To illustrate my point, I would to look at what I refer to the “third unit” of the Hymn:

For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell and through him God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of his cross.” -Col 1:19-20

Reconciliation in the biblical narrative speaks to a fixing that which is undone (undone relationships, undone social systems, etc).  The thing that needs the most “undoing,” of course, is the curse in Genesis.  Whether one takes a literal view of Genesis or not, the main idea of the story seems to be explaining why the world is so undone.  Men rule over women, women have painful childbirths, etc., but if Christ has “reconciled to himself all things” doesn’t this mean the end of the curse?  Obviously, we must take this with a grain of salt as there still is pain and suffering in the world (a common understanding I hear is the reality of the kingdom is an “already, but not yet” paradox).

But if we are to understand, as Christians, the curse is broken, should we not live in such a way?  I think one of the practical ways to live this out is by stopping to define everyone narrowly according to gender roles.  Why does the man have to be the breadwinner?  If the curse is broken, cannot man and wife work alongside one another in peace and harmony?  There will always be problems, but shouldn’t our “post-curse” mentality be focused on the reconciliation of those problems.  Gender should not be a primary means by which we create an “us and them” mentality in the church.

1.  Human Trafficking:  It’s real and we are complicit if we just let it happen on our watch in this global world.

2.  Should the real recipients of aid and money be women?

3.  Why do we want so much stuff?

4.  Will we really go if God calls us?

5.  Jesus turns the world upside-down.

6.  Is our view of Jesus incomplete?  Perhaps Marcus Borg can tell us why.

I have to begin with the positives of the sermon.  Ironically, the end of his sermon provided the strongest part of his sermon.  He talked about how porn is destroying the marriage relationship, how men are sometimes too negative, and how performance and fear can sometimes get in the way of a healthy marriage.  We do need to recognize that porn is destroying our nation and that the ‘performance’ being all important (as touted in most Hollywood sex scenes) sets an impossibly high standard.

But Driscoll also had an extremely high number of unnerving points in his sermon that made me squirm in my seat.  Making the same mistakes as evangelical pastors (such as those who propogate the myth that Charles Darwin recanted on his death bed), he makes a blanket statement, supported with no ‘biblical’ evidence, saying “all men are visual.”  It took me a total of five seconds to search on google to find a scientific study that disproved this pop myth social theory, but Driscoll used no scientific studies to back up his claim that “all men are visual.”  What is more unnerving is that Driscoll, who is known for using the bible to back up his claims, cited no scripture either in support of his “fact” that men are visual.  I am not a fan of proof-texting, but I would think that Driscoll would cite some scripture if he is going to make a claim on half of the human race.

He goes on to make the extremely sexist statement, informed by his “masculine” view on the world, that:

“Men are in a fight every minute of every day.  Women don’t understand this.”

Perhaps some don’t, but most do.  Most women are also in a struggle every minute of their lives.  But this is not the main point.  The main problem with saying this is it indirectly encourages sin. When Driscol uses the blanket word “men” and says “fight,” those men who may not feel the same way as Driscoll are now ostracized in his community.  What’s more?  Women feel that it is abnormal to struggle everyday with sexual issues.  Driscoll is institutionalizing the sin that he hates by doing this.  Some may think I am being extreme here, but there is a better way to deal with this topic:

Make this a human issue instead of a men’s issue.

Driscoll also keeps mentioning “lust” without defining it.  The largest problem in discussing sexuality is the lack of terminology that pastors “assume” people already understand.  Then they make analogies like Driscoll made in the sermon to explain Lust.  He suggests that looking at a women and considering her beautiful is not lust, but looking back at her a second time is lust.  He has just created the arbitrary sin of looking twice at a women. Thus we created men who are afraid to look at women………..

We have to come up with better terms for lust than this.  I have many more qualms with the article, but I would first like to open up discussion here:

What is lust and why is it a sin?  I’m hoping that people will be as specific as possible.  This is a very important topic.

1. It is important to observe contradictory trends. For example, “He said we have a lot more good commentaries available to us than we did fifty years ago. Yet, mainline churches have fewer conversions than ever before.”  I especially like Reformed Pilgrim’s thoughts when he says, “Our mainline churches are focusing on the minutia difference between supralapsarianism and infralapsarianism, for example, but are ignoring the call to both know God and to follow his sending us to our neighbor’s house. There should be a constant tension between group Bible studies and sharing of one’s faith. Otherwise we end up in a holy huddle somewhere arguing about non-essentials.”

2. Current evangelical fragments are moving into a new phase — into polarized “clumps.”  One way to help break these clumps is to stop the divide between youth and adult worship that sometimes occurs in traditional structure.  Clumping is not really a new phenomenon.  Ever since the reformation we have been seeing clumps forming and breaking off from state religions.  As state religions lost more and more power in Europe, individual communities could build localized contexts to meet local needs.  This idea of ‘locality’ was carried nowhere more than in America. With the advent of Luther and ’sola scriptura,’ there have been varying ways in which different scholars have interpreted the Bible.  The only ‘new’ thing about this is that, more and more often, more radical or ‘extreme’ views of scripture can gain ground via the internet through blogs and social networking.  Recently I was listening to post-election panel discussions on Princeton’s website, and one professor noted that Barack Obama understood something about the world.  She said we are not living in a world where America can be at the ‘top’ anymore.  America has to, instead, be a central network hub for the world with lots of connections.  This shift in policy that will come with Obama’s presidency also says something about the way that church will happen in this new century.

3. The most dangerous trends in any age are the trends that most people do not see.  I have quoted one of those trends on my blog earlier from a New Yorker article on sex that needs serious consideration.  I would suggest also looking at how the blog halfway to normal dealt with this issue of sexuality.  Carson makes the case that evangelical leaders need to stop beating the dead horse of 1920’s liberalism, and according to Reform Pilgrim, “Today’s issues like justification, inerrancy, primacy of family, gender roles, sexuality, pornography, modesty, race relations (very few race-integrated churches), tolerance, consumerism and human flourishing are the current issues at hand.”  I like this outlook.  On trend that we have to consider is why superheroes have often taken the place of Saints in contemporary times.

4. There is a trend in our churches to be consumed by social concern.  David Fitch recently wrote on why full-fledged support of Obama, while not necessarily harmful, sometimes help us miss the centrality of the gospel as small (we so often want it to be something large that we forget it is like a mustard seed…and props to Jason for the link to Fitch’s article).  Over at Kingdom Grace, there is also a wake-up call going on asking why we are so involved with social concern (which, seems to be argued there, is only an extension of Christian sub-culture).  Social concern is very true of the emergent movement.  Jesus himself, however, was quite concerned about social issues.  The main question we must consider is how and why Jesus concerned himself with social issues (the answers to this are as many as the books who claim to know the historical Jesus).  If you read Crossan, for instance, he says:

…[Jesus sought to] rebuild a society upward from its grass roots but on principles of religious and economic egalitarianism, with free healing brought directly to the peasant homes and free sharing of whatever they had in return.  The deliberate conjunction of magic and meal, miracle and table, free compassion and open commensality, was a challenged launched not just at Judaism’s strictest purity regulations, or even at the Mediterrean’s patriarchal combination of honor and shae, patronage and clientage, but at civilization’s eternal inclination to draw lines, invoke boundaries, establish heirarchies, and maintain discriminations.

Is this necessarily the picture of Jesus?  Or is it perhaps Crossan’s longing for his own world to see political equality and egalitarianism?  The question may not be answered simply.  Crossan certainly does make a valuable point about the life and times of Jesus missed by more conservative readers, but he does make a bold statement that the central message of Jesus is about “free healing” that launched a political revolution.  Did Jesus really mean to launch a political revolution?  How do we put all of this together with his kingdom?  These are all central questions that Christian organizations must deal with today.

5. There is a trend in our churches to emphasize discipleship over the gospel.  I think that there should be a balance between the two, just as there is with everything else.  Gospel should naturally lead towards discipleship.