So not a few people have asked for clarification regarding whether I (Phil Johnson) am in complete agreement with the article Hohn Cho posted in this space yesterday. The answer is yes. It's not a totally unqualified yes, but it's a hearty yes to pretty much everything Hohn actually said.
My one qualification: I would say even more. And although Hohn contrasted his opinions with the position taken by Doug Wilson, I don't think Wilson is entirely wrong. (I am also pretty sure Hohn himself doesn't believe Wilson is entirely wrong.)
Let's suppose that Hohn's point of view and Wilson's published remarks represent two points on a spectrum of evangelical opinion, with the spectrum's center exactly midway between the two. The fact is, if you go much further from the center than either of these two men, you'll encounter lots of poisonous passions and dangerous pitfalls lying along that spectrum in both directions. That's not a mere guess; I'm not wildly extrapolating into the realm of pure conjecture. There are, in fact, some extremely noisy people with villainous tendencies at both ends of that spectrum.
On the one side, you have the undeniable fact that there's a disastrous epidemic of both spiritual and sexual abuse in churches across north America—and the guilty parties are usually men in leadership. Furthermore, that's not really a new phenomenon.
Adding to the scandal and compounding the abuse suffered by victims is a tendency among far too many church leaders to give cover to the perpetrators—sometimes with patently nefarious motives; sometimes because of a willful naïveté; and sometimes out of sheer ineptitude. Whatever the underlying motive, any attempt to sweep such abuses under the rug is a sinister transgression. It is a true and appalling injustice and a blight on the reputation of biblical Christianity.
And whatever instinct might cause someone to try to minimize, deny, or excuse such gross evil is inconsistent with authentic evangelical conviction.
