Christian Renewal published a letter by Dr. Beach critical of the Federal Vision, and Jim Jordan took the time to respond to it. Jim’s letter was so full of good info and historical details that I asked him if I could publish it here as well. I have heard that the edition of Christian Renewal with his reply has hit the streets, and so I am now free to welcome Jim as a guest poster.
Dear Friends in the Reformed Faith,
I write as someone deeply involved in what is being called the “Federal Vision” (a term we did not choose) to reply to Dr. J. Mark Beach’s letter published in the July 11 issue.
Mr. Beach begins by saying that the Federal Vision (hereafter FV) is “principally driven by paedocommunion.” Well, that would be a surprise to three of the four speakers at the Auburn
Avenue Presbyterian Church Pastor’s Conference entitled “The Federal Vision,” which started this brouhaha, since all three were non-paedocommunionists at the time. While I myself do think that paedocommunion is an important issue, and I realize that those who have invented this FV bugaboo have linked the two, it’s just not correct to say that paedocommunion drove or drives the FV.
Mr. Beach defines paedocommunion as “mandated participation of children from infancy at the Lord’s Table.” This is not correct. Nobody teaches any such thing, and I don’t believe anyone in the history of the Church has ever taught it. What I believe, and what most Reformed paedocommunionists believe, is that baptism is the door to communion, and only when the child is old enough to chew solid food and drink from the rim of a cup. We do not believe in putting crumbs and drops of wine into the mouths of newly baptized babies. We believe in “normal development” communion.
Mr. Beach continues by writing that Mr. Minich’s article “doesn’t mention that paedocommunion is a major item on the FV agenda, probably because he is responding to critics of FV.” Well, that’s because there is no FV agenda. All there ever was was a
Pastor’s Conference. The FV “movement” and “agenda” are creations of the minds of people who don’t like what some of us believe. More on that in a moment.
After all this time of yelling and carrying on, several of us have finally decided to write up a statement of what we believe, and what it seems that all these various anti-FV people are objecting to. It can be read at www.federal-vision.com. But understand, none of this started out as some kind of movement. “Federal Vision theology” is a creation of the minds of FV critics, and that is why it is so hard to say what it is. It varies from critic to critic. Only now, after 5 years, have some of us decided to try and heal this silly war by stating what we think FV might be.
Mr. Beach’s letter is frankly rather insulting as well as erroneous. He states that FV people ignore the history of the Reformed faith and confessions. I’d like for him to show anyone who is guilty of this. Quite the contrary is the case: All supposed FV proponents have repeatedly bent over backward to acknowledge the importance and value of decretal theology, and have paid respect to the scholastic traditions while seeking to refine them. Our motivation is pastoral: to bring the people in the pew in contact with the language God chose to use in the Bible.
He says that FV proponents (unnamed, whoever they are) “have great difficulty showing that their theology stands with Dort or the Westminster Standards against Remonstrant theology.” This is just a smear and it is totally false. We all (whoever we are) stand squarely with Dort and Westminster. We stand squarely in the Reformed tradition, which teaches that the God who ordains the ends (eternal election in this case) also ordains the means (in some cases, temporary faith and election). There is nothing new about this, and it is only hypercalvinists, not authentic Calvinists, who have ever denied it.
I shall not go further though Mr. Beach’s letter. I am constrained to say, as someone who is about as “FV” as you can be, that Mr. Beach has not taken the time to understand what anyone is saying. Mr. Minich has read the relevant articles, and he is a trustworthy guide. Mr. Beach is not. What he criticizes is not anything that anyone has been saying. He attacks a straw man.
With your kind permission, dear editor, I should like to share with your readers how all of this appears to me. I became enamoured with the Biblical theology of Klaas Schilder and his associates back in 1971, when I read Greidanus’s Sola Scriptura and H. Van Til’s Calvinistic Concept of Culture. That’s over 35 years ago. I was also a fan of C. Van Til and of R. J. Rushdoony’s Bible-centered view of culture. So much for a little background. If you want to know what “FV” is, that’s a place to start.
When the Auburn Avenue Conference dealing with covenant theology, called “The Federal Vision” merely as a title, was held in January, 2002, the first people to attack it were Joe Morecraft and his tiny hyper-theonomic denomination. This is hardly a surprise. These people have a very flat view of covenant history, and object to the notion that the New Covenant is the resurrection form of the Old. They also see themselves as “Southern” Presbyterians, which means they dislike Charles Hodge and the kind of open catholicity he represented. Hodge wanted American Presbyterians to make use of the liturgical riches of the Continental Reformed and of the Book of Common Prayer. Morecraft and his “Southerners” are “bapterians” who want no liturgical forms at all. So, they reacted with anger at the covenantal-historical notions presented at the 2002 pastor’s conference.
Next came the Clarkians at Knox Theological Seminary. They, and they alone, actually spoke to the “FV” people that they disagreed with. This, I’m horrified to recount, is unique. None of the other committees and people who have investigated this “FV” stuff have ever bothered to email or phone anyone they are evaluating. At least the Clarkians did talk to us.
But the Clarkians don’t like the FV. Well, is that a surprise? The followers of Gordon Clark say that faith is notitia and assensus, but not fiducia. They have been objecting to historical Calvinism ever since the 1930s. They object to the so-called FV for the same reason: We say that faith involves loyalty, fiducia. Nothing new about that; it’s the standard Calvinistic position; but in the minds of Clarkians standard Calvinism is teaching salvation by faith plus works (fiducia). Hence, it’s hardly surprising that the Clarkians don’t like the FV. They don’t like Cornelius Van Til. They don’t like historic Calvinistic understandings of faith.
Then came the PCA Mississippi Valley Presbytery and its report. Well, they don’t like the FV. That’s no surprise. They don’t like Continental Reformed theology at all. They like Thornwell and the other Southerners, who said that baptized children are just little heathen until they have a “baptistic” faith experience and come to Jesus. They don’t like Hodge. They don’t like Calvin, save as filtered through a “bapterian” mysticism. They are happy with a mix of scholasticism and mysticism, and don’t like the kind of covenant-historical thinking of the Liberated movement and of Cornelius Van Til.
These people have repeatedly said that Presbyterians who like the Federal Vision ideas should leave the Presbyterian church and join a Continental Reformed body. We believe that it is they, with their American revivalistic individualistic mindset, who have departed from the Reformation and from the perspective not only of the Continental tradition, but also of the Westminster tradition. We claim that Westminster is not that much different from the 3FU, and that we stand with both. That’s not acceptable to Southern Presbyterians, who have been described as “baptists who sprinkle babies.”
The OPC chimed in next. No surprise. The OPC is full of Klineans who hate any type of cultural transformation. The whole Reformed “world and life view” tradition is rejected by the Klineans. They want a “spiritual” church that might as well be an invisible church, holed up in this wicked world and waiting for Jesus to come back. Not exactly the robust Calvinism of our postmillennial and “optimistic amillennial” forebears. So, the OPC report (from a stacked committee) rejects the FV. No surprise there.
Finally we come to Mid-America Reformed Seminary, and here I must confess that I was genuinely shocked and saddened. I expected the Southerners, the Clarkians, and the Klineans to dislike what we have been saying. That’s nothing new. They’ve objected to historic Calvinism for two generations at least. And it’s no surprise that the heirs of Kohlbruegge in the RCUS also dislike Norman Shepherd and the FV — after all, if you are suspicious of the whole Reformed doctrine of sanctification, you are not going to welcome people who say that faithful Christians are obedient Christians.
Reading the MARS report, however, I realized that what the MARS faculty dislikes is precisely the Schilderian/Holwerdian thinking that is found in the FV. I don’t know anything much about the politics in the URCNA, but it sure looks to me as an outsider that the MARS report is not really aimed at the FV at all, but at the Canadian Reformed. The things the MARS report criticizes about the FV are mostly Liberated ideas, which we FVers embrace.
To be sure, those of us being grouped into the FV are not on the same page with the Liberated at every point, but we certainly do have a lot of things in common: preferring not to speak of the church as visible and invisible, rejecting the notion of a meritorious covenant of works, treating baptized children as Christians, etc. We who have been put together in this FV Myth have all benefited greatly from the Liberated movement. I have on my shelf a complete file of Almond Branch magazine, which I received from 1971-79. (How many of you readers are old enough to know what that was?) Some “FV” churches use the Canadian Reformed Book of Praise as a hymnal.
Anyway, I guess your magazine will be a place where “FV” notions and scholastic/mystical notions will fight it out. I thought, though, that your readers might want to see how things look from one “major player” in this nonsense.
The worst aspect of this whole debacle is the fact that neither the OPC committee, nor the PCA committee, nor the MARS faculty ever made any contact with the “FV” people they criticize. Had they made even one phone call, they could have found out that we don’t believe most of what they accuse us of believing. I find this behavior appalling.
I have a bit more to say in a series of essays available at www.biblicalhorizons.com
James B. Jordan
Biblical Studies Dept.
Biblical Theological Seminary, St. Petersburg, Russia