Green Baggins is a web site critical of the FV. While some of the standard issue misunderstandings are on display there, and the language of heresy is unfortunately employed too quickly for my taste, nevertheless there is an obvious personal and theological integrity, displayed in a willingness to correct things once they have been worked through.
Lane (the man behind Green Baggins) has begun a series of posts on “Reformed” Is Not Enough, and I will try to keep a discussion going as he does so. I would like to keep this more like a discussion than a debate, and maybe we can all learn something.
He doesn’t like the title of my book, even when the scare quotes around “Reformed” are noted. And he caught a typo in the book — an instance where the scare quotes were omitted, which they certainly should not have been. Let me first make a comment on what the title was intended to mean, and then a statement on the context of its use. The title means that it is not enough to call yourself Reformed; for those in our confessional tradition, it is necessary to actually be Reformed. Now a central part of the FV critique of the broader Reformed world is that we have accommodated ourselves too much with the American baptistic tradition, and this has affected how we read our confessional standards (which do not represent such an accommodation). For example, a number of our critics think they have put distance between themselves and the baptists (as they have, some) by saying that the sacraments are means of grace. But they hasten to add that this is always sanctifying grace. The language of salvation is inappropriate here. The problem with this is that the Westminster Catechisms both ask how is it that the two sacraments are effectual means of salvation. And so, I say in this title that you are not necessarily in the confessional tradition just because you call yourself “Reformed.” That is what it meant.
Was it a provocative title? Well, I don’t think you could call it provocative, but it was combative. I reject the charge of provocation because it was not an attempt on our part to start anything — the controversy was already in full swing. And remember how all this started. We had a pastors’ conference, of the ordinary kind, and we had absolutely no idea of starting anything. It was just the theme of that conference that year. About six months later, we were blindsided by the pronouncement of the RPCUS, and it was a jumbled theological hash of a pronouncement too. But one thing was clear — the bottom line was a “may God have mercy on their souls” kind of dismissal. John Robbins then assiduously made sure that the news was spread all over Reformed tarnation. We were in the middle of a firestorm created by some ignorant and envious men, and so, yeah, the title of my book was a challenge. I had just been consigned to hell for affirming a bunch of things I actually don’t affirm, by men who had never talked to me about it, and I knew for a fact that John Calvin’s twin brother would be run out of Joe Morecraft’s church for sacerdotalism. This was all being done in the name of being Reformed, and so I answered the “Reformed.”
At the same time, the issue was not their doctrine. It was their narrow sectarianism. I know that the “TR” position has been an honorable part of the Reformed faith from the beginning, and I have no difficulty in fellowshipping with such men, up to and including baptists. From our side, these are not heresy issues at all. But men who think that their little blinkered corner of Toad Flatts, Alabama represents the variegated richness of the Reformed faith need to drive to the nearest big city and check a book out of the library.
So then, the strict TR position is not “Reformed.” The position of the sacramental Calvinists is not “Reformed.” The Kuyperian position is not “Reformed.” But any subset of of the historic Reformed world, taking itself for the whole, is “Reformed.” The problem is not holding to certain convictions within the Reformed context. The problem is Reformed sectarianism, and when that happens, I call it “Reformed.”
It looks as though, from the initial comments that Lane made, a good portion of this discussion will revolve around the question of sacramentalism, touched on above, so I will hold on that for the time being. The one thing I will say here is that my views on sacramental union in the Lord’s Supper are basically the same as Calvin’s (and as rejected by Dabney), and as articulated by Keith Mathison in Given for You.