Reforming Marriage Book

Meh. I really don't understand the rave reviews. It's okay. It's not as horrible as the stuff that comes out of CBMW, but he doesn't go far enough with the notion of Covenant marriage, imo.

I'm willing to accept and assert the notion of "male headship," but most of the authors that insist upon the idea are stuck in an earlier decade. Wilson is stuck in an earlier century. He makes the man/husband/father the center of the home, not Christ, and as a result he offers a very egocentric ethic on marriage. He offers some *new* corrections into the conversation (like the unreasonable expectation of consistently mind-blowing sex in evangelical marriages), but they are merely a spice not a whole meal.

I'll give Wilson this too. He is better than the CBMW stuff about the whole "final decision-maker" status that they give to men/husbands/fathers. That's pure foolishness -- something that the CBMWs think is natural and normal, but it's actually very 20th century. Instead, Wilson talks about the husband's responsibility for all commitments -- like a captain on a ship, for instance.

I understand that he's trying to recreate 16th-century patriarchy. I understand that he's trying to foil the Baptistic bent that is stuck in the throat of contemporary Reformed believers. That's fine. But Doug, honey -- if that's what you want to do, don't make feminism your foil. That makes you sounds simply reactionary and merely political.