Deconstructing Piper and Driscoll's Masculine Christianity

What would our society look like if John Piper and Mark Driscoll's vision of the church were to be realized as a global kingdom? Because ecclesiology isn't just about the church, but how we think the world ought to look, what we think the Kingdom of God looks like as God's benevolent society spread over the earth.

If Piper and Driscoll's vision reigned, we would revert to a pre-Enlightenment state of culture. We would see a world where women and children find no freedom beyond the marginalizing constraints of the Patriarchal household. Women wouldn't vote, they wouldn't make major decisions in public life, and more seriously, as widows and orphans women and children would suffer terribly (unless they were taken care of, in which case they would be given more rights!).

John Piper and Mark Driscoll call for a masculine Christianity, a Patriarchal ecclesiology. According to Piper,

“God revealed Himself in the Bible pervasively as king not queen; father not mother. Second person of the Trinity is revealed as the eternal Son not daughter; the Father and the Son create man and woman in His image and give them the name man, the name of the male. God appoints all the priests in the Old Testament to be men; the Son of God came into the world to be a man; He chose 12 men to be His apostles; the apostles appointed that the overseers of the Church be men; and when it came to marriage they taught that the husband should be the head.”

He argues for an "overarching godly male leadership." Now I could spend time talking about why this is shortsighted, about how an incarnational vision of God involves getting involved in the messy details of culture (i.e. kings, patriarchs, etc)  and speaking through them. I could talk about God as Good Housewife in the NT, or God as "like a womb" in the OT, or "mother hen." I could talk about Deborah the judge. The list goes on. But I want to deconstruct this ideology by its own merits to show why it doesn't work.

If God is seen as a Divine Patriarch, a Sovereign deity of phallic domination (think: the Sword of his Word) which will one day consummate his bride -- and if we are this, then is not the church female? And if the church is female, should not the church embody the virtues of the feminine, of self-sacrifice, compassion, love, humility, and submission? Should not the church be yonic, a place of opening up and welcoming and surrendering and submitting rather than a place of domination and abuse and tyranny?

There have been recent reports of Mark Driscoll as a tyrant, of firing any elder who disagrees with him at all. Mark Driscoll is a powerful embodiment of phallic tyranny--a man in love with the masculine, with talking about and practicing the masculine, and guilty of spiritually abusing his own followers (cult leader?).

I find it ironic that Mark Driscoll's book Real Marriage would be published as is by Thomas Nelson, a book that talks explicitly about Mark's sexual and emotional relationship with his wife, about sex toys, etc, etc. And yet, Thomas Nelson required Rachel Held Evans to remove the word "vagina" from her book A Year of Biblical Womanhood before they would publish it. This only points to the church's phallocentric privileging of the masculine over the feminine and its commitment to the outdated models of the Patriarchal world.