against and how I was supposed to respond.

 

Through study and prayer, I started to better understand the schemes of Satan and demons, and how to help liberate people from spiritual oppression with the principles of Ephesians 6:10-20. By God’s liberating power, many people stopped taking medications because the tormenting voices and panic attacks went away. Some people were also miraculously healed. I did not speak much about these things because I feared they would detract from our focus on Jesus and that our young people would start to see me as a guru, which I did not want. But I was grateful to be able to help these people I loved, and that part of my ministry quietly continues to this day. 


Ah, yes, well it would have been even quieter if he hadn't mentioned it in a book back in 2006. By 2008, after the controversial 2007 by-laws revision and firing took place, Mark Driscoll gave an early February presentation on spiritual warfare where he shared some of his personal experiences.  Read through this and see if there's anything in it that resembles menopause.

SPIRITUAL WARFARE PART 1
February 05, 2008
about 4:43

I'll start with my story.  Growing up I didn't know Jesus, not until I was 19 years of age. I did, however, have a lot of demonic--I shouldn't say a lot--I had a few demonic encounters, experiences, that I didn't really know what to do with, to be honest with you. One of them was in a friend's house where a religious leader had lived and committed suicide. Their, one of their parents was really into the occult, into witchcraft and was actually very devoted to the study of religions, and the black magic and black arts.  The result was I was coming down the stairwell in their home on one occasion and actually was physically stopped. I couldn't go down the stairwell. I was a teenager and I didn't know what was going on. It was very disorienting.  I didn't do drugs. I didn't do alcohol. I wasn't in any altered state of consciousness and I literally grabbed the handrail going down the stairs and I pulled myself to the point that I was about a parallel angle with the stairs and I felt pressure on my chest that something was literally holding me up and I couldn't go down the stairs. It was just very bizzare. I went back upstairs for awhile and eventually I DID go back down the stairs. Just some very strange, supernatural, paranormal things that I couldn't really understand.

When Gracie and I were dating, we were out driving in, I think I was driving her car.  We were, again, in our teens,  we were stopped when someone walked by us, just this large, ominous figure.  Very bizzare-looking guy with a black hoodie on and just kinda creeped me out and creeped Grace out. And we drove by him and he was walking and we were going thirty miles an hour. A few blocks later we hadn't stopped or anything, we passed the guy again. What in the world?  She was a pastor's daughter and WAS a Christian.  And she was very scared and it was very unusual, it was late at night. And a little while later we went to take a turn to go to her house and the guy was in front of us, literally.  This was a guy now we passed three times. He was walking over the course of many blocks. We're going thirty miles an hour. He's never stopped.   And we never stopped but there's no way in the world he should be able to keep up with us. It was just one of these bizzare occurences. He literally stepped out into the road in front of us to stop us. And I freaked out. I hit the gas.  I was gonna run the guy over. True story. So I go right at this guy and he disappears and he bangs on my window. I have no idea. I can only explain it as non-physical. Grace and I panicked and drove off but in these occurences my body would respond. My hair would stand on end, I really freaked out, I didn't know what was going on because I didn't understand.  

Just some bizarre, supernatural things like that that didn't make a lot of sense to me. Just odd experiences and then when I got saved, became a Christian, I had a few, I would say, demonic encounters. And then Grace and I got married and things REALLY stepped up when we started Mars Hill Church, to be honest with you. I was basically taught by some dispensational pastors, not in college, but following graduation that Satan and demons worked in the early church but not today. I thought, "Well that's good." Went to plant Mars Hill Church and the next thing I know bizzare things are happening.
...
Given how thoroughly earnest behind closed doors he was talking to Mars Hill leaders about his early experiences with the demonic it seems weirdly quippy in a Marvel movie or Joss Whedon kind of way for him to joke about menopause being like demonic attack. If you have the patience to slog through about three hours' of lecturing of the 4.5 that I transcribed head over to this tag and start reading.


Driscoll said way back in 2008 that for reasons he couldn't explain most of his demonic counseling was with women:

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.


One of Brian Levack's proposals has been that demonization is real and is a cultural script within religious communities and cultures. This can account for why Catholic and Protestant demonization are so consistently different because the preferred spiritualities differ. Among Catholics sexually transgressive behavior is more common because given clerical celibacy requirements and monastic norms men and women who sought to live holy lives and could not reconcile their sexualities to their spiritualities could enact that cognitive dissonance in the form of demonization episodes. On the other hand, demonization episodes also gave occasion to signal to church authorities that abuses were taking places in monastic settings. Sometimes sexual relationships became obvious by way of pregnancies. 

Levack pointed out that in the sixteenth century exorcisms were public events and were wielded as pro-Catholic propaganda. The Protestant response, notably among Dutch and English Calvinists, was to embrace cessationism. Levack situates cessationism as an explicitly anti-Catholic dogmatic stance that was used to delegitimize Catholic exorcism as superstitious magic. Francis Young has chronicled that the Church of England functionally banned exorcisms with Canon 72 in 1604 but as there were no established rites of exorcism in the Anglican tradition what the ban was really banning were prayer meetings, fasts, and gatherings that were not licensed by bishops. 

Given that during the Elizabethan era alternate religions tended to go hand in hand with sedition Young and Levack and other historians note that there were often overtly political aspects to who was doing what kind of exorcism and for what purpose. Catholics being demonized and becoming Protestants were known to happen (Robert Brigges) while in other cases Protestants became demoniacs and became Catholics.  Paradoxically (or not) both Catholic and Anglican top brass viewed exorcists with caution, skepticism and hostility. To date Anglican clerical criticism of exorcism has remained strong and one of the arguments against deliverance ministry is that it can be regarded as a form of psychological and physical abuse and in some cases sexual abuse. 

What scholars and historians of exorcism seem to agree on is that the greater the cognitive dissonance between an individual's life and the cultural script they want to live by the more likely they may be to manifest that cognitive dissonance in ways that can be understood as demonization. Oh, look, I managed to find a way to interpret how women might be more likely to manifest demonization symptoms as a manifestation of cognitive dissonance with a prescribed cultural script thanks to Brian Levack's work and didn't use a "weaker vessel" or "more easily deceived" set of arguments. 

An ambiguity in Mark Driscoll's teaching on demonic attack is that he ultimately can't come down with a clear distinction between whether demonic attacks happen to you because of "an intense season of ministry" or as a kind of providential punishment for sinning that gives you over to evil. A few years ago I did something similar to Driscoll's self-accounted "go through the Bible every where it talks about demons" and I noticed something. There aren't demons in the Hebrew Bible in a way that lines up with traditional Catholic diabology on the one hand and, on the other hand, harmful spirits that are described tend to be dispatched by Yahweh to punish unusually wicked leaders.  For that survey go over to this link.

The Driscolls may have no choice but to believe that their experiences of demonic attack are because of "intense seasons of ministry" and not because they have sinned in ways that make them uniquely vulnerable to attack from harmful spirits.  On this issue it would not be unusual for them to have a standard for themselves and a standard for others.  Mark Driscoll used to say that if someone else had a dream that they thought might be prophetic, eh, maybe it was bad pizza.   When he believed he had had a prophetic dream there was never any doubt.  I've discussed his reliance on dream divination already. You can review that, if you like, at your leisure.

When Mark Driscoll has described his history of encounters with the demonic he has always been pretty earnest if not always the sort of person you might take at his word. When you have a late-night visitor wanting a fight fearing the worst is understandable. What makes Driscoll's jokey tweet about menopause and demonic attack symptoms seem so daft is the earnestness with which he shares his stories with his fans:

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 49-50

To be nearer to the university students, we moved into a former college rental house. We were young, inexperienced, and naïve. We read about loving people and practicing hospitality in the Bible, and in our lack of wisdom we turned our home into the base of our ministry. We lived upstairs with our young children, and on the main floor was the ministry office along with our kitchen, living room, and dining room. In the basement lived interns and broke college kids who needed a place to crash.

Nearly every night of the week we hosted Bible studies in our home. We welcomed a few thousand people into our home each year, and that’s no exaggeration.

We moved out of that house after one final late-night event pushed us over the top. We awoke to the sound of someone vigorously shaking the handle to the front door and trying to get through various closed windows on the main floor. I grabbed my gun, instructed Grace to call the police and stay upstairs no matter what, and started praying that I would not have to preach the funeral for someone I shot.

Peering outside through the narrow glass window next to our front door, I recognized the man. He was sweating, yelling, and agitated. I thought he was possibly on drugs, as we lived in an area that had a lot of black tar heroin overdoses in the grunge era—including one man who died on the back steps of the punk rock venue where we held church.
Within minutes the police arrived. As they approached, the man started growling very loudly and boldly like a lion. The police were trying to calm him down. I stepped outside, and the man immediately escalated. He tried to run toward me and was thrown down to the ground by the police, and they had trouble subduing him as he fought back. In the struggle the man somehow got to a patrol car, where he threw his arms and legs around a tire and held on tight while they tried to arrest him. The entire time he growled like a lion at the top of his lungs. Fortunately, they cuffed him, wrestled him into the patrol car, and arrested him.

Obviously suffering from some combination of demonic and mental problems, the man was later tested, and no drugs were found in his system. However, he escaped a psychiatric ward and walked for miles in his underwear—until he was arrested walking down the middle of the busy street in front of our home. We are happy to report that, with spiritual and medical help, the person was delivered and seems to be doing well today. No one is beyond God’s power of transformation.

If this incident happened back when Mark Driscoll was writing as William Wallace II it may be difficult to ignore the possibility that Driscoll did not anticipate that his inflammatory repartee and posting on Midrash may have brought out the worst in some of his readers. Whether or not demonic influence was ever involved in the incident is obviously moot for Mark Driscoll. When you fear for your safety and the safety of family you probably don't stop to think that "Well, maybe all that stuff I wrote as William Wallace II may have played a role in catalyzing this guy to do this weird stuff". 

Once again, there's not much comparison between symptoms of demonization and menopause. 

Because I have read Win Your War I know that most of the things Mark and Grace Driscoll have described as demonic attacks don't line up with either menopause or hangovers. In fact night terrors are something Grace Driscoll described as relatively commonplace not for menopausal women but for children.

Win Your War, pages 56-57

…

During the writing of this book, several different times when Mark was away preaching out of state or the country, I (Grace) was suddenly awakened by dark, fuzzy shapes moving in our bedroom. One even flew at me, seemingly to attack. I immediately spoke Jesus’ name to command them away. I continued to pray against fear and the enemy and pray for protection of our home and family until I was able to fall asleep again. Sadly this is not uncommon, particularly in seasons of intense ministry.

 
Like most people we have both experienced nightmares and the terror they bring. Your heart races, reacting to the dream as if it were a real event, until you eventually wake up, disoriented and unsure about what is really happening. Our children have had the same experience, and this is not uncommon. The Sleep Health Foundation says that roughly 10 to 50 percent of children experience nightmares.
We know of a godly young pastor’s child who started acting unusually moody and out of sorts. The parents began disciplining the child, but over the course of a few days he grew more despondent. Worried, the parents sat the child down, lovingly prayed over him, and asked him to share anything else that might be happening. The child refused to disclose anything, but the parents could tell something was being concealed. Eventually the child said a “mean man” was appearing in his room at night “saying bad things” about Jesus and the family and threatening that if the child told the parents it would “hurt their family.” The poor child was sleep deprived and traumatized, and a demonic wedge was forming between the child and his parents.


We also know of other children who have had night terrors brought on by demons they referred to as “invisible friends.” Some children put place settings at their tea parties or talk about conversations they have with their “invisible friend.” Sometimes this is an active imagination or fictitious and fun role-playing, like a child dressing up as a princess or a firefighter, but at other times this is literally a demon that deceptively pretends to be a friend. These kinds of demonic encounters can and do contribute to some night terrors for children and can continue into adulthood


Job describes a night terror, saying “Amid thoughts from visions of the night, when deep sleep falls on men, dread came upon me, and trembling, which made all my bones shake. A spirit glided past my face; the hair of my flesh stood up. It stood still, but I could not discern its appearance. A form was before my eyes; there was silence, then I heard a voice.” Sometimes a night terror is demonic as Job describes, sometimes it is simply our minds playing tricks on us. Science still seeks to understand everything about the ways our body works while we sleep.

I wish Grace Driscoll had been clearer.  The editors may have been asleep at the wheel here because it is most emphatically not Job who is quoted in the passage above. The first of Job's friends to "comfort" him is Eliphaz and while the idea is a bit speculative the recently deceased biblical scholar David Clines suggested (as noted by Archie T Wright in a new book on the history of satans) that the terrifying night visitor to Eliphaz may have been the satan. Biblical scholars have noted the irony of how Job's friends have fairly orthodox theologies and theodicies but they do not know about the bet between God and the satan and do not realize they are ultimately wrong until God tells them. For sake of clarity here's the relevant passage where Eliphaz described what happened to him:

Job 4: 13-21 (NASB)

 

12“Now a word was brought to me secretly,
And my ear received a whisper of it.
13“Amid disquieting thoughts from visions of the night,
When deep sleep falls on people,
14Dread came upon me, and trembling,
And made all my bones shake.
15“Then a spirit passed by my face;
The hair of my flesh stood up.
16“Something was standing still, but I could not recognize its appearance;
A form was before my eyes;
There was silence, then I heard a voice:
17‘Can mankind be righteous before God?
Can a man be pure before his Maker?
18‘He puts no trust even in His servants;
And He accuses His angels of error.
19‘How much more those who live in houses of clay,
Whose foundation is in the dust,
Who are crushed before the moth!
20‘Between morning and evening they are broken in pieces;
Unregarded, they perish forever.
21‘Is their tent-cord not pulled out within them?
They die, yet without wisdom.’

At the risk of pointing out the obvious, a pastor's kid married to a preacher using this passage as a description of night terrors and nightmares ... I can sympathize since I've had more than a few nightmares ... but I question the use of this passage both because it's obviously not Job's speech and because there's room to disagree whether it was a nightmare. 

Would Mark Driscoll claim that what Grace experienced was a sign of menopause? Dark fuzzy shapes flying at people could be demonic or, to take a page from Mark Driscoll's joke that "We over-spiritualize things sometimes." maybe what Grace described was the experience of someone in their 50s seeing floaters for the first time. Richard Gregory's standard work on the eye and brain points out that at night but more so at dawn and dusk our eye-brain relationship is most apt to trick us. Would Mark Driscoll be willing to say of his own wife that her perceptions of demonic attacks while he was away was likely a misinterpretation of the problems that beset people in middle age with their eyes? 

This is not an attempt to minimize the real fears and sufferings of Mark Driscoll's family. Night terrors and sleep disorders are real and really bad things. Driscoll's joke does have a genuinely useful kernel in it despite himself. Some people may interpret as spiritual oppression dangerous blood sugar episodes that indicate the onset of diabetes or at least pre-diabetes. Mark Driscoll has shared how he had acid reflux in his 30s, had trouble sleeping for extended periods and at the risk of pointing out the obvious, Soviet era researchers discovered that if you deprive someone of sleep for long enough they can crack.

In our own era it's been established that if you are running on no more than 3 hours of sleep a night for extended periods of time you are functionally intoxicated in terms of mental impairment. Mark Driscoll mentioned he was running on that little sleep circa 2006 to 2007.  He has shared enough about his medical history that a man with acid reflux, sleep deprivation and a history of believing he encountered demonic entities may be better off reassessing how many times he thought the physical was supernatural and talk about that rather than use the royal "we" as a way to make punchlines about other people.  Driscoll's joke tweets come off as smug if you compare those jokey tweets to Mark and Grace Driscoll's own accounts of their travails. Want others to demythologize their lives and explain the health problems that may be the more mundane explanations for things that feel like spiritual attacks?  Consider leading by example.  That is where Mark Driscoll seems unwilling to go. 

The serious point in the joke is worth thinking about even if Driscoll's not the man to follow. Charismatic believers can rush to interpret as demonic attack things that can be serious health issues. Someone I used to know used to talk quite a bit about spiritual oppression and spiritual attack until they got congestive heart failure and diabetes and then after that they once said "Most people who think they have spiritual discernment probably just have blood sugar issues". With Driscoll he seems to have a variation where what he's been through is real but what you're going through may be bad pizza. Yet all this time among those closer to him he has said he has a deliverance ministry of some kind. If he still has one now might be a time to extricate yourself from it.  Just making a suggestion.

When people are steeped in enthusiastic spirituality and don't have family backgrounds that keep good medical histories the temptation to chalk up things to demonic attack that could be signs of diabetes or mental health or neurological issues could be pretty high. Ironically the Catholic and Anglican clergy who have spent centuries trying to get people to not seek out exorcisms might be the first people to say these things.  

The problem with Mark Driscoll's tweet jokes is the double standard lurking within them in the wake of his twenty plus years of public ministry and stories about the spiritual and emotional travails he and his family have been through. At its core the joke, taken as part of Mark Driscoll's public utterances across his ministry career, can be construed as follows: "My suffering is terrifying and yours is a punchline". As the old quip attributed to Mel Brooks had it, tragedy is when he cut his finger and comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die. The joke reveals a  double standard in the Driscoll family understanding of whose suffering is nothing to joke about and whose suffering is. In all their stories about encounters they regarded as demonic the closest natural corresponding experience isn't menopause but night terrors and sleeping disorders. If Mark Driscoll were to actually explain all the ways he misattributed to demonic attack health problems in his own life that double standard inherent in his joke would go away.  So far he hasn't shown himself to be the kind of man willing to go there and do that.  Driscoll has not said, "There are these X, Y and Z moments in my life that I thought were signs of demonic attack that were really just cases of A, B and C in my health I should've gotten treated earlier."  To go by his track record over roughly thirty years of ministry there is no question whether he ever will. 
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