52 Books in 52 Weeks, it's called. The challenge is simple: read a book every week for a year.
13. Pastor dad: scriptural insights on fatherhood.
A slim volume (free ebook), developed from a sermon. Driscoll is a polarizing figure, garnering both acclaim and scorn for his blend of extreme conservatism with the emergent church model. Most of the way, this reads like the barest gloss on Proverbs (“…14:26 says, ‘In the fear of the LORD one has strong confidence, and his children will have a refuge.’ … [So,] the safest place for children is with a man who fears the Lord.”), which isn’t bad. But Driscoll drifts into behaviorism and a shocking lack of grace, admonishing a failing father for his lack of wisdom by (obliquely) recommending he shoot his daughter’s boyfriend and summarily excommunicating Christians-who-sin from the Church. I don’t mind separating the wheat from the chaff. Really, I don’t. But I bet I could find a follower of Jesus to give me sound scriptural advice on fatherhood without demanding that I sift through this deadly legalism to find it.
(Update: I neglected to point out Driscoll’s conviction that it’s a Biblical mandate that a Godly father make a lot of money, which he emphatically asserts but takes little time to flesh out. It follows from the mandate to provide for his family, which, I’m not sure, but I think our role in provision is at the very most as a team member and probably more likely as a charity case.)
Thank you. Driscoll seems like a nice guy. As a Christian I hope to extend grace to everyone and therefore, read all people in the most gracious light possible.
However, Driscoll is a goon. He is poisoning the already poisoned Evangelical church with a masculinistic, nationalistic, calvinistic, homphobic ideology.
Anyway, thank you for this thoughtful and lucid –much more thoughtful and lucid than mine– response to the book.
matthew. March 8th. 2010. 1:14 pm.