Blowing Bubbles From the Bottom
The short form is that Rosaria Champagne Butterfield — whose book was fantastic, by the way — was invited to speak at Wheaton College. This, all by itself, was sufficient to set off a small protest festival of marginalization and hurt.
I would draw your attention to the last several paragraphs, where the crucial task of telling the gospel story is transformed into a bizarre form of narratival masturbation. The central human predicament, what Luther called incurvatus in se, is transformed into a narcissistic virtue, resulting in a self-righteous circle jerk, only without the sex.
As for the response of Wheaton as an institution, I believe that someone should tell the authorities there that blowing bubbles from the bottom of the pool is not the same thing as breathing.
And . . .
I posted something here about a small dust-up at Wheaton College over the appearance of Rosaria Champagne Butterfield there. My post was blunt, as it needed to be, and at least a couple of additional things need to observed after the fact.
The concern of Scripture is holiness, not propriety. Chesterton teaches us that virtue and respectability are not the same thing. They are not synonyms, sorry. In our time, basic Christian morality is being surrendered by the effete evangelical elites, and it is being surrendered for the sake of their own very precious (to them) respectability. Thus, when someone identifies what they are doing in blunt terms that cannot be denied or evaded, the only standard they can appeal to in an attempt to make you back off is the appeal to respectability. I am afraid, however, that I don’t care. I distinguish here, incidentally, the kind of respectable integrity that Paul says all elders ought to have (1 Tim. 3:7
), and the kind of respectability that makes men run after the world’s honors with their tongues hanging out (John 5:44).Second, the issue of the student protest there, and the response to it, simply identifies that the immune system of evangelicalism is just flat busted. The issue isn’t the presence of the sin, or the reality of such temptations, or the fact that this kind of thing shows up everywhere. Of course. Those are pastoral givens. The problem is the anemic response, the weak sister answers, the galling timidity. That is the problem.
But it is not the case that discipline is gone. No, remember the inescapable concept — not whether, but which. Every human society disciplines, of necessity. The issue is what gets disciplined, and what gets invited to further dialog parties. Here’s a thought experiment for you . . . or any conservative Wheaton students with a taste for high-jinks might actually want to try it. They could organize a protest of their own — sponsored by the Wheaton Alliance for Normal Sexual Pleasure, Biblically Defined — and see how far they get. I will go so far as to hazard the guess that invitations to warm dialog will not enter into it. They will be seen as the troublemakers, which is quite right. They would be — disruptors of flaccid respectability.
And about time.
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