Our story so far…

There is a theological perspective that has been gaining some recent popularity known as Federal Vision Theology (FV) with ties to another, longer established view called the New Perspectives on Paul.  For background on all this you can go to my original post or a great web site at www.federal-vision.com.

This past June the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA) approved, by a wide margin, a report critical of this theology and its errors in orthodoxy relative to the PCA standard, the Westminster Confession.

There was considerable discussion about the report before ( 1, 2, 3), during, and after the GA, not just by PCA members but by those in other reformed denominations who are also wrestling with this.  (It probably goes without saying that the PC(USA) has its own controversies and is probably the one reformed denomination in the US that is not looking at this.)

Being some distance from the PCA GA I wanted to look at what has happened since then on this topic.

First, I was very impressed how few “knee jerk” reactions there were.  Responses and commentary were very reasoned, and for the most part respectful, and seemed to shift somewhat from a specific argument about the report’s points and process to a more general and “big picture” view of the situation.  Essentially “here we are, what does it mean.”

One of these reasoned responses was a Joint Federal Vision Statement issued about July 30 and signed by eleven ministers, including all that I would consider the “usual suspects.”  (movie reference – not intended to be negative)  There is one page of introduction, six of doctrinal statements in the form of “We affirm… We deny…” and the final half page with the signatories.  It should be noted that about half of these pastors are with churches that are in the Confederation of Reformed Evangelical Churches, the CREC acronym that is found within the Statement.  Most of the remainder are PCA churches.  One point that I found confusing is that the intro to the statement describes CREC as a “confederation” not strictly a denomination but the web site is loaded with denomination language.

Following the issuance of this statement there has been some analysis of it and it has served as material for debate and rebuttal in the blogosphere.  The most comprehensive critique of the statement has to be by the Rev. Lane Keister in his blog Green Baggins.  I will not even attempt linking to individual posts since he went through the statement with separate posts analyzing and critiquing each individual section.  Lots of reading there if you are so inclined.  Click on his topic Federal Vision.

A second multi-part, but slightly less extensive analysis can by found on the blog Reformed Musings and there is another by the Rev. R. Scott Clark on The Heidelblog.  This latter one has an interesting twist since the Rev. Clark is at a church that is part of the United Reformed Churches in North America www.urcna.info or www.covenant-urc.org/urchrchs.html whose General Synod this past summer adopted resolutions on three points of “sola fide” and nine points of the Federal Vision Theology and he discusses those in his blog as well.

While the blogs above are generally critical of the FV, the signatories of the statement are not silent and you can find the defenses and responses of Douglas Wilson on his blog Blog and Mablog and those of Jeff Meyers on his Corrigenda Denuo.

On the general topic of the FV controversy, one of my favorite blog posts since the report was adopted is by Kevin D. Johnson on July 2 in his blog Reformed Catholicism.  It is a long reflection titled Problems with Federal Vision Theology and Practice.  What strikes me about his viewpoint is first that it comes from his own experience over multiple years as a one-time FV defender and second that his concerns include the pastoral aspects of the theology and controversy.  He writes:

[A]ny critique of the Federal Vision theology should at least first deal
with the pastoral context with which it was originally framed. Is
Federal Vision theology the appropriate pastoral response to the
nominalism apparently latent in the late twentieth-century Reformed
world? In the last five years has Federal Vision theology capably
addressed this and related issues with any sort of effectiveness in
calling youth and children back to Reformed or Presbyterian churches?

Finally, I would like to note one other blog entry, but with a bit of hesitance since it is a bit polarizing and strongly worded.  However, I found the information in the article “ Ligonier Ministries Responsible for Federal Vision Converts?” interesting and, as far as I know the history, accurate.  This article describes how the now defrocked (for other reasons) R. C. Sproul Jr. provided a platform for major FV advocates such as Douglas Wilson and Steve Wilkins in the Ligonier Ministries publication Tabletalk while he was still the editor.  It raises the interesting question of why the Rev. R. C. Sproul Sr. Ph.D. (a PCA pastor and professor) allowed this to happen while he, at least based on his two minute speech that I listened to during this year’s debate on the FV report, favored the PCA report.  The bottom line of the article is that by promoting the FV theology the result was actually to lead people away from the Reformed faith and into either Eastern Orthodox or Roman Catholic churches.

Interesting stuff.  But as multiple observers are now wondering, when will enforcement of the report begin?  And will FV proponent pastors and churches stick around to be heard or quickly move to the CREC.  Similar dilemma to the PC(USA) controversy, different topic.