In "Christians Shouldn't Invoke 'the Longhouse,'" Steven Wedgeworth argues that Christians should give up "the Longhouse" for three reasons: the phrase belongs to Bronze Age Pervert, its family tree runs through Nietzsche and feminist anthropology, and it always demeans women. His genealogy is wrong at every point. The charge that a people's men have handed their government over to the habits of women was a Reformation commonplace three centuries before Nietzsche, and the Reformers aimed it at men. Wedgeworth has mistaken a sixteenth-century Protestant argument for a modern pagan one, and he wants Christians to surrender it because the wrong people picked it up.
Start with the genealogy, since the rest of his case depends on it. Wedgeworth traces the Longhouse through Margaret Mead (he spells her "Meade") and Marija Gimbutas to Nietzsche. He never mentions John Knox, whose First Blast of the Trumpet (1558) made the same diagnosis and reached for Aristotle to support it. Knox reports Aristotle's verdict on the Spartans, "who other wayes amongest the Grecians were moste excellent": their regiment "was not worthie to be reputed nor accompted amongest the nombre of common welthes, that were well gouerned, because the magistrates, and rulers of the same were to muche geuen to please and obey their wyues."1 That is the Den Mother, in one of the founding texts of Reformed resistance theory. Knox even had the meme's mythology. England and Scotland, he wrote, had "dronken also the enchantment and venom of Circes,"2 the witch who turned Odysseus's men into swine. What Wedgeworth calls a reversal of critical theory is nearly three hundred years older than Marx. Its sources are Aristotle, Chrysostom and the Scots Reformation, not Neolithic archaeology.
Wedgeworth's moral claim is that the image is "invariably disparaging towards women." In the tradition's version it was a rebuke of men. Knox's anger falls on the man who "doth not onlie to his own shame, stoupe vnder the obedience of women, but also in despit of God and of his apointed ordre, reioyseth, and mainteineth that monstruouse authoritie."2 When Knox explains why God raised up Deborah, he says God did it partly "to confound and ashame all man of that age, because they had for the moste part declined frome his true obedience."3 The shame lands on the men. Knox also closes the door on the vice Wedgeworth fears. God "wolde not that man for appetit of any vaine glorie shuld desire preeminence aboue woman."4 Headship in Knox exists for the good of the body, not for male pride. That is the sense in which a Christian can speak of the Longhouse. The word names men's failure to rule, not women's existence. Wedgeworth's objection lands on Bronze Age Pervert. It does not touch Knox, and he gives no reason a Christian cannot say what Knox said.
Wedgeworth's practical conclusion is that the ACNA's trouble comes from lone leaders defying norms, and that the cure is canons, committees and synods. Here he has chosen the wrong side of the Reformation. Zwingli described his own duty toward a ruler who turns tyrant: "I correct his recklessness and inveigh against it in season and out of season."5 When Zwingli sent his confession to Charles V, he submitted it "not to one man only, nor to a few merely, but to the whole Church of God, as far as it speaks by the command and inspiration of the Word and Spirit of God."6 It was his Roman opponent, Johann Eck, who answered by defending "the church representative." Not the whole people, Eck argued, but "the princes, the heads, and the ancients, who represented all Israel."7 An ecclesiology that looks first to the representative body and its procedures is Eck's instinct, not Zwingli's. Knox's Scots Confession said of general councils that "as they were men, so have some of them manifestly erred, and that in matters of great weight and importance."8 The Congregational fathers read Acts 15 more closely still. The churches "borrowed indeed light" from the synod at Jerusalem, John Cotton wrote, "but they did not borrow from them any church-liberty at all."9 The Reformers did not expect procedure to restrain the strong. They expected the Word to do it, spoken by men willing to stand against councils. Wedgeworth's confidence that his synods do not have too much power is not a Protestant reflex.
Wedgeworth's one Reformed political witness does not help him either. He quotes Althusius to show that the tradition restrains the strong with reason, law and imperium. Read the passage in context. Althusius's point is that "unbridled ferocity and pride need a director and governor, lest a man destroy himself and think that everything is lawful for him," and from this he concludes "that anarchy is contrary both to right reason and to natural law."10 The remedy Althusius prescribes for disordered men is rule. The reins are held by a governor. The passage defends government against anarchy, and Wedgeworth has turned it into a defense of procedure against governors.
Wedgeworth closes by setting strength against weakness, Mary against the mighty. Zwingli refused that choice. Providence, he wrote, tells the believer that "the cup must be drained, therefore, and the battle won by endurance with undaunted soul. You are God's tool. He wills to wear you out by use, not by idleness." The prize is awarded in an assembly "where recklessness cannot sell itself for bravery, hypocrisy for religion."11 That is the Christian heroic spirit: courage that comes from submission to God, judged by God. It is neither BAP's pirate nor Wedgeworth's vestry.
Wedgeworth is right about Bronze Age Pervert, and the tradition is harder on him than Wedgeworth is. A racial mythology that sets Aryan spirit against "primitive" peoples is paganism. Zwingli located true triumph outside "the eyes of those who applaud even the most wicked, if he only achieves some bloody deed,"11 which describes BAP's heroes exactly. Wedgeworth is also right that a Christian cannot treat the feminine as something to be overcome. And Knox himself went too far. His catalogue of female defects, drawn from Chrysostom and Basil, is harsher than Scripture requires, and no Christian should repeat it. But the tradition's critique is both narrower than BAP's and harder than Wedgeworth's. It is narrower because it condemns men's abdication, not women's nature. It is harder because it treats naming the vice as a duty. Knox: "Yf feare, I say, of persecution, of sclander, or of any inconuenience ... might haue excused ... the seruantes of God, from plainlie rebuking ... the sinnes of the world, iuste cause had euerie one of them to haue ceased frome their office."12
Wedgeworth jokes that his complementarianism makes him heroic and defiant. Yet his standard comes to this: hold male headship as a doctrine, and never name its public collapse in a word that might offend. Knox answered that standard in 1558: "For howe shall any man repent ... not knowing wherin he hath offended?"12 A church whose men have handed off the rule they were given needs the diagnosis, and the diagnosis is not BAP's property. It belongs to Knox, to Aristotle before him, and to every Reformed minister willing to say that the shame lies with the men. Christians can throw out the pagan anthropology without giving up the word. They cannot throw out the rebuke.
Notes
Quotations from the 1558 First Blast keep the original spelling and expand the printer's contractions (ā = an, ē = en, ō = on, ꝓ = pro).
- John Knox, The First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstruous Regiment of Women (1558), p. 9. Read ↩
- Knox, First Blast, p. 29. Read ↩
- Knox, First Blast, on Deborah, passage 571509. Read ↩
- Knox, First Blast, passage 571496. Read ↩
- Ulrich Zwingli, Exposition of the Christian Faith, p. 262, in On Providence and Other Essays. Read ↩
- Zwingli, Account of the Faith (to Charles V), passage 320368, in On Providence and Other Essays. Read ↩
- Johann Eck, Refutation of Zwingli, passage 320417, in Zwingli, On Providence and Other Essays. Read ↩
- Scots Confession (1560), ch. XX, in Knox, History of the Reformation in Scotland. Read ↩
- John Cotton, The Keyes of the Kingdom of Heaven (1644), p. 34. Read ↩
- Johannes Althusius, Politica methodice digesta, passage 242963. Read ↩
- Zwingli, On the Providence of God, pp. 229–30, in On Providence and Other Essays. Read ↩
- Knox, First Blast, p. 4. Read ↩