Is this the Jesus that Mark Driscoll follows? One might think so from his bullying.
Oddly enough I have never seen these words in the Bible.
From David Hayward via Henry Neufeld, with thanks.
PS I have the Add Link to Facebook Plugin as recommended by Jeremy Myers. This should mean that comments made on this post here appear on Facebook, and comments made on Facebook appear here. I hope there won’t be too many teething troubles. And I am waiting for a similar plugin for Google+.
Nearly two years ago I asked here Should I apply to become a biblioblogger? I really wasn’t sure whether Gentle Wisdom, with its eclectic mix of posts, would qualify as a Biblical Studies blog. But existing bibliobloggers put my name forward, and this blog was duly enrolled. It was briefly in the top 50 biblioblogs in early 2010, and made it back into the rankings in April this year.
This month a new biblioblog ranking scheme has been introduced, complete with a new logo (right) and a new live online ranking system allowing real time tracking of biblioblogs and individual posts. This last facility is very clever, but also currently very slow. And at the moment in this system Gentle Wisdom is ranked as #3, behind Joel’s and Scott’s blogs but well ahead of Jim West’s (but that may be because Jim has removed the tracking logo from his blog). Even more gratifying to me is that one of my posts is currently well in the lead for “Top 10 Articles This Month”.
But there is an important issue here. That #1 article of the month is WordPress Twenty Eleven: give us back our sidebar!, which is of course nothing to do with biblical studies. Should such posts be counted in the biblioblog rankings? There are two problems I see with any attempts to exclude them.
One is, who is going to decide which posts should count as related to biblical studies? Clearly the Biblioblog Library team cannot vet each post. But could bibliobloggers be trusted to decide which of their own posts qualify?
The second is that in fact few of the popular posts on biblioblogs are actually about biblical studies. Currently only a couple of the top ten posts of the month and a couple of the top ten of the day would strictly qualify, although many are not quite as irrelevant as my post about a WordPress problem.
Let’s face it, not many people read biblical studies posts, at least unless there is some scandal within the field. Those of us who, by design or accidentally, find ourselves high up the biblioblogger ratings do so because we post material of broad interest as well as about biblical studies.
Scott and Joel ask what a biblioblogger is, but they don’t really give answers, beyond a mention of the draft official criteria, which if applied strictly would probably disqualify both of their blogs, and Jim West’s – and mine. But I don’t suppose anyone has the stomach to throw out several of the best known blogs – only to be left with a more genuine biblioblogger like James McGrath topping the daily rankings with a post about Doctor Who!
Does this make the whole ranking system meaningless? Well, I think it means that no one should take it too seriously. But it provides good entertainment for some of us, and helps to keep us informed about biblical studies and to find some community. So I think it is worthwhile. And I thank the team which has worked so hard to get the new system up and running.
Meanwhile can I hold on to my #3 slot, or edge ahead of Scott to #2? We will see. I got off to a good start by being one of the first to add the new tracking code, and soon after that publishing what proved to be a very popular post. Others have the chance to jump in and catch me up. It may be an interesting race, in a not too serious sport.
Rachel Held Evans writes Mark Driscoll is a bully. Stand up to him:
Mark Driscoll is wrong.
Godly men stick up for people, not make fun of them.
Godly men honor women, not belittle them.
Godly men love their gay and lesbian neighbors, not ridicule them.
Godly men celebrate femininity, not trash it.
Godly men own their sexuality, not flaunt it.
Godly men pursue peace, not dismiss it.
Godly men rise above violence, not glorify it.
Godly men build up the Church, not embarrass it.
Godly men imitate Christ—who praised the gentle and the peacemakers, who stood up for the exploited and abused, who showed compassion for the downtrodden, who valued women, and who loved his enemies to the point of death.
This was prompted mainly by what Driscoll wrote on Facebook:
So, what story do you have about the most effeminate anatomically male worship leader you’ve ever personally witnessed?
But the links Rachel offers show that she has collected a lot more evidence that Driscoll is a bully. She concludes:
Mark’s bullying is unacceptable.
Stop talking about it and do something.
Yes, but what can we do? Sadly I don’t think it will help much to join Rachel’s campaign requesting the elders of Driscoll’s church to take action against him. The website of Mars Hill Church states that
Pastor, Elder, and Overseer are all synonymous terms in the Bible
and names three “Executive Elders”, the first of whom is the “Preaching and Vision Pastor” who is none other than Mark Driscoll. The other two, the “Executive Pastor” and the “Mars Hill Network Pastor”, are surely Driscoll’s personal proteges and are very unlikely to turn against him on this matter.
But if we can mobilise a tide of public opinion against this kind of bullying, maybe we can persuade leaders whom Driscoll does respect, like John Piper, to have a word with him and rein him in. Piper was a guest preacher at Mars Hill Church last year. But he has not been afraid to rebuke Driscoll publicly before, on a rather trivial matter. Now is the time for Piper to rebuke Driscoll again. I’m not saying this needs to be public. But if it is not, Piper needs to keep an eye on Driscoll to make sure he stays within acceptable bounds. He should also try to obtain what even the macho Mark has been known to offer in the past: a public apology.
Rachel is right that we need to do something about this. But in this case the best thing to do about it is to talk and write about it.
Last year I posted that Our world may be a giant hologram, on the basis of a New Scientist article. But now I read that The universe probably isn’t a giant hologram after all. Ah well, you can’t win ’em all.
Thanks to James McGrath for the link. And I love the cartoon in that post of his.
I am copying this title with thanks from the post Revelation is Like a Bouquet of Roses by Jeremy Myers. Indeed he has a good point comparing the various ways in which God reveals himself with a bouquet. Many blooms are better than one, and a variety of blooms is better still.
But the main point I want to take from Jeremy’s post is that, despite the alliteration, it is wrong to contrast science with Scripture.
The real contrasts which need to be made are between Scripture and nature, and between theology and science. Scripture and nature both provide us with data, revealed by God, for us human beings to interpret. Theology is human interpretation of Scripture, and science is human interpretation of nature. Jeremy offers a helpful diagram, copied here, summarising the situation.
So, Jeremy writes,
we can never really say that Science contradicts Scripture. It doesn’t. Nature and Scripture cannot disagree, because both are simply the pools of data from which Science and Theology come. When Science and theology are at odds, it is only because one or the other has misinterpreted and misunderstood the data.
So when someone gets upset that “Science is undermining the Bible!” what they are really saying is that “Science is undermining my understanding of the Bible.” The two are very different. We must be careful to not equate our theology with Scripture. The two are not the same.
I couldn’t have put it better. But there is also another side to it. Much of the theory of evolution, for example, is probably good science. But when atheistic scientists use it as the basis for assertions that there is no place for a Creator God, they need to be reminded not to go beyond what can be justified from observations of nature. Belief in God does not conflict with these observations, but only with some scientific interpretations of them.
A few years ago a story was going around, for example as reported by Richard Bartholomew, that the megachurch pastor and best-selling Christian author Rick Warren claimed that he was the pastor of media tycoon Rupert Murdoch. This was based on a quote from a 2007 story at WorldNetDaily:
In the New Yorker interview published in September 2005, Warren is quoted as saying: “I had dinner with Jack Welch (former chief executive officer of GE) last Sunday night. … And he said to me, ‘Rick, you the biggest thinker I have ever met in my life. The only other person I know who thinks globally like you is Rupert Murdoch.’ And I said, ‘That’s interesting. I’m Rupert’s pastor! Rupert published my book!’”
In fact WorldNetDaily starts the same story with a denial of the most obvious interpretation of Warren’s words:
Rick Warren Chief of Staff David Chrzan wrote to me last week to say WorldNetDaily made “some errors in definition, assumption and application” in our news story about the mega-pastor’s relationship with Rupert Murdoch. …
“First, the story is based on the assertion that Rupert Murdoch, chairman of News Corp., is a member of Saddleback Church, which is not correct,” writes Chrzan. “In fact, he doesn’t even live in Orange County, CA, and has never attended a service here.”
Nevertheless it does seem that in some sense Warren considered himself, in 2005, to have some kind of spiritual responsibility for Murdoch. Warren has also sold at least 30 million copies of his book The Purpose Driven Life
In 2007 Batholomew and others like Chris Rosebrough called Warren out for failing to discipline Murdoch over his ownership of pornographic TV channels, and suggested that he might have kept quiet because of the publishing relationship between the two.
In view of the latest scandals relating to Murdoch and his newspapers, likened by Ruth Gledhill to the Augean Stables, should there be renewed calls for Warren to discipline Murdoch?
Well, first we would need to ascertain that there is a continuing pastoral relationship between Warren and Murdoch. I have found no evidence of this more recent than 2005. It may well have terminated in the intervening years. Indeed it is quite probable that Warren did indeed attempt to discipline Murdoch about the pornography channels, in private as would have been proper, and at that time Murdoch repudiated Warren as his pastor. But in this case it would be helpful for Warren to clarify publicly that what he said in 2005 is no longer true.
If there is in fact a continuing pastoral relationship, I would indeed expect Warren to discuss the current scandal with Murdoch. But he should do so privately, initially, according to the clear teaching of Jesus (Matthew 18:15-16). As Murdoch is not a church member, the biblical next step of bringing the matter to the church cannot apply. It would be appropriate, if the matter cannot be resolved, for Warren to terminate the pastoral relationship and to announce this publicly. But this should be the end point of a possibly prolonged process of clarifying how far Murdoch’s business practices are compatible with whatever kind of Christian faith he may profess.
Of course there might well be legal reasons, part of Warren’s publishing contract, preventing him from making public statements about Murdoch, similar to what may have kept Wayne Grudem from commenting on the NIV 2011 update. On the other hand, it would hardly be in Murdoch’s interests to terminate such a lucrative publishing contract.
Please note that I intend here no criticism of my friends at Zondervan, who, like Ruth Gledhill, are innocent people caught up in a scandal for which they bear no responsibility.
Thanks to Phil Groom, @notbovvered on Twitter, for reminding me of this story.
Roger E. Olson, as one of his “evangelical Arminian theological musings”, explains Why I defend Rob Bell’s Love Wins (and other controversial books). In doing so he offers some fascinating observations about Calvinist attacks on Arminianism and other perceived theological errors. He refers to “American evangelical Calvinisms’ DNA”, but much of what he says applies equally to some strands of British Calvinism, such as that of Adrian Warnock.
Olson considers Calvinist responses both to open theism and to Rob Bell’s book Love Wins
they are human-centered, belittling the glory of God, neglecting God’s justice and wrath in favor of too much emphasis on God’s love, etc., etc.
At this point I would add that there is a similar character to much Calvinist and “Reformed” polemic against those seen as rejecting penal substitutionary atonement, like Steve Chalke, with the same arguments being made that the rejected position is human-centred and neglects God’s justice and wrath.
Olson then considers specifically the arguments against Bell’s book. He looks at 1 Timothy 2:4:
God wants all people to be saved and to come to a knowledge of the truth.
He rejects the Calvinist position that “all people” here means any less than everyone. He also agrees with Bell’s rejection of universalism. So the implication is that what God wants does not actually happen. And, Olson writes,
I think that is what offends critics of Love Wins–the suggestion that God doesn’t get what he really, perfectly wants. That seems to them to demean God, to lessen his glory. …
The deep, inner logic of the attacks on Love Wins seems to me of this variety. The ones I have read and heard ALL arise out of Reformed assumptions about God rather than out of Arminian assumptions about God. And there’s the main difference. Not all Arminians will agree with everything Bell says, but the general thrust of his theology in Love Wins is classically Arminian–that God permits free creatures to resist his love out of love and therefore love wins even as God seems to lose something. Because of the risk his love forces him to take, and human resistance to it, God ends up not getting all that God wants. ON THE OTHER HAND, of course, God DOES GET WHAT GOD WANTS–this world in which his love can be resisted. It’s dialectical but not contradictory.
Olson makes it clear that he does not accept all of Bell’s arguments. But he concludes with
I would like to suggest to both sides that what is really going on in this whole controversy over Bell’s Love Wins is another round of the old Calvinist versus Arminian debate.
That’s what it looks like to me as well.
This morning I at last got into the new Google+, and I have been playing around with it. You can find my profile through this shortened URL, courtesy of gplus.to which is offering what Google+ itself should surely have offered.
So far I am not exactly overwhelmed with Google+. It looks rather like a tidied up version of Facebook, not cluttered with all the extra features which have crept into Facebook over the years. But of course that means it can’t do all those extra things, a few of which are useful. Of course they may be added in later, but that could spoil the uncluttered look. The only useful looking new feature is having separate circles of friends, but I haven’t yet worked out quite how that works.
I tried to find out how to link Google+ to Gentle Wisdom. But this was a frustrating experience. First of all, Google’s search engine seems unable to distinguish between “google”, “google+” and “google +1”, and in fact corrects “google+” (including quotes) to “google”. Fail! WordPress.org search replaces “google+” (including quotes) with “google “. I found a lot about how to put a +1 button on a WordPress blog (which I already did several weeks ago), and a theme which allegedly looks like Google+, but nothing about how to link with Google+.
What I want to do is to add Google+ to Sharedaddy, the “+ Share” button at the bottom of each post, but I have not found a way to do so, or even a plugin which mimics it. This would put a link to my post on my Google+ stream, similar to sharing a link on my Facebook wall. I was able to do this manually. This is not the same thing as adding the Google +1 button, which is more like the Facebook “like”.
Of course this may be because Google has not made it possible. After all, they are reportedly about to replace Blogger, currently the main rival of WordPress, with a new blogging platform integrated with Google+. But Google will never be able to conquer the Facebook and WordPress worlds if it cuts itself off from them, and certainly not by making it hard to share links on its wall.
So will Google+ kill Facebook? At the moment I don’t think it has what it takes. But it could well acquire it in the future, as new features are rolled out. Its biggest challenge is of course the sheer size of the Facebook user base. But, as MySpace discovered, large numbers do not guarantee lasting success. So we will just have to wait and see – and in the meantime make sure our blogs are prepared for it, by offering the same features for Google+ that we do for Facebook.
LATEST:
Church of England’s ruling Synod rejects plans to increase standard fees for weddings and funerals
Good! For more on why this was a bad move, see Weddings R Us by Archdruid Eileen. The issue was not so much the price increase as the attempt to standardise a very diverse product.
UPDATE: For more background see this BBC story, still on the front page although now out of date.
Long term readers of Gentle Wisdom will know that I am no admirer of Wayne Grudem. I have not always been negative about him. But I have been critical of his complementarian position restricting women in ministry. I have pointed out how he has persistently made errors of fact in his biblical arguments for that position. I have rejected his doctrine of functional subordination within the Trinity. And I have had especially strong words to say, mostly elsewhere, about the intemperate and unscholarly way in which Grudem led the condemnation of the TNIV Bible.
So I am happy that Grudem has kept quiet about the NIV 2011 update. I haven’t found any mention of it by him since its publication. Very likely he shares the concerns so strongly expressed by Denny Burk, who has taken his place as the chief spokesman of CBMW on such matters. But he has not put the authority of his name and reputation behind a destructive campaign in the way that he did with TNIV. Rod Decker is wrong to suggest that he has done, while making a good point about Grudem’s hypocrisy over singular “they”. One consequence of Grudem’s silence is that very likely NIV 2011 will become widely accepted, as TNIV was not, as the successor of the 1984 NIV.
But I wonder if there is something other than a change of heart behind Grudem’s reticence on NIV 2011. This could be related to his book Politics According to the Bible
The Koinonia post is an extract from an interview with Grudem by the Acton Institute, about his book – which is actually not as new as I thought at first, as it was published in September last year. Now this is another book that I am mentioning without having read it, so please don’t take this as a review (whatever post categories this might be in). I am responding only to what is in the Acton Institute interview. But I must say I was more favourably impressed than I have been with other things I have seen from Grudem. He has a number of excellent things to say in the interview, including this:
I found that in the Bible there were many examples of God’s people influencing secular governments. I am arguing in the book that it is a spiritually good thing and it is pleasing to God when Christians can influence government for good.
In view of his position on women’s rights in the church and family, this is somewhat ironic:
Christian influence led to granting property rights and other protections to women at various times through history.
But Christian political activity needs to be put in the right context:
My book seeks to warn Christians away from the temptation of thinking if we just elect the right leaders and pass the right laws, we will have a good nation. That fails to understand that a genuine transformation of a nation will not come about unless peoples’ hearts are changed so that they have a desire to do what is right and live in obedience to good laws.
I am somewhat ambivalent on what Grudem says about unemployment benefit, but he is asking the right questions:
… we are to care for the poor and those in need, and the Bible frequently talks about the need to care for the poor. I think government has a legitimate role in providing a safety net for those who are in genuine need of food, clothing and shelter.
There is also a strong strand of biblical teaching that emphasizes the importance of work to earn a living. … The longer that unemployment benefits are continued, the more we contribute to the idea that some people should not have to work in order to earn a living, but we should just continue to have government support them. That creates a culture of dependency, which is unhealthy for the nation and unhealthy for the people who are dependent, year after year, on government handouts.
Indeed. But this needs to be balanced by a realisation that, within our modern economic system, there are many people who genuinely want to earn their own living but are unable to do so, for personal reasons or because no work is available. In our society these are the poor that the Bible calls us to support, for the long term at least in the case of needy widows (1 Timothy 5:9). There is no place in Christian teaching for benefits being cut off after a fixed period.
Grudem finishes as follows:
It is important for Christians to settle in their hearts that God is in control over history, and His purposes will be accomplished.
The last chapter of my book has to do with combining work to bring good influence to government, coupled with faith in God and prayer that God’s good purposes will reign in earthly governments. I think we have to do both things, because God hears prayers, and He also works through the efforts and actions of human beings who are seeking to influence government for good.
Amen!