Mark Driscoll And The Paradoxes Of Calvinism

This is in response to the New York Times article I posted

Mark Driscoll And The Paradoxes Of Calvinism From the A-Team Blog

by David N on Sat 10 Jan 2009 12:44 PM PST

Molly Worthen has written an interesting article for The New York Times Magazine on Mark Driscoll and his "hip" Mars Hill Church entitled Who Would Jesus Smack Down?

The point of her article seems to be to highlight the "paradoxes" that surround Mars Hill. Not only is it an Evangelical church where the pastor swears and talks explicitly about sex and the members are pierced and tatooed. Not only is it a thriving megachurch in the Country's most secular and unchurched city. But Driscoll preaches a hard-edged, no-holding-back Complementarianism and Calvinism. The paradoxes here being that Complementarianism, which teaches that women ought to be functionally subordinate to men in the church, is helping men in the congregation to treat women better than in their non-Christian days, and Calvinism, which teaches the total depravity and moral inability of all people, is creating a church of passionate activists and evangelists.

I'd only like to make 2 comments and then I'll just let you read the article for yourself. First, Worthen doesn't really seem to know any actual history of Calvin or his work in Geneva. At one point she comments on Driscoll's unwillingness to compromise and how quick he is to "shun" church elders or revoke a congregant's member privaleges when they voice disagreement with him, suggesting that Driscoll is just like Calvin in this respect. She then goes on to say, "John Calvin had heretics burned at the stake and made a man who casually criticized him at a dinner party march through the streets of Geneva, kneeling at every intersection to beg forgiveness." As far as I know Calvin only oversaw the burning of one person in Geneva, and from several sources I've read the general consensus seems to be that he was reluctant (perhaps even unwilling). As to the other charge, I'd really like to know where she gets this story from. Dr. Scott Clark comments,

More to the point, she resurrects the worst caricatures of Calvin. I suppose her resuscitation of them is a good reminder that we have to keep repeating the history. I admit, I don’t remember hearing or reading any story about Calvin making “a man who casually criticized him at a dinner party march through the streets of Geneva, kneeling at every intersection to beg forgiveness.” As far as I know the polity in Geneva, he didn’t have that sort of authority. Typically the Consistory fined people. I’ve never seen any instances of this sort of discipline. If everyone who criticized Calvin in Geneva was made to do this there would have been no place to walk!

In any case, my point is that her assessment of Driscoll's Calvinism would be far less paradoxical if she better understood the theology, the history, even the man himself (I noticed that most of her quotes come from random members of the congregation, rather than elders or Drsicoll himself. I wonder why that is).

Lastly, some of the things she says about Drsicoll's disciplining practices are a bit alarming. In traditional Reformed churches, it could take years to officailly excommunicate someone, and in my denomination (URC) the final step cannot be taken until a regional assembly of elders is called. Again, as Dr. Clark (half jokingly) comments, "shunning is an Anabaptist practice."

I'd like to give Driscoll the benefit of the doubt for now. I really hope he isn't practicing a dangerous kind of authoritarianism that could backfire.

Read Worthen's article here.