I have closed the comments on the Sanctified Incoherence posting, but as I leave it, I wish to make something clear. It is alleged in those comments I have said Touchstone leads dissenters on egalitarianism firmly away into a side room. I believe nothing of the sort. It is a far more serious business than that--there is no question of a "side room" at all. I should hope that by now I have made it clear that the egalitarian who believes in his creed has placed himself outside the house entirely, at fundamental variance with Christian teaching:
. . . ἔξω οἱ κύνες καὶ οἱ φάρμακοι καὶ οἱ πόρνοι καὶ οἱ φονεῖς καὶ οἱ εἰδωλολάτραι καὶ πᾶς φιλῶν καὶ ποιῶν ψεῦδος.
This is Revelation 22.15. All "lovers and makers of lies" are Outside. I believe egalitarian teaching to be a lie, with all that follows from that.
This passage is eschatological; it speaks of final things. It does not say that anyone who disagrees with Touchstone, much less Hutchens--who regards his own labilities to be as great as any other man's--will go to hell, but that falling in love with a lie will keep one outside the City of God, and in the wicked company his Maker and Judge thinks he deserves. (Ultimately the question of "Whom does a mere wrong opinion, if wrong it be, hurt?" devolves upon a consideration those who are in the habit of asking it would rather avoid, namely, "What does God hate, whether or not you think he’s right in hating it?" If one insists on putting matters in terms of personal preference, God's trumps everyone else's.)
To the best of my judgment, egalitarianism is as significant and seductive an error as Arianism; it is an anthropological heresy that infects theology proper through the attack on Christology it necessarily entails. I claim no special authority to make this judgment, but simply join mine, whatever it might be worth, to that of greater men, and submit it to the Church.
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