Appropos of a recent pastor's discussion about effeminate worship leaders this raises the question of how we may, as Christians, discuss a man referred to as one of the great musicians and song-writers of the faith. David was, as some put it, a man's man; a man who learned how to kill from childhood. Now killing lions and tigers and bears to protect your dad's flock isn't the same as learning how to kill military adversaries but I suppose we can go with the idea that one pastor has proposed that David was a dude who learned early on how to kill and kick ass.
Except that this is the same King David who another pastor from the same church described as constantly seeming in the Psalms as a whiny emo kid who kept talking about his feelings. Huh, wonder what is up with that? How can the same King David whom one pastor at a church describes as a dude's dude can be described, by the worship pastor at the same church no less, as seeming like a self-absorbed whiny emo kid? Kind of forces you to think that one through a little bit, doesn't it? The scriptures are inspired by the Holy Spirit so if the Psalms of David present him, we may say, as a self-absorbed whiny emo boy is that because he really was one? Is that because we get to stand in judgment of the scriptures inspired by the Spirit and make them a measure by which we can pass judgment on the character of a man who was both a king and a prophet?
Surely if the man had both kingly and prophetic gifts and was annointed by the Lord through the prophet Samuel we might cautiously broach the subject of whether David was either a man's man (who loved Jonathan more than he loved women as he recounted it in the book of Samuel) or that whiny emo boy (who in those whiny emo songs thanks the Lord for giving him the strength to bend a bow of bronze and the ability to kill his adversaries in battle). Obviously neither the dude of dudes nor the whiny emo boy depictions offered do justice to who King David was even via the necessarily incomplete account of his life we get from the scriptures.
The dude of dudes David was a negligent and spoiling parent who did not take any action at all to right the wrong of his son raping his daughter. He also lamented the death of his son Absalom in such a shamefully public fashion Joab warned him that if this persisted the army that just saved his kingdom would desert him and the people would refuse to follow him. He also urged his son Solomon to kill political liabilities whom he collaborated with during his own life. Yet we are told David was a man after God's own heart. And he was, it's just that this didn't keep him from being a nasty piece of work all the same.
The whiny emo boy David was a brilliant tactician and a savvy politician. He was able to forge military alliances and set up politically expedient marriages (not that all evangelicals will be happy to preach that part of David's life for some understandable reasons). He was also shrewd at deception to save his own life. He was pragmatic enough to not try to conquer all the places that would have been part of the promised land so as to create military buffer states and maintain alliances with naval empires. He was able to keep the region of Israel stable enough to allow a lot of trade to happen. This was, among many other things, what made him a good king. He was able to be a servant to the people by not merely fighting battles that gave him glory and made him look good but fighting battles that actually benefited God's people.
Unlike his predecessor Saul, David was willing to fight battles that served the people as much or more as himself. Unlike Saul, when challenged about wrong-doing he was actually capable of not only admitting he was wrong but doing things differently after confrontation. So if those kinds of things made King David a whiny emo boy then may we all who name the name of Christ be more like that whiny emo boy.
Thursday, July 14, 2011
Mark Driscoll, William Wallace II, and Pussified Nation Part 268
http://theresurgence.com/2011/07/13/the-issue-under-a-lot-of-issues
Gender. Is it a socially constructed reality or a God-given identity?
That’s a significant question, and how you answer it has massive implications. The question of gender underlies many current cultural conflicts and theological controversies that go beyond even the long standing debates about whether or not a woman can be a pastor and whether or not a man is to function as the head of his home.
So the title of this entry linked above is "The Issue Under a Lot of Issues". That sure is handy. Perhaps with a little judicious editing of fonts this could be recast as ...
The Issue Under a Lot of Issues
That looks a bit more like it in Driscoll land. And for what it's worth I'm totally convinced that Driscoll has convinced himself and all his executive elder buddies probably also think that that's how this works.
But the blogosphere response to Driscoll's request for stories about pussified worship leaders has been to say Driscoll is making stupid frat boy locker room jokes, which he invited. Mark may seriously think "the" issue under a lot of issues is whether gender is socially constructed or a God-given reality but the issue is not as purely binary as that. The issue is also whether or not Mark Driscoll's remarkably binary and reductionist exposition on gender in public settings can be considered viable even as a conservative evangelical discourse on what masculinity and femininity are.
So, we are working on a new website where I can speak to these real issues in a fuller context. Lord willing, sometime in September, after my trip to Europe with my family and a lot of other people, and then some recovery time, we will launch a new website.
In the past, I’ve not had a regular place to work out personal commentary on social issues, and so I’ve erred in sometimes doing so in places like Facebook, Twitter, and the media, where you can have a good fight but don’t have the room to make a good case
Oh, in the past Mark hasn't had a regular place to work out personal commentary on social issues? Dude, so you have never made personal commentary on social issues through podcasts and blog entries on Resurgence and Acts 29 conferences and Mars Hill boot camps and Mars Hill discussion forums or The City or, dare I say it, your own pulpit at the church you founded because God told you to start a church that you've been using as a platform within which to, incidentally, make personal commentary on social issues for the last, oh, fifteen years? And here I thought after ten years of your sermons that you thought you had a pretty good avenue within your own pulpit for making tons of personal commentary on social issues.
In fact your freedom to make personal commentary on social issues rather than exegeting biblical texts is one small reason I'm no longer attending Mars Hill (and I doubt you want to know the actually big ones though I've explained those here). Now personal commentary on social issues is fine as long as it is not conflated with a so-called exegesis of a biblical text. But the Nehemiah sermons were a tipping point in which there was virtually no exegesis and a lot of personal commentary on social issues related to surprisingly local ecclesiology.
Mark, I spent many years at Mars Hill. I helped get a few ministries off the ground at the church. I served faithfully for quite a few years and gave a little bit of money. Not a lot of money because I've never been a fat cat but enough money to have been disappointed at how that capital campaign from 2005 worked out. But people make dumb mistakes in church leadership and so I kept giving to local projects because I believed in what was going on there. I also served in a ministry where people who had theological questions could ask a Mars Hill pastor and got, um, me. And I was okay with that when the questions were from church members and not Driscoll fans in other states who could go look up answers to questions about biblical texts on-line.
Which is to say that if Mark Driscoll thinks that this is about "the" issue under a lot of issues he's spinning this so that he can define the terms of what the issues are, which is precisely the wrong thing to do. It's one of the things his critics from both liberal and conservative circles have been trying to tell him for years. He's basically said that in pastoral terms pastoral love on his part means never having to say he's sorry to anyone in public about any issue. Even back when he wrote the retraction for the response to Brian McLaren that ended with "In conclusion this is all gay" it was not especially apologetic. It was more a case of "My fellow pastors told me I shouldn't have said what I said in the way that I said it and for that I'm sorry." It's sort of like a high school jock saying, "Hey, bra, I'm totally sorry I called you a pussy faggot. I'll call you queer instead because that's less demeaning." Yeah, okay, sure, that's better. Just wait a week before you call me a pussy faggot and it's all good.
Now I'm not saying the scriptures say that homosexual activity is okay. They don't (last I checked) and it takes a lot of finessing of the text to say they do--but then I'm also not suggesting that just because a straight guy has ever had a boner seeing a woman that this mean the guy "must" be married, which is not far off from Driscoll's theology about masculinity so far as it can be understood. I'm also not saying that the scriptures have nothing to say about how men and women should relate to each other. They do.
But the real issue under a lot of issues is that Driscoll, when challenged about both the style and substance of what he says in the public sphere, insists on being the one to define what the style and substance of the "real" issue is. He casts things as though he were being misrepresented or misunderstood and lacks the opportunity to say what he really means when the response of even fellow Christians who are doctrinally conservative is to point out that this is precisely not the problem. He can even convince himself that some of the problem is that he actually, God only knows why, doesn't have enough opportunities to make personal commentary on social issues and that somehow this is where some of the problem is.
He's had more than a decade in which to make personal commentary on social issues from the pulpit like pretty much any other conservative evangelical or fundamentalist or liberal or liberation theology pastor has. As far back as "I'm not some pansy-ass therapist" he's been selling this shtick. To even suggest otherwise, let alone say that he has not actually had a regular place to work out personal commentary on social issues is the highest level of self-delusion possible in a public figure. It's either that or so patently dishonest I don't know how the guy can go to sleep at night or tuck his kids in to sleep thinking he has never once said in a sermon something that could be construed as personal commentary on social issues. If forced to decide whether this is dishonesty or self-delusion I take the more generous option of interpreting this as self-delusion.
When Driscoll write a blog entry called "The Issue Under a Lot of Issues" he's still spinning all of this stuff he's doing as, fundamentlaly, saying that "Pussified Nation" is ultimately the right way to address all these issues. It's still basically saying that ultimately he's got nothing to say he's sorry about. He even frames it all in terms of saying that we're supposed to magically believe that up until NOW he has not had a venue in which "to speak to these real issues in a fuller context." What exactly were we supposed to imagine four months of Peasant Princess was? "Just preaching the Bible?" No personal commentary on social issues? What exactly were we supposed to think was going on in Nehemiah? No personal commentary on church ecclesiology?
Now the other thing about this situation is that what Mark did was invite people to share about chickafied worship leaders. Those who would defend Driscoll say he's making a valid point. Well, let me see if I can try to roll with that. Let's assume that Mark's inflammatory style is justified because he's challenging people about sin in the church. Has Driscoll's invitation to people to share stories about effeminate worship leaders been an invitation to challenge actual sin in the body of Christ or merely a transgression of certain aesthetics? If Driscoll were confronting actual sins he might have some room to take a confrontational approach.
Even if, for the sake of argument, I assume Driscoll gets to invite people to share stories about failings of church musicians in masculinity is that inviting people to share stories about actual sins in the church that need to be confronted? No. This wouldn't be a case where Driscoll has been challenging people to confront actual sins committed by church musicians, it's a case of inviting people to publicly ridicule brothers in Christ. Driscoll apparently can't or won't apologize for openly soliciting people to share stories belittling brothers in Christ for things that are not actually sins, and has to reframe the issue as being really about whether or not gender is socially constructed or God-given.
You see even if we assume that Driscoll would be entitled to invite people on Facebook to share stories about effeminate anatomically male worship leaders on the basis of confronting sin he can't even prove that he's asking people to speak up about actual sin. And per all that Matthew 18 stuff that the neo-Reformed like to allude to, but only when their pet preachers and teachers are being criticized, shouldn't all these people Mark invited to sound off on Facebook have privately gone to the effeminate musicians to confront them about their sin? Then if the effeminate musicians didn't repent of their sins shouldn't these Facebook people have then gone to their local church leaders? Should they have then only felt at liberty to post stories about the sinfulness of effeminiate male musicians on Driscoll's Facebook page after those effeminate musicians just refused to repent?
Oh, well, seeing as it's hard to make a case that merely being "effeminate" as a worship leader is actually a sin maybe there's no basis for people venting about chickafied worship leaders by the neo-Reformed metric of Matthew 18. The hypocrisy within the double standard here isn't difficult to point out but it's worth pointing out because a non-apology on something like this says more through what it doesn't say than what it, uh, didn't say. This non-apology within the context of the neo-Reformed and in the context of Driscoll's ministry is a gift that may keep on giving. The reality is that he invited fellow Christians to belittle fellow Christians not for any actual sin but for aesthetic differences that are considered to reflect on masculinity. Then when challenged from various directions he just decides to say the "real" issue is whether gender is socially constructed or God-given.
Out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks and it would appear out the abundance of Driscoll's heart he can't resist the temptation to ask people to share stories about effeminate worship leaders. This new non-apology is just Pussified Nation Part 268. It's like I was saying earlier this week, I was afraid this was pretty much where Driscoll was going to go and unfortunately Driscoll didn't prove me wrong. "I am sorry" is not in Driscoll's vocabulary for stuff he says as a pastor much of the time.
Dude, even Benny Hinn can publicly admit that his marriage fell apart because he didn't do what he should have as a husband and father but you can't say "I'm sorry" when Christians say it's getting old inviting people to mock chickafied worship leaders who are brothers in Christ? I can't believe I'm about to write this in a blog but, Mark, you need to learn from Benny Hinn's example in humility, man. There's nothing wrong with actually saying "I'm sorry. I shouldn't have said that. I shouldn't have done that." If even Benny Hinn can issue a public apology why can't you? Whatever happened to the stuff you said years ago in which a person can "win the battle but lose the war?"
Oh, but since Driscoll's been getting "discipled" by C. J. Mahaney and is totally humble if you really get to know him (whatever being "discipled" by pastors on the other side of the country who have admitted they have some problems with pride themselves means) we should just let all of this go and let Driscoll say what "the" issue is under a lot of issues. We have freedom of press and, certainly, if Driscoll absolutely insists on buying his own hype he can keep doing that. I don't doubt his sincerity about what he's saying. Somebody has to believe he hasn't had enough venues for making personal commentary about social issues. It might as well be him.
But since freedom of the press means nobodies can speak about public figures and Driscoll is an internationally known megachurch pastor I have the freedom to say I'm disappointed in him and I'm not buying what he's selling himself. A guy who has Driscoll's public presence and history as a pastor who can actually believe he has not had a venue in which to work out personal commentary on social issues when a good deal of his preaching has been personal commentary on social issues has finally tipped his hand. The self-delusion is just too much to ignore and, unfortunately, some fifteen years of preaching up to yesterday's non-apology makes the point louder than anything I could blog. What is more the double standard of the fan base around the man becomes difficult to ignore.
I don't technically need to blog about this because Driscoll's life and preaching and blogging ultimately testifies against itself. Yet because at one point I sincerely believed he was going to get over these character flaws I feel obliged to blog about this because after more than a decade I wanted to be able to say that he'd gotten better. I can't say that. I can't say that what just transpired yesterday isn't Pussified Nation Part 268. Driscoll can blog what he insists the issue under a lot of issues is but that's the point, people have been saying what the issue under a lot of issues is. The issue is that Driscoll says inflammatory things; invites inflammatory stories about guys who prove that this is a pussified nation; and then, when challenged to find ways to not merely "speak the truth" but also "speak the truth in love", he keeps blogging as though he ultimately never has to say he's sorry. For that I'm really sorry.
Gender. Is it a socially constructed reality or a God-given identity?
That’s a significant question, and how you answer it has massive implications. The question of gender underlies many current cultural conflicts and theological controversies that go beyond even the long standing debates about whether or not a woman can be a pastor and whether or not a man is to function as the head of his home.
So the title of this entry linked above is "The Issue Under a Lot of Issues". That sure is handy. Perhaps with a little judicious editing of fonts this could be recast as ...
The Issue Under a Lot of Issues
That looks a bit more like it in Driscoll land. And for what it's worth I'm totally convinced that Driscoll has convinced himself and all his executive elder buddies probably also think that that's how this works.
But the blogosphere response to Driscoll's request for stories about pussified worship leaders has been to say Driscoll is making stupid frat boy locker room jokes, which he invited. Mark may seriously think "the" issue under a lot of issues is whether gender is socially constructed or a God-given reality but the issue is not as purely binary as that. The issue is also whether or not Mark Driscoll's remarkably binary and reductionist exposition on gender in public settings can be considered viable even as a conservative evangelical discourse on what masculinity and femininity are.
So, we are working on a new website where I can speak to these real issues in a fuller context. Lord willing, sometime in September, after my trip to Europe with my family and a lot of other people, and then some recovery time, we will launch a new website.
In the past, I’ve not had a regular place to work out personal commentary on social issues, and so I’ve erred in sometimes doing so in places like Facebook, Twitter, and the media, where you can have a good fight but don’t have the room to make a good case
Oh, in the past Mark hasn't had a regular place to work out personal commentary on social issues? Dude, so you have never made personal commentary on social issues through podcasts and blog entries on Resurgence and Acts 29 conferences and Mars Hill boot camps and Mars Hill discussion forums or The City or, dare I say it, your own pulpit at the church you founded because God told you to start a church that you've been using as a platform within which to, incidentally, make personal commentary on social issues for the last, oh, fifteen years? And here I thought after ten years of your sermons that you thought you had a pretty good avenue within your own pulpit for making tons of personal commentary on social issues.
In fact your freedom to make personal commentary on social issues rather than exegeting biblical texts is one small reason I'm no longer attending Mars Hill (and I doubt you want to know the actually big ones though I've explained those here). Now personal commentary on social issues is fine as long as it is not conflated with a so-called exegesis of a biblical text. But the Nehemiah sermons were a tipping point in which there was virtually no exegesis and a lot of personal commentary on social issues related to surprisingly local ecclesiology.
Mark, I spent many years at Mars Hill. I helped get a few ministries off the ground at the church. I served faithfully for quite a few years and gave a little bit of money. Not a lot of money because I've never been a fat cat but enough money to have been disappointed at how that capital campaign from 2005 worked out. But people make dumb mistakes in church leadership and so I kept giving to local projects because I believed in what was going on there. I also served in a ministry where people who had theological questions could ask a Mars Hill pastor and got, um, me. And I was okay with that when the questions were from church members and not Driscoll fans in other states who could go look up answers to questions about biblical texts on-line.
Which is to say that if Mark Driscoll thinks that this is about "the" issue under a lot of issues he's spinning this so that he can define the terms of what the issues are, which is precisely the wrong thing to do. It's one of the things his critics from both liberal and conservative circles have been trying to tell him for years. He's basically said that in pastoral terms pastoral love on his part means never having to say he's sorry to anyone in public about any issue. Even back when he wrote the retraction for the response to Brian McLaren that ended with "In conclusion this is all gay" it was not especially apologetic. It was more a case of "My fellow pastors told me I shouldn't have said what I said in the way that I said it and for that I'm sorry." It's sort of like a high school jock saying, "Hey, bra, I'm totally sorry I called you a pussy faggot. I'll call you queer instead because that's less demeaning." Yeah, okay, sure, that's better. Just wait a week before you call me a pussy faggot and it's all good.
Now I'm not saying the scriptures say that homosexual activity is okay. They don't (last I checked) and it takes a lot of finessing of the text to say they do--but then I'm also not suggesting that just because a straight guy has ever had a boner seeing a woman that this mean the guy "must" be married, which is not far off from Driscoll's theology about masculinity so far as it can be understood. I'm also not saying that the scriptures have nothing to say about how men and women should relate to each other. They do.
But the real issue under a lot of issues is that Driscoll, when challenged about both the style and substance of what he says in the public sphere, insists on being the one to define what the style and substance of the "real" issue is. He casts things as though he were being misrepresented or misunderstood and lacks the opportunity to say what he really means when the response of even fellow Christians who are doctrinally conservative is to point out that this is precisely not the problem. He can even convince himself that some of the problem is that he actually, God only knows why, doesn't have enough opportunities to make personal commentary on social issues and that somehow this is where some of the problem is.
He's had more than a decade in which to make personal commentary on social issues from the pulpit like pretty much any other conservative evangelical or fundamentalist or liberal or liberation theology pastor has. As far back as "I'm not some pansy-ass therapist" he's been selling this shtick. To even suggest otherwise, let alone say that he has not actually had a regular place to work out personal commentary on social issues is the highest level of self-delusion possible in a public figure. It's either that or so patently dishonest I don't know how the guy can go to sleep at night or tuck his kids in to sleep thinking he has never once said in a sermon something that could be construed as personal commentary on social issues. If forced to decide whether this is dishonesty or self-delusion I take the more generous option of interpreting this as self-delusion.
When Driscoll write a blog entry called "The Issue Under a Lot of Issues" he's still spinning all of this stuff he's doing as, fundamentlaly, saying that "Pussified Nation" is ultimately the right way to address all these issues. It's still basically saying that ultimately he's got nothing to say he's sorry about. He even frames it all in terms of saying that we're supposed to magically believe that up until NOW he has not had a venue in which "to speak to these real issues in a fuller context." What exactly were we supposed to imagine four months of Peasant Princess was? "Just preaching the Bible?" No personal commentary on social issues? What exactly were we supposed to think was going on in Nehemiah? No personal commentary on church ecclesiology?
Now the other thing about this situation is that what Mark did was invite people to share about chickafied worship leaders. Those who would defend Driscoll say he's making a valid point. Well, let me see if I can try to roll with that. Let's assume that Mark's inflammatory style is justified because he's challenging people about sin in the church. Has Driscoll's invitation to people to share stories about effeminate worship leaders been an invitation to challenge actual sin in the body of Christ or merely a transgression of certain aesthetics? If Driscoll were confronting actual sins he might have some room to take a confrontational approach.
Even if, for the sake of argument, I assume Driscoll gets to invite people to share stories about failings of church musicians in masculinity is that inviting people to share stories about actual sins in the church that need to be confronted? No. This wouldn't be a case where Driscoll has been challenging people to confront actual sins committed by church musicians, it's a case of inviting people to publicly ridicule brothers in Christ. Driscoll apparently can't or won't apologize for openly soliciting people to share stories belittling brothers in Christ for things that are not actually sins, and has to reframe the issue as being really about whether or not gender is socially constructed or God-given.
You see even if we assume that Driscoll would be entitled to invite people on Facebook to share stories about effeminate anatomically male worship leaders on the basis of confronting sin he can't even prove that he's asking people to speak up about actual sin. And per all that Matthew 18 stuff that the neo-Reformed like to allude to, but only when their pet preachers and teachers are being criticized, shouldn't all these people Mark invited to sound off on Facebook have privately gone to the effeminate musicians to confront them about their sin? Then if the effeminate musicians didn't repent of their sins shouldn't these Facebook people have then gone to their local church leaders? Should they have then only felt at liberty to post stories about the sinfulness of effeminiate male musicians on Driscoll's Facebook page after those effeminate musicians just refused to repent?
Oh, well, seeing as it's hard to make a case that merely being "effeminate" as a worship leader is actually a sin maybe there's no basis for people venting about chickafied worship leaders by the neo-Reformed metric of Matthew 18. The hypocrisy within the double standard here isn't difficult to point out but it's worth pointing out because a non-apology on something like this says more through what it doesn't say than what it, uh, didn't say. This non-apology within the context of the neo-Reformed and in the context of Driscoll's ministry is a gift that may keep on giving. The reality is that he invited fellow Christians to belittle fellow Christians not for any actual sin but for aesthetic differences that are considered to reflect on masculinity. Then when challenged from various directions he just decides to say the "real" issue is whether gender is socially constructed or God-given.
Out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks and it would appear out the abundance of Driscoll's heart he can't resist the temptation to ask people to share stories about effeminate worship leaders. This new non-apology is just Pussified Nation Part 268. It's like I was saying earlier this week, I was afraid this was pretty much where Driscoll was going to go and unfortunately Driscoll didn't prove me wrong. "I am sorry" is not in Driscoll's vocabulary for stuff he says as a pastor much of the time.
Dude, even Benny Hinn can publicly admit that his marriage fell apart because he didn't do what he should have as a husband and father but you can't say "I'm sorry" when Christians say it's getting old inviting people to mock chickafied worship leaders who are brothers in Christ? I can't believe I'm about to write this in a blog but, Mark, you need to learn from Benny Hinn's example in humility, man. There's nothing wrong with actually saying "I'm sorry. I shouldn't have said that. I shouldn't have done that." If even Benny Hinn can issue a public apology why can't you? Whatever happened to the stuff you said years ago in which a person can "win the battle but lose the war?"
Oh, but since Driscoll's been getting "discipled" by C. J. Mahaney and is totally humble if you really get to know him (whatever being "discipled" by pastors on the other side of the country who have admitted they have some problems with pride themselves means) we should just let all of this go and let Driscoll say what "the" issue is under a lot of issues. We have freedom of press and, certainly, if Driscoll absolutely insists on buying his own hype he can keep doing that. I don't doubt his sincerity about what he's saying. Somebody has to believe he hasn't had enough venues for making personal commentary about social issues. It might as well be him.
But since freedom of the press means nobodies can speak about public figures and Driscoll is an internationally known megachurch pastor I have the freedom to say I'm disappointed in him and I'm not buying what he's selling himself. A guy who has Driscoll's public presence and history as a pastor who can actually believe he has not had a venue in which to work out personal commentary on social issues when a good deal of his preaching has been personal commentary on social issues has finally tipped his hand. The self-delusion is just too much to ignore and, unfortunately, some fifteen years of preaching up to yesterday's non-apology makes the point louder than anything I could blog. What is more the double standard of the fan base around the man becomes difficult to ignore.
I don't technically need to blog about this because Driscoll's life and preaching and blogging ultimately testifies against itself. Yet because at one point I sincerely believed he was going to get over these character flaws I feel obliged to blog about this because after more than a decade I wanted to be able to say that he'd gotten better. I can't say that. I can't say that what just transpired yesterday isn't Pussified Nation Part 268. Driscoll can blog what he insists the issue under a lot of issues is but that's the point, people have been saying what the issue under a lot of issues is. The issue is that Driscoll says inflammatory things; invites inflammatory stories about guys who prove that this is a pussified nation; and then, when challenged to find ways to not merely "speak the truth" but also "speak the truth in love", he keeps blogging as though he ultimately never has to say he's sorry. For that I'm really sorry.
Tuesday, July 12, 2011
Mark Driscoll, William Wallace II, and Pussified Nation part 267
http://rachelheldevans.com/mark-driscoll-bully
http://twitter.com/#!/PastorMark/statuses/90907044000968704
Rachel Held Evans has sounded off on her conviction that Mark Driscoll is a bully. So has Scott Bailey at Scotteriology. So have a number of people. Those who would defend Driscoll have taken pains to say that he and Mars Hill have done more for abused women than bloggers. They can't actually prove this and if it were provable it is not germane to the nature of the complaints about Driscoll's way with public screeds.
That Driscoll invited people to share stories about anatomically male but effeminate worship leaders should not be seen as acceptable to his fans but it should not be seen as scandalous to his critics. The reason I say this should not be construed as scandalous to his critics has nothing to do with the recency of the Facebook post (apparently now deleted) and a great deal to do with my having seen "Pussified Nation" some ten years ago on the completely unmoderated Mars Hill Midrash php discussion forums. I don't have the capacity for sustained outrage at Driscoll making fun of men he considers pussies because he's been doing this for a decade. What, exactly, is supposed to be new about this?
Sure, I may be one of a very few people on earth who actually remember anything about "Pussified Nation" but God providentially permitted Al Gore to invent the internet so that Mark can go to bed each night knowing that there are still people out there who saw that. If all you ever read about William Wallace II was what Mark wrote in Reformission Rev you might as well have never heard about it at all. As Mark told it he wasn't posting as William Wallace II because he seemed to be a fight-hungry butt-monkey. Nah, he was just rightly challenging all the pussies who refused to man up to go man up. It just stopped being fun when someone escalated the febrile rhetoric into challenging Driscoll to a fight at around 2 in the morning. This, too, Mark spun as someone else's problem. Was he not joking?
Ah, but that was more than a decade ago so things change. What has changed since then? Well, Mark is now past 40 is at least one new thing in the scope of history. He can't plead being young and inexperienced after some fifteen years of being a preacher. His fans can't plead this case for him either. His fans also cannot plea the case that if you just knew Driscoll's heart you'd see that he's only making fun of people who deserve it because they don't believe the real Gospel. Making fun of effeminate church musicians makes that a hard sell because while I imagine there are professional musicians in church settings who aren't Christians they are frequently not leading worship as such or playing liturgical roles. So in many cases the church musicians Driscoll is inviting people to share stories about regarding said musicians' ponce-like ways are brothers in Christ.
Now making fun of apostates and people who claim Christianity but empty of its power are easy marks and I feel no regret in belittling someone like Bishop Spong who, as Fearsome Tycoon put it, ingeniously figured out how to deny every core teaching of the Anglican church while still contriving an excuse to still get paid by it.
Driscoll is the guy who joked that he didn't know how single people made it through the day. He also said during a mens' retreat that if he didn't get any sex for a period of longer than three days he got "wiggy". Whatever that means. A guy who can expound in multiple sermons how Song of Songs refers not to an allegory of Christ's love for the church but wifely stripteases and holy blow jobs is the kind of man who, for whatever reason, might find it challenging to go without for a few days. Aw, I feel super bad for him as a single man who is 37 and has never even had a girlfriend, let alone fornicate with one as Driscoll did with his. I'm afraid I haven't been manly enough for that.
Of course I have legions of character problems so my sarcasm is not intended to suggest that I think I would be a good boyfriend or husband. I just wrote moments ago about how one of the core problems we have as Christians is that we find it easy to condemn evil in others thinking this means we have no evil in ourselves. Some of the vitriol I've seen levelled at Driscoll proves this point. People who rip on Driscoll as a misogynistic homophobe who are waiting for a scandal to erupt in which Driscoll has hired some rent boy or gets caught doing meth with a male prostitute are falling into the same trap where they think Driscoll has happily pitched his tent. These bloggers are eager to denounce the evil they see in Driscoll but do not see it in themselves, most of them.
Case in point, irony level 10 is Scotteriology. Now I enjoy reading Scotteriology but as far as guys who belittle people they disagree with as mental failures for failing to deal with "reality" go Scotteriology and Driscoll are arguably on equal terms. Doesn't mean I dislike either guy. I like reading Scott's entries on intertestamental literature and stuff like that. I found his take down of Driscoll's patently dishonest use of Targum Neofiti helpful. I'm just saying that while Scott's got his moral outrage going about a guy like Driscoll making fun of effeminate men Scott's got plenty to answer for in making fun of plenty of people, too. Both men will rationalize their ridicule of others on the basis of saying "I'm making fun of these idiots because they don't want to acknowledge the truth." Scott, in his own way, is simply the other side of the Driscoll coin. Don't get me wrong, Scott, I still love reading your blog!
Trouble is that a good deal of the people who don't like Driscoll mocking people aren't afraid to mock. They may mask this in amused condescension but the heart is not so very different. In fact I'd say it's pretty much the same as what they see in Driscoll, they just couch it in more righteous sounding terms so they can be indignant about it.
As a never married guy who has never actually been on anything I'd even call a date and am also a sometime church musician I don't know if I'd be "effeminate" but I had plenty of occasions where guys in gym class (joks) assumed I was gay. I got told any number of times that I must be in a gay relationship with my brother because my brother and I hung out together. If you'd moved as much as our family moved you might tend to stick close to family, too, but in high school land that's a way to get labeled queer. I'll cheerfully concede I went and saw House of Flying Daggers because I think Ziyi Zhang is hot ... but by the metrics of high school jocks I was considered pretty gay.
Couldn't help but post the twitter remark. Doesn't caring the slightest bit about fashion make you just the teensiest bit effeminate?
A strange irony afoot in talking about church musicians who aren't manly enough is the whole history of Mars Hill music. The most popular band at Mars Hill for several years was fronted by a man who Driscoll described as looking and sounding like a 12 year old boy. I can speak as someone who repeatedly tried pointing out that if a church has a bunch of musicians who are performing music that only makes sense for the "twelve year old boy" that the church is having a bunch of liturgically useless music foisted on it and then being blamed by the pastors for a lack of participation. A lot of Mars Hill music was stuff written by emo/indie rockers that revelled in a kind of performance art that practically forbade congregational participation. I tolerated a whole bunch of songs written by bands that like Radiohead and U2 and other bands fronted by whiny emo metrosexuals. Driscoll once said his favorite band was the Smiths and ... Morrisey? He's not exactly the most masculine singer now, is he? A good deal of the problem with worship leaders who are chickified dudes is that they have spent decades collectively trying to make worship music more relevant, missional, and contemporary. Screw that. Messiaen's organ work Mass for Pentecost is more masculine than that. :)
Now say what you will about the chickified hippy sorts but at least some of them manage to create music that people can actually sing along with. And in the grand scheme of masculinity (if there is such a thing) how does a guy with a 12-year old boy's voice qualify as less of a failure than the "chickified" dude? Just because you've met his wife and kids?
Now if forty is by Mark's account too old to plead youthful ignorance or indiscretion maybe forty is also too old to be recycling locker room put-downs about guys who seem queer. Didn't Mark used to pay some visits to a church member who has been very plainspoken about his struggles with same-sex attraction? Not sure if Mark hangs with that guy or visits him anymore. I hear Mark pulled down the Facebook post and if so, well maybe Pussified Nation may eventually stop being part of the comedian's routine. That would be the preferable trajectory.
What I fear is more likely is that it has been pulled for more editing and workshopping amongst fellow comedians and will come back later. What I worry may happen is that Mark will just make a few stray remarks and say "people blog" and then his fan base will be animated to defend what they would consider juvenile coming from anyone else and scandalous being directed toward one of their favorite preachers. I've already seen a few years of anti-Driscolls hoping he gets caught molesting a kid. This is just as bad as anything they hope Driscoll will be guilty of.
As I was just writing earlier tonight one does not remove one's share of evil by condemning evil in others. Should we agree that Driscoll is capable of great evil (and I don't think anyone in their right mind, Christian or otherwise, should dispute that this is at least true of Driscoll as it would be of any public figure) we should also agree that like in response to like is not going to make things better. If I wanted to I could have compiled more evidence for Driscoll's pastoral stupidity than most. I have restricted myself to things Driscoll himself has put in the public sphere because public stuff merits public response.
If "Pussified Nation" had not at one point been available for anyone on-line to read I wouldn't consider it a landmark in Driscoll's public screeds on gender and males. I've met people who considered what he said and how he acted in that thread to be heroic and prophetic. Well, they did consider him those things at one point for that but I wonder how many of those people who no longer agree with either the "what" that he said therein or how. I never agreed very much with either the "what" and found the "how" relentlessly self-incriminating. I was not dissuaded by the "If you knew who was saying this stuff you'd agree with it." I was not so incensed I felt like leaving, as some did, when the real identity of William Wallace II finally got revealed, but it left me with the unforgettable impression that there are people who are very happy to condemn in others what they are sure does not reside in themselves.
But, and I keep saying this, some of the most embittered ex Mars folks I have met are the folks who went along with that mentality and rationalized it in pretty much any instance until it came home to roost. Then they did yet another 180 and chose to condemn not only what they saw done to themselves but the whole thing without copping to the reality of their roles. In a way the people who can get most worked up about the injustice of it all are those who, when the chips are down and things are in their favor, are most willing themselves to throw the first stone. We should be cautious in our criticism of those who we believe display a lack of principle that we do not betray those principles we hold as most valuable.
That process of self-betrayal in the name of promoting one's principles is very frequently what I see happening when people decide they have to go try to smack some cyber-sense into Driscoll. They all too often fail to confront weaknesses in his ideas in a persuasive way. They also tend to respond to dopey jokes rather than getting into core theological weaknesses. On his better days Scotteriology has approached engaging Driscoll's pastoral weaknesses by directly talking about his failure to handle a particular text or Targum. But jumping on the bandwagon of Evans' post is not necessarily an effective way to do it, especially since Scotteriology himself is so frequently apt to employ the methodology of Driscoll in his own blogging. Now others don't but I'm not necessarily blogging about them. And, just to repeat myself, Scott, still love reading your blog. I trust you know that.
Anyway, if Driscoll wants to keep seeing himself as Dr. Perry Cox to the collectively metrosexual John Dorian of all "effeminate" Christian musicians I obviously can't stop him. I can't speak on behalf of church musicians amateur and professional who might come under scrutiny of the most nominal and rudimentary sort. I can't speak for whomever people posted stories about for Driscoll to use in a sermon where he makes sport, yet again, of chickified dudes who have product in their hair, listen to Mariah Carey, and drive yellow Cabreolets. I can try, and have tried, but there's a decent chance after fifteen years that the leopard can't change his spots. To expect a change of heart in him now is to expect something as improbable as someone rising from the dead.
http://twitter.com/#!/PastorMark/statuses/90907044000968704
Rachel Held Evans has sounded off on her conviction that Mark Driscoll is a bully. So has Scott Bailey at Scotteriology. So have a number of people. Those who would defend Driscoll have taken pains to say that he and Mars Hill have done more for abused women than bloggers. They can't actually prove this and if it were provable it is not germane to the nature of the complaints about Driscoll's way with public screeds.
That Driscoll invited people to share stories about anatomically male but effeminate worship leaders should not be seen as acceptable to his fans but it should not be seen as scandalous to his critics. The reason I say this should not be construed as scandalous to his critics has nothing to do with the recency of the Facebook post (apparently now deleted) and a great deal to do with my having seen "Pussified Nation" some ten years ago on the completely unmoderated Mars Hill Midrash php discussion forums. I don't have the capacity for sustained outrage at Driscoll making fun of men he considers pussies because he's been doing this for a decade. What, exactly, is supposed to be new about this?
Sure, I may be one of a very few people on earth who actually remember anything about "Pussified Nation" but God providentially permitted Al Gore to invent the internet so that Mark can go to bed each night knowing that there are still people out there who saw that. If all you ever read about William Wallace II was what Mark wrote in Reformission Rev you might as well have never heard about it at all. As Mark told it he wasn't posting as William Wallace II because he seemed to be a fight-hungry butt-monkey. Nah, he was just rightly challenging all the pussies who refused to man up to go man up. It just stopped being fun when someone escalated the febrile rhetoric into challenging Driscoll to a fight at around 2 in the morning. This, too, Mark spun as someone else's problem. Was he not joking?
Ah, but that was more than a decade ago so things change. What has changed since then? Well, Mark is now past 40 is at least one new thing in the scope of history. He can't plead being young and inexperienced after some fifteen years of being a preacher. His fans can't plead this case for him either. His fans also cannot plea the case that if you just knew Driscoll's heart you'd see that he's only making fun of people who deserve it because they don't believe the real Gospel. Making fun of effeminate church musicians makes that a hard sell because while I imagine there are professional musicians in church settings who aren't Christians they are frequently not leading worship as such or playing liturgical roles. So in many cases the church musicians Driscoll is inviting people to share stories about regarding said musicians' ponce-like ways are brothers in Christ.
Now making fun of apostates and people who claim Christianity but empty of its power are easy marks and I feel no regret in belittling someone like Bishop Spong who, as Fearsome Tycoon put it, ingeniously figured out how to deny every core teaching of the Anglican church while still contriving an excuse to still get paid by it.
Driscoll is the guy who joked that he didn't know how single people made it through the day. He also said during a mens' retreat that if he didn't get any sex for a period of longer than three days he got "wiggy". Whatever that means. A guy who can expound in multiple sermons how Song of Songs refers not to an allegory of Christ's love for the church but wifely stripteases and holy blow jobs is the kind of man who, for whatever reason, might find it challenging to go without for a few days. Aw, I feel super bad for him as a single man who is 37 and has never even had a girlfriend, let alone fornicate with one as Driscoll did with his. I'm afraid I haven't been manly enough for that.
Of course I have legions of character problems so my sarcasm is not intended to suggest that I think I would be a good boyfriend or husband. I just wrote moments ago about how one of the core problems we have as Christians is that we find it easy to condemn evil in others thinking this means we have no evil in ourselves. Some of the vitriol I've seen levelled at Driscoll proves this point. People who rip on Driscoll as a misogynistic homophobe who are waiting for a scandal to erupt in which Driscoll has hired some rent boy or gets caught doing meth with a male prostitute are falling into the same trap where they think Driscoll has happily pitched his tent. These bloggers are eager to denounce the evil they see in Driscoll but do not see it in themselves, most of them.
Case in point, irony level 10 is Scotteriology. Now I enjoy reading Scotteriology but as far as guys who belittle people they disagree with as mental failures for failing to deal with "reality" go Scotteriology and Driscoll are arguably on equal terms. Doesn't mean I dislike either guy. I like reading Scott's entries on intertestamental literature and stuff like that. I found his take down of Driscoll's patently dishonest use of Targum Neofiti helpful. I'm just saying that while Scott's got his moral outrage going about a guy like Driscoll making fun of effeminate men Scott's got plenty to answer for in making fun of plenty of people, too. Both men will rationalize their ridicule of others on the basis of saying "I'm making fun of these idiots because they don't want to acknowledge the truth." Scott, in his own way, is simply the other side of the Driscoll coin. Don't get me wrong, Scott, I still love reading your blog!
Trouble is that a good deal of the people who don't like Driscoll mocking people aren't afraid to mock. They may mask this in amused condescension but the heart is not so very different. In fact I'd say it's pretty much the same as what they see in Driscoll, they just couch it in more righteous sounding terms so they can be indignant about it.
As a never married guy who has never actually been on anything I'd even call a date and am also a sometime church musician I don't know if I'd be "effeminate" but I had plenty of occasions where guys in gym class (joks) assumed I was gay. I got told any number of times that I must be in a gay relationship with my brother because my brother and I hung out together. If you'd moved as much as our family moved you might tend to stick close to family, too, but in high school land that's a way to get labeled queer. I'll cheerfully concede I went and saw House of Flying Daggers because I think Ziyi Zhang is hot ... but by the metrics of high school jocks I was considered pretty gay.
Couldn't help but post the twitter remark. Doesn't caring the slightest bit about fashion make you just the teensiest bit effeminate?
A strange irony afoot in talking about church musicians who aren't manly enough is the whole history of Mars Hill music. The most popular band at Mars Hill for several years was fronted by a man who Driscoll described as looking and sounding like a 12 year old boy. I can speak as someone who repeatedly tried pointing out that if a church has a bunch of musicians who are performing music that only makes sense for the "twelve year old boy" that the church is having a bunch of liturgically useless music foisted on it and then being blamed by the pastors for a lack of participation. A lot of Mars Hill music was stuff written by emo/indie rockers that revelled in a kind of performance art that practically forbade congregational participation. I tolerated a whole bunch of songs written by bands that like Radiohead and U2 and other bands fronted by whiny emo metrosexuals. Driscoll once said his favorite band was the Smiths and ... Morrisey? He's not exactly the most masculine singer now, is he? A good deal of the problem with worship leaders who are chickified dudes is that they have spent decades collectively trying to make worship music more relevant, missional, and contemporary. Screw that. Messiaen's organ work Mass for Pentecost is more masculine than that. :)
Now say what you will about the chickified hippy sorts but at least some of them manage to create music that people can actually sing along with. And in the grand scheme of masculinity (if there is such a thing) how does a guy with a 12-year old boy's voice qualify as less of a failure than the "chickified" dude? Just because you've met his wife and kids?
Now if forty is by Mark's account too old to plead youthful ignorance or indiscretion maybe forty is also too old to be recycling locker room put-downs about guys who seem queer. Didn't Mark used to pay some visits to a church member who has been very plainspoken about his struggles with same-sex attraction? Not sure if Mark hangs with that guy or visits him anymore. I hear Mark pulled down the Facebook post and if so, well maybe Pussified Nation may eventually stop being part of the comedian's routine. That would be the preferable trajectory.
What I fear is more likely is that it has been pulled for more editing and workshopping amongst fellow comedians and will come back later. What I worry may happen is that Mark will just make a few stray remarks and say "people blog" and then his fan base will be animated to defend what they would consider juvenile coming from anyone else and scandalous being directed toward one of their favorite preachers. I've already seen a few years of anti-Driscolls hoping he gets caught molesting a kid. This is just as bad as anything they hope Driscoll will be guilty of.
As I was just writing earlier tonight one does not remove one's share of evil by condemning evil in others. Should we agree that Driscoll is capable of great evil (and I don't think anyone in their right mind, Christian or otherwise, should dispute that this is at least true of Driscoll as it would be of any public figure) we should also agree that like in response to like is not going to make things better. If I wanted to I could have compiled more evidence for Driscoll's pastoral stupidity than most. I have restricted myself to things Driscoll himself has put in the public sphere because public stuff merits public response.
If "Pussified Nation" had not at one point been available for anyone on-line to read I wouldn't consider it a landmark in Driscoll's public screeds on gender and males. I've met people who considered what he said and how he acted in that thread to be heroic and prophetic. Well, they did consider him those things at one point for that but I wonder how many of those people who no longer agree with either the "what" that he said therein or how. I never agreed very much with either the "what" and found the "how" relentlessly self-incriminating. I was not dissuaded by the "If you knew who was saying this stuff you'd agree with it." I was not so incensed I felt like leaving, as some did, when the real identity of William Wallace II finally got revealed, but it left me with the unforgettable impression that there are people who are very happy to condemn in others what they are sure does not reside in themselves.
But, and I keep saying this, some of the most embittered ex Mars folks I have met are the folks who went along with that mentality and rationalized it in pretty much any instance until it came home to roost. Then they did yet another 180 and chose to condemn not only what they saw done to themselves but the whole thing without copping to the reality of their roles. In a way the people who can get most worked up about the injustice of it all are those who, when the chips are down and things are in their favor, are most willing themselves to throw the first stone. We should be cautious in our criticism of those who we believe display a lack of principle that we do not betray those principles we hold as most valuable.
That process of self-betrayal in the name of promoting one's principles is very frequently what I see happening when people decide they have to go try to smack some cyber-sense into Driscoll. They all too often fail to confront weaknesses in his ideas in a persuasive way. They also tend to respond to dopey jokes rather than getting into core theological weaknesses. On his better days Scotteriology has approached engaging Driscoll's pastoral weaknesses by directly talking about his failure to handle a particular text or Targum. But jumping on the bandwagon of Evans' post is not necessarily an effective way to do it, especially since Scotteriology himself is so frequently apt to employ the methodology of Driscoll in his own blogging. Now others don't but I'm not necessarily blogging about them. And, just to repeat myself, Scott, still love reading your blog. I trust you know that.
Anyway, if Driscoll wants to keep seeing himself as Dr. Perry Cox to the collectively metrosexual John Dorian of all "effeminate" Christian musicians I obviously can't stop him. I can't speak on behalf of church musicians amateur and professional who might come under scrutiny of the most nominal and rudimentary sort. I can't speak for whomever people posted stories about for Driscoll to use in a sermon where he makes sport, yet again, of chickified dudes who have product in their hair, listen to Mariah Carey, and drive yellow Cabreolets. I can try, and have tried, but there's a decent chance after fifteen years that the leopard can't change his spots. To expect a change of heart in him now is to expect something as improbable as someone rising from the dead.
Monday, July 11, 2011
"Our own share of evil is not removed by condemning evil in others."
This is an observation written by German biblical scholar Adolf Schlatter who was one of Dietrich Bonhoeffer's teachers. Ironically Schlatter himself would eventually go on to bitterly disappoint Bonhoeffer by showing sympathy to the National Socialist party (Bethge p. 54, you probably know the book)
I doubt I could ask for a more useful case study in which a New Testament scholar, who demonstrated keen insight into the scriptures and influenced one of the most important Protestant theologians of the twentieth century, could nevertheless end up exemplifying one of the paradoxical problems in Christians ... and in people generally. Yet this capacity is not strictly the domain of the religious. It is possible to speak up against evil we perceive in someone else while being oblivious to our own evil. We may think we are alert to the failings of others while being unaware of the malice in our own heart. We all have a capacity, a deadly capacity to believe that if we condemn evil in others this is a sign that we have removed evil from ourselves.
The whole idea that condeming evil in others means that you have no evil in your heart is the quintessence of blogging. If a New Testament scholar who taught no less a theologian than Bonhoeffer could still end up being sympathetic to the National Socialists that should give us pause. Let's ask ourselves what the formal platform of the National Socialists was? Didn't it include discussion about how society had been ruined by various moral failings in leadership? Did not Hitler make appeals to the effect of "We just want our country back from the decadent people who ruined it?" The trouble with cries of "consumerism" left and right, theological or political, is that "consumerism" might as well be the new "communist". And "communist" hasn't really gone away either.
It will frequently be considered good enough for a blogger to say "I'm not perfect but ... " which essentially boils down to "I'm not perfect but at least I'm not as bad as this other person." For the sake of particular example, I can read about Scott Bailey over at Scotteriology ripping on Driscoll for being an idiot who rips on other people about things and belittling them for having ideas he thinks are stupid. Okay ... what does Scott do again? Oh ... yeah ... that's right, he makes fun of people who hold to ideas he considers stupid and exploitive, too. The trick becomes discerning the distinction between when it's okay to belittle someone else and when it's not or when to question if belittling itself is also the problem. For the record this hardly means I'm going to stop reading Scotteriology because I've found some of his writings on intertestamental and Old Testament literature fascinating. See, if ALL he ever did was make fun of people he thinks are stupid I wouldn't have a reason to read the blog.
Now I plan to write a bit more here and there about Schlatter's commentary on Romans because it's fascinating but the first thing I feel obliged to blog about Schlatter is to point out that a capable biblical scholar who, so far as I can tell, has keen insight into the scriptures, can still end up in the course of history saying and making some big mistakes. Even sympathizing with National Socialism can be considered a big mistake. That would seem like an easy thing. But what is not so easy is that in many cases we do not realize that our own share of evil is not removed by condemning evil in others because we engage in the ethical rhetoric of relative privation.
Evil as privation of good goes at least as far back as Augustine and I don't wish to dive into that here. I merely mention for sake of observation that the embrace of evil in the history of humanity has never been of the Stan Lee "Brotherhood of Evil Mutants" variety (as Roy Baumeister so amusingly discussed in his book on evil). For the sake of keeping with things X-Men, Magneto doesn't consider himself evil and yet he's a villain through and through. He eventually comes to agree with the racist and supremacist notions of the Nazis he despised because at the end of the day he subscribes to the idea that mutants are entitled to look down upon and act against humans. Magneto is a compelling villain because his embrace of what we would call villainy is done for precisely the reasons we would consider heroic if we were in his shoes.
Those who do the most harm frequently think they are doing the most good. Those who do the most harm may see themselves as imperfect but they believe the evil they condemn in others is ultimately so much greater than the evil they see in themselves that they feel obliged to speak up. Of course I'm not saying don't write a blog unless you are without sin. That would be impossible. I'm also not saying that if you write a blog you have no basis from which to speak about what you consider to be sins in the church but if you find it easier to blog about the sins of others (or preach about them) beware the health of your mind, heart and soul.
It wasn't that difficult for Pharisees to point out the sinful failings of others and arguably many of those people who think they are speaking up against the Pharisaical tendencies of others are just as much Pharisees themselves. If you believe there is no evil in your own heart then you're a liar and a liar who is incapable of telling the truth to others. We frequently find it easy to condemn other people for sins we can't even imagine ourselves committing or we condemn them for the sins we privately realize are our most besetting sins.
It is not simple to explain the impulse as merely being one or the other. We can claim to know this for ourselves and, worse yet, for others, but only God knows for sure which is which within us. If you condemn those who lie to others but you lie to yourself then you may sincerely believe you are confronting sin in another person that you don't struggle with. You imagine you are a spiritual one who is being careful not to fall prey to the same temptation without realizing you have lost to that temptation yourself. Anyone can say that haters will hate while hating people in their heart. A man may complain about how "people will blog" while himself blogging all sorts of incendiary things and pleading that he's speaking the truth in love when it remains to be seen whether he blogged either the truth or did it in love.
I suppose the easy path to take here would be that any time you look at a blogger or pastor or public figure who denounces sin to assume that he or she is privately guilty of that. I don't subscribe to that view. It's simply too easy to assume that behind every public proclamation by a Ted Haggard about homosexuality there is a scandal about meth and a male prostitute waiting to happen. There are pastors about whom some people wait with baited breath to discover have been involved in this or that a scandal.
Jesus' rebuke of the Pharisees did not consist chiefly in their sexual immorality. In fact Jesus went so far as to say that the disciples should do everything the Pharisees told them to do but to not follow their example? Why? Their attitudes toward money and power were what Jesus frequently condemned. The adulteress and the prostitute met with more of Jesus' mercy than the wealthy spiritual leaders of the day for their jockeying for greater prestige and influence, and for more money. It wasn't that Jesus accepted sexual sin, He still told the woman "go and sin no more." Christ welcomed sinners who knew they were sinners while spurning those who thought themselves blameless.
Were the Pharisees really sinless? No, and yet they thought they were, in many cases, okay. Perhaps they believed, as we Christians are so often apt to believe, that if we simply condemn evil in others we are somehow by proxy condemning evil in ourselves? "I used to be that way and that's why after I found Jesus I get to condemn the things in others that they do now that I used to do", maybe? There are a lot of Christians who seem to believe and live as though the great challenge for them as Christians is to confront other people about their sins, whatever they believe those sins may be. Or a person, as I wrote earlier, may believe that the crux of confronting and challenging sin is in confronting the sins that he or she can't imagine any appeal to.
There may be a single man who is argumentative, resentful and bitter that he's not married and revels in arguing with people about any given point about theology or politics. Yet in his mind the big sin to be on the look out for is homosexuality and he gets upset that other Christians do not condemn homosexuality enough. Yet the homosexual can be said to seek meaning and solace in a sexual relationship and sees his or her sexual disposition as God-ordained. Ironically the bitter single man who complains that the Christians in his life aren't doing enough to speak against homosexuality is as besotted with the idea of a sexual relationship giving his life meaning as the homosexual he thinks must be confronted by Christians for embracing a sinful lifestyle and value system.
When I left the last church I was at I came to the conclusion that there were problems in the theol0gy and spiritual formation of that church. But I also came to the conclusion that I had substantial problems in my own spiritual life. The problem I faced was not as simple as "I'm in a bad church". I could say that for various reasons and those would not necessarily be be wrong reasons. I still stand by the reasons I did not renew my membership for a fourth time. But my real point is that I came to see the spiritual problems in my old church as emblematic of spiritual problems I myself had. It was not that I was better than the people at the church I left. In many respects I was one of the worst people there in how I dealt with people on subjects like theology or intellectual debate. I could be extremely belittling of people and cruel.
The problem wasn't merely out there, it was also in here. I came to realize that the reason I needed to stop being at that spiritual community was not just because of the real problems inherent in that community it was also because those problems ensured that my own recurring sins were a good fit for that community! The more I thought about it the more I became convicted that my criticisms of the community were ultimately self-criticisms of patterns of relating to people I had not truly recognized. There's a great deal more that could be said that I won't say. I've been building up to sharing how in my own life I came to realize that condemning evil in others actually revealed my own participation in evil. This is the essence of what Adolf Schlatter was writing about in his commentary on Romans. It is also a sad irony that having written these words Schlatter was able to sympathize with National Socialism. Bonhoeffer was bitterly disappointed with this, more than you or I could possibly be.
There's somewhere else I want to run with this idea but in order to do that I need to write another entry.
Friday, July 08, 2011
Part 4 of cartoon nostalgia, cartoon revolutions has gone up
http://www.mbird.com/2011/07/cartoon-nostalgia-cartoon-revolution-part-4-cold-war-moral-clarity-and-post-cold-war-moral-ambivalence/
Here I stop ripping on cartoon nostalgia for Transformers and Optimus Prime and get at what their existence occasions, a rumination on the "Cold War moral clarity" of not only Transformers but of 1980s pop culture generally. By now, if you've been following the series, I hope you've spotted that this is what can be considered "part 1" of my series on the DC animated universe. I cover an awful lot of pop cultural shifts in what feel like no more than a few sentences but I hope that I can inspire a bit of discussion and thought despite the brevity.
And, yes, the essay about Batman: the animated series is going to be the next one in the cycle. Did I say "cycle"? Bear with me, I'm close to finishing my 24 preludes and fugues for solo guitar and have been spending the last decade composing a cycle of chamber sonatas for guitar paired up with woodwinds, strings, and brass. I would say that my imagination is not tuned to fantasy epics and Mahlerian-sized symphonic utterances but more in the idiom of concept albums by progressive rock bands or even something more like the cycle-length explorations of an Art of Fugue or Well-Tempered Clavier. That's part of the fun of writing this set of series for Mockingbird, it lets me write in a way that fits in with my big picture structural/thematic obsession. Anyway, enough rambling here. Feel free to follow the link to the fourth part in this series and I hope you enjoy it. Perhaps a postlude here about the latest Transformers movie may emerge from the space bridge that is my creative life and quest for work.
Here I stop ripping on cartoon nostalgia for Transformers and Optimus Prime and get at what their existence occasions, a rumination on the "Cold War moral clarity" of not only Transformers but of 1980s pop culture generally. By now, if you've been following the series, I hope you've spotted that this is what can be considered "part 1" of my series on the DC animated universe. I cover an awful lot of pop cultural shifts in what feel like no more than a few sentences but I hope that I can inspire a bit of discussion and thought despite the brevity.
And, yes, the essay about Batman: the animated series is going to be the next one in the cycle. Did I say "cycle"? Bear with me, I'm close to finishing my 24 preludes and fugues for solo guitar and have been spending the last decade composing a cycle of chamber sonatas for guitar paired up with woodwinds, strings, and brass. I would say that my imagination is not tuned to fantasy epics and Mahlerian-sized symphonic utterances but more in the idiom of concept albums by progressive rock bands or even something more like the cycle-length explorations of an Art of Fugue or Well-Tempered Clavier. That's part of the fun of writing this set of series for Mockingbird, it lets me write in a way that fits in with my big picture structural/thematic obsession. Anyway, enough rambling here. Feel free to follow the link to the fourth part in this series and I hope you enjoy it. Perhaps a postlude here about the latest Transformers movie may emerge from the space bridge that is my creative life and quest for work.
Wednesday, July 06, 2011
a few proverbial observations about the poor
The poor is disliked even by his neighbor, but the rich has many friends.
Better is a poor person who walks in his integrity
than one who is crooked in speech and is a fool.
...
Wealth brings many new friends,
but a poor man is deserted by his friend.
...
Many seek the favor of a generous man,
and everyone is a friend to a man who gives gifts.
All a poor man’s brothers hate him;
how much more do his friends go far from him!
He pursues them with words, but does not have them.
You don't have to exercise your imagination too much to wonder where I got these observations. In the last ten years the most I have heard pastors say about "the poor" is merely to discuss that a theology of wealth is bad but that, by general time devoted to the other false alternative, that a theology of poverty is worse. At a lay level there tend to be adherants to one who say that the poor are poor because of hegemonic and systemic influences that lead to injustice that must be addressed. The other has adherants who broadly say that if those evil stupid sinners would just go get any old jobs and stop parasitically living off the revenues raised by good people whose money is wickedly taken from them in the form of taxes then the less-taxed would be creating the wealth needed to give the poor jobs.
Better is a poor person who walks in his integrity
than one who is crooked in speech and is a fool.
...
Wealth brings many new friends,
but a poor man is deserted by his friend.
...
Many seek the favor of a generous man,
and everyone is a friend to a man who gives gifts.
All a poor man’s brothers hate him;
how much more do his friends go far from him!
He pursues them with words, but does not have them.
You don't have to exercise your imagination too much to wonder where I got these observations. In the last ten years the most I have heard pastors say about "the poor" is merely to discuss that a theology of wealth is bad but that, by general time devoted to the other false alternative, that a theology of poverty is worse. At a lay level there tend to be adherants to one who say that the poor are poor because of hegemonic and systemic influences that lead to injustice that must be addressed. The other has adherants who broadly say that if those evil stupid sinners would just go get any old jobs and stop parasitically living off the revenues raised by good people whose money is wickedly taken from them in the form of taxes then the less-taxed would be creating the wealth needed to give the poor jobs.
These caricatures seem to be as far as either side is willing to go. To propose that some of the wealthy are so because they are wicked rather than righteous is both necessary to say but also pedestrian and mundane in a pastoral setting now. To say that some are poor due to the effects of their own sin (either their own sins, as conservatives are want to say or the sins of others, as liberals almost invariably announce) while others are poor because they refuse to sin is also admittedly pedestrian and mundane.
There are plenty of anecdotes about how the poor people whom the liberal wants to help have not mugged him yet explains entirely how he can imagine they are victims of societal oppression. The old saying is that a Republican is a Democrat who has been mugged. There are the old anecdotes about how welfare mothers bilk the system and go around in Cadillacs. Then there are anecdotes about upper management cutting peons loose to keep their big fat annual salaries. These are anecdotes which, even if they could be proven true, are merely anecdotal arguments. What they prove, if anything, is the persistence both right and left of confirmation bias.
To this point, it is hard for me to forget a fellow who eventually became a pastor who said there were, in the broadest possible of terms, no righteous poor in America. None. Zero. Zip. A week later someone apparently had talked to him and he conceded there were some righteous poor in America but that he didn't think there were very many of them. In other words the number was not zero but there were so few righteous people in Sodom and Gommorah, in other words, that the Lord was right to just annihilate the entire city complex for its sin. So it went with the righteous poor in America what was not said was as crucial as what was said.
Generally I prefer to guess the best about people but even with this in mind the last year or two have been challenging for me at a social level. When you've got no income and social life requires money you don't have much of a social life. You can get invited to places you can't go to do things you can't do because you can't afford to. To suggest a purely and flatly literal reading of proverbs such as the above would be to miss their point. The friends of the poor man don't really hate the man, do they? Why even say the poor man has friends if everyone really hates him?
But it is true, very often true, that the poor man pursues friends with words but they remain far from him. This is not out of malice or even neglect so much as that life goes on and the poor man often has no particularly compelling reason to be visited in the time of his affliction. The poor man (or woman) often has greater need than entertainment value for the entertainment of friends. I don't say that sarcastically, mind you. I have some friends who are poor and they don't get to hang out with people much. People used to visit them but rarely do now. Even I have been stuck in visiting one of my friends because I have no income and his health is not too good.
Of course there is also the proverb that a friend loves at all times and a brother is born for adversity. My family has been fortunately very helpful to me at this stage in my life. My "brother" has been born for adversity and I am grateful for that help. Different people play different roles in life and in poverty you can begin to appreciate distinctions between friends and family. Family (assuming you haven't burned every single bridge between you and them or vice versa) can be of mutual aid in times of crisis where friends may depart. Yet there is a friend that is closer than a brother. As I've been saying at various places in this blog, real wisdom does not reside within a universal application of a proverb but in the mysterious path of seeking the Lord and seeking to gain the insight from which to discern when a proverb applies and when it doesn't.
I can admit here (and elsewhere) that there are some passages of scripture that just don't leap out and mean anything to you until you find yourself stuck in the situation those scriptures address. Now for some single man or woman who wants to be married being outside that spot will make you see a passage like "let her breasts satisfy you at all times" as though it's the scriptures talking about all this cool experience you can't have, especially when certain preachers and teachers and bloggers go on about that.
But that's the temptation of envy guiding us there, isn't it? It's easy to go look at Proverbs 5 for the single guy and say "See!? The Bible talks about enjoying one's wife." Yeah, well, like I was saying earlier, if you don't have a wife the scripture isn't telling you to enjoy the wife of your youth. If you're an old man and married do you stop enjoying the old lady because she's no longer young? Of course not. If the wife of your youth has died and you're still alive can you enjoy her embrace anymore? No, and the proverb can't possibly apply to you, can it?
We're not likely to think about passages about poverty if we're Americans, are we? If we do think about it we're likely to imagine that the poor people in our lives are not even really poor because they're American. You can't really be poor if you have access to the internet, an email address, a cel phone, or maybe even a personal computer, can't you? The use of city libraries would only come up in a discussion as a way to, depending on one's views, as bemoaning socialism and unfair government taxation.
I am not sure all proverbs are intended to be guidelines as to how things ought to be but observations about how people actually behave despite their means of self-exoneration. We can choose much of the time to just look away from the poor and suppose the worst about them or, alternately, to suppose the best about them. We transform the poor into something other than people; we transform the poor into those who confirm our ideas and refute the ideas of others. We can talk freely about how Jesus became a poor carpenter if it suits us to refute a prosperity teaching that says Jesus was well off but we can turn around and still find it in our hearts to suppose that people are poor because they're either lazy or stupid or both. And, let's face it, some people are poor because they are either lazy or stupid or both. I have often wondered if that's not true about me about half of the time.
Tuesday, July 05, 2011
postlude regarding the disposability of the single man
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303657404576361691165631366.html?mod=WSJ_article_onespot
Ms. Hvistendahl argues that such imbalances are portents of Very Bad Things to come. "Historically, societies in which men substantially outnumber women are not nice places to live," she writes. "Often they are unstable. Sometimes they are violent." As examples she notes that high sex ratios were at play as far back as the fourth century B.C. in Athens—a particularly bloody time in Greek history—and during China's Taiping Rebellion in the mid-19th century. (Both eras featured widespread female infanticide.) She also notes that the dearth of women along the frontier in the American West probably had a lot to do with its being wild. In 1870, for instance, the sex ratio west of the Mississippi was 125 to 100. In California it was 166 to 100. In Nevada it was 320. In western Kansas, it was 768.
There is indeed compelling evidence of a link between sex ratios and violence. High sex ratios mean that a society is going to have "surplus men"—that is, men with no hope of marrying because there are not enough women. Such men accumulate in the lower classes, where risks of violence are already elevated. And unmarried men with limited incomes tend to make trouble. In Chinese provinces where the sex ratio has spiked, a crime wave has followed. Today in India, the best predictor of violence and crime for any given area is not income but sex ratio.
It is popular in certain conservative Protestant circles to say that a blight on the church is its feminization. It would appear that though the church is historically and canonically called the bride of Christ that it needs doses of testosterone to ensure that it is manly enough to attract men. Concerns get expressed about how churches fail to connect to men by being too feminine either by surplus of actual estrogen or because church leadership is characterized by men who are, in the bluntest of all possible formulation of the objection, pussies or eunuchs or queers.
Problem, the solution to this perceived problem is probably not going to be getting more men into churches. It may help and certainly it is good for men to love the Lord and serve others; but when there are far more men around then there are any possible wives this means that men may act out their disposability on an epic scale. To insist that men in lower income brackets take responsibility and go get married does nothing to make their burden easier. There are a lot of guys who already know they can't afford to be fathers but do not take the trouble to refrain from sexual activities that lead to children. The solution to this problem may not be merely to insist that men solemnize their fornication by way of marriage or get real jobs to support the bastards or legitimate offspring they brought into the world but, as Bonhoeffer so bluntly suggested, reminding people that as terrible as abortion is there are some couples who would do well to refrain from child-rearing because they lack the financial means to responsibly care for the kids.
Ms. Hvistendahl argues that such imbalances are portents of Very Bad Things to come. "Historically, societies in which men substantially outnumber women are not nice places to live," she writes. "Often they are unstable. Sometimes they are violent." As examples she notes that high sex ratios were at play as far back as the fourth century B.C. in Athens—a particularly bloody time in Greek history—and during China's Taiping Rebellion in the mid-19th century. (Both eras featured widespread female infanticide.) She also notes that the dearth of women along the frontier in the American West probably had a lot to do with its being wild. In 1870, for instance, the sex ratio west of the Mississippi was 125 to 100. In California it was 166 to 100. In Nevada it was 320. In western Kansas, it was 768.
There is indeed compelling evidence of a link between sex ratios and violence. High sex ratios mean that a society is going to have "surplus men"—that is, men with no hope of marrying because there are not enough women. Such men accumulate in the lower classes, where risks of violence are already elevated. And unmarried men with limited incomes tend to make trouble. In Chinese provinces where the sex ratio has spiked, a crime wave has followed. Today in India, the best predictor of violence and crime for any given area is not income but sex ratio.
It is popular in certain conservative Protestant circles to say that a blight on the church is its feminization. It would appear that though the church is historically and canonically called the bride of Christ that it needs doses of testosterone to ensure that it is manly enough to attract men. Concerns get expressed about how churches fail to connect to men by being too feminine either by surplus of actual estrogen or because church leadership is characterized by men who are, in the bluntest of all possible formulation of the objection, pussies or eunuchs or queers.
Problem, the solution to this perceived problem is probably not going to be getting more men into churches. It may help and certainly it is good for men to love the Lord and serve others; but when there are far more men around then there are any possible wives this means that men may act out their disposability on an epic scale. To insist that men in lower income brackets take responsibility and go get married does nothing to make their burden easier. There are a lot of guys who already know they can't afford to be fathers but do not take the trouble to refrain from sexual activities that lead to children. The solution to this problem may not be merely to insist that men solemnize their fornication by way of marriage or get real jobs to support the bastards or legitimate offspring they brought into the world but, as Bonhoeffer so bluntly suggested, reminding people that as terrible as abortion is there are some couples who would do well to refrain from child-rearing because they lack the financial means to responsibly care for the kids.
Sunday, July 03, 2011
Roy Baumeister, the disposability of men, and social meaning for the unattached male
http://www.psy.fsu.edu/~baumeistertice/goodaboutmen.htm
I have three short tales about four unmarried men. Two are in their thirties and two are in their forties but all are essentially closer to forty than thirty.
The first man
The first man spent ten years in a conservative Christian setting and wanted to get married. Eventually he turned his back on the Christian faith. He spent years exasperated that he was told from the pulpit that what guys were supposed to do was to go get real jobs, get a woman, marry her, make babies, and move "upstream" to change the culture for Jesus. He felt angry and frustrated that no matter what he tried to do he could never get "upstream" and not only didn't get upstream but probably never would get upstream. All his relationships with women fell apart and he began to feel that this was because the women he had pursued were dishonest and delusional.
The women, for their part, told him he was emotionally and financially unstable and some of them even issued restraining orders against him out of fear for their safety after they broke things off with him. He spent years relying on his feelings as the fuel to motivate him to get things done and pursue goals in his life, yet his feelings could whip around quite violently whether he knew it or not. After he gave up on the Christian faith he also gave up on the idea of marriage and considered it bad and now prefers to argue against human breeding and against marriage altogether.
The second man
The second man also spent years in a conservative Christian setting and by his own account was not only eager to be married but resented God for not giving him a wife because from childhood he had wanted to be married and have a family. Now by "family" he never meant having kids because he dislikes kids but he was eager to marry, so eager he got engaged to a woman who was not particularly faithful before the wedding day and in grave disappointment he broke things off. Eventually he landed at a church where there were a lot of women and he began to consider a number of them as possible bride candidates. None of these worked out even at the level of being more than casual acquaintences. He spent years expressing the idea that no woman should ever be considered out of his league but he never managed to even get into a steady dating relationship and began to feel upset and bitter about how shallow women were for not considering him while considering others.
A friend tried matchmaking for him but none of the propose matches interested him for various reasons revolving around single motherhood and a lack of "spark". Eventually he left that church and came to believe that marriage itself, the thing he coveted for a decade, was basically an abomination. Tax breaks and laws seemed, to him, to favor marriage without any good cause. Women were shallow and he came to regard Tom Leykis as a kind of hero. Though he said of himself he was honest enough to admit "I don't care if they're real as long as they're a certain size" he never put together that he might have been as shallow as the women who never considered him dating material.
In this case a friend approached the man about his ideas about women. The man was fond of saying it was sinful to consider any woman out of his league. A friend asked him that if this were the case what was the man's own unique sales pitch to a woman who could not be out of his league? After all, a woman who would spend her life with a man had to be able to hope for something to be gained from that life? It's one thing to assume no one is above you in the quest for a mate and another thing to have a compelling sales pitch for your candidacy. And would it not also be possible to say that if no woman is above you then no woman is beneath you? To this the man replied that what a woman would stand to gain from life with him was not particularly important, it wasn't even a relevant question. It would appear, however, after ten years of never landing a date that women did consider the question of what they stood to gain from a relationship with him to be fairly important.
Now, however, he considers marriage an abomination. Having spent years saying of those who didn't like the church he was at anymore that they left due to sour grapes he ended up embodying sour grapes himself with regard the thing he resented God for not giving him, marriage. Coveting and envy transformed into loathing and disdain. Along the way he could grant that he was not married because he was an @$$hole but that was a short moment in time. And it wasn't long after that he thought he had a serious shot with a woman who was a decade younger than him. He might have played with the idea that he wasn't the best candidate to be a husband but he was still, at that point, taken with the idea that no woman could possibly be off limits to his consideration in the mating game. He is, probably, still some kind of Christian but spends a good deal of time pontificating against "morality police", though he once revelled in making fun of people using gay slurs he now considers Christians to be unconscienably cruel toward gays. Odds are pretty decent he still teases people by using gay slurs but I don't know for sure.
The third man
This is a Christian man who spent decades hoping to get married. He is not married and he is in his forties now. Unlike the first man, who felt it was impossible to get "upstream" this man has a steady and relatively prosperous career. He can afford to own his own place in an urban center and is socially active. He cares passionately about politics and religion and loves to constantly debate those topics here in the Seattle area. Perhaps unsurprisingly he has a reputation as being a gadfly and an arguer. Not everyone enjoys arguing with him. He feels strongly that the people in the city are basically bad people for judging him, though he rarely backs off from a fight about either religion or politics and does not tend to give people the benefit of a doubt. He has had trouble finding a church home where he feels happy in Seattle because on the one hand he does not like liberal churches but has trouble feeling at home even in conservative ones.
He is a friendly and warm fellow but as yet has not managed to marry and has passed into his forties. He has bristled at jokes made by some Christians that they have no idea how married people make it through the day and is unhappy that some Christians basically speak as though unmarried guys are worthless losers who have done nothing with their lives because they aren't married. Yet he feels that he is, ultimately, a loser precisely because he isn't married and hasn't managed to land a steady dating relationship. He's warm enough and friendly enough to land a few dates here and there but never manages to sustain a romantic relationship for reasons that elude him. He has often suspected the problem is where he is and the people in the city around him. He considers the scriptures and firmly believes that there are no places in the scripture where God indicates that unmarried people have any favor or blessing from the Lord. After all, he who finds a wife finds what is good and receives favor from the Lord. The opposite is never affirmed anywhere in scripture is it?
The fourth man
The fourth man, like the first, was once a conservative Christian and is so no longer. In his Christian days he fretted about his not being married because he was asked point blank by fellow conservative Christians why he wasn't. It was tantamount to being confronted with the question, "What's your excuse? Why aren't you married?" He wasn't sure why. He tended to dread and fear women, in no small way because he could admit he had an emotionally volatile, controlling and manipulative mother. He had the sort of mother who could tell him that the reason good Christian girls dated unbelievers who had sex with them and then made them get abortions was because good Christian guys like him didn't date them.
Except that he didn't feel he really was a good Christian guy, not when he considered his fantasy life and the sexual temptations he relented to. He eventually began to feel that Christian sexual ethics essentially amounted to a utilitarian one in which one only had value due to being paired off. He wanted to have experience and couldn't obtain it clining to Christian teaching. Not only did evolutionary explanations from science suggest that Genesis was unreliable scientific study and evolutionary theories about human nature also suggested that the entire realm of sexual experience Christians sought to limit entirely to marriage were actually available for those who were brave enough to shake off the shackles of Christian legalism and seek what was there to be sought.
But after crossing over the divide between faith and unbelief and obtaining the experiences he sought he found himself disappointed. In his eagerness to obtain experience he jettisoned any standards he might have had. He began to feel that he had settled for relationships that were really not very healthy and for experiences that ultimately weren't worth the effort. And yet on the other side of the divide between belief and unbelief he still felt like a loser because he began to notice that even among the unbelievers everyone his age was already paired off. They might not be married but they were cohabitating and in some cases had done so and borne children.
He began to wonder how it was he got to this point; paradoxically he felt he was just as much a loser among unbelievers for not being in a steady sexual relationship with one person as he did back when he was still a Christian and not married. How was this possible? He felt that ultimately it was his own moral and social failures that accounted for this. Where as the previous three men looked outside and seethed at the injustices done to them with regard to romance this man looked inward and concluded he was just not made of the stuff to have bothered and felt like a loser.
He noticed that a lot of guys who had tried making marriage or a relattionship work had failed and in the process they lost custody of their children and had to make child support payments. The women, it seemed, had the option of filing for divorce and trading up for richer and/or younger modelsof men. It seemed that the flip side of men nabbing trophy wives was that we as a culture had gotten to a point where trophy husbands have come into existence, too. What is more due to the primacy of motherhood a woman would almost invariably get custody in a broken relationship and the male, having once established the life of a child he would no longer have custody over, was totally expendable.
Now the fourth men was able to articulate what I believe is a challenge that every man must eventually face but that is acute for every unmarried man who is also not a parent. Roy Baumeister, in his address responding to Maureen Dowd, said that the paradox about men is that we are valuable in society because we are expendable.
Think of it this way, as some Christian pastors and pundits like to put it, a whole bunch of kids go to bed tonight with no dad. The question is asked "Where's dad?" Dads do play vital, indispensible roles in raising a child and I am not blogging here to propose otherwise. But to see how marriages fail and how custody tends to get assigned it would appear that in terms of legal precedent alone many courts decide that if push comes to shove then the more expendable of the two roles between father and mother the father has the ultimately more expendable role.
Roy Baumeister indirectly touches on this by pointing out a pragmatic reality: if half the men of a generation are killed there are still enough penises left to sire a subsequent generation. If half of the women are killed off by war or disease then the plethora of corresponding penises do absolutely no good in producing a subsequent generation. I might say here that unless one woman agrees in such a situation to sire children for multiple men to ensure family lines continue then a majority of men are consigned to being genetic dead ends.
Actually, Baumeister points out that research in the last ten years on genetics and heredity suggests that half of the males in any given generation are already genetic dead ends. Baumeister makes his point rather bluntly:
A second thing that makes men useful to culture is what I call male expendability. This goes back to what I said at the outset, that cultures tend to use men for the high-risk, high-payoff undertakings, where a significant portion of those will suffer bad outcomes ranging from having their time wasted, all the way to being killed.
Any man who reads the newspapers will encounter the phrase “even women and children” a couple times a month, usually about being killed. The literal meaning of this phrase is that men’s lives have less value than other people’s lives. The idea is usually “It’s bad if people are killed, but it’s especially bad if women and children are killed.” And I think most men know that in an emergency, if there are women and children present, he will be expected to lay down his life without argument or complaint so that the others can survive. On the Titanic, the richest men had a lower survival rate (34%) than the poorest women (46%) (though that’s not how it looked in the movie). That in itself is remarkable. The rich, powerful, and successful men, the movers and shakers, supposedly the ones that the culture is all set up to favor — in a pinch, their lives were valued less than those of women with hardly any money or power or status. The too-few seats in the lifeboats went to the women who weren’t even ladies, instead of to those patriarchs.
Most cultures have had the same attitude. Why? There are pragmatic reasons. When a cultural group competes against other groups, in general, the larger group tends to win out in the long run. Hence most cultures have promoted population growth. And that depends on women. To maximize reproduction, a culture needs all the wombs it can get, but a few penises can do the job. There is usually a penile surplus. If a group loses half its men, the next generation can still be full-sized. But if it loses half its women, the size of the next generation will be severely curtailed. Hence most cultures keep their women out of harm’s way while using men for risky jobs.
These risky jobs extend beyond the battlefield. Many lines of endeavor require some lives to be wasted. Exploration, for example: a culture may send out dozens of parties, and some will get lost or be killed, while others bring back riches and opportunities. Research is somewhat the same way: There may be a dozen possible theories about some problem, only one of which is correct, so the people testing the eleven wrong theories will end up wasting their time and ruining their careers, in contrast to the lucky one who gets the Nobel prize. And of course the dangerous jobs. When the scandals broke about the dangers of the mining industry in Britain, Parliament passed the mining laws that prohibited children under the age of 10 and women of all ages from being sent into the mines. Women and children were too precious to be exposed to death in the mines: so only men. As I said earlier, the gender gap in dangerous work persists today, with men accounting for the vast majority of deaths on the job.
Another basis of male expendability is built into the different ways of being social. Expendability comes with the large groups that male sociality creates. In an intimate, one-to-one relationship, neither person can really be replaced. You can remarry if your spouse dies, but it isn’t really the same marriage or relationship. And of course nobody can ever really replace a child’s mother or father.
In contrast, large groups can and do replace just about everybody. Take any large organization — the Ford Motor Company, the U.S. Army, the Green Bay Packers — and you’ll find that the organization goes on despite having replaced every single person in it. Moreover, every member off those groups knows he or she can be replaced and probably will be replaced some day.
Baumeister is, of course, not the only social scientist to be able to make this observation but with regard to male disposability it can be said that it is a feature and not a flaw in the role of males in human civilization. Now while a conservative Protestant may object that this is a worldly and evolutionary measure of things this is not something that can be disputed with respect to the role of men. How do we know? Well, let me put it to you this way:
Consider the polemic that the epidemic of singleness some neo-Reformed see in today's society is put squarely on the shoulders of irresponsible young men. We get told in numerous ways that they are just refusing to "man up" and go get a woman and marry her. A guy might avoid doing this because he is playing the field in which case he is denounced as a sexual pervert and a jerk who needs to put his pants on, get a real job, go find a girl, and marry her to the glory of Jesus. A guy who has not managed to marry because he is afraid of rejection, insecure about his financial prospects of supporting a family, diffident in the face of a history of rejection, or insecure because he feels he doesn't measure up gets told a different message.
Depending on which pastor is delivering the message of rebuke the gist of things is this, that unmarried man is a worthless coward. Notice that the guy who has, as it were, the courage to sin boldly via fornication is considered to be a guy who just needs to shape up and fly right while the unmarried guy who is afraid of getting shot down and isn't even playing the field is "worthless". Why? Because he's considered to be an irresponsible boy who can shave and is wasting time doing this or that hobby and not building a legacy for Jesus. It would appear in even conservative Christian circles there is a sense in which it is better to ask for forgiveness than to wait for permission! It would appear the guys who are afraid to ask for permission because they fear they'll get told no are "worthless" to some Christian pundits whereas the guys who just went fornicating can find forgiveness in Jesus. The straight fornicators, at any rate, can find "redemption" in marriage.
Well, whatever one may decide about the worthlessness of the unmarried man vs the worthiness of the married man is not exactly what I intend to explore. What I am considering here is that the four men I have mentioned (and by extension myself as the fifth) face down in the later 30s and 40s is the realization that so far as culture and society go we are expendable.
For the first guy a substantial source of bitterness and resentment was hearing a megachurch pastor declare that guys need to find their value in getting a real job, getting a woman, going "upstream" and "influencing culture". This was an explicit manifesto stating that what makes one valuable as a man is doing a set of things and jumping through a set of hoops to the glory of Jesus. And if you either don't do these things through failures on your part or don't manage to do these things because of external obstacles then, well, you're part of the demographic problem of adultescent males who refuse to grow up even if you have managed to been shut down by any girlfriend you ever managed to get.
It is not so surprising, in hindsight, that the first man explicitly rejected both marriage as the definition of truly responsible adulthood and has located it in "sustainable living" and an avoidance of procreation. After all, this places "the breeders" in a lower moral category and makes them more selfish for breeding given the pending ecological catastrophe; it also permits one to transform one's utter failure by one social metric into moral superiority and victory by way of another. The man no longer has to hear from a megachurch pastor with a wife and multiple children that he is a failure for not being married. It is very convenient for someone who by sheer force of will and determination has obtained already all the things considered necessary for being a real man to speak down to those who have failed and considers this to be lighting a fire under them to motivate them. Though the first man has made any number of decisions I have considered to be exceptionally foolhardy I do not entirely begrudge him his vexation at being told in so many ways that he had to basically turn himself into an alpha male rather than the omega male he generally felt he was.
The second man underwent a similar transformation in which the thing he most coveted and envied is now transformed into an abomination but for different reasons. Though he (oddly, like the first guy) was apt to make some of the most derogatory comments about homosexuals I've heard, was able to say without batting an eyelash that Christians should stop being so nasty to them. It's an easy affectation to take up when once you have cast off marriage as an evil abomination and yet claim solidarity in affliction with gays, many of whom would actually like to be married. It does not go without saying that this sort of moral outrage at the sour grapes is not just a little self-serving and selective. What is an abomination for the resentful straight goose can't stop being that for the gay gander.
The third man still wants to be married and still considers married people to have it better in every possible respect. He has never been married and so imagines, as I suppose may be common to many unmarried conservative Christian males, that there is no possibility of such a thing as awkward, unfulfilling or even physically painful sex. I am an unmarried fellow who has seen a lot of fellow single Christians speak of marriage entirely in terms of the benefits and good times.
It is seen by them and even presented in their churches as a "functional savior". Now I hate that phrase because of how cheaply it is used but I use it here because it is, ironically, in those churches that would deny they do this that marriage really is held forth as a kind of functional savior. If a pastor can say from the pulpit that men who don't ask women out due to fear are worthless cowards then this means that they have been judged unfit for real life, since real life and real adulthood are defined by marriage. Marriage is for men and not boys, ergo the unmarried are not real men.
The third man considers himself a loser for having not married and considers marriage to be the big sign in this life of being blessed by God. He measures himself as a failure on this count and yet does not see that though he rejects and repudiates all kinds of other arguments and claims from churches in other areas of his life as legalism and shaming he fully accepts the "failure" of singleness at an emotional level while, it seems, vacillating between internalizing the emotional sense of failure and externalizing its causes. Anyone who attempts to go through the scriptures to point out that categorically declaring marriage to be both better than singleness and the measure of God's favor as a simplistic and atomized reading of scripture is met with his hostility. It is better to feel a failure for having not married, perhaps, than to feel confident that the Lord does not consider us to be better or more precious to Him in our unmarried state than a married one.
A careful consideration of all the marriages in scripture will show that not all marriages were necessarily proofs of God's immense favor. What I have seen time and again in the last twenty years of my adult life is that there is a powerful distinction between a proverb employed as a universal axiom and a proverb deployed in real wisdom. Real wisdom does not reside in merely knowing a proverb and applying it whenever you're sure the proverb even tangentially relates to a situation or a person, real wisdom resides in acquiring through the Lord's mercies the knowledge of when a proverb applies and when it doesn't. Like a lame man’s legs, which hang useless, is a proverb in the mouth of fools. Like a thorn that goes up into the hand of a drunkard is a proverb in the mouth of fools. A proverb can be true itself but useless through misapplication. A proverb employed by a fool can end up doing harm both to the fool and to those upon whom the fool uses the proverb. The whole contest between Job and his friends could be summed up as the dispute between a man afflicted by God with those who in their certainty with proverbs and theodicy made themselves foolish by applying the "right" theology at the wrong time to the wrong person for the wrong reasons.
I have seen Christian stroll through prooftext after prooftext and ignore Paul's explicit statement that those who do not marry are doing fine by the Lord. Many people look at what Paul says about the cares and distractions of married life and how they can be an impediment to seeking and serving the Lord and just assume that Paul must be lying or speaking out of the ignorance of having been unmarried for so long he just didn't know what he was talking about.
The fourth man summed up the anxiety of feeling disposable. He's past forty years old now and realizes that he is, in the scope of human history, nobody. As someone who has been looking for work for nearly two years with no success this is the anxiety I find most troubling to wrestle with. A father, no matter how bad a father he may be, has played an irreversible role in bringing forth a human life. Even if that father were to fail so utterly in his role as to not see his child for the rest of his life (after bringing the child into the world by dint of mere reproduction) he has not, from a genetic standpoint, been a total failure. In other words he providentially has a legacy by way of a child even if it is through a child he doesn't want.
But the unmarried man or woman who goes through life and fails to bring forth a child? Well, it would seem given the way some Christians talk about "God's design" that these men and women are considered failures. They are not just failures simply for missing the mark but get told they are objects of God's judgment for not seeking to fulfill God's design. Ironically the straight single person comes under the same rebuke that a Christian with a same-sex attraction would come under. A person who does not make sufficient visible effort to pair off may simply be suspected of homosexuality even if he or she isn't simply because of a cultural hermeneutic of suspicion. After all, as some Christians put it, the goal of a man should be to love Jesus by getting a real job, getting a wife, and making babies. This is what guys should do so that they are not merely consumers but create a legacy.
But this gets at to me, the problem of framing Christian marriage and fatherhood in terms of "legacy". What if the highest good in the Christian's life is not the creation of one's own legacy but participation in Christ's legacy? This does not indicate that one no longer attempts to pursue marriage or career or whatever but that these can be done out of thanks for a legacy that through Christ is already secured. As the apostle Paul put it himself let those who are married live as though they were not for the time is short. That's the positive way of framing this concern.
The negative way of framing the concern is that legacy is not an intrinsic good. For that matter legacy was the foundation of the temptation to build a tower at Babel. They explicitly sought to not scatter themselves but to build a monument to themselves and a legacy. There are those Christian men who seek fatherhood to obtain for themselves a legacy which is not actually the legacy of Christ but their own legacy. These men should not necessarily stop having children but have a different disposition in their hearts toward these children.
And, once more, we come to Job. A man may accumulate wealth, get a wife, have children, and build a legacy and in a single day the Lord can authorize Satan to destroy all those children, destroy all that wealth, and afflict one's body with disease. Then the wife who is proof of God's blessing and favor urges you to "bless God and die". Then your friends gather around you and tell you how these afflictions must have come upon you because of the sin in your heart for which the Lord is justly judging you. Any attempt to explain that you fear the Lord, fear ever incurring His wrath, and have no idea why God has permitted this to happen to you; any attempt to point out that it's rather crazy to assume that there is a big lesson (because there must be a lesson in this suffering) to be learned in how one must REALLY trust God so that this disaster won't happen becomes evidence against you.
I am at a point in my life where one of the major struggles I have with depression as a man is that I have not managed in nearly two years to talk anyone into hiring me for a job. That leaves a guy feeling useless. I find it hard to feel useless because I am unmarried and have never actually dated because there's nothing like joblessness to make a guy feel like at least there isn't THAT burden on top of me, too. But being explicitly and implicitly told that marriage is the measure of real adulthood can be a source of substantial frustration because it basically means I get told I know nothing about sacrifice. Why? I'm not married. I'm not really an adult. Why? I'm not married. Now I don't get this at the church I'm at but ten years of getting it in other church and family settings takes a while to get over. I think most of the time I'm over it.
But I'm not over not having a job, and I'm not over the gnawing feeling that I spent a decade gaining skills that are basically worthless in the job market. I am not over the struggle to figure out what, if anything, I can do to even land any kind of steady income. Certainly I have plenty of fun writing free-lance projects as I go and composing music but I honestly don't see how that is the same as having a steady 9-5 kind of job. Even when I consider just the feeling that I'm useless because nobody has seen fit to hire me that's not the entire anxiety of meaning, the other part of anxiety of meaning is something that I don't consciously wrestle with the way the four guys I mentioned have, which is the sense of social disposability where marriage goes. I admit I'm not entirely over that.
There's a passage of scripture I have reflected upon in the last few years. My friend Wendy over at practical theology for women has written about women dealing with infertility and singleness. Isaiah wrote about that issue but not just about that issue. Isaiah also wrote to those who never married. To be a man with no wife or children was to be worthless in that society, too, in the long run. Family legacy mattered more than individual legacy. Even if you were a great individual with no family to continue, no heir of any kind, you still died a nobody in many cases.
Jesus said that there were those who were born eunuchs from birth, those made eunuchs by men, and those who made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom. A eunuch was, typically, a man who was a chamberlain for a royal court, a bed-keeper of a harem. Though the royal position itself was a privileged one the customary castration that often went with this in other ancient societies involved a mutilation that made one ineligible to worship in the temple and be in the presence of the Lord. Though one was of great worth to the royal court in terms of the spiritual community and corporate worship one was irrevocably an outsider.
Isaiah 56:3-8
Let no foreigner who is bound to the LORD say,
“The LORD will surely exclude me from his people.”
And let no eunuch complain,
“I am only a dry tree.”
For this is what the LORD says:
“To the eunuchs who keep my Sabbaths,
who choose what pleases me
and hold fast to my covenant—
to them I will give within my temple and its walls
a memorial and a name
better than sons and daughters;
I will give them an everlasting name
that will endure forever.
And foreigners who bind themselves to the LORD
to minister to him,
to love the name of the LORD,
and to be his servants,
all who keep the Sabbath without desecrating it
and who hold fast to my covenant—
these I will bring to my holy mountain
and give them joy in my house of prayer.
Their burnt offerings and sacrifices
will be accepted on my altar;
for my house will be called
a house of prayer for all nations.”
The Sovereign LORD declares—
he who gathers the exiles of Israel:
“I will gather still others to them
besides those already gathered.”
I have three short tales about four unmarried men. Two are in their thirties and two are in their forties but all are essentially closer to forty than thirty.
The first man
The first man spent ten years in a conservative Christian setting and wanted to get married. Eventually he turned his back on the Christian faith. He spent years exasperated that he was told from the pulpit that what guys were supposed to do was to go get real jobs, get a woman, marry her, make babies, and move "upstream" to change the culture for Jesus. He felt angry and frustrated that no matter what he tried to do he could never get "upstream" and not only didn't get upstream but probably never would get upstream. All his relationships with women fell apart and he began to feel that this was because the women he had pursued were dishonest and delusional.
The women, for their part, told him he was emotionally and financially unstable and some of them even issued restraining orders against him out of fear for their safety after they broke things off with him. He spent years relying on his feelings as the fuel to motivate him to get things done and pursue goals in his life, yet his feelings could whip around quite violently whether he knew it or not. After he gave up on the Christian faith he also gave up on the idea of marriage and considered it bad and now prefers to argue against human breeding and against marriage altogether.
The second man
The second man also spent years in a conservative Christian setting and by his own account was not only eager to be married but resented God for not giving him a wife because from childhood he had wanted to be married and have a family. Now by "family" he never meant having kids because he dislikes kids but he was eager to marry, so eager he got engaged to a woman who was not particularly faithful before the wedding day and in grave disappointment he broke things off. Eventually he landed at a church where there were a lot of women and he began to consider a number of them as possible bride candidates. None of these worked out even at the level of being more than casual acquaintences. He spent years expressing the idea that no woman should ever be considered out of his league but he never managed to even get into a steady dating relationship and began to feel upset and bitter about how shallow women were for not considering him while considering others.
A friend tried matchmaking for him but none of the propose matches interested him for various reasons revolving around single motherhood and a lack of "spark". Eventually he left that church and came to believe that marriage itself, the thing he coveted for a decade, was basically an abomination. Tax breaks and laws seemed, to him, to favor marriage without any good cause. Women were shallow and he came to regard Tom Leykis as a kind of hero. Though he said of himself he was honest enough to admit "I don't care if they're real as long as they're a certain size" he never put together that he might have been as shallow as the women who never considered him dating material.
In this case a friend approached the man about his ideas about women. The man was fond of saying it was sinful to consider any woman out of his league. A friend asked him that if this were the case what was the man's own unique sales pitch to a woman who could not be out of his league? After all, a woman who would spend her life with a man had to be able to hope for something to be gained from that life? It's one thing to assume no one is above you in the quest for a mate and another thing to have a compelling sales pitch for your candidacy. And would it not also be possible to say that if no woman is above you then no woman is beneath you? To this the man replied that what a woman would stand to gain from life with him was not particularly important, it wasn't even a relevant question. It would appear, however, after ten years of never landing a date that women did consider the question of what they stood to gain from a relationship with him to be fairly important.
Now, however, he considers marriage an abomination. Having spent years saying of those who didn't like the church he was at anymore that they left due to sour grapes he ended up embodying sour grapes himself with regard the thing he resented God for not giving him, marriage. Coveting and envy transformed into loathing and disdain. Along the way he could grant that he was not married because he was an @$$hole but that was a short moment in time. And it wasn't long after that he thought he had a serious shot with a woman who was a decade younger than him. He might have played with the idea that he wasn't the best candidate to be a husband but he was still, at that point, taken with the idea that no woman could possibly be off limits to his consideration in the mating game. He is, probably, still some kind of Christian but spends a good deal of time pontificating against "morality police", though he once revelled in making fun of people using gay slurs he now considers Christians to be unconscienably cruel toward gays. Odds are pretty decent he still teases people by using gay slurs but I don't know for sure.
The third man
This is a Christian man who spent decades hoping to get married. He is not married and he is in his forties now. Unlike the first man, who felt it was impossible to get "upstream" this man has a steady and relatively prosperous career. He can afford to own his own place in an urban center and is socially active. He cares passionately about politics and religion and loves to constantly debate those topics here in the Seattle area. Perhaps unsurprisingly he has a reputation as being a gadfly and an arguer. Not everyone enjoys arguing with him. He feels strongly that the people in the city are basically bad people for judging him, though he rarely backs off from a fight about either religion or politics and does not tend to give people the benefit of a doubt. He has had trouble finding a church home where he feels happy in Seattle because on the one hand he does not like liberal churches but has trouble feeling at home even in conservative ones.
He is a friendly and warm fellow but as yet has not managed to marry and has passed into his forties. He has bristled at jokes made by some Christians that they have no idea how married people make it through the day and is unhappy that some Christians basically speak as though unmarried guys are worthless losers who have done nothing with their lives because they aren't married. Yet he feels that he is, ultimately, a loser precisely because he isn't married and hasn't managed to land a steady dating relationship. He's warm enough and friendly enough to land a few dates here and there but never manages to sustain a romantic relationship for reasons that elude him. He has often suspected the problem is where he is and the people in the city around him. He considers the scriptures and firmly believes that there are no places in the scripture where God indicates that unmarried people have any favor or blessing from the Lord. After all, he who finds a wife finds what is good and receives favor from the Lord. The opposite is never affirmed anywhere in scripture is it?
The fourth man
The fourth man, like the first, was once a conservative Christian and is so no longer. In his Christian days he fretted about his not being married because he was asked point blank by fellow conservative Christians why he wasn't. It was tantamount to being confronted with the question, "What's your excuse? Why aren't you married?" He wasn't sure why. He tended to dread and fear women, in no small way because he could admit he had an emotionally volatile, controlling and manipulative mother. He had the sort of mother who could tell him that the reason good Christian girls dated unbelievers who had sex with them and then made them get abortions was because good Christian guys like him didn't date them.
Except that he didn't feel he really was a good Christian guy, not when he considered his fantasy life and the sexual temptations he relented to. He eventually began to feel that Christian sexual ethics essentially amounted to a utilitarian one in which one only had value due to being paired off. He wanted to have experience and couldn't obtain it clining to Christian teaching. Not only did evolutionary explanations from science suggest that Genesis was unreliable scientific study and evolutionary theories about human nature also suggested that the entire realm of sexual experience Christians sought to limit entirely to marriage were actually available for those who were brave enough to shake off the shackles of Christian legalism and seek what was there to be sought.
But after crossing over the divide between faith and unbelief and obtaining the experiences he sought he found himself disappointed. In his eagerness to obtain experience he jettisoned any standards he might have had. He began to feel that he had settled for relationships that were really not very healthy and for experiences that ultimately weren't worth the effort. And yet on the other side of the divide between belief and unbelief he still felt like a loser because he began to notice that even among the unbelievers everyone his age was already paired off. They might not be married but they were cohabitating and in some cases had done so and borne children.
He began to wonder how it was he got to this point; paradoxically he felt he was just as much a loser among unbelievers for not being in a steady sexual relationship with one person as he did back when he was still a Christian and not married. How was this possible? He felt that ultimately it was his own moral and social failures that accounted for this. Where as the previous three men looked outside and seethed at the injustices done to them with regard to romance this man looked inward and concluded he was just not made of the stuff to have bothered and felt like a loser.
He noticed that a lot of guys who had tried making marriage or a relattionship work had failed and in the process they lost custody of their children and had to make child support payments. The women, it seemed, had the option of filing for divorce and trading up for richer and/or younger modelsof men. It seemed that the flip side of men nabbing trophy wives was that we as a culture had gotten to a point where trophy husbands have come into existence, too. What is more due to the primacy of motherhood a woman would almost invariably get custody in a broken relationship and the male, having once established the life of a child he would no longer have custody over, was totally expendable.
Now the fourth men was able to articulate what I believe is a challenge that every man must eventually face but that is acute for every unmarried man who is also not a parent. Roy Baumeister, in his address responding to Maureen Dowd, said that the paradox about men is that we are valuable in society because we are expendable.
Think of it this way, as some Christian pastors and pundits like to put it, a whole bunch of kids go to bed tonight with no dad. The question is asked "Where's dad?" Dads do play vital, indispensible roles in raising a child and I am not blogging here to propose otherwise. But to see how marriages fail and how custody tends to get assigned it would appear that in terms of legal precedent alone many courts decide that if push comes to shove then the more expendable of the two roles between father and mother the father has the ultimately more expendable role.
Roy Baumeister indirectly touches on this by pointing out a pragmatic reality: if half the men of a generation are killed there are still enough penises left to sire a subsequent generation. If half of the women are killed off by war or disease then the plethora of corresponding penises do absolutely no good in producing a subsequent generation. I might say here that unless one woman agrees in such a situation to sire children for multiple men to ensure family lines continue then a majority of men are consigned to being genetic dead ends.
Actually, Baumeister points out that research in the last ten years on genetics and heredity suggests that half of the males in any given generation are already genetic dead ends. Baumeister makes his point rather bluntly:
A second thing that makes men useful to culture is what I call male expendability. This goes back to what I said at the outset, that cultures tend to use men for the high-risk, high-payoff undertakings, where a significant portion of those will suffer bad outcomes ranging from having their time wasted, all the way to being killed.
Any man who reads the newspapers will encounter the phrase “even women and children” a couple times a month, usually about being killed. The literal meaning of this phrase is that men’s lives have less value than other people’s lives. The idea is usually “It’s bad if people are killed, but it’s especially bad if women and children are killed.” And I think most men know that in an emergency, if there are women and children present, he will be expected to lay down his life without argument or complaint so that the others can survive. On the Titanic, the richest men had a lower survival rate (34%) than the poorest women (46%) (though that’s not how it looked in the movie). That in itself is remarkable. The rich, powerful, and successful men, the movers and shakers, supposedly the ones that the culture is all set up to favor — in a pinch, their lives were valued less than those of women with hardly any money or power or status. The too-few seats in the lifeboats went to the women who weren’t even ladies, instead of to those patriarchs.
Most cultures have had the same attitude. Why? There are pragmatic reasons. When a cultural group competes against other groups, in general, the larger group tends to win out in the long run. Hence most cultures have promoted population growth. And that depends on women. To maximize reproduction, a culture needs all the wombs it can get, but a few penises can do the job. There is usually a penile surplus. If a group loses half its men, the next generation can still be full-sized. But if it loses half its women, the size of the next generation will be severely curtailed. Hence most cultures keep their women out of harm’s way while using men for risky jobs.
These risky jobs extend beyond the battlefield. Many lines of endeavor require some lives to be wasted. Exploration, for example: a culture may send out dozens of parties, and some will get lost or be killed, while others bring back riches and opportunities. Research is somewhat the same way: There may be a dozen possible theories about some problem, only one of which is correct, so the people testing the eleven wrong theories will end up wasting their time and ruining their careers, in contrast to the lucky one who gets the Nobel prize. And of course the dangerous jobs. When the scandals broke about the dangers of the mining industry in Britain, Parliament passed the mining laws that prohibited children under the age of 10 and women of all ages from being sent into the mines. Women and children were too precious to be exposed to death in the mines: so only men. As I said earlier, the gender gap in dangerous work persists today, with men accounting for the vast majority of deaths on the job.
Another basis of male expendability is built into the different ways of being social. Expendability comes with the large groups that male sociality creates. In an intimate, one-to-one relationship, neither person can really be replaced. You can remarry if your spouse dies, but it isn’t really the same marriage or relationship. And of course nobody can ever really replace a child’s mother or father.
In contrast, large groups can and do replace just about everybody. Take any large organization — the Ford Motor Company, the U.S. Army, the Green Bay Packers — and you’ll find that the organization goes on despite having replaced every single person in it. Moreover, every member off those groups knows he or she can be replaced and probably will be replaced some day.
Baumeister is, of course, not the only social scientist to be able to make this observation but with regard to male disposability it can be said that it is a feature and not a flaw in the role of males in human civilization. Now while a conservative Protestant may object that this is a worldly and evolutionary measure of things this is not something that can be disputed with respect to the role of men. How do we know? Well, let me put it to you this way:
Consider the polemic that the epidemic of singleness some neo-Reformed see in today's society is put squarely on the shoulders of irresponsible young men. We get told in numerous ways that they are just refusing to "man up" and go get a woman and marry her. A guy might avoid doing this because he is playing the field in which case he is denounced as a sexual pervert and a jerk who needs to put his pants on, get a real job, go find a girl, and marry her to the glory of Jesus. A guy who has not managed to marry because he is afraid of rejection, insecure about his financial prospects of supporting a family, diffident in the face of a history of rejection, or insecure because he feels he doesn't measure up gets told a different message.
Depending on which pastor is delivering the message of rebuke the gist of things is this, that unmarried man is a worthless coward. Notice that the guy who has, as it were, the courage to sin boldly via fornication is considered to be a guy who just needs to shape up and fly right while the unmarried guy who is afraid of getting shot down and isn't even playing the field is "worthless". Why? Because he's considered to be an irresponsible boy who can shave and is wasting time doing this or that hobby and not building a legacy for Jesus. It would appear in even conservative Christian circles there is a sense in which it is better to ask for forgiveness than to wait for permission! It would appear the guys who are afraid to ask for permission because they fear they'll get told no are "worthless" to some Christian pundits whereas the guys who just went fornicating can find forgiveness in Jesus. The straight fornicators, at any rate, can find "redemption" in marriage.
Well, whatever one may decide about the worthlessness of the unmarried man vs the worthiness of the married man is not exactly what I intend to explore. What I am considering here is that the four men I have mentioned (and by extension myself as the fifth) face down in the later 30s and 40s is the realization that so far as culture and society go we are expendable.
For the first guy a substantial source of bitterness and resentment was hearing a megachurch pastor declare that guys need to find their value in getting a real job, getting a woman, going "upstream" and "influencing culture". This was an explicit manifesto stating that what makes one valuable as a man is doing a set of things and jumping through a set of hoops to the glory of Jesus. And if you either don't do these things through failures on your part or don't manage to do these things because of external obstacles then, well, you're part of the demographic problem of adultescent males who refuse to grow up even if you have managed to been shut down by any girlfriend you ever managed to get.
It is not so surprising, in hindsight, that the first man explicitly rejected both marriage as the definition of truly responsible adulthood and has located it in "sustainable living" and an avoidance of procreation. After all, this places "the breeders" in a lower moral category and makes them more selfish for breeding given the pending ecological catastrophe; it also permits one to transform one's utter failure by one social metric into moral superiority and victory by way of another. The man no longer has to hear from a megachurch pastor with a wife and multiple children that he is a failure for not being married. It is very convenient for someone who by sheer force of will and determination has obtained already all the things considered necessary for being a real man to speak down to those who have failed and considers this to be lighting a fire under them to motivate them. Though the first man has made any number of decisions I have considered to be exceptionally foolhardy I do not entirely begrudge him his vexation at being told in so many ways that he had to basically turn himself into an alpha male rather than the omega male he generally felt he was.
The second man underwent a similar transformation in which the thing he most coveted and envied is now transformed into an abomination but for different reasons. Though he (oddly, like the first guy) was apt to make some of the most derogatory comments about homosexuals I've heard, was able to say without batting an eyelash that Christians should stop being so nasty to them. It's an easy affectation to take up when once you have cast off marriage as an evil abomination and yet claim solidarity in affliction with gays, many of whom would actually like to be married. It does not go without saying that this sort of moral outrage at the sour grapes is not just a little self-serving and selective. What is an abomination for the resentful straight goose can't stop being that for the gay gander.
The third man still wants to be married and still considers married people to have it better in every possible respect. He has never been married and so imagines, as I suppose may be common to many unmarried conservative Christian males, that there is no possibility of such a thing as awkward, unfulfilling or even physically painful sex. I am an unmarried fellow who has seen a lot of fellow single Christians speak of marriage entirely in terms of the benefits and good times.
It is seen by them and even presented in their churches as a "functional savior". Now I hate that phrase because of how cheaply it is used but I use it here because it is, ironically, in those churches that would deny they do this that marriage really is held forth as a kind of functional savior. If a pastor can say from the pulpit that men who don't ask women out due to fear are worthless cowards then this means that they have been judged unfit for real life, since real life and real adulthood are defined by marriage. Marriage is for men and not boys, ergo the unmarried are not real men.
The third man considers himself a loser for having not married and considers marriage to be the big sign in this life of being blessed by God. He measures himself as a failure on this count and yet does not see that though he rejects and repudiates all kinds of other arguments and claims from churches in other areas of his life as legalism and shaming he fully accepts the "failure" of singleness at an emotional level while, it seems, vacillating between internalizing the emotional sense of failure and externalizing its causes. Anyone who attempts to go through the scriptures to point out that categorically declaring marriage to be both better than singleness and the measure of God's favor as a simplistic and atomized reading of scripture is met with his hostility. It is better to feel a failure for having not married, perhaps, than to feel confident that the Lord does not consider us to be better or more precious to Him in our unmarried state than a married one.
A careful consideration of all the marriages in scripture will show that not all marriages were necessarily proofs of God's immense favor. What I have seen time and again in the last twenty years of my adult life is that there is a powerful distinction between a proverb employed as a universal axiom and a proverb deployed in real wisdom. Real wisdom does not reside in merely knowing a proverb and applying it whenever you're sure the proverb even tangentially relates to a situation or a person, real wisdom resides in acquiring through the Lord's mercies the knowledge of when a proverb applies and when it doesn't. Like a lame man’s legs, which hang useless, is a proverb in the mouth of fools. Like a thorn that goes up into the hand of a drunkard is a proverb in the mouth of fools. A proverb can be true itself but useless through misapplication. A proverb employed by a fool can end up doing harm both to the fool and to those upon whom the fool uses the proverb. The whole contest between Job and his friends could be summed up as the dispute between a man afflicted by God with those who in their certainty with proverbs and theodicy made themselves foolish by applying the "right" theology at the wrong time to the wrong person for the wrong reasons.
I have seen Christian stroll through prooftext after prooftext and ignore Paul's explicit statement that those who do not marry are doing fine by the Lord. Many people look at what Paul says about the cares and distractions of married life and how they can be an impediment to seeking and serving the Lord and just assume that Paul must be lying or speaking out of the ignorance of having been unmarried for so long he just didn't know what he was talking about.
The fourth man summed up the anxiety of feeling disposable. He's past forty years old now and realizes that he is, in the scope of human history, nobody. As someone who has been looking for work for nearly two years with no success this is the anxiety I find most troubling to wrestle with. A father, no matter how bad a father he may be, has played an irreversible role in bringing forth a human life. Even if that father were to fail so utterly in his role as to not see his child for the rest of his life (after bringing the child into the world by dint of mere reproduction) he has not, from a genetic standpoint, been a total failure. In other words he providentially has a legacy by way of a child even if it is through a child he doesn't want.
But the unmarried man or woman who goes through life and fails to bring forth a child? Well, it would seem given the way some Christians talk about "God's design" that these men and women are considered failures. They are not just failures simply for missing the mark but get told they are objects of God's judgment for not seeking to fulfill God's design. Ironically the straight single person comes under the same rebuke that a Christian with a same-sex attraction would come under. A person who does not make sufficient visible effort to pair off may simply be suspected of homosexuality even if he or she isn't simply because of a cultural hermeneutic of suspicion. After all, as some Christians put it, the goal of a man should be to love Jesus by getting a real job, getting a wife, and making babies. This is what guys should do so that they are not merely consumers but create a legacy.
But this gets at to me, the problem of framing Christian marriage and fatherhood in terms of "legacy". What if the highest good in the Christian's life is not the creation of one's own legacy but participation in Christ's legacy? This does not indicate that one no longer attempts to pursue marriage or career or whatever but that these can be done out of thanks for a legacy that through Christ is already secured. As the apostle Paul put it himself let those who are married live as though they were not for the time is short. That's the positive way of framing this concern.
The negative way of framing the concern is that legacy is not an intrinsic good. For that matter legacy was the foundation of the temptation to build a tower at Babel. They explicitly sought to not scatter themselves but to build a monument to themselves and a legacy. There are those Christian men who seek fatherhood to obtain for themselves a legacy which is not actually the legacy of Christ but their own legacy. These men should not necessarily stop having children but have a different disposition in their hearts toward these children.
And, once more, we come to Job. A man may accumulate wealth, get a wife, have children, and build a legacy and in a single day the Lord can authorize Satan to destroy all those children, destroy all that wealth, and afflict one's body with disease. Then the wife who is proof of God's blessing and favor urges you to "bless God and die". Then your friends gather around you and tell you how these afflictions must have come upon you because of the sin in your heart for which the Lord is justly judging you. Any attempt to explain that you fear the Lord, fear ever incurring His wrath, and have no idea why God has permitted this to happen to you; any attempt to point out that it's rather crazy to assume that there is a big lesson (because there must be a lesson in this suffering) to be learned in how one must REALLY trust God so that this disaster won't happen becomes evidence against you.
I am at a point in my life where one of the major struggles I have with depression as a man is that I have not managed in nearly two years to talk anyone into hiring me for a job. That leaves a guy feeling useless. I find it hard to feel useless because I am unmarried and have never actually dated because there's nothing like joblessness to make a guy feel like at least there isn't THAT burden on top of me, too. But being explicitly and implicitly told that marriage is the measure of real adulthood can be a source of substantial frustration because it basically means I get told I know nothing about sacrifice. Why? I'm not married. I'm not really an adult. Why? I'm not married. Now I don't get this at the church I'm at but ten years of getting it in other church and family settings takes a while to get over. I think most of the time I'm over it.
But I'm not over not having a job, and I'm not over the gnawing feeling that I spent a decade gaining skills that are basically worthless in the job market. I am not over the struggle to figure out what, if anything, I can do to even land any kind of steady income. Certainly I have plenty of fun writing free-lance projects as I go and composing music but I honestly don't see how that is the same as having a steady 9-5 kind of job. Even when I consider just the feeling that I'm useless because nobody has seen fit to hire me that's not the entire anxiety of meaning, the other part of anxiety of meaning is something that I don't consciously wrestle with the way the four guys I mentioned have, which is the sense of social disposability where marriage goes. I admit I'm not entirely over that.
There's a passage of scripture I have reflected upon in the last few years. My friend Wendy over at practical theology for women has written about women dealing with infertility and singleness. Isaiah wrote about that issue but not just about that issue. Isaiah also wrote to those who never married. To be a man with no wife or children was to be worthless in that society, too, in the long run. Family legacy mattered more than individual legacy. Even if you were a great individual with no family to continue, no heir of any kind, you still died a nobody in many cases.
Jesus said that there were those who were born eunuchs from birth, those made eunuchs by men, and those who made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom. A eunuch was, typically, a man who was a chamberlain for a royal court, a bed-keeper of a harem. Though the royal position itself was a privileged one the customary castration that often went with this in other ancient societies involved a mutilation that made one ineligible to worship in the temple and be in the presence of the Lord. Though one was of great worth to the royal court in terms of the spiritual community and corporate worship one was irrevocably an outsider.
Isaiah 56:3-8
Let no foreigner who is bound to the LORD say,
“The LORD will surely exclude me from his people.”
And let no eunuch complain,
“I am only a dry tree.”
For this is what the LORD says:
“To the eunuchs who keep my Sabbaths,
who choose what pleases me
and hold fast to my covenant—
to them I will give within my temple and its walls
a memorial and a name
better than sons and daughters;
I will give them an everlasting name
that will endure forever.
And foreigners who bind themselves to the LORD
to minister to him,
to love the name of the LORD,
and to be his servants,
all who keep the Sabbath without desecrating it
and who hold fast to my covenant—
these I will bring to my holy mountain
and give them joy in my house of prayer.
Their burnt offerings and sacrifices
will be accepted on my altar;
for my house will be called
a house of prayer for all nations.”
The Sovereign LORD declares—
he who gathers the exiles of Israel:
“I will gather still others to them
besides those already gathered.”
Monday, June 27, 2011
A friend is useful at all times and a brother is born to be ranked?
http://www.acts29network.org/acts-29-blog/the-pastor-and-his-wife-get-to-pick-their-own-friends--part-1/
http://thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/tgc/2011/05/24/the-pastor-and-his-wife-get-to-pick-their-own-friends-part-2/
One of the things where I have had no problem saying that Mark Driscoll is weak is in handling Old Testament texts. Another area where I believe he is weak is in discussing friendship. He's turned his sights to discussing the subject recently and, honestly, he's still not quite impressing me. It's important to discuss how pastors prioritize friendship, family and ministry but even in his attempt to field these important topics in a practical way there's something a bit funky.
See, Mark cannot but help but constantly rank and evaluate whole categories and individuals on the basis of utility. Consider this set of number-ranked categories:
0 Enemies
+1 Old Acquaintances Not in regular, meaningful contact
– Past relationships such as classmates, teammates, coworkers, neighbors, etc.
+2 Distant Relatives Little regular contact other than when obligated
– Family event (funeral, wedding, reunion, holidays)
+3 Neighbors Not in community; see often but not close
– Not in one another’s homes and only surface chats
+4 Connections Same social circles bring together
– Kids in same school, on same team, or in same activity
– Work out at same gym, etc.
+5 Coworkers
+6 Activity Group Doing something organized with others
– Sports team, community organization, club cause, hobby
+7 Close Family See and speak to frequently
– The family you enjoy and pursue
+8 Fellowship “Church Family”
– Bible study group, ministry partners
+9 Close Friends Friends you frequently see and speak to
– People you enjoy and pursue, mutually
+10 Spouse
So within this number ranking enemies are understandably at 0. But consider that in lane +7 there's "close family". These are family members you like and pursue. Above that are "church family", Bible study group and ministry partners. Now I'm not sure why people you see once a week in a community group or Bible study outrank your own children or your parents. I'm not sure why a pastor you work with in a ministry setting or "friends you frequently see and speak to" are in a higher ranked category than a brother? I don't know what, if anything, any of these rankings suggest about Driscoll's relationship with his siblings and children but in any case, there it is, he's set up numbered lanes in which his children and any siblings rank below guys like Jamie Munson or Scott Thomas and whomever he considers "a good friend".
Even if I grant the axiom that a friend must of necessity be a peer and that therefore one's children can never, ever be one's friends that doesn't factor in adults who have relationships with siblings and parents. If the family, as nearly anyone with a functioning brain could attest, is where socialization habits are developed then any kind of ranking system is going to eventually be useless in the real world. A person who could technically qualify as +9 or +8 may do so for reasons that are not necessarily discussed or analyzed.
It is also not a foregone conclusion that one's spouse must always, only and ever be in the +10 category by definition. What happens to the widow or widower? Does that mean that +10 friendship has been lost and cannot be regained except through remarriage? How, in this context, does the Bible study member or fellow church employee still manage to be +8 while siblings and parents who have known you since before your spouse died are in +7?
Notice, too, that in the context of complementarian applications of headship even the +10 category friend (the wife) is still someone of whom Driscoll has said "it's not headship until you disagree", more or less indicating that even the +10 friend of the wife has to cut off friendships with people who have had a falling out with her pastor-husband. He may be your +10 friend but you've got to submit to him and let him make a financially stupid decision if you can't persuade him to change his mind. She may be your +10 friend but when push comes to shove you can exercise headship and tell her she has to stop hanging out with that brother in Christ you fired. As I've been saying at some obvious length the problems with a real world application of any of this numbered lane stuff are legion. Ranked numbering categories for whole swaths of people has the appearance of practicality and wisdom but the real wisdom probably awaits part 3 where some actual scripture may get discussed.
Those of us who aren't married apparently have no +10 friendship amongst flesth and blood. Christians who deal with a same-sex attraction and do not act upon it out of obedience to Christ apparently have a sucker's deal for ever hoping to obtain +10 friendship in this life, which yields all sorts of subjects on what this may mean. At some point a person is not married and the ranking system presumes a lifelong marriage rather than accounting for the possibility that there are unmarried men and women in all sorts of places. Apparently +10 friendship is reserved just for the person who is willing to carry your babies? If that's so would that I had such a friend and could benefit from having a friendship that apparently Paul thought was perfectly okay to go through life without! But I have written so much on how conservative Protestants work around what Paul said about marriage (the +10 category friendship lane) I don't wish to recite all of that here.
Which gets me to Driscoll's public use of the term "a good friend", often anyone who is serving in ministry at the moment he uses the term who, three years from now, is probably not necessarily going to be in ministry with him or getting called "a good friend". I'm not going to name names because that's not my point, my point is that I'm not surprised that Driscoll, even when he attempts to field the issue of friendship, displays the same weakness in methodology now that he's displayed over the years. I'm not saying he shouldn't prioritize levels of friendship, I'm suggesting that his need to evaluate and find people good or wanting on utility is the core of his problem in approaching this subject. He could have broached the topic of closeness and relational intimacy without having to resort to a ranked number system in which his kids must of necessity be in a lower numbered rank than a pastor who, technically, works for him.
For that matter he isn't really setting the discussion forth in a way that accounts for possibility that at different stages in life a person may be closer to people who are technically in categories 7, 8 or 9 than 10. Has he never talked with a parent or an in-law (category +7?) about ways to improve his marriage. If a friendship must be defined as being a voluntary mutual peer relationship then what's the deal with Jesus telling his disciples "I call you friends"? Surely this does not mean that in every respect, even before the Resurrection, that Peter or James or Thomas were friends by dint of being peers with God the Son, right?
If greater love has no man than this that he lays down his life for his friends then where does that play into the ranked lanes? A father who is not willing to risk his life for his children or brothers or parents more than for a Bible study friend or an employee in a church setting has probably missed the boat somewhere. I'm not saying Driscoll is advocating that, just using these examples as way to point out the goofiness of the very idea of the ranked lanes. If Christ can call those of us who are His friends then this suggests that the ways in which we rank each other may be a sign that we have room for growth. Ever since Reformission Rev Mark has been fond of categorizing and ranking people according to their usefulness to him as a pastor and it's a little disappointing that half a decade later, when he's trying to explain how he had misconceptions about what real friendship is, he's still basically showing the same attitude with respect to who counts as being at what level of friendship. It's in the ranked numbers, folks, and it's from the man himself.
Still, I'm not saying there are no practical insights to be gained from this series, just that even in this Driscoll's showing that he can't resist ranking and tallying humanity. If you skim this series but go and listen to Tim Keller's two sermons titled "Spiritual Friendship" (which are both awesome, not coincidentally) you'll have a more persuasively biblical and big-picture approach to what Christian friend looks like. Keller's preaching can give you a bird's eye view and Driscoll's stuff, put distinctly at a lower level of thought in terms of scriptural study, can give you some broad, axiomatic approaches to the concepts Keller sets forth.
Unless Driscoll pulls off something amazing in part 3 I'm not going to be holding my breath that it will be anything much to discuss beyond his sharing yet again that lots of people want to be friends with pastors for social status reasons and that you shouldn't let that happen. Well, if he can admit that he has decided lots of people ought to be his friends for social status reasons and admit that the temptation to use people runs both ways then that will be an important warning to pastors. As the pastor at my church once put it in a sermon, the measure of a pastor as a shepherd is how he treats the people he can't get anything out of. If you are only considerate of the people you consider useful that is the distinction between the heart of a shepherd and the heart of a hired hand.
Finally, if Christ is the one we seek to follow and emulate Jesus is the one who through His death took us from 0 to +10 at the Cross. On that I trust we can all agree and I would prefer to end on the things we can all agree on.
You see, at just the right time, when we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly. Very rarely will anyone die for a righteous person, though for a good person someone might possibly dare to die. But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us. Since we have now been justified by his blood, how much more shall we be saved from God’s wrath through him! For if, while we were God’s enemies, we were reconciled to him through the death of his Son, how much more, having been reconciled, shall we be saved through his life!
http://thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/tgc/2011/05/24/the-pastor-and-his-wife-get-to-pick-their-own-friends-part-2/
One of the things where I have had no problem saying that Mark Driscoll is weak is in handling Old Testament texts. Another area where I believe he is weak is in discussing friendship. He's turned his sights to discussing the subject recently and, honestly, he's still not quite impressing me. It's important to discuss how pastors prioritize friendship, family and ministry but even in his attempt to field these important topics in a practical way there's something a bit funky.
See, Mark cannot but help but constantly rank and evaluate whole categories and individuals on the basis of utility. Consider this set of number-ranked categories:
0 Enemies
+1 Old Acquaintances Not in regular, meaningful contact
– Past relationships such as classmates, teammates, coworkers, neighbors, etc.
+2 Distant Relatives Little regular contact other than when obligated
– Family event (funeral, wedding, reunion, holidays)
+3 Neighbors Not in community; see often but not close
– Not in one another’s homes and only surface chats
+4 Connections Same social circles bring together
– Kids in same school, on same team, or in same activity
– Work out at same gym, etc.
+5 Coworkers
+6 Activity Group Doing something organized with others
– Sports team, community organization, club cause, hobby
+7 Close Family See and speak to frequently
– The family you enjoy and pursue
+8 Fellowship “Church Family”
– Bible study group, ministry partners
+9 Close Friends Friends you frequently see and speak to
– People you enjoy and pursue, mutually
+10 Spouse
So within this number ranking enemies are understandably at 0. But consider that in lane +7 there's "close family". These are family members you like and pursue. Above that are "church family", Bible study group and ministry partners. Now I'm not sure why people you see once a week in a community group or Bible study outrank your own children or your parents. I'm not sure why a pastor you work with in a ministry setting or "friends you frequently see and speak to" are in a higher ranked category than a brother? I don't know what, if anything, any of these rankings suggest about Driscoll's relationship with his siblings and children but in any case, there it is, he's set up numbered lanes in which his children and any siblings rank below guys like Jamie Munson or Scott Thomas and whomever he considers "a good friend".
Even if I grant the axiom that a friend must of necessity be a peer and that therefore one's children can never, ever be one's friends that doesn't factor in adults who have relationships with siblings and parents. If the family, as nearly anyone with a functioning brain could attest, is where socialization habits are developed then any kind of ranking system is going to eventually be useless in the real world. A person who could technically qualify as +9 or +8 may do so for reasons that are not necessarily discussed or analyzed.
It is also not a foregone conclusion that one's spouse must always, only and ever be in the +10 category by definition. What happens to the widow or widower? Does that mean that +10 friendship has been lost and cannot be regained except through remarriage? How, in this context, does the Bible study member or fellow church employee still manage to be +8 while siblings and parents who have known you since before your spouse died are in +7?
Notice, too, that in the context of complementarian applications of headship even the +10 category friend (the wife) is still someone of whom Driscoll has said "it's not headship until you disagree", more or less indicating that even the +10 friend of the wife has to cut off friendships with people who have had a falling out with her pastor-husband. He may be your +10 friend but you've got to submit to him and let him make a financially stupid decision if you can't persuade him to change his mind. She may be your +10 friend but when push comes to shove you can exercise headship and tell her she has to stop hanging out with that brother in Christ you fired. As I've been saying at some obvious length the problems with a real world application of any of this numbered lane stuff are legion. Ranked numbering categories for whole swaths of people has the appearance of practicality and wisdom but the real wisdom probably awaits part 3 where some actual scripture may get discussed.
Those of us who aren't married apparently have no +10 friendship amongst flesth and blood. Christians who deal with a same-sex attraction and do not act upon it out of obedience to Christ apparently have a sucker's deal for ever hoping to obtain +10 friendship in this life, which yields all sorts of subjects on what this may mean. At some point a person is not married and the ranking system presumes a lifelong marriage rather than accounting for the possibility that there are unmarried men and women in all sorts of places. Apparently +10 friendship is reserved just for the person who is willing to carry your babies? If that's so would that I had such a friend and could benefit from having a friendship that apparently Paul thought was perfectly okay to go through life without! But I have written so much on how conservative Protestants work around what Paul said about marriage (the +10 category friendship lane) I don't wish to recite all of that here.
Which gets me to Driscoll's public use of the term "a good friend", often anyone who is serving in ministry at the moment he uses the term who, three years from now, is probably not necessarily going to be in ministry with him or getting called "a good friend". I'm not going to name names because that's not my point, my point is that I'm not surprised that Driscoll, even when he attempts to field the issue of friendship, displays the same weakness in methodology now that he's displayed over the years. I'm not saying he shouldn't prioritize levels of friendship, I'm suggesting that his need to evaluate and find people good or wanting on utility is the core of his problem in approaching this subject. He could have broached the topic of closeness and relational intimacy without having to resort to a ranked number system in which his kids must of necessity be in a lower numbered rank than a pastor who, technically, works for him.
For that matter he isn't really setting the discussion forth in a way that accounts for possibility that at different stages in life a person may be closer to people who are technically in categories 7, 8 or 9 than 10. Has he never talked with a parent or an in-law (category +7?) about ways to improve his marriage. If a friendship must be defined as being a voluntary mutual peer relationship then what's the deal with Jesus telling his disciples "I call you friends"? Surely this does not mean that in every respect, even before the Resurrection, that Peter or James or Thomas were friends by dint of being peers with God the Son, right?
If greater love has no man than this that he lays down his life for his friends then where does that play into the ranked lanes? A father who is not willing to risk his life for his children or brothers or parents more than for a Bible study friend or an employee in a church setting has probably missed the boat somewhere. I'm not saying Driscoll is advocating that, just using these examples as way to point out the goofiness of the very idea of the ranked lanes. If Christ can call those of us who are His friends then this suggests that the ways in which we rank each other may be a sign that we have room for growth. Ever since Reformission Rev Mark has been fond of categorizing and ranking people according to their usefulness to him as a pastor and it's a little disappointing that half a decade later, when he's trying to explain how he had misconceptions about what real friendship is, he's still basically showing the same attitude with respect to who counts as being at what level of friendship. It's in the ranked numbers, folks, and it's from the man himself.
Still, I'm not saying there are no practical insights to be gained from this series, just that even in this Driscoll's showing that he can't resist ranking and tallying humanity. If you skim this series but go and listen to Tim Keller's two sermons titled "Spiritual Friendship" (which are both awesome, not coincidentally) you'll have a more persuasively biblical and big-picture approach to what Christian friend looks like. Keller's preaching can give you a bird's eye view and Driscoll's stuff, put distinctly at a lower level of thought in terms of scriptural study, can give you some broad, axiomatic approaches to the concepts Keller sets forth.
Unless Driscoll pulls off something amazing in part 3 I'm not going to be holding my breath that it will be anything much to discuss beyond his sharing yet again that lots of people want to be friends with pastors for social status reasons and that you shouldn't let that happen. Well, if he can admit that he has decided lots of people ought to be his friends for social status reasons and admit that the temptation to use people runs both ways then that will be an important warning to pastors. As the pastor at my church once put it in a sermon, the measure of a pastor as a shepherd is how he treats the people he can't get anything out of. If you are only considerate of the people you consider useful that is the distinction between the heart of a shepherd and the heart of a hired hand.
Finally, if Christ is the one we seek to follow and emulate Jesus is the one who through His death took us from 0 to +10 at the Cross. On that I trust we can all agree and I would prefer to end on the things we can all agree on.
You see, at just the right time, when we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly. Very rarely will anyone die for a righteous person, though for a good person someone might possibly dare to die. But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us. Since we have now been justified by his blood, how much more shall we be saved from God’s wrath through him! For if, while we were God’s enemies, we were reconciled to him through the death of his Son, how much more, having been reconciled, shall we be saved through his life!
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