a/k

Mark Driscoll Never Ceases to Amaze

I mean this guy is more annoying than Brian McLaren. He has an ego-mania that has annoyed me ever since I read his book Confessions of a Reformission Rev. more than two years ago. Uh yeah. Who isn't annoyed by Mark Driscoll?

Anyway, awhile ago one of my Republican friends was reading Shane Claibourne's Jesus For President (or "utopian crap" as he called it), he spied the infamous Mark Driscoll quote that Shane inserted in a page without comment.

There is a strong drift toward the hard theological left. Some emergent types [want] to recast Jesus as a limp-wrist hippie in a dress with a lot of product in His hair, who drank decaf and made pithy Zen statements about life while shopping for the perfect pair of shoes. In Revelation, Jesus is a pride fighter with a tattoo down His leg, a sword in His hand and the commitment to make someone bleed. That is a guy I can worship. I cannot worship the hippie, diaper, halo Christ because I cannot worship a guy I can beat up. I fear some are becoming more cultural than Christian, and without a big Jesus who has authority and hates sin as revealed in the Bible, we will have less and less Christians, and more and more confused, spiritually self-righteous blogger critics of Christianity.

My friend loved it. But I was mean enough to finally break it to him that Shane most likely disagreed with the quote and was using it as an illustration of an extremist view. That didn't go down well.

I had totally forgotten about this until Halden recently tackled the statement straight up. I'm not going to join the noise surrounding Driscoll, because it's not worth my time, but check it out if you're interested.

If you ask me though, Driscoll's most disturbing statement to date was from a sermon a few years ago.

You have been told that God is a loving, gracious, merciful, kind, compassionate, wonderful, and good sky fairy who runs a day care in the sky and has a bucket of suckers for everyone because we're all good people. That is a lie... God looks down and says 'I hate you, you are my enemy, and I will crush you,' and we say that is deserved, right and just, and then God says 'Because of Jesus I will love you and forgive you.' This is a miracle.

Maybe Driscoll is revolutionary in the fact that he actually does soteriology that many people hold but refuse to explore. A theology that says Jesus wasn't God. Jesus was the trickster who got slaughtered because of an agreement God had made with Himself. But by Jesus bleeding, God was able to fool Himself into thinking we were actually innocent and Jesus was the bad guy who had done all the bad stuff.

And that makes a damn lot of sense.

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p>Update: Even Graham has come out of the woodwork to comment.