Douglas Wilson's Letter From America

You Don't Get to Keep the Brick 

Culture and Politics - Sex and Culture
Written by Douglas Wilson
Thursday, December 09, 2010

When we say that one doctrine is more important than another one, we are not making a quantitative assessment. It is not the case, for example, that justification by faith alone is beach ball and baptismal modes are a baseball. The doctrines of the Bible are interrelated, and mutually dependant. Many of the doctrines of the Bible have prerequisites. Some doctrines are foundation stones, while others are cornice pieces, and all are related to one another.

Conservative Reformed types are accustomed to saying that the foundational doctrines are the gospel doctrines -- Christ is the cornerstone, and everything else is built on that. This is very true, as far as it does. But others, more healthily suspicious, have seen that there is a kind of relativistic truth rot out there that does not deny any particular doctrine per se, but rather relativizes them all. Machen had this kind of insight -- in the dentistry of apologetics, he was a specialist in truth decay.

The old style heretics were perverse masons, and they would deny this stone or that one. They would remove this brick or that one. They would rearrange everything, but together with the orthodox they would affirm the idea of a building. The meta-heretics of nihilism, relativism, and homo-bishops will not be content until the universe itself is dissolved into a sea of confusion. The old heretics would arrange the bricks wrongly. The new heretics have invented a corrosive which destroys each individual brick, one by one.

So this brings us to the issues of sexual confusion and anarchy. When I argue that the issues surrounding sexual orthodoxy are the issues of our day, I am not saying that justification by faith is a baseball and ordination of PCA women as deacons is the beach ball. This is not a weird reversal of anything. Rather, this is the recognition that pomosexuality is the central selling point for postmodern relativism, and postmodern relativism is hunting bigger game than your particular shibbolethian truth. Do you really think that when they are done with the disintegration of all things, they are going to let Scott Clark keep his brick?

When God gave us the world, He gave us certain building blocks for the understanding -- heaven and earth, sea and dry land, sun and moon, and male and female. Let me try to imagine a place which had heaven and earth muddled, sea and dry land reversed, sun and moon backwards, and the female in combat and the male in drag, but where everybody was sound on Christ crucified and justification by faith alone. Can't picture that? Neither can I.