The Christian blogosphere is inviting us to return to a doxological view of Christian authority—not one that forsakes traditional structures and the importance of accountability, but one that reminds us that all authority comes from Christ, and sometimes voices of truth are speaking from different sorts of pulpits.
So, essentially, there is the church, where you go to sit with all your children, trying to keep them from wiggling and running away, listening to a man exposit the Scriptures—however competently depends on so many variables—and then, when you wander out, there is not only the blogosphere, but now also the conferences and books and tribal pull of women gathering together to make their way through life.
In the immediate aftermath of Warren’s piece, it appeared that Christian women were falling into two camps—rather than Jen vs. Angelina, we had Jen vs. Tish. But instead of taking sides, it might be more useful for us to realize that we are all, like them, products of historical and cultural forces that define our experiences and constrain our choices in ways we often fail to realize.