Authoritarianism and The Right of Private Judgment

Does Paul advocate authoritarianism? To Titus he says:

Declare these things; exhort and reprove with all authority. Let no one disregard you. Titus 2:15

and to the church at Thessalonica he says:

... test all things; hold fast what is good, 1Th. 5:21

So how is it that those who hear the word proclaimed are responsible to "test all things" but those who proclaim are commanded to "Let no one disregard you." It would seem that testing would, on occasion, lead to the discovery that some aspect of what is proclaimed does not pass the test. At this point those who hear would disregard that which does not past the test. But Titus is told to let no one disregard you. Is this just personal instruction to the historical Titus, not to be intimidated by opposition? Is there any warrant for those who proclaim the word today to use this as a general principle?

After four decades of immersion in street level secularism, social "sciences", literary criticism, biblical studies and linguistics, I have become thoroughly acclimatized to the culture of doubt. Forget Derrida and Foucault, lets talk about linguistics. In the last twenty years Relevance Theory (RT) has entered the bible translation mainstream, to verify this, try a search on Ernst- August Gutt or Reinier De Blois or Margaret G. Sim.

RT maximizes the role of inference and cognitive "frameworks" while drawing attention to radical semantic indeterminacy in spoken language as well as texts. So let us say that an exegetical checker, armed with RT undertakes a study of the Song of Songs in preparation for a translation into several Turkic languages. While home on leave, exegetical checker visits Seattle and sits in on a sermon preached on the Song of Songs by a mega church pastor in Ballard. The pastor delivers his exposition and application with great authority. Exegetical checker, aware of the radical semantic indeterminacy of the metaphors and figurative language in Song of Songs, wonders if the authoritarian style of delivery is really warranted by the biblical text.

What we have here is a conflict of cultures. The exegetical checker is a scholar trained to understand the ambiguities of language and texts. The pastor is tasked with proclamation of divine truth in the face of post-modernism and the relativizing of all truth claims. The pastor is armed with Titus 2:15 "Let no one disregard you". The exegetical checker is armed with decades of language study, a massive theoretical framework and the biblical warrant to "test all things".

Where do we go from here?

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the cult of personality & the mega church pastor

Some years ago while I was attending a bible study lead by Wayne Taylor at Calvary Fellowship in Seattle, after one our sessions a grad student came up to me with a question about the Greek text of 1Thessalonians. At least that was the pretext for striking up a conversation that ended up taking more than an hour. It turned out that grad student was a devotee of John MacArthur. I had never read or heard MacArthur but I could remember some fuss about his views on "Lordship" when I was in graduate school over 30 years ago. The dispute didn't hold any interest for me. I was reading a lot of Emil Brunner at the time in preparation for my thesis, MacArthur was not the sort of stuff you read in graduate school.

Anyway, it was plain to me that grad student was a fervent disciple MacArthur. For some reason this sort of thing irritates me. I get put out about uncritical devotion to christian leaders, it is cultish and I had my fill of it growing up in a church were there was plenty of this sort of thing. So I did a little baiting, told grad student that MacArthur's soteriology (doctrine of salvation) was considered by some a minor departure from orthodoxy. This discussion didn't go anywhere since I didn't remember the details of the controversy.

Some time later, grad student went to Wayne Taylor and reported that I was a despicable heretic because I dared to question MacArthur. I found this out months later chatting with one of the associate pastors at Calvary Fellowship. This illustrates a very unhealthy aspect of mega church pastors. It isn't John MacArthur's fault that grad student had this attitude but the mega church model which focuses a great deal of attention on the the super star pastor promotes a sort "big brother" scenario. If the name on the lips of nearly every member is the name of the head pastor, if most discussions center around the person of the head pastor, at some point this becomes idolatry.

For those of use who grew up with a cultural memory of el Duce, der Fuhrer, Stalin; reading 1984, Brave New World, and Fahrenheit 451 ... walking into a "church" which seats thousands of people with a huge stage and a projected image of "the anointed" preaching from a dvd or a live feed from the central campus ... all of this is pretty unsettling. But what is most disturbing is running into "the faithful" who like grad student are uncritical, unthinking, mindlessly devoted to a man who is a sinner saved by grace but far far far from perfection. People like grad student should give mega church pastors nightmares. But they don't seem to. These pastors seem to be more worried about their critics, how to silence them. When they should be worried about their non-critics.

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Alice Cooper in the "Pulpit"

Take all the worst qualities of Bob Jones Sr., Robert B. Thieme and package them in the stage presence of Alice Cooper and what do you end up with? Mark Driscoll. This is neo-fundamentalism with all the authoritarian despotism of 50's style KJV thumpers dished up with the legendary stage presence of Alice Cooper.

I have been working my way through the greek text of Titus with a little help form I.H. Marshall and slogging through the tedious lists of virtues while in the back of my mind I see Mark Driscoll up on the stage presenting to all the world the perfect anti-model of what we find in Titus. Driscoll's rhetoric is abrasive, foul mouthed, confrontational, rude, crude, blasphemous, bigoted, nasty, pornographic and occasionally mean.

This appeals to a certain kind of person, the kind of people who want to be told what to think so they don't have to do any thinking of their own. In every age there have always been hordes of people willing to follow and submit to "Big Brother" so they can turn their minds off and suck up the party line, the propaganda, without question.

The main reason I find this so disgusting is that friends of mine who used to have good sense are buying it. They must have, quite literally, lost their minds.


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Tribal Power Structures and the Mega Church

In the summer of 1968 I did my obligatory out of culture experience by spending two months in El Salvador living with a missionary in Gotera and basically wasting time since I was not fluent in Spanish. I was a hiker and mountain climber so I spent a lot of time walking the roads and the trails early in the day before the heat became intolerable and before the afternoon thunder storm. It was a drought year and people were starving. The thunder storms were only once every three days which is too dry for the rainy season.

On one of my walks I encountered another gringo, which was truly a rare event in '68. Always happy to speak some english, I chatted with him for a while. He was an anthropologist working for the peace corps. I asked him what he was doing and he said he was studying tribal power structures. I thought that was a bizarre way to spend your time but didn't say as much.

That fall I enrolled in a cultural anthropology course and began to get a better grasp on tribal power structures. The Mega Church phenomenon has been studied at great length using numerous different frameworks for analysis. The Tribal metaphor seems a very useful one. We have a chief, the senior pastor, we have a counsel of elders, "the board". The management style can differ dramatically from tribe to tribe. The elders have a substantial authority in some tribes but in others they are pawns who bow to every whim of the chief.

The word on the street is that Mars Hill Church is headed in the direction of one man rule. Mark Driscoll has been accused recently in the NY Times of centralizing his authority by removing elders who disagree with him. That is certainly an old story.

On the other hand, who trusts the NY Times? Certainly not me. The news media are always lairs, gluttons, evil beats. I can picture a scenario where a leader of a church might be compelled by a conflict between the vision which is central to the ministry and several elders who were disrupting things to take action to keep the ship on course. The picture that the NY Times presents isn't the whole story, it never is.

There are other aspects of Mars Hill Church which raise a concern, reports form eye witnesses and participant observers. People talk about Mark ... Mark ... Mark, not about Jesus but Mark. After the service, away from the church, it still goes on, "kissing up to Driscoll" , never a critical word, never a doubt or a question. This sounds a lot like Community Chapel, a sad tale, which was over with before the Mars Hill babies were born.


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The Right of Private Judgment & Totalitarian Mega Churches

In the mid '70s I heard Peter Toon a church historian form the UK give a lecture series on The Right of Private Judgment and the Reformation. Toon focused on the rights and responsibilities of private judgment. What some people are calling the "New Calvinism" has a deeply ironic twist in that it is being promoted by Papal Pastors at totalitarian Mega Churches where the right of private judgment has been taken away. The head pastor has replaced the Pope and his interpretation of the scriptures has been put above criticism. Anyone who dares to openly question his teaching is ostracized or removed from membership.

Mark Driscoll at Mars Hill Church in Seattle is a case in point. Driscoll's exegesis is generally pretty loose. He assumes that his audience is too ignorant to see this. He supports his questionable teachings on sexual ethics, marriage & family, gender roles, and many other popular themes with highly dubious exegetical tactics. He would be blasted out of the room if he presented these readings in a scholarly forum. But at Mars Hill Church his teaching is above criticism. If you are a member of HIS church you do not question HIS teaching.

This is a very common scenario at mega churches. These fellows are not capable of dealing with dissent. When they step into the pulpit they are infallible. They may not claim this in so many words but their policy of repressing dissent carries a subtext of infallibility.



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Mark Driscoll and the New Fascism

I listened to the first five minutes of the sermon Marriage and Men starting with the opening prayer and Mark Driscoll wasn't even half finished with the prayer before I was already thinking of Mussolini. I did a google on Mark Driscoll and fascism found out that I am not alone. What really blows my mind is the friends of mine who were on the extream left of the evnagelical movment about forty years ago are now falling down and worshiping Mark Driscoll. Reminds me of Rinocerous by Ionesco.

I have been keeping an ear tuned to Mark Driscoll since he first went on the radio in Seattle in the early '90s. I now see something like a neo-pagan fertility cult packaged in an authoritarian rhetoric which would make Joseph Goebbels sit up and listen. This fellow Mark Driscoll isn't just a pastor at Mars Church in Seattle, he is the leader of an international movement. Driscoll isn't "nibbling at the edges of stale ideas" he has consumed and digested the rotten beast tusk and all.


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