You can tell a lot about people's sympathies by their alliances. Notice Scot McKnight siding with Jonathan Merritt:
Each has an unspoken agenda that coincides at this point.
Jonathan Merritt is an outed "gay Christian" propagandist. McKnight is an Arminian feminist. Somehow I don't think that's coincidental to their criticisms.
Because TGC participates in the culture wars, defending gender binaries and heteronormativity, Merritt views TGC as an obstacle to his social agenda.
McKnight's theology predisposes him to be hostile to a complementarian, Calvinistic site like TGC. That, in turn, motivates him to side with Merritt's attack on TGC.
McKnight becomes a tool of Merritt. Is he simply unaware of Merritt's social agenda? Or do his own priorities line up with Merritt's at this juncture?
I'd add that that Twitter is not a serious medium for substantive debate.
This doesn't mean TGC, or individual contributors thereof, should be above criticism, by any means. But a social vandal like Merritt is the wrong vehicle.
Mr. Merritt, in his article on TGC, mentions a 4 year old controversy that's gotten lots of air play since...the Doug Wilson/Jared Wilson brouhaha, in which Doug Wilson wrote, "the sexual act cannot be made into an egalitarian pleasuring party. A man penetrates, conquers, colonizes, plants. A woman receives, surrenders, accepts." Jared Wilson posted this quote from Doug on Jared's blog, and Rachel Held Evans charged them with being insensitive to rape victims, or even subtly condoning sexual violence through imprecise, ill-chosen words.
ReplyDeleteOf course, what he declines to say clearly is that Jared Wilson took Ms. Evans' criticism to heart, and removed his blog post of his own accord. Whether Evans was blocked or not, her criticism did get through. Jared Wilson took it down and apologized for those he had hurt. Doug Wilson responded rather differently...
Whether you agree with Jared Wilson's apology or not, he did respond to criticism. He did take it to heart. He behaved the opposite of what one would expect from a "tribalist."
Keep in mind that this was before Evans released her book on biblical womanhood, and before she publicly embraced same sex mirage and joined the Episcopal Church. She was still taken semi-seriously as an evangelical blogger, though, in hindsight, her drift appears more clear.
If anyone is behaving like a "tribalist" in his unfair retelling of a controversy to make the other side look bad, it is Merritt. What does he stand to gain by his intellectual dishonesty?