Pastors Cooperation with R-Rated Driscoll Questioned, or Something er Other
Over at Slice of Laodicea, which I usually only visit when a Mars Hill friend sends me a link to a post about Mark Driscoll, there is a post about, well not too surpisingly, Mark Driscoll:
Cathy Mickels is a wonderful sister-in-Christ who is passionate, articulate and well-documented. Because of this, she is one of my favorite guests on Crosstalk. For years, she has researched what has been going on in evangelicalism regarding young people. Now she has been researching and exposing smut-meister Driscoll.
I don’t think that I have ever heard the term “smut-meister” before. Apparently Cathy Mickels has written a memorandum documenting Driscolls’ alleged “crudeness and careless handling of Scripture”. Should be an interesting read . . . You can read the rest of the Slice post here.
Now as someone who loves Driscolls preaching and has grown a lot from it (I went to Mars Hill for about 5 years by the way) most of these criticisms roll right past me.
I do though remember reading a post from the Internet Monk a while back about “a well-known young evangelical preacher” who was going through the Song of Solomon. <wink wink>
There were a few parts that at least gave me pause.
The sermon contains a lot of good information on marriage and sexual intimacy. I don’t agree with all of the perspective of the preacher on this topic, but the information and advice he’s giving is good. I wish my students would listen to the talk because there’s some exceptionally frank discussion of sex and marriage that will save them a lot of difficulty.
But I’m just not convinced that what I’m hearing is the message of the Song of Solomon. I’m not convinced that what I’m hearing from the preacher can be found authoritatively in the text. I don’t believe that study and exegesis is going to bring these points to the forefront.
and
. . . the preacher went right from some of the more sensual language of the book to specific kinds of popular contemporary sexual acts, and then moved well past that to much more on to the larger subject of sex in marriage and many applications there. Whether his advice was true or not, it wasn’t based on the plain, purposeful reading of the text. He was hanging his own talk on the text, not bringing the message out of the text.
Someone else in the comments I believe asked a question along the lines of “Do you think there is a good reason that God chose to handle these topics using imagery? If there is, do you think that it might be a good reason for us to do the same?”
I certainly had to think about it. What do you think?
Update!
For that memo by Cathy Mickels, go here. Haven’t read it yet myself and might not.
January 14th, 2009 at 12:23 pm
wow, smut-meister. I haven’t heard that one either. not surprised. thanks for posting!
January 14th, 2009 at 1:20 pm
I think Internet monk had an accurate assessment. This was similar to how he treated Nehemiah. His points in the sermons weren’t necessarily wrong, they just weren’t consistent with accurate exposition of the text. And that road always ends badly even if it begins innocently.
January 14th, 2009 at 1:59 pm
I agree both with iM and with the person in the meta who made the comment about the imagery.
But I don’t think this lack of exegesis started with the Song of Solomon series. It seemed to me to start about mid-way through Genesis where the sermons began to be more about Mark’s beliefs on what makes a good life and less about what the Scriptural text was actually saying.
When I read Dever’s 9 Marks one thing that jumped out at me was how he defines the diff’t types of preaching and how Mark’s preaching had wandered away from expository as MHC grew.
Regarding the ‘it should remain allegorical’ comment, I agree. There are some symbolic bits of Scripture that need to be de-symbolized in order to be taught. Song of Solomon is not one of them. Further, the way to interpret this book has been so strongly debated over the centuries that a cavalier dismissal of all other interpretations in a matter of minutes in the first sermon is not really doing service to the hard work of interpretation that’s been done in the past. It’s really just thumbing your nose and jumping into what you want the text to say.
January 14th, 2009 at 3:22 pm
I started out writing a brief response to the Laodicea article, but I just started to get mean. What a ridiculous take on Driscoll. I can’t agree with every detail of Pastor Mark’s incredible history, but he has done huge things for God while (as he would say) keeping the right hand of doctrine firmly closed, and teaching the rest of us to keep the left of methods of communication and approach to culture open. He’s been a huge help to me on these issues.
The fact that Laodicea is closed for comments kills me, but its probably for the best because I got a little steamed.
January 14th, 2009 at 6:30 pm
“For that memo by Cathy Mickels, go here. Haven’t read it yet myself and might not.”
Why not?
January 14th, 2009 at 8:01 pm
I hadn’t read it because I had some things to finish before I headed out the door and I said I might not read it because it wasn’t a priority for me by a long shot! I am very aware of what Mark Driscoll has said so I wasn’t expecting to hear anything new.
Honestly, I have unfortunately wasted enough of the little time I have on earth criticizing other men when I should have been setting my mind on things that would work for my edification and that of those around me.
I do think that a good thing to set our mind on is exegetical integrity in preaching, small groups and personal study though and that is what this piece brought to my mind.
January 14th, 2009 at 8:20 pm
Mickels’ piece is mostly a waste of time for two reasons 1) she hangs most of her case against Mark on what she considers potty talk, which would include simply the word “potty” for her 2) she then assumes this is proof that Mark trivializes Scripture without attempting to make any case that Mark is faulty in his exegesis anywhere. She lacks any demonstrable grounds to say he actually misrepresents or distorts Scripture because she assumes everyone must agree with her and therefore has no need to dispute Mark’s actual handling of a biblical text. She also doesn’t like that he uses irreverant humor with a text she reveres but can’t build a case from that that Mark actually abuses the biblical text.
Long, lazy, and she doesn’t put any real effort into an argument that could be salient, that Mark’s innuendo and flashy talk about sex may promote the thing he thinks he’s trying to speak against, young guys who have bad ideas about sex and sexuality that need correction from Scripture. It’s not new and it’s more of the same. Besides, if Slice links to it it’s not something to take seriously on exegetical grounds as all their punches are second hand Macarthurisms with less exegetical research.
January 14th, 2009 at 8:34 pm
Yeah what Jeremiah said. :D
January 14th, 2009 at 8:43 pm
Plus Dwayne knew I would read it and provide a summary, Dudely Dude. :)
Matt, Alanna, you’re right that Mark bailed on actual exegetical preaching a while back. I’m of two minds about the significance of this. Ruth was two sermons with some Gospel in them on the outside of a bunch moralistic pap with “who’s your daddy” jokes thrown in. Ostensibly about God’s providence in X, Y, and Z it was mostly a set of sermons prescribing a rerun of Mark’s teaching to singles on how to stop being single.
Nehemiah was more or less a pretext for vision casting that needed a biblical text as a starting point so Nehemiah fit the theme of a city within a city. If I wanted that I’d have stayed at the Methodist church I was at ten years earlier. The risk in Mark’s text as pretext approach is that it stops being about exegesis and it doesn’t matter how good his points may be the Scriptures are things he places under his feet as a springboard for jumping off into his own agendas. Those agendas may not seem bad and may even be admirable but it means he’s putting himself over the biblical text, possibly without realizing it.
I’m going to resist the temptation to get really detailed about why his approach to Song of Songs has always been problematic. Instead I’ll point out, Matt, that his “seed of Chucky” dimissal of an early and universally accepted interpretation of Gen 6 is an example of how Mark has felt free to dismiss casually views he doesn’t like from the earlier days of his ministry. Of course to seriously exegete the phrase “strange flesh” in Jude means you have to tackle the issue of 1 Enoch and that means you have to read one of the prime “seed of Chucky” apocryphal books ever written … but Mark has tended to skip exegesis in favor of application. If the church is full of baby Christians who need to get plugged in and aren’t taught how to interpret Scripture for themselves that makes sense … but it seems like a different approach from the earlier years.
January 15th, 2009 at 12:23 pm
For sake of clarification, Mark (I’m sure) does a lot of exegetical work and then when it comes to sermon time he presents his own take on the text in many cases as though that were the plain meaning of the text. During the 1 Corinthians sermon series maybe almost a decade ago (the first one) he knew about the work of Grudem and Fee and the like but tilted toward a cessationist position. Now for someone who hasn’t recounted how God called him in a charismatic type experience to marry Grace, plant a church, and train young men there would have been no tension between a cessationist approach to preaching 1 Corinthians and his own life but I think over time Mark must have figured out that you can’t consistently do that and he’s dropped cessationistic tendencies in his preaching. In that respect at least he isn’t pitting his preference as an expositor over against his personal testimony anymore. But it was an example of how Mark could study all the issues of a text and then simplify things by leaning on his understanding of how to apply the text and that goes back to about 2000-2001. So this is a strength and a weakness he’s had for years. He’s great at bottom-lining but sometimes gets there too soon and comes up with a different bottom line than other preachers, perhaps most obviously in Song of Songs and at that point Mark’s approach made that pun unavoidable.
January 15th, 2009 at 12:41 pm
@Jeremiah
Just thought I would throw this in as a Pastor. I never feel obligated to show my exegesis to my congregation. I want to show them how to handle the Bible, but my chief concern is not to go on about different views of a text. Approaching preaching as part exhortation, part exegesis paper is not healthy. (It seems healthy to young preachers and seminarians, but it isn’t.–not that you are one, I’m just saying). It can lead the congregation to believe that there are 13 ways to approach every text. In the end it actually makes them more hesitant to pick up their Bibles and read. It gives the impression that every passage requires expert intervention. Only people anal about theological and exegetical details burden a congregation with every possible take on a text. (I said details, not meaning depth, but nit-picking details.)
With regard to the way Mark actually preaches a text, there is nothing wrong at all with taking the general principles of a text and bringing some sound, Biblically informed incites to how it applies today. Few men have the breadth of experience with people that Pastor Mark has. Having that as a well to draw from is a huge advantage for him. To stunt that in the name of exposition is silly in my opinion. A preacher should be given a great deal of leeway to do this, especially when working with narrative texts. There is such a thing as being so insistent on exposition that you kill creativity and communication. That isn’t exposition at all. It is presenting an exegesis paper via alliterated points!
I know I’m putting this in a simplistic way, but I don’t have time to nuance everything right now :-). Why am I wasting my time here! I have lectures to write! Blessings.
January 15th, 2009 at 1:48 pm
Your words aren’t falling on deaf ears. Thanks for spending the time to get them out. I have more thoughts on this, but I’d prefer to save them for a post that isn’t tied to such a big personality as Marks.
Sometimes when you reference a person you do so as a stepping stone to talking about an idea. Some people are so polarizing though that they aren’t good stepping stones and the conversation can get stopped on them without moving forward to the idea.
At some point I’ll do a post on Dever’s 9marks http://marks.9marks.org/Mark1/LessonA/Slide1of1 Dever is hardly polarizing. :D