Douglas Wilson
| Birth Date | June 18, 1953 |
|---|---|
| Nationality | American |
| Occupation | Theologian, pastor, author |
| Education | University of Idaho |
| Spouse | Nancy Wilson |
| Children | N. D. Wilson, Rachel Jankovic, Rebekah Merkle |
| Tradition / Movement | Reformed (Presbyterianism), Christian reconstructionism |
| Ordination | CREC |
| Website | DougWils.com |
Douglas James Wilson (born June 18, 1953) is a conservative Reformed and evangelical theologian, pastor at Christ Church in Moscow, Idaho, faculty member at New Saint Andrews College, and author and speaker. Wilson is known for his writing on classical Christian education, Reformed theology, as well as general cultural commentary. He is a public proponent of postmillennialism, Christian nationalism, and covenant theology. He is also featured in the documentary film Collision documenting his debates with anti-theist Christopher Hitchens on their promotional tour for the book Is Christianity Good for the World?.
Biography
Douglas Wilson was born in 1953, and in 1958 his family moved to Annapolis, MD where he spent most of his childhood. His father, Jim Wilson, was a full-time evangelist, who worked with the Officers’ Christian Union. His father had become a Christian in the Naval Academy, and worked in Christian literature ministry, both in Annapolis and later in Idaho. Upon high school graduation Wilson enlisted into the submarine service, after which he attended the University of Idaho, where he met his wife, Nancy, whom he married in 1975.
Career
Wilson co-founded the Reformed cultural and theological journal Credenda/Agenda, is a founding board member of Logos School, a Senior Fellow of Theology at New Saint Andrews College, serves as an instructor at Greyfriars Hall, a ministerial training program at Christ Church, and helped to establish the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches. He has authored books on culture and theology, as well as children's books and poetry collections. He writes regularly on his blog, Blog and Mablog, and frequently appears on Canon Press's Youtube channel. He also operates a personal podcast, The Plodcast. In the past he has contributed to Tabletalk, a magazine published by R. C. Sproul's Ligonier Ministries, and to the Gospel Coalition. He also regularly features as a guest speaker at conferences and other podcasts.
Classical Christian education
Wilson has been an advocate for classical Christian education, laying out his vision in several books and pamphlets, including Recovering the Lost Tools of Learning and The Case for Classical Christian Education. He has also critiqued the American public school system urging Christian parents to seek other educational options in Excused Absence: Should Christian Kids Leave Public Schools?. He argues that American public schools are failing to educate their students, and proposes a Christian approach to education based on the medieval trivium, a philosophy of education with origins in Classical Antiquity and emphasizing grammar, logic, and rhetoric and advocates a wide exposure to the liberal arts, including classical Western languages such as Latin and Greek. The model has been adopted by a number of Christian private schools and homeschoolers. Wilson founded the Logos School in Moscow in 1981 to fulfill his vision. He helped found the Association of Classical Christian Schools in 1993. Their website lists 475 member schools (as of 2023).
Wilson received the inaugural Boniface Award from the ACCS in 2019, given to recognize "a public figure who has stood faithfully for Christian truth, beauty, and goodness with grace."
Theology
Wilson has written on numerous theological subjects and produced several biblical commentaries. He advocates Van Tillian presuppositional apologetics and theonomic postmillennialism.
Against New Atheists
Wilson has engaged in extensive critique and debate with prominent New Atheists. In May 2007, Wilson debated Christopher Hitchens in a six-part series published first in Christianity Today, and subsequently as a book entitled Is Christianity Good for the World? with a foreword by Jonah Goldberg. His book Letter from a Christian Citizen was Wilson's response to atheist Sam Harris's Letter to a Christian Nation, and his book The Deluded Atheist was his response to Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion.
Reformed theology
Wilson has written extensively in defense of covenant theology, infant baptism, and Calvinism in works such as The Covenant Household, Knowledge, Foreknowledge, and the Gospel, and To A Thousand Generations: Infant Baptism.
Eschatology
Wilson holds to a view of Christian eschatology known as postmillennialism. He has set forth his position in Heaven Misplaced: Christ's Kingdom on Earth, in his commentary on Revelation, When the Man Comes Around, and his commentary on First and Second Thessalonians, Mines of Difficulty. He has spoken and written in defense of the view, participating in a dialogue about eschatology with other evangelical ministers, John Piper, Sam Storms, and Jim Hamilton as the representative of the postmillennial position.
Federal Vision
Wilson's views on covenant theology have caused some controversy as part of the Federal Vision theology, partly because of its perceived similarity to the New Perspective on Paul, which Wilson does not fully endorse, though he has praised some tenets. The Reformed Presbyterian Church in the United States's Covenant Presbytery declared his views on the subject to have "the effect of destroying the Reformed Faith", and found his teachings to be heretical.
Discussions on slavery
Wilson's most controversial work is considered to be his pamphlet Southern Slavery, As It Was, which he co-wrote with Christian minister J. Steven Wilkins. In it, Wilkins wrote that "slavery produced in the South a genuine affection between the races that we believe we can say has never existed in any nation before the War or since."Template:Sfn Louis Markos notes that "though the pamphlet condemned racism and said the practice of Southern slavery was unbiblical, critics were troubled that it argued U.S. slavery was more benign than is usually presented in history texts." Some historians, such as Peter H. Wood, Clayborne Carson, and Ira Berlin, condemned the pamphlet's arguments, with Wood calling them "as spurious as Holocaust denial".
In 2004, Wilson held a conference for those who supported his ideas at the University of Idaho. The university published a disclaimer distancing itself from the event, and numerous anti-conference protests took place. Wilson described critical attacks as "abolitionist propaganda". He also has repeatedly denied any racist leanings. He has said his "long war" is not on behalf of white supremacy; rather, Wilson claims to seek restoration of a prior era, during which he says faith and reason seemed at one and when family, church, and community were more powerful than the state.
The Southern Poverty Law Center connects Wilson's views to the neo-Confederate and Christian Reconstruction movements influenced by R. J. Rushdoony, concluding, "Wilson's theology is in most ways indistinguishable from basic tenets of [Christian] Reconstruction." Though categorized by some as a “neo-Confederate”, he rejects that term and calls himself a “paleo-confederate” instead.
Canon Press ceased publication of Southern Slavery, As It Was when it became aware of serious citation errors in 24 passages authored by Wilkins where quotations, some lengthy, from the 1974 book Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery by Robert William Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman were not cited. Robert McKenzie, the history professor who first noticed the citation problems, described the authors as being "sloppy" rather than "malevolent" while also pointing out that he had reached out to Wilson several years earlier. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, "He described the lifted passages as simply reflecting a citation problem, and attributed the latest uproar to "some of our local Banshees [who] have got wind of all this and raised the cry of plagiarism (between intermittent sobs of outrage)."" Wilson reworked and redacted the arguments and published (without Wilkins) a new set of essays under the name Black & Tan after consulting with historian Eugene Genovese.
Concerns about Wilson's personal safety due to his comments on slavery, and criticism from liberals and conservatives, led to the Visão Nacional para a Consciência Cristã rescinding his invitation to speak at a large Reformed theological gathering in Brazil in February 2024.
Personal life
Wilson and his wife Nancy married on New Year's Eve in 1975, and now have three children and many grandchildren.
In 2018, Wilson announced on his blog that he had been diagnosed with a cancerous tumor in his jaw. He wrote in response to the news
Scripture teaches us that we are to give thanks in everything (1 Thess. 5:18), and for everything (Eph. 5:20). God really is sovereign in every detail of every life. So we have thanked the Lord for this cancer, and we intend to continue to thank Him for it. We don’t know what good purpose God has for it, but we are assured that the One who counts both hairs and sparrows is also the One who controls the behavior of every cancer cell.
Later that year Wilson had a successful operation removing the tumor, followed by a successful recovery.
His son Nathan Wilson, a writer of young adult literature, had a year before undergone surgery for a brain tumor.