Doug Wilson’s view on Christian marriage is blasphemous

Last week, I read an article in The Wall Street Journal that profiled Douglas Wilson, pastor of Christ Church in Moscow, Idaho, who is described in Wikipedia as a “public proponent of postmillennialism, Christian nationalism, covenant theology and biblical patriarchy.”

The article in question, “Douglas Wilson Wants the U.S. to be a Christian Republic. MAGA is Listening,” proclaims, “The incendiary pastor calls for taking away women’s right to vote and barring non-Christians from holding office.”

I found many things in the article with which I disagree profoundly with Rev. Wilson. However, one statement I found so appalling and offensive that I felt compelled to take up my pen to refute it.

In the midst of describing Wilson’s views on women’s subservient roles to men, the article quotes from Wilson’s book Fidelity, where he wrote that:

“The sexual act cannot be made into an egalitarian pleasuring party: A man penetrates, conquers, colonizes, plants. A woman receives, surrenders, accepts.”

This description of Holy Matrimony, especially from a minister of the Gospel, is so at odds with God’s revealed design for marriage that it can only be adequately described as blasphemous, defined as “sacrilegious, against God on sacred things, profane.”

What does Holy Scripture tell us about Holy Matrimony? In Genesis, God tells us it was not good for man to be alone—even before the Fall and the entry of the sin nature into the human heart and humankind’s DNA. God created marriage to make of the two people, husband and wife, one flesh. In the sexual union, they become one flesh in a way that can never be completely uncoupled.

The Apostle Paul, writing to the Corinthian Christians in the first century A.D., employed this tremendous spiritual truth to warn them against sexual immorality, explaining that sexual union with another person involves becoming “one” with that other person and vice versa whether you desire it or not or even whether you are aware of it or not. (I Cor. 6:18-20)

God created the sexual union as an act of giving of oneself to one’s partner, not conquest or plunder. Before the Fall, Adam and Eve, after consummating the first marriage, were both naked, the man and his wife, “and were not ashamed.” (Gen. 2:25)

In the letter to the Ephesian Christians, the Apostle Paul commanded that husbands love their wives:

“Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ also loved the church, and gave himself for it.” Eph. 5:25

The word for love is the word agape, which is the Greek word for the highest form of love, a self-sacrificial, redemptive, “in spite of” kind of love that loves even in the face of hostility and rebellion.

Fortunately, we have a divine essay on this Holy Spirit-generated kind of love in Paul’s first letter to the Corinthian church. The Apostle informs us that agape love is kind, non-envious, and is not arrogant (“is not puffed up.” I Cor. 13:4). Agape is not selfish (“seeketh not her own”), and is patient (“not easily provoked”), and is faithful (“never faileth”) (I Cor. 13:8-13).

These biblical pictures of God’s definition of, and intent for, marriage are utterly at odds with Rev. Wilson’s blasphemous parody.

A Christian husband is going to give himself in service of his wife just as Christ gave Himself for the church. The wife responds to that love with similar love for him, responding as a loved and cherished partner, not someone “conquered” or “colonized.”

Perhaps part of the wedding vow from an early English wedding ceremony put it best. The bride and groom, as part of their vows, said each to the other, “with my body I thee worship!”