Time to Give Mark Driscoll a Sabbatical?

Prof. John Stackhouse's Weblog: Time to Give Mark Driscoll a Sabbatical?

... Alas, Brother Mark [Driscoll] responds to these valid concerns too often with bad preaching of a bad message. Recently he managed to demonstrate both problems in all of six minutes. This video clip shows Mr. and Mrs. Driscoll answering a question about the legitimacy of stay-at-home husbands (HT: J. Barrett Lee). In these six minutes, a number of theological problems, in fact, emerge. ...

... We are thus told, by Mrs. Driscoll as well as then by her husband, that a man who does not provide for his wife and children is flatly disobeying God. If she is out working and he isn’t–save only in extreme cases of injury, sickness, or other physical debility (unemployment is not mentioned as an excuse)–he is “worse than an unbeliever.”

That last phrase comes from the text–the one and only text–adduced by the Driscolls on behalf of their forbiddance of men staying home and women working: I Timothy 5:8. And now a cascade of basic exegetical, theological, and homiletical problems begins: ...

... 6. Finally, Brother Driscoll warns his audience that the Biblical teaching is so clear on this subject than any couple found departing from his interpretation would be subject to church discipline at Mars Hill. Really? Church discipline is being threatened (and, yes, “threatened” is the operative verb here) on a matter (badly) argued from a single passage? I’m all for church discipline–another important subject on which Brother Mark and I agree–but I would think that Mars Hill, like any contemporary church, would have its hands full with church disciplinary matters far more clear and far better evidenced from the Bible than this one.

I don’t know what theological training Mrs. Driscoll has received. The Mars Hill website claims that Brother Mark “received a B.A. in Speech Communications from Washington State University and holds a master’s degree in Exegetical Theology from Western Seminary in Portland, Oregon.” I confess to wondering what his professors at Western Seminary would think of this exercise in exegetical theology. ...

I public acknoledge that, by Driscoll's standards, I am worse than an unbeliever. Fortunately, Scripture teaches otherwise.

Comments

[David Brush]

Well, I stay at home all day. But I also work full-time from home as well. Maybe I am more of a purgatorial case then?

[ZZMike]

This is what you get when you let people interpret the Bible (the versions they read only in English) on their own, without help.

See Acts 8:27:
So he got up and went. There he met an Ethiopian eunuch, a court official of Candace, queen of the Ethiopians, who was in charge of all her treasury. ... 8:30 So Philip ran up to it and heard the man reading Isaiah the prophet. He asked him, “Do you understand what you’re reading?” 8:31 The man replied, “How in the world can I, unless someone guides me?”