Hey, Mark Driscoll is not a professional writer or speaker or anything. He’s not used to communicating for a living. So we shouldn’t hold it against him that it’s taken him a solid month to remember that if he’s going to pretend that people are asking him questions, then he needs to make it easy for these theoretical people to communicate with him.
Who here is a first-semester freshman? Raise your hands…. Okay, so almost all of you. Good. I’m passing out stuff you’ll need to know–a syllabus, my test and essay schedule, and a campus map so you can find the bookstore. We keep it on the third basement floor of the Student Life Center behind the tiger pit. Be sure you wear running shoes when you go.
Sometimes I see something a fundagelical wrote and just laugh, because it’s either that or get angry. Today’s laugh is provided by Jerry Falwell Jr. of Liberty University. And I know that Liberty University generally provokes that kind of reaction from everyone except fundagelicals, for whom it is Most Serious Bizniss, Read more
Having suitably–he thinks at least–absolved himself of responsibility for Mars Hill’s disintegration and his own loss of power, now Mark Driscoll must lay tracks down about his personal integrity.
Christian leaders push this redefinition onto their flocks for a reason–and to reach a goal that they clearly feel is more pressing than all that boring stuff Jesus is supposed to have told them to do. I’m talking about compromise, of course, and here’s the skinny on it–and why it’s going to sink any effort Christians even try to make to save their religion from irrelevance.
Today we’ll examine the CBMW’s central conceit, complementarianism, since it informs both of their culture wars, and we’ll see exactly why it fails so hard. The objections people have to its soundness as a doctrine are actually not even its worst facets, as it happens–and I’ll show you why I think that today.
We’re now at day 21 of Mark Driscoll’s arrival to Patheos and the novelty hasn’t worn off yet.
Today I want to look more closely at why the CBMW chose to rally around this particular set of declarations, because that question tells us everything we need to know about that whole end of Christianity–as well as its end.
This re-issuing of already-well-known platforms won’t surprise anybody who’s been around evangelicals for longer than three minutes. But in its release, its timing, and its true purpose, we see something important happening to Christianity as a whole–and in American culture too.
It took Christian leaders some time to recognize that yes indeed, they were facing not just a temporary situation, but rather a serious and devastating long-term decline in membership and cultural clout. They’ve finally come to a widespread recognition of the problem. They still don’t quite know why it’s happening, though–much less what they can do to reverse it. I’ll show you their main stopgap solution today–and even better, I’ll show you why it absolutely will not work.