from iMonk to Orthoduck, an amusing little entry

http://www.orthocuban.com/2009/09/pournelles-iron-law-of-bureaucracy/

I have been reading Internet monk for years, about seven years I guess. And through Internet Monk's writings I have come across Father Ernesto (aka Orthoduck) a Cuban Orthodox priest. Since I have family and some friends who converted to Eastern Orthodoxy I like to have some idea how things look within Eastern Orthodoxy, and so I read Orthoduck. I may tilt Presbyterian personally but I have taken what many would consider the dastardly approach of assuming, until substantial evidence proves otherwise, that Arminians and Orthodox and, yeah, Catholics are also practicing Christians who believe that Jesus is the Christ and salvation is through Him. So, having established that ... here's a bit from Pournelle on bureaucracy:

Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people: those who work to further the actual goals of the organization, and those who work for the organization itself. Examples in education would be teachers who work and sacrifice to teach children, vs. union representative who work to protect any teacher including the most incompetent. The Iron Law states that in all cases, the second type of person will always gain control of the organization, and will always write the rules under which the organization functions.

This is true of bureaucracies all around and can certainly be true of churches. There are people who work to further the actual goals of the body of Christ as given by Christ and then there are those who work for the good of the church as an entity. Ideally both types of people in bureacracies can and do work for the common good but since we live in a fallen world the second category of person invariably conflates his or her work with the work of the first group and may even see the work of the first group as detrimental to the good of the institution, er, "movement". :)

But both kinds of people ARE needed in organizations. Despite the popular American imagination that the maverick is the one who must buck the system because the system doesn't work the truth is that in most cases even broken systems are better than no system at all. Americans are too eager to complain about how average everyone else is without realizing the valient struggle to attain the merely average is the human condition. No, you're not John Galt, especially if you think he's a role model on the orders of a Proverbs 31 woman. It is not impossible for the actual teacher to become a bureacrat and it is not impossible for the bureaucrat to someday become an actual teacher. It doesn't seem likely, I admit, but stranger things have happened.

a poem written in a cranky mood

People who savor their integrity
as if they were drinking a famous wine,
and singing its praise with alacrity,

These people are like clouds that bring no rain,
Stars that have veered off their course in the sky,
they cherish their integrity in vain.

A star that falls from the sky is as true
to itself as one that has never strayed
and thinks to itself, "I am just as good, too."

Yet we know that a star that falls to the earth
is a shooting star, and not a real star.
It is only a star in death, not birth

And to say this as it falls through the sky
would prompt it to say, "You can only lie."

"I don't like institutions"

http://civitatedei.wordpress.com/2009/09/21/a-bad-way-to-argue-about-churches/

http://www.kinnon.tv/2009/09/the-de-churched-or-not-even-virtual-part-ii.html


If Apple suddenly said next week that they are not an institution or a company but a movement of like-minded artisans and engineers and designers and marketers you wouldn't give a crap so long as their computers still worked, right? You would recognize that the jabber about not being an institution is pure hokum nad self-deluding public relations effluvia. The real truth would be that Apple is an institution that has survived and thrived because it does something well enough that people benefit from it.

Now if Pixar suddenly said next week that they are not an institution or a company but a passal of like-minded artists you would also roll your eyes and notice what a financial juggernaut Pixar is. They make beautiful, amazing computer animated films people who don't even have kids are willing to see, to say nothing of grateful parents who would rather watch Up than sit through another viewing of Spirit: The Stallion of Cimmaron. You can't go watching The Last Unicorn on DVD endlessly without having some variety. I didn't just name-drop something just to prove I'm a little animation nerd, did I?

And yet Christians, when it comes to talking about churches and what they are and aren't, can become total dumbasses who would believe that the ecclesial equivalent of an Apple or, better yet, a Pixar that is about fifteen or twenty years old is NOT an institution with a global reach and thousands of parties participating in more than one state. Why? Oh, because THEY SAY SO! Of course! That's like a couple living together who say they don't have to get married because they are married in their hearts. Sure, and so it is with churches that have thousands of members and a denominational power structure but who insist on avoiding the words 'denomination' or 'institution'.

Then you get the Christians who want none of that but want all the mystical social union and "realness" without the side effects of some kind of bureacracy. They think that institutions are bad in the case of the church when they wouldn't dream of saying that about their insurance company, the utility companies that handle their electricity, gas, or cable. No one is really that anti-institutional about their internet connection and people who bitch about church authority being bad a priori can also bitch about other people using public transit or coffee shops not having free wi-fi access. Hello? That is what might be called the lead or introduction to what is obviously going to be a rant.

There are many things I have become despondent and cynical about over the last ten years with respect to the practices of Christian religion but among those have been the declaration of Christians that "I don't like institutions" or "I don't want X to become an institution."

No, that's exactly what you want. I heard this "Let's not become an institution" spiel a lot at Mars Hill and I mostly always thought it was stupid, which is exactly what it has always been. Mars Hill has from the start aspired to be an institution, which is what it should be. You can't seriously propose to be a movement that effects multiple generations for the sake of the good news of Jesus Christ without becoming, yes, that's right, an institution. Do people who have been helped by the Salvation Army care that it's "an institution"? Do people who donate money to Vision Nationals or other organizations somehow recoil at the idea that they are giving money to institutions?

But we delude ourselves into thinking that institutions are invariably full of corruption and that whatever it is we want somehow doesn't have that stain. I saw Mars Hill evolve through various forms of governance into what I would describe as an essentially top-down episcopal structure (without the advantages that might confer from, say, the actual Anglican tradition). I'm sure no pastors at Mars Hill want to say they are a denomination or an institution but they are running a church that is, so far as I can tell, both a denomination and an institution. The difference between me and them might simply be that I say it's better to admit this up front and be happy about the burgeoning organizational and fiscal competence that ought to attend that ... and the pastors seem to feel differently. I hope they come around to my way of thinking so that they don't feel bad about being an institution.

But the folks who left Mars Hill in the wake of the pastoral firings who have sought for an alternative, I am no less concerned about them precisely because given the same attitude of seeing institutions as dead there's no reason for me to suppose they won't make the same mistakes people at Mars Hill made earlier, just in a different way. Anyone who reads this blog (maybe twenty of you) will surmise that I spend time with people on either side of the 2007 fiasco. I have also made no secret to friends on either side that what happened needs a word to describe it--I'm looking for a compound word that starts with "cluster" and ends with something else. You won't have to guess very hard what that word is. :)

I have come to the conviction that most people who don't like "institutions" are fretting about the imcompetence or corruption they saw in institutions. Spin things around and tell them that their family is an institution. I don't see these Christians at Mars Hill or who left Mars Hill complaining about the evils of the institution of marriage or how dead it is, but marriage is an institution, too. Family is a form of institution I don't see evangelical Christians, even the de-churched ones, complaining too much about. We want to have our cake and eat it, too, when it comes to being critical of institutions. THEY have dead institutions and WE have a movement. Nonsense. We have an institution and they have a movement.

Our capacity for self-deception is both dangerous and profound and it is one of the things that most creeps me out about humanity. It creeps me out that men who were happy to be hatchet men for legalistic stupidities could get burned and then become skeptical about the kind of instutions and customs they championed just years before. Some people externalize what is ultimately also a problem of their own character. The man who vents his spleen about how you should not trust the bullies in the pulpit can often be the one who was one of the bullies for that pulpit. I don't think that either the bullying or the advocacy for the bullying, let alone retroactive self-selected martyr status for receiving what you used to dish out is admirable. I can trust the Lord uses these kinds of cycles of sin and counter-sin to humble everyone involved but that doesn't mean anyone will repent.

The longer Mars Hil has been around the more it looks like every other church, despite the belief its members have that it is "different". Seven years ago there was talk of how there would not be services larger than 120 people because, as Mark put it, services larger than that get too impersonal. Sure, and now there's video venue, which suggests that there's a lot of hot air that doesn't lead to action or to converse action. I still remember Jamie Munson at Dead Men saying there were no righteous poor in America. Later he amended the statement to say there were some righteous poor in America, he just didn't believe there were MANY of them. I'm sorry to say that's the only thing I really remember in the last ten years from the man who is now the executive pastor at Mars hill. If bloggers now believe there are bad attitudes in leaders at Mars Hill this one went back to 2001 or 2002 and was made available to anyone who attended Dead Men.

I'm angry about a lot of what I have seen and I know I have only seen a handful of things compared to many people. I am angry because the best and brightest instincts we may have, the best and brightest hopes and dreams are what lead us down a path to sin. We are seduced and destroyed by what we consider our best qualities. People who want to avoid the foundation of "institutions" will inevitably get there. Look at Mars Hill, for instance. Seven years ago the idea of a children's ministry was rejected because it would take children out o fhte common worship experience. Spoken by a guy in his twenties who had no idea what he was talking about and who sincerely believed his own hype. Now childcare is at most Mars Hill services and locations, that thing Mark Driscoll said they wouldn't have. Teenage ministry? Wouldn't have it ... or is that what Proxy isn't these days?

I never saw a problem in institutionalization, in fact it seemed to me that is precisely what the pastors wanted to do, establish one. If you change your tag line from truth, beauty, meaning and community to "a city within the city" guess what you're talking about? That's right, an institution. All of which has given me a new and deeper appreciation for denominations. Denominations have their flaws but I have come to appreciate that they understand what they are, institutions.

I find it exasperating that men and women who rip on instutions when it comes to churches are hot to trot about the nation or politics. They aren't against institutions, they are just against organizations they don't like. The abstract disdain for institutions is just a facade for a dislike of certain real institutions.

The idea that an institution is somehow not the real church is silly, silly because it attempts to pretend that churches are not institutions. Christ reconstituted the nation of Israel around himself through appointing twelve apostles. The apostles, dare I say, had an understanding that they were establishing a movement that would reach out to the whole world because Jesus is the king of all creation. Let me remind folks who are cagey or diffident about this issue, a kingdom is an institution! But the paradox is that stumping for your local church "may" be a manifestation of doing work for the kingdom of God but that doesn't mean you really are. Churches, after all, can be idols, too. None more perilously so than in cases like Mars Hill where people are foolishly persuading themselves that what they don't want to be is an institution but a "movement" (curiously, that phrase was coined by a pastor at Mars Hill who got fired, but I digress).

My point is that when I look back on my time at Mars Hill I can't help feel angry that we have been a bunch of starry-eyed idealistic dumbasses, me particularly. We were like a bunch of hippies on a South Park episode who imagined that it would be cool if, like, people exchanged goods and services to help each other. And one o fthe kids says, "That would be a town." "No, no" the hippies reply, "It's not like that at all." I trust South Park fans will see the argument from there without my having to explain it further. The rest of you, I've been working it out in another way all through this blog entry. One day Mars Hill will become the very institution that kids in their 20s will feel a need to break away from to discover "real" and "authentic" something they call "community". What has been will be again, and there is nothing new under the sun. It may be okay for some to put the "fun" back into fundamentalism but by that token the fun was never really there, was it?

But this doesn't mean it's actually bad for a church to be an institution. Institutions preserve what is valuable among the shared ideals and vision of a people. We don't rip on companies for being institutions. If a business is in business for seventy-five or a hundred years that is something you celebrate, especially among family-run businesses. If more than one generation in a family is part of the family enterprise that is something to be proud of (unless, of course, you don't want to be coerced by your old man or old lady into continuing that legacy if you have other plans!).

Let me put it polemically here--Mark Driscoll can talk about how institutions are bad but if he really believes that then he should encourage his sons to become mechanical engineers or test pilots or fashion models or ANYTHING but a pastor or a theologian. Why? Because to do that would be to promote institutionalism, whether of the Driscoll family as an institution of Christians (ooh ... but that can't be right because that's "legacy") or through Mars Hill transforming the city for ... oh, you get the idea. While I was on the Mars Hill discussion forums I had no difficult pointing out to Driscoll and others that institutionalization is what you should WANT and PLAN FOR if you really plan to impact the city of Seattle for Christ. To propose otherwise is essentially cowardice, plain and simple. If you don't want an institution you don't want a legacy no matter how much you blather about the latter and avoid discussing the reality of the former.

See, this is why I have come to appreciate denominations again, they don't kid themselves with their own crap about somehow not being institutions because they (and not, by contrast, newer churches like Mars Hill) actually understand the implications of legacy. Of course Catholics and Orthodox are even better at understanding the inherent link between legacy and institutions. Any home-schooler can grasp both the negative and positive connotations of institution. Even the de-churched people are really attempting to retain or obtain the positives of what they hoped to find in the institutional church and couldn't find. But to say that Jesus didn't come to establish an institutional church is assasine if we consider the feast days and laws of Israel. Bringing liberty to the practices within the institution (one day esteems one day holy, another all days alike) is not the same as saying there is no institution at all. The abuse of delegated authority given by Christ or invoked without adequate cause or citation is not the same as saying there was no delegated authority.

A case like Driscoll's reveals that a guy can claim a mystical magical encounter with God that validates his call while displaying skepticism about denominations ... at least until John Piper and Tim Keller start calling and then the language about the faults and problems of denominations gets moderated ... A LOT. Gee, you don't suppose I have become cynical about this, have you? :)

Yeah, I'm angry about stuff like this because I by temper have never been interested in throwing out the old or rebelling against the past just because I think things didn't work out. I know too much of Israel's long and pathetic history to buy into that crap the way some Christians and some Christian pastors have done. I have no desire to either rediscover or reinvent the wheel. I wish some people could admit that the wheel has been invented already and that there is no need to gussy it up with sparkles on the spokes and bragging abouthow we put a new wonderful never-seen-before tread on the wheel, or how we put some golden lining on the innertube (that no one can see anyway because the innertube is inside the wheel).

But I have rambled and ranted about why Christians who "don't like institutions" annoy me. I tried being one of those for a while and I realized that while I kept telling myself I could "get" all the things associated with church outside the church the reality is that is not even remotely the case. I'm not even talking about sacraments like the Lord's supper or baptism or other stuff like that, though those are foremost in things you don't have if it's just you and Jesus and all the others who have that view. I mean I got out of college and a lot of people who had that approach didn't even do the things they calimed they could get apart from a church service. That's why generation after generation of Christians, you know, go to church. Lots of people want to have sex and some of them don't care if they are formally married or not. Christians frown on this ... yet a Christian who frowns on the "institution" of church might have to step back and rationalize why one institution "church" is bad and the other "marriage" should be required. Christians who see no need either for a church or formalized marriage are a weird and curious lot but that is another topic for another time.

US Census worker hanged in Kentucky

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090923/ap_on_go_ca_st_pe/us_census_worker_hanged

It is too early to know if the Census Bureau employee committed suicide or was murdered. Reports that the word 'Fed" was scrawled on the man's chest doesn't seem to say it was a suicide ... unless we have some extremely conflicted federal employees out there.

Matthew Lee Anderson has a new piece I find fascinating and will blog about at some point

http://mereorthodoxy.com/?p=1967

I've written quite about Matthew's writing before and never quite finished writing everything I thought about his earlier essay. That was for the natural reason that not everyone would want to read that but this recent piece proposing that on-line church is the natural extension of video preaching intrigues me, particularly since I have had a decade-long connection to Mars Hill and, as Anderson notes, Driscoll refutes the idea that church on-line is valid.

If sacraments have to be taken physically to be valid as sacraments then clearly preaching can't be a sacrament ... or is it? Anderson is right to point out that Driscoll's working definition of sacramentology becomes incoherent at this point. A person who hears an on-line sermon or video-taped sermon is not participating in a sacrament ... or if they ARE experiencing a means through which the grace of Christ is made effective and real for them then why WOULDN'T an on-line church experience be legitimate? What about disabled people who listened to Driscoll's sermons and were blessed by that. Is Driscoll going to say that that wasn't the work of the Spirit or will he propose that preaching itself has no sacramental capacity or might he say that the physical act of hearing the Word preached constitutes the sacrament. Would that then imply there is no corresponding quality of God's work when reading sermons by Spurgeon or Martyn Lloyd-Jones or Packer? Or listening?

I am certainly a Protestant but it seems to me that many evangelical Protestants see the sermon, especially the expository sermon, as a means of grace ... in other words a sacrament. This is not so much because people want to propose there is a priestly class. No, we affirm the priesthood of all believers but some are more priestly than others.

Anderson may be right that Driscoll, for instance, is deeply inconsistent in saying he can preach to you via video but that it is singularly not okay for church to be on-line if Driscoll holds that preaching has any kind of sacramental function. But if Driscoll does not hold there is any inherently sacramental function, that preaching and teaching doesn't do anything to mediate any efficacious grace for sanctification or salvation of any kind, then Driscoll isn't inconsistent. I would propose that Driscoll has a far more sacramental view of a lot of things than first appears. He sees marriage as having the goal not of making you happy but of making you holy and that the woman will be saved through childrearing is presented as a sanctifying grace through which the mother can learn more of God's grace. In other words, Driscoll presents marriage and parenting as sacraments ... but not sacraments.

Anderson's statement that an on-line church is a natural outworking of video venues can be taken as going either way--it can be both correct and incorrect depending on one's sacramentology. He is right to point out that these issues arise from the very nature of evangelical Protestant ecclesiology. For instance, in a congregational or presbyterian government video-venue preaching would be problematic since the video preacher has no inherent connection to the people to whom he is speaking. In an episcopal form of government or a denominational structure video venue preaching might still be permissable. The reason is that the pastors presiding over the sacraments represent the highest level of leadership. If you are video streamed to Arizona from Seattle in a non-episcopal government things are off. There really is no inherent connection between the preacher and the people. In an episcopal system, arguably, there is a connection since the pastors presiding over the sacraments of baptism, communion, marriage, and any other sacraments are there on behalf of the leaders.

Arguably Mars Hill has shifted through a range of governments in the last thirteen years. A set of elders appointed by mutual agreement through the elder board that are self-nominated and not necessarily nominated by members of the congregation with an executive elder board looks pretty much like an episcopate as best I understand the concept. So if preaching has no sacramental function and there are campus pastors presiding over the sacraments then Anderson's case that Driscoll is deeply inconsistent may be moot. This would not in itself mean that video venue preaching is all roses, but it would mean that Anderson's argument against virtual church might have to be made on other grounds.

Now in a church setting like Mars Hill where giving can be done on-line, sermons can be heard on-line, and people are asked to sign up on a social networking device to be part of a virtual community Anderson might be able to say the reason there's no compelling reason to not have the rest of the church on-line is because Mars Hill has virtualized the church experience. Except for the sacraments ... but in the time I have been connected to Mars Hill I have to confess that even I have no idea what kind of coherent sacramental view Mars Hill elders have ever had. And if I answered questions on behalf of Driscoll for a few years and even I don't know what views Mars Hill has on communion or other sacraments (if indeed there are any beyond those two) then if Anderson uses Driscoll as an example of an inconsistency it might be more fair to say that Anderson is using Mars Hill as a one-time example of a church that has an inconsistency when it might be more fair to say the church has also not worked out a coherent view on the sacraments they have. And if Mars Hill weren't often beset by the beguiling prospect of reinventing the wheel the issues at hand might have been worked out by now.

I would suggest, in sympathy, that sacramentology is precisely the domain of theology a church needs to address in order to establish that an on-line church is or isn't appropriate. I am not sure Mars Hill pastors as a group, to say nothing of Driscoll himself, are really serious enough about that branch of theology to tackle the issue. I think they could do it, really, but I'm not sure there's been much evidence that they are interested in the subject. But I do want to thank Matthew Lee Anderson for bringing up the issues and using Driscoll as an example. A church at the forefront of using the internet to build a larger church is a church that NEEDS to think seriously about what sacraments are, what things they hold to be sacraments, and what connection that has to the life of the church. I seee Mars Hill as a multi-site church that is avoiding the big "d" word and the "s" word in attempting to articulate why you should consider joining the church but also not see downloading sermons or on-line fellowship as "real".

Conversely, with such a historically low sacramental approach and a lack of theology about what, if anything, constitutes a sacrament, Mars Hill leadership runs the risk of a whole lot of special pleading. We've done everything in our power to make virtual church the wave of the future ... but we don't really want it to be that because we still want you to show up. At the risk of simply being a smartass addressing sacramentology as it applies to worship (i.e. the church is where you break bread, drink wine, get married, confess sin, pray for the sick, etc) is the thing Mars Hill will have to do to counteract the virtualizing tendency it has had over the years. I am confident that they can do it but I am not sure it's Driscoll who can accomplish that precisely because by means of video preaching he has literally disconnected himself from any sacramental anything for most of any given year.

All that is to say that I think Matthew Lee Anderson makes a great point that stands if Mars Hill can't articulate a clearer sacramentology. The trouble is that if Mars Hill elders DO articulate a clearer sacramentology it may undercut the video venue method of preaching. If there is no mediation of grace by the work of God in Driscoll's preaching then there's no compelling reason it has to be Driscoll preaching. The campus pastors would do just as well, if not better, preaching to the local congregations because they are really connected to those people. Anderson, if he's pointing out that Driscoll is claiming church members should be physically at church to participate in the sacraments, really IS being deeply inconsistent, even at a laughable level, if he simultaneously justifies video preaching but argues that virtual church means you aren't participating in the sacraments. When you're the video preacher you don't really have the right to tell people in New Mexico that they "should" be at the campus participating in communion because, let's face it, you're not there with them, are you? The argument from the sacraments becomes self-defeating.

Then again, if we're talking about an episcopal form of church government and if we've worked out what our view of the sacraments actually IS, then things could be copacetic. This is an opportunity for Mars Hill elders to become strong on something they have historically been really, really weak about.

the sins of fathers and sons, the idols we pass down and take up

Thou shalt not bow down thyself unto them, nor serve them: for I the LORD thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me

For someone raised in a more Pentecostal background the implication of this would involve, for some, discussion of generational curses that have to be broken. It might also include some discourse on the need to use the sword of the spirit to cut soul ties and be very literal about it as though that accomplished anything. I obliged at least one relative on this rather fruitless set of rituals.

We may not immediately realize that with respect to our explanations of the human condition we are not more enlightened in the end than our forbears. When God says that He visits the iniquity of the fathers on the children through the third and fourth generations we object ... but we don't object in the same way if, apart from God, we recognize that genetically sustained infirmities strike us.

In politics the threat of visiting the sins of the fathers on the sons to the third and fourth generation is precisely the whole point. Liberals evoke this for their causes while conservatives evoke it for their causes, quite apart from even any religious context. Do this government healthcar ething now and you will be destroying the financial future of our children. Do this war thing now and generations of children will become the targets of increased terrorism or evil because of an unjust war. Vote for this international trade agreement and you are selling out the jobs America's grandchildren could have that keeps the economy strong. Don't vote for it and you are stifling the spirit of free enterprise now so that children will have no incentive to be industrious in the future. And so it goes.

It is not explained in the Torah necessarily HOW the sins of one generation are visited upon subsequent generations. It is not fixed as to how a sin passes from one generation to the next. To say that "idolatry" is what happens is too much a simplification of the trouble. We can see throughout Israel's history that some of the worst Judean kings had some of the best offspring and vice versa. David brought forth Amnon and Absalom and Adonijah, none of who were chips off the old block in any of the old blocks' best qualities. Josiah was not evil like his father, quite the opposite. If anyone's life should have proven the unstoppable efficacy of generational curses Josiah would have been the proof. Chronicles tells us Manasseh repented near the end of his life Manasseh shows us that there can be a deathbed conversion just as Joash in Judah shows us that there can be a kind of mid-life apostasy.

What I have considered of late is that despite our youthful rebellion we may actually take up the idols of our parents in unexpected and even unobserved ways. If I have a mother who revels in knowledge of spiritual things or simply supposes she is wiser than usual and prizes spiritual knowledge I may not be a know-it-all in precisely the same way but I could still be a know-it-all. This would not be because I really think I actually am smarter than most people but because I emulate the example and values of a parent. If I have a father who tends to love the Lord with his mind and keep his heart to himself I may rebel against that propensity and yet in the process exemplify that fault in another way.

If a man takes pride in his marriage and in his wife and attempts to sell everyone else who isn't married on the necessity that they be married that, too, can be a kind of idolatry unawares. His daughter might grow up to rebel against traditional Christian teaching and shack up with some unbelieving boyfriend. The Christian father would note with disappointment his daughter has not lived out the ideals he has tried to inculcate in her.

Yet, paradoxically, she isn't rebelling against her father's values at all in terms of their substance but merely rejecting the form, living them out to the last details except for the part about getting formal recognition from the state. The child who defies a Christian upbringing and defines themselves by means of a sexual relationship isn't so much rebelling against the values of his or her parents as implementing them in another way. We may be beholden to the flaws of our parents even in our attempts to rebel against their flaws or abuses.

Now for Christian parents the scary, tricky part is that we must understand a distinction. The term "functional savior" can be bandied about too readily but it is a useful thing to discuss in generational contexts because whatever your Christian profession is, a child who rebels may reject the profession but look for solace and meaning in the family idols. A Christian father who is obsessed with his work may raise sons who do or don't profess Christ but measure themselves by their work. In other words, whether or not your children follow Christ they may still struggle or give in to the idols that you struggled with. If you have a legacy of eating disorders, comfort food, and having a talismanic view that just eating certain foods will make you healthy your children can pick up on that. They may not pick up on it precisely the same way, but they may well pick up on it.

Scripture reveals that idols tend to run in families, literally. Idols could function as deeds to property, after all. Generational sins are not necessarily "curses" that can be magically uttered as though some witch or warlock can just "hex" you with this or that sin, generational sins are better seen as proclivities that manifest across generations. Alcoholism, compulsive behaviors like gambling or sex, a history of mental illness or neurological disorders are probably more accurate ways of discussing what would be considered generational sins. At the risk of invoking the cliche, we live in a world marred by sin. Even in our rebellions we reveal our conformities.

The child of fundamentalist parents who becomes an atheist will likely retain their missionary zeal but direct it toward a new cause, yet the character flaw has remained stable from one generation to the next. It becomes all the more difficult to observe because a person can look at their life and believe that because the form is different the substance is different. They do not realize that the sin has been visited on them because they think the change of form is a change of content.

For instance, suppose a man comes from an abusive family and resolves to never continue the abusive legacy of his family, whatever the nature of that abuse or neglect might be. He builds a family and inside his family he is gentle, kind, patient, and understanding. But toward co-workers, subordinates or people outside that family he may be capable of withering verbal abuse or vent his frustrations through physical violence. In his own heart this man may be persuaded that he has successfully overcome the legacy of abuse in his family because he doesn't treat his family in an abusive way, little realizing that he actually HAS continued the abusive legacy of his parents but has compartmentalized it outward to people who aren't considered his family.

A man can believe he is above reproach (basically) because he doesn't treat his family badly but believes he can't really err in how abusive or angry he is toward others. A pastor who treats his family like royalty and self-sacrificingly serves them but is impulsive, angry, and verbally abusive is no better than a drunk who beats up his wife in the end. He doesn't realize that he's just as much an abuser as the wife-beater because he DOESN'T say or do anything harsh to his wife. Indignities he would rebel against if he were subjected to them he doesn't bat an eyelash about dumping on people who aren't family.

A person who grows up with an emotionally distant and unapproving parent may channel all his or her affection toward family and then have a performance-based, using way with "friends". This person may sincerely believe he or she is not living out the mistakes of the parent who expressed love conditionally (after hoops had been properly jumped through) but will not realize that his or her whole foundation for defining someone as "a good friend" is simply a self-deluding way of using people when they are useful and suddenly having no use for their friendship once they are not useful or once a first-level conflict arises. We paradoxically continue the sins of our fathers through the very means we believe sets us apart from them. We repent of their sin of ice and do not realize that our sin is water, the form and temperature have changed but the substance is still there.

Those Israelite and Judean kings who repented did not simply repent of the FORM of the sins of their fathers but also of the substance. Rehoboam had an opportunity to listen to the old men who saw the mistakes of Solomon (because obviously Solomon did not necessarily tell Rehoboam "I screwed up"). He had a chance to repent on behalf of his people and his family. And repent he did, after a fashion, but he decided on the basis of advice from the young men he grew up with living in royal luxury that the real problem was the Israelites needed to be treated more and not less sternly. This is a variety of "quit your bitching, do what you're told to do, and give me more money and sacrifice because I'm your leader." And the response of the men of Israel was "What portion do we have in David?" The kingdom divided, and both parties turned to woshipping other gods, promoting apostasy and immorality.

If you were to ask Rehoboam if he had repented of the mistakes of his father he would have said, "Yeah." But instead of repenting of the true flaws of his father Rehoboam simply took the mistakes of his father Solomon further. He had learned from his father's mistakes, so he thought, and wasn't going to make the same ones. It just turned out that his solution to not being like not-so-dear-old-dad blew up in his face. It was a historical case of those who have will be given more and those who don't have even what they have will be taken from them. Rehoboam thought he had the kingdo (he did) but in clinging to it he lost even that and the very efforts he made to seize things for himself cost him the thing he sought. Ironically trying to be "better" than his father made him much, much worse.

Sometimes it seems as though the sins of the fathers get visited to us because we embrace them ourselves and out-do our fathers in those things. We think that we need to change the scale or direction of our parents' sins rather than considering the essential quality of those sins and how it resides in us as well. The old saying for pilots and soliders is that when the crisis comes you revert to your training. The young woman who shacks up with her boyfriend may sincerely believe she's not living by the training her parents inculcated in her but that would be fooling herself. A son who becomes an ardent Calvinist having been raised by theologically sloppy Arminians may think he is being different from his parents because of the formal doctrines he holds to but the zeal or religious mania remains untouched. A daughter who bails on Protestantism for the Catholic church or Anglicanism ostensibly makes a bigger jump but in some sense the quest for the one true church touched by the Spirit of God that is better than the others may still have residual power. Even in our attempt to make ourselves different from our parents we reflect their values whether we plan to or not.

And, paradoxically, we can differ from our parents most in how we implement those values, qualities, and actions we most admire about them. Once my mother and I were having a disagreement and discussion about politics (or theology) and I mentioned that she had often said she raised me to think for myself. Maybe the problem was that she got exactly what she wanted and now that I think for myself I don't agree with her very much about theology. At least in the last year she's been able to laugh when I point this out. It wasn't a laughing matter most of the previous twelve years. In my own way I was determined to care very much what the scriptures say to the point where I don't agree with my parents on any number of issues. It can't be easy for them to know that my disagreement with them on any number of concrete issues actually stems from the essentially shared principle that I, as I was taught, care what the scriptures say.

Something else I want to say in closing regarding generational sins and how the Lord may visit them upon succeeding generations. We may see that the visitation of that sin may actually be the inculcation of certain virtues as the parent sees it. A Christian parent who is a culture warrior and a rabid partisan for one side or another may find their child takes that up and they will see this as a success. In fact it could simply be the inculcation of the parents' idolatry into the child. The same might even apply when the child switches side. I had a friend who was as militantly paranoid an atheist for some time as he was a militantly paranoid Christian while he was a Christian. His essentially manic dread that the other side was out to destroy liberties hadn't changed. Fortunately he figured this out and has mellowed way, way out on those issues. All this is to say in perhaps too-serious a tone, what Bill Cosby joked about, that mothers have a curse and the curse is tha tyour children will be like you. And this curse works. Christ can break the power of that curse and has broken it but it sure does help if you repent of not just the sins of your fathers but even of their virtues.

a lot on my mind

I'll write about some of it later. Having read some of Wendy's thoughts over at Practical Theology for Women I was struck by the story of a home-schooled by who sexually assaulted another child. This has had me thinking a lot about the reason parents may or may not home-school children, one of which is ostensibly to protect them from the sinful outside influences. This runs the risk of failing to observe how profoundly sinful your own children really are.

While I was in the thick of on-line debates and discussions at Mars Hill I recall debates about six or seven years ago about Christian parenting. I recall seeing people seriously propose that Samson's parents "dropped the ball". Why the anonymous posters on the publicly accessible unmoderated forums proposed this defies my comprehension, I just recall that some Christians were very serious in claiming that Samson's parents messed up and that was why he was so sinful.

Only the scriptures never say this! They don't even imply that Samson's parents made mistakes. We are shown clearly how they tried to dissuade their stupid horndog son from marrying a Phillistine but he would not listen to them and God had plans for that stupid horndog with superpowers. God in select cases is capable of usin gthe worst, most sinful attributes of a person to accomplish a plan that He has that we are not privy to.

So if a Christian parent discovers that he or she has raised a child who turns out to have not really been a Christian at all but has embraced whatever it is he or she was merely biding time to participate in at the earliest convenience that Christian parent is NOT a failure. This is not to disclaim parental responsibilities but simply to point out that even the most protected home-schooled kid has a heart full of sins (not all of them, mind you, consciously chosen because sin is not just about what we actively choose in defiance but also about all the ways we fall short even in our best intentions). Particularly as someone who has grown up as an American Protestant and seen how culture war this and counterculture of evangelicalism that has played out over the last twenty years I believe that many home-schooling parents are unintentionally setting themselves up for the most heathen generation of young adults this country will have seen in some time. But I don't feel like expanding upon this idea at the cost of sleep deprivation. This is more a hint of a wide range of topics I have been contemplating that I will get to later, God willing.

tying threads together: iMonk on women in evangelicalism, Mockingbird on conditional parenting, and me connecting it to homeschooling

http://www.internetmonk.com/archive/recommendation-and-review-jesus-girls-edited-by-hannah-faith-notess

http://mockingbirdnyc.blogspot.com/2009/09/almost-absurdly-relevant-article-from.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/15/health/15mind.html?_r=2

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/aug/08/excess-adam-phillips

I was intrigued by iMonk's recommendation of a book about women in evangelicalism.
I have also been thinking about evangelicalism and women. I have had a sometimes puzzling upbringing in which I heard it explained that the Bible is the inerrant word of God and you have to believe all of it but that Solomon and lots of biblical authors were simple-minded haters of women. The tension was in, if you will, hearing the necessity of young-earth creationism while also being told that the authors of many biblical books were misogynists, particularly in Proverbs where women were denigrated all the time.

Eventually I observed that this was a gross simplification of the wisdom literature that almost completely missed distinctions between a Proverbs 7 woman and a Proverbs 31 woman. Then, when I had noticed that distinction for a good chunk of my life I heard the troubling proclamation that the Proverbs 31 woman never REALLY existed but was simply an ideal to shoot for. Okay ... but that left the Proverbs 7 woman as being all too real.

Really there are times when I understand why evangelical feminism exists.

And there are times when I consider the nexus of home-schooling, quiverfull theologies to be potentially disastrous. More than a century ago laws were passed banning certain types of publicly displayed religious clothing in schools. Separation of church and state was valued precisely so there would be no Church of England equivalent in the United States and particularly so that Catholicism would not be too prominent in the land. Fast forward a century later and the separation of church and state that was lauded by churches that had a not-so-tacit majority in the culture is being denounced as a sign of how godless the United States has become. Ironically conservative Christians were getting upset about the consequences of precisely what they wanted.

I don't feel any need to get to the details of long-term unforeseen consequences of combining child labor restrictions with compulsory public education and prohibition or the New Deal. Christians, suffice it to say, have often created what they believe are their most pressing social problems simply by forcing the issue of what they want now in exchange for whatever may come later.

A fascinating and sad dynamic existed with Christians in medieval Europe. Jews weren't allowed in guilds because they were Jews so they often turned to the things they were allowed to do, get into money-lending and banking. That, in turn, reinforced the stereotype in the minds of Christians of the Jew as a greedy money-lender and a champion of sin even though if anyone had stepped back and considered the circumstances they might have seen that letting Jews work in trades could have pre-empted that whole social evil the Jew was so mired in.

I have grown skeptical about the efficacy of home-school for kids not because of the results. I have met home-schooled people who are living proof that it can be great. One such person wrapped up a doctorate in chemistry recently. Another is a happily married mother and a good friend.

But other home-schooled children were poorly served by this process, in my very unvarnished opinion. I've seen intellectually stunted people who, frankly, are never going to realize their intellectual or creative potential because they seem to have gotten more quiverfull and home-maker instruction than anything about how to integrate into adult society on any other grounds. Too many Christian parents who are attracted to home-schooling are attracted to it because they fear the godless influences in the public schools and not because their child's education is too important to them to NOT pursue directly. If as the scriptures say perfect love casts out fear then a parent who can only send his or her child to public school who loves their child can still be involved in the child's education. The idea that teachers at nine hours a day five days a week somehow have the lion's share of time with the child may be a legitimate concern ... but I'm creeped out by the way Christian parents think.

Let me put it this way, an older guy I know pointed out that people set up Christian schools because they saw how terrible things were in public schools or private schools. Then it turned out that Christian schools were as bad as the public schools and so Christian parents who saw this decided that home-schooling was going to be better. And then those parents discovered that their kids are just as sinful in any event as they would have been in public or private schools, Christian or not. Yep, it's painful,tragic, and infuriating I'm sure, but that's what I'm getting at. We as Christians are tempted to think that we need to protect our little ones from the evils of the outside world without realizing how much evil our little ones can embrace. Beating it or driving it out of them doesn't work because it certainly didn't work with us, did it?

That home-schooled kids can be sexually immoral, liars, cheaters, brawlers, bullies, apostates, and all the rest of the litany of sins is not something I see getting discussed much. For folks who don't hold that there is even such a thing as original sin I get that that discussion won't come up (though those folks might want to at least be aware of Piaget to the extent that the egocentric child does display the need to understand that the cosmos doesn't revolve around him or her).

I have heard a lot of chest-thumping Christian men say it is important to protect the women. Yeah, I have heard that a few times, particularly with respect to sexuality. But I have grown cynical about this because often I have seen a "protect from" mentality that has with it a "protect to" mentality that defines femininity and masculinity in ways that makes marriage and family an idol.

Let me be clearer, a woman who is raised with the quiverfull home-schooled experience and is told that marriage and child-rearing are the highest goods she can attain may simply not want that. She may come to believe that if that is the high earthly calling Christ has ordained for her that she'd just rather not be a Christian, even if she's ostensibly a good little home-schooled quiverfull girl in such and such a family. She has not really been given the good news of Christ but the good news of home-schooled quiverfull theology. She has also, probably, not necessarily been given the opportunity to build anything like a competent adult life for herself that doesn't involve a significant other.

A woman who leaves this and goes out to "live in sin" may appear to be sinning (because she is) but my potentially gruesome critique at this point is that soldiers and pilots understand the axiom that when the emergency comes you revert to your training. In other words, you may be the parent who trained her to so value the sexual relationship (i.e. marriage as the touchstone of all life) that even in her would-be rebellion she's just finding a different way to live out what you trained her to do. Real rebellion for a Reformed home-schooled quiverfull girl would be converting to Catholicism and becoming a nun!

And for men, well, the prospects are really not necessariily better. A home-schooled boy who grows into manhood may be just as intellectually stunted or, more pragmatically, have been trained to be a breadwinner in a globalizing economy where higher education is seen as more necessary for higher-paying work and social mobility but increasingly expensive out of any proportion to the net worth that education has in a job search. He will rightly suppose that college education isn't worth it but he will also likely suppose that higher education might make him a flaming liberal or a commie (let's face it, that is often a criticism of higher education by Christians drawn to homeschooling).

If he gets raised with the idea that socialists and heathens are bent on destroying everything that made this country founded on Christian principles great, well, then we get a fellow who may not hack it in the job market, has been raised to understand fatherhood as a central good, and who is not situated to get a "real" job to support a would-be wife and kids. If the wife at some point has to work it becomes his failure as a man and not a grim reality of the kind of economy and society we have. If work goes to migrant workers then a theology that redounds to racial resentment has been conveniently and probably witlessly set up.

Ironically the Christian parents who want to keep their little boys and girls safe from the ghetto of academic heathen liberalism can set up their own little ghetto that traps them. Those who rebel against this think they have broken free of it when they probably haven't, especially if they don't actually get the education they would need to be aware of alternatives, which is understandable given how expensive things are.

It is strange how when we have freedom, the freedom we as Americans supposedly crave and won't accept being deprived of, we can feel miserable. "You can do anything that you want to do" is great for Blues Clues episodes but the truth is that by the time you hit about 18 years of age I'm not sure anyone in his or her right mind REALLY thinks that is the case. the Greeks used to say that character is destiny and to go by the way Christians home-school it would seem that education is character. In their own respective ways the Christian home-schooling right and the secular "elite" left both believe the same thing regarding the way in which children are the future. But what if that isn't as true as we have told ourselves? An agnostic or atheist child can grow up to become a religous conservative just as a homeschooled quiverfull conservative Christian background can produce someone who is an atheist or a gay rights advocate.

The race is not to the swift nor victory to the strong but time and chance happen to them all. How often we attempt to sell ourselves on the idea that this just can't possibly be true. We want the silver bullet, the magic words, the things that will ensure that where others have screwed up WE will get things right.

a disorganized rant about 9

The new animated film 9 is, in a word, lame. But one word will not suffice. It is a visually pretty work but it is trite at essentially every level. Now I have friends who sincerely believe that trite and cliche is good because whatever is cliche is what "works". Not so with 9. This is a film that revives the trope of technology has no heart or soul and that humanity was destroyed for want of imbueing its technology with some of its own soul.

Nonsense. A film like 9 is essentially dishonest and trafficking in platitudes of the worst sort. I have always hated films that involve a simplified triumph of the human spirit and one of the most essential problems of a film like 9 is it is both unreflective and lacks any sense of irony (no, the fearless fighter being a girl doesn't count because that usurpation of expectation is so mundane as to become a trope).

The solution to the dystopia in the world of 9 is to follow the heart but the human heart is what created the problem. Oh, but that would be the heart of a general rather than the heart of a scientist who nevertheless regrets what he has done in somehow only putting his intellect into "the machine" rather than his soul, which he saw fit to put into burlap sacks.

I suppose I could ignore that the character 9 is the one who unwittingly activates the Machine. The Machine then goes about hunting for the nine soas to feed on their souls. Something that is never really explained about the machine is why it is the villain of the story. If the Machine assimilates all the elements of the scientist's soul then why wouldn't it become the thing that brings a new form of life to the earth? There is no real explanation. There is also no explanation why five parts of the scientist's soul in the nine can magically (yes, magically) make it rain. The whole world presented to us through nine is a sadly simplified dichotomy of machines and technology and intellect equals "evil" and magic and soul and feelings equals "good". The idea that neither unaided can accomplish the best of things for life never gets discussed. There isn't even a paltry hommage to the need for "balance".

Now films about how technology overtakes the nobler elements of humanity aren't new. in fact the idea that the intellect and the heart need a mediator to bring both together for the common good is as old as Fritz Lang's Metropolis! So there is certainly nothing wrong with attempting to address the moral quandary of balancing competing ideals and goods. The essense of tragedy isn't the triumph of evil over good but the terrible price that is paid when one good must be sacrificed for the other. The triumph of evil over good in this world is more properly the domain of horror, while in a tragedy there is room for the reader to see that a tragedy comes when filial piety is set against the welfare of the state (the most famous plays by Sophocles).

The tragedy of Romeo and Juliet lays not in the star-crossed lovers themselves as in their respective families not setting aside their differences for the sake of two kids who love each other. Those two kids are stupid horndogs who want to get laid and are willing to sacrifice loyalty to their families, which doesn't make them heroes ... but the families are so dead set (literally) on destroying each other they don't realize that imposing their mutual animosity on everyone in their respective families will lead to destruction.

Nine won't have any of that and while Acker may aspire to tell us a fable about the need for humanity the moer trenchent, honest, and challenging fable about humanity would be WALL-E. There the machine's primary goal is to PRESERVE human life and it does so to the flaw that the captain articulates, "I don't want to survive I want to live." Paradoxically the Nine have the same mission the autopilot of the Axiom has.

WALL-E's vision of technology is compelling because WALL-E embodies for us our best and worst qualities. He can transcend his basest directives (collect junk and sort it) and yet his very being reveals the limits of our society. He is the last waste allocation load lifter earth class of his kind. And amidst our trash he finds his own treasures, relics of a time when humanity was still on earth.

There is a difference between creating characters that exemplify the paradoxes of ourselves and simply wanting to have it both ways. Acker's #9 is the latter example. 9 unwittingly awakens the machine and yet must become the titular hero of his own tale through heart and soul and burlap limbs. The scientist creates the red-eyed evil machine that has no soul but it doesn't occur to him to simply give the machine a soul. Nah, he empties his soul into nine burlap sacks that turn into nine bickering characters who are types.

As if cliche piled upon cliche weren't annoying enough there's the old canard of the evil military leaders. The stereotype of war-mongering soldiers is popular in almost any epoch for the simple reason that if what you do is fight for a living the stereotype sticks, much like the stereotype that guitarists in rock bands blow through copious amounts of cocaine and groupies. There is some basis for the stereotype but it is generally a notorious minority that establishes the reputation for all, much like the Fifth and Ninth symphonies establish Beethoven's reputation when many people who can sing snippets of those symphonies can't identfy the rest of his work.

Acker has a commendable visual style but his action scenes are by the numbers and his characterization is tepid. It's not fair but, really, even a Pixar short like Partly Cloudy displays more depth of character development in a more compressed narrative. It may be that the lesson for this year in film is that admirable short films that become feature length films don't always improve in the transition, which is what both 9 movies this year (9, and District 9) may or may not prove. To be fair I haven't seen District 9 yet so I'm suspending judgment about how well it comes off.

9 is a let-down and my advice is you're better served by revisiting Up or Coraline.

blog entries pending

I have to vent my spleen about 9 at some point and I don't feel like doing it right now. If you've thought about seeing it and haven't seen it already don't waste your time or money. Go watch Coraline or Up again instead. I will vent my spleen about the film later, but for now I don't feel like doing so.

first drafts, yeah, I know

You who still have the patience to read this may notice that these all read like first drafts lately, these blog entries. And you'd be right! I admit that I should be more responsible to the dictum that writing is rewriting and by rewriting prove myself more of a writer ... but I don't feel like it. There are many reasons I am not blogging quite so much as I used to and they are reasons I'm not going to blog about any time soon, if at all. Even i, of all people, recognize that the world of blogging is not the same as what most people a bit too sanctimoniously call "the real world". The truth is the real world is often as miserable and boring as the blog world but people are more likely to keep that to themselves than if they are writing blog entries. As the proverb puts it the heart knows its own sorrow and no other shares its grief (or joy), not even, really, in blogs.

So I have had a bit more to say than I have managed to say out of consideration for other things.

Judah, Samaria and the mystery of God's patience and discipline

Another title could be this one:

Yahweh doesn't believe in sympathtic magic but we Christians sure do

I have been immersing myself in commentary and in the reading of the biblical narrative of Israel over the last few y ears. I am not going to soft-sell this, Driscoll's almost total lack of responsibility in handling a responsible exegesis of biblical narrative books is what inspired me to go the other way and try to let the biblical text, so to speak, speak for itself rather than just continue to put up with fanciful self-indulgent agenda-pushing. Now, to be fair, I expect good things from Driscoll's teaching in Luke because he's actually got some competence in NT literature and his greatest preaching has come from Lukan texts. I'm not afraid to suggest that not only will a Lukan series be awesome but Driscoll and Mars Hill elders shouldn't feel afraid to tackle Acts while they are at it, so that the Lukan literature can be covered in its mind-bending fullness.

But I am grateful to the Lord Driscoll sucks so bad at preaching through Old Testament historical books because God has used that to remind me that preachers are just preachers, sinners like everyone else being saved by the mercy of God. They have strengths and weaknesses and what is weak in you the Lord can make strong and what is strong in you (so you think) the Lord can render powerless.

So as I have travelled through the history of God's people, Israel, up through to the exile I have been considering how even in that history it is wildly inaccurate to say that God has some one-to-one correspondence between wicked people and wicked leaders who get terrible punishments on the one hand and godly kings and godly people who get only blessings. Ahab tore his clothes and hit sackcloth and while God evebtually had him killed for his unrepentent sin ... God spared Ahab's life for quite a stretch of time. It was some time after Elijah's prediction of Ahab's demise that the demise happened.

And Elijah's life itself is fascinating because, as Provan so trenchently points out, Elijah was a prophet who actually DIDN'T DO several things he was told to do. Elijah was considered one of the greatest prophets and yet in his own way he could be as disobedient and recalictrant as Jonah! There were things llike annointing rulers that Elijah didn't do while he was on earth, things that were done by Elisha. And yet the Lord took up Elijah in a chariot of fire! You can't help asking yourself, when you think about it, how God could give such a spectacular exit from earthly life to such a stubborn and even disobedient prophet!

By contrast, at the end of 2 Kings we see that though Josiah was obedient to the Lord in ways unlike any other king in the history of Israel this obedience was not enough to save his life. He died in battle. Not only did he die in battle his obedience and even the repentence of the people were, good as those things were, were not considered good enough to compensate for the wickedness of Mannesah. Chronicles tells us something else, that when Neco came up to fight he explained he was not there to fight the king of Judah. Josiah didn't listen to the word of the Lord spoken through the Egyptian king and was killed in battle but was thereby spared seeing the full extent of Judah's destruction, humiliation, and downfall.

The words of the Egyptian king should be a serious warning to use who are in Christ. We must remember that God has at different times spoken wisdom through those who do not even know Him. God does reveal truth to unbelievers yet many Christians would say that this is not possible. In fact I heard a certain pastor say it's not possible to learn anything about the Old Testament from Jewish teachers ... which is about the speed of the simplistic reductionist thought that pastor tends to employ on Old Testament literature as a whole but, Lord willing, the Lord will soon have shown him the error of his ways and give him some actual humility before the text, if not before people. :)

But let me get back to Josiah--his life is a sobering notice that even if you do everything right you can still die a miserable death. If one is to speculate as to how Josiah could have lived or died differently we can reflect on Josiah meeting Neco on the battlefield. Josiah died, the Chronicler tells us, because he did not recognize or heed the word of the Lord through a foreign conqueror. He went out to fight a fight that was not his to fight. He went out, as it were, to defend a cause tha twas indefensible that did not warrant his endorsement. There isn't much indication that Josiah did or didn't consult a prophet regarding his military venture. Why Josiah sought to meet an Egyptian on the battlefield isn't explained directly and I am not yet at a detailed study of Chronicles so I'm not going to pretend I know.

What is interesting is that despite Josiah's genuine love for the Lord and despite the reforms these were not considered good enough. It seems that Israel was still a profoundly idolatrous nation. Taking Kings and Chronicles together forces us to recognize that God can choose to crush His people despite their being led by the best of leaders. To put it another way, an unusually sinful church can be crushed by the Lord even if they have the best pastor on earth. Conversely, even the worst pastor can have moments of repentence for which the Lord will delay a judgment. But nowhere can we say with certainty that there is some formulaic, simplified one-to-one correspondence between a great pastor and a great church.

I understand the skepticismof those who suppose that the Chronicler "has" to find some sin to account for the fall of any Judean king or any Israelite king. There is room for the editorial agenda of a biblical author while still having it be scripture. Taken together, however, it seems that we get a warning that God's ways with respect to judging humanity can be, have been, and are mysterious in many ways. If the Chronicler locates Josiah's fall in the sin of not heeding the word of the Lord through Neco and the author of Kings locates the fall of Josiah in punishment on Judea for the sins of Mannaseh (who in Chronicles is shown to have repented at the end of his life) then it reveals that in our day and age simply asserting that someone met a miserable end or met with disaster because of some sin is not a wise path to take.

But we as Christians can so easily persuade ourselves and others that if someone is a failure it is because he or she or they happen to be a loser. We can still look on outward appearances as Samuel did even after the disastrous consequences of annointing Saul king over Israel. God had to remind Samuel that appearances are not what they appear to be and that God assesses a person's heart. The spectacle of Elijah's greatest accomplishments may blind us to his great failures. Josiah's goodness as a king did not mean he wouldn't meet his end in battle, and yet the fate awaiting Israel was so terrible that compared to the fate of Judah as a whole Josiah could be said by the Lord to have died in peace!

Throughout the narrative of Samuel and Kings we see the Lord's most powerful and disturbing form of discipline is to give His people what they say they want. Then they buckle under the weight and shame of getting what they wanted and discovering it was not as good as they hoped it would be. Saul was a self-aggrandizing madman. David was a man after God's own heart and yet also a man of bloodshed and multiple wives. Solomon continued this path and eventually became an apostate. And when Solomon's son listened to the voice of his peers and not the voice of the old men who served in his father's house his vanity and brutality brought with it the division of the kingdom, which was threatening to divide into the northern and southern kingdoms even at different points throughout the officially united kingdom.

I don't think this means that God is actively stomping on people so much as I have come to believe that there is a mysterious sense in which we reap what we sow but God sees to it that there are, to invert the metaphor, some tares of His mercy among the wheat of destruction we sow for ourselves. We are often fortunate the Lord does not LET us reap the harvest of what our heart and actions would produce. Think of it this way, how many sinful kings and sins of even God-fearing kings in Israel and Judah did the Lord tolerate on the throne before the final, full exile took place? Centuries passed! Just as it is foolish to suppose there is a magical formula that sin=God's active wrath or God setting up laws of cause and effect to bring punishment it is also foolish to suppose that success is proof of God's favor. Saul was successful in many campaigns but nowhere does it say the Lord was with him as it says about other kings in the scriptures. Success is not a proof of divine blessing.

There are Christians who think that Obama being in office is a sign of divine judgment against the United States for choosing the godless path. Never mind that both parties have a less than sterling record where godliness goes. Would Christians who seriously propose that God has some cause-and-effect punishment for wicked people who vote for Democrats or Republicans look at their own lives and surmise that their bankruptcy of physical ailments are God's judgment on them for their unrepentent sin and choosing a path of wickedness? This is not usually what I see.

A person who can say without batting an eyelash that God is punishing the United States because people are voting for Democrats may have racked up a pile of debt in bad real estate or other investments or may even blame someone else as the bad guy for their own lack of competence in the job market. Instead of admitting that you just aren't qualified for this or that job you might find it easier to blame the other people who are getting the job. I could easily see how an old white person who has no real competitive job skills or history would decide to resent Hispanics who are bilingual for somehow "stealing" the jobs that white person thinks he or she should have. Thing is I work with bilingual people and it is just smarter business strategy to have people who are bilingual Rather than consider his or her own lack of marketable job skills and experience a person, especially an older person whose health may not be very good and who feels over the hill, can find themselves blaming the people who are getting hired because they are more qualified for simply being of a different race, ethnicity or gender.

It would be easy for an older man to resent a young bilingual Latina getting hired on the supposition that she only got hired because she's young and cute and has somehow compromised true Americanism by knowing another language besides the "real" language of America. This is, by extension, ,wanting an Israel in which God "only" reards the people who jump through the right hoops. This way of thinking would claim that Josiah should not have been killed in battle for being so obedient to the Lord. This is the kind of thinking that woulld say that Ahab should have been killed by the Lord right away instead of being allowed to live on for years after the warning of judgment.

What these sorts of Christians want to do is to imagine that Obama is some kind of Ahab who deserves to be destroyed. But who knows, Christians, whether or not Obama might be spared because he got into office, found out the war on terror was not what he thought it was, repented, and decidd to continue policies set in place under the Bush administration? Suddenly the black Democratic president is considered evil for continuing policies that weren't seen as dictatorial when a white man was ehind them. No offense, but that's funny. As a wise man once said, don't get giddy about power for yourself you wouldn't be happy for someone else to have. Republicans who dread the power Obama has now should have recognized that it was creepy when Bush had it.

In fact amidst all this study of God's mercy toward Judean and Samarian kings this is why I find Piper's comments about a tornado to be so odd. Piper knows the scriptures and knows how long-suffering God was toward His people at their most disobedient. It would be nice to claim there's some clear-cut connectiono because that would make life simpler but the scriptures already are what they are. Jesus told a parable in which he pointed out that those who ignored Moses and the prophets would ignore even someone who came back from the dead. In other words, it doesn't matter what signs are sent to those who don't believe, they won't believe, and if the ELCA put themselves in the position of not believing the scriptures about homosexuality within the church then really there's nothing a tornado would accomplish. Sure enough, some Lutherans seem to have taken that tornado as a sign of the wind of God's approval lilke some kind of Pentecost moment. As I was just saying ... .

Now I have had more than a few words to say about how Driscoll isn't so hot as an exegete from the pulpit or how he has embrodiered biblical narratives with his own brand of pietistic legalism in which the married-with-children set are more godly and responsible than unmarried people. I used to answer theological questions the pastors thought were important enough to get answered but not quite important enough to get answered directly by Driscoll so as an unmarried man I admit to being just a teensy bit cynical about that simplification. However, Driscoll has been right to say that our problem as people is that we want mercy for ourselves and justice for everyone else.

I used to know Christians who seriously proposed Samson went bad because his parents dropped the ball. I used to know Christians who just said that Saul wasn't elect and that was that without really discussing how praiseworthy Jonathan was, Jonathan who actually did the things Saul was commanded by the Lord through Samuel to do. I have seen countless Christians overlook David's sexual life and bloodshed and still imagine that somehow leaders of God's people are called to a higher standard. Well, yeah, and that means they are are even more likely to FAIL to meet that standard than those to whom (we are told implicitly) are NOT called to that standard, never mind the "royal priesthood" and "holy nation" discussion, never mind the priesthood of all believers that suddenly isn't a priesthood of all believers if you think someone else isn't qualified to be a pastor because they hurt you.

These things all point to ways in which Christians employ double standards. Samson went bad? Blame the parents even though the scriptures say God had a purpose for it. Jonathan was noble? Well, maybe he wasn't after all. Samuel's sons were so bad it inspired Israel to ask for a king? Well, Israel was sinful (sure, and so were Samuel's sons). It's fascinating how people want one side exonerated no matter what when it suits them but won't brook the slightest failure from the other side. Even within the scriptures the painful realization that God allowed utterly depraved men to lead his people doesn't mean people had to be happy about it. It also did not mean, however, that that line of reasoning automatically applies to a church now (though if you're Catholic or Orthodox or Anglican I get the argument that the sacraments are blessed even if depraved priests adminster them. This is waht an application of "mercy for me, justice for others" approach can look like. The man who says Samson's parents dropped the ball may not feel like they dropped the ball of his daughter abandons the faith and shacks up with some non-Christian guy. The mother who thinks that God punishes the sinful by visiting disaster on society may be left wondering how she failed if her son comes out as gay. What sins did she commit that warranted her son being gay?

Well, none. A parent may model that the sexual relationship is the highest and greatest good and thereby promote an idolatry of the sexual relationship as THE defining relationship for all of life but that STILL doesn't mean that if that parent's child goes off and sins that there is some magical correspondence that says "Because you have made an idol of sexual fulfillment, John Doe and Jane Roe, the Lord is going to punish you by making your children sexual profligates." There is an appearance of wisdom to that, folks, but in the end it can simply be a form of sympathetic magic. If I just jump through all the right hoops and home school my kids and don't let them hang out with godless Democrats and prepare them to work as housewives and tradesmen then I will ensure all my kids are good little Christians who have lots of grandchildren and vote Republican and are straight. Well you can do all that and raise a bunch of atheistic gay activists, too. You can't control your life, let alone the lives of others, with that kind of precision and power.

I see this all the time among American Christians and their politics. A person who wants "justice" to pour out against Obama wants mercy for themselves rather than consider the possibility that their health and financial disasters are strongly self-caused. It's more fun to say the country is being destroyed because evil people voted for an evil man than to admit you're dying of something like diabetes of heart failure because of a life of gnostic spirituality that allows you to ignore the long-term consequences of what you do to your body. It's easier to plead spiritual warfare or demonic attack than just admit that your family has a significant history of mental illness and neurological disorders or sexual abuse and get some actual treatment for that stuff. Christ bis us to repent of OUR sins not to keep telling other people what sins THEY need to repent of. If even the most wicked of Samarian kings can find mercy from the Lord despite their apostasy how much more will someone who loves Christ find mercy by continuing to seek the Lord for liberty from the bondage of sin?

Don't we then have to admit that sin is slavery to us? This is exceptionally hard to do. A lesson we can draw from Kings and Samuel and Chronicles is that we are not alone, and have never been alone in our slowness to recognize how powerfully sin is at work within us and how powerfully we can delude ourselves into thinking we are all right with the Lord when the Lord is letting us slowly reap the consequences of our own sin in bits and pieces rather than bringing the full weight of our sin upon us. Even in His judgments God still reveals His love and this is soemthing I wish more Christians might discuss. Just as Job was not showing he deserved punishment through what he suffered so we may find that when God permits disaster it may not merely be to punish us for sin but test our faithfulness. We as American Christians can often struggle to admit that God's ways are mysterious. But I have rambled enough for aw eekend.

on Frank Turk and Michael Spenser on Driscoll, a ramble

Meh, I thought about seriously engaging that discussion but have wondered if it is even worth the immense amount of time it would take. What I write here will be an utter ramble of the things I have considered in the wake of the point and counterpoint series. Unfortunately Frank Turk's points about Driscoll are basically worthless because he conflates style with substance and doesn't bother to address Driscoll at an exegetical level. If all he's going to do is complain about the style of delivery and not the substance of Driscoll as an exegete Frank's just another blowhard blogger. It's not as though Driscoll is the first pastor to have a brusque way from teh pulpit. Conversely, while I sympathize with Michael Spenser's belief that a blogger like Frank Turk simply isn't in a position to offer a meaningful rebuke to someone like Driscoll I believe that where Driscoll is weak there are no signs he's going to get better any time soon.

At the same time, Driscoll's real weaknesses are weaknesses so many other pastors have I'm hard pressed to say he's somehow not fit to pastor. God has a history of allowing spectacularly flawed leaders retain their position of leadership, after all. Most people who are conservative in their theology obsess about the style rather than the substance, and liberal theologians obsess about the substance (which they disagree with mightily) and find the style makes it that much more offensive to them.

What neither man has time to discuss is that despite the crude delivery Driscoll's biggest problem isn't necessarily that he's vulgar (i.e. common or coarse, and while we're on that Steve Hays indicated that Mordecai Ham proves that there have always been vulgar or coarse spiritual leaders from time to time) but that he's got flaws as an exegete. What liberal Christians and unbelievers observe in Driscoll is what they consider his legalistic holier-than-thou streak and I submit that while I don't agree with the alternative they propose I believe they are actually right in terms of the core of their criticism. Marx was right to diagnose the problem but wrong about his solution.

By what I said earlier about Driscoll I don't mean he doesn't handle scripture properly, he's great at explaining NT literature. He's a sorry excuse for an exegete on Old Testament literature overall, excepting precisely two aspects of the literature, Proverbs and Ecclesiastes. Both of these play more readily to his propositional/expository approach. In other words there's no NARRATIVE and not a great need for a poetic sensitivity, which is good because Driscoll has the world's biggest tin ear for poetry or narrative flow since he's studied the stand-up comics and obviously not storytellers. If you claim that respect for the inspiration and authority of scripture is an all or nothing deal then you're falling for a trap, a false dichotomy believers have. As I've blogged earlier if you say that all scripture is divinely inspired and then despite a decade-long career don't bother to preach from some of it then that stuff in the scriptures that's not important enough to teach from reveals that it's not enough of a priority for you to share with the flock. Ergo Driscoll has a high view of the epistles and OT books that back him up on his pet topics and has a high view of the minor prophets but isn't up to tackling major prophets, psalms, or narrative. I would also propose that Driscoll is a surprisingly staunch teacher of Law rather than Gospel. This is something you don't figure out until you have listened to about a decade of his teaching.

Thing is Driscoll's biggest weaknesses are weaknesses common to many other pastors which blinds both his critics and supporters. Now it's true that he sucks as an exegete of Old Testament literature and he tends to just read his own pet social and sexual agendas on to biblical texts. He did it with Ruth not once but twice (how to get married took precedence over a meaningful discussion of God's love through providence half the time and his best teaching came from focusing on God's providence itself and the subject of bitterness). He did it with Ecclesiastes where he cast himself as Nehemiah, Mars Hill as ISrael returning from exile (really, which) and the renovation of the church as a city within the city as rebuilding the broken down walls. This was just a long sorry excuse for Driscoll to eisegete for about half a year. People who object to how Driscoll handled Song of Songs need to realize that he's had that exegetical approach since practically the dawn of of his pastoral career.

Thing is Driscoll wouldn't be the first pastor I've heard just read himself and his own cause onto an Old Testament narrative book. What is fascinating is that while a pastor like Driscoll would rip on The Prayer of Jabez being used as a way to rationalize God's favor for a given project that is nevertheless exactly what Driscoll did with the whole book of Nehemiah. Just because one author proposed universalizing the application of Jabez beyond warrant doesn't mean Driscoll didn't essentially do the same thing by casting himself as Nehemiah. The principle is the same, you read yourself onto a biblical figure and thereby justify yourself as having the same divine warrant to basically do whatever you already want to do. Driscoll doesn't have the place to criticize Joel Osteen's health and wealth approach to the good news if he has, in turn, rationalized himself to be Nehemiah as though Mars Hill were Israel returning after decades in exile.

All this is to say that if a blogger like Frank Turk wants to make a serious case that Driscoll needs to repent of sin the case should not be that he has a crude approach to joking about sexuality but should make the case that Driscoll takes a dangerously low view of scripture when he's not handling apostolic writings (e.g. NT literature). Based on Turk's critique of Driscoll I doubt he's competent enough as a biblical scholar or as someone who has paid sufficient attention to Driscoll's teaching to have anything useful to say.

What we need to remember is that David stayed on the throne for a good long time even after doing things that warranted capital punishment. He was not killed for abusing his royal power to take a man's wife and then kill that man. He was not killed for anything. He was allowed to retain royal power for much of his life and while there was an insurrection foretold by the Lord through Nathan this did not mean David was considered completely unfit to lead God's people. This means that even if Driscoll never repents of something Frank Turk thinks he should repent of it doesn't mean Driscoll is not fit to be a pastor. Conversely, given Turk's series on church-leaving he would be obliged for the sake of consistency of self to say no one should leave Mars Hill even if Driscoll is constantly sinning because Frank Turk has a Catholic view of ecclesiology and the sacraments--e.g. as long as the sacraments (whichever they are) are administered the character flaws of the people who mediate the sacraments are not important. So gay bishops would suit Frank just fine, I guess, but it's not my interest to reconcile the logical and scriptural loopholes in Frank Turk's ecclesiology or sacramentology.

On the other hand, I would say that Spenser may not live long enough to hold his breath for Driscoll to change his tune and substance about gender roles and sex. Driscoll was seeing holy blow jobs and wifely stripteases in Song of Songs as far back as 1999 and no one corrected his tone or content or exegesis back then. I would propose that no one has adequately addressed the incoherence in Driscoll's view of the scriptures that flows as a natural consequence of how he does and doesn't exegete Song of Songs. Christ said that all the scriptures point to Him and that the scriptures said what had to happen to the Son of Man. This means that in Driscoll's view all scripture properly interpreted points to Christ and that would of necessity point to the Song of Songs having to point to Christ. Yet despite the fact that Driscoll affirms the metaphor of Christ as groom and Church as bride in Revelation, Ephesians, and all the prophetic literature he explicitly rejects that metaphor and typology in Song of Songs so that Jesus isn't gay. What no one as yet has pointed out is that this reveals an incoherent view of a recurring view of metaphor across scripture. Driscoll rejects in only one book a metaphor/typology that he accepts everywhere else it appears in Scripture. If the groom/Christ metaphor was good enough for Jonathan Edwards and Richard Sibbes and Driscoll loves the Puritans why reject what they affirm? I wrote elsewhere that the only solution Driscoll has out of this trap he's set up for himself is to say that Song of Songs wasn't scripture at the time Jesus spoke, an option he's not likely to take. That means that despite the clear statements by gospel authors that the scriptures point to Christ and that all the scriptures do so Driscoll has to make an exception for the Song of Songs that demonstrates that he has to either explain how Jesus wasn't referred to in Song of Songs or explain how Song of Songs is not really scripture like the other scriptures.

The real question behind this question is whether Driscoll has a consistently high view of scriptures throughout in terms of their pointing to Christ or whether he sets aside some scriptures as not really pointing to Christ. People have partly addressed Driscoll's failure to discuss God's love for His people (Piper, Mahaney) but people have not addressed Driscoll's failure to deal with biblical poetry as a whole or his cavalier approach to biblical narrative or his omission of dealing with major prophets. Driscoll as yet may simply lack the training and knowledge to field this, in which case it's right to wait for him to develop the competence as a biblical scholar to get to those things. In this respect Spenser is right and Turk is irrelevant.

As I wrote earlier, Driscoll is not demonstrably a very responsible or thoughtful exegete of Old Testament literature once you get out of Ecclesiastes and Proverbs. Genesis was another exception that proved the rule.

So while I get why Spenser hopes Driscoll will improve on subjects like sex and gender roles we shouldn't expect that. With mentors like Piper Driscoll's brand of complementarianism won't change precisely because his mentors hold sufficiently similar views that Driscoll will feel pretty safe saying stay-at-home dads deserve church discipline. He probably still feels guilty for letting his wife work to financially support them in the earlier days of the ministry and lets that cloud his judgment about 1 Timothy 5.

The problem with Turk is he can't be bothered to engage Driscoll's exegesis and the problem with Spenser is he's hoping that what hasn't changed in Driscoll after 13 years will change. He's right that Driscoll has things he needs to repent of but misses the boat entirely as to what the most pressing problems are, problems that have been more saliently addressed by John Piper (Driscoll sucks at talking about the love of Christ for His people) or Mahaney (Driscoll isn't humble). Some things, like Driscoll's bitterness toward people he considers foes, Driscoll has simply alluded to and only recently, possibly without anyone even mentioning this to him, certainly not Frank Turk or Michael Spenser.

Both men have valuable ideas about what is and isn't so cool about Driscoll but in the end I don't think they are the people who can offer a meaningful constructive criticism of Driscoll either way. I agree with Spenser that Turk's case of Driscoll's sin is essentially pointless. I also believe that while Turk is right that Driscoll needs to repent of sins Turk fixates on the lowest and dumbest aspects of what he considers Driscoll's sins to be and doesn't demonstrate a serious enough of a mind to engage Driscoll's real pastoral and exegetical weakness. Spenser may be right that Driscoll's attitudes about gender roles and family may be tilting toward legalistic nonsense but with mentors like John Piper this obviously won't change.

This last part gets to a thing I noticed at Mars Hill, namely that fanboyism kicks in and the harshness of the leader inspires the followers to take a similarly dismissive path. It's not Driscoll's fault that Mars Hill men could be proud, dismissive jerks as though it were his fault but he knows (now) that he set the example for them to follow. What he doesn't seem aware of is that they will not just follow his example in terms of pride and dismissiveness towards insufficiently "masculine" conceptions of church or doctrine but will also tend to co-opt his sloppiness as a scholar on Old Testament literature.

Driscoll is, I believe, called to be a pastor, but as I have said a few times the tension between Driscoll the person and Driscoll the persona is still a potentially huge long-term threat and nowhere will this be more apparent than in how scholarly he is or isn't in his pet subjects of marriage, sex, and family. He is in sporadic places getting some serious and constructive cricitism about his weaknesses and, obviously, I don't see any of that constructive criticism coming from Frank Turk, who isn't capable of it. Conversely, Michael Spenser also doesn't look like he'll be a source of heavy constructive criticism and he's smart enough to know that no one will care what he thinks at Mars Hill anyway so why bother?

Too many of the handful of folks offering criticism of Driscoll's flaws on-line have tended to be of the ex-member variety who are so burned by him or his leadership team they are incapable of seeing the good because they themselves were part of so much of the bad but respect for privacy means I won't belabor that point beyond a general observation. It's tougher to rake Driscoll over the coals for brutality in church discipline if you exemplified it yourself or saw fit to make yourself a self-appointed thought-constable on patrol. I used to be part of a team like that and rather than attempt to out-do people within that game I have been struggling to just not play that game.

Someone on the blogsophere mentioned that Driscoll employed special pleading to make a dishonest point. Special pleading is arguably one of the biggest long-term problems that not only Driscoll has but lots of people currently, formerly, and presently at Mars Hill. For instance Driscoll has long since his calling eliminated the incoherency of pleading his divine calling from God while joking that OTHER people who claim divine visions or dreams must have just had bad pizza.

The long-term problem is that Driscoll's precedent of special pleading isn't being addressed as an overall pattern. He can denounce the culture of pornography in this culture while talking about oral sex from the pulpit. He can simultaneously claim all scripture points to Christ except for Song of Songs. He can't rip on Joel Osteen for selling a false gospel and he can't rip on a Prayer of Jabez book with consistency if he's guilty of the same essential methodological error of reading himself and his own agendas on to Old Testament scripture. He doesn't submit to the scriptures in the Old Testament so much as he forces them to say what he wants them to say and this is a very, very serious problem, a problem that, nevertheless, is fairly typical of pastors. We can't be great at everything and we shouldn't pretend we're great at everything in expounding on scripture. Neither Spenser or Turk could stand any chance of observing this pattern and the only reason I've noticed it is because I've heard a decade of Driscoll preaching and have begun to notice the pattern, and I have also noticed my own weakness in appreciating the Psalms and some other parts of scripture. I don't offer this criticism of Driscoll as someone who doesn't suck but as someone newly discovering his own failures in appreciating and understanding some of the scriptures that Driscoll, frankly, shouldn't be preaching or teaching from until he gains more competence in exegeting Hebrew texts (Targum Neofiti really doesn't count).

I both believe that Spenser is too optimistic and Turk is too pessimistic and that Christ is able to display this. I can share Spenser's optimism that Driscoll is eventually going to get better not because there is evidence for it but because Jesus is risen. I can trust that Driscoll will figure out he needs to repent of this or that sin but not the sins Turk is obsessed with but the ones the Lord will lead him to repent of. The Lord loves to use liars and braggers and murderers and adulterers and people with delusions of grandeur who brag about their dreams and cowards and cranky hermits. The people who blog on the sidelines are not the people (for the most part) who have been in the fray, in flesh and blood, at and around Mars Hill.

Finally I'm stating the obvious, two guys practically on the other side of the country blogging pro and con about Driscoll is just two guys blogging about people they've never met. One of them understands how pointless that finally is and the other doesn't. I'm willing to return the favor by doing for them what they've done for Driscoll. Ultimately God probably has better ways to either approve or disapprove of Driscoll's life and teaching than through bloggers and Driscoll knows this better than anyone. It doesn't mean people can't or shouldn't blog and that there is no possibility for speaking the truth through blogging, I just have my doubts about how effectively speaking the truth with love is going to happen that way.

WHy write my blog entry? Well, I hope that's obvious. As much as Spenser and Turk have gone back and forth on Driscoll I figure someone who has had some actual connection to Mars Hill can contribute something. I don't think insiders alone have insight but I also think too many outsiders have acted as though they know the score. None of us really do, only God knows all things. I'm adding my perspective in case, for some reason, God might choose to use it but I also can't say that makes it valuable.