The Don of Vanity Publishing in Moscow, Doug Wilson, has a magazine — sorry, a Trinitarian commentary on philosophy and culture — called Credenda/Agenda. It’s really deep — classicist, Reformed, patriarchal, and printed on kinda shiny paper.
It’s deep, in the sense that it sometimes uses Latin.
Deep, in the sense that it discusses obscure topics and tomes you’ve likely never heard of, for which, C/A will remind you, you are to feel ineffably stupid and silly.
Deep, because most readers don’t understand why they read and then feel they have to accept things like the notorious “studly guy with battery cables attached to his nipples” cover from a few years ago, and deeper still when, if they are Christians, the gorge rises in their throats when they read noxious verbiage like this, from the Dec. 19, 2010, issue:
http://www.credenda.org/index.php/Theology/a-brief-defense-of-gay-jokes.html
Most of the time, I’m happy to express why I think Wilson is a minister in the same way that I’m tall, tanned, slim, and blonde — which is to say, not at all. This time, though, I think it’s probably more than enough to just read the verbal vomit he spewed just two years ago, for which he doesn’t apologize and, barring an actual encounter with the Holy Spirit of God, never will.
This is what hundreds of people in my town call pastoral wisdom from a man they call pastor. Many — probably most — of them truly know Jesus as Lord and Savior. It’s becoming more and more clear, at least to me, that the man they follow is not only NOT a pastor in any Biblical, Spirit-filled sense of the word, but exhibits the kind of fruit that makes you think, and think with profound sobriety, that he may very well not even know the Savior of Whom he speaks — and Who he believes is pleased when he counsels the purveyance of the Christian virtue of telling gay jokes.
Yeah. Based on his conduct — the fruit that Scripture tells us is how we are to determine a person’s character and depth of faith — I’m praying that Pastor Doug Wilson, this Christmas, actually explores whether or not he is at all acquainted with the Emanuel. I pray he is.
And then I beg God to have him start acting like it.