some follow up within/on the Theopolis Institute conversation about the late Michael Heiser and the field of demonology and spirit possession in scholarship

I'm belatedly coming back to the Theopolis Institute conversation on the work of the late Michael Heiser.

links for the weekend 11-16-2025 Theopolis Institute conversation about the work of the late Michael Heiser, on Heiser's Driscoll foreward and some thoughts on trajectories in demonology and anti-demonology in Christian and Jewish theologies

https://theopolisinstitute.com/conversations/the-divine-council/
https://theopolisinstitute.com/conversations/curiosity-and-the-divine-council/
https://theopolisinstitute.com/conversations/evaluating-the-divine-council-theology-of-michael-heiser-and-christopher-kous-adaptations/
https://theopolisinstitute.com/conversations/heisers-interpretive-iconoclasm/
Now it doesn't just so happen if you look up the book on Google books and find the "Limited Preview" version you can read the entirety of Michael Heiser's foreward to Mark and Grace Driscoll's spiritual warfare self-help manual published in 2019. Since I own a physical copy I can just transcribe a bit.  I haven't gotten around to reading Heiser's work beyond about 15% into any given of his books but I saw quickly how much he drew upon work by Archie T. Wright, Loren Stuckenbruck and Annette Yoshiko Reed among others.  I'm more in a Graham Twelftree phase and Andrew Bowie's writing on philosophy lately, so Heiser's on one of a few back burners.  Still, this seemed something to share for the record:
 
Win Your War: Fight in the Realm You Don’t See For Freedom in the One You Do
Mark and Grace Driscoll
Charisma House
Copyright © 2019 by Mark and Grace Driscoll
LCCN 2019022514 (print)               LCCN 2019022515 (ebook)
ISBN 9781629996257 (hardback)     ISBN 9781629996264 (ebook)
Foreward by Michael S. Heiser pages xxiii-xxv
 
As a Biblical scholar I'm prone to read only scholarly works produced under peer review and highbrow academic publishers. The focus of my own work for both the academy and the person in the pew has largely been the supernature worldview of the Bible. Consequently, when I was approached by Mark to read the manuscript of Win Your War, I was drawn out of my scholarly bubble by the twofold goal he and his wife, Grace, sought to accomplish in the book: to convince Christians that they need to embrace the reality of the supernatural world and to process every area of the Christian life (every personal "war") in accord with that belief.
 
The implication, of course, is that being conformed to the image of Christ involves more than the daily struggle to turn from self-destructive behavior, character flaws, and human evil. It also means believing that there are intelligent evil forces at work that not only impede the process of our growth in becoming more like Jesus but seek to manipulate our thinking and behavior to undermine our joy and usefulness to God. In short, God has enemies, and His enemies are our enemies--and they are not passive.
 
This may sound odd to some readers. How does it make sense to tell Christians that they need to embrace the supernatural? Don't Christians believe in God, that Jesus was God in the flesh, and that God the Holy Spirit resides within? Don't they believe what happened on the cross supernaturally resulted in the forgiveness of sin and everlasting life to all who believe that God sent Jesus for those purposes?
 
The answer put for by Mark and Grace is straightforward, For many Christians, belief in the supernatural ends with the points of doctrine noted above. Affirming the reality of intelligent evil the way it is portrayed in the Bible--where supernatural agents of darkness actively participate in misdirecting our thoughts and behavior to self-destruction, unbelief, and apathy--isn't on the table for many Christians in the modern Western world, driven by "enlightenment" rationalism.
 
The unfortunate reality is that many Christians are selectively supernatural in their outlook, a stance that not only denies biblical authority on a range of ideas but anesthetizes believers as to what's really happening to them and their churches on social, cultural, and geopolitical levels. Most believers don't realize that demons occupy a low status in the pecking order of supernatural darkness. It's no accident that the Book of Daniel incudes supernatural intelligences in the operations of empires (Daniel 10's "princes"). It's also no coincidence that Paul's vocabulary for intelligent evil (rulers, principalities, powers, thrones, etc.) follows suit--the terms are common ones for geographical dominion.
 
This is not to endorse a cartoonish view of spiritual warfare, a term that has become a buzzword in certain circles of Christianity. Mark and Grace are not finding demons under every rock (not every church, corporate, or governmental board). While they refer to some truly strange supernatural incidents in their lives, they are quite clear from the outset that Win Your War is not about baptizing Hollywood's portrayals of the supernatural. Biblically speaking (and when we discuss supernatural darkness we should indeed be speaking biblically) warfare should not be defined as soliciting angels, engaging in shouting matches with supernatural powers, or blaming our failures on demons. Rather, spiritual warfare is fundamentally about the conflict between two kingdoms, a conflict within and without for every true Christian whether he or she discerns that or not. Followers of Jesus win their spiritual war when they spready the gospel, protect the gospel against false teaching, and live out the gospel by becoming more conformed to the loving, sacrificial character of Jesus.
 
Not surprisingly, these things are encapsulated in the last words of Jesus before He ascended to heaven (Matt. 28:18-20). It follows, then, that these are the things the supernatural powers of darkness fear, for they grow the kingdom of God and are the catalyst for the Lord's return. As the apostle Paul so eloquently noted, when the gospel spreads to the nations, the moment of the kingdom's consummation draws closer (Rom. 11:25-27); cf. Gal 3:7-9, 26-29). Believers weren't tasked by Jesus with "ghost-busting" in His name. We are instead supposed to be making disciples of all nations. But doing that requires each of us to be a useful and effective believer. The powers of supernatural darkness are on the clock, and they know it. We must win our spiritual war to do our part. This is why we face supernatural opposition.
 
Win Your War is a pastoral plea that needs to take hold in the hearts and minds of serious believers in every church that preaches the gospel. My hope is that Win Your War will prod readers toward realizing that the powers of darkness are real and that they work to influence our thinking and behavior to distract us from fulfilling--and enjoying--our lives in Christ and our kingdom tasks.
--Dr. Michael S. Heiser
PhD, Hebrew Bible and Semitic Studies
Executive Director, Awakening School of Theology and Ministry
Author, The Unseen Realm, Angels, AND Supernatural
 
 
If you are not already familiar with mark Driscoll’s post-Mars Hill resignation books I’m not going to get you up to speed.  Charting the theological trajectory of Mark Driscoll in the last eleven years it not the primary point here.
 
Heiser’s account was that Mark Driscoll sent him a manuscript copy of the book that became Win Your War. Mark Driscoll’s take on Genesis 6:1-4 in 2005 was substantially different from the take he had after reading Michael Heiser’s work.  Driscoll referred to the idea that angels and humans had sexual relations and begat offspring as the “seed of Chucky” theory from the pulpit back in the Genesis series from 2005.  At the risk of pulling the eyewitness testimony move, I remember this because I was attending Mars Hill at the time.  I knew Augustine wrote that this was a widely held belief about how to interpret Genesis 6 but that the interpretation had fallen into disfavor.  I knew Driscoll had read Augustine so his “seed of Chucky” quip struck me as unbalanced and glib with regard to scholarship on an obviously debated biblical passage.
Fast forward twenty years later and, as you can see, people at the Theopolis Institute have been having a round table discussing the late Michael Heiser’s work.
 
What jumped out for me about Heiser’s foreward commending Mark and Grace Driscoll’s book is that there’s no indication Heiser met the Driscoll’s and no indication he had any idea that just a few years earlier in 2014 there were a variety of scandals swirling around Mark Driscoll about plagiarism; the use of ResultSource to rig a #1 place on the New York Time bestseller list; objections made public about Driscoll’s abusive and domineering leadership style; or concerns about the disbursement and use of funds in Mars Hill Global.  There’s no sign that Heiser was familiar with any of that.  If he was busy reading and writing work in peer-reviewed contexts then this may be a sign of how really peripheral Mark Driscoll had always been if Michael Heiser was approached by Driscoll and gave no evidence of having ever heard of him before. 
 
That might, at least, be a potential explanation for how and why Heiser was unfamiliar with the scandals connected to Driscoll and by 2021 former Mars Hill pastors stated for the record they believed Mark Driscoll was unrepentant and showed himself unfit for pastoral ministry.
https://www.christianitytoday.com/2021/07/mars-hill-elders-letter-mark-driscoll-pastor-resign-trinity/
https://www.christianitytoday.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/mars-hill-former-elders-statement.pdf
https://churchleaders.com/news/402200-former-mars-hill-elders-plead-for-mark-driscoll-to-resign-immediately.html
https://julieroys.com/mark-driscoll-unfit-former-mars-hill-elders/
 
This was a point that had already been expressed somewhat by Acts 29 leaders when they urged Mark Driscoll to step down, although that has since been scrubbed off Acts 29 websites.
 
Earlier this year Robert Morris pled guilty to indecent acts against a child.  I asked how it was that Mark “I see things” Driscoll didn’t see “that” about his one-time friend Robert Morris.  Michael Heiser is no longer alive and so he isn’t around to answer a question that, nevertheless, can and should be asked, for an author who wrote so much about the unseen realm and supernatural realities not visible to the naked eye, how did Heiser manage to not be aware of Mark Driscoll’s history of controversy?  Perhaps we could merely guess that an Abiathar can support an Adonijah now and then and not necessarily be an altogether bad guy.  But Heath Henning has contended that Heiser’s teachings are aberrant and errant and because Heiser went to the trouble of writing and endorsing foreward to a post-Mars Hill resignation Mark Driscoll book, specifically Win Your War, I think it’s fair to ask how much practical discernment Heiser had even without raising any claims to the effect that the late Michael Heiser qualified as some kind of false teacher.
My skepticism about varieties of Christian nationalism from evangelical conservatives and liberal mainline Protestants is pretty equal.  The latter dread the influence of the former precisely because the Protestant and mainline denominations threw in with pax Americana and American expansion across the 19th and 20th centuries and dread the prospect of a 21st century dominated by evangelical or charismatic/Pentecostal types with views of spiritual warfare that can feature a Paula White being a spiritual advisor to President Trump.  
So at a practical level just saying Heiser had some bad ideas that shouldn't be adopted proves nothing in itself about the life lived.  Doug Wilson can keep gushing about R L Dabney's prophetic wisdom and vision but Dabney's white supremacism was still what it was, for instance, and we've had eight No Quarter Novembers and hardly a word from Wilson about the Mark Driscoll he said he still liked in 2014.  Having met the man myself some twenty-five years ago I really believe that the Mark Driscoll of 2005 would regard the Mark Driscoll of 2023 to the present as dangerously misguided and a charismaniac of the worst sort.

One of the things that is also worth noting is that there is a distinction to be made between what people say about Heiser's work and seeing how it can (and has been) actually get used by other authors.  Mark Driscoll asked Heiser to review a manuscript and credited Heiser with changing his mind about how to interpret Genesis 6:1-4 but there was little in Win Your War that broke new ground on Mark Driscoll's ideas about spiritual warfare that he articulated in a four-hour session in February 2008 that I mostly transcribed years ago.  

David E Ritchie, on the other hand, drew upon the work of Michael Heiser and others to argue that all forms of nationalism in general and Christian nationalism of the January 6, 2020 variety in particular, can and should be regarded as demonic.

https://wipfandstock.com/9781666732207/why-do-the-nations-rage/

https://www.modernreformation.org/resources/articles/why-do-the-nations-rage-an-interview-with-david-a-ritchie

I have actually read that book and he's written a very earnest case that all forms of nationalism have a demonic element to them. I don't even disagree, actually. All the political theology in the world doesn't address the question of whether the prince of Persia in the Book of Daniel can be saved.  Whatever faults people find with Walter Wink's work he already charted out how powers and principalities could/can refer to earthly empires, seats of authority and spiritual forces behind the scenes.  

That Heiser's work got Driscoll to change his mind doesn't necessarily say anything about Heiser's work.  It tells us that Mark Driscoll is prone to the kinds of all-or-nothing either/or thinking that he prizes.  

Now something that doesn't come up in the Heiser conversation which should come up is that the gap between what academic theologians say about "the unseen realm" and what is popularly believed at the lay level has always differed for centuries.  Francis Young has written histories on exorcism in Anglican and Catholic practice and has pointed out that more people are seeking exorcism now in Catholic and Anglican settings the world over than ever before and the clergy are more reluctant than ever to grant or accede to those requests, preferring to steer people to formal counseling and taking up exorcism as a literal last resort.  The world is not more disenchanted now than it was before, whether because of Weber's thesis or because fewer people believe angels and demons exist.  Jason Ananda Josephson Storm has a whole book about this called The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences. He made two simple points in a somewhat long and daunting book:

1) more people believe in supernatural powers, forces and persons now than ever before both because there are literally more people on the planet and because they didn't stop believing in this stuff just because it's a rote notion in the academy that Weber's disenchantment thesis has been "proven"

2) the entire field of "human sciences" has had partisans eager to sweep under the rug the pervasive interest in the occult held by pioneers in the social sciences (Carl Jung was merely one of the more obvious and unavoidable examples). Reckoning with where the human sciences can go "from here" needs to take seriously what the Euro-American academic mainstream has been scrupulously trying to ignore for the whole history of fields like psychology and sociology (and it's not the replication crisis, which Andrew Scull has written about as a crisis that has bedeviled psychiatry from its inception)

It's something like this we need to keep in mind when academics discuss the popular influence of a popularizer like the late Michael Heiser.  Most evangelical Christians are not even going to think about slogging through books by Loren Stuckenbruck or Archie Wright but the central question between the Old Testament/Hebrew Bible and the New Testament that gets no answer from within the pages of Scripture itself is how did we get from the Jewish scriptures where no demons get mentioned at all to the Gospels where Jesus is obviously presented as an itinerant exorcist?  Depending on which scholars of Judaism you read this could be because Jewish scriptures rejected the idea of demonology as relevant to medicine (Jacob Milgrom staked this claim about Levitical diagnoses of skin diseases as just that over against the demonologies of Babylonian medical manuals). Or you could read a scholarly case that demons and gods were rendered into mere forces that Yahweh could and did control (Judit Blair).  Alternatively you could have Esther Hamori's God's Monsters that contends that all those monsters are all over the Hebrew Bible and that these terrors served at the beck and call of a God who is a ruthless and mercurial mobster.  Hamori also celebrates the necromancer of Endor as a woman who is described as having real power to really summon the dead prophet-judge Samuel and if the text tells us that's what happened that's what happened.  

Jeffrey Burton Russell wrote decades ago that the evolution of the devil is explicable in terms of getting God off the hook for permitting so much atrocity but at the same time theologians fretted that the devil shouldn't be granted so much power as to seem like a potential rival to God.  In Russell's account of the evolution of Western thought on the devil it is this eagerness to minimize the influence and significance of the devil that can be seen as the basis for the trajectory in Western favored atonement theories from the ransom theory to christus victor to satisfaction theory (Anselm) to the more refined variation of satisfaction theory known (and at times damned) as penal substitutionary atonement. Russell pointed out that with each successive atonement theory the devil is increasingly removed from having any role in the human need for salvation.  

What Russell didn't mention is that by the time we get to Friedrich Schleiermacher the liberal Prussian theologian jettisoned the doctrine of The Fall and all demons and the devil as unnecessary to a creedal Christian faith and inadequately accounted for by any biblical texts.  Schleiermacher was happy to jettison the entire unseen realm, to use the late Michael Heiser's idiom, because he didn't see it in the Apostle's Creed or the Nicene Creed so it was easily dispensed with.  

What becomes strikingly obvious if you were to go through, say Merrill Unger's Biblical Demonology and fundamentalist and evangelical writings about Satan and demons is that you find a lot of demonic exegesis taken for granted with zero explanation as to how these traditions emerged or why.  Cue Jeffrey Burton Russell and Peggy Day in the 20th century with attempts to explain how and why.  More recent work has been done by Ryan T Stokes and if you want to go old-school there's a slim book by G. B. Caird.  But the biggest reason a figure like Michael Heiser can sell so many books that academic theologians may urge you to not read is simple, a strictly biblicist take on the Bible gives you no explanation at all of what unclean spirits are, where they came from, what they actually do, and whether or not they are real.  Throw in theological paradigms like cessationism or dispensationalism and the waters become opaque rather than merely murky.  There is probably no field of theology where the gap between the leaders and laity is quite so big as it seems to be on the issue of demonology and spiritual warfare. 

Francis Young and Brivan Levack have both pointed out that hardline cessationism as an anti-Catholic polemical stance was taken up in the Anglican tradition partly to differentiate from Catholicism and also to delegitimize Catholic exorcism as magic and superstition.  On the Catholic side anxiety about the similarities exorcism had to magic was significant enough that the exorcistic formulas that were in the earliest baptismal rites were progressively cut out over a few centuries.  Jason Storm could probably point out that this would be part of the triangular dynamic of legitimate religion, illegitimate superstition and science.  What gets counted as legitimate can change over time.  

Popular belief in demons or the restless dead haven't gone away over a thousand or so years.  If it seems that way because we are modern and "Western" ignore that.  Only a modern post-industrial Western society could keep cranking out films about exorcisms.  This year the United States had successful theatrical releases for anime like Demon Slayer: Infinity Castle and Chainsaw Man, to say nothing of K-Pop Demon Hunters becoming popular. The conceit that the spirit of a restless dead girl could become a full-blown demon was a story line in Rumiko Takahashi's manga Inuyasha decades ago.  Mira being half human and half demon just means she's a new variation on a trope that Inuyasha and countless other tales have had.  

Those are the kinds of things that persist in popular imagination even if academic theologians want to talk about other things like political theology or maybe how "we" are all Christian nationalists now.  In those kinds of moments I am reminded that the Swiss Reformed lay theologian Emil Brunner remarked that the questions that interest and trouble the layman tend to be both more interesting and more difficult than the questions beloved by professional theologians.  

What progressive scholars have regularly noted is that there's never a conversation about demons without talking about who the demons are and how often and reliably the demons or the demonized are "other", people who don't fit into the ideal/idealized culture that people in ivory towers talk about.  The paradoxical aspect of this observation is that in the 21st century progressives tend to demonize socially conservative evangelical Protestants and integralist Catholics.  It's not that I can't understand how and why progressives and secularists could think and feel that way, I'm merely noting the paradox.  The impulse is so strong, apparently, to bracket the unwanted others as demonic in some capacity, that even those who profess to reject such moves on principle can't help making those moves in dealing with and addressing flesh and blood movements they don't want prevailing upon the seats of power.

What I have been finding curious in reading about music is that I find the concept of ethnic or national essentialism to have had what I would regard as actually demonic effects.  Maybe liberal Protestantism turned to intersubjectivity as a way to get past the impasse of the Cartesian split but if the intersubjective modes at hand turned out to be race and nation (per Theodore Vial's work on some arguably bad side effects of thinking about group identity in Schleiermacher) then there is a sense in which some of the most pressing problems of social cohesion and neighborly living in the 21st century had roots in what liberal Prussian Protestants thought was a grand solution to the problem of a lack of German cohesion in the face of Napoleonic conquests in the long 19th century.

What I'm mulling over offline is how it seems partisans of absolute music cordon off a lot of black American music as inferior because there is some inherently lesser range of possibilities in the "musical material".  Now that is manifestly nonsense and I'm not going to rehearse all the blogging I've done in the last ten years toward the aim of advocating for ragtime and blues based sonatas and fugues.  But the social constructivist associationist rebuttal to the racism in partisans of absolute music has not, I think, been able to successfully surmount the problem of tethering musical materials to racialized expression.  To say that all music is racially linked is, unfortunately, conceding the very point antiracists should most want to reject and for obviously understandable reasons.  That is why I have leaned toward steering away from theories of ethnos and race altogether toward how we proprioceptively engage musical time and space.  I don't even have binocular vision, actually, but I can get how we live through space and time by way of integrated senses and this is something we can talk about regardless of our skin color, ethnic heritage, or self-identification by way of race.

I think the antiracists want some great things that a constructivist conception of all music as racially produced will probably prevent them from attaining.  Conversely, the absolutists in absolute music tend to be intellectually dishonest about the alleged impossibility of certain types of musical material to be compatible with "musical argument".  

What can be fruitful about a deep dive into histories of demonologies is something some progressives and secular scholars have pointed out, that who gets demonized should be something we think about.  But there's a more basic intra-scholastic question that needs to be asked, if today's scholars feel obliged to combat the demons their scribal forebears put to page what demons are those scholars creating now that future scholar-scribes may feel compelled to denounce generations from now? 

In Christian theological terms I can appreciate Emil Brunner's terse statement that fundamentalists tend to want to have detailed taxonomies of demons but the Bible is equivocal and unclear; more important for Christians is to say that Christ defeated and overcame all these powers.  

On the other hand, I think Robert Ewusie Moses made a good counterpoint in his book Practices of Power, that Christian life and the life of the mind for a Christian entails confronting what powers and principalities Christ overcame in each age and living in light of that.  I.e. James Cone could assert Christ overcame the powers of white supremacism on the Cross.  I'll say "Amen" to that even if I'm not sure Cone didn't go way, way off the rails in later work after Black Theology and Black Power. 

Given how much tension and debate I've seen within musicology on the legacy of racial essentialist theories about what music X is or music Y isn't, someone like Heiser floating the idea that the biblical literature suggests the possibility of malign spiritual forces being behind anything like that may be rampantly speculative but it's not necessarily more rampantly speculative than advocating for figural readings of passages from The Book of Numbers ... is it? 

I may not be impressed with Heiser's work by the time I finally finish it but it's also not really unfair to ask whether or not the failure of Western academic theologians to address these issues (if they're doctrinally conservative) hasn't made it all the easier for figures like Heiser to simply introduce mainstream scholarly ideas about henotheism in the Levant to otherwise evangelical readers.

Appeals to, say, how the oracle to the King of Tyre in Ezekiel refers to Satan without even explaining why cuts the feet out from under any objection that someone like Heiser has become popular.

Pointing out that Jews have never interpreted the oracle in that way is something Hector Patmore discussed at length in a book published by Brill but I'm trying to wrap up this special links-for-the-weekend post by now.

So it's done. :)

the theme at Mark Driscoll's twitter feed this week is fear (update 9-4-22, toward a proposal that the Driscolls now use forgiveness teaching as a form of apotropaic magic)

Although he's known to block any number of people on Twitter from viewing or responding to his tweets, the fact that Wenatchee The Hatchet isn't even on Twitter and never plans to be means, paradoxically, that it's never been that hard to keep tabs on his tweets.

For whatever reason, since the August 26, 2022 Mike Cosper interview with Dan Allender in The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill series came along ...

https://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/podcasts/rise-and-fall-of-mars-hill/bonus-episode-conversation-with-dan-allender.html

...Mark Driscoll's tweets are full of talk about fear.

https://twitter.com/PastorMark/status/1563601993246990336
Pastor Mark Driscoll
@PastorMark
Fear will come upon you, but you can't let it in you.
11:59 AM · Aug 27, 2022

https://twitter.com/PastorMark/status/1563964381196652545
Pastor Mark Driscoll
@PastorMark
There’s always something to fear. You can look out in fear or look up in faith.
11:59 AM · Aug 28, 2022

https://twitter.com/PastorMark/status/1564327027188056066
Pastor Mark Driscoll
@PastorMark
Faith and fear can't coexist.
12:00 PM · Aug 29, 2022·

https://twitter.com/PastorMark/status/1564689660672184323
Sometimes fear does more damage to you than the person or thing you're afraid of.
12:01 PM · Aug 30, 2022

https://twitter.com/PastorMark/status/1565052048160264193
When the spirit of fear oppress you it turns into false prophecy over your life.
12:01 PM · Aug 31, 2022

Other people can do the screencap thing if they like.  

POSTSCRIPT ... 9-1-2022

Still running with the theme as of 

https://twitter.com/PastorMark/status/1565414436038479872

You need to stop worrying about the outcome and instead worship through the process.

12:01 PM · Sep 1, 2022

POSTSCRIPT 9-4-2022

https://twitter.com/PastorMark/status/1566501851457019904

Forgiving others allows us to move on into the destiny that God has for us.

12:02 PM · Sep 4, 2022

In his post Mars Hill writings Driscoll has leaned heavily on a teaching that says we(you) need to forgive people in order to be free of demonic influence and that if you don't forgive you are saying you want Satan instead of Jesus to reign in your life. It's an idea he had back in 2008, too, for that matter but within a post-Mars Hill context via Win Your War and tweets there's a different element to it.  Some Christians approach spiritual warfare as a set of instructions about how Christians corporately and publicly give witness to the reign of Christ as having already conquered the powers and principalities.  This shows up in books by Esther Acolatse, Daniel K Darko, Robert Ewusie Moses and other pastors and theologians from Ghana and Kenya.  Acolatse has noted that in some African church movements there is a tendency for Christians to treat spiritual warfare as a kind of medicinal individual one-shot deal. Another way to put it, since I've seen this pattern in my life back in my Pentecostal days is that there are a lot of Christians who regard spiritual warfare instructions in Ephesians 6 not as instructions for how Christian communities bear public witness to Christ together so much as a kind of anti-magic that is paradoxically magical.  

In Driscoll's post-Mars Hill variant on teaching about the need for Christians to forgive it's hard for me to shake a sense that he prescribes forgiveness as a blanket "You need to forgive them so Satan doesn't have a ground to attack you".  Yet to go by Mark and Grace Driscoll's statements in Win Your War and comments from people who have left The Trinity Church the Driscolls seem to still experience what they regard as spiritual attacks. As I've discussed in the past looking at Judges 9 and the afflicting spirit the Lord sent to King Saul in the Hebrew Bible we don't even find "demons" as conventionally understood from medieval European Christian diabology moving forward--instead we find the Lord occasionally sent spirits to afflict corrupt, self-serving and wicked leaders to torment them or deceive their prophets.  

This is a commonplace element in the Hebrew Bible when it comes to leaders being afflicted by the Lord for abuse or misappropriation of power but in the Driscolls' writings they chalk up any spiritual attacks they face to "intense seasons of ministry". The possibility that they opened themselves up to spiritual torment because of their abuses and injustices has,  to the best of my knowledge, literally never come up once in their twenty years of being public ministry figures together.  If Mark doesn't publicly confess he wronged people and leans on a forgiveness doctrine that functionally works as apotropaic magic the purpose of forgiveness may no longer even be about relational reconciliation or repentance at all in any Christian sense of the term, but a kind of protective spell-casting that is expected to protect the person who prays from being attacked).  

CT v CT again: Driscoll alleges that Christian Theology (which ones?) err by defining spiritual warfare as personal rather than systemic (which means he's never read Caird, Berkhof, Wink or Stringfellow)

There were moments in reading Mark Driscoll’s new e-book where I wondered if he had suddenly taken the side of Greg Boyd (sarcasm alert): 

Christian Theology vs. Critical Theory

© 2021 by Mark Driscoll

ISBN: 978-1-7374103-7-9 (Paperback)

ISBN: 978-1-7374103-8-6 (E-book)

Page 20

 

The point is that unified unbelievers seeking to make Heaven on earth without God are more powerful than divided believers. Jesus said that a house divided cannot stand up but will fall. Knowing this, the Critic behind Critical Theory, the same spirit that was at work in Babel (also known as Babylon), is seeking to divide believers and unify unbelievers to dismantle systems and institutions and redistribute wealth and power to build their version of Heaven on earth without God. Simply stated, this is a counterfeit of God’s Kingdom ruled by King Jesus - our kingdom ruled by us.

 

Unified unbelievers seeking to make Heaven on earth without God are more powerful than divided believers? On the basis of what?  Driscoll went on to make another proposal that struck me as confident but baffling:

 

The double standards of vulnerability in Mark Driscoll’s spiritual warfare teachings--more thoughts on Episode 8 of The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill

Of necessity a podcast can only be so long.  Mike Cosper recently alluded to Mark Driscoll regarding women who wanted to befriend his wife as threats, without necessarily quoting Driscoll directly in Episode 8 of The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill.

https://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/podcasts/rise-and-fall-of-mars-hill/mars-hill-podcast-mark-driscoll-demon-hunting.html 

For those who want to know what Cosper was alluding to, here you go:

On Episode 8, “Demon Hunting” of The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill, disputing that Driscoll’s early influences on spiritual warfare were charismatic by way of his copious statements to the show otherwise

https://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/podcasts/rise-and-fall-of-mars-hill/mars-hill-podcast-mark-driscoll-demon-hunting.html

 

Well, there is something I should probably get out of the way about Episode 8 up front. It would be easy to take as given the statement that Mark Driscoll’s approach to spiritual warfare was influenced by charismatic theology. The trouble is that Driscoll didn’t identify as charismatic in any formal or affiliated way during his Mars Hill years. In 2001 or 2002 he said in person he leaned more cessationist than charismatic and he told me that.  As in at one point I had dinner with Mark Driscoll and told him I’m a continuationist, if a very, very cautious one and he said he leaned cessationist but there were continuationists whose work he liked such as Wayne Grudem and Gordon Fee.  I’ve liked a few of Gordon Fee’s books but I grew up Assemblies of God. 

In other words, what I'm about to do in arguing that Cosper and company fell short is based on my having been a member of Mars Hill and having had actual exchanges with Mark in the 2000-2004 period of Mars Hill where my continuationist background and stance was known and Mark and I compared notes on things in a period where he has since revealed his convictions shifted. I.e. I'm about to point out that it's not especially accurate to describe Driscoll getting his ideas from charismatic theology if you know anything at all about his history and reading habits from the 1999 through 2004 period.

supplemental reading for those who heard Episode 5 of The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill, a survey of materials formerly and currently available from Driscoll germane to the topic of what married women were told (or expected) to do

I have been thinking about episode 5 from The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill.  It was pretty well-done but I confess to ambivalence. I am glad that the Scotland sermon was quoted so extensively, although the audio sounded a little sped-up to make sure there was room for the whole clip in the podcast.  Nevertheless, I agree with exactly how much of the excerpt they quoted.  Longtime readers will not be surprised I think so because I transcribed the entire anecdote myself here at Wenatchee The Hatchet. 

I have, it turns out, written considerably more on these topics as a single guy than I would have guessed I would have but sex, sexuality, gender, and gender roles were so inextricably part of Mark Driscoll’s shtick it is impossible to not run into them. 

I have mentioned previously that I wrote the following series:

Mark Driscoll and the Gospel of (escaping) White Trash

https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/search/label/mark%20driscoll%20and%20the%20gospel%20of%20white%20trash

and Mark Driscoll and the Influence or Porn

https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/search/label/mark%20driscoll%20and%20the%20influence%20of%20porn

Mark and Grace Driscoll's Win Your War chapter 20 on Native American spirituality--a dumpster fire of historical and cultural laziness about PNW tribes, with a goal of talking about "counterfeits to Christ" with no sign of fake resurrection rituals titleholders undertook through the ritual killing of their slaves in the PNW

I had meant to get around to writing more about Mark and Grace Driscoll's Win Your War and today I'm going to discuss chapter 20 from that book, but not before I frame my discussion of a passage from said book in light of recent headlines about mass graves and residential schools on the one hand, and blogging in substacklandia on the topic of Native Americans on the other.  

A Prelude and Fugue on demons and exorcism in American civil religion (by way of statue toppling and punditry on critical theory)

What I’m about to present is not so much an essay in a usual sense but more as the literary equivalent of a prelude with a fugue--a path of reading by way of a river of citations.  Think of it as a literally prosaic variation on a methodology of quotation used in T. S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland”.

This is a survey of some reading I was doing in 2020 on the topic of statue toppling, statue vandalism, and the reactions of leftist, progressive, liberal, conservative and maybe even some reactionary responses.  I saw a fair bit of coverage that tacitly discussed the toppling of the statues of slave traders and slave owners in terms of political history but less often in terms of civic religion.  The conservative bromides about how toppling statues was a bid to erase history seemed to me in egregiously bad faith because, well, that may give me the opportunity to quote extravagantly from Jaques Ellul’s book The New Demons on the concept of the sacred as it relates to political life.  So ...

Dale Coulter has an article at Firebrand that is a good overview of the neo-charismatic/New Apostolic Reformation scene that has gained momentum since the Obama and Trump administrations

One of the weirdest things, as someone who has tried to keep track of theological ideas, is that there's been a new branch of charismatic Christianity in the last forty years that retained all of its Pentecostal ancestry on pneumatology but has added a post-Rushdooney post-millenialist cultural mandate, which, for this formerly Pentecostal Presbyterian is what I'd personally describe as the worst of both worlds (the untethered "I have super-powers" pneumatology combined with the post-millenialist entitlement mentality that was an element in Manifest Destiny).  The article can be read at the link below

https://firebrandmag.com/articles/neocharismatic-christianity-and-the-rise-of-the-new-apostolic-reformation 

it's a good introductory piece on the last forty years of neo-charismatic/New Apostolic Reformation Christianity in the U.S. to read alongside Julia Duin's recent work on how a failure to distinguish between these groups just mentioned and evangelicalism can lead to sloppy reporting on which evangelicals have been backing Trump. wjocj upi cam read be;pw.

updated version of the reading list from November 2020 on exorcism, diabology, Jesus as exorcist, spiritual warfare, and associated themes (updated 7-4-2026)

Updated list, titles in blue are books I've finished.  Bold indicates books I liked/found helpful. There are tiny summaries in some cases and full-blown reviews that need to be written in some cases.  Some of the books in the list are, predictably, downright awful others are fantastic.

Alan Jacobs had some posts on types of dualisms where he pit Obama against Kendi but in a way that seems sloppy, a sloppy prelude to a possible future post on the default of spiritual warfare manuals in pop U.S. Christianity to a white racial frame

https://blog.ayjay.org/two-quotations-on-american-politics/

Barack Obama:

The point I’ve always made to Ta-Nehisi, the point I sometimes make to Michelle, the point I sometimes make to my own kids — the question is, for me, “Can we make things better?”

I used to explain to my staff after we had a long policy debate about anything, and we had to make a decision about X or Y, “Well, if we do this I understand we’re not getting everything we’re hoping for, but is this better?” And they say yes, and I say, “Well, better is good. Nothing wrong with better.”

Ibram X. Kendi:

There’s no saving America’s soul. There’s no restoring the soul. There’s no fighting for the soul of America. There’s no uniting the souls of America. There is only fighting off the other soul of America.

Obama and Trump did not poison the American soul any more than Biden can heal it. Trump battled for the soul of injustice, and the voters sent him home. Soon, President Biden can battle for the soul of justice.

Our past breaths do not bind our future breaths. I can battle for the soul of justice. And so can you. And so can we. Like our ancestors, for our children. We can change the world for Gianna Floyd. We can — once and for all — win the battle between the souls of America.

This morning I’m doing my weekly reading of the news, and I’ve just read these two stories, from the same magazine, back to back. The contrast is illuminating. One sees politics as the hard slow work of improving the world; the other see politics as the movement towards a final confrontation, on the plain of Megiddo I suppose, between the forces of Righteousness and the forces of Evil.

https://blog.ayjay.org/the-two-parties/

The United States of America has long had a two-party political system, but it now has a two-party social system also. The social system is not divided between Republicans and Democrats but rather between Manichaeans and Humanists. The Manichaean Party is headed by Donald Trump. He works in close concert with Ibram X. Kendi, Eric Metaxas, Xavier Becerra, and Rush Limbaugh, but really, the Party wouldn’t exist at all without him. The Humanist Party, by contrast, doesn’t have an obvious leadership structure and doesn’t make a lot of noise; its chief concern is less to enforce an agenda than to make it a little harder for the Manichaeans to enforce theirs.
The Manichaeans say, all together and in a very loud voice, You are wholly with us or wholly against us! Make your decision! I don’t know when I’ve had an easier choice.

Jacobs might feel perfectly comfortable bracketing Metaxas and Kendi into paradoxically being on the same team.  But if Kendi's dualism even "can" be compared to the spiritual warfare mentality of Jericho March types or Eric Metaxas, then Jacobs could more studious about explaining overlapping methodologies in a way that could account for the obviously real differences between someone like Metaxas and someone like Kendi.  Most people can differentiate between ideologues who are "left" and "right" or "progressive" and "reactionary" and one of the problems with Jacobs' hasty taxonomy is that I don't think he can sustain a case that among the ideologues we're looking at people who are functionally totalitarian.  An ideologue might have a litmus test in which anti-racism must manifest in support for reparations, which Kendi has indicated in some writing in the past, but that's not the same as casting doubt on the legitimacy of electoral processes and simultaneously claiming a divine mandate for Trump's victory.  Maybe some Trump supporters THINK Kendi has done that but I haven't sensed that Kendi has!  

But Kendi's language does suggest that there are progressive and conservative voices who have no problem invoking what in traditional theological talk would be known as the language of spiritual warfare.  Kendi has definitely invoked and evoked the idea of a Manichaean struggle between forces of good and evil, I'll grant Jacobs that much.  But whether or not Obama's proceduralism is necessary a healthy alternative to Kendi's activism I am not entirely sure about.

I don't think it's actually wrong, writing as a Christian, to simply state that white supremacist mentalities should be considered demonic strongholds in Western cultural history and that racial supremacist views can and should be considered "doctrines of demons".  There, just put that in print for the record.  I don't have to agree with several specific "how" elements of Kendi's policy recommendations or approach to historiography to agree that the "what" of white supremacist defaults is something that should be combatted.  

Having just slogged through John H Walton and J Harvey Walton's mostly time-wasting book Demons and Spirits in Biblical Theology: Reading the Biblical Text in Its Cultural and Literary Context, one of the things I found annoying about the book, besides the authors' sloppy and vague definition of "conflict theology" and a reticence to just admit their real target is Greg Boyd's open theistic conception of spiritual warfare is that they misrepresent, I think, Jeffrey Burton Russell's five books' project on the history of Abrahamic religious thought about personified evil as though the eruption of functional dualism is, however unbiblical the Waltons think it is, is something that has to be best battled against by exegeting demons out of every proof-text ever used by Jews or Christians with respect to evil spirits.  The irony of such a project is that within ostensibly secular or mainstream progressive, liberal and exvangelical scenes invoking spiritual warfare language has been overt in the liberal/progressive wing of Christianity (a la Greg Boyd) even more so than within evangelical contexts (although not at all that subset of evangelicalism known as Pentecostalism but I'm saving the topics of forty-plus books on spiritual warfare, exorcism, diabology, the Watchers tradition in 2nd Temple Judaism and the like for some other time!)

Take this podcast title "Powers and Principalities".

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/coming-soon-powers-principalities/id1135731794?i=1000485984924

...

Powers & Principalities, a new podcast series from Blake about the systems and institutions that propagate white evangelical & Christian nationalist sociopolitical power. Debuting in late August 2020.

Follow along in the Exvangelical feed, or subscribe to the new show directly on Spotify. (The feed is new, and will appear on other platforms soon.)

...

That's openly using Ephesians 6 language about powers and principalities to describe the systems and institutions that propagate white evangelical Christian nationalist power.  That the white evangelicals were merely aping and aspiring to the power they saw the mainlines have before them seems to not come up so much in discussions of evangelicalism.  If, as is easily done, evangelicals are punchlines about how uncreative they are then do mainlines and progressives think that evangelicals are solely guilty of Manifest Destiny ideas or have evangelicals in the early 21st century become, possibly, a useful scapegoat for still embracing ideas that they parasitically absorbed from the mainlines they were extracting themselves from between the last 100 and 50 years? 

After all, check out the index of episodes.

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/exvangelical/id1135731794

Now even as a moderately conservative Calvinist I've been bugged by what I'd have to call the default "white racial frame" in pop level spiritual warfare books.  It's a topic I do hope to actually blog about later this year.  I'd add books on the topic of spiritual warfare by African American theologians and am open to recommendations that ... aren't Charisma House or in that orbit.  I've got some articulate and thoughtful books by African pastors and theologians I'm working through right now, actually, and added some Andrei Orlov to my list recently, too.  All that is a tangent with a theme, which is to say that I think American Christians may benefit from perusing through spiritual warfare manuals at the pop and even academic level and thinking about what someone like Merrill Unger was getting at in his dismissive remarks about "ethnic demonology".  

By the way, I am not intending to castigate the Waltons in a categorical way.  I have heard some folks say positive things about John Walton's work but I am reminded of something Jim West blogged a decade ago about how Walton seemed eager to rescue the text from something rather than just exegete it. 

Meanwhile, I refrained from blogging about this stuff last month because I was determined to be on a blogging vacation but this is something I wanted to blog at least something about for a few weeks.  It would be one thing for Jacobs to stake out an overtly and explicitly anti-utopian stance, as Richard Taruskin has done for decades, regardless of where the utopians formally land on a spectrum (I can't forget Taruskin's very sharp-edged observation that it doesn't matter how far "left" or "right" you go in European history seeing as in both extremes somehow people agree that the "solution" is to kill more Jews!).  That reminds me of something my Native American relatives used to tell me about how the American Civil War worked, that there were white racists in the North fighting white racists in the South about how to treat black people and after that sorta ended they agreed that they all wanted to gang up and kill Indians!  

Maybe it's because I gravitated into the realm of the hair-splitting Reformed scene but Jacobs' "two-party system" seemed far too pat.  It doesn't mean I plan to stop reading Jacobs over that, I read people I don't always agree with, I even read people with whom I have vehement disagreements on a semi-regular basis.  

The other thing is, I've read enough progressive and leftist writers to get a sense that using Obama as the example of a counter to Kendi has a flaw in it, which is that the history of injustice can often enough be masked by the appearance of reasonable proceduralism ... the trouble with that being that it's kind of like "witchcraft". Susan R. Garrett, in her book The Demise of the Devil in the Gospel of Luke pointed out something simple and obvious but necessary, that generally witchcraft is less a cohesive, definable set of practices than a polemical accusation.  Alan Jacobs treating Kendi and Metaxas as somehow combined into the second party in a "two party system" seems comparably sloppy. 

since 2019, an official 180 degree turn from Mark Driscoll on interpreting Genesis 6:1-4 ... so he's caught up to the last thirty years of Enochic scholarship but ... why would Satan try to replicate the Incarnation before it happened?

A year and a half ago Driscoll publicly did a 180 on his take on Genesis 6:1-4.  So he does change his views, and has been, for those who have mistakenly still referred to him as a Calvinist when he's said the TULIP is garbage (although the TULIP itself is more recent than many non-Calvinists might realize).  So ... Genesis 6:1-4 can now be thought of as referring to precisely the angelic-human hybrids that Driscoll said couldn't be what Genesis was referring to in the Mars Hill Genesis series circa 2004-2005:

https://www.facebook.com/pastormark/videos/does-genesis-6-teach-that-aliens-mated-with-women-and-created-a-super-race/591300321339707/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9EMwsjyL9ow

postlude to Throckmorton interview with Turner and Bruskas: Justin Dean tweets links to interview, discovers he's been blocked by Driscoll

Now I've written that I loathe Twitter in general and refuse to use it. This does not mean I don't keep track of things on Twitter that seem relevant to me.  So, for instance, it did not pass unnoticed that Justin Dean tweeted links to Warren Throckmorton's interview with Sutton Turner and Dave Bruskas.

a reading list, for the moment presented without much explanation (11-14-2020, but it's a list of books on exorcism, diabology, The Watchers tradition, and spiritual warfare manuals in Christian writings and academic commentary thereon spanning 1895 to 2020)

But you'll see there's, ahem, a very persistent theme after the break. (updated as of 11-15-2020)

Mark Driscoll vs St. Jerome on whether Daniel 4 describes Nebuchadnezzar as becoming demon possessed as the reason for going insane

Since publishing the book Win Your War through Charisma, Mark Driscoll has been revisiting the topic of spiritual warfare and diabology from time to time.  Recently he has taken up a penchant I have sometimes seen, ironically, at watchdog blogs in which the headline is a question that turns out to be rhetorical.  "Was X possibly Y?" turns out, when you read the post, to be a declaration that X is totally Y on the basis of Z, whether or not Z turns out to be plausible evidence a concatenation of quotes that may or may not be in contest, or outright fabrication or assertion.  

Earlier this week Driscoll published a post that was titled "Was King Nebuchadnezzar Demon Possessed?"  There's no textual case for that on the basis of any reading of Daniel 4 but Driscoll doesn't let that stop him from asserting away.  That's the TL:DR version for you. If you want to read a more extensive response to Driscoll's claim, which will be quoted extensively ...

Wendy Alsup in 2019 shared that Mark Driscoll has considered her a contentious women, so we revisit Driscoll's February 2008 declaration that she was fantastic and not like demonic busybody gossips in his spiritual warfare session. So, what happened?

Mark Driscoll, in a 2008 teaching session on spiritual warfare, discussed the "ordinary demonic" of gossip as especially relevant to the ladies.  This was a teaching session given in February 2008 that is so extensive it required a series of sixty some posts to transcribe most of it and discuss its content.  
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/search/label/spiritual%20warfare%202008

http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/11/2-5-2008-spiritual-warfare-part-2-part_70.html

http://download.marshill.se/files/MH%20Vodcast%20Video/2008/
http://download.marshill.se/files/MH%20Vodcast%20Video/2008/20080205_the-devil_vodcast.m4v
February 5, 2008
Pastor Mark Driscoll
Part 2: The Devil

49:58
How about this one? Idle gossip and busybodying. 1 Timothy 5:11-15. THIS one is amazing. Ladies this one is especially for you. Some of you say, "Oh, it's not me." Yeah, it is. [emphasis added] 1 Timothy 5:11-15, "but refuse to enroll younger widows for when their passions draw them away from Christ they desire to marry and so incur condemnation for having abandoned their former faith.  Besides that they learn to be idlers"  Women learn how to make a lot of free time. Going about from house to house. Well now it would be from email to email and from phone call to phone call. Technology makes idle busybodying far more effective than ever.

And not only idlers but also gossips. They like to talk about people. How are you doing? What are you doing? And this isn't sisterly accountability, this is "I need to know what everybody's doing because I like to know what everybody's doing and then I can tell other people what other people are doing and then I can say, `Hey, you need to pray for so-and-so.' and I can make it sound spiritual so that when I'm gossiping and busy-bodying I'm doing so in a way that seems really Jesus-like." And busybodies, they need to know what everybody's doing. They need to know what everybody's doing, saying what they should not. So I would have younger widows marry, bear children and manage their household, right? Stay busy, and give the adversary (that's Satan) no occasion for slander. For some have already strayed after Satan. Hmm.

A woman who's a gossip and a busybody; a woman who has to put her nose in everybody's business and knows what everybody's going on; know what they're doing, she's working with Satan. Now I know most women would say: "No, no, no. I'm not Satanic, I'm concerned. I'm not Satanic, I'm an intercessor. I'm a prayer warrior. I'm not Satanic, I'm an accountability partner.  I'm not Satanic, I'm a concerned friend."  Okay, you're a Satanic intercessory prayer warrior accountability partner concerned friend but just start the whole list with "Satanic" so that we don't misunderstand your job description. 

Now there's a difference between someone inviting you into their life and saying, "I want to be friends, I want to have an accountable  relationship." and you pushing yourself into everyone's life, okay?  I'll tell you, in the history of Mars Hill, I mean, I have had to put up a firewall, a moat, guard dogs, and a high wall with barbed wire on the top, and snipers behind it, around my wife. There are certain women who, they just need to know what Grace is doing and they are determined, they say things like, uh, "Hey, we need to have dinner with your family."

[slight chuckle] No you don't.
"Hey, we need to have coffee."
No you don't. 
"Hey, phone number."
 What? Nope.
"Email." Nope. 

Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope.

"Oh, come on." Nope.
"But I thought you were our pastor."
I am and my first lesson is to tell you you're Satanic.
"Oh, come on, in our last church the pastor's wife [sob] she was my best friend and I got to talk to her all the time."
Well, she was Satanic, too.  Give me her number, I'll call her and tell her. We'll help her out.

You ladies KNOW these women. Right? How many of you ladies know these women? They will try first with the hyper-spiritual, "Oh, praise the Lord! I'd love to pray for you. Let's get together. Let's do Christian community. Let's go to heart." If you decline, then they emotionally manipulate, [inhales, sobbing voice], "I thought we were friends, I thought you loved me. I don't have anybody to talk to." It's all manipulation. It's FEMALE manipulation.  Some of you ladies, right now? You think, "I can't believe he said that." It's all true. It's Satanic, Satanic.

Paul says, "Don't be a busybody, stay busy." Right? Your husband, your kids, your family, your home, Jesus Christ. You got things to do.

Busybodies stay busy inserting themselves into everyone else's life. In some churches there are certain women, if you call them, they'll know everything that's going on because, somehow, they know everything. There's a difference between being a woman who is invited into someone's life for friendship, prayer and accountability, and a woman who emotionally manipulates and is pushy and is sometimes hyperspiritual and demanding and forces herself in because she's a drama queen and has to be at the center of all the drama. That is a Satanic woman.

You need to believe that and the worst thing you can do is accomodate her. Okay, we'll have you over for dinner once. And then, the next month, it's "Okay, buddy, we haven't been together in a month. We need to get together again. I'm sure a lot has happened in your life and I don't know what it is and I need to know because I need to know everything. I have a God complex of omniscience. I want to know everything about everybody." And what you find with these people, Paul says, they tend to be gossips, meaning you don't just talk to them, then they talk to other people.  "Well, did you know their marriage is struggling? Did you know that she's depressed?  Did you know that  she's post-partum?  Do you know that, sexually, her husband's impotent?" These are the conversations I've heard in this building. Really?

Sometimes womens' ministry is the cesspool that this kind of activity flourishes in. Some have asked, "Why don't you have womens' ministry?" The answer is we do, but it's, you have to be very careful, it's like juggling knives. You put the wrong women in charge of womens' ministry, the drama queen, the gossip mama, all of a sudden all the women come together, tell her everything, she becomes the pseudo-elder  quasi-matriarch; she's got the dirt on everybody and sometimes the women all get together to just rip on their husbands in the name of prayer requests. Happens all the time. Happens all the time.  We have worked very hard so that the women who teach here are like Wendy Alsup who I really love and appreciate and respect. She's not like that. It is not that no woman should lead, that no woman should teach, that no woman should in a position of authority over other women  under the authority of their husband, Jesus and the elders it's just that the wrong women tend to want it. The wrong women tend to want it and they tend to want it for the wrong reasons. And sometimes it's the humble woman, who isn't fighting to be the center of drama, control and power; who doesn't have to be up front; she's usually the one who is most capable and qualified.  [emphases added]

And for you single men as well I would say be very, very careful because if you're on staff at Mars Hill  (everything I say sounds terrible, this will just be added to the pile) there are certain women who will tell you, "I want to marry a pastor." Really? You should want to marry a Christian who loves Jesus, loves you, loves your kids should God give them to you. I've lectured enough Bible colleges and seminaries, the young women who come up and say, "I want to marry a pastor"  my immediate default question is, "Are you a gossip? Are you a busybody? Are you a drama queen?" "No. No, I feel called to serve the Lord."  Well, you can serve the Lord without being called to be a pastor's wife in fact, take it from me, it's easier to be a woman and serve the Lord than being married to a pastor.   You single  guys, you gotta be careful, man. There are some women, they want to marry the pastor so they can be the center of power, authority; they can be the first lady; everybody knows them, everybody wants to be their friend, everybody wants to tell them everything; and they can be the center of all the drama. Run for your life. Run for your life. Run for your life. It's Satanic.

See?  I need you women to really search your own heart. Are you Satanic? Is this still part of your flesh, this sick desire in you to know everybody's business? I'm not saying you don't have friends but how much are you on the internet? How much time do you spend emailing? How much time do you spend crying and freaking out and knowing everybody's business and on the phone and having to meet with people because, "Did you know so-and-so did such-and-such and so-and-so is feeling this way and did you--?" Are you the center of LOTS of activity? Why? It's Satanic. It's Satanic. I think I've made my point. 

Now the thing that's interesting about that February 2008 statement is that it may have been given by Mark Driscoll before the Alsups had decided to leave Mars Hill.  Wendy might have to clarify the specifics and details of a timeline of when things happened.  I mention all of these because Wendy wrote on the topic of the late Rachel Held Evans earlier in the year and mentioned that at some point since 2008 Mark Driscoll decided and told at least someone that Wendy was a contentious woman.

https://theologyforwomen.org/2019/05/rhe-and-women-who-question.html

...

Rachel Held Evans came to my attention when I was internally questioning things at Mars Hill without the courage to verbalize it. Mark Driscoll had a low bar for labeling a questioning woman as contentious. And I didn’t have the emotional confidence to bear up under such a label. If he had labeled me contentious in the early years (as he later did), I would have believed him. [emphasis added]

Rachel began pointing out problems with Mark Driscoll’s language, and not that he “cussed” (which has always been a ridiculous distraction for those who don’t realize how much they are like Mark in his misogyny and malice toward others). Rachel pointed out Mark’s sinful misogyny long before the folks that propped him up did. She was the young boy in the tale of The Emperor’s New Clothes, the one with the courage to first say, “He’s not wearing any clothes.” As a questioner without the courage to verbalize my concerns, I will forever be grateful to RHE for leading the way. Like a Coastguard ice-breaker, she cut a path that made the way for others who followed.

But as Rachel began pointing out legitimate problems with the Neo-Reformed figurehead that was Mark Driscoll at the time, she used these problems to justify questioning the authority of Scripture. Because so many folks misused Scripture, and other well meaning folks disagreed on how to live it out in practice, the bottom line must be simply to love God and love your neighbor. Instead of other laws and instructions in Scripture hanging on that foundation, laws and instructions in Rachel’s paradigm lost their binding quality. In particular, explicit instructions concerning biological sex and sex in marriage were not binding today if they did not seem “loving” by a modern definition of love, one that often doesn’t involve self sacrifice. While Rachel gave me courage to voice my questions and concerns, she also inadvertently gave me clarity that the answer to these concerns was IN Scripture, not opposed to it. The answer was found by BETTER understanding how Scripture presents its Laws and instructions, not by writing them off as no longer relevant.

...

I have remained convinced that authors like Mark Driscoll and Rachel Held Evans are the kinds of authors we need less of in Christian popular publishing.  Even though I can respect that RHE was willing to speak up in disagreement with Mark Driscoll in spite of his popularity I couldn't help but notice that her biggest moment of dissent from his views was in the year of 2011, when she had a book of her own that was also published through Thomas Nelson, as Mark Driscoll's Real Marriage would be.  She was not saying much during the plagiarism controversy of late 2013 or the ResultSource controversy of early 2014, controversies brought into the news by Janet Mefferd and Warren Cole Smith respectively, if memory serves.  Which is to say, bluntly, progressives may have cheered the demise of Mark Driscoll but that demise was the result of a spectrum-spanning process of journalistic investigation and theological discussion.  

What I want to highlight, that I have highlighted, is Wendy pointing out that Mark Driscoll eventually did label her a contentious woman.  Whether that designation was handed out after the review of Real Marriage Wendy wrote with her husband in 2012, or earlier, I couldn't say.  The reversal of opinion and statement is the thing, that after having said "she's not like" in 2008, not like those women Mark Driscoll regarded as satanic busybodies and gossips interested in being in control, at some point after 2008 he decided Wendy Alsup was a contentious woman after all and said so enough that Wendy eventually heard about it.  

As Wendy pointed out, Mark Driscoll had a very low bar for what he regarded as contentious.  We've seen for ourselves that Mark Driscoll in 2008 was willing to joke about his regarding women as demonic who expressed interest in being friends with his wife.  Regarding women who want to be friends with your wife and say so as demonic circa 2008 and saying so to your staff probably fits the bill of having a low bar for defining a woman as contentious.  

Having discussed this in the series of posts analyzing the 2008 spiritual warfare teaching I'm drawing upon it again to establish what Wendy refers to when she wrote that Mark Driscoll had a low bar for defining what kind of woman he considered contentious, by way of demonstrating in a reverse process what things he considered praiseworthy about the ways he protected Grace Driscoll from people he considered bad influences.

https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/11/2-5-2008-spiritual-warfare-part-2-part_20.html

the pertinent anecdotes start at about 33:40

http://download.marshill.se/files/MH%20Audio/2008/20080928_sweet-to-my-taste_sd_audio.mp3
... and this is an ENORMOUS part of my relationship with Grace.  I mean I still remember when I first started seeing her she, uh, she went off to college, I was still in high school and they ran out of housing so they put her in a guys' dorm. And I was like, "What!?" so I got in the car and I drove to the university and I knocked on all the doors of all the guys on her floor. "Hi. My name is Mark. I love this woman. Anyone talks to her, touches her,  thinks about talking about touching her I will beat them. Literally I threatened twenty guys. Just knocked on every door. No way she's gonna get messed with. No way.

Later on when she transferred to another university, WSU, she's five hours away. And she moved out there and her phone wasn't hooked up yet and we didn't have cell phones. And I told her, "When you get there, go to a pay phone. Call me. Let me know you got there safe."  Well she ... didn't call so I got in the car and I drove there. Five hours.  The day I had to work. And I knocked on the door. She answered it and I said, "Whu, you didn't call." She said, "I forgot." I said, "Are you okay?" She said, "I'm okay." So, okay, good, I got in the car and I drove home. Just checking. Six hundred miles.  Who cares? It's Grace.

... even emotionally, people send her nasty emails, text messages, talk trash about me, leave the church and want to take parting shots at her. She has nothing to do with any of it. So I even put a white/black list on her email and some people so some people can email her and the rest come to me. Delete. Delete. Delete. Delete. Delete. Delete. Delete. So that she doesn't have to feel bad because people are taking shots at her. That's my girl. No shots. That's the rule. [emphasis added]
...

But Grace Driscoll trained in public relations ... so her ability to deal with the public would seem to be a given.  It would not be very difficult to say that those things Mark Driscoll boasted from the pulpit were signs of his chivalrous care for the woman he loves could be seen as paranoid, jealous and controlling. 

Between the plagiarism and the Result Source contract and patterns of behavior that could be regarded as paranoid and controlling on the part of Mark Driscoll, if Wendy concluded Driscoll had some character issues and wrote about her concerns on that issue and, in response to that, Mark Driscoll decided she was contentious then this probably tells us more about Mark Driscoll than it does about Wendy Alsup. 

What makes Driscoll's praise of Wendy so peculiar in February 2008 was this was during the same session where he explicitly said that distrust of the Mars Hill executive elders was a demonic thing.

https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/11/2-5-2008-spiritual-warfare-part-1-part_19.html

https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/11/2-5-2008-spiritual-warfare-part-1-part.html

I think one of the great myths that has come about (it's a demonic lie) is that myself, the executive elders, the senior leaders we don't care about people. I was the only one who did ANY counseling until we had 800 people. We still do tons of shepherding, counseling, spiritual warfare, conflict. But we try to do so in a way that is humble, that isn't "and here is who I served and here are the demons we cast out and here's the list of people that I've healed." That's demonic. The truth is I love the people as much--actually, more than anyone in this church. And the senior leaders, the campus pastors, the departmental leaders, the executive elders love the people in this church as much or more than anyone else in this church. And one of my great concerns is not just, "Can you hold hands and help sheep?" but "can you also flip the staff over and defend against a wolf?"  You HAVE to have that discernment, that courage, and that ability to tell someone: "You are in sin. That is false doctrine.  You are not qualified to be a leader. If you do not repent you are not welcome here. And I will speak truthfully to those who want to follow you because my job is for the well-being of the sheep."

So distrusting the Mars Hill executive elders in the wake of the 2007 governance changes and what turned out to be kangaroo court trials for Paul Petry and Bent Meyer came from a myth and a demonic lie, but Wendy was great because she wasn't like the demonic busybody gossipy women in February 2008.  But then ... something happened.  Wendy and Andy Alsup left Mars Hill some time in the 2008 year, perhaps.  Exactly when Driscoll decided Wendy was contentious can't be gleaned from Wendy's post,, but what can be understood is that Wendy deciding to publicly criticize Driscoll for his views and conduct probably had a role in Mark Driscoll changing his mind on whether Wendy was one of "those women".