The Shooting Salvationist chronicles what may be the most famous story you have never heard. In the 1920’s, the Reverend J. Frank Norris railed against vice and conspiracies he saw everywhere to a congregation of more than 10,000 at First Baptist Church in Fort Worth, Texas, the largest congregation in America, the first “megachurch.” Norris controlled a radio station, a tabloid newspaper and a valuable tract of land in downtown Fort Worth. Constantly at odds with the oil boomtown’s civic leaders, he aggressively defended his activism, observing, “John the Baptist was into politics.”
Following the death of William Jennings Bryan, Norris was a national figure poised to become the leading fundamentalist in America. This changed, however, in a moment of violence one sweltering Saturday in July when he shot and killed an unarmed man in his church office. Norris was indicted for murder and, if convicted, would be executed in the state of Texas’ electric chair.
At a time when newspaper wire services and national retailers were unifying American popular culture as never before, Norris’ murder trial was front-page news from coast to coast. Set during the Jazz Age, when Prohibition was the law of the land, The Shooting Salvationist leads to a courtroom drama pitting some of the most powerful lawyers of the era against each other with the life of a wildly popular, and equally loathed, religious leader hanging in the balance.
www.theshootingsalvationist.com
"The Shooting Salvationist"
ReplyDeleteAdding fuel to the idiocy of liberal paranoia about Christian theocracy.
To me, this is reason enough to avoid Driscoll:
ReplyDeletehttp://teampyro.blogspot.com/2011/08/pornographic-divination.html
Mathetes, the claims to spiritually given super-powers was one of the reasons I had to consider when I decided to not remain a member of Mars Hill. He used to be more of a MacArthur style cessationist but at length he's continued to claim God-given revelations about situations where I haven't been confident that would apply.
ReplyDeleteDriscoll started the spiritual warfare presentation in 2008 by appealing to William Gurnall but I have not managed to see how invocations of recovered memory therapy methods filtered through claims to have supernatural aid to recovering memories fits with what I've read of Gurnall. I saw enough of recovered memory fad techniques in my Pentecostal days to feel uncomfortable with it and was disappointed that Driscoll has since made so much reference to them.
For instance, the recent statement in Real Marriage in which Driscoll recounts that, implicitly, God gave him a revelation that his wife cheated on him in the first few months they were dating in high school by way of a graphic dream could be construed by Team Pyro as "pornographic divination". I lean toward a more prosaic explanation. Mark Driscoll explains in real marriage that though he was sexually faithful to the girlfriends he had had sex with before marrying Grace they were all unfaithful to him. A nightmare about even Grace being sexually unfaithful does not require a supernatural explanation (though we don't have to categorically rule that out, I suppose). In this case the prosaic explanation could be that Mark Driscoll has gone through life with anxiety about women being sexually unfaithful to him and that this is a compelling and sufficient "natural" reason he could have had such a nightmare. I'm sure he'd beg to differ but he's not here to contest this and I'm simply proposing a prosaic explanation to show why I'm cautious about the "pornographic divination" charge. I may differ with Driscoll about claims of spiritual super-powers but I would prefer not to assume the worst about Driscoll's mental or emotional state without warrant, which is what cessationists have tended to do with him. Since theological liberals have done the same I'd rather avoid that if possible.
Whether or not that justifies the Team Pyro claim of pornographic divination I'm not entirely confident about (i.e. I'm not going to assume Driscoll is demonized) but if Team Pyro means by "divination" resorting to by-now demonstrably quack counseling techniques to attempt to explain relational problems that could be considered in a more prosaic light we might be on the same page after all.