Listen to Mark Driscoll

You should listen to Mark Driscoll, if you don't already.

Here's three reasons why:

First, he probably takes the Bible more seriously than you do.

Second, he's willing to engage the culture in a way few pastors and theologians are.

Third, he represents the way Calvinism gets preached and taught in the church when it is embraced wholeheartedly. And Wesleyans need to hear it to understand it.

If you're asking yourself, "Who is Mark Driscoll and why should I care," then let me explain.

Driscoll is the pastor of Mars Hill Church in Seattle who stands at the forefront of an evangelical resurgence in Reformed theology. Driscoll is a "5-point Calvinist" (a term he embraces) and is causing shockwaves throughout the evangelical world with his unabashed Calvinist preaching, teaching, and writing.

For the purpose of context, you've got to realize that evangelicals (and here I do not mean Wesleyan evangelicals) have long held a theology that is basically a Calvinist and Arminian mishmash. If you don't know what I mean by that, just think for a minute about the incoherence these two statements: "Choose Jesus as your personal Lord and Savior" and "Once saved, always saved." Driscoll, on the other hand, comes across like someone plucked out of 17th century New England and set down in 21st century Seattle. He's a Puritan, only a Puritan who wears retro t-shirts and sports a constant five o'clock shadow.

Driscoll has become enough of a phenomenon that the New York Times ran a feature story on him in the NY Times Magazine back in January. The story was - not surprisingly - both snarky and condescending. But the very fact that it was written speaks volumes about the impact he's having on American culture and religion.

I started listening to podcasts of Driscoll's sermons a few months ago after hearing someone remark about his boundary-pushing preaching style. Since then, I've probably listened to a dozen or more of his sermons (which typically run longer than an hour apiece). Here are my thoughts:

First, Driscoll reads the Bible with an intensity that few Protestants - from liberal to evangelical - are willing to do. He has a sense of the authority of Scripture that is right on. Taking the Bible as seriously as he does is deeply needed in the United Methodist Church. And in that sense, he's more Wesleyan than me or just about any Methodist preacher I know. (For the pastors out there, note the way Driscoll engages in what is often called "pre-critical exegesis." He doesn't always do it consistently, but he does have a sense of the way that historical criticism has overreached and made claims that are no more grounded, and sometimes much less so, than the church's traditional claims about Scripture.)

Second, Driscoll looks out at the wider culture around him and recognizes how out-of-step it is with the way of discipleship presented in the New Testament. Again, for context you've got realize that Protestant liberalism is in its death throes. Its tendency is either to devolve into a muddy spirituality that cannot cope with historic and catholic Christian affirmations or to see Christian discipleship as civic participation in a liberal democratic society with a little Jesus thrown in. Either way, it will (and in some cases has) eventually morph into something that isn't recognizably Christian anymore.

Driscoll sees the thinness of mainline Christianity's presentation of the Christian life, and here's what makes his critique so important: he knows that liberal Christians are liberals, but he also understands that most evangelical Christians are liberals, too. (If you don't know what I mean by that, then just note the two distinct ways I'm using "liberal" in this post.) Theologically, Driscoll's kind of where New England Puritanism was in the 1740s and 50s. Liberalism in American culture had its birth there, as those who embraced Enlightenment rationalism began to move steadily away from the "city on a hill" vision of their forebears. Driscoll sees that and throws his lot in with the federal theology of Calvinist orthodoxy. It makes for a vision of the Christian life with a great deal of internal consistency.

Don't get me wrong: I don't agree with a lot of what Driscoll offers in place of the surrounding cultural alternative. But the fact that he's unwilling to allow the politically correct climate of American society to silence him is impressive. And we can learn something from it.

The problem with Driscoll is that his theology's all wrong. His doctrine of God, his soteriology, his ecclesiology: they're out of step with the gospel given to us by Jesus Christ. And - this is important - he advances his Calvinism by invoking a caricatured version of Arminianism. This comes up from time to time in his preaching, as it did in a sermon on the gospel of Luke that I listened to while raking leaves yesterday. That NY Times Magazine article represented Arminian soteriology (though not by name) with an absurd statement that, interestingly enough, could have come from Driscoll himself: "Since the early 19th century, most evangelicals have preferred a theology that stresses the believer's free decision to accept God's grace. To be born again is a choice God wants you to make; if you so choose, Jesus will be your personal friend." In the sermon I heard yesterday, Driscoll mocks the Arminian understanding of humans' role in accepting God's grace while conveniently leaving out such matters as the universal atonement and prevenient grace.

If you are a Methodist, all this has some implications. First, stop worrying about the mind numbingly mundane "church programming" approach to to Christian discipleship and start getting serious about salvation. Read the Bible (everyday) and pick up a collection of Wesley's sermons (here's a good one). Realize that the culture has infected the church to a degree that we need an exorcism. But realize, also, that Driscoll's Calvinism isn't the answer. The horrible decree of double predestination makes God into a monster. But just the same, God is also not the sentimentalized warm fuzzy "presence" that we've allowed him to become.

It's high time that Wesleyans got serious about the gospel God raised us up to preach. We've been playing at dolls far too long.

What is an evangelical?

What the heck is an evangelical?

I wrote this blog post a couple of years ago about stereotyping evangelicalism, and I readily claimed an evangelical identity for myself. What I did not include in that blog post was any kind of real description of what it means to be a Wesleyan evangelical (although that's really what the substance of the post was about). As a people who trace their roots to the evangelical revival in England in the 18th century, Methodists should be wary of anyone who wants to pigeonhole the identity of evangelicals into a certain political persuasion or ecclesial affiliation.

So I was a little disappointed to read the comments of author Christine Wicker, who was interviewed recently in the United Methodist Reporter about her new book, The Fall of the Evangelical Nation. I don't know exactly how Ms. Wicker would define evangelical, but it is clear in the interview that her working understanding isn't exactly nuanced. The way she uses (and conflates) terms like Religious Right, evangelical/evangelicalism, exclusivist, and fundamentalist suggests that she has a pretty narrow concept of what constitutes an evangelical.
I think Ms. Wicker is playing into the way in which the media has unfairly stereotyped public perceptions of evangelicalism. But in a way, she is also representing a long-standing attitude within mainline Christianity, which has long seen evangelicals as lower-class, unsophisticated, and uncouth.

Frankly, that's an attitude I would like to stop. In this blog post last year, for instance, I talked about what it means to be a Methodist believer. Going back in our history, John Wesley understood the definition of a true Methodist as one who pursues holiness of heart & life. Wesley certainly understood himself as an evangelical. For a true Wesleyan today, you might say that the very definition of an evangelical is someone who is intentionally seeking to respond to God's grace so that he can be transformed (sanctified) by the work of the Holy Spirit - and furthermore, who seeks to share that wonderful gift with others through works of piety and works of mercy.

Consider also that in Peru, all Protestants call themselves evangelicals. In fact, that's the word they use to describe the alternative to "Catholic" - not "Protestant" but rather "Evangelical." (For instance, when I was in Peru in May, I had a conversation with a friend who said, "My family has been evangelical for 5 generations," meaning that they had been Methodist for that long.) Our Peruvian brothers and sisters use the word in its original Reformation sense, which, when you think about it, is really a more positive term than "Protestant."

The key to using a word with such a rich and complex meaning as "evangelical" is to use it carefully, and that's what bothered me about Christine Wicker's comments in her interview. Not only is it not fair to evangelicals to simply equate them with fundamentalists, it does a real disservice to the evangelical tradition of which Methodists are an important part.

I'd be interested to hear your comments about your perception of the word "evangelical" and whether you understand yourself to be one.

Can't we all just get along?

New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof typically writes on the intersection of poverty, economics, disease, and war in Africa. He won a Pulitzer Prize in 2006 (his second, in fact) for his reporting of the Darfur genocide in the Sudan. I find his reporting on various crises in Africa to be compelling, and I think Christians in particular can benefit from the way in which he raises awareness of issues such as the AIDS crisis and endemic poverty.

Mr. Kristof's column in the Times today, entitled, "Evangelicals a Liberal Can Love," is an interesting one, because he is arguing that liberals ought to realize how much they hold in common with Christian evangelicals. Recent surveys show that - surprise, surprise - evangelicals care about issues like poverty, malaria, AIDS, and climate change. It is as if Kristof opened up the paper one day and discovered that evangelical Christianity is not some monolithic politico-religious movement that slavishly follows commands from Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell. And what is more, Mr. Kristof seems to believe that this is a brand new development.

If I knew Mr. Kristof, I'd give him a copy of Richard Heitzenrater's excellent study of a certain little evangelical movement known as Methodism, entitled, Wesley and the People Called Methodists. In that book, he'd see how an evangelical Anglican minister named John Wesley was caring for issues such as poverty, addiction, disease, and slavery long before Jim Wallis made evangelical social activism fashionable.

Many people today would argue that the United Methodist Church is far from evangelical, but that's not entirely true. Large, long-standing institutions like the UMC go through phases, and at least for most of its history, the UMC (and its predecessor bodies) has been thoroughly evangelical - in the best sense of the term. There are large swaths of the church that embrace a Wesleyan evangelicalism today, and if anything, that portion is on the increase. But then again, to understand what that means (and why it is much different than the evangelicalism of a Robertson or a Falwell), one has to treat evangelicalism as a nuanced phenomenon. And that, friends, is something that neither Mr. Kristof nor many other secular liberals do very well.

There is one aspect to Mr. Kristof's column that is particularly revealing. He criticizes the intolerance that tolerance-loving liberals often show toward religious people, particularly in that such intolerance often obscures the commonalities that do exist. But the whole point of his article is to say, "Hey, we can like evangelicals. They're more like us than we thought!" Such a sentiment is not actually demonstrating the tolerance Mr. Kristof advocates. It is only arguing for the acceptance of those parts of the Christian faith that happen to look similar to liberal politics. My guess is that if the topic were to turn to an issue such as abortion, for instance, his tone would change markedly. The acceptance Mr. Kristof is wanting is not based on a shared conception of the good for human beings; it is rather based only on the belief that people of faith have finally "come around" to the point of view that was "right" all along. And who said evangelicals were the only ones interested in conversion?

Christians who are truly serious about their faith, meanwhile, will continue holding views they believe are in conformity with the gospel we have been given, whether or not those views meet the approval of the liberal or conservative intelligentsia of the land.

Stereotyping Evangelicals

Everyone seems to have a strong opinion about evangelical Christianity. In fact, the very word "evangelical" is a polarizing one in our culture. I have known people in my life who practically recoil when they hear "evangelical," and I have known others who wouldn't think of themselves in any other way than as evangelicals.

I was raised in a traditional United Methodist church - not the most evangelical of contexts. I admit that when I was first exposed to evangelical expressions of faith, I was turned off by them. But that was mostly because the evangelicalism I was first exposed to was the evangelicalism of 1980s televangelists (not the best examples of the label). In the past few years of my life, on the other hand, I have been very drawn to evangelical Christianity for a number of reasons. The high authority of Scripture is one. The vibrancy of faith in every aspect of an evangelical's life is another. And frankly, I see in evangelicals a greater willingness to "take risks for Jesus" than I do in other Christian bodies, especially when those risks put the evangelical at odds with friends, family, or the larger culture. In short, I think evangelicals take discipleship more seriously.

Of course, in the wake of the Ted Haggard scandal, many in the media are once again turning to "evangelical bashing," primarily in the form of equating evangelical Christianity with the politically-oriented Religious Right (and the two are most certainly not the same thing). That's unfortunate. But I did run across this article in the Washington Post today, entitled, "Let's Stop Stereotyping Evangelicals." It makes a good case as to why the larger culture should take evangelicals seriously on their own terms.

This article also points out that a relatively recent development in the evangelical Christian community is a growing interest in social justice - that is, working to change the root causes of injustice rather than simply ameliorating the sufferings of individual victims of it. You see that in the work of evangelicals to combat AIDS, genocide, global poverty, etc. This has been the one piece that I think evangelical faith has lacked in the past, and it is also the one piece that has kept me from self-describing as an evangelical in my own faith. But I see a change in that now, and I can think of no better term to describe a Jesus-loving, church-committed, Scripture-reading, neighbor-caring, salvation-centered, injustice-fighting Christian person.

Am I an evangelical? You bet I am.

Ted Haggard Controversy

Update - 3:30 p.m., Sunday, November 5th - The New York Times reported this morning that Rev. Haggard had been dismissed from his position as senior pastor of New Life Church. Here's the link to that story.

Also, CNN reports that a letter from Haggard was read to the congregation at New Life Church this morning, in which he asked forgiveness both for himself and his accuser, Mike Jones. He admitted to struggles with a "lifelong sexual problem" in that letter and called himself "a deceiver and a liar." When a letter from Haggard's wife Gayle was read, in which she indicated that she would remain with Haggard despite a broken heart, the congregation reportedly responded with a standing ovation. Read more in the CNN article here.

This whole saga raises so many questions about the nature of pastoral leadership, that I will not begin to try to dig into them here. If you would like to read a more extended discussion on some of these questions, they have been discussed on Dr. Ben Witherington's blog over the past few days. I am going to commit myself to praying for Ted Haggard, his family, New Life Church, and all parties involved over the next few days.

- Andrew.

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It seems like just a few months ago that the Rev. Ted Haggard's picture was on the front cover of Christianity Today. As the leader of the National Association of Evangelicals, and the pastor of the 14,000 member New Life Church in Colorado Springs, Haggard is one of the most prominent evangelical voices in the country.

So I nearly fell out of my chair when the news media dropped this bombshell today. A male escort has come forward and accused Haggard of engaging in a three-year sexual relationship with him, which included hard drug use. Haggard has taken a leave of absence from his pastorate and resigned as chairman of the NAE, but he is also denying all charges. The news reports say that an independent investigation will be carried out in his church.

The way I see it, one of two things is going on here. This could be a politically-motivated attack on Haggard, in light of his support of next week's proposed constitutional amendment in Colorado outlawing same-sex marriage. Or, the allegations could be true. The male escort admitted his anger at Haggard for supporting the proposed amendment, so he's either telling the truth or he's out to discredit and embarrass Haggard in the run-up to the election.

Either way, the story is shocking and is sure to reverberate across the evangelical Christian community for the next few weeks.