Andy Webb has responded to my Demands of the System post here. In his handling of John 15, I actually appreciated and agreed with much of what he had to say, so this response might possibly bring some closure to this line of the argument. Just two crucial points.
First, Andy thinks that I was setting the Reformed Confessions against Scripture, which is not true. I subscribe to the original Westminster as the best extant summary of the teaching of Scripture. But Andy says:
“Doug Wilson once again shows the FV tendency to attempt to set the Reformed Confessions against scripture, alleging that those opposed to the ever-developing Federal Vision theology use them as a ‘Procrustean bed for Bible verses’ where ‘Verses are stretched or lopped off in order to fit their idea of the system.'”
My position is that Scripture is senior to the Confessions, and that the Confessions are senior to (and quite different from) popular American baptyrian readings of the Confessions. My allegation, quoted by Andy, was actually that “verses are stretched or lopped off in order to fit their idea of the system” (emphasis added). The system is fine. The Confessions are fine. The problem is that Reformed baptyrians have as many problem passages in the Confessions as they do in the Scriptures. What does “exhibited and conferred” mean again?
Second, in my post, I was engaging with the following claim that Andy had made:
“Contra the statements above, the Standards (and scripture) do not teach that the non-elect are ever united to Christ or saved in any sense” (emphasis added).
What I was responding to was the sweeping and universal claim that reprobate covenant members have no union with Christ whatever. But in this last post, Andy has now modified his claim, and so after this post I am happy to drop the point. He now says:
“At this point, no doubt Pastor Wilson and the other FV men will insist that I cannot assert that these branches that were cut off never had a vital, or living union with Christ, because he says they were ‘in me.'”
You can’t change horses in the middle of the stream, and you can’t change terms in the middle of the argument. I am actually happy with any adjectives that differentiate the branches that were united with the Vine, some fruitless and others fruitful. Such distinctions line up with the point of Christ’s parable. I simply am not happy with adjectives which deny the central point of the parable. To distinguish dead branches from living ones (all of them united in some sense to the Vine) is to reinforce the point of the parable. But to say that the dead “branches” were actually a bit of tumbleweed caught in the branches, or the neighbor kid’s lost frisbee, is to miss the point of the parable. If someone were to say, for example, that the dead branches in the Vine of Christ were actually branches in another vine in another vineyard entirely, five miles away, and if I were to object, it would not be to the point to say that Christ’s words were a parable. Yes, it is parable, spoken by the Lord Himself, and so we ought not to edit it like that.
So the claim I was responding to was that the reprobate covenant member never had any kind of union with Christ, not that he didn’t have a vital union. I agree that those who are cut off never had a vital union with Christ, as I argued over the course of three chapters in “Reformed” Is Not Enough. Not only do I agree that they don’t have vital union at the time they were cut off, I have also gone out of my way to teach that there is a vital union that they never had. Something was wrong with them from the beginning.
But Andy had argued that reprobate covenant members did not have any union with Christ, in any sense, at any level. And that is what I was responding to. John 15 clearly shows Andy’s original claim to be false, a point which Andy has now quietly granted. He even quotes Bishop Ryle in support of my point:
“There are myriads of professing Christians in every Church whose union with Christ is only outward and formal. Some of them are joined to Christ by baptism and Church-membership. Some of them go even further than this, and are regular communicants and loud talkers about religion. But they all lack the one thing needful. Notwithstanding services, and sermons, and sacrament, they have no grace in their hearts, no faith, no inward work of the Holy Spirit. They are not one with Christ, and Christ in them. Their union with Him is only nominal, and not real.”
The good bishop acknowledges all kinds of union with Christ here that are not real in the sense of being salvific, as do we, but which do constitute union with Christ in some sense. I mean, look at Ryle’s list again — nominal union, outward and formal union, baptismal union, church-membership union, intellectual assent union, verbal claims union, and communicant union. Bishop Ryle, he’s the man. If he can’t say it, nobody can.