Driscoll On Haggard, Sort Of

Mark Driscoll has an entry on his blog about the Haggard situation, which Dave sent my way (thank you, sir). He also offers some advice (some of it not bad) for men in ministry. Men, mind you. Just men. No advice for how women should avoid temptation. And all the references to "flirtatious women" in his entry make you think the man is beset by floozies in dental floss-sized thongs and bustiers beating down his door most nights. At the risk of "being more widely despised" than he already is, he offers this nugget:

Most pastors I know do not have satisfying, free, sexual conversations and liberties with their wives. At the risk of being even more widely despised than I currently am, I will lean over the plate and take one for the team on this. It is not uncommon to meet pastors’ wives who really let themselves go; they sometimes feel that because their husband is a pastor, he is therefore trapped into fidelity, which gives them cause for laziness. A wife who lets herself go and is not sexually available to her husband in the ways that the Song of Songs is so frank about is not responsible for her husband’s sin, but she may not be helping him either.

For those of you who aren't familiar with sports metaphors, leaning over the plate and taking one for the team is about getting hit with a pitch. It sounds a little ambiguous in the context of the Haggard debacle, so I thought I'd clear that up for you baseball haters. So here we are again: men have affairs because their wives are overweight or generally unattractive or lazy. I'd heard that misogyny had run amok at Mars Hill, but I had no idea that Driscoll was really this much of a 1950's evangelical pastor. Need I remind us that Haggard had a gay affair, so it wouldn't have mattered if he was married to Angelina Jolie or Rhona Mitra; the man is gay. Driscoll seems to be taking advantage of the situation to take another shot at women with his pre-feminist, testosterone-laden, fundamentalist, deutero-Pauline dogmas.

Are pastors supposed to have "liberties" with their wives? Aren't women equal partners in the sexual relationship such that liberties need never enter the conversation? He could have used words like mutuality and respect, but that doesn't suit Driscoll's view of you daughters of Eve. She was the one who was deceived, after all. Just ask Paul. And I'm not sure how available I want my wife to be in the context of the Song of Songs. Navels like goblets and breasts like two fawns (furry?) don't sound all that appealing... Never mind the fact that the Song of Songs is poetry, not an attempt by early Hebrew ethicists to develop a sexual ethic of marriage. And do we really want our sexual ethic of marriage coming from the Tanakh?

Is it possible that we run into these problems all the time because we don't have a healthy understanding of sexuality? Is it possible that we've created more guilt than grace where sex is concerned and now most of us are pathological? Is it possible that we're all susceptible to this sort of stuff and we need to be realistic about it, even if we're married to perfect physical specimens? Is it time for the church to own the word gay without talking about it like it's a disease? Seriously, folks, we're never going to have a good conversation about this stuff so long as True Love Waits mentalities govern how we think about sex in the church. This is not a plug for sexual license; I'm simply saying that heterosexual men who tend to read the sexual ethics in the Bible with a fundamentalist lens have been formulating sexual ethics for men and women in the church for 2000 years (and I'm including the Catholics at this point, and Driscoll has nothing on the Orthodox Churches where misogyny is concerned). Can we bring some other, less pathological, voices to the table, like feminists and gays and the intentionally celibate?

Comments

[T.J.]

no anger here..I'm walking free...oh wretched man has seen the light and repented!

My point is he was THIRTY....we've got boys losing it at 8 now in our super sexualized society...and Rob Bell will bring a book out in spring (probably on the equinox I'm sure) about Sex God....throw in porn sundays from triple x church and it's just a sad sad messed up sexual mess.
Pastors with porn addictions...the closeted Ted Haggard's in the pulpit,...the man had 5 kids with his wife...she must have been SOMEWHAT attractive to him ! SO she was not the problem...he was....or his past was....
Anyway I'm just really sick and tired of the in your face sexuality that bombards us. It has crept into the church where sex will be "mingled" with divinity....I say it's blasphemy

[greg]

Nothing blasphemous about sex, T.J. Read your OT. You seem to be a Bible type. David, Solomon, Jacob: they did all right in the multiple wives, multiple orgasms categories. You might notice that passage in the deutero-Pauline, pastoral text too that says something about the deacon being the husband of one wife. That's because some of those naughty guys had more than one wife.

Rob Bell is pretty orthodox, T.J. I know you think he's some sort of antichrist, but really, you should actually read something he wrote or listen to one of his sermons. I suspect you've done neither; you've probably just heard what Ingrid said about him.

Besides, if I take your theology seriously, all one needs to do is say some sort of chant/prayer about being a sinner and needing the "blood of Jesus." Once that is done, said sinner is "in" so to speak. That means I can be a profligate as long as I've said some form of the sinner's prayer.

[Dallas Tim]

I don't think saying that you can just do whatever you want as long as you pray some "sinner's prayer" would be how I would descibe it. Those who have truly experienced conversion will be thankful and have an attitude of reverance and thanks towards God. That would include obedience.

I doubt you are faithful to Susan just because you "have to be." You love her, want to be faithful to her and realize that she deserves that from you because of your love for her.

I (We) know there are plenty of people who distort the Gospel by saying that since they "Prayed a prayer" then they can do whatever they want. True conversion means you DON'T want.

By the way, I like the way you always refer to your wife as "Hot." I know you say it in a playful way, but it's really a nice example to see someone doing something as blatantly Christian as just taking an opportunity to compliment their spouse.

Sometimes it's the little things that demonstrate where our true commitment lies.

[greg]

Tim,

The language of "true conversion" is how evangelicals have rescued themselves from the trap they created by embracing decisionism.

[Dallas Tim]

Greg,

If anyone embraces "decisionism," then THEY have departed from the Biblical language of conversion. I agree that it's a huge problem.

That doesn't do away with Biblical conversion, it only proves that when people decide to start drifting away from what the Bible actually teaches, it only leads to more problems.

[Zossima]

If anyone embraces "decisionism," then THEY have departed from the Biblical language of conversion. I agree that it's a huge problem.

Well, that's your opinion/interpretation. (It assumes substitutionary atonement, btw.) But (1) numerous books have been written on the topic. (See any # of books by John MacArthur, for example.) And (2), as Greg recently touched on regarding a poster at Ingrid's blog, in practice, all fundagelicals subscribe to the primacy of assent to the proposition of substitutionary atonement as evidence of salvation, because even Hindus can do nice things for people.

[Dallas Tim]

Zoss,

I'm not sure how you're disagreeing with me.

MacArthur has written quite a bit on the ficticious idea of "easy believism." Say a prayer, sign a card, whatever the formula is and you're in. Regardless of how you act after that. That's not what I read in the Bible.

That also doesn't negate SA. It only means that SA is how God saves us. Our response and action after that is our demonstration of what we realize that He has done for us and our response to that action.