[Vision2020] a question regarding Kirk exposure

[Joan Opyr]

My respect for Michael was already great, but this calm, rational, 
grown-up response to Jerry Owen's juvenile finger-poking has raised 
Michael even higher in my estimation.  Michael always emerges from 
these attacks with his integrity intact and his reputation enhanced.  
This is not, I think, in accord with Christ Church's plans.  The 
difference between claiming to be a "true" Christian and demonstrating 
a Christ-like charity towards one's attackers becomes more pronounced 
with each passing day.

Joan Opyr/Auntie Establishment
www.joanopyr.com

PS: If this is the best Aaron Rench and Jerry Owen can do in the Christ 
Church public relations war against Michael Metzler, then they need to 
retire back behind the lines and man the supply hut.  Sit in the rear 
on the gear, as it were.

On May 5, 2006, at 9:10 PM, Michael wrote:

>
> May 05, 2006
>  
> Jerry,
>  
> Thanks for the thoughts.  I’d like to offer a response to you that 
> should provide further help as me, you, and others try to assess the 
> trustworthiness of your fresh claims here about my incompetence, 
> imbalance, double standards, presumptive and delusional arrogance, 
> lack of love and compassion, conspiratorial mindset, ugliness, 
> jeopardized marriage (?), and my destiny for a life of conflicts.  You 
> packed quite a bit in a few paragraphs; that is some well done 
> concision in my book. 
>  
> Unfortunately, however, you have not dealt with any of the claims, 
> illustrations, definitions, analysis, arguments, evidence, and 
> examples that I have been providing every week for the last 5 months.  
> Not one really.  Instead, you merely attack my moral standing 
> generally.  This is not surprising, since this has been a methodology 
> developed and refined by Wilson and Jones over the last decade in 
> order to deal with dissent or challenge from without and from within.  
> This ‘character assassination’ has slowly replaced argument, evidence, 
> and the dignity of the kirker opponent.  I would actually call this a 
> refined ‘art’ in the Kirk at this point.  The kind of control and 
> manipulation that this art is capable of producing is remarkable; I 
> think Wilson and Jones are very wise in using this art.  And likewise, 
> I think you were wise in employing it here on Vision 2020 since you 
> are not of the kind of intellectual frame, currently, to actually 
> address my challenges, argument, and evidence in a rational manner.  
> So once again, my life in the Kirk is comprised of fending off gross 
> slander about my moral standing and psychological normalcy rather than 
> reasonably discussing facts. 
>  
>  
> You Write:
> You were willing to speak on behalf of Vision 2020, so you shouldn't 
> mind everyone hearing what you had to say.  If you would've requested 
> me not to speak about it in public beforehand like your pastor did 
> explicitly in the letter you put on your blog, I would have certainly 
> extended that common courtesy.  If you would like to take this off 
> list, I'm more than happy. 
>  
> Me:
> I am glad that you were willing to confess the truth here and admit 
> that you took a highly private email from me and posted it to Vision 
> 2020 to ridicule and critique it.  This doesn’t make your fellow 
> Wilson Apologists look very good in hind site, given their rhetorical 
> smoke covering up this very question.  But you undue this minor moral 
> problem by telling us the truth; thank you.  Your defense of this 
> strange action, however, leads us into more troubling moral waters.  
> Your conscience must not be feeling purky enough to provide a helpful 
> argument on your behave, for certainly, no sane person here in Moscow 
> would expect a friend to feel justified in posting private 
> correspondence without permission simply because they spoke about 
> Vision 2020, or implicitly referenced what they thought a majority of 
> Vision 2020 posters believe.  Do I need to say more to this?  
> Obviously anyone ‘would mind’ having their highly personal emails 
> posted without notice to Vision 2020, regardless of whether or not 
> they referenced Vision 2020.  I’m not sure how to say anymore about 
> this, for I do not want to imply that you are lying here, but at the 
> same time I do not believe this argument of yours permits me to take 
> it as a sincere defense. 
>  
> Your reference to my Blog is very curious since I only post 
> correspondence on my Blog if :
>  
> 1) It is clearly assumed, or stated, that the material was for the 
> express purpose of being published to my Blog.
>  
> 2) If I ask and get permission from the writer to post their material, 
> usually with clarification if the writer wants their name attached or 
> not.
>  
> 3) Or else the post clearly falls into the category of Kirk Leadership 
> aggression against me, my reputation, and my household.  I attempted 
> to make it very clear early on that I would post anything that fell 
> within this last category; I posted Wilson’s ‘copyrighted’ letter to 
> further confirm this very principle. Because of this, Kirk Leadership 
> always knew that what they put in writing and emailed me would very 
> likely be published at my whim; they therefore had the luxury to craft 
> their statements with this knowledge, so that they could be tailored 
> to both me and the public, which they certainly took advantage of; if 
> they wanted to say something privately to me they could have stopped 
> by for a chat over a beer.  I’m fairly certain that the only material 
> I have published against the wishes of the author was material from 
> Wilson; and yet again, even this did at least include the author’s 
> knowledge that it might likely be published.
>  
> Perhaps there has been a time when the particular circumstance 
> permitted a fourth option, but I currently cannot recall any; and 
> perhaps there have been times when I used poor judgment, but I am 
> currently not aware of any.
>  
> Now, Jerry, consider:  your posting of my email to you does not fit in 
> these three categories at all; you seem to want to make it fit into 
> something like category (3), but it clearly doesn’t.  You did not have 
> the unique context under which I posted correspondence without 
> permission at all. You also knew that I wrote that email to you with 
> no thought that you might be motivated to publish it publicly. 
> Further, from the moral standpoint, the distinction between posting 
> something to one’s private Blog and posting something to an active and 
> local list like Vision 2020 is fairly significant.  In sum, your 
> breach of my privacy goes far deeper than anything I have done within 
> the context of my own Blog, and even though I have been an active 
> participant on Vision 2020 throughout all this, it never crossed my 
> mind to publish someone’s highly private correspondence to me to 
> Vision 2020 without their consent and without their knowledge of the 
> possibility that it would be so published. 
>  
> Your purpose of posting my private correspondence to you hardly makes 
> sense.  Why would you offer such a surprise attack and breach this 
> kind of privacy and trust for a purpose that I can hardly fathom?  
> There is an additional quality of hypocrisy in your dealings about all 
> this now, since you claim that you, pious Greyfriar Jerry, would never 
> think of publishing that very email if I had actually asked you not 
> to.  This is subterfuge; of course I didn’t want you publishing 
> something highly private and clearly written only for your reading.  
> Of course I had no expectation that you would even consider publishing 
> that email from me.  If the possibility even crossed my mind I would 
> have 1) re-written it for everyone’s enjoyment and 2) politely asked 
> you not to publish it. 
>  
> Yet, ironically, much of this is really beside the point.  The real 
> point I was originally trying to make about all this is that even if 
> you did do precisely what I have done, thus giving you the chance to 
> generate that lovely kind of argument we call “well you are one too,” 
> you are still a hypocrite; and if your leaders and other in the kirk 
> community do not point this out to you, then they are hypocrites too.  
> The reason why this is the case, as I have already tried to explain on 
> simple and clear terms, is that this action of posting private 
> correspondence is one of the primary replies, if not THE reply, that 
> the Kirk gives to justify their moral indignation against my blog, as 
> well as their justification to despise any of the work we have done on 
> my blog for the last four months.  What I do not think you 
> understand—or perhaps you just understand it all to well to admit—is 
> that even if you did merely do what I have been doing (which is 
> clearly not the case in truth), you have none-the-less removed your 
> very reason for reviling my web site.  So you can either begin 
> respecting the work we have been doing at www.poohsthink.com and start 
> addressing some of our challenges, evidence, and arguments, or else 
> you need to admit your moral incoherence and hypocrisy.  These really 
> are your only two options, Jerry.  If you think you can come up with a 
> third option, please let me know what it is.
>  
>  
> You Write:
> You need to come to grips with the fact that volume of words doesn't 
> make up for lack of competence.  It's ironic that would you would 
> 'ahem' assuming I've not read McLaren when your earliest 'arguments' 
> with Wilson about McLaren occurred when you admittedly hadn't read 
> him.  Your perspective is filled with this sort of imbalance and 
> double standards.
>  
> Me:
> Well, I’m fairly certain that the last time I did some epistemic 
> sweeping I found the belief that “volume of words doesn’t make up for 
> lack of competence” well in tact.  I wouldn’t imagine trying to 
> disagree with you here.  I did not know that this was one of the 
> disputed issues on the table for discussion. If there is any phrase, 
> sentence, paragraph, or post you have seen me utter or write over the 
> last five months that you think exhibits significant incompetence, 
> please do bring it to my attention.  I always welcome helpful 
> criticism, and if you discover it, I’m certain most others have as 
> well.  It seems in fact that charity would bid you to do just this; 
> withholding from me your knowledge of where I have been in error is 
> not very nice, particularly after telling all of Moscow that you have 
> much of this sort of knowledge.  I do hope that in your next post you 
> will have many examples of my incompetence to help me out here. 
>  
> As for the “ahem” word, I apologize; I had assumed that you had been 
> following my discussion about McLaren on Wilson’s Blog. For anyone 
> closely following that, my meaning would have been crystal clear.  If 
> you were not reading Wilson’s Blog however, I can see how misleading 
> this word would be for you.  I was referencing the fact that after I 
> started reading McLaren I start urging everyone to read the book 
> before blasting it, ridiculing it, hating it, and jeering at it—how 
> unsuccessful my requests were became a running joke. 
>  
> Apparently you have heard something about this discussion on Wilson’s
>  Blog however, since you reference my arguments I made on behalf of 
> McLaren before I had read his book.  Perhaps you got this from Aaron; 
> he made a similar accusation months ago.  Be relieved that your 
> concern here is based on pure mis-information.  What really happened 
> was that I at first granted that Wilson’s conclusion about McLaren was 
> correct and yet was frightened by the way Wilson and some others were 
> reasoning to this conclusion; my concern was primarily ‘internal’ to 
> the ‘arguments’ furthered against McLaren.  Once I started researching 
> McLaren on the internet, all of my factual findings, including 
> material written by him and others—pro and con McLaren—was 
> contradicting Wilson’s assertions.  I therefore began quoting McLaren 
> and noting some of the information I was coming up with in McLaren’s 
> defense.  My primary thesis was not that McLaren was ultimately not 
> guilty as charged; rather, my primary challenge was with respect to 
> the justice of Wilson’s ‘trial.’  I explicitly used courtroom 
> metaphors in my criticism at the time; at one point I explained that 
> we were in process of destroying any just institution for criticizing 
> false teaching regardless of how guilty McLaren really was.  It seems 
> my concerns back them were only the tip of the iceberg; we have 
> clearly come full circle. Throughout all that time I was explicitly 
> noting the extent of my knowledge of McLaren and his views, and I only 
> started positively defending McLaren’s full views along with the book 
> after I had read a number of chapters in the book.  In sum, your 
> concern here is based on complete ignorance of what actually 
> transpired in our discussions of McLaren on Wilson’s Blog. 
>  
> As for “imbalance and double standards,” if you are referring to more 
> than this one misconception about what I actually said about McLaren, 
> then I’m not sure what you would be referring to.  Could you help me 
> out and provide another example?  I would truly appreciate an 
> opportunity to stand corrected or else defend myself against these 
> serious charges.
>  
>  
> You Write:
> You are a self-appointed leader that no one follows, and assume the 
> position to correct and guide when no one recognizes the gift and, 
> more importantly, the love and compassion it takes do to so. 
>  
> Me:
> Jerry, once again I really am lost.  I’m a self-appointed leader?  I’m 
> not sure what you are referring to.  If you could help me out with an 
> example or two, I would appreciate it much.  I don’t think anyone 
> “follows” me and I have never attempted to set myself up as a leader; 
> I have been trying to seek truth, survive the exiting of a 
> pseudo-cult, escape character assignation the best I could, and make a 
> very difficult transition in life while also trying to hold Doug 
> Wilson accountable for his actions through the only possible means I 
> can fathom outside of physical violence—publicity.  I’m still hoping 
> that my hard work here will one day prove helpful for even you. 
>  
> If you are merely referring to people “assuming my position is 
> correct” then you are working with a very false belief; I know that 
> this is what the leadership of Christ Church has been aggressively 
> trying to get you to believe; they have even tried to get me to 
> believe it recently through intimidating utterances of this 
> proposition.   The problem is that, because of my vast correspondence 
> generated from Pooh’s Think, I know that in fact most people not 
> socially tied to the personality of Doug Wilson agree with the 
> majority of the positions I espouse. I even know for a fact that there 
> are underground kirkers still in the Churches who agree with the 
> majority of the positions I espouse.  Almost all kirkers who have left 
> Christ Church after expressing distrust of the leadership believe all 
> of my positions, just about down to the last one. I even have old 
> friends, parents, and reformed pastors giving their thumbs up to the 
> majority of the views I espouse about Christ Church.  I really hope 
> you are willing to be corrected here, since this is just the plain 
> truth.  I have no doubt that inside the kirk an opinion very 
> disconnected from the outside world is able to flourish; Wilson has 
> been progressively cutting off the Kirk from the outside world in 
> various ways, which has included trying to close down Vision 2020 and 
> encouraging kirkers to stop reading the Daily News while encouraging 
> the vision of starting our own Kirk newspaper.  This is why it is so 
> important for you to just ‘get out’ a little bit more.
>  
>  
> You Write:
> Chesterton has a great section in Orthodoxy where he talks about the 
> maniac and his water tight conspiracy theory.  If Wilson and Christ 
> Church are as evil as you say they are, why don't you just move on and 
> get to something lovely in this fantastic world?
>  
> Me:
> I don’t know what to say about me being a maniac selling a tight 
> conspiracy theory.  I do, however, appreciate the fact that you would 
> allow my maniac conspiracy theory to have the quality of ‘tightness.’  
> At least I have succeeded in something.  But I’m not all that 
> convinced about a relativistic, coherence theory of epistemic 
> justification.  I have furthered arguments, made specific claims, and 
> provided evidence for your investigation.  Conspiracy theory or not, 
> all these are on the table for your criticism.  Perhaps you could give 
> one or two illustrations of my conspiratorial maniacy.  If you could 
> do this, I think I would be greatly helped.  Again, I do not think 
> withholding such knowledge from me is very charitable; if you have 
> good reasons to believe I’m a maniac, it would be good for you to 
> share them with me so that I could have good reasons to agree with 
> your assessment. 
>  
>  
> You Write:
> I imagine you think you are called to this, which is just more of the 
> ugly. 
>  
> Me:
> Well, I don’t want to be ugly.  I want to be beautiful, lovely, and 
> edifying.  So help me out here; how is thinking I’m called to do what 
> I’m doing ugly?  I’m not sure I get this.  But in any case, you can be 
> relieved to know that I don’t think I’m called to anything very 
> special.  Five years from now I hope to be teaching at a community 
> college in Arizona [or else somewhere the Crotons don’t have to get 
> covered in the winter], and by then I hope I no longer have need for a 
> Blog.  I would like to publish a book by the time I am 50 years old 
> however; I hope that is not too grandiose a desire for your aesthetic 
> sensibilities. 
>  
>  
> You Write:
> I say these things intended as faithful wounds of a friend, hoping 
> that you will find something constructive to put your efforts toward.  
> If you don't find some sort of balance, proportion and charity in your 
> life, you will continue to find conflict in the rest of the 
> relationships you have.  How will you deal with the next church (if 
> you decide to leave), or marital conflicts?  How do former conflicts 
> in your life exhibit this pattern and how can you look to yourself, 
> before others, to take responsibility? 
>  
> Me:
> Jerry, do you know anything about me? Well, I mean, anything other 
> than Wilson’s lies about me? I think I have found enough constructive 
> things to put my time to.  Right now I have a marriage to tend to.  I 
> have four children I am raising.  I am in the process of building two 
> houses as a local home builder. I am a full time graduate student, and 
> in fact would be writing a paper on the Narrative and Judicial 
> Decision Making right now if you had not found the need to make public 
> accusations against me about my incompetence, imbalance, double 
> standards, presumptive and delusional arrogance, lack of love and 
> compassion, conspiratorial mindset, ugliness, jeopardized marriage, 
> and destiny of a life of conflicts.  I suspect that I am doing more 
> constructive things at the moment than many sufficiently Christian men 
> in America. And as soon as kirkers slow down in their maligning of my 
> character, I will be able to once again participate in the delightful 
> debates and discussions on Vision 2020.  Hopefully I can lead the way 
> in getting other kirkers to start treating other members of Vision 
> 2020 like human beings.
>  
> As for “the next church,” do you have any knowledge of “the previous 
> church?”  I’ve been a member of two other churches the last 10 years, 
> and I don’t recall setting up a web site about my other pastors.  I 
> have also been a Wilson/CC defender over the course of the last 11 
> years.  Jerry, this is one of my biggest concerns about the cultish 
> state of Christ Church by now.  It does not matter who the person is, 
> how long they have proven themselves, or what their track record is. 
> (Please read the qualifications for Greyfriar students if you would 
> like to know what the elders thought about me six months ago). If 
> someone dissents in the wrong sort of way they will be harassed, 
> insulted, belittled, maligned, and accused of all sorts of things.  It 
> just doesn’t matter what the damn facts are, as your beautiful, 
> defamatory post to Vision 2020 today has perfectly illustrated.
>  
> Your Friend
> Michael Metzler 
>  
>  
>  
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