Scott Clark appears to be auguring in. First, he complains about someone on the URC list who received a request from China to have the Federal Vision statement translated into Chinese. Clark was displeased with the fellow on the list who then arranged for it.
“. . . a post from China asking for a translation into Chinese of the new FV Statement. So he naturally issued a call for translators to help spread the galawspel of the FV in China. Could there be anything more heartbreaking?”
I’ll tell you what let’s do. Why don’t we arrange for a debate between Clark and me, in any setting, format, or town — written, audio, or live — and then we have that translated into Chinese? Should fix everything.
But Clark is the kind of defender of the faith who accomplishes his goal in this respect by retreating to a new setting where nobody is attacking it. He is certainly willing to pronounce about the outside world, but it is a fundamental part of his outlook that no backchat is to be permitted from that outside world. Debates go better that way. First he turned off the comments feature on his blog because questions and counterarguments are just pesky, and incipiently Pelagian. And now he has established a new list-serve for URC types, except for those URC types who are not URCish enough, wanting to translate the other side of a debate into Chinese. Don’t people know that if you want to know what somebody teaches, you must not ask them but must go to their adversaries? So the new list has to have a strict RULE because if we want to contend for the gospel of free grace we have to do it with a strict RULE. Galawspel indeed. Anyhow, there is just one rule for this new list.
“Contradiction of the Reformed Confessions is forbidden. This doesn’t mean that there can’t be any questions about our confession and catechisms, but it does mean that folks can’t contradict our confessions under the guise of being Reformed. What this does mean is that the URCNA list is no place for Federal Visionists or other movements that are fundamentally subversive of the Reformed confession.”
Life in a tight, confessionally-sealed echo chamber. But after a time, things will get messy in there, what with a few remaining people coming and going and all, and so access to the chamber will eventually be restricted to one visit annually by one seminary professor, preferrably from California. Little bells will be sewn onto his jacket and a rope will be tied around his ankle in case he has a heart attack in there.
A prophet, one of your own, one H.L. Mencken, described this phenomenon very well when he said, “All ecclesiastical establishments are very sensitive.”