Threads from Henry's Web

Author: henry

  • Interactive Covenants and Prophecies or God Has a Plan B

    It’s interesting to me how we (and I definitely include myself) often read scripture. One concept can easily override another. For example, I recall a conversation in which someone was claiming that no human being was ever righteous. I brought up Job, who is described as righteous in Job 1. “Oh, but that is only as he was seen through the righteousness of Christ,” I was told. Of course, Job 1 isn’t speaking of the righteousness of Christ, and in fact the entire book would be very silly with that change. Job is concerned that he has been punished, but that nothing he has done deserves these results.

    This post is a follow-up to Psalm 89: When Eternal Doesn’t Last, and you should read that post first.

    It’s funny that I begin this post with an illustration from Job, because Job provides a counterpoint to the theology I’m looking at. Jeremiah 18, which I cited in the previous post, talks about how if God is sending disaster, and the recipients of the disaster repent, God will repent of that disaster. One implication that might be drawn is that good deeds result in blessing, and bad deeds result in curses. One need look no further than Deuteronomy 28 to find this theology made explicit, and it is repeatedly hammered in through the various books of the Deuteronomic history.

    But what I’m more interested in here is the interactive nature of the texts, the way in which people’s actions are woven in with God’s will with the implication that you can change the future. Even if God has said things will go one way, that might be changed through human action.

    In theology we tend to reconcile the differences in some way. God might only appear to react to the actions of humans, but he actually knows precisely what is coming and he does precisely what he planned. It may be considered blasphemous to suggest otherwise. But open theism and process theology both suggest that God is more interactive than traditional theology holds, though to different degrees and in different ways.

    My interest here is in the way we read the biblical text, and the way that we understand prophecy and its fulfilment. I’ll get to the covenants shortly.

    Imagine a father who tells his children that he will take them all to the movies in the evening. Now think about the father’s mental processes. Did he suddenly realize that in the fixed future he would have taken his children to the movies, and thus he informed them of this information he had received (or divined, perhaps)? Or did he decide at this moment that he wanted to take his children to the movies, and that he would, in fact, do so this very evening?

    Given that this human father does not know the future, such as to see himself taking future action, we’ll have to assume the latter. He makes a decision in the present, and he announces it to his children by saying, “I’m going to take you to the movies.” At the point at which he makes that statement it’s true. Being an optimistic sort, this particular father doesn’t think of all the possible reasons he might not make it or might change his mind. He just says he’s going.

    Let’s imagine now that the children, having heard of their good fortune, decide that nothing else matters. They fail to do their chores. They ignore their mother. The fail to put away their toys. They say unfortunate things. In fact, they generally make life miserable for their parents.

    Now the father says, “Because you have been misbehaving, we are not going to the movies any more.” Does this make his earlier statement a lie? It was true (at least in intent) when he said it, but it does not actually take place.

    My suggestion is that prophecies are more like this father’s statement than they are like scenes which one might see in a crystal ball. (If crystal balls worked, which they don’t!) When God says “Nineveh will be destroyed in 40 days,” he doesn’t mean that he has observed the future and seen that this happens, but rather that he intends, in 40 days, to destroy Nineveh. That’s clearly the way the Ninevites understand it. It’s the way Jonah is afraid it’s going to work.

    I’m not certain how much difference there is between these two ways of thinking when it is God making the promises or predictions. It makes a great deal of difference in the way we think about what God has to say.

    Now we come to covenant, and I’d like to call our attention to Jeremiah 31:31-34:

    31 The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah. 32 It will not be like the covenant that I made with their ancestors when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt—a covenant that they broke, though I was their husband, says the Lord. 33 But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. 34 No longer shall they teach one another, or say to each other, “Know the Lord,” for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, says the Lord; for I will forgive their iniquity, and remember their sin no more. (NRSV)

    (Note: I would use “lawful lord” rather than “husband” in this passage, but that gets beyond the scope of this blog post.)

    There are a few things to notice about this passage. First, the covenant came with promises (or are they predictions?). Does this make a difference? There are conditions. It is by violating these conditions that the covenant is broken. Once broken, the covenant is not in effect.

    Then comes the unheard of grace—a new covenant. It’s not a restoration of an old covenant. That one has been broken, and as we learned in Psalm 89, no matter what we do we cannot make the promises “have been” fulfilled, because they weren’t. David’s throne was removed. There was no one sitting on it. No amount of restoration years later can make what did not happen happen. Instead, there’s a new covenant. God is now on plan B, unless it’s plan C or D and we didn’t realize it. But at least it’s not plan A.

    And this is where Christians can go off the rail, especially considering how much this passage is used in the book of Hebrews. The easy Christian solution is to assume that the new covenant that God created is a covenant with the church. And I believe that God does indeed have a new covenant with the church.

    But having a covenant with his people the church does not really fulfil the words of Jeremiah 31:31-34, because there he says that a day is coming when he will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah. That precludes one set of ideas, specifically that the church replaces Israel, and that Israel as such is no longer a player.

    But on the other hand we have the view that everything said in the old covenant, the one that was broken, must still be fulfilled. That is not, in my view, scripturally justified. In fact, that is to make the same mistake as those Jeremiah mentioned (7:1-20) who kept repeating: “The temple of the Lord! The temple of the Lord!” God calls attention immediately to Shiloh which had once been the seat of God’s tabernacle, but which had not done so well.

    So it’s now plan B, or perhaps plan C. (Shiloh?) How do we know the form that God’s blessing will take? Perhaps no eye has seen it nor any ear heard it, nor has it entered into any human heart (1 Cor. 2:9).

  • July Biblical Studies Carnival Posted

    … at Reading Acts. This is one of those rare occasions when there is a link back to this very blog!

  • Psalm 51 in The Voice

    I’ve been including The Voice Bible in my lectionary reading for the last couple of weeks. My early impression was that it was fairly good as a paraphrase, though the italics, while fairly consistent, were a bit distracting. I thought they were unnecessary.

    I was wrong. I have yet to do any sort of objective comparison of the use of italics in one of the various formal equivalence translations, such as the KJV, but at this point my impression is that these italics are not fully consistent. At the same time, the added material does not all fall into what I would understand as a paraphrase. Since what belongs in a paraphrase is not well defined in any case, however, this may not be a valid criticism.

    Readers of The Living Bible and The Message have gotten used to some extensive rephrasing, and also a good deal of cultural translation. In the voice, we have a text that translates the text using principles of dynamic equivalence and then adds notes. Rather than using foot- or marginal notes, these notes are in the text in italics. The feel of reading this version is rather different.

    The Psalm for this week is Psalm 51, and some of the notes really grate on me. I probably need to spend more time reading and thinking about this, but let me give some examples again. (These are not intended as a representative sample. I’m listing passages that grated on me. Numbers refer to verses, not list numbers.)

    1.  … wipe out every consequence of my shameful crimes. — Huh?

    2. Thoroughly wash me, inside and out, … — What does this add?

    7. If You wash me, I will be whiter than snow. — If you want to make this a conditional, then it’s part of the translation. If it’s not justified, putting it in italics doesn’t help.

    9.  and erase my guilt from the record. — Again, what does this add?

    16. I would surrender my dearest possessions or destroy all that I prize to prove my regret, but … — This note just seems wrong to me. The verse is not talking about giving up possessions or destroying things you prize. It’s talking about presenting sacrifices to God. There’s a good theological point here, also often made by the prophets, and this note makes it less clear, in my opinion.

    Thus far these are just thoughts as I read. I haven’t formed an overall opinion on this translation. But I am concerned about some of this content.

     

  • Scot McKnight on Dominion Theology

    Well, actually he’s summarizing Paul C. McGlasson. I recently wrote about hearing Dutch Sheets speak and mentioned what he had to say about the term “dominionism.”

    There is something that concerns me here, and that is that Rushdoony and those who agree with him are lumped in with folks like C. Peter Wagner, and of course Sheets. There are similarities and there are differences. There are differences in goals, such as the basis of whatever biblical law various leaders would apply. Is this a reapplication of at least the civil portions of the Mosaic law, or is it a gentle application of the Sermon on the Mount? I don’t see either of these as a basis for civil administration in a pluralistic society, yet the two goals are substantially different. Then there are differences in terms of strategy. Is force permitted? Is one simply working through the democratic process, or is one trying to undermine the entire system?

    I happen to believe that the Kingdom of God, insofar as it is manifested on earth, should be manifested through the people of God, what we often call the “upper case Church.” I believe that civil administration should be secular or as religiously neutral as possible. (I’ll have to write sometime about how I combine those two potentially conflicting ideas.) But at the same time I believe that we need to be careful when we lump groups of people with quite different goals and approaches together.

     

  • Real vs. Hypothetical Evil

    In an article on the Huffington Post, Aaron Taylor suggests a variant of the famous saying, All that is needed for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.

    His variant? “Sometimes evil triumphs not when good people do nothing, but when good people fail to distinguish between hypothetical evil and real evil, and end up doing something about the former when they should be doing something about the latter. ”

    I’m not going to go over his post in detail, so you need to read it to follow what I’m about to say.

    The specific example is the Arms Trade Treaty which is under discussion. Taylor sees this as a good, while the claim that there is a threat inherent in that treat to the 2nd Amendment rights of Americans is the hypothetical evil. Thus one puts up the real good of the treaty (even incomplete) against the hypothetical evil of potential erosion of the 2nd Amendment.

    Before I go forward let me note that I would like to see an effective Arms Trade Treaty completed and put into effect. There are some very nasty people around the world getting weapons all too easily. At the same time I would note that in many cases such weapons start out with perfectly legal sales, such as sales by governments to people they support. Sometimes they are weapons we have sold. Just how much good would such a treaty do?

    My point here is that even though I support such a treaty, the good it proposes is also hypothetical. Neither the good that is proposed, nor the evil that is feared have actually occurred. Both are hypothesized. The question, rather, is which of these hypotheses is correct, and what the balance is going to be.

    Contrary to Taylor’s assertion, we can’t simply accept the real good of the treaty and assume that the hypothetical evil is less important. Neither is yet real. So we must ask first whether the treaty is likely to do the good that its sponsors claim. Then we must ask whether the treaty will, in fact, have an impact on the 2nd Amendment rights of Americans, and indeed one might ask whether such impact would be an “evil” or a “good.” Americans might also ask whether such a treaty can be entered into legally, i.e. constitutionally.

    But the question is not which is hypothetical and which is not. The question is which is likely to happen, and which is not, and which effect is truly good, and which evil.

    By calling the good real (by implication) and the evil hypothetical (explicitly), Taylor privileges the position he favors (ratification of the treaty) without doing the hard work of demonstrating that it will, in fact, have the good results he claims.

    This type of argument is all too frequently used in debating bills and treaties. Proponents make the assumption that the bill will accomplish that which its name implies. Very frequently that is not the case. How can one oppose a bill to reduce crime, for example? Well, one can simply note that the crime reduction implied in the bill’s name is hypothetical, and ask whether that hypothesis is likely to be confirmed by reality. If all the bills passed accomplished precisely what their titles claimed, we’d likely live in a utopia. But they don’t and they won’t.

    I’m afraid I don’t see that Taylor has improved upon the traditional statement.

  • The Other Extreme on Explanation in Translation

    Yesterday I complained a bit about the explanation that The Voice provides to readers, informing them that since Bathsheba had just completed purification after her period, Uriah couldn’t be the father of the child.

    Today I was reading the same passage in the Holman Christian Standard Bible (HCSB), and there we get the opposite. In verse 4 it reads, “… purifying herself from her uncleannes.” This would be easy for a modern reader to miss. It’s implied from the context. Why would the writer mention this unless it had something to do with the story? But it requires a little bit of background knowledge. How many Christian readers know that ritual cleansing was required following a woman’s period?

    A more balanced translation is provided by the NET: “… purifying herself from her menstrual uncleanness.” In addition, as they usually do, the NET provides an informative note. I find such notes less obtrusive. One can read the story as is, or one can take the detour as one prefers.

     

  • Italics in The Voice – The Story of Bathseba

    Last week I mentioned that while I found the italics in The Voice more logical than I usually do in the formal equivalent translations that use the device (e.g. KJV, NKJV, NASB), I still found them annoying in the text. One goal of a dynamic equivalence translation is generally readability, and for me the italics tend to detract from that.

    Then there’s logic. Here are some examples from this coming Sunday’s lectionary passage from the Old Testament, 2 Samuel 11:1-15. This is not a complete list, just those that caught my eye. Numbers refer to verses

    1. most kings – I think readers could figure out that not every king in the world went to battle; it was the season.

    1. Joab out as general in charge of – Again, I think readers could figure this out. Was the addition necessary? Is it necessary to mark it as an addition? It’s pretty clearly implied. But the text also reads very sparsely, “David sent Joab and his servants with him and all Israel.” So why is “as general” in italics and “in charge of” not? Note also that “his” is interpreted (correctly) as “David’s”.

    1. whole army of Israel – again, a well justified addition, but I question whether the reader wouldn’t assume this easily, and whether, if one thinks the addition is justified, italics are necessary. It’s pretty clearly implied.

    2. Early one evening – In this case I think the Hebrew, l’eth ha;ereb, implies the “early” part pretty clearly, but saying “in the evening” in English seems to me to imply it as well.

    2. bathing on a roof below his – Here there’s clear justification for the italics, as this is definitely beyond simple dynamic equivalence translation. I’m not sure if all bathing would have taken place on a roof, but if that’s what the translators believe to be the case, these italics are justified by their rules.

    3.Uriah was one of David’s officers who had gone to war with the rest of David’s troops. – Here we get into a problem with the meaning of dynamic equivalence, which is intended to produce the same effect for the reader. It think letting the reader know where Uriah is weakens the story line. We’re only supposed to be reminded of where Uriah is as the story progresses. Thus my suggestion would be not to add this point. It will become clear later. If added, of course italics are justified by the rules expressed in the preface. (Note that in the course of 2 Samuel, the reader has not been introduced to Uriah at this point, so the storyteller is able to introduce the fact that not only had David committed adultery, but he’d committed it with the wife of one of his soldiers currently at war.)

    4-5. David couldn’t get her off his mind, so he sent messengers – What are the translators doing to the storyteller? The story line does not imply that David spent time thinking about it. It presents a “see, query, get” sequence that is very stark and does not portray David in a good light. The material should clearly be in italics, if added, but I don’t see that it contributes to the story.

    4-5 after the purifying bath after her period, her husband Uriah could not have been the father. – What is this? Bible exposition for dummies? Who missed this point?

    6. his general Joab – We have, presumably, forgotten who Joab is since the first verse.

    8. go to his own house to clean up, relax, and visit his wife. – Again, are we to assume he was going to his house to clean up and then ignore his wife? Surely this is implied by the text, but it makes for much poorer storytelling than does the original.

    That is enough sampling, I think. I see much less logic in the use of italics in this passage as well as in the way in which the translators choose to expand on the text. It’s possible that italics in the text doesn’t bother other people as much as it does me. I’m more than ordinarily aware of typography issues.

    But in this case we add an additional problem. Is the explanatory material making this story easier to read in English or is it just adding stuff? Any storyteller will be aware that adding implied information to a story does not necessarily improve it, and will often destroy it. If that added information was something that modern readers would not be likely to know, it might well be justified, according to the rules stated in the preface to The Voice.

    But I would say that modern readers are at least as likely as ancient ones to get the point that if Bathsheba was purifying herself after her period, that counted out conception prior to that event, and thus made David the father.

    I don’t want to become hypercritical of The Voice. Many people are reading it and benefitting. I don’t think anything here gives a wrong impression. It just takes a rather well done story and reduces its impact.

     

  • Italics and The Voice

    I’ve always regarded the use of italics to indicate words that “aren’t in the Greek” one of the sillier notions in translating. Considering there are no English words in the Greek text, one could put everything in italics. On the other hand, if an English word isn’t in some way justified by the Greek (or Hebrew) text, what is it doing in the translation at all?

    Reading an English text that uses italics, such as the KJV, NKJV, or NASB, can be a bit disconcerting when you know the same text in the original languages or are comparing the English to the source language. The translators just can’t help being inconsistent. Why is one auxiliary verb in English considered original, while another is not, for example?

    Enter The Voice. It’s a modern language Bible version, paraphrased in many ways with supporting and explanatory information included. Some items that are merely implied by the text are filled in. The text is formatted for easier reading and comprehension. But when one makes an ancient text clearer, one also tends to make more assumptions and to guide the reader to conclusions favored by the translator.

    To avoid some of the problems of such extensive paraphrasing (or going beyond material directly tied to a dynamic translation of the text, as the preface says), The Voice uses italics. I haven’t studied their use extensively, but overall it feels more consistent than the use of italics in various formal equivalence translations.

    And I still don’t like it. It just distracts. The justification is good, but I just don’t see it helping that much in practical terms. Perhaps after I’ve studied it further, I’ll feel different.

     

  • Psalm 89: When Eternal Doesn’t Last

    This week’s lectionary (RCL) texts for this week (Proper B11) form an interesting set, complete with the occasional weird cut-off for the scripture. For example, 2 Samuel 7:1-14a chops off the last part of Nathan’s message to David, the part about both the eternal covenant and the potential for God’s discipline. As I read this, I was thinking that they didn’t want to go into that “eternal covenant” territory.

    (Note that for this post I am reading the Old Testament as a Christian and I am not making use of Jewish interpretation. I use “Old Testament” when referring to the Hebrew scriptures as a part of the Christian Bible. I use “Hebrew scriptures” to refer to them as a literary collection or as the Jewish Bible.)

    But then we have Psalm 89:20-37. Here they have all the stuff about the eternal covenant, but they don’t go on to deal with the most important topic of the Psalm. Verse 38 (not part of the reading) begins:

    But you have spurned and rejected him;
    you are angry with your chosen king.
    You have repudiated your covenant with your servant;
    you have thrown his crown to the ground (38-39 NET).

    If you continue reading you get a scene that sounds very much like the Babylonian exile or thereafter, though there might be a couple of other dates that would fit in. In fact, the author of this Psalm is addressing God specifically because he doesn’t see the eternal covenant being fulfilled. Rather, at this point it is impossible for that covenant to be fulfilled as originally written because it called for a descendant of David to be on the throne “forever” and “forever” is not to be interrupted. Unfortunately “forever” has been interrupted.

    Now there are a number of Christian workarounds for this issue, and most readers likely will have one so readily to mind that they may never have noticed the problem in the first place. We get so used to an imposed or traditional interpretation that we actually hear the interpretation when we think we’re reading the text.

    Many of our common answers involve what I call in my essay Facing the Proof-Text Method “text trimming.” Using this method we trim a text down to size so we can claim either that we obey the command or that a promise or prediction has been fulfilled. In this case a common interpretation for this eternal covenant is that Jesus is of the lineage of David, and either is now sitting on David’s throne (conveniently, if figuratively, transported to heaven), or that at a future date Jesus will sit on David’s throne, thus fulfilling the terms of the covenant.

    But somebody future sitting on David’s throne again, or someone sitting on a throne somewhere else doesn’t fulfill the terms of the covenant as expressed here. In fact, these terms cannot and will not be fulfilled because they have already been overcome by events–specifically there was and is a time when no son of David has been sitting on the throne of Israel. To make this seem like a fulfillment, we must make the covenant itself say less than it actually says.

    If we transport ourselves briefly to a time when the door was still open, but this very issue was front and center, we may see some of the difficulties. I refer to the time when Jerusalem was under its final siege prior to the 586 BCE fall of Jerusalem. There we have some people saying that the city cannot fall because it is, after all, the location of God’s house, and God has promised that there will be a descendant of David on the throne.

    Jeremiah has to argue that there is no safety here. The city can fall. The king can be removed. The temple can be destroyed. He makes an extended argument to this effect in Jeremiah 18, which is sometimes quoted to support God’s sovereignty. “Yes, indeed! God can do whatever he wants!” But that is not the intent at all.

    There are times, Jeremiah, when I threaten to uproot, tear down, and destroy a nation or kingdom. But if that nation I threatened stops doing wrong, I will cancel the destruction I intended to do to it. And there are times when I promise to build up and establish a nation or kingdom. But if that nation does what displeases me and does not obey me, then I will cancel the good I promised to do to it (Jeremiah 18:7-10 NET).

    I recommend reading the entire chapter. The message here is not so much God’s sovereignty, though that is a fundamental assumption of the chapter. Rather, it is that God responds to our actions. Eternal blessings involve responsibilities. You can reverse the blessing, but the good news is that you can also reverse the punishment.

    The book of Jonah illustrates this point in narrative form. Jonah assumes the type of theology that Jeremiah states explicitly. Jonah is actually afraid that God will be merciful and won’t fulfill the promise, yet the story does not include any notion that Jonah preached a possibility of repentance. He hoped the Ninevites would not repent. He was annoyed when they weren’t destroyed. (Again, read the whole book! It’s only four chapters.)

    So what do we do with eternal promises that don’t happen precisely as predicted?

    First, Psalm 89 itself makes it clear that any variation here doesn’t involve abandoning Israel. Canonizing this as part of Christian scripture (or accepting it as canonical) indicates that we believe God is in action in Psalm 89, after the king has been removed. God is still active with his people Israel. We acknowledge through this act that Israel is not abandoned, even if we don’t always remember that we did.

    Second, we have another explicit statement of God’s approach in Jeremiah, this time in chapter 31:31-34. (Again, if you are not well acquainted with this passage, shame on you, go read it!) This is the famous passage used extensively in the book of Hebrews. I am reading it in Jeremiah’s context (to the best of my ability), however, and what I want to note is that the new covenant made is not with someone else, but with the house of Israel.

    There is an argument that God transfers his promises from Israel (Israel is said to have failed) to either the church or in some cases to another nation. There are those who think the United States has become God’s chosen people in some way. But a sudden transfer of the promises from Israel to the church is not a good option, because the new covenant is made with Israel.

    I base my interpretation here heavily on Jeremiah, even though I started with Psalm 89, because Jeremiah is the guy who had to deal with this issue when it was live. He had to proclaim his view of the covenant and the results of violating it in the face of torture and death, not sitting comfortably in front of his computer screen or in a church office somewhere.

    At the same time, if we as Christians are to understand this as God’s will, and ourselves as part of God’s will, we will have to see some way in which we become connected. Thus we “trim the text” in some ways, allowing modification, but it’s a modification that is, I think, well supported. Jeremiah maintains there is a new covenant. Even the old covenant called for Israel to bless the entire world.

    Paul makes his argument in Romans 9-11, which is again less concerned with God’s sovereignty, though that is again a fundamental assumption of the passage, but rather with how God deals with Israel. Like a parent, God doesn’t say, “I think I’ll put aside this one son in favor of someone else.” Rather, he looks to extend his blessing. Thus we gentiles are grafted in and receive some of God’s blessing. (It would be interesting to spend some time on Paul’s use of scripture in Romans 9-11. He does some interesting things!)

    It’s easy here to imagine that the Jews must somehow be blessed less. It’s hard for us to understand that God’s love and his blessings are not a limited commodity. When I became a step-parent I was careful never to suggest that my step-children should love their birth father less. I loved them as my own, but I knew the love was shared, yet I felt no loss. Love isn’t a limited commodity either. And we, limited as we are, can add more people into our circle of love. So can God.

    But even here we can make a mistake. We often see “chosen-ness” as being chosen to receive blessings, to be the best loved favorite. But God tends to choose people to do things. Jeremiah was chosen, just as Israel was chosen. It was a different time and place and different purpose (though not as different as it might seem), but being chosen wasn’t fun for Jeremiah. In fact, it was quite miserable.

    So the gentile church has no cause for boasting or for thinking of themselves as better than others. That’s not the point of being chosen by God. The point of being chosen by God is mission–whatever mission God has for you.

    Thus while I say that the promise cannot be fulfilled as written, because it wasn’t, yet God is faithful to act with consistency. A rebellious church might consider a serious reading of Jeremiah 18.

  • Shades of Outrage but Comments Closed

    I pointed earlier to a post by J. R. Daniel Kirk responding to the post at The Gospel Coalition by Jared Wilson. Wilson has now responded to some of the outrage generated by his original post. But generally his new post says we shouldn’t read his excerpt as saying what it actually says, but should understand it as saying something completely different. He then closes comments.

    I have two issues here:

    1) The minor one is that the effort to respond and then cut off public discussion. E-mail is an easy way to take on only those you want to, and not have your responses subject to public scrutiny.

    2) This is not a good characterization of complementarians that I know. I’m egalitarian. I’m quite willing to argue the issue. But I believe most of those complementarians of my acquaintance would not be any more comfortable with this language than I am. It’s important to recognize nuances of one’s position. It’s easy to make all of our arguments based on what some position might lead to or what might be associated with it.

    Wilson tries to maintain that his excerpt is saying nothing more than the ordinary complementarian position (fourth paragraph), and then wonders why people are so perverse as to fail to realize this, especially after the author has said that he really, really didn’t mean what we read his words to say. But unfortunately if language means anything, that summary is inaccurate (the fourth paragraph), and Douglas Wilson’s denial is disingenuous.

    Consider this paragraph, the second in the exerpt:

    When we quarrel with the way the world is, we find that the world has ways of getting back at us. In other words, however we try, the sexual act cannot be made into an egalitarian pleasuring party. A man penetrates, conquers, colonizes, plants. A woman receives, surrenders, accepts. This is of course offensive to all egalitarians, [note that this is not said to be offensive to all decent people, but to egalitarians] and so our culture has rebelled against the concept of authority and submission in marriage. This means that we have sought to suppress the concepts of authority and submission as they relate to the marriage bed [in other words, authority and submission is appropriate to the marriage bed, and is suppressed] (bolding and bracketed comments are mine).

    I vigorously reject this paragraph. Obviously I do so as an egalitarian. But I also reject it as a fundamental statement of complementarianism. Were I to accuse my many complementarian friends of holding such a position, they would justifiably accuse me of constructing a straw man.

    Wilson accuses detractors of decontextualizing this post. Is this excerpt insufficient context? Let him tell us what context would suffice to make this acceptable. The only context I could imagine that would justify the paragraph would be one that made it the statement of a villain in some sort of theological novel.

    (See also this post from Political Jesus regarding Douglas Wilson and a discussion of slavery.)