I take barlow’s point about confessions, and would like to come at it from another angle. I say this as someone who subscribes (in all honesty) to the original Westminster Confession, and we use the Westminster Confession as the curriculum for our systematics class at Greyfriars’ Hall. This means that I teach through the Confession phrase by phrase every other year. I think the Confession is hot stuff. I love the Confession.
But loving the Confession has resulted in reading it carefully, and trying to understand it. When I first arrived in the Reformed world, still wet behind the ears (I had been a baptist), and began learning from the Reformed fathers, the Puritans, and the Confession itself, I soon found myself saying things that put me at odds with my mainstream evangelical background and heritage. And it wasn’t just the predestination stuff — that’s what I thought I was going to get, that is what I was expecting.
After a respectable time lag, I also had become a sacramental Calvinist, and this, remarkably enough, seemed to put me at odds with a number of presbyterians. The high church Calvinists here on this list no doubt understand the sensation. I have, similarly, called myself a high church Puritan for some years, and have puzzled more than one person.
This brings us to an amplification of barlow’s point. It has already been said that we need to do something when the original context of the Confession is no longer widely understood, when the compromises they were making are overlooked, and when a number of centuries have gone by, placing us in a different set of circumstances. These are not arguments for ditching the Confession, but they are arguments for adapting responsibly to the new set-up. We need to do something.
I would argue that this need becomes urgent when someone in the largest Reformed denomination in America can get in serious trouble for simply quoting the Confession, and if the most likely charge that would be brought is that of violating the Confessional Standards. Imagine a presbytery exam, where the hapless candidate was foolish enough to say that he thought baptism and the Lord’s Supper “were effectual means of salvation.”
I’m mostly sympathetic with Doug on this. The present ecclesiastical context some of us live in (PCA) understands confessions in a different manner than the Assembly did, and surely differently than other European reformed traditions did. The subscription debates in the PCA several years back manifest that. However, I’m not sure we are in need of a parachurch (FV) movement calling the church to be more faithful to her calling. The parachurch temper of the evangelical movement has metastasized in the American Reformed communities as well. This from one teaching at an evangelical seminary (Gordon-Conwell) without any ecclesiastical moorings. Many of us have lamented the democratization of evangelicalism for years. The parachurch orientation of the movement(s) is one strong indicator of that. With regard to confessions, there are enormous obstacles to the building of consensus necessary for serious confession writing these days. Too many feudal empires with which to contend. If the FV folks are serious about ecclesiology and confession, recognize the parachurch tendencies that seem to undermine your otherwise noble intentions. I remember the discouragement that Darryl, John and I felt at the Cambridge Platform conference a decade ago when the ACE folk were trying to write a new confession for the 21rst century – as a voluntary society!?!?!
Prof. Lints: For the record, I really enjoyed your Fabric of Theology and look forward to reading Personal Identity. I’ve been well served by your work and thank you for it!
I understand and agree with your ultimate concerns here. But. The loosely associated network of friends that others have labeled “Federal Vision” cannot really be described as a “parachurch movement.” We are all good churchmen. We are all active churchmen. We have no extra-exclessiastical organization as, say, the Navigators or Campus Crusade does. We are friends that share some theological convictions and we happen to be in different ecclesiastical communions or different presbyteries in the same communion. If that’s a movement, then so be it. But it’s not a “parachurch” movement otherwise we may as well trash the Reformation for the same kinds of reasons. For that matter, the Puritan “movement” was a parachurch movement because it included men in various ecclesiastical settings who joined hands in common theological and ethical causes.
Does that make sense?