Well, as most of you know, Douglas Wilson, his son N.D. Wilson, and son-in-law Ben Merkle got the coolest guy in school to come over and sit at their lunch table.
Which is another way of saying that the Wilson/Merkle/Wilson Annual Conference On What Masculinist Reformed Guys Think About Sex is ready for its mid-September debut in Moscow as “The Grace Agenda,” featuring Mark Driscoll, founding pastor of Seattle’s Mars Hill Church, which reaches out with Driscoll’s sex-saturated theology on female subordination, a kick-ass, tough-guy Jesus, and the value of the blow job as an evangelism tool for non-believing husbands. If you’re offended by my language, take it up with Driscoll, who’s provoked the ire of many conservative evangelicals for his salacious take on the Biblical Song of Solomon, coarse pulpit discussion of marital relations, and embrace of all things cool, hep, and relevant, no matter how obnoxious. It’s impossible to write about Driscoll and still sound like a lady.
But I’ll be doing my part nonetheless to welcome him to Moscow by posting — daily, I hope — on him, his ministry, and the Wilsonian-Driscollista take on Christian manliness, the necessity of a rough-and-tough, red-blooded Jesus, and the sentimental, feminized sappiness of the American Church. In some respects, the education is too late. The pastor of the Nazarene Church, where the conference is scheduled to be held, wasn’t made aware of the special circumstances surrounding the groom at the June 11 wedding Wilson officiated there (the groom is a serial pedophile), and when I spoke to him in June, he wasn’t aware that Mark Driscoll was part of the “Grace Agenda” conference he had promised his church building’s use for. That might have been convenient for Wilson, whose own church facility can’t hold a conference, because many pastors, knowing what they know of Mark Driscoll, would prefer several degrees of separation between their churches and him. But a pastor can’t object to what he doesn’t know about . . .
Nazarene Pastor Eby’s lack of diligence in both cases is lamentable, but I intend to make it quite clear that in hosting Wilson and his cronies, he’s not hosting your usual kind of Gospel-preaching pastor; in Wilson’s not having told him about Driscoll, who attracts controversy virtually every time he opens his mouth, our local Arbiter of Manliness was less than forthcoming. Which, I think, is less than honorable. My hope is that Eby is a more diligent, less naive, more educated man after reading this. My greatest hope, however, is that Wilson’s embrace — not that they’d ever, you know, hug or anything — of Driscoll tarnishes both men and reveals them and their ministries for what they are. What they are is not what any Gospel-loving Christian should call “good.”
So fasten your seatbelts, because it’s going to be a quite a ride — vulgar at times, astonishing at others, and dismaying at every turn. We’ll kick off tomorrow with some words from Driscoll about his favorite subject — masculinity, or, if pressed, Jesus-as-the-embodiment thereof — and an opposing quote that puts Driscoll to shame.
If such a thing is possible.