Thursday, December 27, 2007

For Those of You New to the Whole Federal Vision

R. Scott Clark has posted a great summary and "re-cap" of the federal vision controversy. If you are not sure what this is all about this post is for you. Here is a sample,

The FV movement was (and is) disparate. Some of the leaders lack formal theological education (e.g. Doug Wilson). Some have PhDs (e.g. Peter Leithart and Jeff Myers). Their original claim to be recovering historic Reformed Christianity is no longer tenable so now they generally claim to be discovering a “more biblical” form of Christianity, to be carrying on the work of Reformation. The claim to have discovered something new and interesting and to be more biblical, of course, attracts attention from, if I may be blunt, naive evangelicals who don’t know the Reformation or the history of Reformed theology and exegesis in the first place but who are perhaps attracted to the doctrine of predestination and disposed toward novelty already.

The difficulty with the claim to be reforming the Reformed churches, of course, is that the FV ends up advocating views already considered and rejected by the Reformed churches. Most of what the FV is peddling is little different in substance from what the medieval church taught and from what the Remonstrants taught in reaction to the Reformation doctrine of justification sola gratia, sola fide.

2 comments:

  1. Are there any denominations that accept the federal vision?

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  2. There is one that comes specifically to mind, the CREC (Confederation of Reformed Evangelical Churches). It is a denomination started by one of the FV guys Doug Wilson.

    My best guess would be that some of the more liberal denominations would not care if your were FV, PCUSA is one that comes to mind in this regard.

    As a side note, I find it very odd that the CREC lets its member churches pick what confession they hold to. One of the options is the London Baptist Confession of Faith. The reason this is odd is that the FV guys are some of the hardest on baptist theology that I knew. They constantly belittle the main stream PCA for being too baptistic in their views, but they allow baptists in their denomination.

    Like I said, this is just a bit odd.

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