My one question for Doug Wilson

Last updated on: July 17, 2014 at 2:34 pm by Morgan Guyton

My one question for Doug Wilson 2014-07-17T14:34:00-05:00 Morgan Guyton

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The Christian blogosphere has been on fire after a recent blog post by Jared Wilson critiquing the rape porn of 50 Shades of Grey from a Calvinist complementarian perspective. Jared Wilson quotes several paragraphs from a book by Doug Wilson (no relation) that seem to suggest that rape happens because humanity has rebelled against the hierarchical order of male dominance and female submission that God wove into the fabric of nature, which is the boldest claim I have ever heard a complemetarian make aloud.

Here are the paragraphs from Wilson’s book exactly as they were reproduced:

A final aspect of rape that should be briefly mentioned is perhaps closer to home. 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.

I could say a lot about this, but I don’t have the energy to muster more than a single question. If, as Wilson writes, it is the nature of a man to “penetrate, conquer, colonize, plant” and it is the nature of a woman to “receive, surrender, accept,” then was Jesus being a woman on the cross?

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