In this happy little imbroglio of ours, I am pleased to say that this was the very first trigger alert. (HT: Michael Terry). These are the first lines of Fidelity.
But I have noticed two things about this sort of qualification. The first is liberated outrage if I suggest that you should talk to women in a more qualified and careful way than you might otherwise, and then, the second is when feminists actually encounter such unqualified talk and develop an old school case of the vapors. You know the gig — piping but no dancing, and mourning with no lamenting.
Another entry to the fray can be found over at her.meneutics. Feminists generally like to enter the market place of ideas, and then look around for the swooning couches. This post, by comparison at least, while icked out by . . . well, by me, nevertheless notices that it was a blog post, for pity’s sake. So Caryn Rivadeneira did okay in a relatively sane response, and not okay in not noticing that she was responding sanely to an insane set of slanders.
I also posted a couple of quotes from other sources — one from Robert Farrar Capon and another from C.S. Lewis, and the initial returns indicate that a/ they took the bait, and b/ their reading comprehension skills are as high as ever. I posted Capon to illustrate the fact that any number of things can be quoted in such a way as to look bad, and I used a quote from a man with a lot of street cred in the Chnristian hipster crowd. What to do? What to do? Pretend that Wilson said it, and your indignation against this sort of troglodyte fundamentalism can continue on unimpeded.
One twitterer said that she feels like @douglaswils is “just trolling us now.” Oh, no, I am not trolling anybody. I am just answering them. Of course, I could see how feminists might feel trolled if they are answered. There’s something to be said for that theory. Worth looking into.
I actually feel extraordinarily blessed in this. I didn’t pick the terrain for this particular conflict, but if I had picked it, it would have been right here, right in this place. Looking at the accusations that are starting to pile up, I feel like I am being accused of not having ten toes, or of insisting that men must always be clean-shaven. I have a track record spanning over twenty years of teaching on marriage, sex, and family, and to see these people huff around like I have never heard of 1 Cor. 7:4 is just way cool. Heh. Throw me in that briar patch. I could fight on this terrain for the next six months using nothing but published quotes from the early nineties on.
“We need to remember everything else that St. Paul has siad in this passage about honor, love, sacrifice, tenderness and closeness. The mere fact of sexual union alone, together with the ratification of that covenant commitment at the county courthouse, will get you nothing but an ignored and despised ‘great mystery.’ What good is it to be in possession of a great mystery that you trample on” (For a Glory and a Covering, p. 147)
This will dawn on somebody pretty soon, and so they will call for the healing to begin. But before we let that happen, I do think that Rachel Held Evans should take down those posts of hers (but only if Scot McKnight asks her to) in which she allows for the possibililty that Jared Wilson and I condone sexual violence (even though she acknowledged it was “highly unlikely”). I myself think it highly unlikely that RHE has not answered these posts of mine because she has been too busy knocking off gas stations. I mean, what are the odds?