https://heidelblog.net/2023/10/three-congregations-that-grew-during-the-covid-lockdown/
Three congregations that reportedly grew during the
Covid lockdowns in 2020: Christ Church in Moscow, ID; Grace Community Church in
Sun Valley, CA; and Trinity Church in Scottsdale, AZ. These three congregations
have a few things in common. Each is led by a powerful personality: Doug
Wilson, John MacArthur, and Mark Driscoll respectively. Each of these pastors
has been controversial in one way or another, some of which have been
chronicled in this space. All of them, to one degree or another, generated controversy
over their reaction to the Covid mandates. All of them too took a very public
stand in defiance of public health regulations. Comments in a recent article on
Driscoll’s congregation in Scottsdale capture well what happened: …
…
We are to live quietly
because, Paul says, God desires that all people be saved and come to the
knowledge of the truth. The Jews had engaged in rebellions before Jesus. Many
of them, Judas among them, expected Jesus to lead a political rebellion against
the empire. Bar-Kochbah led a rebellion against Rome in the AD 130s. Paul
wanted nothing of it. Paul, like Peter, wants the congregations to be good
citizens, but to mind their business so as to do nothing that interferes with
the advance of the Kingdom of God.
I have been thinking about
something that Clark does not necessarily mention but which seems more than
tangential to his topic, the influence Doug Wilson and John Macarthur had on a
young Mark Driscoll, and a pair of questions that linger over bids by Mark
Driscoll and Doug Wilson to stump for some variation of Christian nationalism,
questions that, ironically, center on whether or not either of these men have coherent
and cohesive exousiologies (not quite the same thing as demonologies). First, let’s get to Wilson, who has been
contending that real men have been shown the door by the pussified society
whether or not he’s willing to use Driscollian wording to make the point:
https://dougwils.com/books-and-culture/s7-engaging-the-culture/little-old-ladies-of-both-sexes.html
...
The problem has been a dearth of biblical
masculinity, and the solution is naturally going to require a restoration of
biblical masculinity.
...
Men will always be dominant, in the very nature of
the case. They are capable of being dominant in incredibly constructive ways,
in ways that are a true marvel. But we, in the grip of a very peculiar frenzy
that has a death grip on our little lizard brains, have decided to outlaw
constructive dominance.
...
Would
this be the kind of biblical masculinity where King David had eight wives and
ten concubines? Between 2 Samuel 3 and 1
Chronicles 3 we get the names of David’s wives, not counting the first:
Ahinoam
of Jezreel
Abigail
of Carmel
Maakah
daughter of Talmai, king of Geshur
Haggith
Abital
Eglah
Bathsheba
Michal,
of course, who was given to another man and who David put away
Then
there are the ten concubines. David was
a man after God’s heart, to be sure, but that’s a lot of wives and concubines.
As Jacob L Wright has put it, because the scriptural texts have positive things
to say about David the king doesn’t mean the overall verdict was always
positive. One of David’s final acts was commanding a disastrous census that military
historians would say was probably the catalyst for a plague. Absent
a clearer set of definitions Amnon and Absalom could be cases of “biblical masculinity”
if all we’re doing is just invoking masculinity as portrayed in a scriptural
text. Ahab would count, too. He was,
after all, described as a capable military leader in 1 Kings.
Driscoll
has contended that if you get the young men you get everything (the women, the
real estate, the children, the legacy and so on) and if you don’t get the young
men you get nothing. By his own accounts
he didn’t get these ideas out of nowhere, he got them from Wilson. Thematically
it is not too many steps from “Pussified Nation” back to the headwaters of its
inspiration. Wilson is still emphasizing
this issue in 2023:
https://dougwils.com/books-and-culture/s7-engaging-the-culture/little-old-ladies-of-both-sexes.html
…
In Christian circles, it has become customary to lament all the
abdicating men. But it would be more accurate, and sound more like real
repentance, if we acknowledged that the men who were willing to act like men
have all been outlawed. Banished as they were, we didn’t see much of them, and
then we pretended that their absence was voluntary on their part. But the
exiles were exiled,
and didn’t go AWOL. They were not deserters.
We could go to them, and ask them to return. We could humble
ourselves as the elders of Gilead did, and plead with Jephthah to come back
(Judges 11). They exiled him, for reasons that seemed like a good idea to them
at the time, but at least they had the good sense to realize that this is what
they had done. They didn’t hold seminars in the AELNA faculty lounge in order
to puzzle over where Jephthah had gotten to. And so when they were confronted
with the might of Ammon, and the crisis they brought in with them, they were
willing to go to the land of Tob to bring Jephthah back.
Because
America needs the kind of man who will offer his one and only daughter as a
holocaust because he scored a military victory after making a hedged bet
promise to the Lord. I’ve got Barry Webb’s
commentary on The Book of
Judges in the NICOT series. Yes,
Jephthah was considered a hero of the faith in Hebrews 11 but William S Lane
proposed that was because of Jepthah’s willingness to help his fellow
Israelites after they had banished him, not necessarily a blanket endorsement
of everything he did. Barry Webb has
pointed out that the dedicated virgin interpretation of what was done with/to
Jephthah’s daughter doesn’t hold water for the simple reason that the term
describing what Jephthah did was to offer his daughter as a holocaust, the same
Hebrew term that saturates instructions on the sacrificial rites in Leviticus. In contrast to some lazy contemporary “Western”
pundits, the question of how much of your identity you gain or lose in spirit
possession states is not a foregone conclusion across Asiatic and African
societies from centuries ago but this is not the time and place to wander off
into that set of topics, although there are some recent publications that dive
head first into that set of questions (here’s
one).
Invoking
Jephthah as an exemplar of the kind of manly man we need more of without
tackling the issue of his human sacrifice seems a bit precipitous and pat … but
then, I’m afraid, this is Doug Wilson. He comes across as a careful thinker and
exegete to people already committed to taking him seriously. I have had a hard time taking him seriously
because, whatever his speech and conduct in person, via his blogging he comes
across as a preening blowhard who thinks he’s smarter than he demonstrates himself
to be in his eisegetical flourishes.
Take the above invocation of Jephthah, for instance.
But as
the decades go by it becomes harder and harder to evade the fact that Mark
Driscoll made no secret of being substantially influenced by Doug Wilson. It
may be much easier for Mark Driscoll and his fans to note the influence than
for Doug Wilson fans to accept Mark Driscoll as an example of pastors
culturally “downstream” of Wilson’s teaching.
Driscoll shared that early on he was significantly influenced by John
Macarthur, though he came to view Macarthur’s cessationism as too belligerent and
insufficiently grounded in a responsible exegetical engagement with biblical
texts. How do I know that? Besides the
fact that I published “Pussified Nation” (in which Driscoll noted Wilson’s
influence), it’s because I attended Mars Hill from about late 1999 through to 2009
and actually had conversations with Driscoll on the topic of Macarthur and
cessationist pneumatology. I have never
been a cessationist but I am not what most Pentecostals would considered a
card-carrying continuationist, either.
But let
me get back to my observation on the ways in which Doug Wilson’s penchant for
basking in controversies that keep him front and center has formed a kind of
precedent for Driscoll. Take this bit
from October 2023 in which Wilson offers up a hypothetical scenario and his
response to the anticipated hypothetical scenario:
The following is a transcript of
my remarks to the Society of the Perpetually Aggrieved. The occasion for the
address was a response to a court order, and it was in anticipation of the next
sexual scandal that is going to be thrown against our community, whenever that
might happen to be. A car was running outside, and I had a police escort.
Good evening, harpies, hostiles and intoleristas. I
am sure that you all would rather not be here, and I think I can say that I
feel exactly the same way, and so let’s just try to get through this together,
shall we? The court order was as much of a surprise to me as I gather it was to
you, and my only explanation is that a few Trump judges got together, and they
each of them had one or two beers too many. So with the pleasantries out of the
way, let me get to the substance of my remarks, and then we can be done
…
I make
no secret that I don’t regard Doug Wilson or men like him as competent enough
theologians, Bible scholars or pastors to have any significant business
advising on what kind of theocratic libertarian state people should be living
in. Paradoxically, Mark Driscoll has
poured a lot of contempt on theonomy over the years and for that I would’ve
thought Doug Wilson would’ve liked Mark Driscoll less than he seems to. The same goes for Mark
Driscoll’s accounts of his reliance on dream divination to make significant
leadership decisions throughout the history of Mars Hill. I can’t take Doug Wilson seriously if he won’t
take his own stated cessationist stance seriously enough to publicly fisk
Driscoll in a No Quarter November for going off on self-publishing treks
into claiming his newer material is hugely anointed and prophetic. Now I sincerely think that the
Mark Driscoll of 2003 would say the Mark Driscoll of 2023 must’ve dribbled the
idiot ball against his own face for a literal 24 hour period in an automatic
writing frenzy session of cutting and pasting from his previously
self-published and Charisma House books that he should not have self-published.
Back on
Monday, August 25, 2014 Douglas Wilson wrote, among other things, “9. I liked Mark
Driscoll before and I like him now.”
How about now, post New Days, Old Demons? If Wilson knew the extent to which Mark
Driscoll, by his own accounts, relied on prophetic dreams to make decisions, is
it a consistent position to stick with “I liked Mark Driscoll before and I like
him now”? Does Mark Driscoll think about
Douglas Wilson much at all these days, or vice versa?
All the
same, here in 2023 and surveying decades of Mars Hill Church history, the
master had a learner, a learner who had no regrets naming a name. If anything Mark Driscoll became the master
and is better at taking a “no quarter” stance than Wilson. “Bat-Guano
Crazy” bears a punch-pulling title for a No Quarter November post, keeping up
appearances is too important to have gone with the title “Bat-shit crazy” that
the title so obviously trades on. It’s not “Pussified
Nation” and Doug Wilson might even grant that his style and substance
influenced Mark Driscoll since if you scroll through the whole thread you’ll
see his name mentioned, but he’s the kind of pastor who won’t actually call his
post “Bat-shit Crazy” even if he claims he’s posting during No Quarter
November.
Let’s
revisit a snippet of the post he wrote in 2012 in the wake of a situation at
Liberty University:
…
…
On Friday night and Saturday morning, Grace and I
will teach as part of our Real Marriage Tour. Across
the US, we’ve been humbled and honored to see people saved, marriages mended,
divorce proceedings ceased, sin confessed and forgiven, sexual assault and
addiction healed, and single people taught with this content, and we rejoice
that we get to share it yet again.
Lately,
I’ve been busy with something you may have heard of called Easter. So, I’ve not
been on the Internet much but instead busy with church and family. However,
rumor has it there is a bit of mushroom cloud of controversy over my planned
trip. So, I asked our community relations manager, who gets to enjoy reading
blogs about me while eating breakfast every day (it’s amazing he holds anything
down), to give me a summary of this kerfuffle. (Henceforth, we will officially
refer to this situation as “The Kerfuffle.”)
The
trouble started with a Southern Baptist blogger . . . yes, you should have seen
that one coming. Now, to be fair, the blogger quoted an anonymous “source.”
And, we all know that almost everything bloggers say is true. But, when they
have something as solid as an anonymous “source,” then you can rest assured
that when Jesus talked about the truth over and over in John, this is precisely
what he was referring to. I have a degree from Washington State’s Edward R.
Murrow College of Communication and worked professionally as a journalist, and
I can assure you that The Kerfuffle is a very serious matter to be taken with
the utmost sobriety and propriety. In fact, one anonymous “source” I spoke to
said that Watergate pales in comparison.
…
These
are men who, to go by the things they write, luxuriate in controversies that
swirl around them. They are less eager
to wade into other issues.
https://twitter.com/PastorMark/status/1726652938104557960
Pastor Mark Driscoll
@PastorMark
Globalism is a demonic counterfeit of God's design,
nationalism.
This isn't just a political issue, it's spiritual.
9:25 AM · Nov 20, 2023
·
51.4K Views
But here are two questions.
The first one, aren’t counterfeits supposed to be able to pass for what is being counterfeited?
Globalism simply can’t be
a demonic counterfeit of any nationalism that is more or less by definition
anti-globalist. The counterfeit that globalism is has to be a counterfeit of
something else that Driscoll thinks people should embrace. In that case wouldn’t
globalism be a demonic counterfeit of catholicity? Or, to put it in more geopolitical terms, wouldn’t
globalism be some kind of counterfeit to Christian nationalism being an ideal
prescribed for all nations? Wilson, at
least, might be more consistent if he stipulates that globalism is bad because
it posits all the nations are disciples of Satan rather than Jesus but I
confess I am not so assiduous a reader of Wilson as to know if he has fielded
that. I have more direct experience chronicling
Driscoll and the late Mars Hill.
Now for the second question, if God’s design is “nationalism” what do you do with the Prince of Persia passage in the book of Daniel? Can the Prince of Persia from Daniel 10:13 be redeemed?
G.
B. Caird, at least, proposed that Pauline theology about the powers and
principalities may actually have been ambiguous on that question, since
talking about Christ reconciling all things to Himself seems to suggest a potential
reconciliation/redemption of the powers and principalities Christ overcame on
the Cross and through His resurrection. On the other hand, Christ has judged
and vanquished the powers. Do some people
think that post-Ascension the powers and principalities can be redeemed? Caird proposed that Paul may have changed his
thinking on this set of issues across his epistles (Caird took as given Pauline
authorship of Ephesians and Colossians, which many biblical scholars would simply
not accept now). But for evangelicals
and fundamentalist Caird’s option of “maybe” wouldn’t sit well, because when we
talk about powers and principalities in conventionally evangelical or
fundamentalist spiritual warfare manuals the Prince of Persia cannot be
redeemed.
For someone
like Jacques Ellul’s Christ vanquishing the powers became the basis for Ellul’s
later-in-life universalism. See Matthew T. Prior’s recent book Confronting
Technology: The Theology of Jacques Ellul. Prior rehearses a number of interesting critiques
of Ellul’s theology, chiefly that in his fixation on defining the city
negatively and tracing its development from Cain through Nimrod, Ellul left no
room for divine inspiration in Bezalel and the voluntary offerings and work
done to create the Tabernacle, which a number of theologians suggest reveals
that God redeems human creativity and technologies by giving them opportunities
to contribute to the Tabernacle as a kind of secondary creation. Ellul believed
that because Christ vanquished the powers all would be saved because all have
been enslaved to one or more of the powers. But this presupposes the powers may
be more consistently malignant than some theologians might be able to assent
to. This is the paltriest of brief case
studies on whether or not the Prince of Persia could be reconciled but it is,
if we take exousiology as our theological topic, a significant question. Ellul contended the powers were not redeemable
as such and that Christ’s defeating them was the basis for universal
salvation. The powers and principalities
“might” be redeemable once all the human sinners are liberated from bondage to
them, but that would have to happen first.
Christian
nationalisms, so far as I can tell, have not waded into exousiology much, but
the question of whether or not the Prince of Persia can be redeemed seems like
a significant question for any would-be theology of Christian nationalism to
address. Variations of Christian nationalism seem to want to have their cake
and eat it, too, when it comes to exousiology, the theology of powers and
principalities. Everything God created
was good according to Genesis 1 but that would include the angels who many
Christians believe later became demons.
David E Ritchie, drawing extensively on work done by the late Michael
Heiser, Esther Acolatse and Daniel K Darko, has argued that nationalisms are
ultimately demonic in origin. Thus his
book Why Do
the Nations Rage?: The Demonic Origin of Nationalism. Ritchie’s theology of the powers and
principalities suggests he believes the Prince of Persia cannot be
redeemed. That is a consistent and
coherent theological position if you’ve read his book and the authors he has
drawn upon. Christian nationalisms seem
to posit a potential redemption of righteous purpose for a Prince of Persia, at
least if the prince in question is of the United States. If you contend that nations make covenants
with God and that God honors these covenants then that may just be another
reason why you need to formulate a cohesive and coherent exousiology, which by
and large seems to escape the interest of Christian nationalists that I’m aware
of so far.
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