Re: Time to Give Mark Driscoll a Sabbatical?

Mark's interpretation tortures the gist of what Paul wrote in his letters;
men shouldn't determine to avoid work and stay home for the sole purpose of
sponging off their wimmenfolk. That's not Peter's case, where staying home
is a noble (and pragmatic) sacrifice on behalf of his kids and his
family-at-large.

Johne Cook
| http://raygunrevival.com | http://authorculture.blogspot.com |


On Wed, Oct 27, 2010 at 1:30 AM, Peter Chattaway
<petert-LOVM4QxV+tDq6eQxt3vRmLDks+cytr/[email protected]>wrote:

> I'm a stay-at-home dad myself, so naturally, I don't particularly cotton to
> Driscoll's view that people like me are "worse than unbelievers".
>
> - - -
>
>
> http://stackblog.wordpress.com/2010/10/25/time-to-give-mark-driscoll-a-sabbatical/
>
> by John Stackhouse
> October 25, 2010
>
> There’s a lot to like about what Mark Driscoll has done in his pastoral
> work at Mars Hill Church in Seattle. Sadly, however, there’s a lot to
> dislike, too.
>
> Brother Mark is right, for example, to bemoan the lack of clear preaching
> of the Bible that calls people to intellectual and moral account, rather
> than merely entertaining them or confirming them in their blithe
> consumerism.
>
> He’s also right to worry about the feminization of much North American
> Christianity–a trend noticed by church historians also that reaches back to
> the nineteenth century. (I say this as a feminist who sees this trend as
> unhelpful for both men and women. A good popular-level roundup of these
> concerns can be found in David Murrow’s Why Men Hate Going to Church–a book
> that I judge to be about 80 per cent right, 10 per cent not right, and 10
> per cent wildly wrong—mostly in its John Eldredge-inspired
> recommendations—which is a pretty good average for a book on such a
> contentious and wide-ranging subject.)
>
> Alas, Brother Mark responds to these valid concerns too often with bad
> preaching of a bad message. Recently he managed to demonstrate both problems
> in all of six minutes. This video clip shows Mr. and Mrs. Driscoll answering
> a question about the legitimacy of stay-at-home husbands (HT: J. Barrett
> Lee). In these six minutes, a number of theological problems, in fact,
> emerge.
>
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1WPVxndUcHQ
>
> For a man who preaches that women aren’t supposed to teach men, it seems
> immediately odd that Brother Mark has his wife offer Scriptural teaching in
> their church, which she does as this clip starts off. I expect that he
> legitimizes what to many of his ilk must appear to be disobedience to
> Scripture (“I do not permit a woman to teach or to have authority over a
> man; she must be silent”–I Tim. 2:12) by claiming that his wife is under his
> authority, or perhaps under the authority of the elders of the church. This
> is a common expedient among evangelicals, the “Under Authority Arrangement,”
> as I call it, that doesn’t actually appear anywhere in the Bible, nor is it
> taught anywhere in Scripture, but is certainly something for which a
> pragmatic feminist such as I am is grateful: It lets women speak, even if
> under strange (and unbiblical) constraints.
>
> We are thus told, by Mrs. Driscoll as well as then by her husband, that a
> man who does not provide for his wife and children is flatly disobeying God.
> If she is out working and he isn’t–save only in extreme cases of injury,
> sickness, or other physical debility (unemployment is not mentioned as an
> excuse)–he is “worse than an unbeliever.”
>
> That last phrase comes from the text–the one and only text–adduced by the
> Driscolls on behalf of their forbiddance of men staying home and women
> working: I Timothy 5:8. And now a cascade of basic exegetical, theological,
> and homiletical problems begins:
>
> 1. The passage in question has nothing to do with gender roles. The context
> clearly has a single, very different, issue in mind. Widows in Timothy’s
> church were not being looked after by their relatives and so were posing a
> financial hardship for the church. Some were also apparently exploiting
> their status for charity they did not deserve. So Paul warns the Christians,
> via Timothy, that they must do what even non-Christians understand to be a
> matter of basic obligation: support your kinfolk.
>
> 2. Thus the “worse than an unbeliever” charge, which sounds pretty harsh
> and not terribly appreciative of non-Christians on the lips of a
> twenty-first-century Seattle couple with no interpretive context given (I
> mean, are non-Christians really so bad?!), is really just Paul saying, “We
> Christians are called to live by a standard better than those around us, but
> failing to render financial support to your relatives isn’t even meeting the
> lowest common denominator of morality all around us.”
>
> 3. The passage has nothing to do with a couple who decide that, for at
> least a while, the mother will work outside the home while the father works
> inside the home caring for the children. Any argument one wants to raise
> against that option–which is exactly what lots of contemporary Christian
> couples nowadays elect, whether because Dad is finishing his education, or
> Dad has been laid off, or Mom wants to get back to work she loves while Dad
> longs to connect more with their kids–or the option of both spouses going to
> work in order to provide properly for their family, must be raised from
> other Scripture, not this one. And good luck finding that other Scripture.
>
> 4. Brother Driscoll then assures his audience that since he has read the
> whole Bible–which seems a rather basic thing for a pastor to claim–and can’t
> think of any Bible verse that justifies a husband staying home and a woman
> working, then there is no such verse and there could be no legitimate
> grounds for another view. “You can argue with me all day,” he assures us,
> and his mind will not be changed. Oh, dear: Do we preachers really want to
> sound like that? And on a subject like this?
>
> 5. Brother Driscoll also quickly dismisses any alternative intepretation
> that might render this teaching a matter of “culture.” That use of “culture”
> is code-language among preachers like Mr. Driscoll for something like
> “trying to dodge the abiding truth of God’s Word by relegating its
> universal, eternal teachings to a distant and remote alternative social
> situation.”
>
> I’m sympathetic with his aversion to such dodges. They are indeed rife and
> ought to be both exposed and resisted.
>
> But the exegetical effect of misusing the category of “culture” works both
> ways. In this case, Brother Driscoll’s teaching is deeply embedded in, and
> makes a sort of sense only for, one social situation: middle-class people
> (or richer) who can live on the husband’s single paycheque that he earns in
> work undertaken outside the home.
>
> Yet before the Industrial Revolution, and in many parts of the world today,
> the workplace is the home, and husbands and wives work together in the
> family farm, or shop, or service, or whatever. Furthermore, in many modern
> societies even in so-called developed economies, the days of a living wage
> being paid to men on which they can then support a wife and kids have
> disappeared for everyone below the middle-middle class—a reality affecting,
> I daresay, a significant number of people living in Brother Driscoll’s own
> city of Seattle.
>
> So that can’t possibly be what the Holy Spirit was telling Paul to tell the
> rest of us everywhere and always. Brother Mark’s interpretation is obviously
> culture-specific, ironically enough, and therefore not plausible.
>
> 6. Finally, Brother Driscoll warns his audience that the Biblical teaching
> is so clear on this subject than any couple found departing from his
> interpretation would be subject to church discipline at Mars Hill. Really?
> Church discipline is being threatened (and, yes, “threatened” is the
> operative verb here) on a matter (badly) argued from a single passage? I’m
> all for church discipline–another important subject on which Brother Mark
> and I agree–but I would think that Mars Hill, like any contemporary church,
> would have its hands full with church disciplinary matters far more clear
> and far better evidenced from the Bible than this one.
>
> I don’t know what theological training Mrs. Driscoll has received. The Mars
> Hill website claims that Brother Mark “received a B.A. in Speech
> Communications from Washington State University and holds a master’s degree
> in Exegetical Theology from Western Seminary in Portland, Oregon.” I confess
> to wondering what his professors at Western Seminary would think of this
> exercise in exegetical theology.
>
> Mark Driscoll, I repeat, has doubtless done much good for the Kingdom of
> God and has a lot to offer it still. He’s undeniably energetic, charismatic,
> and principled. But my goodness: how he has strayed from the basic
> exegetical teaching I trust he received at Western! How much damage he is
> doing by misreading the Scripture and then dogmatically declaiming his
> errors with the full weight of his Big Church and even larger network behind
> him.
>
> I expect he won’t listen to me: We haven’t met and I have no reason to
> think he would pay my opinion much attention. But I hope his big brothers in
> the American Reformed circle he frequents, such as John Piper and Tim
> Keller, will take him aside and remind him of the basic exegetical do’s and
> don’t's he seems somehow, somewhere to have abandoned. Perhaps he is due for
> a well-deserved study break to regroup, re-establish his basic tools, and
> hear what God wants him to do next–and how God wants him to do it.
>
> If instead, however, he persists in such troubling exegesis, theology, and
> preaching, the impressively innovative, faithful, and effective work done at
> Mars Hill will be compromised, perhaps fatally. People who find this sort of
> interpretation to be sexist, classist, and just plain uninformed will go
> elsewhere for competent Biblical preaching.
>
> And they should.
>
>
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