Three weeks ago, after the Gospel Coalition’s Keller Center for Cultural Apologetics published an article about the similarities between sexual intercourse and the church’s union with Christ, which was an excerpt from Pastor Joshua Ryan Butler’s brand new book, both he and TGC received unprecedented pushback, resulting in TGC retracting the article and seeing Butler replaced from his role at The Keller Institute.
These rebuffs include fair-minded critiques unimpressed with these crude comparisons, endorsers of the book who admit they never read it in the first place and were forced to retract, and the usual cadre of cry-foul ChristianHarpies seeking to use these questionable texts as a way to score points against complementarianism while bolstering their own bizarre notions of gender roles.
In many ways, the book was used as fodder by hysterical women and effeminate nuancebros who make a habit of getting outraged and upset by the lack of nuance in the Christian community, taking the book to extremes that it was never intended to go and then crying foul as an excuse to virtue-twerk their tears all over social media.
Appearing on Theology in the Raw with Preston Sprinkle to review some of these charges, when asked who he is influenced by in his writing, Butler lists off several Roman Catholic heretics and mystics as his source of inspiration:
I see myself kind of writing in the stream of Pope John Paul II and Christopher West, kind of that Theology of the Body stream. There’s like Teresa of Ávila, Bernard of Clairvaux, the Mystical Union Tradition, uh Saint Augustine and John Chrysostom, just one there’s a wide historic stream here … I’m attempting to do a dumbed down Protestant version of Theology of the Body.
As far as anything he’d change, he says he regrets that excerpt being used isolated from the rest of the book and that some of the pastoral nuance was lost in the editing process.
“Is there anything I’d change? And I would say yeah, I think two big mistakes that I made. One is I was unwise to allow that excerpt to be used in a short article, 800 word format, whatever it was, right? Like I think in the surrounding context of in the book, you know, I’ve directly addressed sexual abuse shortly before and shortly after. Some of the loaded language like the temple imagery had endnotes that kind of pointed (unintelligible) we’ll deal with that later in the book. There’s a whole backstory behind an excerpt getting, you know, like 100 emails that week and me not paying close enough attention that I should have, but I need to own it at the end of the day. I made a mistake in judgment in allowing that excerpt to be used.
I think the second mistake I made is in revisions. I mean, you’re revising a book and the original was around 100,000 words; we had to cut it down to around 70,000 and so you’re down like like 25% of the book or whatever, and realizing I lost some important pastoral nuance in a few places in that excerpt. Where kind of finding me and my language was interpreted in a few places actually the opposite of what I meant, you know? And I could have been clear. I thought ‘man, they’ll never think I’m saying that, you know? I don’t know if this is necessary.’ And I was wrong.
He lastly notes that he ran his book through the gamut of intersectional identities, women of color, gay people, and divorced people, and hired a woman editor to validate the book.
So big picture, my response for my heart has been extremely heavy the last few weeks, particularly where my lack of nuance evoked pain in some people’s stories. And for those listening, if that’s you, I can only ask for your understanding and grace.
And I’m working with the publisher right now on some clarifications that I can make for the next printing and I can make public before the release, just to be a little clearer in some areas that would be helpful. We, the publisher and I, we have valued sensitivity in this process. We ran the content through a wide variety of perspectives; single people, divorce people, women and people of color, same-sex attracted people, people with backgrounds of sexual abuse, all gave really valuable input on the manuscript.
And when all that was done, the publisher actually, together we hired an outside professional female editor who specialized with sensitivity reviews too, and she had a personal story uniquely suited to give sensitive input on the book. And she loved the book, big picture, and we took all her recommendations and tweaks. So just to say, man, this is something that we valued from the beginning and want to continue to press into in light of kind of the controversy and all.
