Links on the internet are kind of like footnotes. If you're not careful, you can spend hours chasing down one source after another.
So it was when I followed a link here to here to here to here and here.
Thankfully, someone kept the passage that was causing all the ruckus available for folks to read.
This passage is from a book by someone named Douglas Wilson, entitled Fidelity: What it Means to be a One-Woman Man. Now, if you've read the passage and are wondering, "Wow," don't feel alone.
Rather than get into any criticism of the words on display above, I really only have a couple questions, that I think deserve an answer. First, what the hell is a complementarian? That isn't even a word, for crying out loud! In the last post linked above, Ms. Held-Evans insists she made a distinction between the alleged "complementarians" and what she calls "hard patriarchalists" (again, a non-word). Reading this, I have to wonder what the latter group teach.
So it was when I followed a link here to here to here to here and here.
Thankfully, someone kept the passage that was causing all the ruckus available for folks to read.
Because we have forgotten the biblical concepts of true authority and submission, or more accurately, have rebelled against them, we have created a climate in which caricatures of authority and submission intrude upon our lives with violence.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, 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.But we cannot make gravity disappear just because we dislike it, and in the same way we find that our banished authority and submission comes back to us in pathological forms. This is what lies behind sexual “bondage and submission games,” along with very common rape fantasies. Men dream of being rapists, and women find themselves wistfully reading novels in which someone ravishes the “soon to be made willing” heroine. Those who deny they have any need for water at all will soon find themselves lusting after polluted water, but water nonetheless.True authority and true submission are therefore an erotic necessity. When authority is honored according to the word of God it serves and protects — and gives enormous pleasure. When it is denied, the result is not “no authority,” but an authority which devours. (italics added by Rachel Held-Evans)
This passage is from a book by someone named Douglas Wilson, entitled Fidelity: What it Means to be a One-Woman Man. Now, if you've read the passage and are wondering, "Wow," don't feel alone.
Rather than get into any criticism of the words on display above, I really only have a couple questions, that I think deserve an answer. First, what the hell is a complementarian? That isn't even a word, for crying out loud! In the last post linked above, Ms. Held-Evans insists she made a distinction between the alleged "complementarians" and what she calls "hard patriarchalists" (again, a non-word). Reading this, I have to wonder what the latter group teach.
Do these various groups just make shit up, slap a label on it, and say, "Here, this is what the Bible teaches?" Honest to God, I have no idea what any of these labels mean, what the quote excerpted above has to do with the Bible or the Christian religion or . . . human life outside rape fantasies.
No wonder people are leaving the Christian churches in droves. My God, if my denomination taught something like this, you can bet I'd be Episcopalian before the sun set.
I realize Ms. Held-Evans is trying to extend every courtesy and benefit of the doubt to Mr. Wilson here. That's very thoughtful and generous. Thing is, this is little more than some guy's rape fantasy; "Close your eyes and think of England," isn't an ethic. This is a freaking horror show.
