Sunday, March 26, 2006

Reading Mark Driscoll and Other Updates

Well, here's an update on the weekend. First of all, Friday I just physically crashed after a long week. When I woke up, I tried to do some school reading and some doctrines of grace reading (in preparation for posting that night) and suddenly realized I wanted to lynch those books. Fed up, I decided I would take the entire weekend "off" from school and limited atonement. The result has been a very restful and refreshing weekend. I will return to class and work on Monday healthy and happy, and my mind will be ready to tackle limited atonement. Tricia and I decided not to adopt Flurry, the Golden Retriever puppy that was born deaf. I'm so sad. We also decided not to adopt our backup, a hearing beagle named Reba. I'm more sad. But now we can focus on the types of dogs I really wanted for later; namely chihuahuas and cocker spaniels. Yay! Once the disappointment had time to settle, Tricia got serious about the whole getting a dog thing and now has a short list of breeds she'd like to look at, and Cavalier King Charles Spaniel has been added to my two-deep list. Not bad for someone who two years ago was afraid of dogs. We can thank her mother's Golden Retriever Ellie for bringing her into the wonderful world of barkdom. In the course of my resting, I decided I'd pick up Mark Driscoll's The Radical Reformission and read it over the weekend. I have almost finished, with a quarter of the book left to read as I write this. Here's a couple of thoughts on that. First, if Driscoll is the "godfather" of the emergent movement, so to speak, then the entire emergent movement (to the extent I have been able to read) has completely missed the point he was trying to make in this book. From Driscoll's own statements in the book, the emergent movement as it exists today is nothing more than heresy. Heresy! That seems a far cry from what he originally proposed. My buddy Shane said that from what I told him it sounded like emergents took Driscoll's ideas and "ran wild" with them. That's exactly what I think after reading through this book. Talk about an "adventure in missing the point!" Second, if Driscoll is correct in what he says, then we have to completely overhaul our ecclesiology. We've got to see if we've become so entrenched in our traditions that the Gospel becomes irrelevant, or if we've gotten so fancy in our innovations that we compromise the Gospel and again make it irrelevant. The second half of that statement is exactly why I think the emergent movement has completely missed the point. I'm not too sure what to think in this area, so I'm going to hold off on any further commentary until I've finished the book and had time to think more on this. Third, if what he says is true about me, I've got some further sanctification to get cracking on. I've been convicted by some of the things I've read in here, and roundly encouraged towards a goal by other things I've read in the book as well. Fourth, some of the guys who've recently reviewed the book need to get a life and grow a sense of humor. This guy is funny. Funny. I did not in the least feel his handling of Scripture was irreverent; then again maybe my sense of humor is different from most other people's. But I have never gotten such a knee-slapping laugh out of a book other than Christopher Moore's Lamb, and that one was a parody of the Gospel! Much less, I have never laughed while reading a serious book like Reformission. When you can thoroughly enjoy someone laying some serious sanctifying smackdown on you, you know the book is good. So, I'd recommend this book heavily to everyone who asks me about it. I'd recommend it over Brian McLaren any day. I still need to finish McLaren's other books, and as such I've assigned myself an additional summer reading project of reading the rest of McLaren's books (the New Kind of Christian series) and other Emergent publications as well. Until then I'm still going to withhold final judgment on the whole emergent deal. Well, that is the Sunday update. See you when I finally get around to limited atonement!

1 Comments:

Blogger Reid S. Monaghan said...

Amen brother. I agree with you about Driscoll. He is raw, missional, reformed, soundly complementarian, evangelistically engaged, FUNNY guy.

He talks about how big "his" church is a bit much. But I listen to his sermons now for personal encouragement, edification and lots of laughs.

His resurgence vision is much more needed today than the emergent toilet water Driscoll now aptly describes.

Reid

3/29/2006 12:43:00 AM  

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