Robert Cargill, following up on a post from Scotteriology, has the latest on Mark Driscoll, pastor of Mars Hill Church in Seatttle:
It’s not enough to be a bully and an open advocate for the subjugation of women and homosexuals. But now, Mark Driscoll is admitting HE SEES THINGS!, as in, bilocative visions and psychic extrasensory perception in his head as well as back through time! In fact, Mark Driscoll claims he can see your past abuses from 10 years ago!
Bob has transcribed a particularly worrying example:
On occasion, I see things. I see things. Uh, like, I was meeting with one person, and they, they didn’t know this, but they were abused when they were a child, and I said, “When you were a child, you were abused. This person did this to you – physically touched you this way.” And he said, “How do you know?” And I said, “I don’t know. It’s like I got a TV right here and I’m seeing it.” He said, “No, that never happened.” And I said, “Go ask ’em. Go ask ’em if they actually did what I think they did, and I see that they did.” And they went and asked this person, “When I was a little kid, did you do this?” And the person said, “Yeah, but you were only like a year or two old. How do you remember that?” And they said, “Well, Pastor Mark told me.”(Watch from the 0:06 mark).
This should be setting off alarm bells: Driscoll is throwing around accusations of sex abuse based on his supposed supernatural discernment, and manipulating members of his congregation into believing they were victims (and, perhaps in some cases, even perpetrators). This is the kind of thing that contributed to the “Satanic panics” of the 1980s, and the consequences may well lead to tragedy.
In a second almost-equally distasteful example, Driscoll boasts about how he uncovered a woman’s adultery, and called her out on it in front of her husband:
…I said, “You remember that place: it was that cheap hotel with that certain colored bedspread. You did it, you had sex with the light on because you weren’t ashamed and you wanted him to see you, and you wanted to see him.” She was just looking at me like [throws hands in air]. I said, “You know, it was about ten years ago?”
I see everything [makes TV square with hands]…
Driscoll has a prurient streak that featured on this blog back in 2009: he notoriously teaches that Song of Solomon 2:3 – “The fruit of her husband is sweet to her taste and she delights to be beneath him” – is a commandment (not just permission) for women to perform oral sex on their husbands. Gen. J.C. Christian sent Driscoll his thoughts on that here.
According to a recent report in the Seattle Times, Driscoll
has eight churches in Western Washington with a ninth to open in September in Everett plus churches in Oregon, California and New Mexico.
The Seattle Times reports ( http://bit.ly/mUizhV) Mars Hill churches had weekly attendance last year of 8,700, ranking it among the largest Protestant churches in the nation.
UPDATE (14 Jan 2012): Not even Driscoll’s wife is safe from being “exposed” by Driscoll’s supernatural ability to see other people having sex. David Sessions notes a passage in Driscroll’s new book Real Marriage: The Truth About Sex, Friendship and Life Together:
He recalls having a dream, shortly before Grace gave birth to the couple’s first child, in which he “saw in painful detail Grace sinning sexually during a senior trip she took after high school when we had just started dating.” He awoke, threw up, and asked her if it was true. She confessed, and he was “shell-shocked. Had I known about this sin, I would not have married her.”
…”Grace is often cast as the damaged and sinful wife who withholds sex from her deserving husband, Mark the hero who is justified in leaving his wife but instead comes along to rescue her,” wrote Rachel Held Evans, a popular evangelical blogger and author, discussing the dream episode. “The amount of guilt and shame that pervades this part of the book makes me so sad.”
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