Lord Snow Presides…. over Mark Driscoll!
Last week, Mark Driscoll arrived to the Evangelical channel. And he’s clearly hoping everyone has long forgotten about all the terrible things he’s done that should, and indeed would in any decent group of people, utterly disqualify him forever from holding any kind of leadership position ever again.
I noticed immediately–as, I suspect, other visitors to his blog did–that he not only is ignoring the elephant in the room regarding his past scandals, but he’s closed all comments on his blog so that nobody can tell his new potential sheep about any of that stuff.
And that bothers me.
I mean, I’m used to Christians closing comments on their blogs–I think most of the Catholic bloggers here do that, and plenty of Driscoll’s evangelical pals have some very sharp limits on what kinds of comments they accept–but it bothers me particularly when it comes to this guy, and particularly when I read his opening salvo on Patheos about how much he “hopes to be helpful” and his blather in that post about wanting “a bit of a relationship” with his readers.
Yes, “a bit.” Just a bit. Not enough to allow public two-way communication, of course. Not enough to permit any kind of feedback. Not enough to even outline in the blog post how readers are supposed to contact him if they want to talk to him or ask him anything. Just a bit. Sorta like Jesus, I guess.
Darkness festers best in silence. Terrible people need dank little corners where they can operate free of feedback like they need air itself. And it’s weird how often those dank little corners are found in the hearts of Christian leaders–or at least it would be weird if I didn’t know anything about Christian leaders. That inability to handle criticism and feedback is exactly how Mark Driscoll got in trouble at Mars Hill–and clearly he hasn’t learned a thing from that disastrous scandal, as Warren Throckmorton promptly pointed out regarding Driscoll’s longstanding love of plagiarism.
So I thought–I mean, me, being ever so helpful this way–that I’d help Mark Driscoll out by opening his posts to comments here. I thought we could pretend that his post had run allowing comments, and respond to it accordingly. Our RoE still fully applies, of course, particularly to drive-by Christians who see what we’re up to and want to crusade for their lizard king or get mad at us for pointing out the obvious about him. (This series is not to be construed by Christians as an excuse to debate real live atheists or as permission to preach to an unconsenting audience.)
Lord Snow Presides is an off-topic post series that I run whenever Disqus gets really balky over our comment count. So if you don’t want to talk about Mark Driscoll, you don’t have to. Feel free to chat about anything on your mind–share pet pictures, whatever you like! And either way, we’ll see you next time tomorrow, same Bat-time, same Bat-channel, on our regularly-scheduled post Tuesday night.
Here’s Mark Driscoll’s full October 2nd post archived, so you don’t even have to give him a click.
So…. what say you?
