God’s people have always needed discernment to distinguish the voices that edify from those that merely impress (Jer. 23:16; 2 Cor. 11:5, 13). Throughout history, the Lord has raised up prophets who proclaimed his word with courage and tears. Jeremiah, John the Baptist, the Lord Jesus, the apostle Paul, and others show that the hallmark of a true prophet is not popularity or rhetorical skill but the burden of declaring God’s hard truth to those most able to hurt them—whatever the cost.
Admirers of Doug Wilson hail him as a modern-day prophet, the voice we need in our cultural moment. Wilson himself has embraced the mantle. In a 2019 post titled “On the Nature of Prophetic Language,” written to defend his use of a vulgar epithet for women, he described his offensive language as “part of a prophetic ministry” and identified it with “the prophetic office.” More recently, when Kevin DeYoung cautioned pastors against choosing prophetic punditry over faithful shepherding (“Brothers, We Are Not Political Pundits”), Wilson reframed the alternative as “a carefully calibrated and calculated irrelevance.” His pretensions are reinforced by associates such as Toby Sumpter, who contends that Wilson and Moscow “mock the prophets of Baal and the schoolmarm Pharisees of our day, just like Jesus did and all of the faithful prophets,” and Joe Rigney, who insists that apart from The Babylon Bee, only Wilson and his circle embody the satirical “prophetic mode of speech.”
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