Strip away the
confessional specifics of popular Christian self-help literature and large
stretches of it can begin to seem as indebted to the work of Joseph Campbell as
to any biblical text or theological tradition. What was Joseph Campbell’s signal message from
the twentieth century? He’s best-known
for formulating what has been called the monomyth or The Hero’s Journey but this
is to misunderstand what his stated aims were and what his overarching intent
turned out to be. The Hero With a Thousand Faces turns out, if you actually read it,
to be a kind of self-help book.
Originally published a
bit more than sixty years ago, Joseph Campbell’s book asserted that all of
mythology the world over spoke a special truth that the ossification of rigid
dogmatism obscured. What was this message?
We can hardly do better than to quote Campbell at length:
THE HERO WITH A THOUSAND FACES
JOSEPH CAMPBELL
NEW WORLD LIBRARY
original edition copyright (c) 1949 by Bollingen Foundation
and published by Pantheon Books
ISBN 978-1-57731-593-3
ISBN 978-1-57731-593-3
pages 30-31
The cosmogonic cycle is presented with astonishing
consistency in the sacred writings of all the continents, and it gives the
adventure of the hero a new and interesting turn; for now it appears that the
perilous journey was a labor not of attainment but of reattainment, not
discovery, but rediscovery. The godly powers sought and dangerously won are
revealed to have been within the heart of the hero all the time. He is
"the king's son" who has come to know who he is and therewith has
entered into the exercise of his proper power--"God's son," who has
learned to know how much that title means. From this point of view the hero is
symbolical of that divine creative and redemptive image which is hidden within
us all, only waiting to be known and rendered into life.
page 135
The good news, which the World Redeemer brings and which so
many have been glad to hear, zealous to preach, but reluctant, apparently, to
demonstrate, is that God is love, that He can be, and is to be, loved, and that
all without exception are his children. Such comparatively trivial matters as
the remaining details of the credo, the techniques of worship, and devices of
episcopal organization (which have so absorbed the interest of Occidental
theologians that they are today seriously discussed as the principle questions
of religion), are merely pedantic snares, unless kept ancillary to the major
teaching.
Did Campbell say “hidden
within us all, only waiting to be known and rendered into life”? Well, Campbell may have used “all” in a kind
of Calvinist soteriological way where all can’t literally mean “all” because
elsewhere in his famous book Campbell wrote that
page 196
Not everyone has a destiny; only the hero who has plunged
to touch it, and has come up again--with a ring.
So, not everyone has a
destiny, for all that, only the hero.
Had Campbell spelled more explicitly the “you” who may ever have read
his book who is not “the hero” the book might not have become as popular or
influential as it has since it was first published. The hero (or heroine, even if that aspect of
the monomyth tends to get ignored by those who try to defend Campbell from
those who would try to have The Hero’s Journey be a Heroine’s Journey), has to
be someone special:
page 275
Jesus, for example can be regarded as a man who by dint of
austerities and meditation attained wisdom; or on the other hand, one may
believe that a god descended and took upon himself the enactment of a human
career. The first view would lead one to imitate the master literally, in order
to break through, in the same way as he, to the transcendent, redemptive
experience. But the second states that the hero is rather a symbol to be
contemplated than an example to be literally followed. The divine being is a
revelation of the omnipotent Self, which dwells within us all. The
contemplation of the life thus should be undertaken as a meditation on one's
own immanent divinity, not as a prelude to a precise imitation, the lesson
being, not "Do thus and be good," but "Know this and be
God."
page 315
The mighty hero of extraordinary powers--able to life Mount
Govardhan on a finger, and to fill himself with the terrible glory of the
universe--is each of us: not the physical self visible in the mirror, but the
king within.
Campbell slightly
backed away from his theorizing about the extraordinary hero a bit to highlight
what he regarded as the problem of his era and by implication ours. Self-actualization of a post-Maslowian kind
that emerges only from the individual tended, in Campbell’s estimation, to lead
to egoism and egotism.
page 334
The problem of mankind today, therefore, is precisely the
opposite to that of men in the comparatively stable periods of those great
co-ordinating mythologies which now are known as lies. Then all meaning was in
the group, in the great anonymous forms, none in the self-expressive
individual; today no meaning is in the group--none in the world: all is in the
individual. But there the meaning is absolutely unconscious. One does not know
toward what one moves. One does not know by what one is propelled. The lines of
communication between the conscious and the unconscious zones of the human
psyche have all been cut, and we have been split in two.
page 335
Nor can the great world religions, as at present
understood, meet the requirement. For they have become associated with the
causes of the factions, as instruments of propaganda and self-congratulation.
(Even Buddhism has lately suffered this degradation, in reaction to the lessons
of the West.) The universal triumph of the secular state has thrown all religious
organizations into such a definitely secondary, and finally ineffectual,
position that religious pantomime is hardly more today than a sanctimonious
exercise for Sunday morning, whereas business ethics and patriotism stand for
the remainder of the week. Such a
monkey-holiness is not what the functioning world requires; rather, a
transmutation of the whole social order is necessary, so that through every
detail and act of secular life the vitalizing image of the universal god-man
who is actually immanent and effective in all of us may be somehow made known
to consciousness.
Campbell,
by his own account, was grappling with how to find a solution to identity
predicated on social connection and cohesion in an era that he regarded as
having fragmented into individualism and individuation that left individuals
adrift.
If in
the hands of a Joseph Campbell the self-help manual could take on a distinctly
panentheistic Pelagian cast, in popular level Christian self-help confessional
standards are still expected. What is
also frequently expected is that the discovery of the self is still expected to
be found in the metaphorical and literal embrace of the other. In conservative American Protestant settings
God is “imaged” and the Trinity is “imaged” in many an inspirational account by
the love between husband and wife.
But it
would be a serious mistake to imagine that this idea of a sacramental
revelation of the divine in the sexual relationship isn’t found across the
spectrums of red and blue, conservative and liberal, orthodox or mystical. What has made the reception of Nadia
Bolz-Weber’s self-help manual on marriage and sex, Shameless, curious, is the extent to which those who reviewed the
book almost solely in terms of its niche market. The plaudits heaped upon the book by those
who endorsed it read as though what Nadia Bolz-Weber did was different and
revolutionary. Having documented the
peak and demise of the former Mars Hill Church in Puget Sound what stands out
about Nadia Bolz-Weber’s public persona in general and her book Shameless in particular is how much this
cussing pastor with a history of stand-up delivery resembles Mark Driscoll, a
celebrity pastor with a history of cussing who “got real” about sex decades
ago.
This
is not to say that Mark Driscoll and Nadia Bolz-Weber would agree on anything
much more than that Jesus rose from the dead.
But the similarities are nevertheless striking. Take a feature in The New Yorker that
described how humble the beginnings were of Nadia Bolz-Weber’s church.
The Lutheran Pastor Calling for a Sexual
Reformation
By Eliza Griswold
February 8, 2019
...
In 2007, Bolz-Weber started her church
with eight people in her living room, and it has since grown to include six
hundred members. Last July, Bolz-Weber left the organization. She wanted to
avoid “founder’s syndrome,” she told me, so that the church could flourish
without her. “It’s awful,” she said. She misses her church, especially on
Sundays, when she feels rootless. Yet she also wanted to pursue life as a
public theologian. Last May, she put out a video of a mini-sermon about forgiveness
that has been viewed nearly forty million times, and she often shares stages
with figures like Lance Armstrong, whom she interviewed at a conference on
Nantucket, in 2018. “I see from my notes you took drugs you weren’t supposed to
and then you lied about it,” she recalled starting her interview with
Armstrong. “Oh, my God, I did that shit so many times.”
A
nationally famous church started by a pastor in a living room that has since grown
to include six hundred members. Well,
that’s six hundred instead of six-thousand or fourteen-thousand but the
parallel to Mark Driscoll starting his church in his living room seems obvious
enough. Perhaps to Bolz-Weber’s fans her
use of profanity is not a sign of worldiness but of a special kind of honest
spirituality, the kind honest enough to use the swear words to reveal a lack of
fakeness. This was, for those who
witnessed the rise and peak and fall of Mars Hill and Mark Driscoll’s place in
that scene, nothing especially unique.
Mark Driscoll decades ago preached that if anyone told you there was
salvation apart from faith in Christ that person was preaching a God-damned
lie, the kind of cussing pastor moment that got the attention of Donald Miller.
Bolz-Weber’s
blue-state bona fides ensure that on paper she is opposed to almost everything
Mark claims Jesus taught, but what’s all the more striking if you read both her
work and his and listen to them both talk for cameras, is that the cussing
hipster aesthetic permeates them both.
If Mark Driscoll saw fit to crash The Strange Fire conference to distribute
copies of his 2013 book A Call to Resurgence, Bolz-Weber opened Shameless with her own story of how she
decided to do something public, a form of protest, to address what she regarded
as an injustice.
SHAMELESS: A SEXUAL REFORMATION
Nadia Bolz-Weber
Copyright (c) 2019 by Nadia Bolz-Weber
Published in the United States by Convergent Book, an
imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC
ISBN 978-1-60142-758-8
ebook ISBN 978-1-60142-760-1
pages 1-2
The week Prince died, I was flying to Charlotte, North Carolina,
to speak to a group of Methodists. That same week, the state legislature of
North Carolina voted in the so-called bathroom bill, which stated that people
must use the bathroom that corresponds to the gender on their driver's license.
As I stuffed my carry-on bag beneath the seat in front of me, I thought of this
hideous bill and the little plan I had concocted to protest it. My bag
contained a roll of Scotch tape and half a dozen sheets of paper, all which
bore--in huge purple print--the androgynous symbol for Prince's name.
The plane took off, and I looked out the window. We were
traveling over the dry plains of eastern Colorado, thirty thousand feet above a
dot matrix of green and brown circles that revealed the geometry of industrial
agriculture. As a city girl who doesn't know a thing about farming, I've always
found those green circles puzzling. Why would farmers plant circles of crops in
lots that are square?
When I looked into it later, I discovered that in 1940,
just twenty-nine miles from the spot where my plane made its way into the crisp
Colorado sky, a man named Frank Zybach invented the center-pivot irrigation
system, essentially revolutionizing farming in America. In his system, the
watering equipment turns on a pivot, allowing sprinklers to water crops in a
circular pattern. The crops aren't planted in circles; they're just watered
that way. The water never gets to the crops in the corners.
When I arrived at the Charlotte airport, I went about my
project of taping the purple Prince symbols over bathroom signs that read
"Men" and "Women." Then I went to church.
In contrast to Mark
Driscoll’s publicity stunt of crashing The Strange Fire conference to
distribute copies of his book, Bolz-Weber’s political protest was of a sort
where if she did it quickly and discreetly nobody would catch her doing it and
she could share it in her book as though it were actually a significant form of
protest. The kind of stunt that
fourteen-year olds might do just for the transgressive fun of it is, in Bolz-Weber’s
account, a principled political protest of what she regards as an unjust
law. Setting off to the side that matter
of that law, her form of protest was of the kind where her telling us about it
at the start of her book sends us a warning, a warning that a whole lot of the
content of Shameless is inextricably
mediated through Nadia Bolz-Weber.
Now, maybe, we’re all
entitled as Americans to view ourselves as the central protagonists of our own
lives but I have met pastors, for instances, who have taught that through
Christ we recognize that we are not the protagonists in the story of the
cosmos. Read a couple of books by
Bolz-Weber and a couple of books by Mark Driscoll and you may find that what
they have in common is that they have a relentless capacity to present what
they see as the Gospel of Jesus Christ that doesn’t just so happen to fit a
Jesus they have reverse-engineered into being for the things they are for.
Let me give an example
of Bolz-Weber’s pastrix meets comic shtick routine:
page 23
I grew up in a religious tradition that eschewed all
alcohol consumption--a practice that is called "teetotaling," which I
always took to mean that tea was the totality of what we were allowed to
drink. ...
As preacher jokes go
this is about on par with Mark Driscoll’s old joke about wanting to put the fun back into fundamentalism. They both have enough sense as comedians to not
laugh at their own jokes but they do us the disservice of thinking they’re
being witty. To this one had best reply, “Yes, doubtless you are the people and
all wisdom will die with you but I am not inferior to you.” Figures like Bolz-Weber and Driscoll, whether
they admit it or not, sell their books on the premise that there are things
they have figured out that their target audiences have not.
In Mark Driscoll’s
case, he insisted, twenty years ago, that Song of Songs was translated by “cowards”. Let’s revisit something published at
Wenatchee The Hatchet a few years back, the raw text of William Wallace II (aka
Mark Driscoll’s) thread conversation called “Using Your Penis”:
Author Topic: Using your penis
William Wallace II
Member posted 01-08-2001 10:59 PM
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The first thing to
know about your penis is, that despite the way it may seem, it is not your
penis. Ultimately, God created you and it is His penis. You are simply
borrowing it for a while.
While His penis is
on loan you must admit that it is sort of just hanging out there very lonely as
if it needed a home, sort of like a man wandering the streets looking for a
house to live in. Knowing that His penis would need a home, God created a woman
to be your wife and when you marry her and look down you will notice that your
wife is shaped differently than you and makes a very nice home.
Therefore, if you
are single you must remember that your penis is homeless and needs a home. But,
though you may believe your hand is shaped like a home, it is not. And, though
women other than your wife may look like a home, to rest there would be
breaking into another mans home. And, if you look at a man it is quite obvious
that what a homeless man does not need is another man without a home. Paul
tells us that your penis actually belongs to your wife, and once you are
married she will trade you it for her home (I Corinthians 7:4), and every man
knows this is a very good trade for him to make.
With his penis, the man is supposed to please his wife and
learn how to be patient, self-controlled and be educated on how to keep his
home happy and joyous (I Corinthians 7:3). The man should be aroused by his new
home, and his wife should rejoice at seeing his penis rise to greet her (Song
of Songs 5:14b).
...
William Wallace II
Member posted 01-09-2001 09:20 AM
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
That verse in the Song of Songs was translated by some cowards. She
likens her husbands penis to hard white ivory. In your NIV the footnote at the
botton says it's the "lapis lazuli" which is the penis. The Bible
translators are so skiddish they couldn't actually say what the author said.
They do the same thing with the woman's body in Song of Songs 7:2 where they
say that her belly button is round, red, and moist with a sweet taste. Guess
what, it's not her belly button. Very sad, I'd have to say that if you can't
just say what the Bible says but need to make it G-rated then you've got a low
view of Scripture. [emphasis added]
IP: Logged
William Wallace II
Member posted 01-18-2001 11:13 AM
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Christian
pornography. Christian phone sex. Christian cyber-sex. Christian lap dances.
Someone recently
asked me about these issues. And, they are quite valid.
The problem with
many unfaithful unmanly unmen is that they have heads filled with desires and
dreams, but they marry a Christian women raised on a steady diet of gnosticism
(so she hates her body) psychology (so she thinks too much before she climbs
into bed) and guilt ridden don't have sex because it's a dirty nasty thing that
God hates and makes you a slut youth group propaganda from hell/Family Books.
So the poor guy is
like a starving man who is told he can only eat once ever couple weeks and his
restaurant only has one crummy unspiced bland item on the menu and he either
eats it or starves to death.
Bummer for that guy.
What the guy wants
is to see a stripper, a porno, and have some phone and cyber sex. What the guy
needs is a good Christian woman. The kind of woman who knows that men like
unclothed and sexually aggressive women. Why? Because they are breathing. As
long as a man is alive he is ready for sex every minute of every day.
Ladies, listen
closely. The guy will never get the big dreams out of his head. He can either
explore them with his wife, become bitter and sexually repressed, or sneak off
to Deja Vu or log on to the net and escape in a moment of adventure. Birds fly,
ducks float, dogs bark, and men think about sex every minute of every day
because they have a magical ability to continually think of two things at one
time, one of which is always sex. Any man who denies this is a liar or has
broken plumbing.
So it would behoove
a good godly woman to learn how to strip for her husband. Some nice music, a
couple of drinks, candlight and a wife who has thrown her youth group
devotionals to the wind would be nice. Most women do not do this because they
are uncomfortable with their bodies. Know that for a man there are two
variables with a woman's body. One, what does she have to work with? Two, how
does she use it? Now I will tell you a secret, number two is the most
important.
How about a Christian guy who wants to watch
porno? Maybe his wife should get a Polaroid and snap a few shots of her in
various states of marital undress and bliss and sneak them into his Bible so
that when the guy sits down to eat his lunch at work and read some Scripture he
has reasons to praise God. Or, maybe if the lady would plug in a camcorder and
secretly film herself showering, undressing, making love to her husband etc.
she could give it to him when he's on the road for weeks at a time, or maybe
just so the poor guy can see his wife as some undressed passionate goddess. I
have yet to find a wife take me up on this be rebuked by her husband. [emphasis
added]
And what guy
breaking his stones on the job every day wouldn't like a hot phone call from
his wife now and then telling him in great detail what awaits him when he gets
home. Or how about the occasional instant explicit message from his wife
rolling across his screen giving him some reasons to expect that dessert will
precede dinner that night.
Do you know why the
adult entertainment industry is raking in billions of dollars? Because people
like to have sex and have fun. Does it lead to sin? Yes. Can it lead to
worship. Of course. If you resist this message, please stay single until you
get your head straightened out. If you are married and fully constipated,
bummer for you and your upcoming divorce.
…
When Nadia Bolz-Weber,
for her part, tells us on pages 170-171 of Shameless that “Sheila” was a
sexually liberated woman whose poetry was credited to King Solomon her basic
stance is that Song of Songs is Hebrew erotica that the Church fathers got
squeamish about. That far, there’s
literally nothing in her position on Song of Songs to distinguish it from Mark
Driscoll’s views quoted at length above.
Bolz-Weber lets us know
in Shameless that Augustine of Hippo
had hang-ups, big hang-ups, about sex.
page 42
Augustine was a North African bishop and theologian from
the fourth century whose writings have deeply influenced Christian thinking to
this day. The world around him was changing, and he himself was changing, so
like many of us, he looked to scripture for guidance. His own version fo the
Garden of Eden story goes like this: God created paradise for humans to live
in, but Eve messed it up for everyone by eating a piece of fruit that God told
her not to eat, and this caused a fall from grace. So now all of humanity is
cursed, and this so-called original sin of Eve's became sort of, I don't know
.... a sexually transmitted disease. According to Augustine, every person born
after Eve inherited her original sin, and so it is essential that men should be
dominant--controling women so they don't screw over humanity any more than they
already have.
pages 42-43
It is important to know, as we consider the origin of the church's
beliefs about sex and bodies and gender, that Augustine's theology and
interpretation of the Bible stories were rooted in his own shame. Augustine
felt shame about his own sexual proclivities and regret about his licentious
behavior before converting to Christianity.
Augustine's shame reportedly took root when, as an
adolescent, he got an erection while at a Roman bath. Embarrassing, yes. But Augustine was so
consumed with the shame of not being able to control his erections that he
spent a decade writing a theological treatise. In the treatise, he set out to
prove that the main condition of paradise before the fall was that Adam could
control his erections with his own will. Then Eve messed everything up.
I feel for him. Augustine, like all of us, had
[i]issues[i]. And it was more than fine
for him to take his own concerns into the creative project of biblical
interpretation. He is allowed, just like
we all are.
But we must stop confusing his baggage and our baggage and
our pastors' baggage and our parents' baggage with God's will. Because while many of Augustine's teachings
have been revered for generations, when it came to his ideas around sex and
gender, he basically took a dump and the church encased it in amber. But instead of realizing this was one guy's
personal shit, we assumed it was straight from God. We ignored the harmful impact these teachings
have had on actual people ... .
Let’s compare
Bolz-Weber’s take on Augustin in 2019’s Shameless
and compare it to the take Mark (and Grace) Driscoll had on Augustine in Real Marriage from 2012.
Real
Marriage: the truth about sex, friendship and life together
Mark and
Grace Driscoll
copyright
2012 by On Mission, LLC
ISBN
978-1-4041-8352-0
Augustine (AD 354-430) was sexually active before his
conversion and later decided that sex within marriage was not sinful, though
the lust and the passion associated with it was sinful. Because of this, he often
commended married couples for not engaging in sex and referred to it as a form
of animalistic lust. (page 115)
This was back when Mark
Driscoll was claiming to be a Calvinist so he moved along in a few pages on
page 118 of Real Marriage to praise the Puritans (i.e. Calvinists, or even
super-Calvinists) for having healthier views of sexuality than Augustine
had. Bolz-Weber used more four-letter
words in her version but the basic take that “Wow, Augustine was messed up
about sex and I’m so glad I don’t have his baggage about it!” is more or less
the same.
How about Origen, one
of the fish that swim in the barrel of historically influential figures in
early Christianity that contemporary authors like to shoot at once in a while
for his take on sex? Bolz-Weber can’t
resist:
from Shameless:
page 170
Origen had a few lifelong hang-ups himself. (Surprise, surprise) He was so tortured by
his own sexual desires that he took matters into his own hands, literally. Origen took seriously the Platonic notion
(often repeated in some of Paul's writings) that the spirit is of a higher
plane than the flesh, that the body is the enemy of the soul. So rather than be plagued by sinful sexual desires,
he castrated himself. That's
committment.
Self-castration for the purpose of avoiding temptation
seems so extreme, and yet it differs only in degree from insisting that women
hide their bodies so that they do not tempt men, telling hormone-soaked boys
that they have to avoid even thinking
about sex ,and describing sex as sinful and dangerous and toxic outside of
heterosexual marriage. All of it smacks
of the bullshit Cindy's pastor barked about "transcending our sinful
bodies."
By 2012, with his
megachurch rep secured, Driscoll put it more tersely in Real Marriage on page
115, “Origen (AD 185-254) was so convinced of the evils of sexual pleasure that
he not only allegorized the Song of Songs but also took a knife and castrated
himself.” For Driscoll, perhaps, the
terror of a man castrating himself might be enough to speak for itself. Bolz-Weber felt obliged to linger, so to
speak, over the blood stains on the floor.
Mark was like that … twenty years ago but we’ll get to that in a
while.
For the moment it’s
worth noting that there are very basic points in the sexual prosperity gospel
of Nadia Bolz-Weber that are fundamentally the same as those expressed by Mark
Driscoll. They would appear to be on
opposite sides of a lot of issue that they are, really, on opposite sides
about, but look past the “what” they disagree on to “how” they sell what they
do believe in and it becomes easier to see that Mark Driscoll pioneered the
gimmicks that have defined Nadia Bolz-Weber’s public persona.
Even on the matter that
Song of Songs should be understood chiefly as Hebrew erotica that should not be
interpreted as having any typological reference to the love of God for the
people of God. Bolz-Weber can’t even lay any claim to having a racy or new take
on Song of Songs. Her shtick depends on
the assumption that even mainlines aren’t comfortable with racy content yet
Mark Driscoll took his Song of Songs as erotica theme to the pulpit as far back
as 1999. If you don’t believe me go listen to all seven of these sermons Mark
Driscoll preached on Song of Songs called Sacred
Romance.
Those sermons are some
of the earliest that Mark Driscoll clearly thought were good enough to preserve
by way of recording and since his take on Song of Songs has been one of “the”
touchstones of his entire public ministry career it makes sense. For instance, let’s take a sermon Mark
Driscoll preached in 2007, the year that Eliza Griswold reported was the year
that Nadia Bolz-Weber started her church.
As we saw from his writing on the Mars Hill php forum Midrash in 2000
Mark Driscoll was extolling the basic viability of the concept of “Christian
porno” in the “Using Your Penis” thread.
By 2007 the Driscoll brand of selling sex was more developed:
about 23:05 (content warning as this is the notorious 2007 Edinburgh, Scotland sermon
"Like an apple tree among the trees of the
forest," she says, "is my lover among the young men. I delight to sit
in his shade and his fruit is sweet to my taste." What is she talking
about? Oral sex on her husband. That as he stands, she likes to be beneath him
and his taste is sweet. It is a euphemism for oral sex, in your Bible. The Jews
wouldn‘t even let men read this until they were married or thirty. Now you know
why. You‘ve got Jewish boys under the blankets at night with a candle.
[Laughter from audience.] Men, I am glad to report to you that oral sex is
biblical. Amen? [Minimal response from audience.] No, you can do better than
that. [Laughter from audience] The wife performing oral sex on the husband is
biblical. God‘s men said, Amen. Ladies, your husbands appreciate oral sex. They
do. So, serve them, love them well. It‘s biblical. Right here. We have a verse.
The fruit of her husband is sweet to her taste and she delights to be beneath
24:17
I'll tell you a story if you don't tell anyone else of a
man who started attending our church because of oral sex. Right? So many women
go to church. In your country it's sixty or seventy percent. "My husband
won't come to church. He doesn't have any interest in the things of God. He
doesn't understand why church would apply to him." We had a woman like
that in our church. She became a Christian. Her husband was not a Christian. He
hated the church, wanted nothing to do with the church. She kept browbeating
him about Jesus. "You need to get saved. You're gonna burn in hell."
He had no interest in that.
And so, finally, I was teaching a class on sex and she
said, "Oh, so oral sex on a husband is what a wife is supposed to
do?" I said, "Yes." She said, "My husband's always wanted
that but I've refused him." I went to 1 Peter 3. I said, "The Bible
says that if your husband is not a Christian that you are to win him over with
deeds of kindness." I said, "So go home and tell your husband that
you were in a Bible study today and that God has convicted you of sin. And repent and go perform oral sex on your
husband and tell him that Jesus, Jesus Christ commands you to do so." The
next week the man showed up at church. He came up to me, he said, "You
know, this is a really good church." That handing out tracts on the street
thing, there's a better way to see revival, I assure you of that.
28:29
--you say, "Won't that make me dirty?" No, it'll
make you a good wife, and ladies, let me assure you of this, if you think
you're being dirty he's pretty happy.
Nadia Bolz-Weber may
have temporarily caused a stir by endorsing porn consumption as long as the porn
is “ethically sourced” but as I’ve demonstrated from Mark Driscoll’s public
statements, one could go so far as to say that sacred porno was inextricably
part of Mark Driscoll’s message. Jessica
Johnson did not call her monograph on Mars Hill Biblical Porn for nothing.
Driscoll has repeatedly publicly repudiated pornography as a profession
and yet to observe Mark Driscoll’s cumulative claims about what he was okay
with, it’s hard to shake a sense that he thinks that pornography that is made
as a strictly, er, mom and pop amateur industry in which the consumers are the
producers is basically a good thing.
Which is to say that
even on what might seem to be the raciest and most daring aspect of Nadia
Bolz-Weber’s public persona is an also-ran compared to her red-state forerunner
Mark Driscoll.
That Bolz-Weber and
Driscoll regard the sexual bond as something holy isn’t even really a point of
difference in general, the differences come in what kinds of sexual
relationships Bolz-Weber is willing to call holy that Mark Driscoll believes
are still prohibited by the Bible.
from Shameless:
page 20
... But holiness is not something we earn, or create, or
strive to become. It's not about self-improvement. It's just something we bump
up against by happenstance, something that jars us into ourselves and out of
ourselves at the same time. Holiness happens in those moments when we are
blissfully free from our ego and yet totally connected to our self and
something else. It is in the smell of a
newborn's head and the exhaustion of a laboring mother. The moment during a
celebration when you are sharing a cake with those you love, and you take the
first bite and every pleasure sensor is firing [i] holy holy holy[i]. Holiness
is the thing I never saw coming that makes me catch my breath because I know
the sacred has interrupted my isolation.
And--I insist on this--when two loving individuals, two
bearer's of God's image, are unified in an erotic embrace, there is space for
something holy. What was separate has come together. Two spirits, two bodies,
two stories are drawn so close that they are something together that they
cannot be alone. There is unity.
So if the bond between
two loving individuals is a space for something holy that could seem like a
variation of Jesus’ words about how “What God has joined together let no one
separate”.
About that …
from Shameless:
pages 58-59
My husband of nearly twenty years and I didn't know how to
connect. It wasn't his fault. He is a good man and a great father. But there was a part of me that was shut down
for a very long time. It was hell for both of us, but finally we were able to
face reality and walk with our family through an amicable separation and
divorce.
When I started seeing my boyfriend, I felt connected to him
and to my body and my desires and my erotic nature in a deep way. It was like an exfoliation of my entire
spirit. It softened me and opened my heart and cleared away the gunk in my
head. It was [i]good[i]. Not perfect. Good.
Good like bodies. Good like
chocolate cake. Good like when God saw
what God made, and God looked at it and said it was good.
Those of us who
wondered, however briefly, why Nadia Bolz-Weber expressed no interest in
discussing how Tony Jones dealt with his ex-wife, we might now have an
explanation for why Bolz-Weber wasn’t the sort to speak up against pastors
divorcing spouses. She had gotten
divorced herself.
In The New Yorker
feature on her we read the following:
… Four years later, she began attending community college.
By 2003, she had transferred to the University of Colorado, Boulder, and in
2005 she graduated and enrolled in a seminary. She had married a Lutheran
pastor in 1996; in 2016, after two decades of trying at a marriage without much
physical intimacy, she got up the courage to get a divorce. Six months later,
she reconnected with an old boyfriend named Eric, and, from the start, the sex
was amazing. “It was like an exfoliation,” she told me. Through better sex, her
spirit softened, and she found herself closer to God, which led her to rethink
the relationship between sex and religion. Bolz-Weber discusses these events in
“Shameless,” which is both a theological text and a personal one. Until now,
she’s never spoken about her abortion, but she believes that it’s time to begin
a new conversation about abortion and religion. The story embodies her mode of
preaching as taboo-breaking, which she calls “screw it, I’ll go first.” …
Two decades of marriage
without much physical intimacy. Kids
happened. Kids being born tends to
suggest that some kind of sex happened, at least enough sex for actual human
reproduction to happen. That Bolz-Weber,
however she worded it, conveyed that she sex wasn’t very frequent or very good
is, once again, a reminder that whatever the blue state and red state
differences, there’s something at the core of Nadia Bolz-Weber as a celebrity
Christian and motivational speaker that resonates with Mark Driscoll’s
gimmicks.
Real Marriage
Mark and Grace Driscoll
Copyright (c) 2012 by On Mission, LLC
Thomas Nelson
ISBN 978-1-4002-0383-3
ISBN 978-1-4041-8352-0 (IE)
page 164
As with many things in marriage, communication is key. When I cam to the conclusion that the cure for
a lot of my moodiness was having more frequent sex with my wife, I simply told
her. Yes, it's that simple. [emphasis added] For years,
when I would endure depression, I tried to talk to Grace about it. Her natural
inclination was to want to have long talks about our feelings toward each
other, and I know that connecting with her like this is important. But
sometimes I was just too frustrated and ended up blowing up and hurting her
feelings. The truth was I wanted to have more frequent sex with my life, and we
needed to discuss how that could happen.
To make matters worse, seemingly every book I read by Christians on sex and
marriage sounded unfair. Nearly every one said the husband had to work very
hard to understand his wife, to relate to her, and when he did that to her
satisfaction then, maybe, she would have sex with him as a sort of reward.
After many years I finally told Grace that I needed more sex. I asked if we
could have sex more days of the week and try a variety of positions. She'd be
the one to decide exactly how we would be together. Grace said that helped her
think about our intimacy throughout the course of the day, which helped prepare
her mind and body. To our mutual delight, we discovered that both of us felt
closer more loved and understood, and were more patient with each other if we
were together regularly in some way. And whether my depression was
testosterone-induced or not, I just generally felt happier.
So where Mark Driscoll resented
his frigid wife for a decade but eventually came up with a theological and
personal rationale for getting more sex from her that was anchored in sex being
the cure for his moodiness and depression; Nadia Bolz-Weber decided to divorce
her husband of twenty years, take up a boyfriend, and formulate a theology in
which sexuality in Christianity needs a reformation that looks suspiciously
like what Bolz-Weber wants for herself and others.
from Shameless:
page 158
As I have talked with my friends and my spiritual
community, I have realized that many of us need a space where we can grieve
lost or twisted sexuality. Do you, too, need this? If so, I invite you to let the unprocessed
trauma that is stored in our bodies find its way out. Maybe with a trusted friend. Maybe alone.
Maybe in a church. Let's tell the
truth about those scares. Not because
they define us, but because we can define them.
Let us grieve that we were not taught to love and respect the inherent dignity
of our own human bodies. Grieve the decades we avoided sex when we could have
been enjoying sex. Grieve the pain. Grieve the abuse. Grieve the loss. Grieve
the harm done to us by the messages of the church. Grieve our own sins and
mistakes.
Our scars are part of our story, but they are not its
conclusion. ... .
If
Bolz-Weber divorced because she wasn’t getting the frequency or quality of
physical intimacy she wanted and she said so for the record to a reporter
writing for The New Yorker it’s going to be impossible for Bolz-Weber to
position herself as having a practically different perspective than Mark
Driscoll’s. Why? Because both celebrity Christian motivational
speakers seem to have reverse-engineered the kind of theology about sex they
needed to be able to live with the decisions they made that other people now
have to live with. Expressing my convictions as a lay person I can’t shake a
sense that Bolz-Weber and Driscoll come across as people who have built entire
theological systems that they alternately invite and require people to live by
to get what they want from their sex
lives. They also both managed to parlay
these processes of personal negotiation or ultimatum-giving into self-help
books and in neither case have I come to the end of their books having any
confidence that anyone should build any aspects of their lives on the advice of
these two people. Nadia Bolz-Weber and
Mark Driscoll have written pop Christian self-help books targeted toward people
who, whatever their real differences on what we would now call blue-state and
red-state issues, nevertheless tend to be people who believe they have a
God-given right to get laid that they aim to make congruent with Christian
confession as they understand it.
Ultimately
Bolz-Weber and Driscoll have far more in common in the “how” of their public personas
than their fans would wish to realize.
They differ in the “what” that they affirm the Bible teaches, obviously,
but that makes their underlying similarities both harder to detect for their
already sold fan bases and easier to spot for those who read widely enough
across liberal and conservative, secular and religious literature to see what’s
going on. These two celebrity Christian
motivational speakers with careers as pastors who have sought out the role of “public
theologian”, and they both have self-help books about sexuality, sex and
(sometimes) marriage to sell. In the
decades since Joseph Campbell developed his one-size-fits-all Americanist
approach to global myth and religious thought, self-help literature in the
United States has been able to proliferate in ways that can transform every
kind of story, if you have the courage to see that it’s about you, is about
you.
What
makes endorsements of Bolz-Weber seem staggering to me, watching as I have the
way that Mars Hill Church rose and fell on the reputation of Mark Driscoll, is
that Bolz-Weber’s publicity stunts, penchant for a cussing pastor shtick, and
vague invocations of tales in which she’s the reasonable heroine of her story
who is gobsmacked that people don’t see things the way she does is that this
was Mark Driscoll’s shtick at Mars Hill for about twenty years. What makes it all the more remarkable is that
someone like the late Rachel Held Evans would writing a gushing endorsement
blurb for Shameless. Was this the
same Rachel Held Evans who once said that Mark Driscoll was a bully and that we
should stand up to him? Having read
works by Driscoll and Bolz-Weber the similarities in persona are more striking
than the real differences on political platform and doctrinal points regarding
sex. Why? Because, to put it in the harshest way
possible in the hopes that readers will have gotten this point already, the
celebrity Christian self-help book can be the product of self-absorbed,
self-aggrandizing people even when we factor in the good old red-state and
blue-state differences. As Adolf
Schlatter put it in his commentary on Romans:
Romans: The Righteousness of God
Adolf Schlatter, Hendrickson Publisers (c)
1995
The individual is godless if he fabricates
religion in his own interest, for the sake of his own happiness. God must be
worshipped for the sake of God.
... Paul emphasizes the absurdity of
idolatry. It is absurd to put the individual, under the law of death, in the
place of God, because in doing so it is not even the human and the animal that
are worshipped, but only their likeness. This likeness is no reproduction of
living beings at all, it is merely able to copy the outline of the form, the lines
shaping their figure.
page 40
... it is a lie arising from selfish
covetousness, if the individual makes his image to be God's image and his lust
to be God's will.
page 43 (ibid)
Bolz-Weber
and Driscoll can both reverse-engineer the Jesus who will give them the sex
lives they think they’ve deserved and, more crafty still, they’ve figured out
that by seamlessly weaving their own personal stories into their assertions
about pop Christian self-help theology, they can make it seem impossible to
engage with the laziness of their theological enterprises by wrapping
themselves in personal narrative that protects them from being pressed on the
issue of why they are so convinced that what they think Jesus wants for them so
often seems to be what they already seemed to want anyway. Per Schlatter, if the individual celebrity
Christian self-help merchant makes his or her own image to be God’s image and
his or her own lust to be God’s will then that’s that. God has spoken, and if anyone has any questions
about selfish covetousness, well, then we get back to stuff about how you
shouldn’t touch God’s anointed, especially not the self-annointed.
Where
this good news goes all the way to the bank is where Bolz-Weber and Driscoll
have sold sexual prosperity gospels in which they will assure you, dear reader,
that the twenty to twenty-five dollars in U.S. currency you may have spent to
get Shameless or Real Marriage will bring to you the author’s hard-won wisdom that
it’s your God-given right to get laid and that this is one of the highest and
holiest things you can do as a Christian.
Anyone who might tell you that in the real world there are
responsibilities and disappointments to any path you choose in life, well, that
must be from Satan and Satan is a liar. The
“good news” in books on sex by writers such as Bolz-Weber and Driscoll is only
good news on the reader’s presumption of a divinely given right to have a sex
life, albeit within some vague, generalized confines of what they consider
Christian ethics. But in some crucial
ways, I think, these kinds of self-help
books from popular level Christian authors are variations on Joseph Campbell’s
monomyth, a Jesus formula that paradoxically authorizes the kind of egoism and
egotism that Campbell thought he was writing to correct that he paradoxically
amplified.
To put
the point more strongly still, the self-help genre in the twenty-first century
United States may be an industry populated by narcissists writing for
narcissists who have, through the alchemy of appropriating mythology, folklore,
religious literature, natural science or social science (whatever the mark
needs), figured out how to sell you what they have figured out you are already
willing to buy. Self-help can promise
you a better life and if you don’t get that better life you at least bought the
opportunity to vicariously live your best life now through the merchants of
dreams whose book you were just sold.
Bolz-Weber’s
Shameless has the illusion of
edginess that is ultimately someone else’s set of shopworn gimmicks and that
someone else is Mark Driscoll. Nadia
Bolz-Weber is Mark Driscoll 2.0 for blue state residents who object to what
Mark Driscoll thinks the Bible teaches, but will eagerly buy up the racy
gimmickry he used if it’s used to sell the Jesus who has been
reverse-engineered to rubber stamp the kinds of Americans they already happen
to be.
