Don Carson on The Federal Vision (updated)

Rev'd Professor Don A. Carson commented carefully and very helpfully on The Federal Vision (FV) or High Church Presbyterianism at the Evangelical Ministry Assembly (EMA) at St Helen's, Bishopgate today. The FV was also discussed in questions with Carson at New Word Alive this year, I believe.

I suggest you listen to it in full when the recording becomes available (online or to buy, I think).

I paraphrase from memory.

In the "On the Record off the Cuff slot", Rev'd Richard Cunningham asked Carson if engagement with the FV is a "99" moment analogous to the times when the captain of the British Lions called on his team to all run up and punch their opposite numbers amongst the Springbox!

Carson seemed to think not. He said that he thought such moments came rarely if ever and that such things should only be done in a spirit of brokenness, if they must be done.

A fair ammount of the hour long interview was given over to the topic and to my mind it felt like the main issue of substance tackled. Unity with Charismatics and the emerging church were also discussed. I imagine most of those present had not heard of the Federal Vision which is quite a small movement in the States and a little elsewhere. Tiny to non-existent in the UK.

Carson identified 2 main points about the FV:

(1) The issues themselves where the questions are nuanced and the answers complex.

We must be careful in our treatment of the movement which has strengths and powerful things things to teach us.

Rev'd Douglas Wilson is the most able / best advocate of things FV. He has written lots of fine stuff and is tremendously gifted. [You can find largely positive reviews of a couple of Wilson's books in The Briefing from this last year or so. I believe Wilson is due to speak at a John Piper / Desiring God conference on Calvin and the glory of God in Sept '09].

Carson didn't really go into the issues beyond what is mentioned here.

(2) The way the issues have been presented and advocated.

We must not assume we know the motives of others.

Young people tend to like the kind of tough minded clarity that some of the FV offers. It may be especially attractive to Evangelical Anglicans.

The best established teachers may not make the FV the be all and end all but students often pick up on their teachers' interests and enthusiasms even if they are not that important in themselves or to their teachers. Carson commented that the main thing he had learnt as a teacher is that students don't learn what he teaches them!

Some FVers may be like one string violins taken up with one or two issues.

Some of the younger FVers especially may have gone a bit OTT or expressed things badly etc.

Some young FVers may be going through a growing up experimental phase.

It may be that some FVers have noticed weaknesses in some contemporary evangelicalism (e.g. about baptism) and over reacted. Such movements can be the unpaid debts of the church.

We must keep the main things the main things and keep the (richly understood) gospel and evangelism central and controlling to everything, rather than, say, Christian education and baptism, though of course the issues are all related.

The gospel must not be simply assumed. We need to continue to be interested and excited about that above all. Neglecting evangelism is a danger.

We want to stick to historical Reformed orthodoxy in so far as it is Biblical and so on.

Like e.g. Young Earth Creationism we must not make the FV a touchstone of soundness, unity or fellowship.

I agree with all that and think we all need to hear it, FVers, sympathisers and opponents alike.

I might also have mentioned Rev'd Dr Peter Leithart PhD(Cantab) as a brilliant FVer. Rev'd James Jordan of Biblical Horizons has been a major influence. I think their writings repay very careful and thoughtful reading.

Obviously, as a Baptist, Carson disagrees with some of the FV stuff on baptism and I guess he thinks that baptism should always be tied to personal conversion from a life of sin and a more or less articulate declaration of individual faith. He thinks there are dangers in speaking too highly of baptismal efficacy and of kinds of presumptive regeneration which he sees as problematic historically e.g. in Holland. These latter point, of course, FVers would grant, but Carson did not address the possibility of infant faith in his brief comments nor the other arguments for infant baptism that are well known for example to the readers of the Westminster Confession or the Institutes of the Christian Religion.

Food for thought and on-going healthy discussion, I think. No punch-ups called for, then?

Ironically, I think opponents of the FV sometimes make FV a primary dividing issue by saying it is a heretical other gospel to be hated and stamped out whereas it seems Carson would prefer to say just that it is wrong and dangerous in certain respects, whatever might be going for it. I think this is a vital distinction and I imagine most FVers would grant that in many ways it is a 2nd or 23rd order issue.