A Tardy Rebuke To Masculinist Exclusionists -- Wilson, Feminism, and Church Discipline

It's been a couple of weeks since our local Pontiff, Doug Wilson, issued his ex-cathedra declaration that those who support or practice feminism -- a "heresy," he says, not just a social issue -- ought to be under church discipline and denied a place at the table of Holy Communion.

It's such a nakedly silly and typically overweening pronouncement from a silly and overweening man for whom pompous displays of ecclesiastical and theological self-importance would be amusing -- if they didn't bring about such damage to the Gospel.  Would that Wilson were a plumber or a landscaper; he could pontificate about PVC piping and nitrogen levels in soil and, whether he's correct or not, the damage would be contained.  Or, if he weren't a ministerial entrepreneur and media magnate, he could nevertheless discuss theology and culture and -- work with me here, folks -- not be reckless, divisive, and ignorant.  In a perfect world, which Moscow isn't, we'd have either a knowledgeable, reasonable theo-sociological commentator with a large audience, or a theo-sociological dilettante with only a few oatmeal-stout drinking pals to influence and pat him on the back, since he's the guy who always pays the tab.

Instead, we have in Wilson a self-aggrandizing, hermeneutically challenged, jaw-droppingly obnoxious guy whose ministerial influence extends to thousands beyond Moscow's Ambrose House, from which he pounds the keyboard with gleeful tenacity.  There's nothing that can be known, Wilsonian conventional wisdom assures us, of which Wilson won't announce his undeniable expertise. Architecture, history, music, poetry, art, hermeneutics, nutrition, environmental science, physics, biology -- there's nothing he doesn't know.  Nothing tentative or wondering has ever, it seems, come through his mind or spilled out of his mouth or danced across his keyboard.  Certainty is his entry into the market; recklessness is his stock in trade.  His success is no indication of rightness.  Rather, it confirms that righteousness is indeed a rare commodity and Godly discernment and courage scarcer still.  His people eat this stuff up, not just because, in so many cases locally, their livelihoods depend on his success, but also because they know nothing else.  Besides, insecure men gravitate toward masculinist theology, and their women speak only of life as their helpmeets and cheerleaders and ecclesiastically necessary casserole makers.

It's a failsafe gig he's got going.  Ruination of the Gospel has always been popular.

Tomorrow, as a woman who promotes the "heresy" of feminism on her blog and in her words and, indeed, in the entirety of her life -- except that I call it "living the Gospel in obedience to Galatians 3:28", not merely "feminism" -- I'll analyze Wilson's assertion that I ought to be under church discipline and unable to partake of the Sacrament of the Lord's Supper.  You may be certain that I won't be begging for his absolution or understanding.  Indeed, my understanding of what Wilson calls "feminism" is just Gospel 101.  Fortunately, the One who invites me to the table isn't a locally famous, fatuous faux pastor, but the Lord Jesus himself.

When I answer to a bearded man, it won't be Douglas Wilson.