Mark Driscoll's Christian Theology vs Critical Theory could probably use at least one footnote giving credit to Stephen Eric Bronner's primer on critical theory

Christian Theology vs. Critical Theory

© 2021 by Mark Driscoll

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

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

Pages 21-22

 

In 1923 the Institute for Social Research (also called the Frankfurt School, or Critical Theory) opened as the first funded Marxist think tank. It sought to determine how to bring a utopian future to the world because the human soul needs to have not only food, water, air, and shelter in order to live, but also hope. Spearheaded by Jewish academics who were anti-capitalism, they wanted to pursue justice by deconstructing and reconstructing everything from gender to family, religion, education and more. Despite being fringe, counterculture radicals and idealists, their concepts did appeal to some people who were suffering and feeling a sense of injustice, oppression, and loss amidst great poverty.

 

As a very general rule, Critical Theory is based upon five big ideas:

1. Power: Structures are created by powerful people to privilege themselves, which is a form of abuse and injustice.

2. Systemic Oppression: Though often invisible like demons, there are inherent biases and prejudices built into every system by those in power to systematically oppress those without power.

3. Critique: It is good and right to find the flaws and problems in all systems of thought as well as institutions, not unlike God who knows our sin and names it.

4. Justice: It is righteous to dismantle oppressive ideas and structures and redistribute power and wealth for equality. Examples include eradicating private property ownership, redistributing wealth through

reparations or tax benefits, or attacking businesses that have benefitted from systemic oppression, which explains rioting and looting that is cheered as justice instead of jeered as injustice.

5. Government: Government replaces God as the sovereign authority to bring justice, protect peace, and provide for the needs of people who have been oppressed. This is a counterfeit of the Kingdom of God ruled by King Jesus who began His public ministry in Luke 4:18-21 reading from and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor.’ And he rolled up the scroll and gave it back to the attendant and sat down. And the eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him. And he began to say to them, ‘Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.’” To have a Kingdom that is perfect, you need a perfect King and His name is Jesus.

 

In 1933, Adolf Hitler became Chancellor in Germany, and the next year became Fuhrer with his own idea of how to achieve a utopian society without God. Around this time, the Nazis closed the Frankfurt school, which then moved to Geneva for a season, then Paris, eventually landing at Columbia University in New York. From 1939-1945, starting with the invasion of Poland, World War II gripped the globe as a demonic anti-Christ sought to impose himself as the head of nations. Hitler enacted a plot to deconstruct governments and reconstruct the world with himself as the King of Kings and Lord of Lords much like Pharoah, Nebuchadnezzar, Caesar and others had done before him by the same powerful spirit of the Critic. Tragically, the concepts of Critical Theory developed by some Jewish scholars were used to justify the Holocaust. Some Germans concluded that the Jews used their power to create systemic oppression and so the Nazis critiqued the Jews and brought social justice through the government by seizing Jewish property, enslaving and murdering Jewish people, and destroying Jewish businesses in the name of social justice. Yes, perhaps the greatest racial/ethnic injustice in modern history was in the name of social justice based upon the principles of Critical Theory.

 

There’s a lot that could be said about the above-quoted passage, but let’s start with the most basic point.  The Institute for Social Research wouldn’t have been the first Marxist think tank the world over. The Marx-Engels Institute that eventually became the Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute was a think tank that was founded in 1919. Now if we said that the first Marxist think tank in the West was founded in 1923 with the Institute for Social Research then, okay, we can grant that point but that is not the point Driscoll made.

 

But all of that is to raise the question about where might Driscoll have gotten the idea that the Frankfurt School was the first Marxist think tank?  You might think that for such a categorical and sweeping claim as describing the Frankfurt School as the first Marxist think tank there’d be a single footnote of attribution but Driscoll’s bibliographic citations are sparser than ever.

 

Nevertheless, he gave us a clue a while back.

https://www.facebook.com/pastormark/photos/side-study-this-week-to-prep-for-romans-2-/10158631698491912/

Mark Driscoll

September 30, 2020  ·

Side study this week to prep for Romans 2

 

What's that book in the lower right corner?  Stephen Eric Bronner’s Critical Theory: A Very Short Introduction. So we know beyond all doubt Driscoll showed the world he had the book as part of his side study for a sermon, so what’s the author have to say about the start of the Institute for Social Research?

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/critical-theory-a-very-short-introduction-9780190692674?cc=us&lang=en&

 

Critical Theory: A Very Short Introduction

Copyright © 2011 by Stephen Eric Bronner

Published by Oxford University Press, Inc.

ISBN: 978-0-19-973007-0 (paperback)

ISBN: 978-0-19-0692674

 

Page 9

The Institute for Social Research was founded in 1923. Growing out of a Marxist study group, which sought to deal with the practical problems facing the labor movement in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution, this first Marxist think tank was funded by Hermann Weil. He was an enlightened business man, who made his fortune on the grain market in Argentina. The money was given at the urging of his son, Felix, who considered himself a “salon Bolshevik”

So that could have been a footnote as best as I can tell.  Did Driscoll think that showing off the books he was reading on social media would count toward a footnote in Christian Theology vs Critical Theory?

 

Now as for how and why the Frankfurt School developed, it would be more accurate to say that what the founders were trying to understand was how the Russian Revolution devolved into a bloodbath on the one hand and how bids at communist revolution not only failed in Germany but led to the emergence of National Socialism on the other. Deconstructionism wouldn’t even become an academic trend until decades after the members of the Frankfurt School had emigrated to the United States to assist in researching potential explanations for the rise of fascism a la The Authoritarian Personality. Driscoll’s use of “deconstruct” as a buzzword is a dog whistle.  What hath Adorno to do with Derrida?

 

Driscoll can write about King Jesus but didn’t Jesus say “My kingdom is not of this world?” Hasn’t Driscoll mentioned in the past that Western Christendom has died?  If critical theory is supposed to be a counterfeit gospel and a counterfeit to the Kingdom of God what exactly “is” that kingdom in Mark Driscoll’s mind?  Western Christendom?

 

Confessions of a Reformission Rev

Mark Driscoll, Zondervan 2006
ISBN-13: 978-0-310-27016-4
ISBN-10:0-310-27016-2

Pages 16-17

 

During the era of Christendom, it was generally believed that our national culture was Christian, or at least Judeo-Christian. Consequently, it was the job of the church to make converts for the nation by challenging people to commit themselves to Jesus and live morally. The upside of Chrisendom was that many people did attend church. The downside was that the church in large part became the servant of morality and the national good. The result was a mean-spirited hypocrisy among “Christians” who wrongly believed morality and redemption were synonymous and lived lives more dominated by American values of pride and selfishness than by the gospel virtues of humility and selflessness.  Also, Christendom churches defined themselves in contrast to other competing churches, which led to unnecessary hostility between Christian traditions that were distinct but not altogether different.

 

By 2013’s A Call to Resurgence, Driscoll spoke of the death of Christendom as complete.  Now in 2021 Driscoll refers to the death of Christendom as a slow process that happened in the past and that he called, it seems, the time of death. Thus in Christian Theology vs Critical Theory:

 

page 38

Like many deaths, the final demise of Christendom occurred after a long, painful struggle that started in the 1960s and 1970s as I described in my book A Call to Resurgence. Christendom took a serious beating during those years from the fatal five: gender confusion, sex, abortions, drugs, and Spiritless spirituality. Strength and vigor waned as Christendom grew old and tired in the 1980s and 1990s; by the turn of the millennium, it could no longer fight back. Finally, after more than a decade of labored breathing and a weakening heart, Christendom has gone the way of all flesh.

 

But before we move forward into a future without Christendom, it’s important to look back to see where we’ve come from. What exactly is Christendom, how is it different from Christianity itself, and how does it relate to the church today?

 

Christendom began about the time of the Reformation and lasted roughly 500 years. The United States was among the most adventurous experiments of Christendom. …

…

 

Page 40

Due to the ongoing existence of American civil religion, many evangelicals are oblivious to the fact that Christendom is dead and real Christianity is in serious decline. Those in the United States may have a general sense that Christianity is struggling in Europe, but many remain fairly optimistic about our “one nation under God.” As long as we see Christmas trees on government property, the 10 Commandments posted on public buildings, and hear public figures talk about “faith,” many believers naively assume that real Christianity is alive and well and respected by the majority of our people.

 

Brace yourself. It’s an illusion.

 

It would seem that gone altogether are Driscoll’s earlier hopeful observations about how the death of Christendom could signal the demise of merely nominal professions of faith:

 

Page 42

With the death of Christendom, however, the cultural advantages of Christianity have diminished, and many people have decided to drop the charade altogether. This shouldn’t come as a surprise; without inward conversion there’s no reason to expect outward devotion. Younger generations increasingly feel less obligated even to profess Christianity, and society increasingly provides less incentive to do so. The advent of mass media, digital communication, and global travel have made competing religions, spiritualities, and philosophies (including agnosticism and atheism) more acceptable and fashionable. In contrast, Christendom is the old way, led by old people for old people. It’s no wonder young people stop attending church, stop giving to the church, and stop practicing faith through Bible reading, a lifestyle of repentance, and passion for Jesus Christ.

 

He says that as though it’s a bad thing. What happened to the Mark Driscoll who wrote that the demise of Christendom meant less hypocrisy and nominalism? What happened to the Driscoll who was willing to say that nationalistic civic religion was not something Christianity ought to have underwritten as seemed to be the case even back in 2006 with Confessions of a Reformission Rev?  

 

Of course Driscoll’s very definition of “Christendom” is a debatable definition. The idea that Christendom didn’t start until the Reformation seems implicit in Driscoll’s definition but surely most historians would propose Christendom got a boost from Constantine and that the Carolingian empire had some small role to play across a thousand years of European history.

 

Driscoll has returned to an idea he credited to his daughter Ashley back in Win Your War, that Christians should think in terms of black and white (binary thinking).

 

From page 3 of Christian Theology vs Critical Theory:

Everything God creates, Satan counterfeits. The counterfeit of Christian Theology is Critical Theory. As a spiritual virus that spreads much more quickly than a physical virus, it has already infected and affected academia, government, and social media platforms, as well as many pulpits and pastors. In Romans 1, Paul speaks of Critical Theory as part of the “lie” that is against the “truth” and he says that the demonic powers at work in the world “suppress the truth” to silence dissent with things like social media throttling, banning from platforms, and cancel culture. This is not solely a political issue. This is primarily a spiritual and a theological issue that has already taken deep-seated root in many mainline, apostate, liberal Christian denominations that fly the rainbow flag and join in parades for things they should be having funerals for. It has now infected many evangelicals as well.

…

Christians should think in terms of black and white (binary thinking). Non-Christians think in terms of shades of gray. Biblical thinking is binary thinking.

 

Biblical Christianity requires black-and-white thinking because it is dualistic. From beginning to end, the Bible is thoroughly categorical: Satan and God, demons and angels, sin and holiness, lies and truth, wolves and shepherds, non-Christians and Christians, damnation and salvation, Hell and Heaven. An exhaustive list could fill a book—but you get the point. The Bible makes clear distinctions and judgments between opposed categories.

 

What kind of dualistic thinking?  Like a Donatist, Gnostic or Marcionite dualism?  Those were declared heresies ages ago.  Jeffrey Burton Russell wrote in his book Satan: The Early Christian Traditions that Christianity was not a monist religion in its orthodox forms but neither was it dualistic in the sense that Mazdaism was; it was, instead, a modified or mitigated dualism.  Anthropological dualism he argued, was mainly a Greek concept and that early Christian heresies tended toward dualisms. That there are dualistic elements in Christian thought and traditions is easy to establish but the question as to how and why Mark Driscoll would or should be considered competent to make such a sweeping claim about what kind of dualism is “Christian” does not require us to answer with a clear affirmative.

 

Meanwhile, at least one footnote for the founding of the Frankfurt School would seem to be in order, especially since Driscoll showed off the books he had been reading about critical theory on social media.

there was, it turned out, a brief comment from Driscoll alluding to the suicide of Darrin Patrick before it was ruled a suicide (a belated update)

Earlier I had indicated that it seemed Mark Driscoll had not addressed the death of Darrin Patrick so far as I could tell in any way online.  Well, it seems I was wrong.  Driscoll did mention something in passing that seemed to allude to Patrick's death.

Eugene Narmour's Beyond Schenkerism

 a commenter mentioned the book a while back and although it took some time I finally landed a copy of the book, which I'm very much looking forward to reading!

Episodes 9 and 10 of the CT series have dropped but no comments about them beyond a few brief remarks for the time being

https://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/podcasts/rise-and-fall-of-mars-hill/bobby-knight-problem.html

https://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/podcasts/rise-and-fall-of-mars-hill/red-sky-morning-mars-hill-driscoll.html

So episodes 9 and 10 of The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill have dropped.  Episode 9 seemed simultaneously diffuse and focused, maybe too focused, on coach Bob Knight as a parallel to Mark Driscoll.  That Rose Madrid Sweatman and Paul Chapman were on record about the didn't-happen protest was ... sort of interesting but it reminded me of what a non-starter that attempt was and how, within Mars Hill, the thing was regarded as less than nothing even in terms of public relations.  

Len Oakes on the role of charismatic rituals initiated by self-designated prophets to form social cohesion

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

https://press.syr.edu/supressbooks/486/prophetic-charisma/

Prophetic Charisma: The Psychology of Revolutionary Religious Personalities

Len Oakes

ISBN 9780815603986 paperback

ISBN 9780815627005 hardcover

ISBN 9780815603993 ebook

From Chapter 8: The Charismatic Moment

page 145 (or 146)

Charismatic rituals are the prophet's main creative achievement. At one and the same time the ritual satisfies the leader's narcissistic needs and transforms the followers; the former, by re-creating a world within which the leader is omnipotent, and the latter, by emotionally revitalizing all who participate in it. The rituals lay an emotional and spiritual base for the community. hence an important task, perhaps the most important task, for the prophet during this time is the construction of charismatic rituals. They are his or her framework for the exploration of love and truth. Each is a set of guidelines that allows people to come together and celebrate the mystery that lies between them. 

Hat tip to reader chris for highlighting this book!

Heinrich Albert, Sonata No. 1 in E minor with score

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N9FBbEznMro

I really, really want to get into a more detailed analysis of this sonata but this week has not been that week!  But I plan to come back to this sonata with some more discussion of what I like about it.  For now, I hope you enjoy it and if anyone knows of who has recorded Sonata No. 2 in D major comment away!

on the Christianity Today podcast mini-episode questioning the origin myths of Mars Hill, a long-form review of Mark Driscoll's stories of conversion and calling from 1992-2019, the most significant revisions have been post-MHC accounts

PART ONE: MARK DRISCOLL’S ACCOUNTS OF HIS CONVERSION PROCESS AND CALLING

 

https://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/podcasts/rise-and-fall-of-mars-hill/

https://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/podcasts/rise-and-fall-of-mars-hill/mars-hill-podcast-driscoll-origin-myth.html

 

A sixteen minute podcast episode that is called “Questioning the Origin Myth” may do too much and too little and this particular mini-episode has gnawed at my thoughts since it was released.  It attempts to do too much by overtly questioning the alleged origin myths surrounding the founding of Mars Hill Church and Mark Driscoll’s accounts of his conversion to Christianity and his calling to ministry.  Yet it simultaneously does too little in that a podcast, let alone such a short podcast episode, cannot possibly cover the sheer mass of written and preached material Mark Driscoll has published recounting his conversion process, his calling to ministry, and founding of Mars Hill Church stories.  That there is a core set of founding myths is easily established but Cosper didn’t really successfully make a case that Driscoll or others significantly changed the stories that became the founding myths of the former Mars Hill Church.

 

If anything, a review of a variety of published materials, chiefly from Mark Driscoll’s writings spanning from the early 1990s through to the present suggests that Mark Driscoll’s overall set of origin stories has stayed robustly on message.  If there are cracks in some proverbial façade they show up in what kind of man Mark Driscoll claimed he was planning to be before he had his conversion process.

 

Notice I keep referring to his “conversion process”. Cumulatively I do not think he had what could be called an evangelical moment-of-crisis conversion experience, nor do I think he really needed one but within the context of evangelicalism and its literary and homiletic conventions Mark Driscoll probably thought and maybe even more strongly felt that he needed to have a narrative of some time with a robust contrast between the before and after of his process of conversion to what he thinks of as evangelical Christianity. 

 

Rather than assume, as could be done, that Mark Driscoll’s accounts of his conversion and c calling experiences were changed, we should go through the accounts and consider them as literary and homiletic works.  Driscoll has demonstrated that he has always been acutely sensitive to questions of status and perception. He is also, if you appreciate this figure of speech, always closing a sale. Generally Mark Driscoll has not published a story about how he came to faith or felt called to plant a church without that story explicitly serving as a self-authenticating witness of Mark Driscoll’s self-perceived fitness for ministry.

 

Cosper has some reason to wonder about the degree to which Driscoll changed key elements in the story of conversion and calling that shaped the foundation narratives associated with mars Hill.  On the other hand, that Mark Driscoll kept changing his accounts of conversion and calling does not in itself suggest that Driscoll necessarily made drastic changes.  Mike Cosper was himself a pastor, right? Don’t pastors tailor stories to fit into the over-arching point of a sermon?  This seems to be, pretty clearly I believe, what Driscoll has habitually done with his biography. There are reasons to wonder whether strategic changes or omissions occurred.

 

But before we ask whether or not it seems that Mark Driscoll changed his story we should  never forget that because he’s always pitching his idea of the gospel or making a homiletic point that the given point will suggest possible reasons for the inclusion or omission of biographical details. Too much of the journalism and social media commentary and blogging I have seen that discusses Mark Driscoll rushes to assess whether he’s really a Calvinist or a charismatic or how he fits into a taxonomy of doctrinal or political categories rather than do the more laborious work of trawling through the primary source statements Mark Driscoll has poured out on the page and in sermons. 

 

So let’s start with the earliest published account of Mark Driscoll’s conversion process that seems to be available, an op ed he wrote for The Daily Evergreen when he was attending Washington State University.

 

Nikolai Kapustin plays his Piano Sonata No. 2 Op. 54

Because I haven't linked to anything Kapustin-related in a while.  Here's a recording of him playing is second piano sonata.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IemxsBikA70

I'm trying to hunt down a recording of his Piano Sonata No. 3, which is proving weirdly hard to find seeing as Kapustin scholars tend to agree it's one of his big landmark works in his musical output. 

For that matter, if anyone has the info on this linked recording of Kapustin's performance of Piano Sonata No. 2 comment away.  

a postscript to earlier thoughts on "Dark Was the Night", if we consult the tunes associated with the text at hymnary.org ... the hymn tunes associated with the hymn texts have absolutely nothing to do with Johnson's performance

One of the things about Blind Willie Johnson's "Dark Was the Night" that is mysterious is exactly which tune he was extrapolating his performance from.  The text of "Dark Was the Night and Cold the Ground" is relatively well-known. We can establish that it's credited to Thomas Hawells.

https://hymnary.org/text/dark_was_the_night_and_cold_the_ground

The text is listed as follows:

1 Dark was the night, and cold the ground

On which the Lord was laid;

His sweat like drops of blood ran down;

In agony He prayed.

2 "Father, remove this bitter cup,

If such Thy sacred will;

If not, content to drink it up

Thy pleasure I fulfill."

3 Go the the garden, sinner, see

Those precious drops that flow;

The heavy load He bore for thee;

For thee He lies so low.

4 Then learn of Him the cross to bear;

Thy Father's will obey;

And when temptations press thee near,

Awake to watch and pray.

So if you want to understand what Blind Willie Johnson was adapting into music you'll have to know the text he was working from even if he never sang the words.  Mahalia Jackson, by contrast, did sing the words and it helps us get a clearer sense of how flexible this text has been in terms of melodic settings.  The hymn is also mentioned as being in an African Methodist Episcopal hymnal.

Mark Driscoll has a message for "Woke Joke Folk" that he's got a new ebook out on Christian Theology vs. Critical Theory, too bad he couldn't be bothered to list primary or secondary sources in his bibliographic notes

https://www.facebook.com/pastormark/videos/2065642433600130/

https://twitter.com/PastorMark/status/1444796371165458435

Haven’t gotten in trouble for a while. It was time. Download the book, “Christian Theology VS Critical Theory,” at the link in my bio. 

Twitter responses seem to alternately suggest that initially the link didn't work and the form of Driscoll's announcement was not received in an entirely joyful manner.

Driscoll, however, is making headlines, which is what he has complained other people are seeking while seeking them himself.  

https://churchleaders.com/news/406407-mark-driscoll-critical-theory.html

Ethan Hein discusses the Kronos Quartet playing Jimi Hendrix and ... Blind Willie Johnson (for which I can never forgive them!)--update: I've found exactly ONE academic monograph on the lining hymn traditions so far, included at the end of the post

http://www.ethanhein.com/wp/2021/the-kronos-quartet-play-jimi-hendrix/

I agree with Ethan Hein about wondering whether the Kronos Quartet's attempt to play Jimi Hendrix was successful.  I lean "no".  The tempi for the different sections of the "Purple Haze" arrangement jack knifes away any possibility of either attempted groove actually working.  The down tempo intro is slower than what Hendrix did and the verse-and-chorus arrangement is faster than what Hendrix did and in neither case does a steady groove happen as the cumulative result.  

And the quartet arrangement of "Dark Was the Night" is frustrating beyond words.  Ethan Hein notes there's no groove but there's also no low end.  The groove that lives and breathes beneath Blind Willie Johnson's amazing performance is bolstered by those droning bass strings. 

Mahalia Jackson did an amazing solo voice performance of the lining hymn, so a spare, minimalist approach to the song can absolutely work.  

As for jazz violin, I tend to think of Ray Nance's wonderful solo on "Bakiff".

The thing I'm thinking is that if a string quartet isn't going to get the groove of folk blues and they have the chops to get at timbrel variation and microtonal inflections there should be two things going on. The first is low end.  The second is that some kind of heterophony that replicates the heterophony that often shows up in lining hymn performances should have happened and the Kronos arrangement doesn't get any heterophonic/quasi-polyphonic patterns going for long.  That would also, probably, require an arranger and ensemble to find out what groove against which the heterophony or polyphony would be playing against.  

Radames Gnatalli's Sonata for Guitar and Cello, movement 1 with video and score

I feel fortunate I got the score for this lovely work back when it was still in print!  Radames Gnattali's Sonata for Cello and Guitar deserves to be in the top ten pieces ever written for this combination of instruments.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ad7_fQT8hyA

Theme 1 takes up the first 1:08 and is in E minor, kinda.  There's a gorgeous dorian element to the soaring cello line and the guitar gets a magnificent 2/4 and 5/8 alternating groove. There's a lovely transition and Theme 2 kicks in (I think) at 1:09 but gets a clearer gestural identity at 1:34.  This second theme is developed across the space of the Theme 2 place in the "exposition". Gnattali veers from E minor into G# minor via sequential development of the Theme 2 gesture.  Theme 2 develops more by languid fantasia that fades out into a preparation for the return of Theme 1 than some kind of Beethovenian "drive" to the dominant pedal point that sets up a big syntactic climax.  This kind of "winding down" development is pretty common in Ferdinand Rebay's solo guitar sonatas which I shall have to write about later.

thoughts on The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill by episode 9: it isn't really a history and responses to it have often fit what Samuel D James has described and exemplified in his responses as "the take trap"

The series The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill has hit Episode 9. 9https://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/podcasts/rise-and-fall-of-mars-hill/

I am taking a break from listening to the series, however, to take stock of some of the reactions I’ve seen and the gamut I’ve seen so far suggests that reactions tend to be of a wagon-circling variety across doctrinal and political spectrums.

an article at Vice on Doug Wilson's church gets a response from Wilson who regards it as a work full of lies but a great microphone handed to him to promote the 2nd edition of A Justice Primer

I've written intermittently over the the last few years about the seminal influence Doug Wilson had on Mark Driscoll's ideas about men, women, marriage and sexuality.  

https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/08/on-seminal-and-continuing-thematic-link.html

https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2021/08/some-more-thoughts-on-formative.html

https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2021/07/a-crawford-gribben-inspired-proposal.html

Wilson's books were available at the Mars Hill book store. I got one or two and confess I can remember little about any of them.  I found it hard to shake a sense that Doug Wilson was a self-regarding gasbag whose persona seemed to influence Mark Driscoll's.  It turned out, based on Crawford Gribben's excellent work mapping the evolution of the American Redoubt, that Wilson was launching Credenda Agenda and other projects in the late 1980s and early 1990s when a newly converted Mark Driscoll was attending WSU and went on a retreat and subsequently claimed to hear an audible calling from God after praying by an Idaho river.  

Vice has run an article recently on Douglas Wilson's scene and its background.  It's both what I would expect from a Vice article and a reminder to me that even though The Stranger had hostile coverage of Mars Hill they also tended to have the most accurate coverage. In an era in which it is tempting to dismiss reports on account of the source I hesitate to be skeptical of a critical article merely because it has come from Vice.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/m7ezwx/inside-the-church-that-preaches-wives-need-to-be-led-with-a-firm-hand

yet ...

George Walker: String Quartet No. 1: I. Allegro

Because I like a fair chunk of George Walker's music, here's the first movement of his first string quartet

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AlFOUtCV4N0

a history of Mars Hill Fellowship by way of articles of incorporation and annual reports 1995-2007

One of the things the podcast The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill has reminded me of is how few people from the earliest stages of Mars Hill history have said anything on record.  A reason for this absence may partly be because people from Antioch Bible Church and Spanish River Church such as Ken Hutcherson and David Nicholas died years ago.  Conspicuous by their absence from the podcast are the three co-founding leaders of Mars Hill Mark Driscoll, Mike Gunn and Lief Moi.

But ... now that in the wake of the dissolution of the corporation formerly known as Mars Hill Church the original articles of incorporation and annual reports have been made available through the State of Washington and so, absent more comments (or any) from people from the earlier years as of the eve of October 2021 it may be as well to document a history of Mars Hill through filed documents.   Thus ...

Dream Divination in the Ministry of Mark Driscoll: Driscoll on the rarity of his interpreting other dreams as an implicit baseline against which to appreciate his reliance on dream divination in his own ministry

I have already broached the topic of dream divination in Mark Driscoll’s ministry by way of his accounts of his reliance on what he’s called prophetic dreams in his own ministry. 

https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2021/09/dream-divination-in-ministry-of-mark.html 

Following up on an old thread taken up by Warren Throckmorton, however, it’s worth revisiting that Driscoll claimed he rarely interpreted anyone else’s dreams.  That Driscoll said it was rare for him to interpret the dreams of others suggests that the base line against which he made this comparison was a history of interpreting his own dreams. 

Van runs an article on the low state of classical music humor--much of the bad classical music humor is wordplay on extra-musical concepts, musical humor that lands usually upends or lampshades MUSICAL conventions and axioms

This article is worth reading just for the featured clip of Dudley Moore playing "Colonel Bogey" in the style of a Beethoven piano sonata.

https://van-magazine.com/mag/classical-music-humor/

The lugubrious minor key phrases, the bloviating coda that takes up the last 1:30 of an already short piece ... if you know Beethoven's style the parody is really funny. :) 

Marcyn Dylla plays Tansman's Variations on a Theme by Scriabin

I mean, I know I've linked to a performance of the work before ... but that video has long since been listed as private and this performance by Marcin Dylla is at hand.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LwGu-Jdi3Jw

If only there were a posted performance of his complete Suite in Modo Polonico for guitar and harp.

Among many other things musical I feel overdue to discuss some Tansman but, well, longtime readers may know that I've been side-tracked with some other projects of a more historical/documentary nature.

Warren Throckmorton republishes the story of one of Paul and Jonna Petry's children visiting services at The Trinity Church 9-26-21; Driscoll tweets a devotional 9-27-21 about triumphing amidst trials ... okay ...

https://twitter.com/PastorMark/status/1442494996272148481

I’ll be honest, as I preach about finding joy in the everyday and triumphing through trials, I’m preaching to myself.

7:23 AM · Sep 27, 2021

 

It looks like after having not preached from the Epistle of James since 2014 on the theme of Jesus’ bold little brother, Mark Driscoll is back to James. It’s been striking how much material from the era of The Trinity Church seems to be thematic recycling of material that Mark Driscoll preached at Mars Hill.  Is he ever going to preach through the book of Isaiah, the book or the book of Lamentations like he said he was hoping he’d one day do on Midrash circa 2005?  He did, to be fair, get around to Luke but it’s been striking to me how readily Driscoll has gone back to preaching through books he preached throughout his Mars Hill years. It’s not like people can’t go to the marshill.se sight and spot how much recycling’s happened in terms of books of the Bible.  Still, sometimes there are hints in daily devotions of struggles. 

https://realfaith.com/daily-devotions/joy-hikes-with-jesus/

 

James 1:17-18 – Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change. Of his own will he brought us forth by the word of truth, that we should be a kind of firstfruits of his creatures.  

I’ll be honest, as I preach about finding joy in the everyday and triumphing through trials, I’m preaching to myself. As I preach James, I wrote at the top of my daily to-do list “Find joy” and it’s not one I’m ever going to cross off because I’m continuing in this pursuit daily. 

Along with this, I’ve started scheduling weekly hikes with the Lord where I turn my phone off, listen to Him and recount all the reasons to be joyful. Last week, I just started audibly listing reasons why I can be joyful, and the hike took several hours.

This week, I talked to God about trials I’m going through, and frustrations I have, and I came away from it unburdened. The Lord gave me wisdom, increased my joy, and showed me patterns in my own life where I’m living in the flesh and need to change so I can live in the fullness of the Spirit, freedom, and joy. 

I would encourage you to do the same. It may not be a hike and you may not have several hours to dedicate to it, but a set amount of time with the Lord each week is important nourishment for your soul. You will never be the same and will leave this time changed for the better and with an increased joy for your future. 

I hope that, among those things Driscoll has considered trials and frustrations he’s had, one of them was not Benjamin Petry’s visit to two services at The Trinity Church. Petry’s account was published recently by Warren Throckmorton for the record.

https://www.wthrockmorton.com/2021/09/26/postcards-from-phoenix-ben-petry-went-to-phoenix/

links for the weekend on a theme--Ted Gioia points out the 3 minute song is no good for generating trance states (like it's unable to generate the "argument" of a symphonic form) and other things

I'd first heard of Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam through Ethan Iverson's blogging ...

https://ethaniverson.com/2017/04/21/the-story-of-the-wind/

and her work has gotten  mentioned more recently by Ted Gioia

https://tedgioia.substack.com/p/the-honky-tonk-nun-of-ethiopia

who has a piece on whether the three-minute song format has been bad for music.

https://tedgioia.substack.com/p/is-the-three-minute-song-bad-for

Gioia points out about 02:38 that a piece of music has to last about 10 minutes before the trance-inducing capacity of the music takes hold or, as he puts it, before the trance benefits of the music are able to take hold.

Dream Divination in the Ministry of Mark Driscoll: A Survey of Primary Source Accounts

Mark Driscoll would probably never say he has practiced oneiromancy throughout his entire public ministry, nor would he call what he has described as prophetic dreams a pattern of dream divination, and this would be entirely because of his confessional commitments. He’s a Bible-believing, Jesus-preaching, church-planting guy so whatever methods he has relied upon in his ministry cannot be termed divination.  Yet to consult Mark Driscoll’s own statements, whatever he refuses to call it, dream divination has played a crucial role in his public ministry since even before its formal beginning. 

Dream divination shows up in biblical literature and across the ancient near east and has been the subject of a monograph I’ve started into, co-edited by Esther Hamori. That dreams were regarded as potentially divine communication did not mean that dreams were automatically regarded as such, not even when the dream included statements made by gods. It was not unheard of for even a king to have a dream and resort to some other form of technical divination to confirm whether or not the god that appeared in the dream had really spoken or was actually the god that claimed to have a message within the dream.  We’ll eventually see that Mark Driscoll, too, could act a bit like an ancient Mesopotamian king in having dreams he regarded as having supernatural origin but that he wanted to test against a firmer, canonical text or method of dream verification. 

In the past critics of Mark Driscoll from the Team Pyro wing have fixated on what they regarded as Mark Driscoll’s pornographic divination.  If salacious and scandalous content alone were sufficient to prove a message couldn’t have come from Yahweh the Team Pyro sorts have to contend with Ezekiel 23.  Now I think we should be concerned that when Driscoll said “I see things” he kept seeing sexual acts and domestic violence—his gift of discernment was not so great a gift that he saw that using Result Source to rig a No. 1 spot on the New York Times bestseller list for Real Marriage was a disastrously bad idea.  But I contend that if we are going to attempt to assess whether Mark Driscoll’s claims about “I see things” may be credible we should back up the proverbial truck and look at his accounts of what can be called dream divination and that he’d prefer to call prophetic dreams.

So let’s start at the start of Mars Hill Church.

Pablo Moreno plays Bryan Lester's Jazz Fugue IV for guitar

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jDNhFlRohtc

This is a three-voiced fugue written for the guitar and whether it's really jazz or not I suspect could be a matter for debate. I don't think of it as jazz in the traditional sense because it's clearly a fully-scored contrapuntal work for guitar.  There's a subject and it gets an answer and then the subject emerges in the third voice. There are no countersubjects.  

Whether I'd dig all five of the jazz fugues remains to be heard (and maybe seen) but I find that there have been attempts across the last century to achieve a synthesis of classical musical forms and processes with the musical vocabulary of jazz, blues, ragtime and associated African diaspora styles that developed in the United States.  I'm aware that there are partisans for and purists in various camps but that kind of purism has not only not interested me I regard it as essentially adversarial to any successful synthesis across the often scholastically constructed, mediated and defended boundaries that practicing musicians and composers have been earnestly if not often successfully been trying to cross for generations.

as Warren Throckmorton has put it, it's been Earth, Wind & Fire Day ...

https://www.wthrockmorton.com/2021/09/21/happy-earth-wind-fire-day/

so of course ... 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cok9b46j4wk

there have been plenty of cloudy days here in Seattle because, you know ... it's Seattle ... but with a little help from the band it's like they're not the only thing here. 

Analysis of Matiegka’s Six Sonates Progressives Op. 31, Sonata No. 2 in A minor--now supplemented with in-score analysis

At first I thought of simply adding the in-score analysis to the earlier post but since I'm already taking this series at such a leisurely pace I'm posting this older material again and adding the new in-score analysis as a bonus:

The Anxieties of Empires and decolonizing musicology, how Anglo-American musicology is having a debate about the primacy of German music, sort of

If the British Empire and it's spin-off the United States of America had not more or less continuously exerted world-defining influence and power across the entire planet we might not be seeing the back and forth debates we've been seeing about whether or not Anglo-American musicology needs to be "decolonized" by way of giving less emphasis to the would-be German empire we helped defeat in two wars inside the last century.

For reasons I admit I have not discerned, Norman Lebrecht has posted as an “exclusive” that J. P. E. Harper-Scott has decided to withdraw from academia in response to “woke” musicology.   A dutiful addition of a composer who “can’t be decolonized” was added that mentioned that Franz Liszt could not be decolonized.  

But how can the announcement have been an “exclusive” when it was sitting at Harper-Scott’s website for the whole world to read?

https://jpehs.co.uk/why-i-left-academia/

…

I would put the problem in this (Kantian) way: I wrongly supposed that universities would be critical places, but they are becoming increasingly dogmatic. Consider the following statement, which fairly well articulates an increasingly common view in musicology.

 

Nineteenth-century musical works were the product of an imperial society. The classical musical canon must be decolonised.

 

The statement, and the attitude that goes with it, are dogmatic by virtue of form, not content. It does not matter that the statement in the first sentence is one that I can assent to. It becomes dogmatic by virtue of the second sentence, which admits of no doubt, no criticism, no challenge.  …

So Harper-Scott has announced he has left academia.  This move seems indicative, writing as someone outside academia, like a small part of a set of conflicts between British leftists and American progressives in Anglo-American musicology.  Harper-Scott is hardly a political reactionary but Americans might get the idea that he is. The tricky thing about attempting to parse debates and battles through a left/right binary is that there’s no shortage of radical musicians in terms of politics who were traditionalist in their musical styles (Hans Eisler, for instance, or a raft of Soviet composers).  Ian Pace has been arguing for both leftist politics and against what he regards as the “deskilling” of musicology, as well as having a discussion about the hegemonic influence of Anglo-American popular musics.  Harper-Scott has, so far, not struck me as being nearly as specific as Pace.  That sort of thing was on my mind when I wrote “hegemony may be in the eye of the complainer “ years ago. British musicologists being concerned about the hegemonic influence of American popular music can sincerely think that in terms of market presence Anglo-American pop has ruled the world and that Anglo-American pop could and has included blues and jazz.

some music from Trio Raltchenitza

Because we all need more chamber music for flute, accordion and guitar in our lives. :)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ZaBCgjs15A

the line-up is:

Petar Ralchev - accordeon Mie Ogura - flute Atanas Ourkouzounov - guitar

Whenever this trio should put an album ... I am so getting it.

Nikita Koshkin: Prelude and Fugue in C major performed by Thodoris Theodoroudis

I wrote an analysis of Prelude and Fugue in C major back in early 2020 and it's a lovely piece that is worth hearing, lately performed by Thodoris Theodoroudis.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sBC5qlh0sKc

Freddie DeBoer says the original The Matrix is pretty bad, Ross Douthat dissents ... but pretty "good" or "bad" at what, exactly? Anime and Hong Kong action cinema that a lot of Americans hadn't seen much of in `99 so ...

While if you've ever read deBoer on film his take is unsurprising what is surprising is that he takes aim at the dated style and the murky substance of The Matrix without really saying what it was pretty bad at.  If you want to check out what he wrote head over here.

https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/i-think-the-original-matrix-is-pretty

Ross Douthat dissents and argues that The Matrix is ultimately a kind of Gnostic take on metaphysics.  That's ... something I'd expect Douthat to argue.

https://douthat.substack.com/p/is-the-matrix-good

I enjoyed the first film but found the rest of the films aggravating bores.  The third film annoyed me so much that, when Archer aired and I'd soaked up that show's dialogue a bit, I recast the final encounter between Agent Smith and Neo as a disagreement between Lana Kane and Sterling Archer.

Agent Smith/Kane:  Why do you persist!?

Neo/Archer:  Because I choose to(?).

Agent Smith/Kane: First of all, "Because I choose to" is not a real reason. Second, whatever the reason is for you to say "Because I choose to" is the actual reason, so what is it?

Neo/Archer: Well, uh, because I'm offering to make a deal with the machines in which I sacrifice myself on the basis of a model of propitiation or atonement that the machine world either shouldn't even know of or care about (lifts finger) ... but which is supposed to be an profoundly cathartic and emotionally satisfactory ending for the audience.

Agent Smith/Kane: [sighs] That's a stupid reason ... but at least it's a reason. 

That line, "Because I choose to" is the ultimate failure of the sequels. 

sometimes ... (a haiku)

"Come On Eileen" sounds

like The Cure covered a song

by Village People

side note ... I'm going to see about having a score for the analysis of Op. 31 No. 2 in A minor (let the reader understand) later this upcoming weekend. It's been a while since we've gotten back to music stuff. 

once again we must report drawing upon published materials by and about Mark Driscoll that have gotten purged, Carey Nieuwhof's CNLP_328 vanished some time after CT started its podcast

It is likely a coincidence but it is a coincidence nonetheless worth observing that Carey Nieuwhof's interview with Mark Driscoll from early 2020 discussing Win Your War has vanished. I drew upon that material for an extended series analyzing public statements by former Mars Hill executive elders Mark Driscoll, Dave Bruskas and Sutton Turner across 2020 back in October 2020.

https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/search/label/2020%20interviews%20on%20the%20late%20Mars%20Hill

https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2020/10/2020-interviews-on-late-mars-hill-part_86.html#more

Back then the following link worked

https://careynieuwhof.com/episode328/

and it was plugged at Facebook

https://www.facebook.com/cnieuwhof/photos/a.425443390977428/1339477212907370/

and Twitter 

https://twitter.com/cnieuwhof/status/1239996939900420097?lang=en

But now ...

SORRY! THAT PAGE DOESN'T SEEM TO EXIST.

The old transcript is still, for some reason accessible 

https://careynieuwhof.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/CNLP_328-%E2%80%93With_Mark-Driscoll.pdf

but if you click on a link to go to the newer transcript at rev.com it's an expired link

'

The last time the CNLP_328 was accessible and also tracked by The Wayback Machine was June 8, 2021.

https://web.archive.org/web/20210608214756/https://careynieuwhof.com/episode328/

Nieuwhof even noted that the Driscoll episode from early 2020 was among the top 10 episodes most listened to in 2020 at his site.

https://careynieuwhof.com/the-10-most-listened-to-podcasts-of-2020/

The teaser for the Christianity Today podcast The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill hit the net on May 27, 2021

https://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/podcasts/rise-and-fall-of-mars-hill/teaser-trailer-mars-hill-podcast.html

Episode 1 dropped June 21, 2021.

https://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/podcasts/rise-and-fall-of-mars-hill/who-killed-mars-hill-church-mark-driscoll-rise-fall.html

Has anyone read or heard word of why CNLP_328 got scrubbed?  If Carey Nieuwhof and associates have an explanation for why the episode get pulled that would be interesting to learn.

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

Justin Dean’s first day on the job at the former Mars Hill Church and a sense of glorious purpose in his book PR Matters

Something Justin Dean has clarified via Twitter recently is that he decided he would not talk with Mike Cosper for Christianity Today’s podcast series The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill. Dean objects to Cosper’s take on the “How Dare You” sermon suggesting that no man’s life seemed to be changed and that, far from a spontaneous outburst, the moment was planned and executed in the same way in all versions of the sermon. Dean has said that if Cosper couldn’t find any man whose life was changed by that sermon he wasn’t looking.

 

Now perhaps Cosper was trying to make a point that didn’t come across, a point that I have made explicit in suggesting that Mark Driscoll’s “Pussified Nation” could be seen as agitation propaganda while Dead Men and the mens’ boot camps from the 2000-2001 era could be viewed as integration propaganda. I have, of course, made some extensive use of Jacques Ellul’s book Propaganda as a way to think about the William Wallace II era. I have argued that Mark Driscoll should be understood not so much as a pastor but as a propagandist. I will quote Ellul’s warning about Christians using propaganda techniques to disseminate Christianity as a preface to looking at some statements Justin Dean has made in his book PR Matters (which I have reviewed in a three-part series of posts here, here and here). 

CT episode 8 is up, Demon Hunting

 So the newest episode is up and it was a necessary follow-up as a matter of principle to episode 7.  I had meant to get around to writing about spiritual warfare as a necessary component of the "state of emergency" because the biggest amount of material Mark taught on spiritual warfare in terms of hours talked was the 2008 spiritual warfare session.  Even Win Your War is in many respects a revisitation of material from 2008.

My little reading list of about 50 books on spiritual warfare, diabology, exorcism, Enochic literature, and the topic of spirit-possession in the ancient near east is connected to wanting to eventually deal with the issue of spiritual warfare within Mars Hill history as a subset not only of charismatic beliefs but as a subset of beliefs within evangelicalism and fundamentalism.  It would be bad history and theology to claim that Mark got his ideas about deliverance strictly from charismatic theologies.  James Collins has a helpful survey delineating how fundamentalists and evangelicals and charismatics have a surprisingly large amount of overlap in the core concepts of their not-exorcism approach to spiritual warfare.  

But episode 8 just dropped and I'll need time to listen to it.  I've also been meaning to write about Win Your War.  

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

okay, for Matiegka fans, one of the older posts has just been supplemented with an in-score analysis

Okay, so back on July 3, 2020 I published a strictly written analysis of Wenzel Matiegka's Op. 31, No. 1 fro his Progressive Sonatas.  Now I've gone back and added a score with in-score analysis to supplement the old blog post.  So if you haven't found the Op. 31 scores free online previously or don't have the Stanley Yates edition I can now start to (probably slowly as ever!) get to analyzing the Matiegka sonatas from the Op. 31 with some scores for sonatas 1, 2, 5 and 6.

To go read the updated musical analysis head over here.

https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2020/07/matiegka-six-sonates-progressives-op-31.html

If you want to check out a more recent guitar sonata in C minor that draws more inspiration from Aretha Franklin, James Brown and Wilson Pickett than Matiegka you can go here.  The conclusion I reached by the time I finished Ragtime and Sonata Forms last year was that if it's practical to compose sonata forms using ragtime materials it is no less possible to compose sonata forms using materials more typical of R&B, soul, funk and rock.  I would not go so far as to say it's easy but it can be done.

An in-score analysis to Op. 31, No. 2 in A minor is eventually going to happen but I'm feeling less inspired to blog lately than to tackle other kinds of projects away from this blog.  Hope you have had a good Labor Day weekend. 

a new little episode in The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill on the origin myth of Mars Hill and how it changed in significant ways the farther along Mars Hill went; Justin Dean says he won't talk with Cosper

I confess to ambivalence about the Christianity Today podcast.  As I noted previously, it is impossible to reconcile Scott Thomas' claims in 2021 with literally anything he wrote by email or written statement to Mars Hill members in 2007.  When Tim Smith claimed that if a man in pastoral ministry at Mars Hill had a wife who worked outside the home that would be considered grounds for church discipline it was impossible not to think of pastors who were ostentatious counter-examples, men whose wives worked outside the home and who never seemed to come up for church discipline.  To put the point starkly, Cosper's advantage of being an outsider to the Mars Hill scene lets him contextualize Mars Hill within the larger scene of North American evangelicalism but at the potential price of not being able to quickly pick up which sources are more reliable or, more bluntly, credible than others.

Having said that, the reason I think it's a net positive that Christianity Today is doing anything at all is because, Justin Dean's laments noted and with standing, he might want to take stock of some other , academic, writings that have mentioned Driscoll over the years that I've read and complained about here.

Dale E. Soden's Outsiders in a Promised Land collapsed 20 years of Mars Hill history into the chapter "The Christian Right Strikes Back", if academic treatments of the history of Mars Hill stay at this level academic discourse the future is going to be restricted to the celebrity rather than the community

So if Cosper decides it's time to question the origin myths associated with Mark Driscoll's ministry and the founding of Mars Hill someone like Justin Dean might consider that egalitarian/progressive/liberal but Cosper's work is more carefully researched than Dale E Soden's.

https://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/podcasts/rise-and-fall-of-mars-hill/mars-hill-podcast-driscoll-origin-myth.html

Longtime readers of Wenatchee The Hatchet have likely read already some of what Cosper has discussed here in such posts as ... 

annotated copy of "Seasons of Grace" by Mark Driscoll, his dawn-of-the-millenium history of Mars Hill Fellowship

Mark Driscoll's art of narrative omissions, looking at a 1992 op-ed for the Daily Evergreen in which Driscoll recounts his conversion to Christianity in a way that completely omits his girlfriend

Mark Driscoll shows us the hat and not the cattle, part 2: Driscoll takes on editorial duties and plugs his journalistic credentials in the wake of the Mefferd interview

... but the new episode is well worth listening to because Cosper talks about how Driscoll mentioned being spurred to consider Christianity and regard himself as called to ministry through a friend with an in-the-closet gay Christian friend; Cosper noted in the earliest accounts of his Christian conversion Driscoll didn't mention Grace Martin at all and in the earliest accounts of how and why Mark Driscoll felt called to ministry and church planting divine directives also don't appear.  That seems of a piece with Mark Driscoll saying he sought wise counsel in 2014 before deciding to resign from Mars Hill and then only in 2015 publicly saying he heard from God and, for good measure, beginning to tell stories about how The Trinity Church was  started because of his kids and not his own ambitions to continue in public ministry.  

Thanks to commenter chris e for highlighting the new little episode of the CT series just arrived.  

Justin Dean's response on Twitter has been to clarify he won't be talking with Mike Cosper

https://twitter.com/justinjdean/status/1432504923569233926

https://twitter.com/justinjdean/status/1432942815114371074

https://twitter.com/justinjdean/status/1432942819954593792

I'm not really interested in doing podcasts myself so I'm not going to blame Justin Dean for believing that a podcast by its nature is not a very efficient medium or genre through which to discuss Mars Hill and its history.  Let the record show that Justin Dean and Wenatchee The Hatchet do sometimes actually agree.  I have made a point of sticking to writing things here.  

I've written at some length about Justin Dean's book PR Matters ... 

https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2018/03/a-first-prelude-to-review-of-justin_20.html

https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2018/03/a-second-prelude-to-review-of-justin.html

https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2018/03/justin-deans-pr-matters-review.html

Those who have not read it won't know that Dean described Mark Driscoll telling him he was an ideal fit for the work he was being given.  Dean joined Mars Hill Church around 2010, a point at which the origin stories of the founding of Mars Hill and Mark Driscoll's story of his conversion and calling were completely consolidated.  Dean can be understandably committed to the origin myths that were completely solidified previously. For those of us who attended from 1999 through about 2009, however, the seams in the accounts had bit by bit begun to show so Dean might benefit from slogging through the podcasts.  He may be tempted to think that because egalitarians and feminists are given so much time and space that harms the credibility of the Cosper project.  But something that Driscoll claimed to Carey Nieuwhof was that Mars Hill fell apart due to internal leadership battles over LGBTQ issues, a claim so patently untrue it took about fifty pages of extensive writing cross referencing Sutton Turner and Dave Bruskas and Mark Driscoll's comments to show that Mark's claim in 2020 about the demise of Mars Hill doesn't hold water.  I'm not doubting the honesty, integrity or credibility of Justin Dean himself, mind you, but that of his former boss.

PART TWO: 9-2-2021 6:53PM

One of the things people might mistakenly think from Cosper's recent podcast is that the fact that Mark Driscoll's story changed might be a "tell" that he has lied a lot.  Now there are cases where Driscoll told lies and the deception could be backed up; and Driscoll has never explained why he'd call a post "We Even Lie About Our Lying" that presupposes literally everyone lies.  Brutal honesty is a phrase in the English language for reasons.

Something that I have dealt with in the past is how Driscoll does share different stories about how he became a Christian and how he got an audible call to marry Grace, teach the Bible, train young men and plant churches.  The thing to keep in mind is that Driscoll has been a preacher, maybe a self-ordained and self-anointed preacher in a lot of ways but he's still a preacher.  I would suggest that in any and every given story he has told or written about his conversion or calling keep in mind the literary and homiletic context.  Mark is never not selling an idea in what he says.  So he didn't mention reading the Bible his wife Grace gave him in The Daily Evergreen op ed he wrote.  

Think about the audience and author. A young man with anxieties and ambitions about manhood and marriage who wanted to present an apologetic for why he became a Christian would not lead with "because I read the Bible my girlfriend gave me" even if he wasn't in a sexual relationship with said girlfriend. Why?  For the obvious reason that such an apologetic would be dismissed by non-Christian readers (and Christian readers for that matter in many a case). But within a church and  church cultures saying you became a believer because you read the Bible given to you by the woman who became your wife is acceptable because of tropes about the redeeming love of a good woman and other tropes. 

This would be the Captain Obvious moment in which I point out that spinning  stories to suit target audiences to whom you're making an overt and obvious homiletic or apologetic point is not necessarily the same as constantly changing your story in a way that is "I'm lying".  It "could" be but it isn't necessarily the case.  Even if you wanted to put it in the sharpest and harshest way possible, Mark Driscoll has not so much demonstrably changed his overall story so as to lie as much as he has presented, emphasized and spun different elements of a generally steady pair of stories about his conversion and sense-of-calling experience depending on what audience he is pandering to.  

That last part is the most significant part to keep in mind assessing Driscoll's stories and it is the part that Cosper omits altogether in the recent podcast.  He gets to if he decided it's not germane to the question of Driscoll's changing accounts and the nuances of those accounts.  But then Wenatchee The Hatchet has done that over the years and it doesn't strike me as exactly a "gotcha" moment.  Some of the people who would be most in a position to confirm or deny details to any degree are dead or have never spoken on record that I know of about Mark Driscoll. We'll obviously be unlikely to get an account from Hutch and as yet nobody has contacted Doug Busby that I know of.  There's no indications either Gunn or Moi have been or are necessarily willing to talk to Cosper but that has not been discussed to the best of my knowledge in any on record statement.

What I've been seeing is that partisans are willing to use the podcast as a springboard to talk about the kinds of issues they would tend to talk about independent of any knowledge of Mars Hill Church. So far the level of discussion about the podcast has not been inspiring.  If Cosper wants to raise questions about how reliable Driscoll's accounts are that's a legitimate question but questions about how reliable all of his sources may be and what their connection to Mars Hill even is get opened up or are up for consideration at some point.  What Joshua Harris has to do with Mars Hill history is beyond me, for instance and I've been in the orbit of Mars Hill and related people and topics for twenty years.  

Emerson String Quartet to disband in 2023

There's nothing like the recent announcement that the Emerson String Quartet will disband in 2023 to get this blogger out of planned dormancy, at least to note the following news.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/26/arts/music/emerson-string-quartet.html

https://www.vulture.com/2021/08/after-45-years-the-emerson-string-quartet-is-disbanding.html

https://slippedisc.com/2021/08/breakup-americas-top-string-quartet-calls-is-quits/

Lebrecht being Lebrecht he threw in a covid-19 reference that seems to insinuate that it has something to do with the ensemble disbanding but even without a covid-19 situation 40 years is a spectacular run for a string quartet and this is a string quartet that has done landmark recordings of Shostakovich and Bartok over the years (and I got to hear them perform one of Joan Tower's string quartets when they came and played at the University of Washington).

Shostakovich Quartet No. 8 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=41HIXtBElH4

and, of course, their unforgettable take on the final movement of Bartok's Third String Quartet

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ux0GnilyF44

Lebrecht has floated the question of which U.S. quartet will step in as though it were mysterious.  The string quartet is such a venerable medium there doesn't need to be a new "it" quartet.  I heard some great performances by the Pacifica Quartet in the last fifteen years (and they even played a Hindemith quartet, which wins them points in my book for being willing to play his stuff when a lot of ensembles don't).  The Takacs Quartet is still around.  I'm rusty on my string quartets in the last ten years having focused so intently on guitar music, solo or chamber, but Lebrecht needn't worry in reality or in posture about whether or not there's going to be some high quality string quartet in the United States.  One of the Emersons said at a concert that every quartet in the last few centuries has been small fry compared to the quartet that was formed by Haydn, Mozart, Ditters and Vanhal.  Uh, yeah, that's kind of hard to dispute in terms of collected compositional skill.  Whether or not they all played with "chops of death" has, apparently, been less certain a thing but maybe someone can fill in comments about accounts of the HMDV quartet.

Anyway, I was glad to hear the Emersons play a lot of fantastic music here in Seattle over the course of twenty years and I still dig their recordings.