On Not Caring About Stemming the Tide of Mainline Decline
January 12, 2012
It appears that Anglicans are really quite talented at creating entire cottage industries around problems of identity. Books about “Anglican Identity” and “What is Anglicanism?” abound in numbers far greater than you may at first imagine. I feel as though, if one is allowed to judge by certain internet circles, we are about to start on a whole new creation when finally – about 30 years too late – we get around to addressing the “problem” of “mainline decline.”
The facts are…
- We’re getting older
- We’re getting smaller
- We’re getting poorer
- We’re getting less and less important in our social stature
Well, WHAT ARE WE GOING TO DO ABOUT IT!!!????
- Should we eschew hierarchy?
- Should we come up with THE missional strategy?
- Should we maybe wear khakis to preach?
- Should we mess with the liturgies? Make God more feminine; black; expansive; Celtic; relevant?
Now, these are not all merely banal questions (though perhaps some are), but I would like to suggest that so long as the beginning and focal point of the discussion is centered around decline and “stemming the tide,” then we’ve already failed.
This line of reasoning puts us immediately in a reactionary position. “What are we going to do about this threat? (This too is where the “identity fetish” creeps in. Constantly going in circles trying to fence the boundaries of identity means that less and less do we care to look to Jesus to judge what we think it important about our identity).
It also creates an atmosphere where even practices and beliefs that are very good are swept aside by the well-meaning or self-proclaimed “prophets” and “reformers.”
What often goes overlooked is how deeply institutional this line of reasoning is, and how ironic it is that these questions are often under the guise of being “anti-institutional.” Concern about numbers and colleges and seminaries and ages are all very institutional issues. (Though, far be it from me to be anti-institutional.)
Allow me to suggest that whether numbers are waxing or waning, the primary issue ought to be one of praying, working, longing, to be faithful to our Lord and faithful to the proclamation of the Gospel. I know this might seem just empty and pious word-mixing. The point I’m trying to make, though, isn’t about out-piousing anybody, but about shifting the seat of discernment from one of reactionary concern about structures to a positive freedom to love and worship our Lord and love our neighbor without concern for “maintaining” the Episcopal Church.
Doing otherwise evinces a deep lack of faith. As if somehow Christ isn’t risen and it’s up to us to pick up the Church by her bootstraps and keep her going! (Thus, even now the pelagian shadow of liberal protestantism lurks behind every question and every answer)
I think we could all stand to learn from people like Derek Olsen, who when prodded on the question of a drop in numbers responds not by saying what ought to go in order to stop the bleeding, but by pointing out what ought not be negotiable because they are the things that help to keep us faithful to the Gospel that we’ve received. Or +Rowan Williams who concludes his astounding essay “God” in this way:
“In a church that is in many ways deeply wedded to ‘territorial’ preoccupations, it is unlikely that the gift and promise of the non-territorial God will be clearly discernible. In other words, a church that is concerned about its internal politics will not transform the political in the way that is in fact made possible by Jesus. The desire to secure purity and control in the Church (which can be a preoccupation as much of ‘progressives’ as of ‘traditionalists’) looks to a territory in which believers may see in one another a reassuring sameness; and when believers are looking at one another to test that assurance, they are less likely to be attending to the foundational absence on which the life of the community rests. And if the contemplative life is central in some way to the integrity of the Church at large, it is because of this: not to point to ‘values’ above and beyond the concerns of the world, not to pass judgment on the unspiritual conflicts of the Church or society, but to witness to the way in which a life may be constructed in which all acts are referrable to God and in which the consequent ‘deregionalizing’ of the life of the spirit, life before God, impacts increasingly upon the understanding of prayer. It is to do with the poverty and wealth of the everyday; with the fullness and emptiness of faith.”
“When Therefore He Was Raised From the Dead, His Disciples Remembered”
November 12, 2011
Ben Meyers has given yet another penetrating reflection on Christian art. This time, comparing the Icon of the Holy Cross to Grünewald‘s own great work. We are privileged to hear his considered reflections. I would like to disagree, though, with one of his central indictments against the icon.
“Is not history – the history of Jesus – completely fixed and immobilised in this representation? Is it not suspended in eternity like a beautiful figure inside a glass ball?”
For Ben, as with certain Protestant aesthetics, the icon represents our own fantasies, a muting or even denial of the via crucis.
“The presence of the saints makes the cross safe, familiar, and accessible. There is, the icon assures us, a proper human posture that corresponds to the event of the cross.”
I would like to suggest, though, that the reverse is actually true. It is the unceasing and unthinking (because no meaning can be made of the Cross) gaze upon the dead flesh that completely fixes and immobilizes the history of Jesus. There is, on this take, no history for Jesus after the cross. The truth of God is utterly and without reserve made manifest in this one moment. There is nothing of God left and no true thing can be known of God — only the ‘brute fact of the cross of history’ remains. It is important here that Grünewald depicts below the crucifixion, not death, hell, and the grave, pierced by the cross as for the icon, but simply the idolotrous veneration of the corpse of Jesus. The body can be done away with now; sealed up in stone, covered and abandoned. The disincarnate word has now the characteristic of geist, it can be spoken everywhere, but felt nowhere.
But for the icon, the revelation of the cross is not an end. It is not the last word. Ben’s own words are, perhaps, telling. The icon speaks of truth, but Grünewald of fact, of immediate presence, but not of relationship nor therefore of reconciliation. The icon in fact speaks of new life, of freedom, of movement, of the continued unfolding of what has happened. We find this iconic truth in the icon of the Nativity. In the Nativity, the whole history of Jesus is shown. There is no fixed point at which to rest. While the center is, of course, Jesus, our eyes are led to the Cross, to Hades, to a post-birth washing, etc… Here, who Jesus is cannot be reduced to any one part of his life or death, and the circular pattern of the icon, forever drawing our attention to Jesus and forever drawing it out to the entire and inexhaustible scope of salvation, forecloses the possibility that Jesus is to be found alone in one historical place. It is also to be found in the Gospels, in for instance, the quote of John which entitles this reflection. The dramatic date of the crucifixion indeed was as it is for Grünewald, and we dare not make it otherwise. It was, for the moment, absolute negation, total abandonment, sheer meaninglessness. As the women looked on, it could have been nothing but this. (It is curious that attention is not drawn to the whole Grünewald altarpiece which also includes an overwhelming resurrection scene. A consideration of the whole work leads more to my interpretation of the icon, that even of the Altarpiece is iconic.)
Yet for the icon, as for St. John’s Gospel, that was not the whole truth, because Jesus now can be known in greater depth than he could otherwise ever have been known had he remained on the hard wood of the cross. There is more to learn about what has happened. Jesus’s identity can be, in fact, added to, learned about — his life is not confined to a single corpse now, it has been broken and can therefore be distributed and ingested, nourishing and revealing, judging and reconciling.
The resurrection, the via gloriae, is not the abandonment of real material history. As John Updike, himself a barthian of sorts, knew. In his Seven Stanzas at Easter he comments,
The stone is rolled back, not papier-mâché,
not a stone in a story,
but the vast rock of materiality that in the slow
grinding of time will eclipse for each of us
the wide light of day.
The dead god, the one who remains in the tomb, is rather the one who can now be done with. The rotting body of Jesus is, for Updike, what secures our fantasies because to us the resurrection is an offense.
Let us not seek to make it less monstrous,
for our own convenience, our own sense of beauty,
The cross is still the door, there is simply no other path to new life than through death.
But ‘Death, be not proud.’
- Paperback: 272 pages
- Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell; 1 edition (December 4, 2007)
- ISBN-10: 1405102713
- ISBN-13: 978-1405102711
My thanks to Blackwell for the review copy.
Very often times it feels like the very last thing the world needs is another introduction to Topic X. Not least to theology. Aren’t intro’s just the easy way for a teacher to get published with very little work or creativity? And it’s not like there aren’t good ones out there. Alister McGrath is now into the 5th ed of his (mostly historical) Christian Theology: An Introduction (with a simpler version of it, as well as a Reader 4th ed, and an intro to historical theology). Christopher Morse’s famous Not Every Spirit: A Dogmatics of Christian Disbelief is also a great intro. (My thanks to David Congdon for the recommendation).
Yet even in such a world, Mark A. McIntosh’s Divine Teaching: An Introduction to Christian Theology offers something unique and irresistible. I found myself learning much more from this intro than I do often times from “academic” pieces. There were so many places to pause and reflect, to soak in a rich theological wisdom. And at a shy 252 total pages, it was really quite astonishing what he was able to fit in.
This brevity, among other things, makes this book a standout from a pedagogical standpoint. Being as short as it is, there is a significant amount of free room that a teacher could take to supplement and expand the book in whatever way is deemed necessary for the kind of school or class that they are teaching. Are you at a Pentecostal school? Feel free to throw some readings in on pneumatology. Are you at a Catholic school? Take the time and compare McIntosh’s readings of Saints Augustine and Thomas on Sin or the Trinity. Are you Anglican? Throw some Herbert in there… anywhere could do as the whole book revolves around the contemplative life of prayer as being taught by the actions of the Holy Trinity.
And this life of prayer as participation in and learning from the Trinity is the broad outline of the book, hence the title. McIntosh has much experience in this. His PhD work was in Balthasar and he has written several works on “mystical theology” (see here and here) and even a little book for teaching in Church on the Mysteries of Faith. He is an Episcopal priest and is now teaching at Durham (in England). He is also an Anglican representative at this latest ARCIC meeting between Anglicans and Roman Catholics.
The beginning of the book functions as a sort of prologue for those led to be skeptical of theology as mere irrational nonsense. Can one understand theology and not be a believer?, he asks. His answer is, surprisingly, no, not really. One can come to acquire knowledge of a tradition and this can be taught, but McIntosh says to be truly taught by God, one’s own inner life must be made ready to receive this knowledge as a gift. To show how this is so, he introduces a method that he uses several times throughout the book. On the left third of the page, he has a text, here it is Romans 6.3-11 but he does this for several other Scriptural passages and also works like the Nicene Creed; and on the right he comments on it. It’s really quite helpful. Nevertheless he does address the relationship of reason and faith by way of an exposition of Cardinal Newman’s Oxford Sermons.
From this first part of the book, “How God Makes Theologians,” McIntosh moves onto the larger more constructive part “Theology’s Search for Understanding,” in which he begins with the Mystery of Salvation, to the Divine Life, and finally to Creaturely Life. This movement, he believes, represents the kind of shape that Christians have experienced from the beginning. Trinitarian reflection came from a deep meditation and struggle with what had happened to them in Christ and Pentecost. He would no doubt agree with David Bentley Hart that early Christian trinitarian thought was a kind of phenomenology of salvation. Among his teaching methods, at the end of each chapter, McIntosh pauses for “Landmarks” and “Pathfinding.” In this section on salvation he includes Irenaeus, Augustine and Anselm. While recognizing that there are exaggerated critiques of Anselm available, he ultimately agrees with Lossky that Anselm (and much subsequent Western reflection) focuses on the Cross to the exclusion of the entire movement of the mysteries of faith. In the “Pathfinding” section, he brings in Orthodox, Feminist and Girardian contributions to soteriology.
But this critical thought about salvation itself gives way to a deeper movement from how God revealed God in Christ, to how God has always been if this is the one God. This middle section on the Trinity takes up the bulk of the book and includes a comprehensive walk through St. Augustine’s entire book de Trinitate! These 20 pages alone are worth the price of the book. But he also includes Karl Barth on the “God Who Loves in Freedom.”
The final section on Creaturely life doesn’t disappoint either. He begins with the fact that it is Easter which gives the ultimate shape to creaturely life, drawing generously on James Alison. But the main section rightly revolves around Aquinas, yet he also brings Pascal alive in a way I hadn’t expected. The combination of the two acted as a kind of apophatic trinitarian anthropology, it was quite a surprise and ended the book well. I appreciate that he didn’t feel the need to begin with this section to “ground” theology in epistemology. In this way he followed the general shape of traditional dogmatics so that even a strident Protestant couldn’t protest too much.
The book is not confessional in any denominational sense. And while the book is clearly more on the “catholic” side of things, this lack of polemic or overt sense of identifying with any group means that Divine Teaching can be used profitably by anyone who wants to teach from within the Nicene tradition.
McIntosh’s uncompromisingly Christian and trinitarian approach means that this book might not be ideal for use in a school where there is generally taken the traditional “comparative religion” or “religious studies” approach. Yet, if a school was open to actually teaching Christian theology from a “post-liberal” (in the broadest sense of that word) position, this is precisely the book I would use; not least since approaching Christian thought from the position of prayer and “mystical participation” would likely connect well with my generation of kids. But in order to do this, one would have to supplement the book with something to do with other faiths, as this is one area not really addressed in the book. Graham Ward’s True Religion could fill that void quite nicely I imagine.
I don’t know what it says about the book, but, as I often meditate on how I would teach theology in the future, this book has jumped to the very top of the list. There are so many strengths to the book, many of which I’ve tried to point out. Chief among them is that this book is all about how we might actually learn about God from God, in our inmost being, not as bits of true information, but as an abiding light that will illuminate all other seeing and knowing.
Pentecost: End of the Law, Beginning of Judgement
June 12, 2011
Moses and the Israelites received the Law on the fiery mount. Israel was bound to it by covenant and its violation meant judgement upon them. This Law governed all aspects of life from agricultural to sexual policy and marked the people as God’s own. But the Law itself and the prophets too understood that the Law itself would one day be transcended (Rom 3.21).
The Church received the Spirit in the fiery upper room. She was bound together by another covenant; and it was a covenant that has no Law but Judgement. The Feast celebrated the giving of Torah, but in Jerusalem was given no new law, rather unfettered possibility of human and divine reconciliation under the one Lord in one Spirit. John 20.19-23 means the book of Acts. To bind and loose, to forgive and retain, these are not self-grounded proclamations of a new authoritative community – No! There is no authority handed over to the Church to make a new Law; rather Judgement is the necessary way of living beyond the Law, and all judgements are provisional as even the apostolic ‘Council of Jerusalem’ is. The Spirit blows now where She wills and perpetually gives Judgement, which the Church tries to discern. The Spirit can fall before baptism; She can proclaim clean what was formerly unclean.
The Spirit is not bound by any Law whatsoever.
Some Notes on Bulgakov’s Political Theology
April 30, 2011
I’m taking a survey course this semester on the history and culture of Eastern Orthodoxy. A fair amount of time has been spent on Russia and I used it as an opportunity to read up on some Sergii Bulgakov, though I’ve not read as much as I would’ve liked yet, and I’ll certainly need some help with his massive trilogy, The Lamb of God, The Comforter & The Bride of the Lamb, which is so far above my skill level it’s insane.
The primary book I worked with is +Rowan Williams’ book introducing Bulgakov’s political theology. It consists in a group of texts edited and translated by +Williams himself and his own introductions to each reading. The total effort is a minor intellectual biography focused more on politics than his larger works in theology. In a large part this introduction is already out of date since the publication of many works of Bulkagov in English in the last few years, thanks in no small part to the effort of Eerdmans and the tireless labor of the translator, Boris Jakim. But the introductions by +Williams are worth the price of the book.
Bulgakov, the son of a priest, went to seminary but dropped out and became an atheist Marxist. But during his time working on his doctoral thesis about “Capitalism and Agriculture,” he found himself shifting from received Marxist orthodoxy. This was eventually to put him in deep water and Lenin eventually shipped him and over a hundred other “rogue academics” out of Russia. What’s the point of having an authoritarian state without using it to excommunicate heretics and political dissidents?
In The Economic Ideal, Bulgakov is critical of notions of the human being reduced to a homo economicus. For him, it is fundamentally necessary to speak of the larger goals of wealth creation and distribution, that for which spirit is working. There are two errors that theorists can fall into, according to Bulgakov. The one is a hedonism, which he saw reflected in the bourgeoise pseudo-capitalism of Sombart. ”Naive hedonism is always allied to a conscious or unconscious economic philosophy, in so far as wealth and high consumption or demand are ultimately taken to be the absolute good” (31) The other is a social asceticism as reflected in certain kinds of buddhism. ”asceticism strives for its complete liberation from matter…All pleasure is slavery for the spirit. Life is a mirage, a malign deception, an illusion.” (35) For Bulgakov, the historical task is one of labor, indeed the centrality of labor to his work is pervasive. At the same time, he remains strident that freedom from poverty is the fundamental foundation for entrance into the moral life, the life of spirit. Without it, one remains subject to the elemental powers of the world. The fall was for him a sort of reversal; in the beginning humanity was the “master” of matter and nature, and the post-lapsarian condition is a kind of enslavement to nature. Labor and creation, freedom from sheer survival, is the move toward salvation, the imitation and realization of the divine Logos/Sophia in the human and created sophia. What here is mostly political commentary, eventually flowers into his full fledged work on the Divine-Humanity.
In fact I got the impression that Bulgakov’s dogmatic work was in a way an attempt to give a solid christological and dogmatic foundation to an understanding of human poetics, to supplant his former Marxism with a Christian vision of the world as a household. (The whole series of works based on oikos is relevant) There’s a lot of unworked potential in conversation with Bulgakov, and his hasty denouncement by the Russian patriarchate and men like Vladimir Lossky and Georges Florovsky, and the only very recent translation of his works into English, has pronounced this. I for one can’t wait to read some more.
What is at stake in the “Gender Roles” debate?
April 19, 2011
My previous post seemed to prompt a myriad of other questions from readers and from my own ruminations. There can be little argument that gender roles have been and will continue to be an issue for much of the Christian church for many years (perhaps generations) to come. This all prompts the beginning of what has become an important exercise for me. Whenever I get into the middle of a polemical debate, eventually I want to know what people are protecting; and, so, I begin deconstructing the various arguments trying to find out what is at stake for each group in the argument. Unfortunately, sometimes the breadth of the issue extends beyond my personal expertise. The argument over gender roles is quickly turning into one of those discussions that obviously has pertinence in a variety of fields – effectively dismantling my ability to efficiently tease out the prominent theological issues. There seems to me to be clear interference in identifying theologically sound gender roles coming from cultural narratives. Even the soft sciences point to the fact that much of our gender identity comes from environment. Consequently, the loop I get stuck in comes, in part, from the fact that those soft sciences identify religion as one of the environmental factors that produce sexism (here is an example of what I mean). So, what are the questions that best identify what is at stake when we discuss gender roles and their practical impact on Christian theology? Here are a few of the things that I have been thinking about and researching as I try to identify some of the root issues.
1. To what extent, if any, does the biological function of gender play? Namely, there are some writing from the Christian perspective that seem invested in framing gender roles within the confines of anatomical differences, why? There are, of course, a series of questions that follow - and this will require the most exploration, because I know the least about it. Does your reproductive function (your maleness or femaleness) actually have bearing on anything outside of, well, reproduction? In other words, does having a certain anatomical characteristic extend beyond the anatomy’s actual function? In an entirely biological sense, I am a male because my body produces “small, typically motile gametes, esp. spermatozoa, with which a female may be fertilized or inseminated to produce offspring.” Is that the end of gender distinction? Do the hormones that cause my body to serve a certain reproductive function also program my personality to only serve a certain social function? Does that programmed social function constitute the will of God for my life? In fact, by the 1990′s we have an interdisciplinary field trying to explain how these questions get answered – sociobiology.
2. Are some Christians trying to prop up their bibliology? Here, I must confess a personal bias. I have read many evangelical scholars that essentially paint themselves into a corner on this issue. Many have attempted to defend certain notions of inerrancy and infallibility in our modern translations only to retreat to defending them in the manuscripts, only to retreat to defending them in autographs, only to defending them in “essential” New Testament material (see this text by G.K. Beale for a discussion of the “erosion” as he calls it)
3. Are some Christians trying to prop up their ecclesiology? Let’s be honest, the huge ordination debate centers on the fact that traditionalist understandings of gender roles prevail in most churches. A few articles that interact with some different nuances of the issue are here, here, here, and here.
4. Are some Christian men trying to prop up their patriarchy? Here is an even-handed text that addresses these (and other) kinds of questions.
5. What is the real (if any) significance that Jesus was male, and how is that significance offset by a robust Mariology in the Church?
6. How much of Scripture’s account regarding this material is meant to be prescriptive; and how much is, by virtue of context, only descriptive?
I don’t currently belive that there is a clear-cut answer to all of these types of questions. I think gender and gender identity is created by a variety of things, but I can assert with certainty at least one thing: whatever differences gender identity and roles introduce, there is no value difference between men and women and to the extent that our theology allows men to be held above women our theology is wrong.
So, what do you think is really at stake in the debate over gender roles? What do you think people are protecting?
Mars Hill Church, Mark Driscoll, and Gender Roles
April 14, 2011
If you are a student of theology searching through sources that are immediately obvious (Mars Hill Church’s web page) and easily attainable (the publications of Pastor Mark Driscoll) concerning the theology of Mars Hill Church, you will find nothing surprising, nothing indecent, nothing “out of the ordinary.” This was, frankly, a little bit surprising, indecent, and unexpected to me. You see, much of my experience with Mars Hill Church, and Mark Driscoll by way of extension, is through those that attend services at a Mars Hill campus or through those that listen to Mark’s sermons. Without fail (no, really) these conversations always lead to a discussion regarding Mark’s theology on gender roles; particularly gender roles and how they are played out in the church and home. Now, admittedly, many of my more recent conversations have been driven by my own morbid curiosity concerning these issues. As such, I am the one that brings up the gender role “issue.” However, my most recent encounter with this theology comes via a concerned friend attending a Mars Hill Church.
I know I am late to this party. Bloggers have been bashing and defending Mark for years. The reason I enter the fray now is in order to faithfully walk with a friend in need. Consequently, though I am late, I wonder if two or three years after the brouhaha I am not seeing the practical incarnation of Mark’s theology in the lives of his parishioners. Still, it bears telling that after reading everything I could get my hands on for free and after watching what seemed like pertinent sermon archives on YouTube, I am mostly annoyed over how little I am actually annoyed by Mark’s writing and preaching when it comes to matters of orthodox theology. Sure, his tone is brash, his words are poorly chosen at times, and he mostly lacks theological finesse; but which of these things could not also be said of me? The lion’s share of his doctrinal writing is done in the style and quality of most reformed theology. So, after adjusting for things that I would personally not like to be nitpicked on, I am not left with a lot to attack.
Then there is the ministry niche he is filling. Mark has made his mark in the church market by bringing in the elusive 20-35 male crowd. He has published quite a bit of material directed toward discipling Christian men on how to be good husbands and fathers. How did he do it? Well, here is where most people have been fighting. Dr. Richard Beck of ACU has a very evenhanded approach to understanding the practical/pastoral theology of Mark Driscoll and why it makes waves in the broader Christian community. In short, Mark’s advocates claim that he has given men permission to be real men, and Mark’s detractors claim that he has created a haven for misogynists and their sympathizers. Dr. Beck’s blog (here and at the end of this post) answers with an eloquent “yes” on both counts.
Mark should be applauded for an attempt to bring genuine masculinity into an environment whose controlling narrative is fundamentally feminine and feminizing. Conversely, Mark’s teaching is not always accurate in depicting genuine masculinity. Instead, much of what Mark props up as complimentarian gender distinction finds its locus in misogyny. To borrow Dr. Beck’s words,
“I think this is because there is a great deal of confusion about what we mean by “masculine.” In psychology, the word “masculinity”, due to its gender overtones, has been largely replaced by the term “agency.” Agency/masculinity is associated with motives for control, power, independence, and dominance. These are, stereotypically, “masculine” traits, but women can be highly agentic as well. If agency means power, control, and dominance then it seems clear that “masculine” traits will struggle to find a place in the Christian ethic. This was precisely Nietzsche’s concern about Christianity: Christianity preaches a passive “slave ethic.””
Consequently, Mark is an “agentic” guy and he interprets his “agency” as genuine masculinity. So, what is the best way for Christian men to be genuinely masculine in the Christian sense? If you read Mark’s publications the answer is for men to exert control, power, independence, and dominance over their wives and children. Hmm, that sounds familiar. Where have we heard it before?
One more quote from Dr. Beck is helpful I think:
“I’ve {Dr. Beck} argued in Thought #1 and #2 that Driscoll should not be so easily dismissed. The question he’s raising–Why are males not more attracted to church?–is worth asking. And one of his diagnoses on this issue–Church leaders are chickified–has some merit to it.
But the dark side of Driscoll’s ministry is its chauvinism and misogyny. And this criticism is also valid for certain impulses one finds in the Christian men’s movements. Specifically, the assertion of masculinity implies a suppression of women and a restoration of male power over women. To be a “Christian man” means “reclaiming” and “taking back” leadership roles in both the family and the church. Men use spiritual warrant to assert power over women.”
The danger is when Mark uses biblical exegesis in that very “evangelical argumentum ad baculum” way to proof text gender roles that he superimposes on biblical texts. Why is this problematic? It is problematic, because this theology has created a normative expression of gender in the Mars Hill Community that cannot be contradicted, because of an appeal to Scriptural authority. If one does not meet the expectations of those normative gender roles, then one is looked down upon for not submitting to God. In short, if you are a member of Mars Hill Church and want to participate as a leader (even at the lowest rung) in discipleship or fellowship, then you cannot deviate from the established gender roles. If you want to lead a small group and you are a man, then you had better be fulfilling Mark’s vision of genuine masculinity – read dominant, controlling, and powerful. If you want your family to belong and you are a woman, then you had better be fulfilling Mark’s vision of genuine femininity – read submissive, controlled, and weak. So, what happens if it makes better sense for a family if the mother works and the father stays home to raise the children? You come up for “review” with the leadership of the church, that’s what. A man who will stay home with his children while his wife works comes under the same kind of scrutiny as a man who is cheating on his wife. It becomes a question of whether said man is “fit to lead.” This is justified, because, apparently, Mark’s Bible says so.
Exegetically, Mark takes too many liberties in 1) giving narrow definitions for terms that are either contextually or culturally bound in the text, and in 2) insisting that such notions be applied to the lives of Christians as if they were the actual theological principles found in the texts, and in 3) using wisdom literature as prescriptive rather than descriptive.
For an instance of #1 and #2, in this broadcast posted on YouTube, you can see the basic hermeneutical approach utilized by Mark and his wife. They use 1 Timothy 5:8 which says, “but a man that will not provide for his own and especially for those of his household, he has denied the faith, and is worse than an unbeliever” as an injunction against both a father that would stay home and take care of his family in order for his wife to work, and as an injunction against a father that allows his wife to work outside of the home - at all. Mark even goes as far as to acknowledge that some have complained that he takes the Bible out of its cultural context, but does nothing to answer the criticism.
As far as 1 Timothy 5 is concerned, a larger issue than even the cultural expression of gender role is the fact that Paul is clearly not talking about “every man.” Paul is giving instruction to widows, their families, and their churches. Paul tells them that some of them are merely husbandless, and some of them are “true widows.” Those women who find themselves husbandless are to return to their parents. In which case, Paul explains that the parents of husbandless women that will not care for her have denied the faith and are worse than an unbeliever. Apparently, Timothy’s church was full of rich, heartless bastards that wouldn’t even take care of their widowed daughters, because it was easy to let the church community do it instead. This comes from only a simple reading of the whole text of Timothy. No fancy Greek translation, no obscure historical-cultural background. Mark Driscoll is superimposing what he wants the text to say onto a text that seems to fit the bill. I think we call that proof texting? In fact, if anyone would take the time to read it, I surmise that I could easily dismiss most of his readings in Ephesians 5, Colossians 3, 1 Peter 3, and Titus 2 on the basis of the same kind of sloppy hermeneutics.
For an instance of #3, in Pastor Dad he states that Proverbs 19:13 proves that the sorry state of modern families is due to the fact that women have undermined the authority of the husbands by “chirping” at them constantly and turning their children into ruinous fools by proxy. The verse says, “A foolish son is ruin to his father, and a wife’s quarreling is a continual dripping of rain.” I’m sure it is obvious to everyone how he came to those conclusions? Interestingly, this kind of exegesis is damaging to the actual principle at hand. Why can we not just appreciate the wisdom of Scripture in identifying the importance of harmony in the home? Why does this verse prove gender roles? Go ahead; replace any of the characters in the verse with another member of the family. For instance, what if son and father is replaced with daughter and mother – what if a wife’s quarreling is replaced with a husband’s quarreling? Does it change the theological principle? No. Does it change the verse’s utility as a proof text for gender roles? Uh-oh. Furthermore, and perhaps more problematic, why does Mark have to rely on Scripture’s wisdom literature in such a prescriptive manner for so much of his theological stance on gender roles?
What is ultimately the case, in my experience, is that only people who have the luxury of indulging their personal biases and living out their “ideal self” are ever so pedantic about moralizing issues like gender role. Sure, there are lots of chauvinist men out there that would have their wives in their proper place – the home; but how many of them earn Mark’s salary? Sure, there are lots of misogynists out there that think women are gullible and weaker than men, but how many of them are as charismatic as Mark? Mark has the ability to get away with this moralizing, because he is a successful mega-church pastor (and has been since a young age) and is untouched by the realities faced by young professionals, single parents and low-income families alike. This is, of course, a practical explanation of what ultimately originates from a need in the theological framework of most “conservative evangelical” narratives. Meaning this: sure Mark is reaching a historically hard to reach demographic, but he is reinforcing a historically negative social hierarchy based in gender bias. This negative bias is at the root of many patriarchal worldviews, and is defensible from arguments that rely on perspectives that in turn rely on traditionally fundamentalist understandings of Scriptural authority. What’s the cost? Real people, in real modern families, are once again begin taught to objectify women by men of the cloth. Kyrie Eleison.
Some of the interesting material I used preparing for the post
http://theresurgence.com/files/2011/03/02/relit_ebook_pastordad.pdf
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1WPVxndUcHQ
http://experimentaltheology.blogspot.com/2009/02/thoughts-on-mark-driscoll-while-im.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/11/magazine/11punk-t.html?pagewanted=all
http://www.cbmw.org/images/onlinebooks/rbmw.pdf
http://www.dennyburk.com/mark-driscoll-on-women-in-ministry-2/
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-goldstein/whos-to-blame-for-pastor-_b_33279.html
Tony Hunt
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Shawn Wamsley
