“MD sounds so cool with his tattoos, t-shirts, and beer but he is more legalistic than your grandma who thinks beer is of the devil.” (I can’t find who but will give proper recognition if someone can help me).
Robin said that on yesterday’s post. It’s right near the top.

Thanks 🙂

“Driscoll stated dramatically at the Orlando event that “cessationism is heretical”. My understanding of MD’s brash, offensive, shock jock approach to the gospel is this.”

I have a question about being heretical. I thought heretics were those who denied the historic truths of the Christian faith namely messing with the Trinity and how one is Justified. Maybe I am wrong but is cessationism messing with the trinity?

Dee said:
“That brought a icy response from Grudem, Mark’s right hand man, and it was the last we heard from them.”

Just for clarification, that would be Elliot Grudem , Wayne Grudem’s son.

Elliot pastored a Presbyterian church in Raleigh, NC (which belongs to the Acts 29 Network) prior to moving to Seattle to work with Driscoll’s ministry. Yes, it’s a small world after all…

By the by, yes, for Lutherans and high church folk I’ve know there are arguments that the Sallie isn’t really a church because they don’t baptise and don’t have eucharist or other sacraments. I trust you’ll understand that wasn’t what I was getting at. 🙂

Dee,

The protesters outside Calvary that morning were not from the local area, nor even from Texas for the most part, but from other states! And the child was a daughter, not a son. But the balance of the story is true.

BTW, at about the same time, another Baptist church in Waco called a woman to be pastor, and she still serves. Neither church was tossed from the association (and there is no such effort recorded to my knowledge) and neither was drummed out of the Baptist General Convention of Texas, to which most SBC churches belong, as well as CBF churches. Alliance of Baptists churches generally do not belong to the BGCT, unless also aligned with the SBC or CBF. (I know, a church dually aligned with the AoB and SBC sounds strange, but it does occur!).

BTW, the great “Waco” tragedy, the Branch Davidians event, did not occur in Waco, but miles outside city limits in the countryside. Kind of like something in Cary being attributed to being in Chapel Hill, because the reporters all rented hotel rooms in Chapel Hill as the nearest place with a nice hotel, and filed the stories from there. And kind of like treating everything that goes on in South Carolina as being in Carolina and therefore, applicable to you all in Chapel Hill!!!

Of course, there’s great irony in Mark calling out heretical belief, on an issue that has nothing to do with core Christian belief. The irony is that he is now cozying up to TD Jakes, of the word-faith, “name it and claim it” movement, who denies the trinity. It seems that Mark has a tough time identifying what the core beliefs of the faith are.

Robin: “MD sounds so cool with his tattoos, t-shirts, and beer but he is more legalistic than your grandma who thinks beer is of the devil.”

Dee: “Driscoll defines the core beliefs to be whatever he feels they are. Driscoll is his own judge.”

Driscoll, as has been said here many times, projects. He projects what he wants onto others and onto the very nature of God.

Psalm 50:21 “These things you have done and I kept silence;
You thought that I was just like you;
I will reprove you and state the case in order before your eyes.”

This is a danger for ALL of us. It is something we need to be aware of.

Driscoll has no clue that he does this. If it feels right in his own heart then it MUST be right. If is feels right to give himself and the men of his church freedom upon freedom in the area of tattoos and beer and all manner of manly men stuff, then is must be right. If it feels right to restrict women to ridiculous levels, even to the point of screening their emails and cutting them off from their mothers (a crime against motherhood, womanhood, and humanity in general though he and his beer/tattoo liberated dude followers are blind to this FACT) then it must be right.
If it feels right to deny Haiti support because the perfect vehicle of support happens to have a woman in a co-authority position with her husband, then it MUST be right. And God MUST agree with him.

He thinks that God is just like him.

Dee:

“I did not know about Driscoll +Jakes. I need to check it out.”

I’m guessing that’s a reference to The Elephant Room Round 2, though there could be something else going on that I don’t know about:

http://www.theelephantroom.com/conversations/

Dee – so right as always!

Love that he must be called to account by people like you who run influential blogs. He can’t argue with that!

🙂

Dee and Deb –

That is exactly what SGM was doing for years. What happens is not new believers but preaching of the PDI/SGM doctrine and congregations grow with transplantees. I’d love to see the numbers of new believers vs. tranaplants in Driscolls serfdom. :). Maybe CJ had feelings too – hmmm – sounds very pop-70’s culturish.

Driscoll, Acts 29 Deny Haiti Relief Because of a Female Pastor

Purity of Ideology trumps Reality.

Comrade Pol Pot would be proud.

I think the whole TD Jakes/Mark Driscoll thing on the Elephant Room is a set up. We heard MD make a comment that implied that the gloves were off.

As always Dee, you have a good and timely post. Timely on account of its questioning the issue of gender roles in evangelical Christianity, and good that you’re providing some push back to the radical elements around Christendom who want to make sure that women get no higher than the kitchen stove. It has never been addressed quite like it has over say the last 20 yrs. or so.

I would argue that the whole issue of egalitarianism vs. gender based hierarchy is rooted in one’s view of Scripture. Not necessarily a high view stacked against an alleged “low view” (planar), but rather one that depends largely upon a three-dimensional angular view.

If we use a rigid and deterministic 2D view of St. Paul’s letter to his protégé Timothy, then Paul indeed becomes the gentile Moses and Yahweh continues to thunder from atop Sinai through him. But on the other hand if we use a 3D angular displacement (vector) approach to Scripture, we see that Paul is only pointing to the good news of the empty tomb and the women who delivered it to the world when the men hid out in fear for their own skins.

Mr. Driscoll has said that he’ll gladly argue “Biblically” with his opponents on anything. So long as it’s a cage fight where he can rely on circular reasoning and special pleading to beat his opponent down, he’ll be game. If it’s moderated and he has to go up against someone like Greg Boyd or Chris Hedges, he’ll squeal like any schoolyard bully who gets his clock cleaned.

To be honest in view what an elder is SUPPOSE to do in a congregation it is by those tasks that merit them to be male. They are to be involved in formative training and development men to be Christ-like in their leadership. Driscoll and those like this Grudem or whoever who promote this progressive dispensationalism Calvinism needs to go back and prooftext passages on what a leader should BE like. I remember reading awhile back on those who support just war theologians would use Scripture to support their defense, the interesting thing about those who did not support it used Christ and the apostles in their defense. It was an interesting article to say the least. In thinking about that article I concluded “just defense” is valid and leaders willing to lay down their lives for their sheep is the high calling.

I believe that God is great, fwiw…

Hi Dee,

Thanks for your comment on my old site. I have launched my new site and things are mostly unpacked now. 🙂

Please feel free to stop by!

More here.

Yes it is, Muff!

I’m equally certain that people all around the world – of many differing faiths, or of none at all – have pondered and will continue to ponder these very things.

Hmm, so I’m not the only person who thinks the only reason Driscoll said “nobody make a final judgment” was to make sure he gets the shot at shredding Jakes for modalism?

Thx, Numo. May brain may be being affected by a current bug! – sounds like a reasonable excuse to me anyway!

Dee,

A pastor whose preaching I listened to for a couple of years once said that the answer to the question “Where is God” is that even the densest material we know consists of atoms, and within every atom, there is a space between the nucleus and the electrons. In fact, there is more unoccupied space (or intermittently occupied space, kind of like the space in our solar system!) than occupied space, actually millions of times more space is unoccupied. Therefore, God could exist in each and everyone of us, in the unoccupied space in our atoms!

Now I do not think or believe that God needs unoccupied space in which to exist, since as spirit, he can exist in otherwise occupied space. But it does give an alternative to the idea that God is out THERE somewhere (“watching us from a distance” — what a heresy) but is in HERE and in EVERYWHERE.

Dee, let me give a brief account to let you know what I was refering to. Driscoll now has a new BFF 🙂 in James MacDonald, from Harvest Bible Chapel in Illinois. These two fully endorse each other and appear at each other’s “church”, etc. Tomorrow, James Mac will host a huge event called “elephant room 2.” The first elephant room was last year. This is an event where JM brings in high profile, celebrity “pastors” and they sit around and congratulate themselves on being masters of the universe. Oops, sorry, couldn’t help myself there. I meant to say, they sit around and discuss various issues related to church, culture, etc. For $99 (I believe that’s the cost) you too can have the privilege of going to various locations around the country to watch this wonderful event! LOL. Anyway, the first elephant room included such noble theologians as Perry Noble and Steven Furtick (I assume you know who those two guys are. If you don’t, think Driscoll, only worse. I believe they are “pastors” in North Carolina). Last fall, JM announced that at Elephant Room 2, one of the featured speakers would be noted heretic TD Jakes. Yes, I call him a heretic because he denies the Trinity. Jakes affirms the heresy of the early centuries called Modalism. Now, this caused an issue for JM because he had previously stated that the purpose of the elephant room was to bring “brothers” together to discuss various issues related to the church. since Driscoll appeared at the first elephant room, and will appear again tomorrow (with Jakes) he felt compelled to write a blog post about Jakes. I don’t have time right now to link to it (you can find it easily), but in that post Driscoll failed to call out Jakes for his heretical views and totally danced around the issue. To sum, Driscoll fails to call out obvious heresy, but that calls out people as being heretics for issues that are not even central to the faith.

There is GREAT irony in Driscoll denying funding to this couple because the wife preaches. Yesterday, at the “elephant room 2” Driscoll cozied up to TD Jakes, and treated him with the utmost of velvet gloves. Never once would Driscoll broach the topic of Jakes having a woman pastor on his staff, nor of the topic of Jakes being the “mentor” to prosperity “theologian” Paula White. Simply amazing.

Jakes is a Oneness Pentecostal, to the best of my understanding. If you look into the history of Pentecostalism (in both black and white churches), “oneness” comes into the picture pretty early on.

while I disagree with “oneness” theology, I don’t think that’s Jakes’ primary problem. But that’s a discussion for another time, and another post (probably elsewhere).