Back after a long, difficult period away from blogging with this: in apparently trying to condemn the tawdry book ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’, the Gospel Coalition allows a blog post that uses language which seems to endorse rape. The justifications in the comments by author Jared Wilson that the language of a man ‘conquering’ his wife in the sexual act are to be taken metaphorically are beyond belief. What kind of metaphor is that? How does it soften the language? Not one bit. He accuses critics of misunderstanding the post – all this when it later appears he thought E L James, the author of the murky trilogy, was a man. I don’t think he’s in any position to tell others they have misunderstood. Jared Wilson has posted a clarification, but he is still so tied to male authority and female submission that he doesn’t see the point about the grim metaphor of conquest, however much he might protest that Douglas Wilson doesn’t stand for that.
As for repeatedly quoting 1 Corinthians 7:1-5 and the Song of Songs in favour of male authority and female submission, that requires taking a pair of scissors to both texts. The former clearly says that both parties in a marriage must realise their bodies belong to their spouse, not to themselves. And in the Song of Songs the Shulammite woman clearly takes the initiative in an erotic encounter.
I’m left with this question: does the Gospel Coalition have any Gospel for women? I think the answer is ‘no’.
(See also Scot McKnight, Rod the Rogue Demon Hunter, Rachel Held Evans and others.)
Big Circumstance 
Dave, thank you for your thoughts and for linking to my post; I appreciate it.
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When I first read this post my instinctive reaction was not to react. I thought to do so would give some validity to Wilson’s original blog post and later ‘clarification’. But silence isn’t the answer.
Men in the church who view women as objects of male authority and submission diminish only themselves. For women to be treated in this way is effectively saying to them “The most valuable possession that you have, your life’s narrative, is not worth considering or writing about in any serious way.”
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