Prediction I Hope Will Be Wrong

Sometimes I really, really hope I'm wrong. Now, for instance.

Big news came from Seattle this week: Mark Driscoll is stepping down as pastor of Mars Hill. Well, for six weeks, anyway. Serious charges have been brought against him, and he will go on vacation or something while the Mars Hill elders weigh the charges.

Now it should go without saying that we all hope this is a true church discipline process resulting in his repentance. Unfortunately, I suspect the whole thing is a traveshamockery. My prediction I seriously hope is wrong is this: no positive change will come out of this, and in fact I believe this will only make things worse.

Why do I think that? Start with his positively Clintonian statement, carefully crafted to give a façade of faux-repentance without actually repenting, twisting the facts, and making sure everyone knows the real villains are the people who have an issue with him.

Now consider the upcoming process and who will be administering it. Over the last few years, Driscoll has systematically eliminated elders who dare to disagree with him, smeared them as "divisive" per Titus 3:10-11, and stacked the elder board with personally-chosen sycophants. Now this collection of yes-men will choose between these "divisive" former brothers and their meal ticket. Pardon me for being a wee bit skeptical of the legitimacy of this process.

My prediction is that they will function like a "Blue Ribbon Panel" in Washington. Their primary job is to look like the issue is being taken seriously, give the aggrieved a chance to vent and 'be heard', and make sure no real consequences hit anyone important. They will issue a report vaguely acknowledging "mistakes were made", assuring us all that Pastor Mark is really, really sorry and truly, madly, deeply repentant for his minor imperfections (but reminding us again that those who said anything publicly are a million times worse), making vague claims of continued efforts towards restitution, and then reinstating him without consequence.

But it won't just be without consequence, you see. Now there will be cover as well. When the same things keep happening, and we go through this yet again, the Kool-Aid drinkers will point to this as indisputable, brave, humble repentance, and scold those who dare doubt it. Already instead of thanking those who warned them, the "don't you dare question him now!" scoldings and selective amnesia about their own culpability have flown freely. Next time we go through this, the chorus shouting that we have to pretend nothing before September 2014 ever happened will be deafening.

Again, I hope I'm completely wrong on every part of this. I hope there is genuine repentance, that elders hand-picked specifically for their ability to be spineless yes-men will suddenly become vertebrates and rule justly, and that true restitution is made. But nothing we've seen so far in over a decade of Driscoll makes any of that remotely likely.

On Acts 29's blessed subtraction

If you're the type to follow the happenings of greater evangelicalism, you've no doubt heard that sorta-famous sorta-pastor Mark Driscoll received the boot of disfellowship to the hindquarters of his association with Acts 29, a church-planting parachurch group he helped start and until recently ran as its chief prophet-king or something. You might say Acts 29 engaged in blessed subtraction, and that he got run over by the bus, joining the mountain of bodies (by God's grace) - if you're the sort of person to make such jokes, and I most certainly am.

This story has been all over the Christian and pretend-Christian corner of the interwebs, so I won't rehash the whole thing. Here I'll just offer a few quick thoughts on the whole affair.

1) Before listening to Driscoll's horrendous "blessed subtraction" message again, I had forgotten it had been a speech to an Acts 29 conference. Am I a bad man for laughing?

2) It can't be easy to oust your group's founder, especially after sticking behind him for so long. As easy as it is to question the move - and we will - it still took some level of courage and/or conviction. On the other hand...

3) When Krusty the Klown announced his retirement, a reporter asked the pertinent question: "Why now? Why not twenty years ago?" Similarly, why was this move made now instead of five or ten years ago? What exactly has changed? Are these issues actually new, or are they just now too public to ignore?

4) To reiterate - there is very little new here. Nearly all of these issues have been knowable for years, for anyone who didn't actively try to not know. See for example here, here, and the multitude here. So again, what has changed? Why do Acts 29 and James MacDonald and Lifeway suddenly have to bail right now, when these sins and shortcomings have been obvious for around a decade?

5) Carl Trueman asks an important question: what did the major evangelical leaders who've been promoting Driscoll for a decade know and when did they know it? I would add, if they didn't know, what could explain that other than deliberate ignorance?

6) With all this happening in Driscoll's extracurriculars, don't forget he's still the sorta-pastor of a church with thousands of people. Having gone through a similar period a few years ago (when my pastor decided little things like "the Trinity" and "the gospel" are insignificant compared to "the Harvest brand" and his personal enrichment), I can tell you how easy it isn't. Disillusionment, confusion, "how could we have been so wrong?" - or the "how dare they attack our hero!" mentality of the personality cult. Pray for them, especially that they can break away and find an actual church.

7) As for Driscoll, he still has 'his' church, and now a bunch of extra fuel for his martyr complex. His two choices are to repent or double down (see Phillips' Axiom #2); early indications do not look good for repentance. I can't pretend to know how this will end, but without genuine repentance, more disaster is coming.

Preaching About the Wrong Man

This was originally going to be a post bemoaning the "ethics downgrade" plaguing American evangelicalism. Since Mark Driscoll and Ergun Caner are back in the news for their various violations of ethics rules accepted even among the most virulently secular, I was planning to compare the response of secular organizations in similar situations, and axe why the American district of the City on a Hill has lower standards than those in the valley.

And that would be an easy post to write, would it not? Recount some stories of people fired or expelled from hostilely secular schools and companies for relatively minor cases of plagiarism, then ask why Mark Driscoll can brazenly steal the work of others, and the response of the Christian elite (as if that term doesn't explain the problem) is to attempt to destroy the person who dared to expose his self-exalting theft.

Then I could recall the story of George O'Leary, the college football coach who in 2001 was hired for one of the most prestigious positions in his field, head coach at Notre Dame. But when the school went to prepare his biography for their media machine, some discrepancies were found. He had padded his resume three or four decades earlier to help him break into the field, and never got around to removing the padding from his bio. He had a great track record as a coach over multiple decades, so no big deal, right? Wrong. Notre Dame, a Catholic school, exposed the decades-old lies, and fired him immediately.

It would be easy enough to compare that to the case of Ergun Caner, who built a career through lying about, well, pretty much everything. In numerous sermons at churches all over America, he told a life story that simply isn't true. He lied to the Marines, presenting himself as an expert on Islam because of his background in order to train them in Muslim relations (shudder to think of soldiers dying because they followed his advice). Time after time, he told the same story of his life - and when someone finally looked into it, it was a mountain of lies. Did his employer, Liberty University, act as boldly as Notre Dame, especially considering how much more serious Caner's lies are than O'Leary's were? No. They 'cleared' him of lying, saying only that he had made "factual statements that are self-contradictory", and letting him remain on the faculty. Egads.  Now several years and several gigs later, he was hired as president of Brewton-Parker College. Was he hired in spite of his lies? Worse - according to their official statement, he was hired because of them. Specifically, because he remained unrepentant and defiant, and is fighting in anti-Christian ways to destroy those who exposed him. The liar is a hero and paragon of virtue, while the truth-tellers are pagan attackers.

That's not an ethics downgrade. That's hitting bottom and keeping on digging. The folks at Brewton-Parker hit rock bottom, and brought in the dynamite.

OK, so I guess I wound up writing that post anyway. So be it. Anyway, while I was thinking that through, something else occurred to me. I'm going to set Driscoll aside for a moment here - which, come to think of it, is good advice all the time; let the widdle boy-man pee in his own sandbox all he wants, don't worry about him, but be willing to hose him off if he ever realizes how much his diaper stinks and asks for a change.

For now, let's just focus on Caner, with one question - why does it matter so much that he's such a dirty rotten filthy stinking liar? What difference does it make that his life story has him sitting on a throne of lies? Aside from listing the bare-minimum qualifications for an elder, let's do a little thought experiment.

Think about your pastor, and maybe a famous pastor you respect (MacArthur, for instance). Imagine they had lied about some significant biographical details. How many sermons would they have to preach before the lies had an impact on the message? I suspect for many pastors, it would be several months before those stories were in sermons, if ever.

Now do the same with Caner. Find any sermon he preached from about late 2001 to 2010. How much would it change the message if you replace the biographical lies with the truth? Could you find even a 10-minute stretch which wouldn't be any different without the lies? Change Caner's lies about himself to the truth about himself, and his sermons would be completely unrecognizable!

For any faithful pastor, from the MacArthurs and Pipers and Sprouls to the myriad small-church pastors you'll never hear of until heaven - really, anyone who fits the minimum qualifications of an elder - the star of every message is Jesus Christ.

For Ergun Caner, the star of every message is Ergun Caner.

The trail of lies (and the inexcusable actions of his enablers) is disqualifying. But it wouldn't be so noticeable, and he maybe wouldn't have been so tempted to do it, if he didn't preach about the wrong man.

Yesterday, Today, and Forever

So apparently Mark Driscoll recently went on a rant that was just silly, ignorant, and flat-out stupid. Frank Turk as usual does a masterful job of dissecting the absurdity. It's worth a read. Pack a lunch.

Now, out of that whole mess, there's one particular argument I'd like to take a closer look at. The discussion regards the issue of cessationism, the idea that miraculous spiritual gifts ceased with the end of the apostolic period. After effectively calling the vast multitudes of Christians throughout the ages who've held this position the same as atheists and deists, Driscoll backs it up with this:

"So within that God's not really speaking, God's not really working and the supernatural gifts are not in operation; Healing, revelation, speaking in tongues, those kinds of things they are over in the God-used-to box. Even though I was reading this book that said he was the same yesterday, today and forever."

The 'book' he read that said that is of course Hebrews, specifically 13:8. His argument seems to be that based on this verse, if God has ever done something some way, He must forever keep doing the same thing the same way.

The book of Hebrews has 303 verses. This attempt to use this verse is so spectacularly awful, you have to wonder if he's ever read any of the other 302.

Honestly, if you were going to make this argument, is there a worse book you could possibly use than Hebrews? OK, maybe Revelation might be up there with it, but Hebrews is about as bad as it can get for this position. It's hard to find a portion of the book which doesn't fight against this silly argument. Consider:

Hebrews 8:13 - "In speaking of a new covenant, he makes the first one obsolete. And what is becoming obsolete and growing old is ready to vanish away." Though God is the same yesterday, today, and forever, he apparently had no problem replacing the obsolete old covenant with a new, better one.

Hebrews 7:11ff - Remember the Levitical priesthood? The unchanging God gladly replaced it with the superior Melchizedekian priesthood of Jesus.

Hebrews 10:1-18 - Based on Driscoll's argument, we should still be worthlessly sacrificing bulls and goats, and verses 9 and 18 are practically atheistic or deistic.

Hebrews 9:11ff - That old tabernacle and associated stuff? Gone. Buh bye. Replaced with the heavenly, better versions. But I thought God was the same yesterday, today, and forever...?

So yeah, the meat of the book is all about the old and obsolete being replaced with the new and better. What else do we find?

Hebrews 10:19-20 - "Therefore, brothers, since we have confidence to enter the holy places by the blood of Jesus, by the new and living way that he opened for us through the curtain, that is, through his flesh..." Whoa, wait a second, what's all this "new and living way" stuff? I thought God was unchanging!

Hebrews 3:7-11 - "Therefore, as the Holy Spirit says..." What does he say? A long scripture quote! Interesting, isn't it? It's almost as if Driscoll's larger argument, that if you don't believe in perpetually ongoing fresh revelation you believe God is silent, is completely and utterly demolished by this single passage. But that would be a silly thought, that God speaks through scripture, AKA His Word.

Oh, how about one more? Let's look at the first couple verses of chapter 2, with my comments in brackets.

Therefore we must pay much closer attention to what we have heard, lest we drift away from it. For since the message declared by angels [the Mosaic law, Acts 7:53] proved to be reliable, and every transgression or disobedience received a just retribution, how shall we escape if we neglect such a great salvation? It [the gospel] was declared at first by the Lord, and it was attested to us by those who heard [the apostles], while God also bore witness [to what? the gospel proclamation of 'those who heard' Jesus!] by signs and wonders and various miracles and by gifts of the Holy Spirit distributed according to his will.

Folks, this is perhaps the #1 cessationist passage regarding the purpose of the miraculous gifts. It very explicitly ties them to the initial proclamation of the gospel by those who heard it directly from Jesus.

So this book, basically from beginning to end, is opposed to the point Driscoll tried to make from one poorly-applied verse. That leaves us with a couple options.

(1) He simply doesn't know any better. The pastor is so unfamiliar with this magnificent tome of Christology that he has no idea how contrary his point is to the central themes of the book.
(2) He knows better, but is fine with completely misusing scripture to make a minor rhetorical point.
(3) I'm so completely far off in my understanding of these fairly plain and straightforward passages from Hebrews that I should really just give up blogging, teaching, or even commenting on scripture until I get my mind right.
(4) ???? I dunno, help me out here.

I'm fairly sure it's not 3 - otherwise, I wouldn't have written this all. 1 and 2 are both simply ghastly options, completely unfitting for a pastor, and really could disqualify one from eldership at all. So someone please tell me it's 4, and figure out what that could possibly be. 'Coz I'm kinda stumped.