On who is god mark driscoll

With t hat said, many of the people who have been watching Driscoll for years agree that was a major turning point for Driscoll. One of the reasons that Driscoll appealed to so many people was the emphasis he placed on accountability. He assured people that even he, as the pastor, was under the authority of a board of elders. If at any time the board disapproved of his behavior, it had every right to fire him.

Jim Henderson, a pastor who's been watching Driscoll for 10 years, dug up this statement by Driscoll made back in I will say this publicly: I am one of the pastors. They can out-vote me and fire me. They have total freedom to do so. And if at any time in the history of this church the elders discipline me, do not be loyal to me. Be loyal to them; be loyal to Jesus. And if at any point — God forbid — I should say or do something that would disqualify me from being your pastor — and I have no intentions of, and I do live a life above reproach.

And if by - I just shudder to say this, but if I should ever say or do anything that the elders would need to fire me, do not be loyal to me. Be loyal to Jesus; be loyal to your elders. Not long after Driscoll preached these words to his church, he began what The Stranger 's Brendan Kiley calls a consolidation of power. Until this time, Mars Hill was run with the principle of distributed authority, according to Paul Petry, a former pastor there, who granted Kiley an interview.

Decisions were put to a council of 24 elders, which included Driscoll, but which was supposed to ensure that his was "just one voice among When Driscoll convinced some elders to resign, Petry and another elder protested. As a result, Driscoll fired them both and made them take part in one of the church's secretive ecclesiastical trials. Driscoll's actions left some members feeling betrayed, since, as Petry explained to Kiley, "Mars Hill was a magnet for people coming from abusive churches.

They were looking for a place with some accountability. According to Henderson, Driscoll's power-grab highlights the "organizing sentiment" of Driscoll's career: that is, that he's a bully.

Says Henderson: "My principal reason for getting involved with this is that Driscoll is popularizing and legitimating spiritual bullying for young men, and is infecting thousands of young men" with his ideological machismo. The way Henderson sees it, the hierarchical system of Driscoll's church has provided a good cover to his bullying, essentially making it all right for him to speak disapprovingly or condescendingly to anyone he sees behaving out of step with his particular brand of theology.

At one point in , Driscoll posted messages anonymously on an online church message board, under the pseudonym "William Wallace. At this time, our church also started an unmoderated discussion board on our website, called Midrash, and it was being inundated with postings by emerging-church type feminists and liberals. I went onto the site and posted as William Wallace II, after the great Scottish man portrayed in the movie Braveheart, and attacked those who were posting.

It got insane, and thousands of posts were being made each day until it was discovered that it was me raging like a madman under the guise of a movie character. As Wallace, Driscoll's main battle cry seemed to be that Christian men were becoming a "pussified nation," by which he meant that they'd become "sensitive" and "emasculated.

Here are a few of them. In a letter provided to Christianity Today , Driscoll apologized for the posting as William Wallace, saying he was "embarrassed" by his words. As Christian blogger Matthew Paul Turner notes , this is not the first time Driscoll has had to issue an apology.

Responses to Driscoll's apology were mixed. Warren Throckmorton , a psychology professor at Grove City College, wrote at his blog on Patheos that while the apology was "commendable," Driscoll still has work to do. Throckmorton, who has been following Driscoll closely on his blog, noted that the William Wallace comments were not an isolated incident: "I have conducted numerous interviews with former Mars Hill pastors and ex-members and they often disclose instances of similar crude language and intimidation in public settings more recently.

Last fall, as Slate writes, Driscoll was a guest on an evangelical radio show hosted by Janet Mefferd. The radio host confronted Driscoll about 14 pages in his writing that she believed were plagiarized.

Driscoll questioned Mefferd's intentions, which he claimed were "not very Christ-like. After that, Driscoll's line seemed to go dead, to which Mefferd said she guessed he'd "opted out" of the remaining discussion.

However, a raw audio file obtained by Relevant Magazine "showed that Driscoll did not hang up," writes the magazine. As Christianity Today reported, Mefferd later issued an apology for how she handled the allegations, saying she should have gone to Driscoll's publisher first and should not have confronted Driscoll in front of her listeners.

Driscoll's publisher, meanwhile, said it was "stunned … by the belligerent tone of Ms. Mefferd's questioning," according to Relevant. Notably, shortly after Mefferd's apology, one of her producers resigned, giving the following explanation:.

All I can share is that there is an evangelical celebrity machine that is more powerful than anyone realizes. He gave us the Church of Latter Day Saints. The real question when studying nineteenth-century American religion is this: who was not receiving direct revelations from the Lord or from angels or the like? According to Driscoll, when someone quite reasonably questioned the validity of his claim to have received a direct revelation he scoffed.

Who could doubt its validity since it was in accord with Scripture and his aims were true? Well, any Reformed Christian would and should seriously question any claim made by anyone to have received a direct revelation from the Lord.

Where has the Lord promised to give extra-canonical, extra-Biblical revelations? The best Biblical case for such e. The case mostly rests on assumptions rather than Scripture. If the core of his call was nothing more than can be found in Scripture, then why the claim to direct revelation? This is an important question and its answer illuminates the nature of American evangelicalism since the early eighteenth century: For centuries now American Christianity has been, in its spirituality and often in its theology, piety, and practice Anabaptist and Pentecostal.

The Charismatic movement, which has become so prominent since the s is, from a Reformed perspective, little more than the polite suburban relative of the more urban i. It is not well known outside the ranks of scholars of the early Anabaptism but one of the features that alienated the magisterial Protestants from the Anabaptist radicals was claims by leaders of the Anabaptist movements to continuing revelation.

Indeed, many of the phenomena we associate with the modern Pentecostal and Charismatic movements e. The Reformed pastor Guido de Bres —67 , who died as a martyr for the faith at the hands of the Papists, who was the primary author of the Belgic Confession wrote a treatise against the Anabaptists in which he described in some detail the very sort of Pentecostal phenomena that we associate with groups such as the Assemblies of God.

At the core of the magisterial Protestant rejection of the Anabaptist Pentecostalism was our doctrine of sola Scriptura. For him, the Bible only became the Word of God when it seemed so to him. The post-Reformation history of Christianity is littered with claims of continuing revelation, beginning with Rome.

It is of the essence of Romanism that the councils and popes receive, in effect, continuing revelation. Most of the sects, to one degree or another claim continuing revelation. Today, claims of continuing revelation are so commonplace few seem fazed by them. Since the Cane Ridge Revival in the nineteenth century and the Topeka and Azusa Street revivals in the twentieth century, American evangelical Christianity has come to be increasingly dominated by powerful personalities who claim to receive direct revelations.

Driscoll is just one in a long line of such claimants. Not only did he know, allegedly from God, what he must do before the church ever had an opportunity to evaluate him but he used the authority endowed and endued by the claim to direct revelation to control the congregation and the rebuke challenges to his authority.

Driscoll was laying down a marker from the beginning. We can see the trajectory. Did Driscoll listen to the congregation or to others outside the congregation after it all melted down? He received yet more direct revelations and went to Scottsdale, AZ and set up a congregation in which there is not even a pretense of accountability. The Charismatics loved it so much they put him on the cover of Charisma Magazine. Who cares whom he hurt or how? The publishers of Charisma are apparently did not care.

This is what happens when evangelicals pay more attention to the gifts of the Spirit than to the fruit of the Spirit. Mark Driscoll is a cautionary tale. It is a warning about the dangers of churchless Christianity and a reminder to the Reformed about the importance of the marks of the true church Belgic art.

Christ, not any preacher, is the Anointed One Heidelberg Catechism The church is organized around Christ. The Scriptures are the sufficient Word of God. Want to Read saving…. Want to Read Currently Reading Read. Other editions. Enlarge cover. Error rating book.

Refresh and try again. Open Preview See a Problem? Details if other :. Thanks for telling us about the problem. Return to Book Page. Preview — On Who Is God? On Who Is God? Mark Driscoll tackles five of the most controversial issues about God over which various religions and philosophies collide: knowledge of God; perspectives of God; the nature of God; the incarnation of God; and the worship of God.

Get A Copy. Paperback , 84 pages. More Details Original Title. A Book You'll Actually Read 2. Other Editions 8. Friend Reviews. To see what your friends thought of this book, please sign up.

To ask other readers questions about On Who Is God? Lists with This Book. Community Reviews. Showing Average rating 3. Rating details. More filters. Sort order. Start your review of On Who Is God?

Jan 30, C. Sadaphal rated it it was amazing. If you seek a quick, succinct, clear and easy-to-read guide to better understand the central tenets about God, then look no further. Certainly, you could read a more comprehensive theology textbook, but you then would have to make it through hundreds of pages in order to extract the same basic themes. Without question, On Who is God never strays away from the Biblical text.