Re: Time to Give Mark Driscoll a Sabbatical?

I see what they are getting at, but I think this is again a place where they want 
to pigeon hole the definitions unfairly.

My friend in Cal is partially disabled, and he lost his job a while back.  His 
wife is a payroll analyst who can provide for them, so they are not suffering.

But I also have to note that his self esteem has taken quite a hit because he 
feels useless (youngest child now in high school, so not quite Mr Mom scenario) 
and unable to provide.  He is however also renovating her parents home (her dad 
dies last year) so his time is not wasted.

And what of the women like my ex who watched me working two jobs (three if you 
count the Military reserves) for 80 hours a week to keep us afloat...barely...and 
still refused to get a part time job just for grocery money.

What I hate about that video is not that they are taking a hardline chauvinistic 
view, but that they are so easy to make blanket judgments in general on what are 
really often complex situations.

-----Original Message-----
From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of 
Mike Findlay
Sent: Wednesday, October 27, 2010 6:45 AM
To: DADL (off topic)
Subject: Re: [DADL-OT] Time to Give Mark Driscoll a Sabbatical?

If some christians are capable of spouting so much bullshit it is a wonder that
anyone believe anything any christian says.  Some of the idiocy really raises
the question of whether the belief system itself is all quackery.  I know we are
supposed to be fools for Christ, but I think the "for Christ" part is essential
to that admonition.

I was a stay at home dad, (I worked out of a home office, going to court when
needed while my wife worked full time for a decent wage and great benefits), for
the early part of my kids lives, (the boys up to about 10 and up to about 5 for
my daughter).  I bristle at this garbage.


Mike F.



----- Original Message ----
From: Peter Chattaway <petert-LOVM4QxV+tDq6eQxt3vRmLDks+cytr/[email protected]>
To: Daniel Amos off-topic listserver <[email protected]>
Sent: Wed, October 27, 2010 1:30:55 AM
Subject: [DADL-OT] Time to Give Mark Driscoll a Sabbatical?

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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