Greenbaggins has raised the spilt milk issue, and is wondering whether my repeated raising of the stacked committee issue is worthwhile, now that the vote has gone down. But before I answer this, now that we are on the subject again, let me just say that the committee was as stacked as a Campbell soup display in the front aisle of Safeway. But my metaphors aren’t getting through to Lane, and he now argues that for me to keep returning to this issue betrays a lack of confidence in God’s sovereignty.
“And yet, look at Wilson’s last post. What good will it do to continue to state that the deck was stacked? Is he going to convince anyone of it? Question to Wilson: was the composition of the study committee somehow outside the providence of God?”
There are two issues here. First, I do not believe that the fact that God has decreed something is in any way inconsistent with the free agency and responsibility of man. This is because He decrees everything, and we remain responsible for our little portion of that everything. If I sinned yesterday, I know as a good Calvinist that this was part of the decretal will of God, settled before all worlds. But I also know that His decrees do not annihilate my responsibility to confess my sin heartily and honestly. So of course God decreed that the PCA General Assembly would do exactly what they did. And that does not in any way remove the moral responsibility of the men who greased the parliamentary skids with an holy unction.
The second part of Lane’s question is this. “Is he going to convince anyone of it?” Well, yes, actually. I intend to convince quite a few people of it, and I don’t have to do a lot of talking. This is not a hard sell. It is, to use a theological phrase, stinking obvious. All I have to do is continue to point out that the committee had no minority report, and the fact that it was not going to have a minority report was assured and settled from the very beginning, from the moment the committee assignments were first given.
I have said for a number of years that this is a battle over the second year seminarians. There are any number of young men who do not yet have a dog in the fight. They are in the “reading up on it” stage. They do not have a job yet (meaning that they don’t have a job that can be threatened), and these young bucks are just sitting there watching this whole thing. Their heads are going back and forth, like the crowd at Wimbledon watching a really hot tennis match. Huh, they think. Look at that. Whoa, they think. Look at that. Does Lane really think that the rigged nature of this charade is not obvious to any disinterested observer? Does he really think I would have any trouble persuading people that a stacked committee was a stacked committee?
There are some who are suspicious of the Federal Vision who are men of integrity, and they don’t like the way this thing is being done. Lane should join them. I have a good friend, deeply skepical of FV, who is consistently embarrassed by the behavior of the anti-FV national leaders.
And David Bayly, no friend of the FV, said this:
Tim and I believe the Ad Interim Report would have been stronger if the committee had contained representatives of Federal Vision views. Our experience both in authoring and in taking part in such committees leads us to believe that the inclusion of foes uniformly sharpens the thinking–and ultimately the reporting–of such committees.
This is exactly correct, and the fact that this was not done is the standing legacy of that hand-picked committee. You know, the committee that was as stacked as all the Miles Davis LPs in an FM radio station basement. Lane would be well-advised to give up the vain task of defending men who ought to be able to defend themselves, but who, in the political world they live in, won’t need to at all. They don’t need Lane to carry water for them because they are going to just brazen it out. This was a parliamentary power move — “because we can” — and we on the receiving end are all grown-ups. We understand what is being done to us. And we trust the sovereignty of God in the midst of it. But the sovereignty of God over sin sanctifies no sin. Only the blood of Jesus Christ does that.