Monday, January 30, 2006

Enigmatic Driscoll

I don't want to be one of those guys who wildly take pot shots at everyone, relishing any justification to check off one more evangelical as a validated apostate. So, in order to be fair, I want to point out Mark Driscoll's strong if not [warning] a bit crass stand against Brian McLaren's foolish prancing around biblical teaching on homosexuality. Clearly, not everyone in the broad emerging movement is cut out of the same cloth, even though I don't understand how Driscoll can defend Schuller one moment and condemn McLaren the next, particularly in light of what Schuller has to say about homosexuality.

3 comments:

Ben said...

Dave,

Can you clarify what bickering in the comments sections you're talking about? I think you're talking about the Out of Ur blog I linked to, not Paleo, right?

If I understand what you're saying, I agree that partisan bickering is certainly not unique to fundamentalism. It may actually be more characteristic of the blogosphere than any other entity. I believe the tone of some edgy evangelicals is too easily dismissed and even applauded as "just part of who he is" as if it were a winsome personality. And of course I should not exclude my own depravity from that kind of examination.

This blog isn't about tone, though; it's about ideas (I hope)—good ones and bad ones. I can't say with certainty that I've never criticized tone here or never will, but (a) I think the ideas are more important, and (b) if I start criticizing tone, I'll get accused of hypocrisy faster than you can type "asdfjkl;".

Oh, and I haven't read the comments. I don't think I will.

Feel free to rant here anytime.

P.S. A thought just occurred to me. Maybe fundamentalists get tarred and feathered more aggressively because some fundamentalists claim that fundamentalism is the one true expression of Christianity in the world today. That may invite criticism. Perhaps evangelicals are attacked less because no one seriously believes that evangelicalism is an authentic expression of Christianity. Just a theory. That doesn't alleviate the inconsistency, but it might explain it.

SB said...

Have you ever listened to Driscoll preach Ben?

Ben said...

Absolutely.