I haven’t been keeping up very well with my postings on the Federal Vision report and controversy over the last few weeks and there have been a couple of interesting developments.  First, in preparation for the 35th General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in America, the report has now been posted on the web site for the General Assembly.  The report is no longer available from the online magazine byFaith but that site now has a link pointing to the official GA site.

In addition to a conversion to PDF and a reformatting to look like a GA report, people who have compared the two note that at least one paragraph was corrected or clarified.  If you want more on that you can check out the entry on the blog Reformed News.

This week news started circulating of a letter signed by ten PCA pastors urging the GA to proceed with caution and not approve the Federal Vision report at this time.  As best as I can tell, the on-line source closest to the original is a posting on Joel Garver’s blog Sacra Doctrina.  There are also comments and information on each pastor’s affiliation on Reformed News.

The pastors emphasize that they are not proponents of the Federal Vision Theology, but are concerned about several aspects of the report.  They raise procedural questions and several theological questions.  They begin by saying:

We are not FV men. We are PCA pastors and elders who believe that it
would be premature and unwise to ratify this report as it now stands.
We also have procedural questions related to the forming of this
committee. In this letter, we cite statements from the report followed
by related questions that we believe the report fails to answer
adequately.

And they conclude with:

Fellow presbyters, until the committee clarifies these issues, it would
be premature for us to ratify their report. We encourage you to
carefully and prayerfully think through these issues and not enter into
this vote hastily. We are convinced that the report as it now stands
lacks the quality and scholarship of a PCA General Assembly position
paper.

In general the response in the blogosphere to the letter has been positive but with a couple of comments along the lines that “the ten pastors are sympathizers” or “if you have problems with the process why didn’t you speak up at last year’s GA when the process was approved.”

Finally, in an interesting twist there has been a flurry of writing in the past week about the Federal Vision Theology and Roman Catholic Theology.  An ex-Reformed and now Roman Catholic blogger, Taylor Marshall, back on May 22, posted an article on his blog, Canterbury Tales, titled “The Catholic Perspective on the Federal Vision.”  In this article he writes:

The [PCA] leadership and pew members are basically Evangelicals that read R.C. Sproul, maybe believe in infant baptism, and have worked “the five points of Calvinism” into their worldview. And when the last word is spoken, the Federal Visionists will be sidelined and ridiculed as crypto-Catholics and adherents to “salvation by works.” Fundamentally, the PCA fears that the Federal Vision movement is “just too Catholic.” All this talk about sacraments, covenants, ecclesiology, robes, candles, weekly communion, just gives your typical Southern Presbyterian the heebie-jeebies. They want that old time religion of three Wesleyan hymns, the pastoral prayer, and a 35 minute sermon
proclaims the “sovereign grace of the Gospel.”

Ultimately, I
think that younger Presbyterians will gravitate toward what the Federal
Vision offers. Many will sink their teeth into it and many will find it
wanting. Many will discover that the Catholic Church is their true
home, and many will discover her in a great moment of joy. This Federal
Vision is really only a peek into the keyhole of the Catholic Church.
The Federal Visionist has a vision of the beautiful things inside, but
they have not yet appreciated the warmth of a true home.

As you might expect this article has also lit up the blogosphere with a number of writers on both the “He’s right” and “He’s wrong” side.  Among those who think he fairly characterizes the Federal Vision Theology are R. Scott Clark at Oceanside United Reformed Church and Matt on his blog Berit Olam.

On the opposite side I would note a post on the Puritan Board discussion forum titled “The View From Rome is a Little Fuzzy.”  However, I would encourage you to read the comments to the article.  One in particular caught my attention where the author, Anne Ivy, writes:

I was RC (Roman Catholic), too….an adult convert, AAMOF….and have been struck for years by the similarities between the FV and RC doctrine.

And you know what else? Off the top of my head I can’t think of a single ex-RC-turned-Reformed that doesn’t see those similarities.

So we’ve got those who have come out of the RCC issuing warnings
regarding how much it resembles the FV, and we’ve got new converts to
the RCC chirping about how the FV’s doctrinal distinctives resemble the
RCC’s.

But the ex-RC’s and the new RC’s are assumed to not know what they’re talking about and are shrugged off by FV supporters.

Y’know, that’s really rather irritating.

Just some more to ponder about the Federal Vision Controversy.  The PCA GA starts June 12.  We will see what wisdom the Holy Spirit gives the commissioners about this.