Scott Clark on Federal Vision (Part 2)

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Federal Vision is in the news. You might ask, What is Federal Vision? Why does it matter? Who teaches

Federal Vision? And what's the scoop? So today, we have part two of our guest, Scott Clark, on No Compromise Radio.

If you didn't listen to yesterday's show, I suggest you do to catch yourself up to this very important topic that hits at the heart of Sola Fide and our most favorite doctrine almost, the justification by faith alone.

Scott, thanks for being back on No Compromise Radio again today. Great to be with you, Mike. Thank you for having me.

Let me start off by giving you a quote from R .C. Sproul. I saw my son, Luke, post this on Twitter yesterday.

R .C. Sproul said, I can't fathom why there's any hesitancy about rejecting

Federal Vision. There's too much at stake. This is the gospel we're talking about, end quote,

R .C. Sproul. Any comments? Well, R .C., I was watching live.

This is early days when you could watch, you know, brand new, you could watch the General Assembly.

This is the 2007 General Assembly of the PCA, Presbyterian Church in America, and that's one of the conservative

Presbyterian groups, not the mainline liberal Presbyterians. And they were debating, you know, whether to receive a report by a committee that had been very critical of the

Federal Vision, and whether they should publicly come out and reject the

Federal Vision. And there were some in the denomination who were a little worried about, you know, rejecting this.

If we're going to reject this, what else are we going to reject? They were arguing kind of a latitudinarian position that, you know, we start rejecting things, you know,

I might get rejected or something. And so, R .C., I don't know how often

R .C. went to GA, but he was there for this one. This was a big one. And he stood up, and he said the very words that you just read.

And as I watched it online, it seems to me that that comment changed the direction of the discussion in the

General Assembly. So, for those who haven't been to a General Assembly or a Senate, it operates a little bit like Congress or the

Senate. Maybe the Senate is a better way, a better analogy. So, people stand up and make speeches.

There are motions and votes and all of that, and that's what this was about. So it was like a senator standing up, making a speech on the floor of the

Senate, swaying all the other senators, and then they voted to reject the federal vision theology.

So he was exactly right. Say what you will about R .C., but he knew the difference between the

Law and the Gospel. He was a Lutheran man. He's a Reformation guy, and he wasn't interested in messing around.

You know, when Chuck Colson and J .I. Packer drafted and others drafted the

Evangelicals and Catholics together and published this confusing, ambiguous statement on justification, he was right there with the others to denounce it and to publish an alternative.

And again, when they did it again, he spoke up again. So he was a stalwart when it came to the inerrancy of Scripture, the doctrine of justification, the holiness of God, and so many other things.

But, you know, the Reformed theologian in 1618, J .H. Allstead, borrowing from Luther, to be sure, said that justification is the article of the standing or falling of the

Church. So if we don't get this right, we lose the Church. You know, as Bob Guthrie says, you know, if we don't feed people, other people will feed them.

If we don't clothe them, other people will clothe them, other organizations. But if we don't preach the Gospel, nobody else will preach the

Gospel. That's one of the very few things, as I understand it, the Church essentially has three jobs, and that's job number one, preach the

Gospel. And so if we don't get that right, then we're in very serious trouble.

Yeah, but Scott, you don't understand. There's a culture war, and a government overreach, and a bunch of woke people doing their woke things.

And so it seems to me that these cultural issues have functionally boiled to the top and have eclipsed

Sola Fide. And this is what people always say. You know, the culture, we have other fish to fry, is what people say.

They've been saying this to me for 20 years. Yeah, 20 years ago, people were saying, oh, shut up about the federal vision and all that.

You know, we have these big cultural problems we need to face. Well, I'd like somebody to show me from the

New Testament, where did anyone tell the Apostle Paul not to rebuke

Peter for refusing to eat with the Gentiles, and thereby, according to Paul, you know, corrupt the

Gospel, to deny the Gospel, and then to record it under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit to record it in the book of Galatians for posterity?

Where did anybody tell him? You know, there's a lot of bad things happening in the

Roman Empire. There's chemical abortions, there's slavery, homosexuality, lesbianism, pederasty, all the things that are really genuinely terrible that we're worried about now, they were all going on in the first century in the

Roman Empire. And show me where the Apostle Paul compromised the Gospel, cut a deal with compromisers in order to fight the culture war.

What letter did the Apostle Paul write to Nero or Claudius or any

Roman leader to deal with the great pressing cultural issues of the first century?

Where is that letter? I've never seen it. Well, I love your reference to Rome, because if you think of Romans chapter 1,

Paul said, I'm eager to preach the Gospel to you. And whether they're unbelievers or believers, we've got one message, and it's the good news.

Scott, years ago, of course, many denominations condemned federal vision.

And so the ecclesiastical reports from the URCNA, the

ARP, the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, Mid -America Reform Seminary, and others said federal vision is wrong.

And here's a couple of points from the OPC report, because many of our listeners would understand an

Orthodox Presbyterian Church. 11. 11. A denial of the imputation of the active obedience of Christ in justification.

12. Defining justification exclusively as the forgiveness of sins. 14.

Including works by use of the words faithfulness and obedience in the very definition of faith.

And then 15. Failing to affirm an infallible perseverance and the indefectibility of grace.

Have we forgotten all these ecclesiastical reports? And from my Baptist point of view, those reports, they take a long time.

If it takes eight years to get Norman Shepard kicked out of Westminster, Philly, they're going to do their due diligence as Presbyterians and not knee -jerk it, right?

I think that's right. I mean, I don't know that all of the groups, you know, investigated it thoroughly, but they did benefit from the work of the groups that did investigate it.

And so the RCUS study committee particularly worked on Doug Wilson, because they've had a history of theonomy, and so there was a particular reason to be concerned about that.

The PCA report is very well done, very carefully done. The URC report is well done, the

OPC report is well done. The URC has actually spoken to this three times.

So we have our own canonical committee report on the federal vision and justification. We have a report rejecting justification through works in 2004, and we even adopted nine points of pastoral advice on the federal vision, where we, you know, we deny, we say, therefore sin that rejects the errors of those who, for example, deny or modify the teaching that God created men good, and it goes on until nine points.

So these things are extremely valuable, very accessible. I've got them all organized for you at heidelblog .net

slash resources, and then just search there for the resource page. It's all alphabetized on the federal vision, and then when you get there, there's a section, and there's a table of contents even.

You just have to click on the link, and it'll take you to the section of all the ecclesiastical reports and actions.

And so, yeah, there is a great consensus, and yet, as you say, since 2007, people have sort of gradually forgotten or ignored or dismissed, and that is special pleading and self -serving is what it is, when people say, oh, well, ignore that.

Why? Well, because I want you to. Well, that's called special pleading, and that's not a compelling argument.

Either the various denominations were right about the federal vision, or they were wrong. And of course, there are lots of things that people say, oh, well, it's changed.

Well, not really. Well, Wilson doesn't believe in federal vision anymore. No, he does.

When you tell me that, you're just telling me that you read the headline of a blog post, but you didn't actually read the blog post.

Because in the post, he said, in the article, he said, oh, I still believe it all, I just don't want to be called a federal visionist.

That's like an arsonist publishing an article saying, you know, arsonist, no, I'm not. I don't want to be called an arsonist anymore.

Well, do you still carry gasoline around and light buildings on fire? Oh, sure.

Yeah, I've always lit buildings on fire, and I still light them. I stand by all my fires that I set, but I don't want to be called an arsonist.

Well, who's the deconstructionist, radical, you know, nominalist now?

I liked it when Adriel Sanchez on Twitter went after Andrew Sandlin, he goes by Doc Sandlin, and Sandlin said, faith alone is the instrument of justification, not faith and works.

Faith is always accompanied by good works, so we're justified by faith alone, never by a faith that's alone.

This isn't heresy, this is good old -fashioned, biblical, confessional, Calvinistic orthodoxy. So that's what

Sandlin posted. And then Sanchez posted a bunch of quotes from Sandlin's book that would deny the very things if you compare the text with a tweet, and I guess maybe,

Scott, my question is this. What should a federal visionist do if they no longer believe federal vision theology?

Instead of playing semantics and everything else, why can't they just say, I repudiate it,

I don't believe it, I'm no longer part of this denomination? What should they do? Because they're just, many of them, and Sandlin's case in point,

September 28th tweet, I think they're just game -playing. Well, I mean, this is the thing.

So there's two things. First, Doc Sandlin, Andrew Sandlin, is a heartfelt opponent to the

Reformation's distinction between law and gospel. Last I knew, he is alleged to have written a doctoral dissertation on the work of F.

Scott Clark, about the law -gospel distinction. So I've been looking for this,

I've asked him to send it to me, and he wrote to me and said, well, it's a typo, it's supposed to be R, and I thought, you know, when

I did my doctoral dissertation, I learned how to spell the name of the guy whom I was studying. So that was the first thing

I learned to do. I was going to say, you know, the old

S's looked like F's, but that's not going to work with an R, is it? No, no, no, it's not it.

You know, I'm not that old. So he hates the law -gospel distinction, as do most of the

Federal Visionists, in fact, all of them, as far as I know. And that's a fundamental Protestant basic that we all share.

So there's that. So let's say somebody is tired of being a Federal Visionist. I just happen to have a form.

So in some churches, there are forms to be read. When there's discipline, or when communion is being administered, or when a baptism is being administered, we read a form.

And so, I won't read the whole thing, but I did write and publish in 2013, or maybe before that, even.

Yeah, no, 2008. So it got reprinted in 2013. In 2008, I wrote a form, because I thought, well, some of these people are probably going to change their mind.

So I said, To all whom these presents do come, I hereby declare that I really and heartily believe in, form and substance, what the

Reformed Churches confess, that God declares sinners righteous, sola gratia, sola fide, only on the grounds of the imputation of the whole and perfect obedience of Christ.

I also confess that being caught up in the fever of the moment, I was attracted to the anti -revivalist rhetoric of the federal vision movement, and my enthusiasm for their anti -revivalism and anti -subjectivism led me to embrace doctrines and practices

I now recognize to have been mistaken. And then I go on. And so, there's a form here, where I give them an opportunity to list all the sins and errors that they've committed by virtue of the federal vision error.

And then at the end, there's a classic announcement of sin.

Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. So, there you go. Well, Scott, I don't think it's that hard.

I mean, it goes against our pride, of course, but I've said many times, and I want to keep saying it, that years ago, while I'd like to blame other people and books that I read,

I taught an eternal functional subordination. And I was wrong.

I repent. I don't teach that anymore. And I tell people, I don't teach that anymore, and I'm wrong.

And I keep repeating those kind of things. And so, how hard is that? You just tell people, I was wrong.

It was sinful. Please forgive me. And then we move on. And in your particular case, we sign a form.

Do you have a form for me, when I used to teach eternal functional subordination? I can make one.

Well, you know, mea culpa, I did the same thing. You know, in the late 80s, mid to late 80s, we were all worried about what we now know to be third -wave feminism.

We didn't know what to do and how to respond, and so some folks that we trusted probably mistakenly came along and said, we can fix this.

We will say that male -female relations are just like the relations between the father and the son, and just in the way that females submit to their husbands, etc.,

the son has eternally been subordinate to the father.

We were just talking about that in class today, because today was an ancient church class, and we were talking a little bit about the

Nicene Creed. And I told them, look, I was not a sufficiently

Nicene Christian. It wasn't in my bones. So had I been a truly

Nicene Christian, and had I read or heard somebody say the words eternal and subordination in the same sentence, right,

I would have known, oh no, hold on, you can't do that. We don't believe that.

I shouldn't have teached that. We settled this at Nicaea. You can't say eternal and subordinate of the son in the same sentence without becoming an

Aryan. So this is what happens when American evangelicals, and you know, at mea culpa, I got caught up in this myself.

And it was a serious error, a gross error, and arguably a heresy against the ecumenical faith.

So this is the American thing. We're always remaking stuff. And so it was a good—I was actually chastised by a prof, a fellow prof at Wheaton, sort of just popped into my office and started railing at me about this.

I had no idea where it came from or why, but as it turns out, I thought about what he said, and he was right, and I was wrong.

And so yeah, if you believe in grace, then there's no shame in admitting you're wrong, right?

But if your standing before God depends on being right all the time, then it's much harder,

I think, to admit that you are wrong. Scott, let's talk a little bit about helping our listeners.

If our listeners know of folks that believe the federal vision and they're dialoguing with them back and forth—I mean, we could talk about all kinds of things out of Moscow, but I'm mainly focused on the federal vision issue.

If I—what are some good diagnostic questions, Columbo -like questions?

You know, the detective and he's walking out the door. Oh, one more thing. You said faith, you know, please define it.

Yeah. How should our folks talk to the federal visionist to get them to really, you know, show their true hand so then they could try to combat that?

Well, one—I think the core error is this. Is there more than one way of being in the covenant of grace?

So, traditionally in Reformed theology, we say there are those who have an internal relation and an external relation.

But there are those who only have an external relation. Or we could say in the

Church, there are those, for example, like Judas, we could say, who was in the Church and yet not believing.

Obviously, it seems like from Hebrews 6, there were people in that congregation who didn't actually believe.

Ananias and Sapphira apparently didn't actually believe. And there are other people listed in the New Testament who were in the

Church and didn't believe. Are those people actually in the Church in some sense? And if you get that right, then that saves you a lot of problems.

What does baptism do? Does baptism confer all of the benefits of Christ, or is baptism a sign and a seal of what is true of believers?

So what is the instrument here? Is it baptism, or is it faith? That's another diagnostic question.

How do they define faith? Is faith resting, receiving, trusting, you know, knowledge, assent, and trust?

Or is it loyalty, fidelity, faithfulness? That's a diagnostic question.

How many stages are there in justification? Are you initially justified by grace alone through faith alone, but only to be finally justified through good works?

Or is it the case that there's only one stage?

I mean, frankly, anybody who talks to you about two stages, that person is halfway to Rome. Maybe more than halfway.

So I wouldn't let anybody who believes in two stages teach you about the doctrine of justification.

So those are some diagnostic questions. Why are you giving communion to your infants?

Don't you know that baptism is the sign of initiation into the Church, and communion is the sign of renewal?

You see people giving communion. I mean that. You know, dipping little pieces of bread into wine and giving it to infants.

Why are you doing that? Why are you collapsing the two signs? Sign of initiation, sign of renewal.

Those are the kinds of diagnostic things that you could look for and talk about.

I think that would make a great little Heidel blog article.

I'm not trying to give you work to do, but those kind of questions are important because people are trying to weed through this very muddy issue and confusing issue.

I think so many people believe so many things about it. It's fluid. They also, I think in my mind, are trying to confuse the people listening.

And so I like that. I always say, Scott, there's only one thing worse than intinction, and that is infant intinction.

For what it's worth, I don't actually think that the federal vision is that complicated. It was for me because there were no roadmaps or handbooks when

I was trying to figure this out. We were living it in the early 2000s, and it was developing right in front of us.

But now in 2022, we know what it is. And anybody who tells you, listener, or you,

Mike, that, well, nobody really knows, that tells me this person has not done the reading.

They haven't read the primary sources. I have. They haven't read the various responses, and I have.

And I've written responses, many, many of them, both in books and pamphlets, online articles.

So it isn't really mysterious, and I don't actually think that it is shifting.

People are shifting. How about that? But I don't think the federal vision is shifting.

So if somebody says, well, you know, federal vision no more, meaning federal vision no more, and the title gives the impression that a person is rejecting the federal vision, but then when you read the article, they're saying, well, no,

I still do. I still believe everything I said. Well, then you know you're not dealing with somebody who is, as we used to say back home, a straight shooter.

Scott, maybe we can add another question. Why won't, why doesn't Doug Wilson take down his book,

Reformed is Not Enough, from the Canon Press website? I mean, if you're in charge of the press,

I mean, if I call Zondervan and say, stop publishing my Romans commentary from S. Lewis Johnson, it's probably harder for me to do that than it would be if I owned

Zondervan. But then you'd call me Rupert Murdoch, maybe. But why, in other words, why are they still publishing material that they say they no longer believe?

Well, that's because they don't, they still believe it. I don't think anything's changed. And by the way,

I'm glad you mentioned that title, because I think that is the crucial title in that respect, in respect to figuring out what the leading advocate actually believes.

It's in print, and nothing has changed. So, you know, you don't get to be reformed and say reformed is not enough.

So this is equivalent to handing tools to a chimpanzee and turning him loose on your

Rolls -Royce engine. Say, go ahead and work on my Rolls -Royce, chimpanzee. Here's our set of metric tools.

Go at it. That's crazy. You have to know what you're doing. You have to understand how the engine works.

And you have not to be a chimpanzee. Those are the prerequisites for working on a Rolls -Royce. And so when you've written a book saying reformed is not enough, you've disqualified yourself to get to redefine the reformed faith.

He and others are dialectical. They say regularly, A and not

A, at the same time about the same thing. And when that happens, in politics, we call it gaslighting.

The guy's just stepping on your toes and telling you, oh, I'm not really stepping on your toes. No, you really are.

I can feel it. It hurts. So no, you can tell me that you're not.

It's like when the cops arrest people and the guy says, I'm submitting, you know, I'm not resisting.

While he's resisting, how do I know you're not resisting? Because you're not reaching into your waistband for a firearm.

That's how I know you're not resisting. You're relaxing. You're putting your hands behind your back. So we just have to think clearly and talk sense about this and pay attention.

And yet you do have to be willing to believe your eyes. So when a guy writes a book, reformed is not enough.

Or when he tells you in an article, no, I still believe the federal vision. You have to be willing to believe your eyes that, well, okay, that's the truth.

Talking to Scott Clark today, R. Scott Clark, he's professor at Westminster Theological Seminary in Escondido, California, and writes on the

Heidel blog. I think you can also go to his website rscottclark .org and find all kinds of interesting and edifying articles.

Scott, when I first got to know you, I went to that site and looked up your reading list for certain classes, you know, a two -hour class.

And I thought, that's more than I used to have to read for a four -hour class at other schools. And so I just,

I got the list of books and just went through and bought them all. And I still haven't read them all, but I'm working on it. Well, my students complain.

And I just remind them that when I was in seminary, after we graduated, the accreditors came in and they cut the curriculum down by 10%.

So what I'm assigning is at least 10 % less than what I was assigned. And I didn't die.

So they'll survive. Well, thank you for being on the show. I wanted to make sure we talked a little bit more about this very important topic.

It's back in the news, and I don't think it's going away. And, you know, for many of you may be listening, you don't know that Cannon Press is in your church because it's in your homeschool movement.

And there's all kinds of other things going on with this. But I wanted to make sure people could understand justification by faith alone is very, very important and that we need to stand for the truth.

And if people don't like it, then come what may. Scott, thanks for being on the show today. Thanks, Mike.

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