Jeff Hutchinson has posted something on my “dead rat” post here, and in the course of his post, he identifies himself as the dead rat I was referring to. “To him, I am the dead rat behind the fridge . . .” Jeff also turned the comments off, so I need to correct some things here.
In my post, I distinguished between hitting above the belt and below the belt, and had I been calling Jeff, or anyone else in this fracas a dead rat, that would certainly have been below the belt, and I would owe that person an abject apology. But that was not the point of the illustration. The dead rat is the sin of countenancing anonymous accusations for more than the two seconds they deserve, and the air freshener was the attempt to do this in a way that seems pious, thoughtful, or respectful. The joke turned on the incongruity of the two activities, just like the parallel example I used — “He’s a lying skunk, bless his heart.”
Secondly, Jeff makes a point of saying that he and maybe Bob Mattes were the ones I was thinking of. I was actually thinking of three — Jeff, Bob, and Gary Johnson have all written that the anonymous attacks on me are at least worthy of consideration. But they are not worthy of consideration, and not because they say I am a sinner. I am a sinner. They are not worth consideration because they violate the principle laid down for all lawful testimony in Deuteronomy 19.
Jeff wrote for the record, and so shall I. I don’t believe that any of our adversaries in this mess are rats, dead or otherwise. I would happy to buy any of them a beer, and would welcome them to the Lord’s Supper together with us if any of them visited us here on the Lord’s Day. And precisely because they are brothers, I am calling them on this sin and am going to continue to call the air freshener they propose using as nothing but air freshener trying to cover up a stench.
For example, in this post, Jeff said this:
“In retrospect, it would have been wise for me to have run my proposed post by a few trusted folks first. They would have most likely helped me with the ‘temperature’ of my post. I do apologize for having unnecessarily inflamed an already tense situation, having gone ahead with a post unedited by anyone else, and I do ask everyone’s forgiveness. Please forgive me.”
I would be more than willing to forgive Jeff for the temperature of his post, but there was nothing sinful or wrong about the temperature of his post. The problem was with what he did, not the heat with which he did it. If the action itself were lawful, his temperature was just fine. But the action was not lawful. See Deuteronomy 19. Again. Jeff’s concern about his temperature amounts to a concern that he forgot to say “bless his heart.”
He notes that he issued appropriate warnings, showing that he was not telling everyone to believe whatever they read in those anonymous sites. Doesn’t that make it fine? NO. I said he treated them as credible, not because he accepted everything they said, but rather that he thought they were worth reading in this conflict as long as the reading was done carefully — “with appropriate warnings, for those who might choose to read the articles and documents,” which he certainly wanted to be read “with godly discernment.” Jeff says “the facts are not as [Wilson] represents them.” Jeff defends himself by saying that he did not “cite anonymous attack blogs as credible sources.
But here is the point I am making. Credible means believable, not necessarily believed. A credible report is one that some might believe while others don’t. To pass something on as worthy of consideration (however you yourself come down on it after considering it), is to treat it as credible in principle.
But godly discernment reads an anonymous attack on someone’s Christian character just long enough to discover that it is anonymous, and then prints it off and immediately lines the parrot’s cage with it, telling everyone he knows to do the same. Yes, Jeff was urging godly discernment. But he wasn’t practicing it, because godly discernment assigns zero worth to anonymous testimony. What is so hard to comprehend in this?
This is a principle that Jeff probably understands quite well, and I think that he could even argue the point I am making, using Bible verses and everything, provided the tables were turned. Suppose there were an anonymous web site out there that accused Jeff of child molestation (just as some of the stuff he linked to accused me of horrendous stuff). And suppose that I have an FV controversy going with Jeff, and anything that puts a few dents in his reputation in perilous times like these can be considered by me as a defense of the gospel. I am not saying I believe the reports, and I might even go so far as to say that I probably don’t. But suppose I put a link to the slanderous web site on my site anyway, and urged everybody to read the anonymous slander “with godly discernment.” What’s wrong with this, besides everything?
I am not saying this as an FV partisan. As I have mentioned before, the Bayly brothers are critics of the FV, and they get this principle. And to return the favor, I think R.C. Sproul stumbled badly in his speech at General Assembly, and confused the issues enormously for a lot of people. He is a great man, and I was embarrassed for him. But nevertheless, he came out “on the other side,” so is that somehow a signal for me to go look up all the anonymous and scurrilous attacks that were attacking him last year, put them up on my web site, and tell people to read them “with discernment”? God forbid. Those sites, aimed at someone now on the “other side” of this thing, are still every bit as reprehensible as the sites directed at the ministries here. All that matters to me on this point is that men who are embarrassed of the name Christ gave them at their baptisms who are willing to besmirch the names of others (who are not ashamed of their names) on the basis of supposd “insider knowledge” are not going to get any consideration from me under any circumstances. If there were a little emotikon available, showing a character spitting on the ground, I would put it here. I wouldn’t do to John Robbins’ dog what some people are willing to do to advance the purity of the gospel.
Let us conclude with an observation or two about investigative reporting. Jeff refers to “a pattern that I believe to have been long established by the investigative reporting of journalists from WORLD Magazine, Presbyterian and Reformed News, and even the New York Times”
The New York Times did have a reporter out here, and what they did could honestly be called reporting. Molly Worthen for the Times did what we begged World magazine to do, but which they declined to do. The NYT piece was a balanced bit of reporting, one that included both kudos and criticism, but the upshot of the article was (we thought) very positive for us. Judging by the people who got angry about it, it most certainly was. And when Molly was out here, she talked to everybody in detail, friends and foes alike (as World should have done), and the result was an article we were pretty happy with. But the World piece was investigative reporting in the same way that one of my periodic flights to the east coast could be described as me going over Nebraska “with a fine tooth comb.” As for Presbyterian and Reformed News, let’s not get me started on that — not if we are trying to keep my satiric proclivities in check.
In short, a conservative Christian church in a small university town has been in one of the hotter parts of the nation’s culture wars, for all the reasons that you can imagine. Our opponents have included the standard issue pro-aborts, lesbians, hard leftists, and so on — but here comes the wrinkle. They are joined by some professing evangelicals, the local ones twisted by bitterness, the non-local ones blinded by . . . I don’t know. You tell me what’s blinding them. When this clash between conservative believers finally got noticed at the national level, did we get investigative reporting and a fair shake from fellow believers? Nope. We did get an actual reporter, and a fair shake, from The New York Times. Go figure that one out.