Some time ago, I posted a note on my invitation to a debate over Auburn Avenue issues. I did that here. And now, on The Puritan Board, there is an ongoing discussion of that invitation. The consensus appears to be that a debate with me would be a bad idea, with a few folks questioning the wisdom of this approach.
Just two comments. The first is that such a debate is not some crazy idea that I cooked up. “A bishop must . . . be able by sound doctrine both to exhort and to convince the gainsayers. For there are many unruly and vain talkers and deceivers, specially they of the circumcision: whose mouths must be stopped . . .” (Tit. 1:7-11). If my positions actually are what these gentlemen claim, then that means that I qualify as an unruly and vain talker, a deceiver, a Judaizer, and one whose mouth must be stopped. Okay, then. You can’t have it both ways. If I really am that kind of man, where in North America is a recognized champion of orthodoxy who will provide the valuable service of shutting me up? “Ah, but Wilson is so slippery,” say many on The Puritan Board. Okay. Isn’t that precisely why you have to shut such people up? Their slipperiness subverting whole households and all? “But he contradicts himself, morphing his positions! Hard to pin down!” That’s what they say, anyway, and apparently this is so obvious a failing in me that it should be child’s play to demonstrate in a debate. Right? I would wager that the first century contained false teachers who were just as much a slippery gus as I appear to be in the eyes of some. St. Paul told Titus to do something about them. St. Paul is telling the TRs, given their premises, to do something about it also. But if they won’t debate, then they have a responsibility to ramp down the rhetoric, and to knock off calling fellow Reformed ministers “unruly and vain talkers.”
The second point has to do with an ad hom that was offered on the board, explaining why I am desperate for this debate. Apparently, I have a career to save, networks to preserve, contracts to sandbag, a high profile reputation to keep from tanking, and so on. Like Mark Twain, who said that reports of his death were greatly exaggerated, I really have to say a similar thing here. Through no merit of ours, and by His grace alone, God continues to bless what we are connected with, and we are most grateful to Him for it. New St. Andrews is bursting at the seams, Canon Press has a stack of new books at the printers now, Credenda is flourishing, our churches here in Moscow have been continuing to steadily grow, and the CREC is prospering. So my “desperation” for a debate needs to be grounded in something else, and if it needs to be nefarious, perhaps someone should suggest that I am being blackmailed. But whatever they say, the real reason for a debate is that I would like to make it plain to the broader Reformed community that Machen’s warrior children don’t really need another civil war.
And in the meantime, if this altar is God’s, and the fire is going to fall, it doesn’t matter to me how many buckets of blog water you pour on it.