D Hart

Some have voiced frustration with the discussion here about tradition because it distracts from more substantial conversations about the teaching of FV. At the risk of trying the patience of the anti-formalists, I would like the FV people to consider the following set of quotations from Carl Trueman about James Buchanan’s formulation of justification. I believe it bears on both the form and the content of the debate, and how difficult it is to separate the two — in other words, why it is dangerous to separate the formulation of justification from the Reformed tradition per se (in other words, what happens when you don’t connect the dots between Vos and Ursinus).

Trueman writes:
“. . . tinkering with justification, indeed tinkering with a host of other doctrines with which justification is connected, will serve to place on’s theology outside the bounds of the Westminster Standards. Deny the covenant of works, for example, and one implicitly denies the whole structure of justification taught in the standards. Then again, if one wishes to historicize and relativize imputation by claiming that this doctrine did in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries what some other doctrine can or must do today, one needs to revise and reconstruct a whole host of other doctrines to make the claim coherent; and in doing so, if one is being honest, one is really required to abandon anything even vaguely resembling confessional Reformed orthodoxy. One can repeat the shibboleth of, say ‘union with Christ’ indefinitely — and such a concept is certainly germane to Reformed theology — but unless this is clearly set within a solid, federal scheme akin to that outlined by Buchanan, the content of the phrase will not be Reformed in any meaningful, historic, confessional way. This is not to say that the Westminster Standards, or the Reformed orthodox tradition as a whole, demands precise agreement on every jot and tittle of doctrine . . . but it is to say that both the content of justification and its basic placement within the federal structure of Reformed theology are clear and nonnegotiable for those committed by church vow to upholding the theology of the Westminster Standards.”

While I’m at it, Trueman also writes about Buchanan’s work in a way that I find quite consistent with my own understanding of tradition and how it functions in the work of a Reformed churchman: “Buchanan was not a generic evangelical who responded to the Enlightenment by privileging piety or experience over doctrinal formulation; nor was he a Bible-thumping ‘no book but the Bible’ fundamentalist for whom the church’s doctrinal tradition was just so much quasi-Roman bunkum; nor was he a reactionary obscruantist who was simply committed to mouthing the old shibboleths and talking nostalgically about a mythical golden age of doctrinal and ecclesiastical purity. Rather, he was a confessional Presbyterian, obliged by his ecclesiastical vows not only to take the historic teaching of his church seriously and to expound and defend the theology of the Westminster Standards as consistent with Scripture, but also to use these, and the tradition of theology to which they belonged, as a principal resource for combatting error in his role as protector and shepherd of God’s flock.” (The Faith Once Delivered, ed., Anthony Selvaggio, pp. 61, 60.)

Date: Sep 23rd, 2007 · Comments RSS · Tags: Federal Vision