an update on writing in general and life

I have intended to write a lot, and I do mean a lot. I have, however, had to deal with real-world, off-line concerns about my vision. Back when I discovered I had cataracts I was grateful it was "just" cataracts I've had for a decade or more. But that was before I found out two doctors think it would be a very good idea for me to have the cataracts removed. By the way, I'm still unemployed. Nevertheless, I am attempting to do what I can to see if I can get cataract removal surgery.

The last time I had a major problem with my eyes was some fifteen years ago when the macula of my right eye detached. I've never had things go wrong with my eyes at particularly wonderful or opportune moments. Not that there are GOOD times to have things like growing cataracts or macular detachments but I've had what have felt like the worst times to have these kinds of things happen to me. When you already have been unemployed for 23 months and nobody seems interested in hiring you and you're not sure what you're doing wrong that makes nobody want to hire you finding out that your vision is failing (again) can be depressing. Perhaps in an unfortunate way there's a peculiar value to this kind of experience to provide a perspective in some of the stuff I have been trying to write.

Such writing as I can bring myself to do under the circumstances has mostly been devoted to a few running comments discussions but, more importantly, in attempting to keep producing new material for Mockingbird. The DCAU project is still on-going. In fact I haven't gotten to the stuff that most excites me until just now. I wrote about Superman this year, and about 1980s cartoons and how many of them stunk. I have been writing on Batman: the animated series and going back and forth with David over at Mockingbird on finding the right way to explore several themes but to do so in a way that is compact and readable.

This project has exploded in scale and scope since we first kicked around the idea of an overview of the DC animated universe some time around last christmas. All things considered this is no surprise, I've been attempting to summarize what now amounts to close to twenty years of narrative continuity surrounding some of the most beloved characters in the history of American pop culture. Along the way I have struggled a lot to discern and articulate what I believe are the core themes and concepts in some wonderful shows.

I normally try to steer clear of stating things in personal ways when I blog. This hasn't kept some of my family members from saying that I blog about stuff they'd never feel comfortable writing about in public but I have frequently seen what I share here as more ideas than feelings, more ruminations than a lot of personal history. There's plenty about myself and my life I don't discuss. However, I have realized along the path of writing about the DC animated universe for Mockingbird that there have been some significant points where how I have written about cartoons is informed by my life in ways I hadn't previously stopped to consider.

Let me take what I wrote about Superman as an American icon at war both with and for his legacies. Superman/Clark Kent is not just the last son of Krypton but the son of an American farming family. He is, to put it in a tacky and perhaps outdated way, the product of two races. He has two legacies. Well, that I'm even alive is due to the result of an interracial marriage. Unsurprisingly this has informed me in all sorts of ways I hadn't stopped to consider but I have, at least, realized, that the reason I've come to love Superman: the animated series as much as I do is because Dini and Timm got a thread to tie together Superman stories that I can relate to, the opportunities and challenges of figuring out who you are when there's not strictly one heritage you could be (or should be) defined by.

Superman spends a lot of time doing battle with rogues who believe that their own race ought to be given priority at the expense of others, whether it's Jax-Ur and Mala choosing to subjugate humanity to preserve the Kryptonian race and their sense of entitlement that goes with that, or Lex Luthor's suspicion of Superman as the Kryptonian who comes and plots to subvert everything he loves about his society and his position in it. Superman could be considered the ultimate illegal immigrant that Lex Luthor thinks has no right living in America. :)

And then there's Batman. I have been looking forward to writing about Batman: the animated series for months and now the moment of truth has come and it's kicking my butt like I'm Riddler and Batman just outsmarted my last, best deathtrap. I wrote "moment of truth" a sentence ago but it would be more apt to say there is a process of truth. It's helped that I've read Grant Morrison's book Supergods with help from a generous friend, but when Morrison writes that Batman is a character that lacks originality but makes up for that lack with soul and staying power I think that fairly opens up the question of what that soul and staying power consist of. Setting aside that I think Morrison's kinda crazy (yet another thing I will blog about later, maybe) I think that Morrison's on to something when he says that there has always been something of madness to Batman and his quest. Morrison is spot on in saying all of Batman's villains are embodiments of mental illness. But what about Batman himself?

This is all, by now, obviously a teaser rather than a spoiler for what I've been working on for Mockingbird. I don't intend to give away everything but I am willing to throw in a potential spoiler by providing a title for the upcoming series. Loyal readers (all twenty of you?) keep your eyes peeled and before too long you should start seeing some installments of my next series for Mockingbird--Batman: The Agony of Loss and the Madness of Desire. You probably can't quite imagine how stoked I am about this project or how daunting it is.

And Jamie Munson has stepped down from executive eldership

http://blog.marshill.com/2011/09/06/important-letters-from-pastors/

Yeah, I saw this ... though I confess I have more pressing things to consider in many ways. When Driscoll says Munson has always been above reproach I wonder if he just pretends that Munson never said "There are no righteous poor in America" way back in 2002. Somebody told Munson that was a skunk thing to say because a week afterward Munson said "There are righteous poor in America," and then with a slight smirk in his voice, "I just don't think there are very many of them." Thanks, Jamie, it was nice to hear you thought there were at least some righteous poor in America after someone obviously talked to you about your categorical denial from the previous week.

Then again, considering that one of the big spiritual influences in Munson's life has been Mark "The real issue under a lot of issues" Driscoll what chance did the guy have? It's not like Driscoll thought he actually had to apologize for this year's bit about effeminate worship leaders. For that matter a lot of Driscoll's apologies have amounted to "I'm sorry that I said something that was offensive to you." The apologies have not always been of the "I was wrong to have said or even thought what I just said." Driscoll's not even the only person I've met who is a master of the "I'm sorry you're offended but not for what I said" apology; one of the other masters of the form has sworn off churches without realizing he shares the non-apologetic trolling nature of the church leader for which he's sworn off churches. Anyway, with a spiritual mentor like Driscoll around would it have been any surprise Munson would go from "There are no righteous poor in America" to "there just aren't very many of them"?

But I don't see any reason to subscribe to a conspiracy theory that Munson got the boot. He may have really resigned. I don't have much to say here on this blog about that. I know people make mistakes and I mention some because not all mistakes are intentional. I do think it is useful to keep in mind that despite a propensity in neo-Calvinist land to assume sin is motivated by pride and is conscious that a lot of sins are motivated by fear and are inadvertant. Since I have written at such length on that elsewhere in this blog I won't repeat myself too much there.

I do, however, have something to say about "The numbers aren't important but we're restructuring to reach the next growth barrier." When Driscoll blogs this it's a puzzle. I have said for years that my concern about Mars Hill (back when I was an attender and now even when I'm not) has been simple--the church has a history of committing to exponential growth of a sort that constantly outstrips 1) the competence of its leadership and infrastructure and 2) the stability of a well-cultivated donor base.

When the Lake City campus closed due to a diffusion of church members to both church plants and Anchor Church (don't misunderstand me, I REALLY like the folks I know at Anchor, they're wonderful people) it pretty much proved my point. A church that devotes itself to non-stop growth will do so at the expense of the financial viability of campuses. I've seen friends lose jobs because Mars Hill couldn't simultaneously afford to keep them employed while pursuing new campuses and renovating existing properties. For a few years in a row I'd hear news of a wave of lay-offs due to not making budget all while the pastors kept up the growth strategy. In terms of church growth it can come off like the pursuit of a "too big to fail" church in a recession that may be double dipping into a depression for all we know.

But Driscoll assures us the numbers aren' t important, though he has a vision of 25,000 people. You know what? That makes about as much sense as some guy telling me, "Hey, I don't have to marry a woman who looks like a supermodel ... but I want the girl I marry to look kinda like so-and-so [insert name of supermodel here]." There was a guy who used to say he wanted to marry a woman with measurements along the lines of 36-32-36 who wore a size 7 dress and had a D cup. God only knows how such a woman could exist in real life. My brother met this guy and once asked aloud where they even make such women and a woman he was friends with said, "You're right, they make those kinds of women." But I've already written about the kind of man who can aspire to that sort of woman as his ideal who then complains about the shallowness of women. Well, if Driscoll can keep shilling his stuff I can try to emulate his example. If you'd like to read an article by an actual nobody talking about the plight of nobodies who have discovered they're never going to be even as famous as the nobody who wants to tell you about somebody ...

http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2011/07/roy-baumeister-disposability-of-men-and.html

Link: Open letter to the Child Star of PastorMark TV

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/alisaharris/2011/09/to-the-child-star-of-pastormark-tv/

Years ago Mark Driscoll said that the sign of an errant pastor was that when you'd go to look for the pastor's church the pastor's name was the domain name for the church. Okay, fair point, I suppose.

 

 

So what am I then supposed to make of Pastor Mark TV? What am I to make of Driscoll presenting his daughter Ashley as a model for other Christian teenage girls to emulate?

 

 

Spit take, this is how stories like that of Francis and Frank Schaeffer may begin. I've never met Ashley so it's not like I assume this is an inevitable outcome but Driscoll and company have been using Ashley at convenient times for years and at some point she may look back on these moments with, if not regret or anger, at the least some ambivalence.

 

 

Let's take the cutesy photo of Ashley smiling in Reformission Rev from 2006 with the caption "Thank you for buying my daddy's book." If prompted any child who loves her parents might say something like this and it may be harmless as far as things go ... but, it can also be taken as a sign that where public relations, image-promotion, and branding go that Ashley has been a useful PR/marketing tool for Mark Driscoll's image as father and family man. He wouldn't even be the first dad I've come across who has used his children as a point for boasting about the rightness of his ideas, ideals, and practices. He's just more obvious about it.

 

 

Now Driscoll fans have wanted to have things both ways. It's fine for him to be a celebrity preacher and say crazy stuff to get people's attention and say this is focusing on the "real" issues. So it's fine to say the author of The Shack is promoting heresy and say that because calling out false teaching is a public matter Matthew 18 doesn't apply. If Driscoll invites people to share stories about the most effeminate anatomically male worship leaders out there then people say he's confronting a real problem in the church. Driscoll himself will say that he's dealing with the "real" issue under a lot of issues. If Driscoll says that video games are stupid pursuits of vicarious victories that don't matter in contrast to building a legacy for Jesus (which, of course, we must assume he thinks he's doing) then Driscoll fans will come up with a way to exegete Driscoll's rant against video games as a way of saying he isn't saying video games are stupid so they can keep playing video games; the idea that Driscoll has pursued stupid vicarious victories that don't matter by watching a single baseball game just wouldn't compute.
 

Then the other shoe drops and Driscoll fanboys told MacArthur he needed to contact Driscoll privately abou this concerns and John MacArthur pointed out that he'd been doing that for some time. So when Driscoll rips into some public figure by name or by implication he's either speaking the truth or else he's doind something like engaging culture. When people speak up against Driscoll the fans tend to get nervous or angry because these people just don't know Driscoll's heart. Strange how they so readily know the heart of others. Since the heart is deceitful above all things I'm not quite sure why anyone trusts his or her own heart, let alone presumes to speak up with certainty about what's in the heart of another.
 

Now this is not hypocrisy because hypocrisy is advocating a standard that you don't live up to or even try to obtain yourself. There's a difference between hypocrisy and having a double standard. When I observe Driscoll fanboys I don't see a case of hypocrisy in which Driscoll is actually immune from criticism--Driscoll has at times conceded his critics have important things to tell him. What I observe in Driscoll fanboys is a double standard. They excuse in Driscoll what they cannot tolerate for twenty seconds in someone else because they judge Driscoll by a different set of criteria than what they apply to other people.
 

So if Ed Young Jr. or Benny Hinn or some other pastor outside neo-Calvinist land had his fourteen year old daughter contributing blog entries to a website named after the pastor how would neo-Calvinists take this. What if, say, Casey Treat had a child posting comments about what it's like to follow Jesus and be a kid in today's culture? How would Driscoll fans react to that? Is there some reason Driscoll can take his wife on tour to promote a book he wrote with her but Ed Young is crazy for having a sermon series on sex where he sits on a bed with his wife? Driscoll and his wife fielded questions on anal sex so this looks like a distinction without a difference ... or at least it would be if no double standards were ever involved.
 

You can think of it this way, once a person becomes a public figure libel and slander laws become far more lenient. I shouldn't really have to spell out what this means, do I? I don't think we really need to spell out how this could apply to a teenage girl of any kind? By bringing his wife Grace and his daughter Ashley on to Pastor Mark TV and by creating a book with Grace and setting up a thing like a "Real Marriage" tour for 2012 Driscoll is putting his wife and daughter into the public sphere as public figures.
 

If, as he indicated during some of his spiritual warfare talks in 2008, Driscoll screens emails so Grace doesn't get to see some of the nasty stuff that might be said (because she's sensitive about that stuff), why bring Grace into the public sphere herself? Maybe she's developed a thicker skin in the last four years? Okay, she's an adult. Ashley is still a minor. Minors who are children of controversial public figures and celebrities get things said about them. Let me rattle off a few non-random examples: Bristol Palin, Chelsea Clinton, George W. Bush (technically he fits), Frank Schaeffer (again). Then there are the famous child stars I don't really need to mention. Alisa Harris has a point worth considering, a man who would seek to protect his wife and family would have a legitimate basis for refusing or postponing a daughter's request to blog about how other people should live and using herself as an example just because she sees daddy doing it so much of the time.

 

 

And at the risk of indulging in my fondness for N. T. Wright (who I know for certain Driscoll has read), in the book Jesus & the Victory of God, Wright points out that the Pharisees were not people with tons of formal political power. Some of them, yes, had substantial influence but they were in many cases public figures by dint of their passion for the Torah and Israel's identity. THey could be likened in many cases to journalists and pundits. Or, to borrow Driscollian vernacular, people blog. Now if it is bad for people who are self-appointed experts on how other people should live why invite one's daughter to join the Christian blogosphere at such a young age? Not to speak too dismissively but the most brilliant fourteen-year-old is still a fourteen-year old. If our Lord Himself did not enter into public ministry until he was in his thirties as is traditionally described what's wrong with suggesting that a boy or girl imitate Jesus and wait a bit before deciding to jump into the public speaking and teaching game?
 

Now I'm not saying kids can't or shouldn't get before the public and do things they love to do. I mean, I own too many Hilary Hahn albums to make some categorical statement like that! I also own too many Stevie Wonder albums to say that a talented child shouldn't be out there doing things to entertain people and enrich their lives. At the risk of seeming like a callous person, does Driscoll think he has a Hilary Hahn or a Stevie Wonder on his hands in the form of Ashley Driscoll? Is she that comparable level of great, brilliant, and disciplined? Is she that great at theologian? Paternal affection is frequently cool and all but that doesn't mean that Ashley Driscoll is ready to have a primetime slot.
 

Okay, you know, if she did a discourse on problems in Nestorianism or unpacked the significance of allegations of Montanism in contemporary Pentecostal thought then MAYBE I would grant she's the theological whiz kid Driscoll has bragged about from the pulpit. But even if she is, what is the value in having her out on the internet now where, as the daughter of a public figure megachurch pastor, she will be inculcated into the same pasttime and vocation. The trouble is that if she doesn't go crazy at some point like teenagers will do she could just be getting groomed to be a Pharisee of Pharisees.

 

 

If that doesn't happen, Ashley Driscoll is still wading into the realm of blogging and being the celebrity pastor's kid. Given how the internet has a habit of bringing out a lot of peoples', er, not-so-inner Driscoll quipper mentality, is putting Ashley into this cyber-world at the age of fourteen a particularly great idea? Obviously I don't personally think it is. She's not my kid, you may say, I grant that, too. It's just that, well, I saw the picture of Ashley with that caption "Thank you for buying my daddy's book" and I thought it was cheesy, manipulative, and kitsch back in 2006. I don't yet see giving Ashley a platform to show off the great theology her daddy thinks she has as a fourteen year old is necessarily any different. It's a way for Driscoll to brag about how your family should be like his family but it doesn't mean Ashley deserves or needs to be part a new website shilling Driscoll stuff that she contributes to chiefly on the basis of nepotism.

 

 

I can't really overstate this concern--if this wasn't the fourteen year old daughter of a celebrity megachurch pastor who's gunning for 25,000 members even though numbers don't matter, would anyone give a crap what the fourteen year old girl had to say about theology? If this were just a fourteen year old girl nobody had heard of who had a father nobody had heard of no one would even know she was in a position to write. To be a Driscoll-level of blunt about this, the only reaoson Ashley Driscoll would have any platform at all is due to plain old nepotism and at this tender age in her life Driscoll has more to benefit from having Ashley blog than Ashley will gain from it unless Driscoll's going to use Ashley's blogging as a way to invite instructive and constructive criticism to her about how to make a sustained argument. Like anyone who would read a Pastor Mark Driscoll's daughter blog is likely to be allowed to do that anyway.

 

 

Once it's on the internet it can stay up there for a long time. Consider that there are folks who still remember Pussified Nation. If anything it would be useful if one day Ashley Driscoll could grow up to see Pussified Nation and see the kinds of stuff William Wallace II wrote. If there was something Driscoll can look back on (and should) to tell Ashley about what to do and not do on internet discussion he could turn to Pussified Nation from the unmoderated Midrash and say, "Honey, whatever you do, don't do what I did."
 

Nah, in Reformission Rev he sold his actions as necessary to get the young men in line. Oh, that'd be the other 20-something men who thought they were going to change the world. If Driscoll makes any claim to have regretted started into ministry too soon and before he was really ready then it would be on the basis of THAT that letting Ashley become a celebrity blogger by nepotistic proxy ... on the basis of that he might just be a teensy bit of a hypocrite. Or maybe just a double standard.

 

 

I guess I should look forward to Ashley Driscoll's review of William Gurnall's The Christian in Full Armour then. Or maybe her review of the cases for and against paedobaptism and why she thinks Calvin was wrong to advocate paedobaptism. If Driscoll was serious in saying a lot of young people are wrongly and idolatrously obsessed with the Christian conference scene why is he not only going on a tour with his wife to promote a book on "Real Marriage", but also assimilating Ashley into the borg-like world of neo-Calvinist blogging? I mean, if I had a life, which I don't quite have, I might blog a whole lot less. But Mark assures us that his baby girl is a great theologian and who am I to doubt his paternal affection?

Links from Mockingbird: The imcompetent bloodshed of the Locavore and inauthentic authenticity

http://www.mbird.com/2011/09/choking-the-chicken-a-locavores-lament/

http://www.mbird.com/2011/09/inauthentic-authenticity-and-the-best-way-to-sell-yourself/
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/11/fashion/for-only-the-authentic-cultural-studies.html?_r=2&pagewanted=1

Two separate blog entries but their overlap is intriguing. I do not value authenticity so much as I value honesty. Authenticity is not really, to put it crudely, a Christian virtue or any virtue at all. Authenticity is simply the fruit of your life growing on the vines or branches for people to observe. You will always be authentic but you may be an authentic honest person or an authentic liar or an authentic ditherer.

A quest for a locavore lifestyle is a sort of Seattle thing. It does not confer upon a person a connection to 'real' or 'authentic' living. If anything it is, within Seattle, an extension of a kind of consumeristic obsession with status that speaks not of authenticity or simplicity but of a luxury of convenience that leaves a gap that permits the person aspiring to locavorism to see himself or herself as part of a solution to a problem. "Sustainability" is not necessarily a terrible thing but in our day and place it is more realistically described not as a vocation but as a hobby that aspires to an authenticity that in earlier epochs arose from the bluntest pragmatic and practical concerns.

Recycled material: Meditation on John 1:1-5

O Word of God who formed the sun,
Who formed the billions and the one;
O God, the Word, who made all things,
Whose praise the universe still sings;
Our origin and end you are
And in all things we prove your power.
Of you we can't be over-awed
O Word who is true God with God.

O Life who is the fount of life
In spurning you we loved our strife,
Your breath is how we came to breathe,
Your health our sickness will relieve;
Your blood makes our dead hearts to beat
And makes our withered hands complete;
O Life of Life you can decree
That e'en the blindest eye may see.

O Light that makes the cosmos shine
Please fill our minds with light divine,
That with yourself our hearts may glow
And you our darkness overthrow.
O Light in whom no shadow lies
Give sight to all our blinded eyes
That we may see you are the Word,
True Life and Light to all the world.

I wrote this poem between January and March 2007 and posted it in March of `07. It took months of work and was a slow and steady process. If it weren't obvious already I had been immersing myself in a lot of the poetry of John Donne around the same time I was reading John's Gospel. I tried setting the poem to music but never successfully made any music that I felt properly fit or set the text. I trust it's obvious that I was (and would be) going for a simple four-part chorale/hymn setting. I'm simply a competent poet, if even that, but since my church is heading into a series on John and since I wrote this poem inspired by reflecting on the famous first five verses of that gospel I thought I'd repost this.

You may notice a slight change or two if you compare this version to the version I originally posted. The differences are small but not subtle. I made the revisions I made (if you read the original, can you spot them?) so as to avoid what I considered to be overly synergistic implications in the original form of the poem. In case you hadn't noticed it in my blog entries since 2006 I kinda care about theological stuff. :)

list of things to write about later.

In Christianese parlance this is so you dear readers can "hold me accountable".

I am interested in writing a bit about Michael Card's lecture on Job from years ago, particularly about his observation that the book of Job as a character drama shows us Job attempting to complete a lament offered to God that is constantly interrupted by his friends who insist on correcting Job's theology. I could write a lot about that but I feel I should save that for later.

I am interested in writing about Scheibe's polemic against the music of Bach and how that connects, in its tangential way, to the polemics of northern German music critics against Haydn later in the same century. Say what? Well, criticisms of Bach and Haydn are instructive because 18th century criticisms shed light on a shift in 19th century perspective regarding Bach and Haydn. I hope to get to the question of what is "authentic" and how 19th century musicians and scholars had some diffidence about Haydn because he wrote for the Man (a royal court) and Bach wrote for the Church. Both were happy to do what amounted to work-for-hire yet both were so collosally influential their work was unavoidable.

I want to eventually tackle how in a post-20th century musical world in the West we are at a point where no more rules can really be broken and we can take up what Cuban guitarist and composer Leo Brouwer considered the important musical revolution musical academia has mostly failed to address, fusion. I plan to suggest down the road (as I already have) that in such a setting a Mozart or a Beethoven is not likely to be a composer who matters in our time, or maybe even a Stravinsky. The composers who have made works that have really resonated in pop culture (and not necessarily academic culture) are folks like John Williams, popular composers whose path to a willing audience has been through integration and assimilation, fusion in other words. When we consider the fusion of white and black American music that led to rock and roll this is not very surprising but it would take a lot of time to explore.

I have more I wish to write about "I see things" down the road and about some points I consider cessationists to have even though I believe the polarity between cessationism and charismatic theology is itself irreducibly problematic. I have come to this view because I have noticed how much both groups try to front load their goals for ecclesiology and liturgical order back on to biblical texts that do not necessarily support either agenda.

But as I was hinting at earlier this week I've still got a lot of work to do writing for Mockingbird. With the twentieth anniversary of Batman: the animated series coming up I still have a lot more work I want to do fleshing out how and why this cartoon was so revolutionary. It may seem like a small thing but Paul Dini and Bruce Timm's Batman is a pop culture character who emerged in the post-Cold War era and transitioned easily into the post 9/11 era. I also have a polemic in the works about Joseph Campbell and how pop cultural artifacts like Transformers and comics and sports become religious/cultural narratives. Trek fans "may" look forward to the case I plan to make for why Star Trek is genuine pop culture mythology while Star Wars is little more than merchandising exploitation of the monomyth as a brand. Real myths and the monomyth are not the same thing but I should save my debt to Jeffrey Burton Russell's cross-cultural examination of the Faust myth as a refutation of Campbell for later.

amidst a certain amount of chaos I am still working on some projects

The last month or so have not been the greatest months in terms of focus. I attended the funeral of a relative; I came home from said funeral of relative to discover my roommates and I had major housecleaning to do that needed taking care of; then the next week was spent trying to figure out if terrible headaches and a decline in vision were something as bad as my doctor feared it might be. The good news was that it wasn't as bad as he feared. The bad news is that I have to have cataract surgery during one of the least opportune times in my life to need it. On the other hand, I live in a city with some potentially great resources for getting help for that kind of thing. I have also been trying to keep the fire alive in hunting for steady employment and had a few job leads I needed to devote time to pursuing.

In the midst of all this I have blogged but more important than blogging has been attempting to get my momentum back for the next phase in my big project for Mockingbird. If you read the end of the last series I did about cartoons and 1980s nostalgia you saw that I was setting things up for a set of pieces on Batman: the animated series. Those are still in process. In fact what I consider to be parts 1 and 2 are almost as big as the entire Superman: the animated series project. There are still three more parts to go. And then as I map out what needs to be tackled for Justice League/Justice League Unlimited there's a mountain of stuff to be written there.

I also have a set of polemical essays about pop culture analysis, problematic views of universal narrative and how Christians can get sucked into these kinds of things as ways of "engaging culture" that are neither very scholarly nor in the long run necessarily helpful to a Christian apologetic. That's not to say these ideas I'll be taking issue with are necessarily "Christian ideas" or that the Christians who make use of them are bad Christians, far from it. In fact several of the people I have known who go in some directions I consider unproductive are some of my favorite Christians I've had the pleasure to know! However my aim is not to be that personal in addressing points of difference with people. My aim is to promote discussion of ideas and art. The points where some brothers and I disagree are not nearly so important as the points where we agree.

But as I alluded to above cataract surgery is going to be a big priority in the next month. I also have been trying to make some time to spend time with friends and family. One of my friends had a pretty bad stroke and has been recuperating. Doctors gave her a poor prognosis and told her kids (all friends of mine, which made the news of her stroke pretty rough to hear) that their mother would not speak again in all likelihood. Well, yesterday I was able to play her music I've written for steel-string guitar and classical guitar and I got to hear her use the word "counterintuitive". He ability to speak is taking time to come back and there's a lot of struggle but considering what the prognosis was a month ago she's had some remarkable recovery.

Here I digress strategically to say that I have come to suspect that part of the scriptural encouragement that we believers weep with those who weep and rejoice with those who rejoice is that this is, in its way, a way to help us realize that the Lord is faithful to provide for fellow believers in times when our prayers for ourselves so often seem to go unanswered.

I do have other things I mean to write about here but I trust you'll all be patient (those of you who actually follow this blog) if I take some time off, kinda, to write about other things. There's actually a lot of stuff I am looking into writing that may make me have to resist writing on this blog like it's the temptation it has sometimes become.

I managed to miss this, this year Driscoll says preachers talk too much about sex

http://www.toddrhoades.com/driscoll-too-much-sex/
http://phoenixpreacher.net/?p=7208

The world's biggest pot has called a couple of kettles black. Why can't he just name Ed Young Jr. already? And didn't Driscoll spend a quarter of a year preaching Song of Songs in 2008, having preached it for a couple of months earlier in 1999? Then there was that sermon from 2002 that has been pulled because it involved discussions of sexual techniques and positions. If Driscoll can say in 2011 preachers talk too much about sex is that because he and his wife have finished their book about marriage and because this fall we're going to get Driscoll's next platform for pontificiating about gender? Prior to Driscoll's extended glosses on Song of Songs I would never have imagined that Song of Songs chapters 7 and 2 were about wifely stripteases and oral sex.

I mean, what is it with this guy? I had an agnostic friend in my college days who felt sheepish laughing at mention of the word 69 around me and he knew I was a Christian. Then he felt sheepish about explaining why it was so funny in the context of a Monty Python song. That nonbeliever showed more discretion in talking about sex with a Christian than Driscoll did. I don't wish to get into Driscoll levels of detail but whatever helps Driscoll intended to be for all those already-married guys who want better sex lives, for bachelors, this bachelor anyway, there was a bunch of too much information that I can't quite forget. I will eventually because the human brain is not like a computer or a file case with unlimited space. Stuff gets lodged from the memory eventually.

I mean in break-out sessions for men in 2001-2002 he'd talk about which condoms had spermicides that were unhealthy and I went from being interested in themens' training sessions to wondering, "When am I going to get information I can use?" I don't want information about condoms or spermicides or what has apparently turned into the never-ending question from guys to Driscoll over the years about anal sex. Where before I had some chance of reading Song of Songs and seeing it as in some way referring to Christ post-Driscoll sermons Song of Songs is readable only as Hebrew erotica. In Driscoll's eager hands it became what in my crankiest moments I have referred to as Christian porn, months and months of discourses on wifely stripteases and holy blowjobs and various positions. Even one of my married friends confided to me that despite his being married he found the series to be useless.

When I heard Driscoll via video chuckle and talk about how pastors talk about sex too much from the pulpit I almost snorted in a mixture of disbelief and indignation. If Driscoll thinks pastors are using sex in gimmicky ways he's chief among sinners. It's not as though Peasant Princess, a quarter-year series in 2008, wasn't perfectly timed a year after Paul Petry and Bent Meyer were fired in a controversial set of decisions related to the Mars Hill by-laws. It's not as though Peasant Princess didn't come after the Doctrine series in 2008 where the pulpit was transformed into a platform for going through new membership materials so that all interested parties could become members on-line. Driscoll said at one point in a Gospel Coalition interview that 1,000 members bailed because of the increased doctrinal standards. What increased doctrinal standards? A harder line on complementarianism? Nope, still women deacons. But a lot of members left after Paul Petry and Bent Meyer were fired.

A lot of members also left when the elders finally conceded that the big second Ballard campus purchased circa 2005 couldn't be zoned for anything but industrial use. The rest of us ex-members began to do the math and realized that about 1.5 million of church member gifts was dumped into a boondoggle around the same time the pastors very reluctantly conceded that two counseling pastors were fired in the midst of a political battle over church polity. But I do not doubt that in Mark's mind he really believes (now) that 1,000 members left over that stuff. But not everyone even "left". Some people resigned their memberships only to discover they weren't going to be allowed to resign their memberships. Others just never renewed their memberships because renewing a "covenant" every two or three years just starts to feel weirdly skeezy. If the church membership covenant is likened to the covenant of marriage some of us church members who had to keep renewing the covenant over and over again to retain membership began to feel, dare I suggest this, like paying consorts.

So when in 2008 Peasant Princess came on with its quasi anime intro and the weird colors and the months of talking about sex, Driscoll could talk about how fast the church was growing. Huh, it's almost as though there were a science to it all. Maybe, just maybe, Driscoll set up Peasant Princess as a kind of sweeps week to draw in more fish to more than make up for the ones that left because they felt betrayed by a sense that Mars Hill displayed fiscal imcompetence in real estate investment and a lack of transparency in the blunt resolution of political fights? So when Driscoll tells Todd Rhoades that some of the preachers talking about sex get crazy with this pastor talking with his wife on a bed on a stadium it's just ...

God, I don't get it. What is it with these preachers who can sell themselves like Barnum & Bailey and then get on the high horse about other pastors using sex as a topic from the pulpit in gimmicky ways? If any preacher could be cited as a suspect in blatantly using months of sex-talk as a sweeps week style quest for ratings and buts in the seats to recoup a loss of church membership ... you would think Driscoll could be considered at least a nominee. It surprises even me (and I was at Mars Hill from late 1999 to just before Peasant Princess in 2008) that Mark can act as though OTHER pastors talk too much about sex. If he had just coupled this with an admission of "And I am chief of sinners in using sex-talk as a gimmick to attract people" then, okay, I could take him more seriously again.

And, honestly, I kinda want to be able to take him more seriously again. Watching the institution that is Mars Hill grow is bittersweet for me because in my twenties I thought it was something I could be part of my whole life and watch grow into a church unlike anything I'd come across. Ah ... the naivety and foolishness of youth!

It's an unhappy confession to admit that even I was astonished by what Driscoll said to Todd Rhoades. I guess here I tangentially mention that Zizek claims we should not attempt to take refuge in cynicism. We should be willing to be outraged and upset and consider that something is wrong. Okay, you Marxist weirdo, I'll grant you that just this once.

In some ways seeing stuff like that video with Todd Rhoades God has providentially done me a favor. I have been cautious and skeptical about the idea that a generation can really change the world and make a big impact on things. I like to think this caution is scripturally informed and grounded but when I consider the anger and regret of how sold out I was to Mars Hill as a movement I see in it a humbling process that is useful for my spiritual health. There are all sorts of things wrong with my spiritual life and yet I can be grateful that I have been disabused of a quality I often disliked in the Baby Boomers, a naive hubris that "my" generation was going to fix things. I was able, so I thought, to see this hubris in other people, even other people in my generation, but I was not able to see how it was part and parcel of my own heart, too.

And, frankly, I believe that it is a hubris that is central to the heart of anyone and everyone who not only calls Mars Hill home but chooses to see it first and foremost now as a movement and not an institution. The folks who see it as an institution and a nascent denomination? (surely those must exist). You know what? I'm probably okay with those people. If a person could be pragmatic enough to admit to someone that there's such a thing as a pastoral sweeps week move to pull in new members, I might be able to respect that person a little more.

Rather than just rant against Mars Hill as so many bloggers have done, or rave on its behalf as so many others have done, I keep coming back to Mars Hill despite my desires to set it all aside and move on with my life because, well, let's face it, I don't have a life. I haven't had a job in 23 months. I have no money, I don't even particularly have my health in as much as I have to have a cataract removed and things stink on the job search side of things. I look for job leads and try to network. So I kinda have few places to escape to and the things I could use to escape are ... well, not good choices in most cases. I compose music and I read blogs and wonder if I'm really making proper use of my time. I battle depression and the gnawing sensation that I'm not only useless and disposable but that even the things I love most and seem to be est at are useless things that no one should be making a profession or vocation of. In other words, to borrow Driscoll parlance, I have never felt like the things I wanted to do with my life constituted a "real job" or could.

So I am in a place where I'm close enough and far enough about things Martian that I am continually forced to confront something called ambivalence. There are so very many blogs seething with the purity of for or against that sometimes I wonder if God has in some cruel yet providential way gotten me stuck in this ambivalent point to blog ambivalently for reasons I can't even begin to fathom. I could get angry about something stupid Driscoll has said (yet again) and then be grateful that Mars Hill members have helped me in my time of need. I could get exasperated at the gender roles stuff and the weird vibe of self-righteousness I get from newer members, and then be grateful for a chance to help some long-time Mars Hill friends paint their house and get to know their children a little. I can spend time with former pastors and friends who were shunned by the bureaucracy and church culture as "in sin" and yet I still love spending time with the friends I have made at Mars Hill who are still there.

If I could give any advice, as a man who spent nine years there and still has connections there, never make Mars Hill more than a small part of your life, even if you're in leadership there. My big mistake was pouring my whole self into that place. That was a big mistake. If you pour your whole self into anything that's your idol and despite what bloggers may say, churches can be idols. No self-respecting Protestant can deny the reality of this. If a Protestant blogger can say with a straight face that the Roman church is the whore of Babylon or an apostate church then that Protestant blogger has to concede that ANY church can take the role of an idol, especially the church that really, say, teaches the doctrines of grace, or has it together.

So there's a sense in which Driscoll, when he makes self-serving dissembling dumbass jokes about how OTHER pastors use sex as a gimmick it's a humbling reminder that the Lord, whatever He has in store for me, has kept me both near and far with Mars Hill. The ambivalence is often aggravating and humbling, and humiliating. But as the old school Mars Hill people used to always say, we were about exploring tension.

Matt Redmond notices how a pastor manages to fit his own checklist of false repentance on something

http://mattbredmond.blogspot.com/2011/07/arent-we-ones-who-should-be-for.html
http://theresurgence.com/2010/07/05/7-counterfeits-of-repentance

Fascinatingly, Matt Redmond points out that within days of Driscoll posting his thing about effeminate anatomically male worship leads he was also posting about false repentance and seven different forms it can take. Redmond, interestingly enough, notes that at least 4, 6 and 7 are prominently on display in Driscoll's non-apology about posting about effeminate worship leaders. But by framing "the real issue" as whether gender is designed or constructed 1 and 5 were easily displayed in the non-apology. After all, since there's this crisis of a lack of real men in the church wasn't it necessary to speak up strongly about the problem of effeminate worship leaders?

Now we are all capable of false repentance in all sorts of areas in our lives but if you and I learn any lesson from Driscoll's facebook scuffle this summer may it be this, that as soon as you dump legions of stuff out there and have a high profile it becomes all the easier for people to put together the realization that you or I or Driscoll can simultaneously talk about signs of false repentance while displaying them. Driscoll showed us 1, 4, 5, 6 and 7 in his check list of signs of false repentance. That's not a small matter but I am a small person so my pointing this out is probably just an outworking of personal conviction and observation, all of which may be flawed.

Mark Driscoll, cessationists, and God's love letter to us written by committee

I.e. Mark Driscoll says he sees stuff and Christians and unbelievers alike have lots to say about this:

http://thewartburgwatch.com/2011/08/29/mark-driscoll-i-watch-molestations-and-affairs-in-progress/
http://phoenixpreacher.net/?p=8686#comments
http://hereiblog.com/mark-driscoll-prophetic-dreams-seeing-future/
http://teampyro.blogspot.com/2011/08/pornographic-divination.html

I should mention that most people don't bother to actually source most of Driscoll's statements about spiritual superpowers very accurately. Some statemens he has made come from the 2008 series on Spiritual Warfare (yeah, I did listen to nearly all of it). Other statements are from a "christus victor" sermon that goes all the way back to 2008.

But since Driscoll-preaching 2008 was the great year of recycling whether it was the doctrine series or rehashing stuff from the 2005 Atonement series or letting campus pastors preach through Jonah (they did a good job, actually), and culminating in 2008's quarter-year rerun of Peasant Princess Driscoll critics would do well to recognize that material mentioned in 2008 was frequently material that had been taught in some form or another in the previous nine years. The spiritual warfare marathon was for pastors and leaders and not made available in services. You had to know about it and go looking for it in the audio library in order to find it.

One of the common objections in Team Pyro side of things is that the Spirit couldn't be giving Driscoll these visions because essentially Driscoll says he's shown movies of sexual abuse and affairs and violence. So God divinely siphons hardcore porn into Driscoll's mind and that's spiritual discernment? That doesn't sound like something the Spirit would do. If Driscoll were a true prophet and even a real Christian this couldn't be. Either he's a sideshow salesman of snake-oil or a demonized madman. Driscoll is trotted out as an example of the evils of all continuationist theology. I'm not exactly a continuationist or a cessationist at this point because it strikes me that both sides are essentially playing political and institutional games with the Scriptures to prop up the team they're on that they believe should have more clout. Call that cynical but that's where I'm at.

Considering Driscoll's warnings and lengthy discourses on the perversions of men I must grant Team Pyro and other similar critics a significant point, if Driscoll's so eager to hammer men for sleeping around and watching porno why is it Driscoll claims that God's occasionally downloading the hardest of hardcore stuff into his brain during spiritual counseling sessions? See in my Pentecostal days when someone got the sense the Spirit was showing him or her something things were pretty vague.

Yeah, I already know what both cessationists and atheists would say about that and cessationists have to consider that their being in the same field as the atheist on this is more telling in its way then they are going to admit. The main trouble of a formal cessationist position has been, at its most rudimentary level, building an expectation in Christian life that though we read about miracles and divine guidance in the lives of saints in the scriptures absolutely none of that is for us. Well, the scriptures are for us but everything we get is in the scriptures, which is better than, say, Abraham speaking with God about the city of Sodom, or Moses speaking with Yahweh personally.

You see the reason people like Driscoll can say that cessationism is a road that ultimately leads to atheism is not so much because Driscoll thinks a cessationist like John MacArthur is an atheist. He's a former student of MacArthur's flamboyant, winner-take-all rhetoric, though, so when Driscoll says that the cessationist is basically moving in the direction of atheism (or deism) is because he'z zeroing in on what amounts to a spiritual double standard. We speak confidently about saints in the past, before the canonisation process was done by the still catholic church. But anyone who claims any of those sorts of things may be possible now is basically wrong.

Pentecostalism is rife with all sorts of theological weaknesses but contrary to the claims of various confident cessationists whose goal is merely to make a list of every heresy known to Christendom and draw a straight line through them to modern Pentecostals, the movement began with a dissatisfaction with the deadness of American churches. We can say that while Pentecostalism's "second blessing" pneumatology is deficient and has led to a lot of chaos it would be dishonest historically and in plain old daily life to claim that the average Christian can meaningfully speak about a relationship with God of the sort described in the scriptures.

As Michael Spenser used to put it, there are those of us who are real Christians who don't hear voices in our heads that we are sure are proofs of God's speaking directly to us. As I put it now regarding the cessationist, if the Bible is God's love letter to us then it was a letter put together over thousands of years and overseen in a generation by a committee of people who figured out what manuscripts fit the best description of who Jesus was. The compilation being canonised, we were given the text, those of us who can read anyway, as something we could consult. Given how many people over millenia couldn't read to say that the Bible is God's love letter to us meant that it was for most Christians prior to the printing press a love letter that had to be read to them by someone trained to read. And as love letters go, I suppose it's got the decorum of a love letter a husband would write to his wife that was read to her through either a child or a family servant.

Which gets back to the concerns about Driscoll's super powers. Because, after all, this is all of a piece, it is important to note that many Christians see in the "love letter" analogy how remarkably indirect God is about how He communicates to the vast majority of believers. Anyone who claims to get a special dispensation of spiritual powers has a lot to answer for and rigorous criteria. Of course Driscoll would say he must be meeting those criteria in some way or he wouldn't be getting these things from the Holy Spirit. Of course cessationists say that's precisely what can't be true.

And if it can't, for the sake of discussion, why do American cessationist Protestants spend any time talking about a personal relationship with God when the relationship is so indirect in all its mediated forms that the relationship is, well, mediated through the local church, the local preacher, the personal devotional time, and so on? I mean you take the position far enough what you get is not a deistic position or an atheistic position per Driscoll's polemic, you get the idea that he cannot God call his Father who does not regard the Church as his mother. Where ... oh where do we hear or read these sorts of sentiments? I notice at least one Pyromaniac has been writing for First Things. Well, I guess in a strange sort of way that answers that question, doesn't it?

But no Protestant from a cessationist camp would say "I don't really have a personal relationship with Jesus". They can't say that! If they did they'd have to concede the Church/church/God's people play an indispensable and unavoidable role in mediating the presence of Christ to His people. We can't have that! The solas! Of course there are plenty of Protestants who grant that ordinary means of grace are essential to Christian living but there are plenty of cessationists who don't really want to affirm that, or won't affirm it officially. There aren't any sacraments except baptism and communion, but the 39 Articles or the Westminster Confession, or the Book of Common Prayer, or the Book of Hours, or the Canon of Repentance, or the Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom. Pentecostals are all heretics because they claim to have spiritual superpowers but that's not, having grown up in Pentecostal circles, what drives their theology. They want to be able to feel the presence of God. How dare they want that. Bad, bad Pentecostals! You should be content with the love letter from God compiled by committee read to you by other people instead of wanting the heretical emotional experiences of actually being shown or told you are loved by the Lord.

I have other directions I want to go with respect to reflecting on the role God's people play in mediating His presence in the world but that will take time. The thing I notice about what Christians (Protestants at least) say and don't say about a "personal relationship" with Jesus on these kinds of occasions is that we pay lip service to an idea we know we don't live. The reason liberals and non-evangelical Christians consider evangelicals and fundamentalists to be jokes of spirituality is that we have a history of shouting about how we've got a "real" relationship with the risen Christ all those other Christians, if we dare even call them Christians, just can't possibly attain. Oh, except for those stupid Pentecostals. But if we admit that we DON'T have a personal relationship with God in the vast majority of our lives then we're in a place that may be scary.

So while Driscoll can get assaulted rhetorically by people who can't believe God would show him sexual assaults and I grant there's some seriousness to those concerns, if we put it in the context of the lip service evangelicals and fundamentalists pay to the "personal relationship with Jesus", we begin to see the lady doth protest too much. These are people who are complaining that a man publicly talks about how God gives him spiritual super powers to do his job as a pastor. Well, THAT can't be right! But if it isn't right ... then what is a "real" "relationship" with Jesus supposed to look like? Reading that church committee assembled love letter from Jesus, or having it read to you if you're not literate?

If that's a personal relationship with the risen Christ that's an awfully indirect one! It's like you're a junior high boy and you get a note from a girl who got it from a girl who's friends with a girl who says she likes you. You sit there wondering why the girl can't just come up to you and talk with you. Well, so it is with the cessationist conception of God. It's not that the girl doesn't exist, it's that if you're being told you need to have a personal relationship with and personal faith in Christ it sure would be handy if there were some, as Josh McDowell loves to put it, evidence that demands a verdict. She likes me! I got this note.

And for junior high boys that is, for a time, good enough. In fact I would suggest that a proper eschatological understanding of Christ and His work tells us that this actually is the kind of personal relationship with God we have. It's just not how evangelicals and fundamentalists want to sell the relationship because if they did that a lot of people would realize that it's not so different from the "impersonal" churches they could be going to.

But there are those Christians who, like high school boys I guess, don't want just words on the page. They're older now and they want to see some action or get some action. This is the point at which skeezy pop stars write songs with lyrics about how "more than words" is what they need from the girl. What would the girl do if the boy took the words from her? How would she show him how she feels? She could do something that would make sure the boy already knew how she felt about him and wouldn't need to use all those words, not that he doesn't want to hear the words but ... you know. I might be betraying a general loathing of love songs here that I might have to get over some day. There are very few of them I can stand and those usually on musical grounds rather than the lyrics but I digress.

What I meant to get at is that if we're honest about how indirect our relationship with Christ is as a Christian we will be able to better appreciate the appeal of a person being able to say "I see things". If cessationists could back up the truck a bit and concede that they have never had a truly personal relationship with God the way they do with, say, a sister or brother; a wife or husband; a friend or cousin, then it would be easier to provide a gentler critique of the problems inherent in charismatic and pentecostal theology.

The foundation of the critique could be anchored in, ironically, a 1 Corinthians foundation. An over-realized eschatology leads to sin because we think we have powers and liberties we have not necessarily been given because we lack the motive of maturing Christian love as the basis from which to serve each other with the gifts the Lord has already given us, gifts that we can identify in ourselves and each other, as well as gifts that we can seek to obtain. The cessationists and continuationists will remain so busy saing "I'm of John MacArthur" or "I'm of Warfield"; or "I'm of Mark Driscoll" or "I'm of Wayne Grudem" that these people have fallen into the error of Corinth while thinking they are correcting someone else's problems!

Paul's first letter to the church of Corinth is something that presents us with problems among cessationists and continuationists because Paul doesn't seem to care to define what gifts are and aren't supposed to be normally operating within the church. Personally I thank God that's how things played out in Paul's correspondence. Paul is concerned about what spiritual gifts are being abused but he is even more concerned with the partisan bickering and lack of mutual love in the church that causes them to tolerate sexual immorality, litigate against each other, and reinforce abuses and inequalities in love feasts where the poor don't even manage to eat and others have died due to the abuse of food and the Lord's supper. The fat Baptist cessationist who's dealing with heart disease is finally no better than the skinny fake-and-baked charismatic who is obsessed with a prosperity teaching. Paul's rebukes to Christians in Corinth covers both sorts of sins.

I am not here attempting to diminish concerns some people have about Driscoll's claim to spiritual superpowers. But I want to peel a few layers off of the onion here and bring up some issues that aren't so readily discussed by pro and con folks on Driscoll. This is why hymnals and prayer books and confessions and the like become battlefields and subjects for war within churches. They become battles because despite the lip service paid by evangelical and fundamental Protestants about "personal relationship with Jesus" we know on the ground level that this "relationship" is mediated. Even our relationship to Christ is mediated by what authors we read, which Christians we share faith with (as in we're sharing a journey following Christ with them, not proselytizing them to what we consider to be a truer faith).

The Christians who think they have just a "me and Jesus" relationship still have a relationship with Christ mediated by how they heard about Christ to begin with. This is why when a man or woman who led you to Christ renounces Him or is mired in terrible sin your heart sinks a little because, in a way, it should. You should feel grief that a brother or sister in Christ is lost, and in a way it's the kind of sinking feeling you have if you've seen friends or family divorce. "Wow, if they couldn't get things to work out how am I supposed to do any better?"

So a cessationist fan of MacArthur may find it scandalous that Driscoll talks about God siphoning explicit sex scenes into his brain. He or she may find it crazy to imagine that a personal relationship with God would involve seeing that sort of sin, God can't see that kind of sin. Well, if God can't look at that kind of sin then He couldn't have taken pity on us sinners and died for us on the Cross, could he? I think we know there's some rhetorical flourish in "God can't look upon sin." God can look upon it and decide to flood the world to destroy the sinful human race, save Noah and his family. It never ceases to surprise me how pedantic and selectively literal we Christians can be with biblical texts when we're assuming someone else is wrong. I shouldn't be surprised, as a fellow Christian, but I admit that I still am surprised.

But in a way the cessationist is saying that it seems crazy that Driscoll says God is siphoning porno straight into his brain, he is saying in a sense that a person really can't talk about having a personal relationship with God. There has to be a mediator. Jesus. Jesus is revealed to us in that love letter assembled by committee with explanatory notes by John MacArthur. See, the John Macarthur Study Bible is in its own way a sort of miniature magisterium, isn't it? Driscoll's paradoxical heresy and evil is that he actually talks as though he has a personal relationship with God. I'm not here saying everything Driscoll says is right, far from it. I'm just camping out on a pattern I have noticed with cessationists who use Driscoll as an example, and even non-cessationists who would use Driscoll as an example of how "not" to do things in the personal relationship with God part.

I have plenty of other things I could write but I have to set an arbitrary limit somewhere. Tonight/today the arbitrary limit is that I have written about how cessationist evangelicals and fundamentalists can be seen as hypocrites on the "personal relationship with God" issue, just as charismatics like Driscoll are hypocrites if they claim that cessationists take a path that ultimately leads to atheism or deism. The alternative, that our experience of Christ our mediator is itself entirely mediated through His people is quite possibly too scary for either the charismatic Calvinist or the cessationist. Why? Because then our responsibility as God's ambassadors to the world and to each other becomes far, far weightier. If it doesn't scare the crap out of you thinking about it then you haven't thought about it at all. Frankly to go by blogs and counterblogs using Driscoll as a case study for what's wrong with those other people ... I get the sinking feeling a lot of folks really haven't thought about it very much, including me.

HT Andrew at City of God: Wedgewords--Partisan Anxiety, Extremism & Fight Club

http://wedgewords.wordpress.com/2011/08/22/partisan-anxiety-extremism-and-fight-club/
I excerpt at some length here:

This definitely applies to certain personalities that are attracted to religious extremism. It really isn’t even correct to call it religious extremism, because, as we saw in the case of Breivik, they can routinely admit to not being very religious at all. So let’s call it cultural extremism. Cultural extremists are on a quest, and they are trying to solve a deep problem in their lives. They are disaffected with modernity and long for another era where the men were men and the living was authentic. Whether it be some notion of medieval Europe, the golden age of Islam, or even the American founding, a nearly utopian world is created in which the cultural extremist can find his new identity. He may or may not cease to be active out in the “real world” (his local community and the public square), but he certainly devotes the majority of his interests to the alternative world.

This isn’t just a sampling of silly hobbies that accompany religious ideologies. This is actually part of wider condition throughout modernity which transcends the various ideologies under discussion, and we do have a relatively recent portrayal of this disposition in popular American culture: Fight Club.

...

First a book and then a popular movie (though as a cult classic, which is more appropriate for the topic at hand), Fight Club is a portrait of a man jilted by modernity and in search of something more authentic and primal in his life. He begins a secret club where men can regain their true identities by fighting. This eventually becomes a terrorist organization with the goal of bringing down modern corporate America. Sound familiar? There’s no religion in Fight Club because the phenomenon is its own issue. We could say that it is its own religion. And what I’d like to propose is that radical Islam and right-wing nationalism have more in common with each other than they do with their own purported cultural and religious histories. They are Fight Club.

As I mentioned in a previous post, I am not willing to say that there’s nothing to worry about with Islam. But I am insisting that what there is to worry about with Islam is totally different than what the majority of the media and mainstream press get worked up over. What they’re always on about is either something worth considering (the idea that religion and culture might actually impact each other) or it’s just the Fight Club phenomenon. And when dealing with this latter issue, we don’t need to be fooled into thinking that it’s primarily a political or theological issue. It’s a personal issue. People attracted to real-life RPGs in the form of partisan hostility do not need so much to be combated on the intellectual level, but on the existential one. They are having trouble with “reentry” and need to come back to reality.

A few things for consideration.


The part I didn't excerpt is still pertinent. Baptists who become Presbyterians, as the jocular observation goes, go watch Braveheart and get bagpipe music and if they live below the Mason-Dixon line affect an affection for the antebellum South (except for Douglas Wilson and his ilk, who are pretty affectionate toward the antebellum South despite being pretty far north of the Mason-Dixon line).

Now I cannot resist some sideways comments. Earlier this year I wrote about a certain pastor who made the sweeping declaration that video games are stupid and are the pursuit of vicarious victories that don't matter. I said at the time that one flaw in this categorical declaration is that baseball is also obviously a time-wasting pursuit in victories that don't matter. This is even more true for people who waste hours and days and years of their lives following the game but not playing it. At least the athletes get physical conditioning out of it, I grant that. Still, since I own every episode of Powerpuff Girls far be it from me to just say something someone else likes is plain old dumb. Everything we love is stupid in the eyes of at least one other person on earth. That's just part of being human.

But what holds true is that whatever movement you choose to join or choose to start, even the movements you leave behind, they are all in their own ways providing vicarious victories. Hitch your wagon to a star and all that. Join the cool kids and you will be cool if they'll take you. Join the free thinkers and you will think freely. Everyone promises a salvation they can't attain for themselves but you surely will never obtain it yourself.


Wedgeworth points out that Breivik was into dress up. He was into role playing games. Lest people look down on this as a sign that gamers are weird proto-fascist murderers in the making Wedgeworth points out that the what of the role playing game constitutes an emotional script, an alternate world in which young men who are otherwise rootless and lacking vocation and influence can find an outlet and a catalyst for creativity. Partisan conflict confers upon a person an identity and vocation that may be missing somewhere else. To the most salient and potentially awkward point Wedgeworth points out that a Christian right wing culture warrior gunning for men to be manly men is not that different from the Muslim who believes that if sharia gets put in place things will improve. These partisan enterprises are real life role-playing games that have defined the lives of young men.


All of Wedgeworth's observations dovetail with themes I have been considering here as an unemployed man in his later 30s. I'm stuck. I've got no job. I'm not sure what I can do that is also sufficiently useful enough to other people that they will pay me to do that. I am on food stamps and have failed to reintegrate back into "normal" working society. I am unmarried and have become aware of just how disposable unmarried men are in any given society. Even married men are in many respects disposable and Roy Baumeister's observation that the importance of men as creators of and contributors to culture is in their inherent disposability. The existential crisis Wedgeworth points out for a young man radicalized into Islamic extremism or Christian right-wing reconstructionism perhaps is that a young man with no prospects and seemingly few options embraces a narrative and a group that provide identity.


Let me be particular, I met a lot of guys in their 20s like me ten years ago. Mars Hill promised a place where we could have a legacy, where we could develop social capital. We could network for work and network in the quest for a spouse. That not only was encouraged but was often explicitly lined out as the reason the Church exists. My friend J. S. Bangs has a banner quote from Eve Tushnet that says that "realism" for people whose worldviews are accepted as realistic; the rest of us must make do with genre.


This is to say, in this context, that the people who look down on people who are into role playing games or other games as the pursuit of victories that don't matter tend to be those who have figured out their role in the role-playing game called life. They are certain of their role, the rules, and their objective. They see a game as a victory that doesn't matter because they have decided which victories matter and because of this they also decide that those victories that don't matter can't even be victories.

But it's not as though one church were unique in this. There is an accepted script, often alluded to but not examined, which holds that men become useful when they produce more than they consume and produce enough to support new lives they have preferrably spawned in settings where those new lives do not henceforth become wards of the state.


As I wrote earlier this year men who get into their 30s and have not paired off into a marriage or some semi-steady sexual partnership are ripe for transforming into ideologues. I have written extensively on how single guys discover their moment of disposability as an existential crisis. It is often in the midst of this crisis a man may either more desperately seek salvation in the form of a sexual bond or, perhaps more often now, denounce marriage as a rite and social bond. In its place? Partisan politics of any and every kind of the embrace of either a religious or secular fanaticism. Or, as we have begun to see, the immersive alternate universe of games.


To suggest that one of these options is inherently more or less consumeristic than the other is to entirely miss the reality of the emotional and existential function of the vocation, for vocation is what these things sare. A man who immerses himself in World of Warcraft is not so different from a man who spends his spare time contemplating baseball scores and leadership principles to be gleaned from watching one of the most tedious activities created by fallen man.

Partisan anxiety and aggression define humanity. This may seem like a grim, relentless and unnecessary way of looking at the human condition but it is as true as it is to say that humans display great capacity for empathy, depth of thought and reason. But it is this capacity, when once committed to the quest for both the self and community, that permits precisely those things to be broken. We are paradoxically slain by the things we devote ourselves to. Whoever loves money never has money enough, the eye never has enough of seeing, nor the ear of hearing, and better what the eye sees than the desires in the heart.

Particularly having observed fellow single guys if we don't manage to "settle down" we become defined by what we choose to fight for or, as is too often the case with a great many men (and women, I might add) what we choose to fight against. Negation becomes necessary to define who is not with us and who is with us. So, at the risk of rambling and repeating myself, those young, restless Reformed Calvinist Baptist types are not really different from the old cranky Calvinists who disapprove of them. MacArthur fans and Driscoll fans may look upon each other with suspicion or a tempered admiration but the roles the fans play are exactly the same, and the roles the men play are not quite so far removed from each other. The ideal is to give young men something to fight for, the ideal is to "get the young men" because if you get them you get "everything".

It's easy to see this with a guy like Mark Driscoll who states it up front. Credit him for his bluntness. MacArthur and Piper and various others want the same thing but are not quite so forward in their ambitions. It has stuck with me for some time that Drew G. I. Hart pointed out that the Piper/Bell fracas is basically two white guys having a disagreement over who will win the hearts of the 20-something white guys who are supposed to guide the future of American white Christianity. Fortunately global Christianity is ultimately not so white that this battle matters! Thanks be to God. Even as a guy who's pretty white I can be grateful for that.

It's good to realize that the Fight Club is its own religion. We can dress it up and comb its hair and give it a fancy suit and say it is in the service of this or that cause and for authentic masculinity but it is, ultimately, its own religion with its own goals. To the extent that the story of Fight Club matters it's that it shows how a man deludes himself into becoming a terrorist on the basis of feeling like he's not the right kind of man. There's the axiom that if God is a father and our fathers left us what does that say about God? Well, that would say a great deal in its way but we know some people don't believe in any gods and not all gods are seen as fathers. Furthermore, as the eventual revelation of Jack's delusion arrives we can see that the substitute provided is not a significant improvement. Even among Christians there's room for error. Are men following the man Jesus or the Jesus who makes them feel like men? Only one of these Jesus is actually savior. The others are Jesus that we can enlist as banners for which to fight for cultural enterprises and to give us victories that ultimiately don't matter.

Orthocuban: Baby Boomers and the Crime rate

http://www.orthocuban.com/2011/09/baby-boomers-and-the-crime-rate/

Huh ... so if the only pattern correlating to a steady rise and fall in crime is the physical viability and age of Baby Boomers does this mean that the end to an age of crime will be when the last Baby Boomer has died off and stops collecting Social Security? Maybe the patriotic duty of Baby Boomers is to commit ritual suicide to stop living parasitically off of the government welfare programs they created so that they can make life easier for the children they thought they would make the world a safer, better place for? I don't really know, but it's curious that FBI stats indicate crime went up with the rise of Baby Boomers and has been going down as they become old people.

Could it be that Eric Cartman is right about hippies? I guess we'll see. Of course as the proverb puts it correlation is not proof of causation. A kinist will say the uptick in crime is due to black people pushing for privileges and hand-outs to usurp the white race. Others might look to the emergence of the deleterious influence of rock and roll or communism blooming in the 1960s. If it turns out the ONLY correlation is the generation of Baby Boomers coming of age into crime then this wouldn't manage to explain "why" this correlation is happening. Various people have been trying to read the wind on that for generations. It may be that there is nothing to read.

Sure, as someone who grew up in the 1980s and became an official adult just after the end of the Cold War I got the impression that Baby Boomers were the most preening, self-congratulatory generation on earth. My grandparents' generation fought in World War 2 and grew up weathering the Great Depression; my parents' generation smoked a lot of weed, went to college and took credit for "changing the world" but it's hard to tell what changed. After all, if you think about it policy changes in place about race relations done during the Eisenhower or Kennedy years were not done by the 20-year old hippies in the 1960s but by the generation of people who shed blood in World War 2, and in some cases maybe even World War 1.

So in terms of policies and their effects the Baby Boomers could be seen as doing their activism thing, but the people who ultimately implemented the policies that "changed the world" were the ones who had already changed the world by battling the Axis. Yeah, I'm being deliberately polemical here but the Baby Boomers seem to have gone through life being able to take for granted as their own victories that were obtained by the previous generation. Of course they played a role but the idea that one generation can take credit for changing the world is one that is impossible.

about that recent Mars Hill article in the Seattle Times

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2016059736_marshill31m.html
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2016065964_apwamarshillchurch.html

A few people asked me if I saw this week's article about Mars Hill in The Seattle Times. I used to go there and I was at one point a journalism student. I have been asked,implicitly, if I have thoughts about the article. I read it over and having been, well, anyway I know a puff piece when I read one. So there's nothing particularly bursting forth within my bosom about the article itself.

No, dear reader, I direct your attention to the Associated Press regurgitation and streamlining of the original article. Go read the original and then read the AP version. The differences are obvious enough but they defy expression in mere words. I could blankly describe the differences but you have to go see for yourself! Or not. Carry on.

The Illusion of Asymmetric Insight between theists and atheists

http://youarenotsosmart.com/2011/08/21/the-illusion-of-asymmetric-insight/#more-1369

There is no subject on which the illusion of asymmetric insight could be more relevant than the ways in which religious and non-religious people presume insights into each others minds. The religious person, and most famously in the West the Calvinist presuppositionalist apologist of the Van Til/Bahnsen variety, works on the assumption that the following two statements declare the truth about atheists.

1) there are no atheists because anyone who is an atheist is deluded about the reality of God
2) Any other atheists are only atheists because they constantly lie to themselves and others about reality.

Then there's the atheists who return the favor given them by presuppositionalist Christian apologists
1) any theists are simply deluded about what reality is by believing there is any kind of god
2) any theists who aren't covered in category 1 are just knowingly lying and suppressing the truth about the reality that no gods exist.

Both groups profess a knowledge and insight into the other that not only supercedes the insight the other group may bring to the table about them, but both groups also profess a knowledge and insight into the other which, by their own reckoning, the assessed group isn't capable of making about itself. This, I suggest, could be seen as how the social cognitive bias of the illusion of asymmetric insight continuously plays out between theists and atheists.

Both groups will steadfastly deny that they themselves are capable of exercising this social cognitive bias. Why? Well, obviously because if I'm right then I can't possibly be bringing a social cognitive bias to the discussion, can I? If my metaphysical position and methodology are right then it's simply impossible for me to display a social cognitive bias in how I denounce some other group. Would it not seem that the definition of a cognitive bias in social assessment is defined by having trouble to observe it in myself when I can so readily observe it in others. As a certain website might put it, you think that you are more generous to others than they are to you, and you think that you don't make categorically positive or negative judgments about others, and you may think you aren't employing a cognitive bias in assessing an entire people group ... but you are not so smart. HT, of course, to You Are Not So Smart.

Of course the sticky wicket here is that simply because you are absolutely sure that your metaphysical position is right does not mean you can't/don't/won't/aren't operating with a social cognitive bias in assessing other people. Having seen how theists and atheists go back and forth it has struck me in the last twenty years that both sides employ arguments within the illusion of asymmetric insight with gusto.

At a sort of subliminal but visible market level this is why theists and atheists have such cottage industries invested in promoting and selling the wares of converts and apostates. See, they exclaim, that this person switched sides is proof that even if you grew up thinking A then you can discover B is the truth over against the upbringing you got with family and peer pressure. Well, all right, but this sort of marketing gimmick employed by both sides is a kind of concession to an awareness that asymmetric insight is a risk. This is why atheists like to pitch books by ex-preachers particularly, just as Christians like to pitch the conversion of an atheist into a theist, even if that atheist "converts" to some deistic form of theism that has nothing to do with the faith claims the theist is really interested in defending.

I admit here I have what some would call a low anthropology. I have not observed that the greatest and highest virtue of humanity is its intellect or capacity to reason. Sure, technically humans can and do reason but even the most ardent materialistic naturalist committed to both methodological and philosophical naturalism would be hard-pressed to say that in the last 24 pack of millenia that human progress has suggested we are getting that much "better". So the Enlightenment happened. At length the Enlightenment led to the Industrial Age and the Industrial led to the Age of Imperialism and then into the 20th century.

We have greater advances is science and technology now than ever before and now we have so many people that people fret about the inability of the biosphere to sustain all the human life our amazing technology has permitted to live. There's a whole field of medical practice of which I am a grateful beneficiary that has not existed as a viable medical practice for even about fifty years, so far as I know. We developed nuclear weapons that hippies and doves feared would obliterate all life on the planet for five decades, a dread that the Cold War could only end in a Hot Death for the planet unless everyone united for multilateral disarmament. And yet here the planet is.

For all the shrieking and screeching about how insane and made and terrible other people are, you know, the people who don't think exactly the same way we do, it appears the planet is still around and humans are still breeding (even though, apparently, they shouldn't but it would appear the laws of nature has not-quite-designed humans to be eager beavers in the breeding department and sex, so I'm told, is apparently enough fun for people to overcome all sorts of trial and error of "doing it right". But if the planet has too many people why don't people just, you know, resist the urge to get laid? Oh ... perhaps that would be because much of the world is rather broadly straight and desire cannot be denied or something like that? I have sometimes wondered why secularist overpopulation types don't advocate celibacy more. It would seem to make sense ... .

But at any rate, what does it matter if free thinkers can tell Christians the Church is anti-sex while the Church has so many voices speaking against birth control because sex naturally tends to lead to babies. Well, we can't have that and people should have sex because it's a natural drive ... but there are too many babies being born and there should be fewer of them ... but if there is a danger of overpopulation then the whole desire to have sex in itself must be both irrational and destructive to the biosphere and we should instead consider curtailing the sex drive to prevent overpopulation rather than constantly attempt to employ sex in a recreational fashion. When I have stepped back further and further to try to get a sense of what might be reasonable or unreasonable on either side I began to realize that reason wasn't really looking like a whole lot of what was important to any human position. Humanity is capable of remarkable but selective reason. We're geniuses at making cases for what we want or feel we need but it would seem that our strengthes have corresponding weaknesses.

Consider a recent idea in brain research and psychology, the proposal that belief in a god can be construed as an extension of what is known as "theory of mind". "Theory of mind" is essentially our capacity, as humans, to imagine what it is like to think and feel as someone else does. If someone is otherwise completely functional but unable to conceive of what it is like for another person to think and feel differently than the individual does that is called Asperger's syndrome. it's consider on the low end of autism spectrum disorders. A failure to grasp how another person thinks and feels leads to all sorts of social disorder.

On the other hand, if a person has a highly developed capacity to imagine the thoughts and feelings of others but has a sensory deintegration this person hears voices that do not correspond to a sentient being outside the individual's head. Auditory hallucinations and the like indicate, colloquially, that the person be crazy. These used to be the sorts of people who were having conversations with no one you could see back before cellular phones were invented. When I was a kid it was a foregone conclusion that any person walking around seeming to talk to nobody was nuts. Now, well, they could just be using a wireless headset so you aren't quite sure. Either way that person still seems to be not entirely aware of what's going on around them.

But, say some philosophers and scientist, the tricky part about our capacity to imagine the thoughts and feelings of others is that we are capable of imagining the thoughts and feelings of someone who doesn't exist. Ergo, God exists in our minds because we have conflated our capacity to imagine and empathize with real people into a belief that sentient beings we can't observe also exist.

But this is not all, we can also anthropomorphise creatures that don't really display any comparable intellect or capacity for linguistic communication. Take the Pixar film WALL-E. Take any of the Apes movies. There's no way an army of non-human primates is going to conquer the human race with it's six billion population, firearms, nuclear weapons, biological weapons and collosal capacity for conceptual and linguistic communication. The only beings that can imagine that such a primate conquest of humanity are folks who go by names like Gorilla Grodd ... or Mojo Jojo. I think I'd rather have dinner with Mojo Jojo all things considered. He seems to have better taste in music.

Now I know atheists and theists alike may think I'm completely wrong in putting things this way. That's part of what prompted me to write this. It seems as though the theist and the atheist habitually work from the illusion of asymmetric insight while imputing the cognitive bias entirely to the other team. It also appears that so long as you are convinced that your metaphysical position is most likely the really true one you get a pass on even being capable of cognitive biases.

But if the recent theory that humanity evolved the capacity to reason NOT to discover the truth but primarily to win arguments in social settings gains any traction (and it might not, I don't know) ... then both the theologian and the free-thinker/philosopher might turn out to have been guilty of the same cognitive bias without realizing they had something in common. They may turn out to have labored for millenia to prove that reason and logic prove them right categorically when reason and logic don't prove anything so much by themselves.

And despite various appeals to the Laws of Nature the temptation to rework the Laws of Nature where we don't like them seems to be an impulse that crosses a theistic/atheistic divide. Christians want to make gays no longer gay, Dawkins has at points suggested that maybe eugenics is okay to bring back on the table after all, apparently. There are those who think that genetically modified crops are playing god yet if humanity has advanced to the point where we can more directly manipulate genetic outcomes than our history of breeding specific kinds of dogs then it seems that "reason" is always put in the service of other things. Humans seem to be brilliant at rationalizing a lot of decisions that are not as rational as we keep telling ourselves they are.

Links from Orthocuban: Southerners cohabitating, divorcing, and remarrying

http://www.orthocuban.com/2011/08/highest-divorce-rates-from-2009/

http://www.orthocuban.com/2011/08/highest-cohabitation-rates-from-2009/

http://www.orthocuban.com/2011/08/divorce-the-south-and-culture/

http://www.orthocuban.com/2011/09/culture-of-honor-the-south-and-understanding/


There's a lot I could write about this but I may just save it for later.

City of God: A Problem with Young Ministers (is that young ministers grow old and then second guess the wisdom of letting guys like them run things)

http://www.civitatedei.com/2011/08/a-problem-with-young-ministers/

It seems to be a law within human nature but especially men in pastoral offices to succumb to a certain temptation to advise others to do as they say the Bible says and not as they did. Linked via City of God, Douglas Wilson makes a case that younger men with young children should not, perhaps, be considered pastoral candidates. A pastor who is willing to pastor when his kids are two or six years old, he writes, should be willing to step down in resignation from pastoral work if his kid(s) have spent two to six years in a jail. That sounds witty and insightful on paper but then there's the problem of the Old Testament and what that says about the Lord's approach to leadership.

If Wilson's right then the measure for getting admitted to the job should be tough. He may even be right that it should be even tougher to lose the job than to get the job. But that gets us back to Abraham. Was Abraham appointed to be the father of many nations and our forebear in the faith because of his unflagging faithfulness? Was Jacob the chosen one through whom the promise would be fulfilled on Abraham's behalf despite his being a schemer and a trickster? Why was Esau described as unfit for the promise because he sold his birthright for a bowl of soup when Jacob himself was a lying mama's boy who, nevertheless, was favored by God? What about Samson? Why was Jephthah considered a hero of the fiath by the author of Hebrews when his conspicuous act of obedience to the Lord mentioned in Judges was fulfilling a vow to sacrifice the first living thing that came before him in thanks for a military victory and then ended up sacrificing his own daughter?

What about Eli? He was not removed from his position except by death. Okay, fair enough, Eli was considered a bad leader. Saul was a bad king yet his son Jonathan was a solid guy. Then there's David. As I have noted over the years in private reading, it would appear that being a polygamist and a man capable of deceit and genocide wasn't made unqualified to be the annointed king of Israel. As V Phillips Long once put it in some lectures I heard via a friend, David's life is definitely troubling for those who consider what Christian ethical teaching is and consider David's actual life. God didn't depose David from his position of leadership. This is both a sobering observation that not all those God raises up to lead within His people are good men (Saul arguably didn't even have regard for the Lord at all and was one of the conspicuous "unbelievers" in Israelite leadership).

Some of the men God raises up to a position of power and influence are positively terrible like Babylonian leaders. Still others, like David or Solomon, may have been appointed by the Lord but not necessarily in the way their sales pitches about themselves would have us believe. That, too, can be gleaned over time from the scriptures themselves. And David was not permamently shut out from being king because he failed to discipline Amnon for raping his half sister or for asking for leniency toward Absalom when Absalom staged an insurrection against his father. If WIlson's case is to be considered seriously we must nonetheless remember that the Lord tends to pick those who are nothing in this world and of no account even among God's people. David was not the man that even Samuel would have picked if he had gone by what he saw.

As with Driscoll 0n sexual ethics, so perhaps with Wilson on youthfulness and pastoral investment. Christ Church in Moscow Idaho got started when Wilson was, what, 22? There's this pattern that is not unique to the "new Calvinists" or the "young, restless and Reformed". The pattern seems to be "Do as I say the Bible teaches, not as I actually did." We can discuss the pertinent biblical texts and that will be a fruitful discussion, but I do feel obliged to ask how it is that a pastor can find it so easy to exhort people from a text to do something he hasn't done. I heard a pastor explain ten years ago how if his daughter fell away from the faith he'd drop everything and try to win her back.

That sounds compelling and virtuous coming from a twenty-something idealist pastor who thinks that his qualification to lead comes from whether or not he has successfully programmed his children to be obedient to the Lord but Samuel didn't lose his job as priest and judge because his sons were so wicked Israel wanted a king to rule over them instead of taking their chances on Samuel's sons. You would think the real lesson pastors should glean from the scriptures is that nepotism is an evil way to qualify people for the ministry, whatever that ministry is, whether it be a kingly position, a prophetic position ("I am not a prophet nor the son of a prophet" so to speak), or a priestly position.

It is not entirely without cause that many Christians look back on the lives of saints and notice a pattern that those most fit to have important and difficult positions of leadership in God's people were those who did not seek that work, did not want that work, and did not by their estimation see that as a job to go do. When once they were called they did not even always like the work, but they stuck with it out of loyalty to the Lord.

Of course new Calvinists won't really subscribe to the idea that a man, to be a pastor, must have already raised his children to be obedient (or even obedient in the Lord). There'd have been no young, restless and Reformed movement if all the good new Calvinists had waited until their kids were obedient teenagers. Of course by now I have made it clear I think that metric is a bit silly. It's not like John Stott was somehow never fit to be a pastor because he died at the age of 90, a bachelor. But I suppose new Calvinist leaders has wisdom that is justified by, er, her children.