Mark Driscoll is Harmfully Wrong About Esther (and Wrong About Women)

I normally don’t post about wild, crazy things other people in the Christian world say or do. There’s plenty of work to be done in my own life and in my own church and in my own neighborhood. And I usually don’t have the time to care. But this issue touched on too many nerves to avoid.

Update January 2015: Since Mars Hill closed down, the links to Mars Hill web pages no longer work. I imagine they are archived somewhere on the web if you spend a few minutes searching for them.

Mark Driscoll writes this in a post promoting his upcoming teaching series on the biblical story of Esther:

[Esther] grows up in a very lukewarm religious home as an orphan raised by her uncle. Beautiful, she allows men to tend to her needs and make her decisions. Her behavior is sinful and she spends around a year in the spa getting dolled up to lose her virginity with the pagan king like hundreds of other women. She performs so well that he chooses her as his favorite. Today, her story would be, a beautiful young woman living in a major city allows men to cater to her needs, undergoes lots of beauty treatment to look her best, and lands a really rich guy whom she meets on The Bachelor and wows with an amazing night in bed. She’s simply a person without any character until her own neck is on the line, and then we see her rise up to save the life of her people when she is converted to a real faith in God.

To be fair, there’s part of that description I agree with. Mainly, this:

[Esther] grows up in a very lukewarm religious home as an orphan raised by her uncle. Beautiful, she allows men to tend to her needs and make her decisions. Her behavior is sinful and she spends around a year in the spa getting dolled up to lose her virginity with the pagan king like hundreds of other women. She performs so well that he chooses her as his favorite. Today, her story would be, a beautiful young woman living in a major city allows men to cater to her needs, undergoes lots of beauty treatment to look her best, and lands a really rich guy whom she meets on The Bachelor and wows with an amazing night in bed. She’s simply a person without any character until her own neck is on the line, and then we see her rise up to save the life of her people when she is converted to a real faith in God.

What Mark Driscoll is ascribing to Esther – painting her as a woman who lacks both faith and character who is sexually coercive and manipulative –  is not from the sparsely detailed text of the book of Esther. It’s not from the history of the church’s interpretation of this Jewish writing.

It ignores the narrative storyline clearly showing that Esther was taken, forcibly relocated and coerced into a place of physical and sexual submission by a drunken and despotic fool of a man who used power to get whatever he wanted.

I don’t know where it comes from other than a skewed perspective on women and an agenda-laden filtering of the Scriptures through that skewed perspective.

It comes from an inability to acknowledge broken/sinful cultural conditions leading to a disrespect and abuse of women and an unwillingness to do what’s necessary to participate in correcting those conditions.

It’s unhelpful.

It’s unhealthy.

It’s unfaithful to the Scriptures’ witness to both Esther and women in general.

(For more conversation on this, check out Rachel Held Evans’ good thoughts on this.)

Feel free to agree or disagree by offering a comment….or let’s grab coffee and talk about it.