All of the Respectful and Thoughtful Complementarians Must be at Home Watching Football Too

(That’s not one of my Photoshop specialties. That is from Mark’s Blog)

Mark Driscoll’s Brand of Complementarianism
If you have not read the previous post on why I hold to an egalitarian postion please start there.

Last October I wrote a piece called All the Innovative Dudes are at Home Watching Football. In it I addressed some issues I have concerning Pastor Mark Driscoll and his ruff and brash so called complementarian position. In the last 3 days I have had a couple of dozen hits on that post from The Hippie Christian Bulletin Board. This happens from time to time as it seems that Driscoll’s out of control antics have come up several times as an issue of debate there. On at least two such occasions my good friend Christian has left a link to my post in his responses to conversations there. Most recently the hits are all coming from a conversation over there that I somewhat reluctantly joined in because someone had read my post and concluded this type of conversation is “a waste of time for heresy-hunters.”

You may remember this past December in the wake of the Ted Haggard sex scandal Driscoll made these disparaging remarks about how a pastor’s wife should present herself:

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.

You can read Driscoll’s comments in their entirety on his blog. I am still wondering what relevance those comments had to the tragedy that the Haggard family experienced or how his wife not ‘letting herself go’ might have helped with Ted’s temptation to lie with men.

Anyway, I honestly had no intention of writing anything about Driscoll again anytime soon and then this whole Hippie bulletin board thing came up so I started poking around on Driscoll’s blog again and I found a post on his banned church planting video. Which is also right here for your viewing displeasure:

The outlandish video was for a church planting conference that Driscoll could not attend. The entire thing was shot in a military cemetery. In it Driscoll discusses “the man, the mission and the message” essential in his estimate for affective church planting. The video was pulled from the conference and DVD copies were not distributed after the video was criticized by Bill Hybels for not including women as potential church planters. I am not a big fan of Hybels but I do commend Brother Bill for speaking out against this:

The Least likely person to go to church in the United States of America is a young man in his twenties. These are guys who have absolutely made a wreck of everything. They’re banging their girlfriends. They are guys who are blowing all of their money, staying up all night playing World of Warcraft, finding free porn on the internet and trying to figure out how to get a bigger subwoofer into their retarded car. Those are the guys who must first be gathered. They must get a swift boot in the rear. They need a good run through boot camp. They need to be told that Jesus Christ is not a gay hippie in a dress and that they’re dealing with the king of kings and the Lord of lords and there is a mission he has called them to. Sixty percent of all Christians today are female. I’m glad the ladies love Jesus; but if you want to win a war you have to get the men. And once you get the men you’ve got to know what to do with them. They want to know how to get married. They want to know how to have sex with their wife at least once a day. They want to know how to make money, buy a home, how to have children, how to pay bills, how to father their sons, how to encourage, love and instruct their daughters… The bottom line is the mission is to get the men because if you get the men you win the war.

According to Driscoll if you get the young men, the women and children and the rest of society will follow. Apparently nobody informed Jesus or the apostle Paul that you need to get brutish young men in order to “win the war.” (Again please see the previous post if you have not yet)

So Where are the Respectful and Thoughtful Complementarians?
I do not want to set up a straw man. I realize that Driscoll is a controversial figure and some of his rhetoric is way over the top. But what I am wondering is where are the complementarians that are respectful to women but still insist on different roles in the Church and in the home? Where are the complementarians who oppose ordination of women but have a thoughtful and well articulated reason as to why they take that position.

I know that Driscoll has a relationship to other prominent evangelical leaders who publicly take such a position such as John Piper, a member of the Together for the Gospel movement (also including the likes of John MacArthur and R.C. Sproul). But I do not see Piper or any of his associates making any effort to distance themselves from Driscoll’s ultimate fighting-esque approach to the complementarian position. To the contrary there seems to be a growing affinity between Piper and Driscoll.

Of course, I have no idea what any of these men may say to Mark Driscoll in private. And John MacArthur has stated some disapointment with Driscoll but mostly for the fact that he is too culturally savvy he swears and was labled as a “cussing pastor” in Donald Miller’s Blue Like Jazz. Well personally I think Driscoll’s presentation of his message is antiquated and a bit barbaric not savvy or hip. And I don’t give a damn if he curses; I am more concerned that he start treating woman better and quit ridiculing other men for “singing love-songs to Jesus” or for generally being too effeminate in his estimation.

As far as misogyny goes, Driscoll uses “the feminine” as and insult for other men not conforming to his image of what a man should be. He constantly employs terms like “chick” and “chickified.” At best he could mean weak or soft which would be the original meaning for such slang, comparing a woman to a baby chicken. At worst it’s often a euphemism for Bitch in the contemporary culture of the young males Driscoll prides himself on working with. He also uses “chick” or “chickified” or other euphemisms for feminine in the video and in several places on his blog and in interviews as an insult for men who are not living up to his version of male. It would be similar if I constantly used derogatory terms for jews or blacks when I was disgruntled with my white friends but still insisted I was not antisemitic or racist. To say that female does not equal less than male in Driscoll’s system is to turn a blind eye.

So again I ask: where are the respectful and thoughtful complementarians? I should add Protestant complementarians. I can understand the Catholic and Orthodox positions. It is part of the faberic of their overall theology. However, what I have a much harder time understanding is the Protestant for whom “the priesthood of all believers” is one of the great revelations of scripture that the Reformation was founded on. Where is the man or woman who will say that Mark Driscoll’s use of anything and everything “feminine” as an insult or weapon against other men makes them sick but yet will argue for “different roles” for men and women? Do such people exist? Or is the vulgar sense that the feminine is something “other” even something “less than” truly lie at the heart of even the most polite presentation of the complementarian position?

Please think on these things.

Shalom,
Wayne