Scott Clark Needs to be Narrower

A friend of mine just directed me to one of Doug Wilson’s latest posts in which he offers some thoughts on N.T. Wright and his lecture at ETS. Contra those who consider Wright a Catholic in Anglican clothing, Wilson insists that “Wright's blunders are genuinely Protestant blunders. But blunders they are, and we really need to address them.” One of these blunders, Wilson says, is his wrongly understanding human “righteousness” in terms of one being a member of God’s covenant community, thus removing from the term any moral connotations. So far, so good.

What struck me about Wilson’s post, though, was his somewhat random choice to mock Scott Clark in the middle of it. He writes:

[I]n order to address [Wright’s errors] effectively, someone needs to take the trueblue confessional screechers aside, and tell them to stop being the TSA of the Reformed world…. So, in a postmodern world, teeming with egalitarian, evolutionary, academic, and relativistic C4, Scott Clark is busy confiscating knitting needles and bottles of contact solution containing more than three ounces.

After this rant, Wilson promptly returns to his critique of Wright.

Obviously Wilson feels that his own disagreements with Wright are weighty and substantial, while Clark’s disagreements with Wright are trivial and annoying. What is it that accounts for this seeming double standard? I mean, if you ask Clark about the reasons for his disagreements with Wright, he will say that they focus on Wright’s failure to distinguish properly between faith and faithfulness, gospel and law, and grace and works. Those issues don’t sound trivial to me, and they certainly don’t sound like the spiritual equivalent of the TSA taking away an old lady’s tube of denture cream.

But when you stop and think about it, it becomes immediately clear that the errors for which Clark faults Wright are the very same errors for which he faults Wilson. Wilson’s mocking dismissal of Clark’s disagreements with the New Perspective, therefore, can seemingly be explained by the fact that they also apply to the Federal Vision.

It would appear, then, that the reason Wilson wants people like Clark banned from the New Perspective discussion is not really because of the overly-scrupulous nature of his attacks, but because those attacks aren’t narrow enough to just zero in on Durham, but they also set their sights upon Moscow, Idaho. In a word, Wilson’s problem isn’t that Clark is too nitpicky, it’s that he’s not nitpicky enough, for if he would agree to pinpoint only those errors of Wright’s that Wilson agrees are erroneous, then all would be well and Clark would welcomed back into the discussion. But since his attacks on Wright are broader than what Wilson is comfortable with, he is branded a mere irritant and dismissed with a wave of the hand.

So there you have it: the real problem with Scott Clark is that he's just not narrow enough. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is what I call irony.