MOSCOW’S CALVINIST COLLEGE

MAKES THE NEW YORK TIMES

 

For much more on Wilson see these
two links

 

By Nick Gier, Professor Emeritus, University of Idaho (ngier∂uidaho.edu)

 

 New St. Andrews College (NSA), a Calvinist school in the heart
of downtown Moscow, was founded by Douglas Wilson, a former student of mine. We
only ask that our student’s use their degrees responsibly, but I’m afraid that
Wilson has become the notorious TV preacher with everything except the big hair
and the wide screen.

 

Over the last 15
years, Wilson has established a religious empire that includes NSA, 200
Classical Christian K-12 schools, Canon Press in Moscow, a seminary Grey Friars,
and his own denomination, the Confederation of Reformed Evangelical Churches.

 

NSA was just
featured in The New York Times Magazine (9-30-7).  The article is
entitled "Onward Christian Scholars" and the author is Molly Worthen.  Worthen
has written an excellent and balanced analysis, and I would like to expand on
some of the topics she covered.

 

NSA students are
bright and hard working, and I once spent about 60 hours advising an NSA student
on his senior thesis on Buddhism.  I’m afraid, however, that some of their
instructors do not meet NSA’s requirement that their students have good moral
character.

 

NSA President Roy
Atwood is quoted as saying that Wilson and Co. "are not interested in political
takeover," but the facts tell another story.  Wilson makes much of the fact that
he doesn’t like Bush and is against the war in Iraq.  Worthen quotes him as
declaring: "They voted for Bush; I’d vote for Jefferson Davis."

 

Wilson repeatedly
tells his critics that he is not a neo-Confederate, but the ties are just too
close for him to deny it.  In 1994, he and Steven Wilkins wrote a booklet
entitled Southern Slavery as It Was, in which they
celebrate the Antebellum South as the greatest multiracial society in human
history.

 

Wilkins is a
conservative Presbyterian minister in Louisiana who was a founding director of
the neo-Confederate League of the South (LOS).  LOS president Michael Hill, who
attends Wilkins’ church, proposes that an independent neo-Confederacy of fifteen
states would have the duty to protect the values of Anglo-Celtic culture from
black Americans, who are "a compliant and deadly underclass." 

 

I am pleased that
Worthen was able to get Wilson to come clean on his relationship with R. J.
Rushdoony, the founder of Christian Reconstructionism, a movement with a very
explicit political agenda.  Both Wilson and Rushdoony are postmillennialists,
which means that Christians must first, on their own initiative, set up godly
governments before Christ will come. 

 

There will be no
quick Rapture; rather, there will be a long war against non-believers, the end
of which Wilson once described as a Christian tsunami crashing into pagan lawn
chairs on a beach.

 

Central to the
Reconstructed Christian state is the administration of Old Testament law.  Four
years after the fact, Wilson conveniently announced that he was misquoted in a
local paper about allowing banishment for homosexuals rather than their
execution. 

 

Worthen’s article
has Wilson on the record again with this exact same administration of Old
Testament law.  This is just one of many examples of Wilson’s duplicity and
deception.

 

For many years I
have had the mistaken impression that Wilson’s father, Jim Wilson, was not
responsible for his son’s theological waywardness.  But Worthen’s article
reminded me of The Principles of War: A Handbook on Strategic Evangelism
written by Jim Wilson. Worthen also noted that NSA coffee mugs have the Latin
motto, which translates as "for the faithful, wars shall never cease."

 

Worthen quotes Jim
Wilson as being disappointed that his son undermined the opportunity of a
surprise attack.  Some years ago Son Wilson did follow his father’s military
strategy of choosing an appropriate target (Moscow was just the right size), but
then foolishly publicized his battle plan.

 

In a debate that I
had with Wilson in January, 2007, I tried to get him to clarify his position on
"covenantal" lying, which allows the use of deception to advance the Gospel. 
Wilson responded that this was permissible only if he and his congregations were
in fact at war.

 

We now have more
than enough evidence that the war is on, and we now know the real reason for
Wilson’s evasiveness and deceit over the years.

 

Nick Gier taught
religion and philosophy at the University of Idaho for 31 years.  Read the full
story about Wilson’s religious empire at www.class.uidaho.edu/ngier/Wilson.htm.