"Looking for Jesus and His Mother"

I recently came across (what I eventually realized was) a satirical piece about Mark Driscoll, pastor of Seattle's Mars Hill Church. According to the article, Driscoll was speaking at a recent men's conference when he launched into one of his tirades about how effeminate everyone except him and the apostles is. The satirized Driscoll explained:

"The problem with our churches today is that the lead pastor is some sissy boy who wears cardigan sweaters, has The Carpenters dialed in on his iPod, gets his hair cut at a salon instead of a barber shop, hasn't been to an Ultimate Fighting match, works out on an elliptical machine instead of going to isolated regions of Russia like in Rocky IV in order to harvest lumber with his teeth, and generally swishes around like Jack on Three's Company whenever Mr. Roper was around."

The men of the Bible were real men, Driscoll insisted: "King David might have played the lyre, but he also slaughtered thousands of guys."

Driscoll's obsession with masculinity is well-documented. As I highlighted in my last post, he recently suggested that Great Britain's complete lack of good Bible teachers is due to its churches being filled with effeminate, limp-wristed girly men.

I have been doing a bit of thinking about this issue, and I've concluded that maybe Mark has a point. Many in the American church have feminized God even to the point of insisting that his nurturing, maternal qualities eclipse his power and omniscience (what comes immediately to mind is Open Theism, which teaches that when your loved one dies in a car accident, God is a true shoulder to cry on since he is as genuinely surprised and saddened by the tragedy as you are). Clearly against the backdrop of such a housebroken and castrated God who spends all his time wringing his hands and weeping powerlessly, one cannot really blame a pastor for trying to reassert God's strength and masculinity.

But then again, those who have grown up around men only with no feminine influences can surely testify that there is a big difference between a house and a home, and that a family without a mother can be rather cold, clinical, and repressed. So when people perceive the Christian church to be lacking in warmth and compassion, they understandably seek to project these more feminine attributes upon God. This, in turn, tends to drive men away and make them dismiss church as being a place for women, causing Mark Driscoll to huff, puff, and expose his chest hair.

G.K. Chesterton highlighted the paradox of how that the church in his own day was both dismissed as a place that oppresses all women while simultaneously being criticized for unduly exalting one of them in particular. In other words, Christianity has historically thought too little of every female except Mary, of whom it thinks too much.

Of course, we Protestants understandably cringe at the Mariolatry perceived in certain older, pre-Reformation traditions, but if our choice is between God-as-coldhearted-Father and God-as-compassionate-Mother, one can hardly blame those who wish they were part of a two-parent family.

No, I'm not suggesting that anyone start kissing statues or venerating the Virgin's image in a tortilla. But I do think it would be worthwhile to ponder the source of the error to which Driscoll is erroneously reacting, and to whatever degree one can, to seek to rectify it.