http://pitchfork.com/news/65617-kanye-west-sued-over-new-slaves/
by Sheldon Pearce
Associate Staff Writer
Kanye West is being sued over the Yeezus single "New Slaves." Hungarian composer Gabor Presser is claiming that he is owed money for a sample that was used at the end of the track, TMZ reports. Presser says that Kanye reached out for permission to use the sample and that he agreed, but only on the condition that a formal deal would be arranged. According to documents obtained by TMZ, Kanye sent Presser a $10,000 advance, but the check was never cashed. Now, Presser is asking for at least $2.5 million.
Not being exactly a big fan or not-fan of West it's not a topic for blogging here to wish ill or bad for the guy. But since a Hungarian composer's come up it's interesting to me--I think it's possible to demonstrate how American popular music can be demonstrated to carry on and modify musical idioms that have developed in European contexts half a century or more before. This doesn't make the American stuff not American, far from it, reviving, revitalizing and tinkering with riffs is what's made the American music American. You can take some fun riffs from Spanish guitar music from the 19th century, play with them a bit, and get yourself to ragtime a la the 1890-1920 period. It can also be done with Bohemian music for the guitar.
Even J. S. Bach took what he liked from French, German, Italian, English and Polish music and synthesized that into what we hear in his work. The thing is that back in Bach's era patronage worked more by paying you for services rendered and not mechanical licensing.
For instance, one of the more memorable case studies that comes to mind is Hungarian composer Gyorgy Ligeti, whose music was famously used in Stanley Kubrick's 2011.
http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/music_box/2008/07/ligeti_a_sound_odyssey.html
...
Ligeti told us that when his music was first being performed in European new-music festivals, he had to hitchhike to the concerts. "I didn't have the money to buy a girl a cup of coffee." Then one day somebody told him, "Did you know there's a movie with your music in it?" Ligeti didn't know. Kubrick had simply ripped off his things for 2001. Ligeti duly sued Kubrick and in the end, he told us, received the grand sum of $3,000. "But do you like the movie?" somebody asked. "Yah, I really like it," Ligeti said. And of course, 2001 did for him what Sgt. Pepper's did for Stockhausen—helped make him famous beyond the esoteric circles of the European new-music scene. By the '90s, the two were the dominant figures of their generation, but by then Stockhausen was mostly out of sight, sunk in his mystical cycle of operas called Licht, or "light."
As the story reportedly went, Kubrick had fill-in music for the soundtrack, disliked the music the commissioned composer came up with, and settled on using the fill-in music as the actual soundtrack, but that's hearsay from memory so I can't be sure that's how it really worked out. However it played out ... Ligeti thought it was cool and all, that his music ended up in 2001, except for the part where Kubrick didn't pay him, at least not at first.
This is stuff that can be kept in mind looking back on the 2013 controversy that swirled around Mark Driscoll on the subject of plagiarism and copyright infringement. Some of Driscoll's defenders (if those are still out there) might propose that nobody decided to litigate but copyright litigation is hugely expensive and a case can take as long as a decade to get resolved. Had the Christian publishing industry actually in any fashion gotten itself embroiled in litigation over intellectual property who knows if there'd even be a Christian publishing industry as we know it by the end of it. The Result Source controversy sort of came and went and the mere idea that mainstream Christian publishing could have somehow not addressed the level of plagiarism and sales list rigging that's been going on in the industry is a bit sad to consider.
To the extent that people like Kanye West or Led Zeppelin can end up in headlines on the issue of alleged copyright infringement can be a reminder that there are some Christians who actually think copyright itself is the problem rather than the changes made to copyright and licensing law by gigantic corporations like Disney.
What some Christians have been trying to assert in the midst (and wake) of Driscoll's plagiarism controversy is that intellectual property (aka copyright) is bad because it asserts ownership of ideas. Well ... that's a pretty big assertion and one that doesn't account for the kind of copyright/trademark that is all over a tentpole film like Batman vs Superman and every superhero, that thing known as "work for hire". Frank Miller doesn't own the copyright for The Dark Knight Returns but his name is on it. If we stop insisting on the inaccurate assertion that copyright asserts ownership of an idea and can be regarded as a testimony about labor with attendant concerns about how that labor may be appropriated, then we can come across cases where an artistic work may have a copyright but that is regarded as public domain. Like ... Woody Guthrie.
http://blog.librarylaw.com/librarylaw/2004/08/ithis_land_is_y.html
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2004/08/song-belongs-you-and-me
...
But also important was our other discovery: "This Land Is Your Land" has been in the public domain since 1973.
Fact #1: Guthrie wrote the song in 1940. At that time, the term of copyright was 28 years, renewable once for an additional 28 years. Under the relevant law, the copyright term for a song begins when the song is published as sheet music (just performing it is not enough to trigger the clock).
Fact #2: A search of Copyright Office records shows that the copyright wasn't registered until 1956, and Ludlow filed for a renewal in 1984.
Fact #3: Thanks to tips provided by musicologists who heard about this story, we discovered that Guthrie published and sold the sheet music for "This Land Is Your Land" in a pamphlet in 1945. An original copy of this mimeograph was located for us by generous volunteers who visited the Library of Congress in Washington, DC. For those who are not able to visit the Woody Guthrie Manuscript Collection at the American Folklife Archives, we've posted a copy of the document.
This means that the copyright in the song expired in 1973, 28 years after Guthrie published the sheet music. Ludlow's attempted renewal in 1984 was 11 years tardy, which means the classic Guthrie song is in the public domain. (I'll note that Ludlow apparently disputes this, although I've not heard any credible explanation from them.)
Ever since the "Blurred Lines" verdict I've been reading different reactions to that ruling. There are plenty of people who consider the ruling a disaster for musicians and songwriters ... but is it? I mean, I write for the classical guitar and I love to rework the riffs and themes of composers who have been dead for centuries. When everything is a remix but there's virtually no such thing as a popular cultural idiom in the last century that can be construed as truly public domain what do you do? One option is to go back to the stuff that's indisputably public domain and work forward from that.
Saturday, May 21, 2016
Thursday, May 19, 2016
Phoenix Preacher's Kevin H on the Penn State legacy of looking the other way, Louis Menand at The New Yorker on how the entire sports industry may just be a bubble, maybe we're a civilization that overlooks abuse to save bubbles
http://michaelnewnham.com/?p=25612
The Penn State child sex abuse scandal came back into the headlines in the past couple of weeks.
http://www.newyorker.com/
...Two things especially concern him. One is what might be called the Michael Jordan effect. As Futterman is not the first person to note, the model for contemporary sports marketing was set in Hollywood in the nineteen-fifties, and the key figure was Lew Wasserman, who ran the talent agency M.C.A. What Wasserman and the studios figured out was that stars sell a picture. If you promote the actors, rather than the story, you will sell more tickets.
This meant paying the stars a lot more, and sometimes giving them a piece of the action—“points”—as Wasserman did, starting in 1950, with his client Jimmy Stewart. The result is what we might call, if the analogy were not a little grotesque, entertainment-industry income inequality. Stars make astronomically more than the rest of the talent. For “Star Wars: The Force Awakens,” Harrison Ford is reported to have been paid between twenty and thirty million dollars; Daisy Ridley, one of the leads, got between one and three hundred thousand.
...
Futterman’s other concern is more alarming, at least to the oligarchs of professional sports. He thinks that the industry has expanded beyond the scale of its actual audience. “One of the great illusions of the sports industry is mass fascination,” he says. It’s true that hundreds of millions of people watch special events like the World Cup and the Olympics, but the day-to-day audience for sports is tiny. [emphasis added] In the United States, it amounts to about four per cent of households. Fewer than three per cent on average watch their local N.B.A. games; fewer than two per cent watch their home-town N.H.L. teams.
The exception proves the rule. The one major sport that continues to attract viewers and high Nielsen ratings is football, and that, Futterman argues, is because it is the only sport that broadcasts all of its games on network television. Its income is an accurate reflection of the size of its audience. [emphasis added] All the other leagues and teams have deals with cable companies, like ESPN. Some, like the Yankees, own a stake in their own cable companies.
Cable works by bundling: your monthly cable bill is split up among the channels your carrier provides, whether you watch those channels or not. Futterman says this means that about twenty per cent of the average cable bill goes to sports channels, which pay the teams or the leagues for the right to show their games. Which means that sports are currently enjoying a very large subsidy from a public that doesn’t watch them. Cable looks to be on the way to disaggregation, and, when that happens, sports will be worth what the actual audience is willing to pay for them. We may be looking at a bubble. [emphases added]
...
The irony, if that is the right word, is that sports is essentially aestheticized labor. It is the spectacle of men and women exerting all their mental and physical powers to produce . . . nothing. Kant defined art as “purposiveness without purpose.” I think (gulp) Kant was wrong about art—artists have purposes, and people who watch, listen to, or read works of art try to grasp what those purposes are. But he would have been right about sports. [WtH: although surely we could suggest that athletics and sports could be considered a form of art for the human body ... somewhat analogous to, say, fashion?]
Sports, Maxim Gorky wrote, makes people “even more stupid than they are.” Fran Lebowitz, not always known for agreeing with Soviet writers, agreed. “What is truly chilling is that there are a lot of smart people interested in sports,” she said. “That just gives you no hope at all for the human race.” Still, leaving aside all the trash talk and chest thumping (maybe you can’t), there is something beautiful and touching about watching fellow-members of what is fundamentally a klutzy, badly engineered, and underpowered species perform difficult physical acts. A squirrel watching a gymnastics routine would just laugh. On the other hand, squirrels can’t endorse pizza. We’re way ahead of them in that department.
Why mention all this stuff about the possibility that sports may be a bubble? Well, what if the abuses we're discovering across the elft and right and center in American society suggests that it's all a bubble? What if we're papering over injustices in our own backyards because it's easier to condemn the other team, however we define other team? But what if the reputation we're trying to protect turns out to be a bubble, the result not so much of real long-term impact but the cumulative effect of the echo chamber that is our self-reinforcing intra-group hype? What if we have communiteis that have looked the other way from generations of abuse to preserve a collective self-image? Have we been seeing a bunch of people looking the other way or really just not seeing things because we're seeking to preserve the self-perceived legitimacy and integrity of something that's ... just a bubble?
The Penn State child sex abuse scandal came back into the headlines in the past couple of weeks.
New information has gained public awareness and it was reported that one of the claims that Penn State settled with a victim dates abuse all the way back to 1971. This was forty years before longtime defensive coordinator and convicted child sexual abuser Jerry Sandusky was arrested. Another report claimed that one of the victims informed legendary head coach Joe Paterno of abuse in 1976. Other reports claimed that a couple different assistant coaches were aware of Sandusky’s abuse in the 1980’s.
With the new exposure of these allegations, Penn State has taken to denying and deflecting. It is pretty much the same tactic they took the first time around before the plethora of evidence became so great that they had practically no choice but to be humbled. Evidence that showed that the university and its leaders had not properly handled what they knew about Sandusky.
So it's not just Catholic priests or Protestant megachurch pastors, it can be campus athletics coaches or movie directors or fashion photographers or comedians or athletes. I mean, let's think of particular cases of controversy and it seems that across a great swath of human activity in the contemporary English-speaking world there are people in power (very often dudes) who use and abuse people and they get protected because of a concern for the sanctity of the brand.
...
Outwardly, the Washington, D.C.–based FitzGibbon Media appeared committed to feminist ideals: In addition to clients like Amnesty International and WikiLeaks, it represented NARAL Pro-Choice America and the women’s rights organization UltraViolet. But despite the ostensibly progressive environment, the alleged victims evidently didn’t feel as though they could speak out, and until recently, by all accounts, they didn’t speak to each other. Assuming the multiple and still-proliferating charges are true, it begs the question: How did FitzGibbon get away with it for so long?
...
The piece was titled "The Nice Guy Fallacy" but I've written before that it's probably more accurately described as "the peeps on MY team wouldn't do that" fallacy, or just plain old No True Scotsman ... . The idea that politically progressive men can be misogynistic rapey asshats is just not acceptable for some people to consider, kind of like for religious conservatives they don't like to imagine some of their more popular men could be misogynistic rapey asshats. That people on the left and right can even imagine that nobody on their team would be able to do that stuff because ... politics ... suggests how far gone we are in tsunamis of self-selected propaganda and groupthink. An abuser can have any perspective on life and the universe.
Not being a sports fan I was, admittedly, curious to read a long feature by Louis Menand at the New Yorker on the question of whether the whole sports entertainment industry as we know it is some kind of bubble:
http://www.newyorker.com/
...Two things especially concern him. One is what might be called the Michael Jordan effect. As Futterman is not the first person to note, the model for contemporary sports marketing was set in Hollywood in the nineteen-fifties, and the key figure was Lew Wasserman, who ran the talent agency M.C.A. What Wasserman and the studios figured out was that stars sell a picture. If you promote the actors, rather than the story, you will sell more tickets.
This meant paying the stars a lot more, and sometimes giving them a piece of the action—“points”—as Wasserman did, starting in 1950, with his client Jimmy Stewart. The result is what we might call, if the analogy were not a little grotesque, entertainment-industry income inequality. Stars make astronomically more than the rest of the talent. For “Star Wars: The Force Awakens,” Harrison Ford is reported to have been paid between twenty and thirty million dollars; Daisy Ridley, one of the leads, got between one and three hundred thousand.
...
Futterman’s other concern is more alarming, at least to the oligarchs of professional sports. He thinks that the industry has expanded beyond the scale of its actual audience. “One of the great illusions of the sports industry is mass fascination,” he says. It’s true that hundreds of millions of people watch special events like the World Cup and the Olympics, but the day-to-day audience for sports is tiny. [emphasis added] In the United States, it amounts to about four per cent of households. Fewer than three per cent on average watch their local N.B.A. games; fewer than two per cent watch their home-town N.H.L. teams.
The exception proves the rule. The one major sport that continues to attract viewers and high Nielsen ratings is football, and that, Futterman argues, is because it is the only sport that broadcasts all of its games on network television. Its income is an accurate reflection of the size of its audience. [emphasis added] All the other leagues and teams have deals with cable companies, like ESPN. Some, like the Yankees, own a stake in their own cable companies.
Cable works by bundling: your monthly cable bill is split up among the channels your carrier provides, whether you watch those channels or not. Futterman says this means that about twenty per cent of the average cable bill goes to sports channels, which pay the teams or the leagues for the right to show their games. Which means that sports are currently enjoying a very large subsidy from a public that doesn’t watch them. Cable looks to be on the way to disaggregation, and, when that happens, sports will be worth what the actual audience is willing to pay for them. We may be looking at a bubble. [emphases added]
...
The irony, if that is the right word, is that sports is essentially aestheticized labor. It is the spectacle of men and women exerting all their mental and physical powers to produce . . . nothing. Kant defined art as “purposiveness without purpose.” I think (gulp) Kant was wrong about art—artists have purposes, and people who watch, listen to, or read works of art try to grasp what those purposes are. But he would have been right about sports. [WtH: although surely we could suggest that athletics and sports could be considered a form of art for the human body ... somewhat analogous to, say, fashion?]
Sports, Maxim Gorky wrote, makes people “even more stupid than they are.” Fran Lebowitz, not always known for agreeing with Soviet writers, agreed. “What is truly chilling is that there are a lot of smart people interested in sports,” she said. “That just gives you no hope at all for the human race.” Still, leaving aside all the trash talk and chest thumping (maybe you can’t), there is something beautiful and touching about watching fellow-members of what is fundamentally a klutzy, badly engineered, and underpowered species perform difficult physical acts. A squirrel watching a gymnastics routine would just laugh. On the other hand, squirrels can’t endorse pizza. We’re way ahead of them in that department.
Why mention all this stuff about the possibility that sports may be a bubble? Well, what if the abuses we're discovering across the elft and right and center in American society suggests that it's all a bubble? What if we're papering over injustices in our own backyards because it's easier to condemn the other team, however we define other team? But what if the reputation we're trying to protect turns out to be a bubble, the result not so much of real long-term impact but the cumulative effect of the echo chamber that is our self-reinforcing intra-group hype? What if we have communiteis that have looked the other way from generations of abuse to preserve a collective self-image? Have we been seeing a bunch of people looking the other way or really just not seeing things because we're seeking to preserve the self-perceived legitimacy and integrity of something that's ... just a bubble?
Atlantic--The Artist Loft: affordable housing (for white people) looks at the possibility of racial inequality in subsidized housing for arts that may skew really white
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/05/affordable-housing-for-white-people/483444/
...
The report calls these buildings POSH developments, Politically Opportune Subsidized Housing. They’re priced in such a way that families with children or those who are extremely poor could not afford them. To be considered affordable for those whose income is 60 percent of the area median income, rents can be 30 percent of the set income level. But often, the rents for these buildings are at the very upper end of the spectrum. For a one-person household in Minneapolis, the maximum allowable rent is $910. A-Mill studios rent for $898. Most tax-credit developers don’t set the rents that high because their projects are in lower-income neighborhoods and because they are targeting lower-income tenants. But developers of POSH properties do. The buildings also require application fees and reservation fees (to keep a unit off the market while the application is processed), additional costs that would make units out of reach for low-income families, the authors say.
In 2007, the IRS tried to crack down on subsidized housing that gave preference to artists. They said that doling out credits for such properties potentially violated the tax code because such housing was not “for use by the general public.” Soon after, lobbyists succeeded in inserting an item into 2008’s Housing and Economic Recovery Act (HERA) that exempted artists’ housing from the tax rules requiring projects using tax credits be used by the general public. Since then, according to Orfield and Stancil, subsidized artists’ housing has grown rapidly in Minneapolis and other areas.
The artist properties share a few characteristics. They’re usually conversions of historic buildings (which can more easily win developers tax credits). They have restrictions on the professions of the tenants (usually artists). They’re located in hip neighborhoods where the market rent is among the highest in the city. And they are often built with loans from the city to promote the public good, by making a place for artists to live.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with promoting the public good and building more affordable apartments in trendy and expensive neighborhoods. POSH properties can help high-income neighborhoods become more economically diverse. And the not-in-my-backyard objections that often come with affordable housing are less likely to be present for POSH properties, because neighbors rarely object to artists’ buildings that look like luxury condos and hold mostly white tenants. POSH properties help lower-income white people and artists who want to live in cities but otherwise would be pushed further out into suburbs.
I didn't know there was even such a thing as low-income subsidized housing for artists. I can't help but think back to reading Paul Hindemith's rants about American arts education and how one of its great delusions was telling kids that any one of them could be the next Heifetz or Horowitz or Rubinstein; the delusional notion that the only way to have a life of music would be to get paid for doing it professionally as if since the dawn of humanity no musicians ever did what they did as amateurs for the sheer joy of it and making music with other people. What Hindemith was damning, in a way, was American exceptionalism as it took shape in the notion that says "because I like the arts and love making art that alone should be sufficient for me to get paid a living wage or better for doing it." Forget about art for the sake of art here, why would a state have housing subsidies for artists specifically?
When I look back on my musical education I don't recall any mention of how people got paid. There wasn't much discussion of the history of patronage systems so you wouldn't know that the famous guitarist composer Fernando Sor had a military job early in his life. You wouldn't know that Wenzel Matiegka was a clerk/reader at a law office. You wouldn't hear about Haydn being contracted as part of the military class, and for that matter you wouldn't hear artsy types progressive or conservative talking about the linkage between military culture and arts culture, which is maybe just another reason to consider Miyazaki's The Wind Rises such a remarkable film for binding them together and suggesting that all art, no matter how idealistic, has always in some sense been the servant of an empire. Now it could be easy for progressives with a Marxist bent to get furious over the belated news that a lot of avant garde arts were secretly funded by the CIA during the Cold War period. Duh, just as those who curried favor with the Stalinist powers in the USSR got to not die. But we live in the sort of era in which what "we" do is art and what "they" do isn't, it might just be propaganda ... as if we don't make that ourselves. It may be what we need is a folk music revival and by folk music I don't mean strumming acoustic guitars but a socio-economic definition of folk music, the kind of music you make at a loss because you want to make something that sounds cool. So in that sense the idea that artists should get subsidies for housing seems ... kind of obscene to me for some reason.
...
The report calls these buildings POSH developments, Politically Opportune Subsidized Housing. They’re priced in such a way that families with children or those who are extremely poor could not afford them. To be considered affordable for those whose income is 60 percent of the area median income, rents can be 30 percent of the set income level. But often, the rents for these buildings are at the very upper end of the spectrum. For a one-person household in Minneapolis, the maximum allowable rent is $910. A-Mill studios rent for $898. Most tax-credit developers don’t set the rents that high because their projects are in lower-income neighborhoods and because they are targeting lower-income tenants. But developers of POSH properties do. The buildings also require application fees and reservation fees (to keep a unit off the market while the application is processed), additional costs that would make units out of reach for low-income families, the authors say.
In 2007, the IRS tried to crack down on subsidized housing that gave preference to artists. They said that doling out credits for such properties potentially violated the tax code because such housing was not “for use by the general public.” Soon after, lobbyists succeeded in inserting an item into 2008’s Housing and Economic Recovery Act (HERA) that exempted artists’ housing from the tax rules requiring projects using tax credits be used by the general public. Since then, according to Orfield and Stancil, subsidized artists’ housing has grown rapidly in Minneapolis and other areas.
The artist properties share a few characteristics. They’re usually conversions of historic buildings (which can more easily win developers tax credits). They have restrictions on the professions of the tenants (usually artists). They’re located in hip neighborhoods where the market rent is among the highest in the city. And they are often built with loans from the city to promote the public good, by making a place for artists to live.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with promoting the public good and building more affordable apartments in trendy and expensive neighborhoods. POSH properties can help high-income neighborhoods become more economically diverse. And the not-in-my-backyard objections that often come with affordable housing are less likely to be present for POSH properties, because neighbors rarely object to artists’ buildings that look like luxury condos and hold mostly white tenants. POSH properties help lower-income white people and artists who want to live in cities but otherwise would be pushed further out into suburbs.
I didn't know there was even such a thing as low-income subsidized housing for artists. I can't help but think back to reading Paul Hindemith's rants about American arts education and how one of its great delusions was telling kids that any one of them could be the next Heifetz or Horowitz or Rubinstein; the delusional notion that the only way to have a life of music would be to get paid for doing it professionally as if since the dawn of humanity no musicians ever did what they did as amateurs for the sheer joy of it and making music with other people. What Hindemith was damning, in a way, was American exceptionalism as it took shape in the notion that says "because I like the arts and love making art that alone should be sufficient for me to get paid a living wage or better for doing it." Forget about art for the sake of art here, why would a state have housing subsidies for artists specifically?
When I look back on my musical education I don't recall any mention of how people got paid. There wasn't much discussion of the history of patronage systems so you wouldn't know that the famous guitarist composer Fernando Sor had a military job early in his life. You wouldn't know that Wenzel Matiegka was a clerk/reader at a law office. You wouldn't hear about Haydn being contracted as part of the military class, and for that matter you wouldn't hear artsy types progressive or conservative talking about the linkage between military culture and arts culture, which is maybe just another reason to consider Miyazaki's The Wind Rises such a remarkable film for binding them together and suggesting that all art, no matter how idealistic, has always in some sense been the servant of an empire. Now it could be easy for progressives with a Marxist bent to get furious over the belated news that a lot of avant garde arts were secretly funded by the CIA during the Cold War period. Duh, just as those who curried favor with the Stalinist powers in the USSR got to not die. But we live in the sort of era in which what "we" do is art and what "they" do isn't, it might just be propaganda ... as if we don't make that ourselves. It may be what we need is a folk music revival and by folk music I don't mean strumming acoustic guitars but a socio-economic definition of folk music, the kind of music you make at a loss because you want to make something that sounds cool. So in that sense the idea that artists should get subsidies for housing seems ... kind of obscene to me for some reason.
Ruth Graham's"How liberal Christians can turn the Democrats into the Party of God" seems to forget that an evangelicalism that was progressive a century ago may have had it's day
http://www.slate.com/articles/life/cover_story/2016/05/how_liberal_christians_can_turn_the_democrats_into_the_party_of_god.html
Over at Mere Orthodoxy Jake Meador has proposed that there's a key shortcoming to Ruth Graham's piece:
...
But Graham’s piece, helpful though it is as a chronicling of the change, fails for reasons strikingly similar to the likely reason for the religious right’s failure—a lazy collapsing of right-wing political ideas and theological orthodoxy under the category “conservative” and an equally sloppy collapsing of left-wing political ideas and theological heterodoxy (at best) under the category of “liberal.” (Aside from a brief mention of the black church, generally politically liberal and theologically conservative, Graham collapses political and theological conservatism and liberalism down into a single thing throughout the piece.)
What I didn't see too much of is a point that D. G. Hart wrote a little book about, From Billy Graham to Sarah Palin: Evangelicals and the Betrayal of American Conservatism, in which he argued two basic points: 1) evangelicalism and conservatism were only united for a short while during the Reagan coalition in which Reagan almost magically got traditional conservatives, libertarians and anti-communists to agree on a shared agenda that collapsed once the Cold War was officially over, after which religious conservatives began to discover their social agendas did not align with traditional political conservatives, let alone neo-cons and 2) that evangelicalism, taken for the span of its history, has been more steadily aligned with progressive causes.
Not all conservative evangelicals like the Hart book, since he fisks not only the likes of David Barton but also Francis Schaeffer in a chapter aptly christened "the search for a usable past", describing how in the absence of any truly compelling historical case that the Founding Fathers were conservative evangelical Protestants in anything like a late 20th century form, conservative Christian activists had to come up with a master narrative in which these kinds of people existed.
It can be easy for those who don't already know this to never know, but Hart's book was a useful reminder that William Jennings Bryan, for instance, was at the forefront of the progressive movement even as he eventually became famous for the Scopes trial. The pop mythology of Bryan being against evolution was easier for some to remember than his opposition to eugenics and his belief that wealthy elites were harming the goodwill of regular working class people. For those who grew up in Oregon it's not TOO HARD to remember Senator John Hatfield if you're old enough, who despite being Republican had some progressive causes.
Election cycle propaganda for the right and the left has seen fit to paper over the history of evangelical interest in progressive causes that ranged from the 1920s to 1970s and arguably culminated in the election of Jimmy Carter, the evangelical president. Sure, thanks to contemporary political fights he might not be so labeled but one of the problems with Graham's piece and in some ways Meador's rebuttal is that both sides have found it waaaay too convenient to conflate doctrinal conservatism with political conservatism and vice versa. when a more honest and thorough history of religion in the United States could show us that the theologically conservative have been politicaly progressive while theologically liberal types could play more reactionary political roles in American history.
the dog whistling politics on the left and right has reached what feels like a saturation point. It's not difficult to see folks on the right invoke Sanger's history of supporting birth control and eugenics to play that up as racist while over at places like Jacobin a master narrative of neo-cons as Jewish guys who would have otherwise supported civil rights for blacks if they weren't afraid they'd lose their disproportionate influence in academia to affirmative action quotas. While progressives and conservatives have made plenty of hay formulating propagandistic narratives aimed at persuading non-whites that each side is bad it ... might not be an altogether bad idea to view white progressives and reactionaries as equally bad at this point. Who's to say that Sanders and Trump aren't BOTH populist agitators whose primary appeal is to angry whites on the left and right respectively.
In our current era when abortion is celebrated as a right on the left and wars on terror are celebrated on the right it seems what Americans left and right fundamentally have in common is a belief that for the individual or for the nation the liberty to use pre-emptive lethal force to take a life that would inhibit financial upward mobility for an individual and a society should ultimately not be limited. It seems that a consistent perspective would be that what is acceptable at the individual level is also acceptable at the national level (i.e. pro-choice and pro-war to preserve consumer options across the board, or, by contrast, being against abortion and pre-emptive use of lethal force to take down those whose existence or actions would impede our consumer options) but it seems that the left and right in the United States are mainly committed to selective contradictions.
It could certainly seem as though there's plenty of trouble for all sides. The revelations of John Howard Yoder's sexual harassment of women has been something the Mennonites have been coming to terms with in the last few years. Driscoll had his downfall, and Tony Jones' reputation should be in at least some doubt for his divorce of his prior wife. I've already written plenty in the past about my complete inability to take Rachel Held Evans seriously. It's too bad Ruth Graham has opted to take Evans seriously. Back in 2012 it was handy to blog about how Mark Driscoll was a bully and to stand up to him but that was identity politics as usual. Evans played no role in the 2013 plagiarism controversy that erupted because of Mark Driscoll's interview with Janet Mefferd.
I'll say what regular readers already know about me, I'm not even remotely progressive in politics or religion, but I'm persuaded that it's far more important that progressives and conservatives consider whether their own team members are living in accordance with stated principles than to fixate too much on the hypocrisy and evil of the other side. We're the United States of America. We have the military power to wipe out all life on the planet if we want; we have the informational technology to cause a lot of damage; we have an empire unlike anything the world has ever seen; so the idea that the United States will stop being Babylon a la the book of Revelation just because the red state or blue state voters manage to realize their dream of single party rule at a practical level doesn't change any of that. The drift of the left and right on the internet has suggested to me that what internet activists for both sides want is functionally ultimately a totalitarian system in which ideological purity for the left and right causes becomes paramount. But having said that I think that what we need to be on the lookout is not necessarily "their" impulses to tyranny but "our" impulses to tyranny.
Long, long ago before the cult of personality transformed it into the Mark Driscoll Show, what I appreciated about Mars Hill was that evangelicals with politically progressive and conservative convictions could share Christian community. Obviously that didn't last very long because nobody really wrote about it having ever happened. I could hang out with people at Mars Hill who are huge fans of Doug Wilson and then the next week trade messages online with someone who's totally into the Christian anarchist writings of Jacques Ellul. To the extent that progressives and conservatives have worried about the centralization of media ownership and federal power they actually have a common worry ... but thanks to the era of the internet the problem of what Ellul thought the near impossibility of easily creating horizontal/sociological propaganda has been solved by stuff like Twitter and Facebook. In the previous century such totalizing propaganda for partisan views was stuff that had to be formulated and distributed from the top down. Now people can feel the Bern and want to make America great again at a grass roots level. Let's not worry so much about the Big Brother that we forget that we are Big Brother now. When people can get fired from jobs over stuff they put on Twitter what top-down part of Big Brother does that? Somebody had to read social media reactions at some point to get the idea to fire.
So, yeah, I agree with Jake Meador about Graham's piece being a little disappointing, though my disappointment is that it seems that the left and right of today are so busy rewriting history so that everything fits the current arguments there's relatively little room for a more honest history. If DG Hart's rebuke of the Religious Right was that it went out in search of a usable past to fit the political goals of their present, the attempts to re-found or revive a Religious Left seem likely to flounder because after a century of progressive Christianity allied itself to power in the first half of the 20th century someo f the trouble was that the civil rights movement and feminism brought to light that the problem with allying with power is that power doesn't want change to happen to quickly. Had the people running the Religious Right learned those lessons from more careful observation of the mainlines they "might" have learned to do things differently. But it's not a given that those who don't know the past are doomed to repeat. Maybe we can know the past intimately and are doomed to repeat it precisely because we tell ourselves that WE are going to be the exceptions. Not everyone's going to like Hart's suggestion that we make peace with the permanence of the United States as a formally secular state but he might have a point, a point that neither the Religious Right nor the Religious Left will be very interested in taking to heart.
Over at Mere Orthodoxy Jake Meador has proposed that there's a key shortcoming to Ruth Graham's piece:
...
But Graham’s piece, helpful though it is as a chronicling of the change, fails for reasons strikingly similar to the likely reason for the religious right’s failure—a lazy collapsing of right-wing political ideas and theological orthodoxy under the category “conservative” and an equally sloppy collapsing of left-wing political ideas and theological heterodoxy (at best) under the category of “liberal.” (Aside from a brief mention of the black church, generally politically liberal and theologically conservative, Graham collapses political and theological conservatism and liberalism down into a single thing throughout the piece.)
What I didn't see too much of is a point that D. G. Hart wrote a little book about, From Billy Graham to Sarah Palin: Evangelicals and the Betrayal of American Conservatism, in which he argued two basic points: 1) evangelicalism and conservatism were only united for a short while during the Reagan coalition in which Reagan almost magically got traditional conservatives, libertarians and anti-communists to agree on a shared agenda that collapsed once the Cold War was officially over, after which religious conservatives began to discover their social agendas did not align with traditional political conservatives, let alone neo-cons and 2) that evangelicalism, taken for the span of its history, has been more steadily aligned with progressive causes.
Not all conservative evangelicals like the Hart book, since he fisks not only the likes of David Barton but also Francis Schaeffer in a chapter aptly christened "the search for a usable past", describing how in the absence of any truly compelling historical case that the Founding Fathers were conservative evangelical Protestants in anything like a late 20th century form, conservative Christian activists had to come up with a master narrative in which these kinds of people existed.
It can be easy for those who don't already know this to never know, but Hart's book was a useful reminder that William Jennings Bryan, for instance, was at the forefront of the progressive movement even as he eventually became famous for the Scopes trial. The pop mythology of Bryan being against evolution was easier for some to remember than his opposition to eugenics and his belief that wealthy elites were harming the goodwill of regular working class people. For those who grew up in Oregon it's not TOO HARD to remember Senator John Hatfield if you're old enough, who despite being Republican had some progressive causes.
Election cycle propaganda for the right and the left has seen fit to paper over the history of evangelical interest in progressive causes that ranged from the 1920s to 1970s and arguably culminated in the election of Jimmy Carter, the evangelical president. Sure, thanks to contemporary political fights he might not be so labeled but one of the problems with Graham's piece and in some ways Meador's rebuttal is that both sides have found it waaaay too convenient to conflate doctrinal conservatism with political conservatism and vice versa. when a more honest and thorough history of religion in the United States could show us that the theologically conservative have been politicaly progressive while theologically liberal types could play more reactionary political roles in American history.
the dog whistling politics on the left and right has reached what feels like a saturation point. It's not difficult to see folks on the right invoke Sanger's history of supporting birth control and eugenics to play that up as racist while over at places like Jacobin a master narrative of neo-cons as Jewish guys who would have otherwise supported civil rights for blacks if they weren't afraid they'd lose their disproportionate influence in academia to affirmative action quotas. While progressives and conservatives have made plenty of hay formulating propagandistic narratives aimed at persuading non-whites that each side is bad it ... might not be an altogether bad idea to view white progressives and reactionaries as equally bad at this point. Who's to say that Sanders and Trump aren't BOTH populist agitators whose primary appeal is to angry whites on the left and right respectively.
In our current era when abortion is celebrated as a right on the left and wars on terror are celebrated on the right it seems what Americans left and right fundamentally have in common is a belief that for the individual or for the nation the liberty to use pre-emptive lethal force to take a life that would inhibit financial upward mobility for an individual and a society should ultimately not be limited. It seems that a consistent perspective would be that what is acceptable at the individual level is also acceptable at the national level (i.e. pro-choice and pro-war to preserve consumer options across the board, or, by contrast, being against abortion and pre-emptive use of lethal force to take down those whose existence or actions would impede our consumer options) but it seems that the left and right in the United States are mainly committed to selective contradictions.
It could certainly seem as though there's plenty of trouble for all sides. The revelations of John Howard Yoder's sexual harassment of women has been something the Mennonites have been coming to terms with in the last few years. Driscoll had his downfall, and Tony Jones' reputation should be in at least some doubt for his divorce of his prior wife. I've already written plenty in the past about my complete inability to take Rachel Held Evans seriously. It's too bad Ruth Graham has opted to take Evans seriously. Back in 2012 it was handy to blog about how Mark Driscoll was a bully and to stand up to him but that was identity politics as usual. Evans played no role in the 2013 plagiarism controversy that erupted because of Mark Driscoll's interview with Janet Mefferd.
I'll say what regular readers already know about me, I'm not even remotely progressive in politics or religion, but I'm persuaded that it's far more important that progressives and conservatives consider whether their own team members are living in accordance with stated principles than to fixate too much on the hypocrisy and evil of the other side. We're the United States of America. We have the military power to wipe out all life on the planet if we want; we have the informational technology to cause a lot of damage; we have an empire unlike anything the world has ever seen; so the idea that the United States will stop being Babylon a la the book of Revelation just because the red state or blue state voters manage to realize their dream of single party rule at a practical level doesn't change any of that. The drift of the left and right on the internet has suggested to me that what internet activists for both sides want is functionally ultimately a totalitarian system in which ideological purity for the left and right causes becomes paramount. But having said that I think that what we need to be on the lookout is not necessarily "their" impulses to tyranny but "our" impulses to tyranny.
Long, long ago before the cult of personality transformed it into the Mark Driscoll Show, what I appreciated about Mars Hill was that evangelicals with politically progressive and conservative convictions could share Christian community. Obviously that didn't last very long because nobody really wrote about it having ever happened. I could hang out with people at Mars Hill who are huge fans of Doug Wilson and then the next week trade messages online with someone who's totally into the Christian anarchist writings of Jacques Ellul. To the extent that progressives and conservatives have worried about the centralization of media ownership and federal power they actually have a common worry ... but thanks to the era of the internet the problem of what Ellul thought the near impossibility of easily creating horizontal/sociological propaganda has been solved by stuff like Twitter and Facebook. In the previous century such totalizing propaganda for partisan views was stuff that had to be formulated and distributed from the top down. Now people can feel the Bern and want to make America great again at a grass roots level. Let's not worry so much about the Big Brother that we forget that we are Big Brother now. When people can get fired from jobs over stuff they put on Twitter what top-down part of Big Brother does that? Somebody had to read social media reactions at some point to get the idea to fire.
So, yeah, I agree with Jake Meador about Graham's piece being a little disappointing, though my disappointment is that it seems that the left and right of today are so busy rewriting history so that everything fits the current arguments there's relatively little room for a more honest history. If DG Hart's rebuke of the Religious Right was that it went out in search of a usable past to fit the political goals of their present, the attempts to re-found or revive a Religious Left seem likely to flounder because after a century of progressive Christianity allied itself to power in the first half of the 20th century someo f the trouble was that the civil rights movement and feminism brought to light that the problem with allying with power is that power doesn't want change to happen to quickly. Had the people running the Religious Right learned those lessons from more careful observation of the mainlines they "might" have learned to do things differently. But it's not a given that those who don't know the past are doomed to repeat. Maybe we can know the past intimately and are doomed to repeat it precisely because we tell ourselves that WE are going to be the exceptions. Not everyone's going to like Hart's suggestion that we make peace with the permanence of the United States as a formally secular state but he might have a point, a point that neither the Religious Right nor the Religious Left will be very interested in taking to heart.
Wednesday, May 18, 2016
part 2 of Mark Driscoll discussing whether anorexia is a sin--"This is where Satan, demons are lying to you ... " might contradict Driscoll's stance that Satan would go after Billy Graham, not a rank and file Christian
We discussed earlier this week the odd matter of Mark Driscoll fielding the question of whether or not anorexia is a sin, in which he didn't exactly directly answer the question but also managed to frame discussion of the question in terms of his 2008 spiritual warfare content. He also, somehow, managed to transform the question and story of someone into an occasion to talk about himself.
But we'll set that off to the side so that we can get to this:
http://markdriscoll.org/is-anorexia-a-sin/
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/2016/05/16/mark-driscoll-takes-on-anorexia-might-be-demonic/
In Driscoll’s way of thinking, anorexia could be almost anything, including idolatry or the work of demons. Speaking of demons at 8:40 into the clip, Driscoll says:
http://download.marshill.se/files/MH%20Vodcast%20Video/2008/20080205_introduction-to-spiritual-warfare_vodcast.m4v
20.06
... For example, Satan is not omnipresent. He's not everywhere like God is. Somebody might say, "Oh, Satan's getting me." Ah, Satan may be bugging Billy Graham, but if he's gonna pick one person it's probably not gonna be you or me, right? He's got more important people to attack. Now you and I could have demonic opposition, to be sure, but Satan and demons are not omnipresent. They're not everywhere.
So unless the person who contacted Driscoll were someone at "Billy Graham" level Mark Driscoll's own prior instruction regarding spiritual warfare indicates that Satan wouldn't be involved.
That said, by Mark Driscoll's own account a Christian can be demonized, though not precisely demonically possessed. Driscoll also emphatically said that Satan can work on Christians and adduced from Acts 5 that Satan filled the hearts of Christians. This you'll have to hear/read for yourself:
http://download.marshill.se/files/MH%20Vodcast%20Video/2008/20080205_christus-victor_vodcast.m4v
06.19ish
Second thing, what about Christians? Can Christians be demon possessed? Not in terms of ownership, no. You belong to God, right? You belong to God. Some would say, therefore, Satan doesn't work on Christians. Well, sure he does. He attacked Jesus. --say, "Yeah, well, he [Satan] can't internally influence them." Well, yeah, he can. Jesus looks at Peter and says, "Get behind me--" what? Satan. In Acts 5 there's a couple called Ananias and Sapphira. They were members of the church, believers, they were bringing their tithe after selling some land, and they withheld part of their alleged pledged tithe, and Peter looks at them and says "Why has Satan so filled your heart? You've not lied to men but to God the Holy Spirit." Why has Satan so filled your heart? Right at the center and core of who you are. Satan work's from THERE. [emphases added]
The same language again in Ephesians, "Don't be drunk with wine, be FILLED with the Holy Spirit." Why are you FILLED in your heart with Satan? Christians can't be owned, possessed in terms of demons but they can be externally oppressed and (this will be my most controversial statement) internally influenced. Not possessed, not controlled. [emphasis added]
I'll use a very simple analogy, very controversial. There are huge books written warring over this. Some would argue, "Well, Satan can't have any access to a believer because God and Satan don't occupy the same space." I said, "Well they did in the days of Job when Satan was allowed to go into the presence of God." In me I have the flesh and my new nature. I have my depravity and the Holy Spirit. The world, God and Satan are at work there. Now God is greater, to be sure, and the only way I believe a believer is really opened up to the demonic is through sin and folly and lies and they open up themselves up. Are they possessed? NO. Are they internally influenced? Possibly. Possibly, for some.
8:21
In the same way, okay, I'll give you an analogy. I own my house. It's my house. No one has any right to live there but let's say I just invite over some total losers (drug addicts, alcoholics, freeloaders, whatever) and I let `em eat my food, hang out, sleep on the couch, crash in the bedroom, I just let `em live there. I don't kick `em out, I don't do anything. Do they own the house? Do they possess the house? No. Do they have access to it? Well, yeah, I opened the door, I let `em in. Are they gonna create havoc in my house? Yeah, they're gonna ruin everything. So what do I need to do? I need to kick `em out because they have no right to be there and then I need to lock the door and not invite `em in ever again.
I'm saying in that simple analogy that's kinda how Satan and demons work. If you open up your life, and this is not, not, you know, you had a bad day and said a bad word, this is a Christian who all of a sudden you're into the demonic; you're sick and you want to be healed so you go to some healer and now you're involved in demons; there's sin in your life that you've never really dealt with, that kind of stuff. You're doing drugs, you're opening yourself up to an altered state of conscioucesness (the Bible says to be self-controlled and alert and resist the devil and not you're not doing that cuz you're into drugs and alcohol and bizarre spirituality). You can open the door, bad guys move in, they don't OWN the house, you can kick `em out, lock the door. That's my description of internal influence. It's in very extreme cases and this isn't very often but it's possible.
So, even though it would seem that one has to be an unusually high status Christian leader in the United States, for instance, to merit the attention of Satan himself, Driscoll's taxonomy of demonization asserts that a Christian can most certainly be demonized, although how that comes to pass doesn't get explained here. The actual explanation for how a Christian could possibly be demonized is hours long on Driscoll's part. It involves a lot of stuff about the "ordinary demonic" transcribed here.
Had Driscoll stopped to consider whether he was consistently applying his own content in recycling it in response to a question he should have hesitated to tell someone Satan is telling them anything because to go by Driscoll's past instructions on spiritual warfare, Satan's not going to be going after you or me or some random anonymous Christian, Satan's going to be going after someone like Billy Graham.
Then again ...
http://download.marshill.se/files/MH%20Vodcast%20Video/2008/20080205_introduction-to-spiritual-warfare_vodcast.m4v
33.22
...
I think one of the great myths that has come about (it's a demonic lie) is that myself, the executive elders, the senior leaders we don't care about people. I was the only one who did ANY counseling until we had 800 people. We still do tons of shepherding, counseling, spiritual warfare, conflict. But we try to do so in a way that is humble, that isn't "and here is who I served and here are the demons we cast out and here's the list of people that I've healed." That's demonic. The truth is I love the people as much--actually, more than anyone in this church. [emphases added] And the senior leaders, the campus pastors, the departmental leaders, the executive elders love the people in this church as much or more than anyone else in this church. And one of my great concerns is not just, "Can you hold hands and help sheep?" but "can you also flip the staff over and defend against a wolf?" You HAVE to have that discernment, that courage, and that ability to tell someone: "You are in sin. That is false doctrine. You are not qualified to be a leader. If you do not repent you are not welcome here. And I will speak truthfully to those who want to follow you because my job is for the well-being of the sheep."
That was back in 2008 a few months after Meyer and Petry got fired and run through a kangaroo court. Back in 2014 Driscoll was under some kind of investigation that "may" have been completed and while he said on the road in 2015 he, like, totally agreed with the decision of the Board, all of a sudden he said God told him "a trap had been set" and, lo, he did quitteth Mars Hill. Greater love hath no pastor than this, that he bailed on Mars Hill in Seattle out of love for the sheep to go plant a church in Phoenix. But back in 2008 anyone who expressed doubts about how deeply or sincerely Mark Driscoll loved the people of Mars Hill, whoever those were, they believed a demonic lie.
So, on the whole, while Driscoll's grab bag approach "could" propose that someone with anorexia "could" be demonized if the right kinds of sins were committed by them and/or against them, it doesn't fit in his history of teaching to propose consistently that Satan himself has anything to do with the individual believer who isn't Billy Graham level important in the American or global church scene.
Which is why it might have been better if he'd left that stuff unsaid in the transcript Throckmorton provided.
But we'll set that off to the side so that we can get to this:
http://markdriscoll.org/is-anorexia-a-sin/
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/2016/05/16/mark-driscoll-takes-on-anorexia-might-be-demonic/
In Driscoll’s way of thinking, anorexia could be almost anything, including idolatry or the work of demons. Speaking of demons at 8:40 into the clip, Driscoll says:
This is where Satan, demons are lying to you, tempting you. The Bible says that Satan is the accuser of the children of God. He accuses them day and night in Revelation 12:10 there are accusations. If you start realizing this oppression, you can get out of it by acknowledging what God has to say. Oppression, an accusation, is often in the second person, you are unlovable, you need to punish yourself, you don’t appear attractive, whatever the oppression is, it’s telling you something that’s just not true. And so, what you need to understand is that’s demonic, that God doesn’t speak to you that way and if you’re hearing in the second person, maybe someone is talking to you, a spiritual being is lying to you, I’ll get to that in just a moment, and the way out is deliverance, you have victory in Christ, Colossians 2 says He has disarmed and defeated the powers and principalities of evil, triumphing over them through his victorious forgiveness of sinners on the cross.Since Driscoll hasn't renounced or repudiated anything he's taught from the 2008 spiritual warfare session and has been repeating it, it seems useful to point out that Driscoll tells someone "This is where Satan, demons are lying to you ... ." Driscoll has made it clear in the past, in other contexts, that while there might be demonic opposition in some cases it's exceedingly remote Satan himself would be involved with any ordinary rank and file Christian.
http://download.marshill.se/files/MH%20Vodcast%20Video/2008/20080205_introduction-to-spiritual-warfare_vodcast.m4v
20.06
... For example, Satan is not omnipresent. He's not everywhere like God is. Somebody might say, "Oh, Satan's getting me." Ah, Satan may be bugging Billy Graham, but if he's gonna pick one person it's probably not gonna be you or me, right? He's got more important people to attack. Now you and I could have demonic opposition, to be sure, but Satan and demons are not omnipresent. They're not everywhere.
So unless the person who contacted Driscoll were someone at "Billy Graham" level Mark Driscoll's own prior instruction regarding spiritual warfare indicates that Satan wouldn't be involved.
That said, by Mark Driscoll's own account a Christian can be demonized, though not precisely demonically possessed. Driscoll also emphatically said that Satan can work on Christians and adduced from Acts 5 that Satan filled the hearts of Christians. This you'll have to hear/read for yourself:
http://download.marshill.se/files/MH%20Vodcast%20Video/2008/20080205_christus-victor_vodcast.m4v
06.19ish
Second thing, what about Christians? Can Christians be demon possessed? Not in terms of ownership, no. You belong to God, right? You belong to God. Some would say, therefore, Satan doesn't work on Christians. Well, sure he does. He attacked Jesus. --say, "Yeah, well, he [Satan] can't internally influence them." Well, yeah, he can. Jesus looks at Peter and says, "Get behind me--" what? Satan. In Acts 5 there's a couple called Ananias and Sapphira. They were members of the church, believers, they were bringing their tithe after selling some land, and they withheld part of their alleged pledged tithe, and Peter looks at them and says "Why has Satan so filled your heart? You've not lied to men but to God the Holy Spirit." Why has Satan so filled your heart? Right at the center and core of who you are. Satan work's from THERE. [emphases added]
The same language again in Ephesians, "Don't be drunk with wine, be FILLED with the Holy Spirit." Why are you FILLED in your heart with Satan? Christians can't be owned, possessed in terms of demons but they can be externally oppressed and (this will be my most controversial statement) internally influenced. Not possessed, not controlled. [emphasis added]
I'll use a very simple analogy, very controversial. There are huge books written warring over this. Some would argue, "Well, Satan can't have any access to a believer because God and Satan don't occupy the same space." I said, "Well they did in the days of Job when Satan was allowed to go into the presence of God." In me I have the flesh and my new nature. I have my depravity and the Holy Spirit. The world, God and Satan are at work there. Now God is greater, to be sure, and the only way I believe a believer is really opened up to the demonic is through sin and folly and lies and they open up themselves up. Are they possessed? NO. Are they internally influenced? Possibly. Possibly, for some.
8:21
In the same way, okay, I'll give you an analogy. I own my house. It's my house. No one has any right to live there but let's say I just invite over some total losers (drug addicts, alcoholics, freeloaders, whatever) and I let `em eat my food, hang out, sleep on the couch, crash in the bedroom, I just let `em live there. I don't kick `em out, I don't do anything. Do they own the house? Do they possess the house? No. Do they have access to it? Well, yeah, I opened the door, I let `em in. Are they gonna create havoc in my house? Yeah, they're gonna ruin everything. So what do I need to do? I need to kick `em out because they have no right to be there and then I need to lock the door and not invite `em in ever again.
I'm saying in that simple analogy that's kinda how Satan and demons work. If you open up your life, and this is not, not, you know, you had a bad day and said a bad word, this is a Christian who all of a sudden you're into the demonic; you're sick and you want to be healed so you go to some healer and now you're involved in demons; there's sin in your life that you've never really dealt with, that kind of stuff. You're doing drugs, you're opening yourself up to an altered state of conscioucesness (the Bible says to be self-controlled and alert and resist the devil and not you're not doing that cuz you're into drugs and alcohol and bizarre spirituality). You can open the door, bad guys move in, they don't OWN the house, you can kick `em out, lock the door. That's my description of internal influence. It's in very extreme cases and this isn't very often but it's possible.
So, even though it would seem that one has to be an unusually high status Christian leader in the United States, for instance, to merit the attention of Satan himself, Driscoll's taxonomy of demonization asserts that a Christian can most certainly be demonized, although how that comes to pass doesn't get explained here. The actual explanation for how a Christian could possibly be demonized is hours long on Driscoll's part. It involves a lot of stuff about the "ordinary demonic" transcribed here.
Had Driscoll stopped to consider whether he was consistently applying his own content in recycling it in response to a question he should have hesitated to tell someone Satan is telling them anything because to go by Driscoll's past instructions on spiritual warfare, Satan's not going to be going after you or me or some random anonymous Christian, Satan's going to be going after someone like Billy Graham.
Then again ...
http://download.marshill.se/files/MH%20Vodcast%20Video/2008/20080205_introduction-to-spiritual-warfare_vodcast.m4v
33.22
...
I think one of the great myths that has come about (it's a demonic lie) is that myself, the executive elders, the senior leaders we don't care about people. I was the only one who did ANY counseling until we had 800 people. We still do tons of shepherding, counseling, spiritual warfare, conflict. But we try to do so in a way that is humble, that isn't "and here is who I served and here are the demons we cast out and here's the list of people that I've healed." That's demonic. The truth is I love the people as much--actually, more than anyone in this church. [emphases added] And the senior leaders, the campus pastors, the departmental leaders, the executive elders love the people in this church as much or more than anyone else in this church. And one of my great concerns is not just, "Can you hold hands and help sheep?" but "can you also flip the staff over and defend against a wolf?" You HAVE to have that discernment, that courage, and that ability to tell someone: "You are in sin. That is false doctrine. You are not qualified to be a leader. If you do not repent you are not welcome here. And I will speak truthfully to those who want to follow you because my job is for the well-being of the sheep."
That was back in 2008 a few months after Meyer and Petry got fired and run through a kangaroo court. Back in 2014 Driscoll was under some kind of investigation that "may" have been completed and while he said on the road in 2015 he, like, totally agreed with the decision of the Board, all of a sudden he said God told him "a trap had been set" and, lo, he did quitteth Mars Hill. Greater love hath no pastor than this, that he bailed on Mars Hill in Seattle out of love for the sheep to go plant a church in Phoenix. But back in 2008 anyone who expressed doubts about how deeply or sincerely Mark Driscoll loved the people of Mars Hill, whoever those were, they believed a demonic lie.
So, on the whole, while Driscoll's grab bag approach "could" propose that someone with anorexia "could" be demonized if the right kinds of sins were committed by them and/or against them, it doesn't fit in his history of teaching to propose consistently that Satan himself has anything to do with the individual believer who isn't Billy Graham level important in the American or global church scene.
Which is why it might have been better if he'd left that stuff unsaid in the transcript Throckmorton provided.
Monday, May 16, 2016
Driscoll vodcast "Is Anorexia a sin?", how to delicately formulate a set of doctrines that don't quite blame the person while only framing issues in categories of blame?
Why Mark Driscoll decided to publicly field the question "Is anorexia a sin" is a mystery; almost as mysterious as why he decided to provide some kind of response to the question accompanied by the sound of sludgy over-driven guitar riffs. There's a point at which a question could be serious enough to get an answer not accompanied by a rock soundtrack. Call it a musician's bias, but these days too many films have too much music that distracts from other content, and no, that's not just about films like Batman vs Superman where Wonder Woman gets this loud, boisterous 7/8 vamp while she ... checks her email.
No, if you are willing to watch the clip ...
http://markdriscoll.org/is-anorexia-a-sin/
This ... is a remarkable parade of recycled content given to someone whom we can only assume asked the question sincerely.
Once again Driscoll trots out to men "your standard of beauty is your wife", as if eating disorders were only something straight people dealt with? If a gay guy knows someone who has an eating disorder what's the point of saying "your standard of beauty is your wife" to that guy? While there could be a lot to be said about how standards of beauty are associated with sexual desirability and social capital the two are not necessarily the same.
It's one thing for Driscoll to state abstractly in response to a question from someone who has shared dealing with an eating disorder that a guy's standard of beauty is to be his wife, and it's another to remember that in the charges and concerns raised by former Mars Hill elders ...
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/2014/08/21/former-mars-hill-church-pastors-bring-formal-charges-against-mark-driscoll/
...
October 2011—Mark said in a meeting that he did not want a certain staff elder (who was not slim) to take on a certain prominent leadership role because “his fat ass is not the image we want for our church.”
It's also impossible to forget that Mark Driscoll wrote the following:
Real Marriage: the truth about sex, friendship and life together
Mark and Grace Driscoll
Thomas Nelson
copyright (c) 2012 by On Mission, LLC
ISBN 978-1-4041-8352-0
page 11Our marriage was functional but not much fun. As we approached the launch of the church, Grace was pregnant with our first child and suffering from painful stress-related issues caused by her public relations job, which culminated in me apologizing for not bearing the entire financial burden for our family. ...
In this season we shifted into ministry-and-family mode, neglecting our intimacy and falling ot work through our issues. This became apparent to me when my pregnant wife came home from a hair appointment with her previously long hair (that I loved) chopped off and replaced with a short, mommish haircut. She asked what I thought, and could tell from the look on my face. She had put a mom's need for convenience before being a wife. She wept.
So when it comes to Mark Driscoll attempting to offer counsel to a woman by saying a guy should have a standard of beauty that is his wife ... well, the way Mark Driscoll might have put things a few years back is to say he's the chief of hypocrites. This has clearly been a guy willing to articulate a standard of beauty that he likes that his wife was able to deviate from.
Most infamously, Mark Driscoll wrote the following, which has been preserved here at Wenatchee The Hatchet because it got scrubbed.
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/07/revisiting-that-2006-post-that.html
http://web.archive.org/web/20070106220656/http://theresurgence.com/md_blog_2006-11-03_evangelical_leader_quits
http://theresurgence.com/md_blog_2006-11-03_evangelical_leader_quits
•Most pastors I know do not have satisfying, free, sexual conversations and liberties with their wives. At the risk of being even more widely despised than I currently am, I will lean over the plate and take one for the team on this. It is not uncommon to meet pastors' wives who really let themselves go; they sometimes feel that because their husband is a pastor, he is therefore trapped into fidelity, which gives them cause for laziness. A wife who lets herself go and is not sexually available to her husband in the ways that the Song of Songs is so frank about is not responsible for her husband's sin, but she may not be helping him either.
How could a wife ever opt for "lets herself go" if she is, by definition, her husband's standard of beauty? Driscoll used to say that if you're wife is skinny you're into skinny and if you're wife is not-skinny you're into not-skinny. But that's the pulpit persona, not necessarily the actual guy in normal life.
So while Driscoll talks about how guys who have any "objective standard of beauty other than your wife" put a burden on wives and daughters ... well, it's not clear at all that Driscoll himself has been all that consistent about living this out himself by his own accounts. Maybe ten years ago he was still holding to some "objective standard" by which he could talk, then, about pastors' wives who "really let themselves go"?
And that's just discussing points made by Driscoll in the first four minutes.
No doubt fatherly affection and encouragement toward daughters and sons is precious, but that kinda gets us back to the concern of former Mars Hill elders about Mark Driscoll allegedly referring to some pastor at Ballard as being a fat ass. Driscoll's camping out on "the father heart of God" and has talked about wanting to be a father figure to young men and to be a pastor to pastors. But it remains to be seen whether he's come to terms with the extent to which former staff have described his propensity to use language of the sort that we would expect him to not use on his own children or wife that he has, by a few accounts, felt very free to use on staff and members and people he considered adversaries. Whether he likes it or not this, too, is part of his legacy.
at about 6:00 Driscoll talks about how he and Grace had a rough season and how they were sat down by some godly people who asked them questions. There's not much about what that season was aor when it was or what the troubles were.
So there are nine pairs of concepts Driscoll discusses. One of the ones Warren Throckmorton recently took note of is
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/2016/05/16/mark-driscoll-takes-on-anorexia-might-be-demonic/
...
This is where Satan, demons are lying to you, tempting you. The Bible says that Satan is the accuser of the children of God. He accuses them day and night in Revelation 12:10 there are accusations. If you start realizing this oppression, you can get out of it by acknowledging what God has to say. Oppression, an accusation, is often in the second person, you are unlovable, you need to punish yourself, you don’t appear attractive, whatever the oppression is, it’s telling you something that’s just not true. And so, what you need to understand is that’s demonic, that God doesn’t speak to you that way and if you’re hearing in the second person, maybe someone is talking to you, a spiritual being is lying to you, I’ll get to that in just a moment, and the way out is deliverance, you have victory in Christ, Colossians 2 says He has disarmed and defeated the powers and principalities of evil, triumphing over them through his victorious forgiveness of sinners on the cross.
...
PS – I find some of what Driscoll said about acceptance of body image to be incompatible with what he and his wife wrote in Real Marriage about cosmetic surgery. Read Tim Chailles reaction to the Driscoll’s approval of cosmetic surgery.
A couple things ... Driscoll hits that "Second person is from the devil" about accusation. If God never spoke to His people in an accusatory second person diatribe ... would there by any prophetic literature in the Bible? So while Driscoll's advice might seem like a helpfully pious bromide he can't even get it square with an entire genre of biblical literature that is notoriously defined by accusatory oracles from the Almighty over sins that the prophets considered worthy of condemnation. There's possibly a conviction/condemnation distinction Driscoll could make but the key counterpoint here is that even if Driscoll tries to broadbrush any internal "self talk" that is second-person accusatory as Satanic it's not clear on what basis, if any, he can make this claim.
For those who don't follow the link to Tim Challies' reservations about the Driscollian endorsement of cosmetic surgery ... let's just say it will suffice to say that this is another question about how sincerely Mark and/or Grace Driscoll believe their spiel about how "your wife is your standard of beauty". Neither Driscoll seems to mean by that to say that if a person's wife doesn't shave her legs or armpits or washes her hair for a few days and maybe gains a little weight that she's still the "standard of beauty" if a little cosmetic csurgery here and there might be okay.
And while it's good to raise questions about standards of beauty it became abundantly clear in Real Marriage that was not necessarily hwere a really bad fracture point was in the Driscoll marriage. A big fracture point was sex and specifically how often it wasn't happening to Mark Driscoll's satisfaction. In the "Can We ______?" chapter Chailes pointed out that there was a grid in which one of the questions was "is it enslaving?" Well, nobody seemed all that interested in asking a basic question--Mark Driscoll made it clear that he realized the cure for his mood swings and depression was more frequent sex with his wife.
The segment from about 6 to 7:15 is where Driscoll talks about how if there's an idolatry problem you need to stop worshipping the idol and start worshipping God.
That ... sounds kinda like Redemption Group doctrine. I've discussed at greater length here than I care to repeat why it's a pretty big problem to formulate struggles only in terms of idolatry. I don't plan to get into all that again here. But it seems necessary to say that bringing up idolatry in connection to anorexia seems worse than useless. Even if we set aside the aforementioned doubts about how consistently Mark Driscoll's lived out his "your wife is your standard of beauty" stuff, to suggest that idolatry for a particular body type or the approval of a father or boyfriend (not mother or peer group?) could be an idolatry that needs to be repented of can introduce a double bind in which wanting to please someone else gets defined as idolatry. It "could" be ... but that still puts the issue in terms of what the person struggling with anorexia or bulimia has idolatrously embraced, even after Driscoll had made a point of talking about unrealistic worldly standards for beauty.
In the recent video Driscoll mentiones the possibility of generational sin. The last time I can recall that generational sin in a family line was a major point of discussion was ...
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/12/2-5-2008-spiritual-warfare-part-3-part_30.html
that link just above is for a transcript, for those who are game to watch the video more directly ...
http://download.marshill.se/files/MH%20Vodcast%20Video/2008/20080205_christus-victor_vodcast.m4v
Spiritual Warfare
February 5, 2008
Pastor Mark Driscoll
Christus Victor (Part 3)
34:54ish
I then ask them to confess sins and cancel ground and command leaving one at a time. `s all before we start, "How did you open the door?" proverbially speaking? "Well, it was I committed adultery then after that I started having nightmares."
"Well, guess what? Probably a connection there, huh? Probably opened the door with adultery. Have you ever really repented of that to Jesus and asked him to forgive you?"
"Not really."
"Well let's do that right now. Let's stop right now and have you repent of that sin, ask Jesus to forgive you. He died. Receive forgiveness."
Let's get--cuz, see, Satan and demons, with a believer, in addition to external torment and such, most of what they have is what we've given them by opening the door through sin.
"Well then, confess it is a sin. Let's kick `em out, lock the door but you gotta straighten this out with Jesus. You gotta repent."
So a good chunk of time is just spent on repentence of particular sin. It's all it is. Getting rid of those handholds and footholds.
...
36:00
I then ask them a series of questions. This is where we start, number ten. I'll usually check with ancestral sin. I'm looking at their past.
Now if they come from ten generations of third degree Masons I'm startin' there. If they're grandma was into witchcraft and their mama was into witchcraft and they have some demonic issues it shouldn't be shocking to think that this has been an issue in their family for a while.
I know one family where incest was just part of the family. They actually had very intricate rules to control incest. The grandfathers and uncles could molest little girls but daddies couldn't and you could only do that once they hit the age of ten. You couldn't molest any child before that. I get these complicated rules that have been passed down for generations for the sexual abuse of the children. You're like, this, your struggle here, your temptations, your issues, they have generational lineage.
There are whole family lines that are just demonically inspired. You ever wonder why, in the Old Testament, God will occasionally tell his people, "When you go to war against that nation kill ALL of them. Don't let one of them live." People say, "Oh, oh that's terrible." Not if that whole line is demonized. Not if that whole line of people exists for the express purpose of fighting God and killing his people. The issue is either you get rid of them or they get rid of you. Satan is inspiring them to destroy you and you gotta get rid of them. Satan DOES work through family lines. There are family lines like the Herods who, just from one generation to the next, they're trying to kill Jesus and his people. Some of the family fights in Genesis, they continue all the way to this day. Not saying every person in the family line is demonized, but it seems like Satan likes to work through family lines, ancestral sin.
To begin then, I'll find the area of deepest root, for the deepest root. If it's ancestral I start there and I have `em pray after me. Much of our time is spent praying. I have `em pray something like this: Lord Jesus, if there are any spirits who have anything to do with me (body, soul or spirit) because of ancestral sin or whatever the sin is (sexual sin, adultery, drugs, whatever it is) I ask that you forgive this sin and cancel any ground that may have been held against me.
And I have them repeat after me: If there are any demons working in me in the area of (whatever it is--sex, drugs, alcohol, you know, night terrors, clairvoyance, visions, pedophilia, whatever it is, witchcraft, whatever) we bind all of you together, along with all your work and effects and command you to come forward.
So the way the demon trial seems to have been set up ancestral sin can be something your ancestors are guilty of that you are, in some sense, also guilty of. Bringing this up in connection to an eating disorder could be construed as a possible counseling double bind. The person struggling with an eating disorder could be described as a victim of ancestral sin yet guilty of perpetuating that sin in the present. If the answer Mark Driscoll was aiming to provide to "is anorexia a sin" was supposed to be "no" fails don't get more epic than this. If the answer was supposed to be "yes" why did he lack the courage to be consistent with conviction and say so?
about 10:20 into the recent video Driscoll talks about how believing lies can have you in bondage. So it's impossible not to think about how this, too, resembles teaching content he had on the subject of spiritual warfare from 2008.
http://download.marshill.se/files/MH%20Vodcast%20Video/2008/20080205_the-devil_vodcast.m4v
February 5, 2008
Pastor Mark DriscollPart 2: The Devil
01:05:40ish
...
I had one woman, wonderful gal, sweet gal, she was convinced of the lie that her husband was committing adultery on her. So every time he'd go to work she would literally have a panic attack and would go into the closet and shut the door and be there for hours having a literal, full-blown nervous breakdown panic attack. Her husband's a great guy. Loves Jesus, loves her. It [the idea that the husband was cheating on his wife] was a total lie but something in her believed that lie and I think, for her, that struck at the core of her sense of security and identity and Satan got her to believe that lie and it absolutely undid her. She went to counseling; she was diagnosed bipolar, paranoid schizophrenic, multiple personality disorder (I believe that such things are true but sometimes they're a junk drawer for other diagnoses for people that are experiencing real spiritual problems); they put her on all kinds of medication, she still had panic attacks, still freaking out, still in the closet; and I just told her, I said, "Sweetheart, it's a lie." It's a lie.Her husband's sitting right there, I said, "Okay, God's honest truth, have you ever committed adultery on your wife?"
"No."
"When you leave the house are you going to commit adultery?"
"No, I'm going to work."
"Have you ever touched another woman, are you looking at porn, are you doing anything."
He's like, "I'm not doing anything. I go to work and I come home. That's what I'm doing. I love her. You know, I'm delighted to be with her. She's the best."
I looked at her, I said, "Okay, here's what faith looks like for you--believe the truth. Don't believe the lie. If you believe the lie, you're going to ruin everything. If you believe the truth, you'll be okay. And you know what? By God's grace she repented of her feeding the lie. She needed to see that believing a lie was a sin. It was a sin to be repented of. Here's the truth, here's the lie, I chose the lie. That's a sin, I need to repent. I need to believe the truth. I need to have faith to live in light of the truth, like Jesus said, then I'll be free in the truth.
[She] went off her medication, no more panic attacks, no diagnoses, she's fine. This has been some years, they've got a loving marriage, they're doing great, they love Jesus. They're wonderful people. But she fed the lie. Don't feed the lies. And they're everywhere and part of your art in counseling is asking enough questions to figure out what the lies are that people believe.
Not that we're ever likely to find out who this person is, though. What's remarkable about this account is that Driscoll presents someone as responsible for being in demonic bondage for believing lies told to them. This has been an aspect of Driscoll's counseling approach that has gone without remark for so long it seems necessary to keep bringing it back into the light, not least because this just came up again this week from Mark Driscoll himself. You need to stop believing in lies so you're not in bondage. That's from the 2008 spiritual warfare lecture marathon.
I've meant to scale back blogging about Driscoll this year but that he's willing to field a question from someone sharing struggles with eating disorders and to talk about whether or not anorexia is a sin ... it suggests that Mark Driscoll is willing to wade into providing counsel via vodcast. I've got doubts as a matter of personal convictions and experience how valuable counseling via mediated content can actually be. It seems an actually responsible pastor would save the majority of assistance to someone struggling with an eating disorder to someone qualified to help that person through those difficulties, whether a psychologist or a dietician qualified to help people with eating disorders. Not some guy who bailed on restorative discipline from his own church back in 2014 and is putting down roots in the Phoenix area whose posse scrubbed the internet of spiritual warfare content from 2008 that he is now so very obviously recycling in providing a vodcast answer to the question "is anorexia a sin?"
But it's not as though a pastor has nothing possible to do. For those of us with more of a Reformed background Richard Sibbes' The Bruised Reed can be helpful in meditating on the love of Christ that sustains us even as we struggle and fail with besetting sins by reminding us that it was for these very sins Christ died, but also to remind us that as we struggle with the infirmities of the flesh Christ bore these infirmities for our sake. There are ways to discuss how Christ in His life and death chose to bear with us the sufferings that we face in life in a way that doesn't have to bottom line everything in the category of sin, because "sin" as Christians so often discuss it tends to focus entirely on sins we think people knowingly do with intent when in our daily lives we may fail in all kinds of ways that are unobserved and inadvertent by us. It is possible for pastors and just regular Christians to share what encouragements we have received without presuming to tell someone struggling with something we don't understand that there's something they could repent of, some lies they need to stop believing, and so on. How do we know they didn't hear those lies from us, for instance?
It is this kind of question Mark Driscoll seems never to have confronted--when he has scolded men for having unrealistic expectations about sex and beauty it's never clear that he's thought that carefully about himself. Let's take the Driscollian grid and consider where the question is "is it enslaving?" And let's remember Mark Driscoll wrote:
Real Marriage
Mark and Grace Driscoll
Copyright (c) 2012 by On Mission, LLC
Thomas Nelson
ISBN 978-1-4002-0383-3
ISBN 978-1-4041-8352-0 (IE)
page 164
As with many things in marriage, communication is key. When I cam to the conclusion that the cure for a lot of my moodiness was having more frequent sex with my wife, I simply told her. Yes, it's that simple. For years, when I would endure depression, I tried to talk to Grace about it. Her natural inclination was to want to have long talks about our feelings toward each other, and I know that connecting with her like this is important. But sometimes I was jsut too frustrated and ended up blowing up and hurting her feelings. The truth was I wanted to have more frequent sex with my life, and we needed to discuss how that could happen.
To make matters worse, seemingly every book I read by Christians on sex and marriage sounded unfair. Nearly every one said the husband had to work very hard to understand his wife, to relate to her, and when he did that to her satisfaction then, maybe, she would have sex with him as a sort of reward. After many years I finally told Grace that I needed more sex. I asked if we could have sex more days of the week and try a variety of positions. She'd be the one to decide exactly how we would be together. Grace said that helped her think about our intimacy throughout the course of the day, which helped prepare her mind and body. To our mutual delight, we discovered that both of us felt closer more loved and understood, and were more patient with each other if we were together regularly in some way. And whether my depression was testosterone-induced or not, I just generally felt happier.For a wife, sex comes out of a healthy relationship, whereas, for a husband, it leads to one. [emphases added]
But, as has been so directly and bluntly asked here before, if Mark Driscoll's self-diagnosed cure for his depression and mood swings was increasing sex (i.e. number of orgasms) and if elsewhere in Real Marriage Driscoll likened the endorphine rush of an orgasm to a hit of heroin ... how often did he need sex to stabilize his mood? More to the point, if a single person (male or female) opted to masturbate to orgasm as frequently as Mark Driscoll felt he had to have sex with Grace to stabilize his mood swings and depression ... would Mark Driscoll consider that number of orgasms self-administered by a single person to be enslaving?
There's something else about Mark Driscoll's teaching and counseling history that seems necessary to mention, something he mentioned in Confessions of a Reformission Rev slightly more than a decade ago.
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2013/10/real-marriage-chapter-7-grace-driscolls.html
...
Confessions of a Reformission Rev
Mark Driscoll, Zondervan 2006
copyright 2006 by Mark DriscollISBN-13: 978-0-310-27016-4
ISBN-10:0-310-2-7016-2page 151
To make these transitions, I needed to hand much of my work load to my elders and deacons so that I could continue to concentrate on the future of expansion of our church. In some ways I longed for this day because it meant the weight of the church would be off my shoulders and shared with many leaders. In other ways I lamented not being able to invest in every young couple, experience the joy of officiating at so many weddings, or know everything that was going on in the church.
I asked our newest and oldest elder, Bent, to take over the counseling load that I had been carrying. [emphasis added] He was the first person to join our church who had gray hair, and he and Filipino wife, Joanne, were like rock stars with groupies since all the young people wanted to hang out with these grandparents that loved Jesus. My problem was I loved our people so much that if I got deeply involved in the pain of too many people's lives, it emotionally killed me, and I needed to do less counseling.
Bent Meyer started tackling counseling somewhere around 2002-2003 if memory serves. What this could mean is that ... it's possible hat Mark Driscoll had scaled back his counseling load as far back as 2002 or 2003 and that he's been out of the game awhile when it comes to pastoral counseling on a person to person basis. It's difficult to see why anyone should put much stock in this guy's counseling acumen if he backed away from pastoral counseling and handed that work over to former Mars Hill pastor Bent Meyer. One of the ironies of Grace Driscoll's complaints about ministries for abuse victims circa 2006 at Mars Hill was that she was complaining about the ministries run by men whom Mark Driscoll personally and directly, by his account, put in charge of things.
So in responding to the question "is anorexia a sin" Driscoll's answer is evasive but steeped in categories that tend to shift toward "yes". It would seem that here we are in 2016 and Mark Driscoll still can't quite think through the infirmities of the human condition in a category that doesn't involve blame.
If Mark Driscoll's really thinking of making the stuff in that video some kind of curriculum it'd be best if he didn't bother because ...
http://download.marshill.se/files/MH%20Vodcast%20Video/2008/20080205_introduction-to-spiritual-warfare_vodcast.m4v
http://download.marshill.se/files/MH%20Vodcast%20Video/2008/20080205_the-devil_vodcast.m4v
http://download.marshill.se/files/MH%20Vodcast%20Video/2008/20080205_christus-victor_vodcast.m4v
http://download.marshill.se/files/MH%20Vodcast%20Video/2008/20080205_q-a_vodcast.m4v
There's four hours' worth of stuff on spiritual warfare available to download for free at marshill.se already. If he's going to recycle content he was teaching 8 years ago the least we can do is point that out and show you where you can get the old stuff so that if he recycles it again you won't feel any need to part with any money for stuff you can get for free.
No, if you are willing to watch the clip ...
http://markdriscoll.org/is-anorexia-a-sin/
This ... is a remarkable parade of recycled content given to someone whom we can only assume asked the question sincerely.
Once again Driscoll trots out to men "your standard of beauty is your wife", as if eating disorders were only something straight people dealt with? If a gay guy knows someone who has an eating disorder what's the point of saying "your standard of beauty is your wife" to that guy? While there could be a lot to be said about how standards of beauty are associated with sexual desirability and social capital the two are not necessarily the same.
It's one thing for Driscoll to state abstractly in response to a question from someone who has shared dealing with an eating disorder that a guy's standard of beauty is to be his wife, and it's another to remember that in the charges and concerns raised by former Mars Hill elders ...
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/2014/08/21/former-mars-hill-church-pastors-bring-formal-charges-against-mark-driscoll/
...
October 2011—Mark said in a meeting that he did not want a certain staff elder (who was not slim) to take on a certain prominent leadership role because “his fat ass is not the image we want for our church.”
It's also impossible to forget that Mark Driscoll wrote the following:
Real Marriage: the truth about sex, friendship and life together
Mark and Grace Driscoll
Thomas Nelson
copyright (c) 2012 by On Mission, LLC
ISBN 978-1-4041-8352-0
page 11Our marriage was functional but not much fun. As we approached the launch of the church, Grace was pregnant with our first child and suffering from painful stress-related issues caused by her public relations job, which culminated in me apologizing for not bearing the entire financial burden for our family. ...
In this season we shifted into ministry-and-family mode, neglecting our intimacy and falling ot work through our issues. This became apparent to me when my pregnant wife came home from a hair appointment with her previously long hair (that I loved) chopped off and replaced with a short, mommish haircut. She asked what I thought, and could tell from the look on my face. She had put a mom's need for convenience before being a wife. She wept.
So when it comes to Mark Driscoll attempting to offer counsel to a woman by saying a guy should have a standard of beauty that is his wife ... well, the way Mark Driscoll might have put things a few years back is to say he's the chief of hypocrites. This has clearly been a guy willing to articulate a standard of beauty that he likes that his wife was able to deviate from.
Most infamously, Mark Driscoll wrote the following, which has been preserved here at Wenatchee The Hatchet because it got scrubbed.
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/07/revisiting-that-2006-post-that.html
http://web.archive.org/web/20070106220656/http://theresurgence.com/md_blog_2006-11-03_evangelical_leader_quits
http://theresurgence.com/md_blog_2006-11-03_evangelical_leader_quits
•Most pastors I know do not have satisfying, free, sexual conversations and liberties with their wives. At the risk of being even more widely despised than I currently am, I will lean over the plate and take one for the team on this. It is not uncommon to meet pastors' wives who really let themselves go; they sometimes feel that because their husband is a pastor, he is therefore trapped into fidelity, which gives them cause for laziness. A wife who lets herself go and is not sexually available to her husband in the ways that the Song of Songs is so frank about is not responsible for her husband's sin, but she may not be helping him either.
How could a wife ever opt for "lets herself go" if she is, by definition, her husband's standard of beauty? Driscoll used to say that if you're wife is skinny you're into skinny and if you're wife is not-skinny you're into not-skinny. But that's the pulpit persona, not necessarily the actual guy in normal life.
So while Driscoll talks about how guys who have any "objective standard of beauty other than your wife" put a burden on wives and daughters ... well, it's not clear at all that Driscoll himself has been all that consistent about living this out himself by his own accounts. Maybe ten years ago he was still holding to some "objective standard" by which he could talk, then, about pastors' wives who "really let themselves go"?
And that's just discussing points made by Driscoll in the first four minutes.
No doubt fatherly affection and encouragement toward daughters and sons is precious, but that kinda gets us back to the concern of former Mars Hill elders about Mark Driscoll allegedly referring to some pastor at Ballard as being a fat ass. Driscoll's camping out on "the father heart of God" and has talked about wanting to be a father figure to young men and to be a pastor to pastors. But it remains to be seen whether he's come to terms with the extent to which former staff have described his propensity to use language of the sort that we would expect him to not use on his own children or wife that he has, by a few accounts, felt very free to use on staff and members and people he considered adversaries. Whether he likes it or not this, too, is part of his legacy.
at about 6:00 Driscoll talks about how he and Grace had a rough season and how they were sat down by some godly people who asked them questions. There's not much about what that season was aor when it was or what the troubles were.
So there are nine pairs of concepts Driscoll discusses. One of the ones Warren Throckmorton recently took note of is
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/2016/05/16/mark-driscoll-takes-on-anorexia-might-be-demonic/
...
This is where Satan, demons are lying to you, tempting you. The Bible says that Satan is the accuser of the children of God. He accuses them day and night in Revelation 12:10 there are accusations. If you start realizing this oppression, you can get out of it by acknowledging what God has to say. Oppression, an accusation, is often in the second person, you are unlovable, you need to punish yourself, you don’t appear attractive, whatever the oppression is, it’s telling you something that’s just not true. And so, what you need to understand is that’s demonic, that God doesn’t speak to you that way and if you’re hearing in the second person, maybe someone is talking to you, a spiritual being is lying to you, I’ll get to that in just a moment, and the way out is deliverance, you have victory in Christ, Colossians 2 says He has disarmed and defeated the powers and principalities of evil, triumphing over them through his victorious forgiveness of sinners on the cross.
...
PS – I find some of what Driscoll said about acceptance of body image to be incompatible with what he and his wife wrote in Real Marriage about cosmetic surgery. Read Tim Chailles reaction to the Driscoll’s approval of cosmetic surgery.
A couple things ... Driscoll hits that "Second person is from the devil" about accusation. If God never spoke to His people in an accusatory second person diatribe ... would there by any prophetic literature in the Bible? So while Driscoll's advice might seem like a helpfully pious bromide he can't even get it square with an entire genre of biblical literature that is notoriously defined by accusatory oracles from the Almighty over sins that the prophets considered worthy of condemnation. There's possibly a conviction/condemnation distinction Driscoll could make but the key counterpoint here is that even if Driscoll tries to broadbrush any internal "self talk" that is second-person accusatory as Satanic it's not clear on what basis, if any, he can make this claim.
For those who don't follow the link to Tim Challies' reservations about the Driscollian endorsement of cosmetic surgery ... let's just say it will suffice to say that this is another question about how sincerely Mark and/or Grace Driscoll believe their spiel about how "your wife is your standard of beauty". Neither Driscoll seems to mean by that to say that if a person's wife doesn't shave her legs or armpits or washes her hair for a few days and maybe gains a little weight that she's still the "standard of beauty" if a little cosmetic csurgery here and there might be okay.
And while it's good to raise questions about standards of beauty it became abundantly clear in Real Marriage that was not necessarily hwere a really bad fracture point was in the Driscoll marriage. A big fracture point was sex and specifically how often it wasn't happening to Mark Driscoll's satisfaction. In the "Can We ______?" chapter Chailes pointed out that there was a grid in which one of the questions was "is it enslaving?" Well, nobody seemed all that interested in asking a basic question--Mark Driscoll made it clear that he realized the cure for his mood swings and depression was more frequent sex with his wife.
The segment from about 6 to 7:15 is where Driscoll talks about how if there's an idolatry problem you need to stop worshipping the idol and start worshipping God.
That ... sounds kinda like Redemption Group doctrine. I've discussed at greater length here than I care to repeat why it's a pretty big problem to formulate struggles only in terms of idolatry. I don't plan to get into all that again here. But it seems necessary to say that bringing up idolatry in connection to anorexia seems worse than useless. Even if we set aside the aforementioned doubts about how consistently Mark Driscoll's lived out his "your wife is your standard of beauty" stuff, to suggest that idolatry for a particular body type or the approval of a father or boyfriend (not mother or peer group?) could be an idolatry that needs to be repented of can introduce a double bind in which wanting to please someone else gets defined as idolatry. It "could" be ... but that still puts the issue in terms of what the person struggling with anorexia or bulimia has idolatrously embraced, even after Driscoll had made a point of talking about unrealistic worldly standards for beauty.
In the recent video Driscoll mentiones the possibility of generational sin. The last time I can recall that generational sin in a family line was a major point of discussion was ...
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/12/2-5-2008-spiritual-warfare-part-3-part_30.html
that link just above is for a transcript, for those who are game to watch the video more directly ...
http://download.marshill.se/files/MH%20Vodcast%20Video/2008/20080205_christus-victor_vodcast.m4v
Spiritual Warfare
February 5, 2008
Pastor Mark Driscoll
Christus Victor (Part 3)
34:54ish
I then ask them to confess sins and cancel ground and command leaving one at a time. `s all before we start, "How did you open the door?" proverbially speaking? "Well, it was I committed adultery then after that I started having nightmares."
"Well, guess what? Probably a connection there, huh? Probably opened the door with adultery. Have you ever really repented of that to Jesus and asked him to forgive you?"
"Not really."
"Well let's do that right now. Let's stop right now and have you repent of that sin, ask Jesus to forgive you. He died. Receive forgiveness."
Let's get--cuz, see, Satan and demons, with a believer, in addition to external torment and such, most of what they have is what we've given them by opening the door through sin.
"Well then, confess it is a sin. Let's kick `em out, lock the door but you gotta straighten this out with Jesus. You gotta repent."
So a good chunk of time is just spent on repentence of particular sin. It's all it is. Getting rid of those handholds and footholds.
...
36:00
I then ask them a series of questions. This is where we start, number ten. I'll usually check with ancestral sin. I'm looking at their past.
Now if they come from ten generations of third degree Masons I'm startin' there. If they're grandma was into witchcraft and their mama was into witchcraft and they have some demonic issues it shouldn't be shocking to think that this has been an issue in their family for a while.
I know one family where incest was just part of the family. They actually had very intricate rules to control incest. The grandfathers and uncles could molest little girls but daddies couldn't and you could only do that once they hit the age of ten. You couldn't molest any child before that. I get these complicated rules that have been passed down for generations for the sexual abuse of the children. You're like, this, your struggle here, your temptations, your issues, they have generational lineage.
There are whole family lines that are just demonically inspired. You ever wonder why, in the Old Testament, God will occasionally tell his people, "When you go to war against that nation kill ALL of them. Don't let one of them live." People say, "Oh, oh that's terrible." Not if that whole line is demonized. Not if that whole line of people exists for the express purpose of fighting God and killing his people. The issue is either you get rid of them or they get rid of you. Satan is inspiring them to destroy you and you gotta get rid of them. Satan DOES work through family lines. There are family lines like the Herods who, just from one generation to the next, they're trying to kill Jesus and his people. Some of the family fights in Genesis, they continue all the way to this day. Not saying every person in the family line is demonized, but it seems like Satan likes to work through family lines, ancestral sin.
To begin then, I'll find the area of deepest root, for the deepest root. If it's ancestral I start there and I have `em pray after me. Much of our time is spent praying. I have `em pray something like this: Lord Jesus, if there are any spirits who have anything to do with me (body, soul or spirit) because of ancestral sin or whatever the sin is (sexual sin, adultery, drugs, whatever it is) I ask that you forgive this sin and cancel any ground that may have been held against me.
And I have them repeat after me: If there are any demons working in me in the area of (whatever it is--sex, drugs, alcohol, you know, night terrors, clairvoyance, visions, pedophilia, whatever it is, witchcraft, whatever) we bind all of you together, along with all your work and effects and command you to come forward.
So the way the demon trial seems to have been set up ancestral sin can be something your ancestors are guilty of that you are, in some sense, also guilty of. Bringing this up in connection to an eating disorder could be construed as a possible counseling double bind. The person struggling with an eating disorder could be described as a victim of ancestral sin yet guilty of perpetuating that sin in the present. If the answer Mark Driscoll was aiming to provide to "is anorexia a sin" was supposed to be "no" fails don't get more epic than this. If the answer was supposed to be "yes" why did he lack the courage to be consistent with conviction and say so?
about 10:20 into the recent video Driscoll talks about how believing lies can have you in bondage. So it's impossible not to think about how this, too, resembles teaching content he had on the subject of spiritual warfare from 2008.
http://download.marshill.se/files/MH%20Vodcast%20Video/2008/20080205_the-devil_vodcast.m4v
February 5, 2008
Pastor Mark DriscollPart 2: The Devil
01:05:40ish
...
I had one woman, wonderful gal, sweet gal, she was convinced of the lie that her husband was committing adultery on her. So every time he'd go to work she would literally have a panic attack and would go into the closet and shut the door and be there for hours having a literal, full-blown nervous breakdown panic attack. Her husband's a great guy. Loves Jesus, loves her. It [the idea that the husband was cheating on his wife] was a total lie but something in her believed that lie and I think, for her, that struck at the core of her sense of security and identity and Satan got her to believe that lie and it absolutely undid her. She went to counseling; she was diagnosed bipolar, paranoid schizophrenic, multiple personality disorder (I believe that such things are true but sometimes they're a junk drawer for other diagnoses for people that are experiencing real spiritual problems); they put her on all kinds of medication, she still had panic attacks, still freaking out, still in the closet; and I just told her, I said, "Sweetheart, it's a lie." It's a lie.Her husband's sitting right there, I said, "Okay, God's honest truth, have you ever committed adultery on your wife?"
"No."
"When you leave the house are you going to commit adultery?"
"No, I'm going to work."
"Have you ever touched another woman, are you looking at porn, are you doing anything."
He's like, "I'm not doing anything. I go to work and I come home. That's what I'm doing. I love her. You know, I'm delighted to be with her. She's the best."
I looked at her, I said, "Okay, here's what faith looks like for you--believe the truth. Don't believe the lie. If you believe the lie, you're going to ruin everything. If you believe the truth, you'll be okay. And you know what? By God's grace she repented of her feeding the lie. She needed to see that believing a lie was a sin. It was a sin to be repented of. Here's the truth, here's the lie, I chose the lie. That's a sin, I need to repent. I need to believe the truth. I need to have faith to live in light of the truth, like Jesus said, then I'll be free in the truth.
[She] went off her medication, no more panic attacks, no diagnoses, she's fine. This has been some years, they've got a loving marriage, they're doing great, they love Jesus. They're wonderful people. But she fed the lie. Don't feed the lies. And they're everywhere and part of your art in counseling is asking enough questions to figure out what the lies are that people believe.
Not that we're ever likely to find out who this person is, though. What's remarkable about this account is that Driscoll presents someone as responsible for being in demonic bondage for believing lies told to them. This has been an aspect of Driscoll's counseling approach that has gone without remark for so long it seems necessary to keep bringing it back into the light, not least because this just came up again this week from Mark Driscoll himself. You need to stop believing in lies so you're not in bondage. That's from the 2008 spiritual warfare lecture marathon.
I've meant to scale back blogging about Driscoll this year but that he's willing to field a question from someone sharing struggles with eating disorders and to talk about whether or not anorexia is a sin ... it suggests that Mark Driscoll is willing to wade into providing counsel via vodcast. I've got doubts as a matter of personal convictions and experience how valuable counseling via mediated content can actually be. It seems an actually responsible pastor would save the majority of assistance to someone struggling with an eating disorder to someone qualified to help that person through those difficulties, whether a psychologist or a dietician qualified to help people with eating disorders. Not some guy who bailed on restorative discipline from his own church back in 2014 and is putting down roots in the Phoenix area whose posse scrubbed the internet of spiritual warfare content from 2008 that he is now so very obviously recycling in providing a vodcast answer to the question "is anorexia a sin?"
But it's not as though a pastor has nothing possible to do. For those of us with more of a Reformed background Richard Sibbes' The Bruised Reed can be helpful in meditating on the love of Christ that sustains us even as we struggle and fail with besetting sins by reminding us that it was for these very sins Christ died, but also to remind us that as we struggle with the infirmities of the flesh Christ bore these infirmities for our sake. There are ways to discuss how Christ in His life and death chose to bear with us the sufferings that we face in life in a way that doesn't have to bottom line everything in the category of sin, because "sin" as Christians so often discuss it tends to focus entirely on sins we think people knowingly do with intent when in our daily lives we may fail in all kinds of ways that are unobserved and inadvertent by us. It is possible for pastors and just regular Christians to share what encouragements we have received without presuming to tell someone struggling with something we don't understand that there's something they could repent of, some lies they need to stop believing, and so on. How do we know they didn't hear those lies from us, for instance?
It is this kind of question Mark Driscoll seems never to have confronted--when he has scolded men for having unrealistic expectations about sex and beauty it's never clear that he's thought that carefully about himself. Let's take the Driscollian grid and consider where the question is "is it enslaving?" And let's remember Mark Driscoll wrote:
Real Marriage
Mark and Grace Driscoll
Copyright (c) 2012 by On Mission, LLC
Thomas Nelson
ISBN 978-1-4002-0383-3
ISBN 978-1-4041-8352-0 (IE)
page 164
As with many things in marriage, communication is key. When I cam to the conclusion that the cure for a lot of my moodiness was having more frequent sex with my wife, I simply told her. Yes, it's that simple. For years, when I would endure depression, I tried to talk to Grace about it. Her natural inclination was to want to have long talks about our feelings toward each other, and I know that connecting with her like this is important. But sometimes I was jsut too frustrated and ended up blowing up and hurting her feelings. The truth was I wanted to have more frequent sex with my life, and we needed to discuss how that could happen.
To make matters worse, seemingly every book I read by Christians on sex and marriage sounded unfair. Nearly every one said the husband had to work very hard to understand his wife, to relate to her, and when he did that to her satisfaction then, maybe, she would have sex with him as a sort of reward. After many years I finally told Grace that I needed more sex. I asked if we could have sex more days of the week and try a variety of positions. She'd be the one to decide exactly how we would be together. Grace said that helped her think about our intimacy throughout the course of the day, which helped prepare her mind and body. To our mutual delight, we discovered that both of us felt closer more loved and understood, and were more patient with each other if we were together regularly in some way. And whether my depression was testosterone-induced or not, I just generally felt happier.For a wife, sex comes out of a healthy relationship, whereas, for a husband, it leads to one. [emphases added]
But, as has been so directly and bluntly asked here before, if Mark Driscoll's self-diagnosed cure for his depression and mood swings was increasing sex (i.e. number of orgasms) and if elsewhere in Real Marriage Driscoll likened the endorphine rush of an orgasm to a hit of heroin ... how often did he need sex to stabilize his mood? More to the point, if a single person (male or female) opted to masturbate to orgasm as frequently as Mark Driscoll felt he had to have sex with Grace to stabilize his mood swings and depression ... would Mark Driscoll consider that number of orgasms self-administered by a single person to be enslaving?
There's something else about Mark Driscoll's teaching and counseling history that seems necessary to mention, something he mentioned in Confessions of a Reformission Rev slightly more than a decade ago.
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2013/10/real-marriage-chapter-7-grace-driscolls.html
...
Confessions of a Reformission Rev
Mark Driscoll, Zondervan 2006
copyright 2006 by Mark DriscollISBN-13: 978-0-310-27016-4
ISBN-10:0-310-2-7016-2page 151
To make these transitions, I needed to hand much of my work load to my elders and deacons so that I could continue to concentrate on the future of expansion of our church. In some ways I longed for this day because it meant the weight of the church would be off my shoulders and shared with many leaders. In other ways I lamented not being able to invest in every young couple, experience the joy of officiating at so many weddings, or know everything that was going on in the church.
I asked our newest and oldest elder, Bent, to take over the counseling load that I had been carrying. [emphasis added] He was the first person to join our church who had gray hair, and he and Filipino wife, Joanne, were like rock stars with groupies since all the young people wanted to hang out with these grandparents that loved Jesus. My problem was I loved our people so much that if I got deeply involved in the pain of too many people's lives, it emotionally killed me, and I needed to do less counseling.
Bent Meyer started tackling counseling somewhere around 2002-2003 if memory serves. What this could mean is that ... it's possible hat Mark Driscoll had scaled back his counseling load as far back as 2002 or 2003 and that he's been out of the game awhile when it comes to pastoral counseling on a person to person basis. It's difficult to see why anyone should put much stock in this guy's counseling acumen if he backed away from pastoral counseling and handed that work over to former Mars Hill pastor Bent Meyer. One of the ironies of Grace Driscoll's complaints about ministries for abuse victims circa 2006 at Mars Hill was that she was complaining about the ministries run by men whom Mark Driscoll personally and directly, by his account, put in charge of things.
So in responding to the question "is anorexia a sin" Driscoll's answer is evasive but steeped in categories that tend to shift toward "yes". It would seem that here we are in 2016 and Mark Driscoll still can't quite think through the infirmities of the human condition in a category that doesn't involve blame.
If Mark Driscoll's really thinking of making the stuff in that video some kind of curriculum it'd be best if he didn't bother because ...
http://download.marshill.se/files/MH%20Vodcast%20Video/2008/20080205_introduction-to-spiritual-warfare_vodcast.m4v
http://download.marshill.se/files/MH%20Vodcast%20Video/2008/20080205_the-devil_vodcast.m4v
http://download.marshill.se/files/MH%20Vodcast%20Video/2008/20080205_christus-victor_vodcast.m4v
http://download.marshill.se/files/MH%20Vodcast%20Video/2008/20080205_q-a_vodcast.m4v
There's four hours' worth of stuff on spiritual warfare available to download for free at marshill.se already. If he's going to recycle content he was teaching 8 years ago the least we can do is point that out and show you where you can get the old stuff so that if he recycles it again you won't feel any need to part with any money for stuff you can get for free.
Sunday, May 15, 2016
towers of Babel and legacies, a little Pentecost rumination on the dual nature of living for a legacy as a path to sin or love of neighbor
Today being Pentecost (Western calendar anyway), it seems a good day to reflect on what those recorded in Genesis as seeking to make a name for themselves set out to achieve.
It was, in a word, building a legacy.
You may well already know the story and let's not rehearse it if you don't already know the story of the tower project at Babel.
There was something Mike Anderson wrote a few years back about how what he saw at Mars Hill was a kind of tower building enterprise. It's been interesting to see that comparison come up, because when former staffers from Mars Hill describe what Mark Driscoll was doing as being like building a tower of Babel that is a comparison that ties into a long Christian interpretive tradition that connects the tower of Babel to Babylon the Great in the apocalyptic idiom in Revelation.
It's not like Mark isn't still urging young guys to think in terms of legacy, of living for a legacy.
That is, in a nutshell the strength and core failure of Mark Driscoll's entire public career in ministry. He may not be open to the thought that a strength is always a corresponding weakness. Paul wrote that he was told by God that His strength is made perfect in weakness, but Mark Driscoll's last few years would not necessarily bear this out. For a weakness to be a strength isn't the same as a strength bringing with it a weakness.
Let's look back on Result Source and the Docent Group research help. What's the incentive for those? Legacy, more or less. Over the years, whatever his initial vision of things was, something changed in Mark Driscoll's career. There's an ironic clue to that within the title "God's Work, Our Witness". it's in the word "our". In spite of the many men and women from the history of Mars Hill who contributed to the film from 2011 there is a sense in which you have to watch that film with an alternate title that may more accurately reflect how Mark Driscoll seemed to come across, "My Empire, My Legacy." It was all about Jesus, perhaps, but it was all about a Jesus who gave Mark Driscoll a vision of legacy.
One of the core stories of our shared faith as Christians is of Abraham and Isaac. God promised Abraham a legacy and the tale of the sacrifice of Isaac (which, of course, was thwarted) reminds us that while God promised Abraham a legacy of being the father of nations this promise took a lifetime to fulfill. Then when the son was granted God told Abraham to sacrifice Isaac. The God who promises you a legacy can also command you to sacrifice that legacy in obedience to Him. Precisely why Mark Driscoll or his supporters haven't invoked this analogy is a bit of a mystery. Driscoll mentioned hearing "a trap has been set" but that's about it.
But if we are in Christ then Christ is our legacy. This could be liberating to us if in it we recognize that we don't have to fret about what our legacy is in a way that inspires us to work as if no one else could secure a legacy for us. There's no need to get Docent Group research help for you to write books if you recognize that books don't have to be your legacy. There's no need to take advice to rig the New York Times bestseller list if you recognize that whatever your legacy is, it doesn't require rigging a game. But these kinds of ploys suggest concern for legacy. I've written this before that over the last twenty years what may have started as a sincere vision of a few guys to build a legacy together that pointed toward Christ slowly transformed into a franchise in which Mark Driscoll became focused on his own legacy--legacy isn't necessarily a bad thing to want but by the time you let the New York Times best seller list get rigged in your favor you have "probably" made legacy an idol. I believe it was on the altar to the idol of personal legacy leadership at Mars Hill made a sacrifice that destroyed the long term health of what was once called Mars Hill Church.
It's seemed to me over the last few years, particularly in the wake of leaving Mars Hill years ago, that a great deal of harm people do to each other has not come from direct and conscious malice but through people doing what they convinced themselves was the right thing to do for the right reasons. When things didn't quite go as envisioned or the pressure to keep up with one's own metrics of success became too tempting, self-rationalization kicked in. A lot of us made foolish decisions and rather than face up to our foolishness we doubled down on the certainty that what we were doing and why we were doing it were incontestably good. We were working toward a legacy while forgetting that so long as mere mortals are concerned every legacy in some sense unavoidably comes about by the formation and preservation of an empire. In spite of those among us who convince ourselves we really are free spirits and independent thinkers humanity on the whole seems to tilt toward kool-aid drinking and empire building.
We all have a potential temptation to go build our own tower of Babel of some kind, to say or do or be something that we'll get noticed for and remembered by. The reason this motive is so seductive is because it is a good and beautiful thing to be remembered and remembered in a positive light.
What I think came about may be best put this way--Mark spent his life craving a legacy and telling people, but especially young men, to seek a legacy and to live for the sake of a legacy. For those of us who recall that Driscoll said he wanted to start a Bible school, start a record label, start a publishing company, host conferences and all that, all that stuff would have been a fine legacy to shoot for if worked toward in a way that recognizes that we can aspire to but at many profound levels never CONTROL our own legacies. Our legacy, if we are in Christ, is Christ Himself and what history records of us (if anything at all) is not so much in our control. What we can control, which is more limited in many respects than we might like to believe, is how we treat other people and how we relate to them.
Although this blog has at times been described as a watchblog and some of Mark's fans have seen the blog as being against Mars Hill and Mark Driscoll that's not at all how I see it. I see the times I've written about the history of Mars Hill as being FOR its people. It seems good that someone spent some tie to write about the history of Mars Hill in a way that was not just advertising copy and that took seriously the lives and contributions of people connected to Mars Hill who weren't just that one guy who was always on the screen so much. Every so often I wonder about whether or not to try to set everything into an orderly narrative and maybe write a kind of underground history of Mars Hill. It'd only be "underground" in the sense that I don't particularly care what Mark Driscoll might think of a history of Mars Hill that took seriously that it could not have happened the way it did in the early years without Mike Gunn and Lief Moi and others who are not usually named.
But now there kind of is no Mars Hill. It's one of the things about Mark Driscoll's legacy he has to live with, that the last twenty years of Mars Hill is being regarded by his posse as if it, in many respects, didn't exactly exist. A legacy is a ffine thing to talk about until that legacy turns out to be one that ends in disaster debacle and shame. Then it becomes ever so appealing to talk about rising from death.
There's a part about the life of David as king that can be easily ignored or skimmed over. Yeah, we all heard about David and Bathsheba. But we hear less about the things that led up to that. Anybody remember the 2 Samuel 10 part? There was that back and forth that led to armed conflict. When the Ammonites found they'd made themselves odious to David they hired troops. It didn't go so well for them. But it's background to bear in mind as we get to 2 Samuel 11 and its notorious tale. It's also good to bear in mind 2 Samuel 12. For those who didn't read this book ...
http://www.cambridge.org/us/academic/subjects/religion/judaism/david-king-israel-and-caleb-biblical-memory
Jacob Wright made a fascinating case that what made the siege against the Ammonites unusual in the history of David's reign is that if we bear in mind the Torah and its prohibitions, there were explicit prohibitions against engaging in an aggressive war against Ammonites. Wars of defense weren't off the table, but attacking Ammonite territory to take it was forbidden.
Deuteronomy 2:19
When you come to the Ammonites, do not harass them or provoke them to war, for I will not give you possession of any land belonging to the Ammonites. I have given it as a possession to the descendants of Lot."
It's worth noting when we get to the famous 2 Samuel 11:1
In the spring, at the time when kings go off to war, David sent Joab out with the king's men and the whole Israelite army. They destroyed the Ammonites and besieged Rabbah. But David remained in Jerusalem.
There are, a bit mysteriously, those who would defend David's sending of Joab to wage war against the Ammonites and besiege Rabbah. Maybe it was bad that David delegated his kingly duties of fighting battles and if he'd been on the battle lines he might not have been tempted by Bathsheba, but the legitimacy of the war itself isn't up for question.
Or is it? Let's consider the possibility that in light of the warning in Deuteronomy to not aggressively go to war against Ammonites because Yahweh would not give Israel possession of their lands ... what did David think he was going to accomplish sending Joab out in war against Rabbah?
In other words, what if the author of the biblical text tipped us off that since David was already seeking to take lands that, had he appreciated the word of the Lord he should not have taken action against, why wouldn't he decide to seize for himself someone who was not lawfully his closer to home?
Let's consider the part so many skip past or don't even bother to mention, the part at the end of 2 Samuel 12:
26Meanwhile Joab fought against Rabbah of the Ammonites and captured the royal citadel. 27Joab then sent messengers to David, saying, “I have fought against Rabbah and taken its water supply. 28Now muster the rest of the troops and besiege the city and capture it. Otherwise I will take the city, and it will be named after me.”
29So David mustered the entire army and went to Rabbah, and attacked and captured it. 30David took the crown from their king’s head, and it was placed on his own head. It weighed a talente of gold, and it was set with precious stones. David took a great quantity of plunder from the city 31and brought out the people who were there, consigning them to labor with saws and with iron picks and axes, and he made them work at brickmaking. David did this to all the Ammonite towns. Then he and his entire army returned to Jerusalem.
When David hears from Joab that if he doesn't come officially finish the job of conquering Rabbah that Joab would name the conquered city after himself that tells us something, that just as David saw fit to take a woman who was not his wife for himself, he was willing to take the city of Rabbah himself so that it was not named after Joab's victory.
David had set his heart on taking what was not lawfully his BEFORE he took a man's wife and had that guy killed. Jacob Wright's observation is worth repeating, that the turning point in David's reign (and one for the worse) was when David stopped fighting battles in the interest of the Israelite people at large and started fighting battles he shouldn't have been fighting for ... what?
His personal legacy.
It's not like we never come across David concerned for his life and how people think about him in the Psalms ... but we'll leave that aside having merely mentioned it.
To 1 Corinthians 13-14 all of this, if your great motivator in Christian ministry is a personal legacy or a family legacy, stop. Quit. Bail on that. If what motivates you in Christian ministry is that the legacy you want to further is the love of Christ for the whole world and for those who put their faith in Christ. Okay ... maybe keep doing that.
A king who serves out of love for the people is a king whose legacy will be fairly secure; a king who fights to win glory for himself will at a few different times, eventually, get remembered as a jerk. David came to regret what he had done but Nathan's rebuke included a warning, because he'd despised the word of the Lord and seized what was not rightfully his the sword would never depart from his house. At the risk of going all Yoda here, once you take the dark path forever will it influence your destiny. Once David took the path of self-glorification and the creation of a legacy for himself instead of serving the people it permanently altered the course of his kingdom. There were plenty of signs the united monarchy wouldn't last; the census at the end of David's reign led to a plague and in the end his final years were marked by subterfuge and deceit within his own house. David's last words were warnings to kill threats real or imagined against a unified monarchy. David was a man after God's own heart ... but ... that didn't mean that David wasn't concerned about his personal legacy in ways that led him to do things that were disobedient to the Lord. No matter how directly divine you may think your "calling" is, it is absolutely no assurance that you will not at some point choose a selfish and evil thing in the pursuit of a personal legacy. If even David was guilty of it how easily could you or I or someone else succumb? Very, very easily.
Whether or not Mark Driscoll is ultimately a Christian isn't something I see reason to talk about. We could assume for sake of consideration that his Christian faith is not in doubt any more than Christians doubt that David was one of the saints of old. But that Mark Driscoll made a series of ultimately catastrophic decisions or allowed those decisions to be made on behalf of his personal legacy at the expense of the survival of what was once Mars Hill seems ... fairly easy to establish. It's not even exactly an irony at this point that in making the decisions he made he kind of destroyed the legacy he'd been working on with others over the last twenty years. If Mars Hill became a tower of Babel as some have proposed, then it might be that God providentially came down and sowed the seeds of its death so that having preached "legacy" for decades Mark Driscoll might be confronted with the possibility that you and I and he can't just make our legacy be whatever it is we will for it to be.
The extent to which he's eager to start another church with a bigger building than his start-up from twenty years ago and eager to stay in media saturation mode makes it hard to take seriously the idea tha the's repented of anything. Even how he left Mars Hill can seem as if it were informed by a desire to preserve his personal reputation and legacy to a point where he could, since he wanted to, re:boot his career.
But the scriptures tell us that just because a guy is empowered by God to accomplish something in a supernatural way doesn't mean that persists. The Spirit of the Lord departed from Saul, for instance. Samson did not realize when the strength of the Lord had left him because he allowed his hair to be cut. The seventy elders Moses had appointed (who remembers them?) prophesied ... but that did not continue. One of the most dangerous misunderstandings about the activity of the Spirit in the scriptures is that whatever the Spirit is described as doing can be construed as both normative and as continuing. We should not assume that just because mark has talked about how he was called by God to do X Y and Z that this calling may remain in place. It's not like there's no precedent in the Bible itself for God to raise up someone for a task who failed at it and who was then cast aside in favor of someone else who was more obedient to the Lord. That's how David got his job. But even David proved susceptible to the temptation of legacy.
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/search?q=bait+the+hook
http://download.marshill.se/files/MH%20Vodcast%20Video/2008/20080205_introduction-to-spiritual-warfare_vodcast.m4v
THE FLESH49:16
Number Two, the flesh. The world is your external enemy, the flesh is your internal enemy and I want you to see how these work together.
Your flesh (internally) has sinful desires, rebellious proclivities and the world continually provides opportunities for sin in the flesh. One of my favorites on this is the Puritan Thomas Brookes. He's got a book, Precious Remedies Against Satan's Devices. I think he's one of the greatest puritan writers. He's just a very skilled writer. And he uses this analogy which I really like, I use it sometimes in my preaching--and that is that you need to see your flesh as a hook and you need to see the world as bait. I'm paraphrasing. That in you there are wicked desires and in the world there are wicked opportunities to feed those desires and they work together and all Satan wants to do is bait your hook with whatever feeds your flesh. So he'll take anything from the world, put it on the hook of your flesh. As long as you bite he doesn't care. Satan will give people sex, money, fame, power, glory. He'll give them whatever they want. He doesn't care because his whole goal is to get them to bite and then reel them into destruction and death.
If you're a fisherman you know it's that way. Fisherman know fish are not the most brilliant of creatures and depending on what fish you're trying to catch that determines what bait you put on the hook and you drop it in and you wait for one that is foolish enough to bite thinking they're going to feast and then you feast on them. That's how Satan works. The key is with yourself and the people that you counsel to really come to the place of honesty about the hooks in the flesh. [emphasis added] What is, what is the hook that you're most prone to bite on? Is it sex? Is it drugs? Is it alcohol? Is it money? Is it pride? Is it comfort? What does Satan like to bait your hook with because it tends to be where you most frequently bite.
And when we're speaking of flesh, we're talking not just of your physical body--a misunderstanding of that word in some translations (they really confuse this) the flesh is not just your physical body, your flesh is your internal resistance to God. It's rebellion. It's that Adamic seed. It's that corrupt aspect. We're made in God's image; were image bearers; we sin; we become marred, stained, effected by sin; we still bear God's image and when we become a Christian we get a new heart and a new nature and a power through the Holy Spirit (the great doctrine of regeneration) but we still have flesh. We still have fleshly desires, fleshly yearnings. They don't completely go away until we're glorified (right?), we die, we rise, and we start over, as it were. But Christians still have fleshly desires.
Sadly, it seems that Mark Driscoll may have forgotten that one of those fleshly desires can be legacy, and if we had any moments of forgetfulness, the lectionary reading today can help us out.
Genesis 11:1-4, 8
Now the whole world had one language and a common speech. As people moved eastward, a they found a plain in Shinar and settled there.
They said to each other, “Come, let’s make bricks and bake them thoroughly.” They used brick instead of stone, and tar for mortar. Then they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves; otherwise we will be scattered over the face of the whole earth.”
...
So the Lord scattered them from there over all the earth, and they stopped building the city.
So if a Christian has a fleshly desire for legacy how does one put that fleshly desire for legacy to death in practical ways? Can it be done? Or can re-orienting our desires to be subordinate to the love of Christ and neighbor be of any help? Paul warned that without love gifts are mere noise. We may have just seen how in just a few short years God providentially dismantled a legacy that had been taking decades in the making in Seattle. If Mark Driscoll's still calling himself a Calvinist he can't really get around this matter by trying to blame Satan. And even if a spirit of calamity had some part in the dissolution of Mars Hill, Judges 9 should be reminder enough that, as we've discussed before, the range of Old Testament narratives about evil spirits sent against leaders of God's people tends to play out with this pattern where God authorizes demons or spirits of calamity to bring disaster on men who arrogate power to themselves to serve themselves and their own legacies rather than to serve the people.
Legacy is a paradoxical thing in humans. It's both the thing that seems most noble and most nasty about us.
POTSCRIPT 05-16-2016
0743pm
http://download.marshill.se/files/2006/06/18/20060618_resisting-idols-like-jesus_sd_audio.mp3
RESISTING IDOLS LIKE JESUS
Part 22 of 1st Corinthians
Pastor Mark Driscoll | 1 Corinthians 10:1-14 | June 18, 2006
...
Here’s the tricky part: Figuring out what your idols are. Let me give you an example. Let’s say for example, you define for yourself a little Hell. For you, Hell is being poor. For you, your definition of Hell is being ugly. For you, your definition of Hell is being fat. For you, your definition of Hell is being unloved. For you, your definition of Hell is being unappreciated. That fear of that Hell then compels you to choose for yourself a false savior god to save you from that Hell. And then you worship that false savior god in an effort to save yourself from your self-described Hell. So, some of you are single. Many of you are unmarried. For you, Hell is being unmarried and your savior will be a spouse. And so you keep looking for someone to worship, to give yourself to so that they will save you. For some of you, you are lonely and your Hell is loneliness, and so you choose for yourself a savior, a friend, a group of friends or a pet because you’ve tried the friends and they’re not dependable. And you worship that pet. You worship that friend. You worship that group of friends. You will do anything for them because they are your functional savior, saving you from your Hell. That is, by definition, idolatry. It is having created people and created things in the place of the creator God for ultimate allegiance, value and worth.
So here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to get incredibly personal. This will get painfully uncomfortable if I do my job well. I’m going to ask you some probing questions. We’re going to try to get to the root of your idols and mine and I am guilty. I was sitting at breakfast this morning. My wife said, “So what is your idol?” I was like, “Hey, I’m eating breakfast! Leave me alone. I don’t want to talk about that.” I’m the pastor. I preach. I don’t get preached at. Eating bacon. Don’t ruin it. You know, it’s going good., And I told her, I said, “Honey, I think for me, my idol is victory.” Man, I am an old jock. More old than jock, lately, but I – I’m a guy who is highly competitive. Every year, I want the church to grow. I want my knowledge to grow. I want my influence to grow. I want our staff to grow. I want our church plants to grow. I want everything – because I want to win. I don’t want to just be where I’m at. I don’t want anything to be where it’s at. And so for me it is success and drivenness and it is productivity and it is victory that drives me constantly. I – that’s my own little idol and it works well in a church because no one would ever yell at you for being a Christian who produces results. So I found the perfect place to hide. [emphasis added]
And I was thinking about it this week. What if the church stopped growing? What if we shrunk? What if everything fell apart? What if half the staff left? Would I still worship Jesus or would I be a total despairing mess? I don’t know. By God’s grace, I won’t have to find out, but you never know. So we’re going to look for your idols, too. Some questions. Think about it. Be honest with me. What are you most afraid of? What is your greatest fear? See, that probably tells you what your idol is. Sometimes your idol is the thing that you’re scared of not having, not being, not doing. What are you scared of? You scared that you’ll be alone? Are you scared that no one will ever love you? Are you scared that you will be found out that you’re not all that smart? Are you scared that you’ll be stuck in the same dead-end job forever? What are you afraid of?
It was, in a word, building a legacy.
You may well already know the story and let's not rehearse it if you don't already know the story of the tower project at Babel.
There was something Mike Anderson wrote a few years back about how what he saw at Mars Hill was a kind of tower building enterprise. It's been interesting to see that comparison come up, because when former staffers from Mars Hill describe what Mark Driscoll was doing as being like building a tower of Babel that is a comparison that ties into a long Christian interpretive tradition that connects the tower of Babel to Babylon the Great in the apocalyptic idiom in Revelation.
It's not like Mark isn't still urging young guys to think in terms of legacy, of living for a legacy.
That is, in a nutshell the strength and core failure of Mark Driscoll's entire public career in ministry. He may not be open to the thought that a strength is always a corresponding weakness. Paul wrote that he was told by God that His strength is made perfect in weakness, but Mark Driscoll's last few years would not necessarily bear this out. For a weakness to be a strength isn't the same as a strength bringing with it a weakness.
Let's look back on Result Source and the Docent Group research help. What's the incentive for those? Legacy, more or less. Over the years, whatever his initial vision of things was, something changed in Mark Driscoll's career. There's an ironic clue to that within the title "God's Work, Our Witness". it's in the word "our". In spite of the many men and women from the history of Mars Hill who contributed to the film from 2011 there is a sense in which you have to watch that film with an alternate title that may more accurately reflect how Mark Driscoll seemed to come across, "My Empire, My Legacy." It was all about Jesus, perhaps, but it was all about a Jesus who gave Mark Driscoll a vision of legacy.
One of the core stories of our shared faith as Christians is of Abraham and Isaac. God promised Abraham a legacy and the tale of the sacrifice of Isaac (which, of course, was thwarted) reminds us that while God promised Abraham a legacy of being the father of nations this promise took a lifetime to fulfill. Then when the son was granted God told Abraham to sacrifice Isaac. The God who promises you a legacy can also command you to sacrifice that legacy in obedience to Him. Precisely why Mark Driscoll or his supporters haven't invoked this analogy is a bit of a mystery. Driscoll mentioned hearing "a trap has been set" but that's about it.
But if we are in Christ then Christ is our legacy. This could be liberating to us if in it we recognize that we don't have to fret about what our legacy is in a way that inspires us to work as if no one else could secure a legacy for us. There's no need to get Docent Group research help for you to write books if you recognize that books don't have to be your legacy. There's no need to take advice to rig the New York Times bestseller list if you recognize that whatever your legacy is, it doesn't require rigging a game. But these kinds of ploys suggest concern for legacy. I've written this before that over the last twenty years what may have started as a sincere vision of a few guys to build a legacy together that pointed toward Christ slowly transformed into a franchise in which Mark Driscoll became focused on his own legacy--legacy isn't necessarily a bad thing to want but by the time you let the New York Times best seller list get rigged in your favor you have "probably" made legacy an idol. I believe it was on the altar to the idol of personal legacy leadership at Mars Hill made a sacrifice that destroyed the long term health of what was once called Mars Hill Church.
It's seemed to me over the last few years, particularly in the wake of leaving Mars Hill years ago, that a great deal of harm people do to each other has not come from direct and conscious malice but through people doing what they convinced themselves was the right thing to do for the right reasons. When things didn't quite go as envisioned or the pressure to keep up with one's own metrics of success became too tempting, self-rationalization kicked in. A lot of us made foolish decisions and rather than face up to our foolishness we doubled down on the certainty that what we were doing and why we were doing it were incontestably good. We were working toward a legacy while forgetting that so long as mere mortals are concerned every legacy in some sense unavoidably comes about by the formation and preservation of an empire. In spite of those among us who convince ourselves we really are free spirits and independent thinkers humanity on the whole seems to tilt toward kool-aid drinking and empire building.
We all have a potential temptation to go build our own tower of Babel of some kind, to say or do or be something that we'll get noticed for and remembered by. The reason this motive is so seductive is because it is a good and beautiful thing to be remembered and remembered in a positive light.
What I think came about may be best put this way--Mark spent his life craving a legacy and telling people, but especially young men, to seek a legacy and to live for the sake of a legacy. For those of us who recall that Driscoll said he wanted to start a Bible school, start a record label, start a publishing company, host conferences and all that, all that stuff would have been a fine legacy to shoot for if worked toward in a way that recognizes that we can aspire to but at many profound levels never CONTROL our own legacies. Our legacy, if we are in Christ, is Christ Himself and what history records of us (if anything at all) is not so much in our control. What we can control, which is more limited in many respects than we might like to believe, is how we treat other people and how we relate to them.
Although this blog has at times been described as a watchblog and some of Mark's fans have seen the blog as being against Mars Hill and Mark Driscoll that's not at all how I see it. I see the times I've written about the history of Mars Hill as being FOR its people. It seems good that someone spent some tie to write about the history of Mars Hill in a way that was not just advertising copy and that took seriously the lives and contributions of people connected to Mars Hill who weren't just that one guy who was always on the screen so much. Every so often I wonder about whether or not to try to set everything into an orderly narrative and maybe write a kind of underground history of Mars Hill. It'd only be "underground" in the sense that I don't particularly care what Mark Driscoll might think of a history of Mars Hill that took seriously that it could not have happened the way it did in the early years without Mike Gunn and Lief Moi and others who are not usually named.
But now there kind of is no Mars Hill. It's one of the things about Mark Driscoll's legacy he has to live with, that the last twenty years of Mars Hill is being regarded by his posse as if it, in many respects, didn't exactly exist. A legacy is a ffine thing to talk about until that legacy turns out to be one that ends in disaster debacle and shame. Then it becomes ever so appealing to talk about rising from death.
There's a part about the life of David as king that can be easily ignored or skimmed over. Yeah, we all heard about David and Bathsheba. But we hear less about the things that led up to that. Anybody remember the 2 Samuel 10 part? There was that back and forth that led to armed conflict. When the Ammonites found they'd made themselves odious to David they hired troops. It didn't go so well for them. But it's background to bear in mind as we get to 2 Samuel 11 and its notorious tale. It's also good to bear in mind 2 Samuel 12. For those who didn't read this book ...
http://www.cambridge.org/us/academic/subjects/religion/judaism/david-king-israel-and-caleb-biblical-memory
Jacob Wright made a fascinating case that what made the siege against the Ammonites unusual in the history of David's reign is that if we bear in mind the Torah and its prohibitions, there were explicit prohibitions against engaging in an aggressive war against Ammonites. Wars of defense weren't off the table, but attacking Ammonite territory to take it was forbidden.
Deuteronomy 2:19
When you come to the Ammonites, do not harass them or provoke them to war, for I will not give you possession of any land belonging to the Ammonites. I have given it as a possession to the descendants of Lot."
It's worth noting when we get to the famous 2 Samuel 11:1
In the spring, at the time when kings go off to war, David sent Joab out with the king's men and the whole Israelite army. They destroyed the Ammonites and besieged Rabbah. But David remained in Jerusalem.
There are, a bit mysteriously, those who would defend David's sending of Joab to wage war against the Ammonites and besiege Rabbah. Maybe it was bad that David delegated his kingly duties of fighting battles and if he'd been on the battle lines he might not have been tempted by Bathsheba, but the legitimacy of the war itself isn't up for question.
Or is it? Let's consider the possibility that in light of the warning in Deuteronomy to not aggressively go to war against Ammonites because Yahweh would not give Israel possession of their lands ... what did David think he was going to accomplish sending Joab out in war against Rabbah?
In other words, what if the author of the biblical text tipped us off that since David was already seeking to take lands that, had he appreciated the word of the Lord he should not have taken action against, why wouldn't he decide to seize for himself someone who was not lawfully his closer to home?
Let's consider the part so many skip past or don't even bother to mention, the part at the end of 2 Samuel 12:
26Meanwhile Joab fought against Rabbah of the Ammonites and captured the royal citadel. 27Joab then sent messengers to David, saying, “I have fought against Rabbah and taken its water supply. 28Now muster the rest of the troops and besiege the city and capture it. Otherwise I will take the city, and it will be named after me.”
29So David mustered the entire army and went to Rabbah, and attacked and captured it. 30David took the crown from their king’s head, and it was placed on his own head. It weighed a talente of gold, and it was set with precious stones. David took a great quantity of plunder from the city 31and brought out the people who were there, consigning them to labor with saws and with iron picks and axes, and he made them work at brickmaking. David did this to all the Ammonite towns. Then he and his entire army returned to Jerusalem.
When David hears from Joab that if he doesn't come officially finish the job of conquering Rabbah that Joab would name the conquered city after himself that tells us something, that just as David saw fit to take a woman who was not his wife for himself, he was willing to take the city of Rabbah himself so that it was not named after Joab's victory.
David had set his heart on taking what was not lawfully his BEFORE he took a man's wife and had that guy killed. Jacob Wright's observation is worth repeating, that the turning point in David's reign (and one for the worse) was when David stopped fighting battles in the interest of the Israelite people at large and started fighting battles he shouldn't have been fighting for ... what?
His personal legacy.
It's not like we never come across David concerned for his life and how people think about him in the Psalms ... but we'll leave that aside having merely mentioned it.
To 1 Corinthians 13-14 all of this, if your great motivator in Christian ministry is a personal legacy or a family legacy, stop. Quit. Bail on that. If what motivates you in Christian ministry is that the legacy you want to further is the love of Christ for the whole world and for those who put their faith in Christ. Okay ... maybe keep doing that.
A king who serves out of love for the people is a king whose legacy will be fairly secure; a king who fights to win glory for himself will at a few different times, eventually, get remembered as a jerk. David came to regret what he had done but Nathan's rebuke included a warning, because he'd despised the word of the Lord and seized what was not rightfully his the sword would never depart from his house. At the risk of going all Yoda here, once you take the dark path forever will it influence your destiny. Once David took the path of self-glorification and the creation of a legacy for himself instead of serving the people it permanently altered the course of his kingdom. There were plenty of signs the united monarchy wouldn't last; the census at the end of David's reign led to a plague and in the end his final years were marked by subterfuge and deceit within his own house. David's last words were warnings to kill threats real or imagined against a unified monarchy. David was a man after God's own heart ... but ... that didn't mean that David wasn't concerned about his personal legacy in ways that led him to do things that were disobedient to the Lord. No matter how directly divine you may think your "calling" is, it is absolutely no assurance that you will not at some point choose a selfish and evil thing in the pursuit of a personal legacy. If even David was guilty of it how easily could you or I or someone else succumb? Very, very easily.
Whether or not Mark Driscoll is ultimately a Christian isn't something I see reason to talk about. We could assume for sake of consideration that his Christian faith is not in doubt any more than Christians doubt that David was one of the saints of old. But that Mark Driscoll made a series of ultimately catastrophic decisions or allowed those decisions to be made on behalf of his personal legacy at the expense of the survival of what was once Mars Hill seems ... fairly easy to establish. It's not even exactly an irony at this point that in making the decisions he made he kind of destroyed the legacy he'd been working on with others over the last twenty years. If Mars Hill became a tower of Babel as some have proposed, then it might be that God providentially came down and sowed the seeds of its death so that having preached "legacy" for decades Mark Driscoll might be confronted with the possibility that you and I and he can't just make our legacy be whatever it is we will for it to be.
The extent to which he's eager to start another church with a bigger building than his start-up from twenty years ago and eager to stay in media saturation mode makes it hard to take seriously the idea tha the's repented of anything. Even how he left Mars Hill can seem as if it were informed by a desire to preserve his personal reputation and legacy to a point where he could, since he wanted to, re:boot his career.
But the scriptures tell us that just because a guy is empowered by God to accomplish something in a supernatural way doesn't mean that persists. The Spirit of the Lord departed from Saul, for instance. Samson did not realize when the strength of the Lord had left him because he allowed his hair to be cut. The seventy elders Moses had appointed (who remembers them?) prophesied ... but that did not continue. One of the most dangerous misunderstandings about the activity of the Spirit in the scriptures is that whatever the Spirit is described as doing can be construed as both normative and as continuing. We should not assume that just because mark has talked about how he was called by God to do X Y and Z that this calling may remain in place. It's not like there's no precedent in the Bible itself for God to raise up someone for a task who failed at it and who was then cast aside in favor of someone else who was more obedient to the Lord. That's how David got his job. But even David proved susceptible to the temptation of legacy.
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/search?q=bait+the+hook
http://download.marshill.se/files/MH%20Vodcast%20Video/2008/20080205_introduction-to-spiritual-warfare_vodcast.m4v
THE FLESH49:16
Number Two, the flesh. The world is your external enemy, the flesh is your internal enemy and I want you to see how these work together.
Your flesh (internally) has sinful desires, rebellious proclivities and the world continually provides opportunities for sin in the flesh. One of my favorites on this is the Puritan Thomas Brookes. He's got a book, Precious Remedies Against Satan's Devices. I think he's one of the greatest puritan writers. He's just a very skilled writer. And he uses this analogy which I really like, I use it sometimes in my preaching--and that is that you need to see your flesh as a hook and you need to see the world as bait. I'm paraphrasing. That in you there are wicked desires and in the world there are wicked opportunities to feed those desires and they work together and all Satan wants to do is bait your hook with whatever feeds your flesh. So he'll take anything from the world, put it on the hook of your flesh. As long as you bite he doesn't care. Satan will give people sex, money, fame, power, glory. He'll give them whatever they want. He doesn't care because his whole goal is to get them to bite and then reel them into destruction and death.
If you're a fisherman you know it's that way. Fisherman know fish are not the most brilliant of creatures and depending on what fish you're trying to catch that determines what bait you put on the hook and you drop it in and you wait for one that is foolish enough to bite thinking they're going to feast and then you feast on them. That's how Satan works. The key is with yourself and the people that you counsel to really come to the place of honesty about the hooks in the flesh. [emphasis added] What is, what is the hook that you're most prone to bite on? Is it sex? Is it drugs? Is it alcohol? Is it money? Is it pride? Is it comfort? What does Satan like to bait your hook with because it tends to be where you most frequently bite.
And when we're speaking of flesh, we're talking not just of your physical body--a misunderstanding of that word in some translations (they really confuse this) the flesh is not just your physical body, your flesh is your internal resistance to God. It's rebellion. It's that Adamic seed. It's that corrupt aspect. We're made in God's image; were image bearers; we sin; we become marred, stained, effected by sin; we still bear God's image and when we become a Christian we get a new heart and a new nature and a power through the Holy Spirit (the great doctrine of regeneration) but we still have flesh. We still have fleshly desires, fleshly yearnings. They don't completely go away until we're glorified (right?), we die, we rise, and we start over, as it were. But Christians still have fleshly desires.
Sadly, it seems that Mark Driscoll may have forgotten that one of those fleshly desires can be legacy, and if we had any moments of forgetfulness, the lectionary reading today can help us out.
Genesis 11:1-4, 8
Now the whole world had one language and a common speech. As people moved eastward, a they found a plain in Shinar and settled there.
They said to each other, “Come, let’s make bricks and bake them thoroughly.” They used brick instead of stone, and tar for mortar. Then they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves; otherwise we will be scattered over the face of the whole earth.”
...
So the Lord scattered them from there over all the earth, and they stopped building the city.
So if a Christian has a fleshly desire for legacy how does one put that fleshly desire for legacy to death in practical ways? Can it be done? Or can re-orienting our desires to be subordinate to the love of Christ and neighbor be of any help? Paul warned that without love gifts are mere noise. We may have just seen how in just a few short years God providentially dismantled a legacy that had been taking decades in the making in Seattle. If Mark Driscoll's still calling himself a Calvinist he can't really get around this matter by trying to blame Satan. And even if a spirit of calamity had some part in the dissolution of Mars Hill, Judges 9 should be reminder enough that, as we've discussed before, the range of Old Testament narratives about evil spirits sent against leaders of God's people tends to play out with this pattern where God authorizes demons or spirits of calamity to bring disaster on men who arrogate power to themselves to serve themselves and their own legacies rather than to serve the people.
Legacy is a paradoxical thing in humans. It's both the thing that seems most noble and most nasty about us.
POTSCRIPT 05-16-2016
0743pm
http://download.marshill.se/files/2006/06/18/20060618_resisting-idols-like-jesus_sd_audio.mp3
RESISTING IDOLS LIKE JESUS
Part 22 of 1st Corinthians
Pastor Mark Driscoll | 1 Corinthians 10:1-14 | June 18, 2006
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Here’s the tricky part: Figuring out what your idols are. Let me give you an example. Let’s say for example, you define for yourself a little Hell. For you, Hell is being poor. For you, your definition of Hell is being ugly. For you, your definition of Hell is being fat. For you, your definition of Hell is being unloved. For you, your definition of Hell is being unappreciated. That fear of that Hell then compels you to choose for yourself a false savior god to save you from that Hell. And then you worship that false savior god in an effort to save yourself from your self-described Hell. So, some of you are single. Many of you are unmarried. For you, Hell is being unmarried and your savior will be a spouse. And so you keep looking for someone to worship, to give yourself to so that they will save you. For some of you, you are lonely and your Hell is loneliness, and so you choose for yourself a savior, a friend, a group of friends or a pet because you’ve tried the friends and they’re not dependable. And you worship that pet. You worship that friend. You worship that group of friends. You will do anything for them because they are your functional savior, saving you from your Hell. That is, by definition, idolatry. It is having created people and created things in the place of the creator God for ultimate allegiance, value and worth.
So here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to get incredibly personal. This will get painfully uncomfortable if I do my job well. I’m going to ask you some probing questions. We’re going to try to get to the root of your idols and mine and I am guilty. I was sitting at breakfast this morning. My wife said, “So what is your idol?” I was like, “Hey, I’m eating breakfast! Leave me alone. I don’t want to talk about that.” I’m the pastor. I preach. I don’t get preached at. Eating bacon. Don’t ruin it. You know, it’s going good., And I told her, I said, “Honey, I think for me, my idol is victory.” Man, I am an old jock. More old than jock, lately, but I – I’m a guy who is highly competitive. Every year, I want the church to grow. I want my knowledge to grow. I want my influence to grow. I want our staff to grow. I want our church plants to grow. I want everything – because I want to win. I don’t want to just be where I’m at. I don’t want anything to be where it’s at. And so for me it is success and drivenness and it is productivity and it is victory that drives me constantly. I – that’s my own little idol and it works well in a church because no one would ever yell at you for being a Christian who produces results. So I found the perfect place to hide. [emphasis added]
And I was thinking about it this week. What if the church stopped growing? What if we shrunk? What if everything fell apart? What if half the staff left? Would I still worship Jesus or would I be a total despairing mess? I don’t know. By God’s grace, I won’t have to find out, but you never know. So we’re going to look for your idols, too. Some questions. Think about it. Be honest with me. What are you most afraid of? What is your greatest fear? See, that probably tells you what your idol is. Sometimes your idol is the thing that you’re scared of not having, not being, not doing. What are you scared of? You scared that you’ll be alone? Are you scared that no one will ever love you? Are you scared that you will be found out that you’re not all that smart? Are you scared that you’ll be stuck in the same dead-end job forever? What are you afraid of?
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