If the phrase Federal Vision means anything to you, this post is a good summary of the theological question at stake. It's coming down to this: "what does saving faith look like?"
Wilson has a great paragraph at the end putting controversy like this in perspective:
"We are (all of us) going to give an acccount of ourselves, down to every idle word, every motion at presbytery, and certainly down to every blog post. Because you have been justified by the free grace of God in Christ, this means that your misrepresentations of my position have been as forgiven as it gets. The judgment seat we will all stand before will not be that kind of judgment seat -- we will (all of us) have to walk past the altar where Christ sprinkled His blood before we get to this seat of evaluation, where Christ sorts out our tangles. But when He sorts out our tangles, as He promises He will, you will shake hands with me, brother, and we will be able to chat in true fellowship while the angels are passing out the sheet music."
Part of the problem is the FV is it is far from monolithic. While I have less problems with Doug Wilson, I have many more problems with others. I have been slowly reading through The Auburn Avenue Theology Pros & Cons: Debating the Federal Vision edited by Calvin Beisner. Frankly, the more FV stuff I read, the more problems I have with it, but I am not even close to finished with this rather large tome.
ReplyDeleteSteve, I would humbly disagree. The advantage of Auburn Avenue Theology Pros & Cons is that it is a collection of essays by both the FV proponents and the FV opponents. So it has essays by Leithart, Wilson, Schlissel, etc. What I am reading in there is their own presentation of the FV. To claim that they are misrepresenting their own view would not apply to that particular work. In fact it is not until the final essay by Beisner that he presents his own views on this. Frankly for the most part I find I disagree anywhere from a small amount to very strongly with the articles I have read by FV proponents so far. As I said, it is a rather large book, and the print is rather small, so it is a lot of reading. Also, due to the importance of the matter, I am trying to read carefully rather than skimming.
ReplyDeleteThere are many things I appreciate Wilson for, and frankly I have not gotten to his essay in this book yet so I cannot comment on what he had to write.