Aldo Leon Dissects Doug Wilson (Part 1)

Welcome to No Compromise Radio, a ministry coming to you from Bethlehem Bible Church in West Boylston. No Compromise Radio is a program dedicated to the ongoing proclamation of Jesus Christ, based on the theme in Galatians 2, verse 5, where the Apostle Paul said, �But we did not yield in subjection to them for even an hour, so that the truth of the gospel would remain with you.

In short, if you like smooth, watered-down words to make you simply feel good, this show isn�t for you. By purpose, we are first biblical, but we can also be controversial. Stay tuned for the next 25 minutes as we�re called by the Divine Trumpet to summon the troops for the honor and glory of her King.

Here�s our host, Pastor Mike Abendroth.

Guest Introduction and Ministry Background

Welcome to No Compromise Radio, a ministry. My name is Mike Abendroth, and I regularly tell people that my favorite No Compromise Day is Wednesday, and that�s because we have guests on. We have theologians, pastors, authors, and I get to hear from other parts of the country and the world and see what the Lord is doing through different people, and today is no different.

Today, we have a guest on, and I heard this guest on another podcast, and I thought to myself when I was listening at 1 .5 speed, I was in the gym doing squats, and I thought, �This guy is right up NoCo�s alley.

This guy is so excited, enthusiastic, hyped up, and straight-to-the-point blunt that he�s going to make me look sweet, so I�m going to have this guest on today for lots of reasons, including those.

Although, Leigh Ann, welcome to No Compromise Radio.

Hey, it�s good to be on here. I�ve been listening on and off to NoCo for a while, and I thought some of the similar things that you said as you heard me is like, �Yeah, he�s a straight-shooter, to-the-point guy, and he�s talking about gospel and grace in a courageous way.

So, yeah, man. When you said, �Come on I was like, �Yeah, sure, no problem, man.

Great. Well, we have similar backgrounds in the sense that we both went to Master Seminary, and then after that, we both went to Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. Did you know that? Oh. I didn�t know the Southern part.

That�s interesting. I know. So, then, you�re now a PCA pastor, ReconcileChurchMiami .org. Tell us a little bit about the Church there, Aldo.

Okay, so Reconciled Church was, I planted in the SPC, I became a Presbyterian in the middle of my second year of Church planting, Reconciled Church came under the oversight of Pilate�s Presbyterian Church.

They lost their pastor. They called me as their pastor, and I brought my church plant into Pilate�s Presbyterian Church. So, I went from being a church planter to pastoring the oldest PCA church in Miami, and I�ve been there two years, but I planted the church in 2015, so I�ve been pastoring in Miami since 2015.

So, it�s kind of like, yeah, that�s a little short story of how the church thing went.

Federal Vision, Doug Wilson, and the Moscow Influence

Okay. Great. And when I was listening to you on Presbycast, you guys were talking about federal vision and how it contradicts Sola Fide and the folks up in Moscow and Doug Wilson, and I think some of some, especially Baptists, maybe some Presbyterians too, but I think Baptists are especially drawn to Canon Press and Moscow and Doug Wilson, and just give me your pastoral take about, what do you think.

What�s going on up there? Is it good? Is it bad? How do you shepherd your people? This is basically, here�s a springboard. Go ahead and launch.

Okay. Yeah, well, I�ve been watching Canon Press, Moscow, Doug Wilson, very closely, not very closely, on and off, closely sometimes, less closely in about six years. I saw content from Heidelblog about him and federal vision way back, but I slowly watched and listened and read.

And recently, I had a few families in our church talk about Moscow and one of them thinking about moving to Moscow, and then his popularity surging in the NAPARC world, the confessional PCA churches, and also the Reformed Baptist world, and just pretty much everywhere.

The last two years was a ripe soil for a false hero to step in, and he did step in. So I was like, I need to get my hand around this person, because he�s very influential, very growingly influential, and now it�s stepped into my backyard.

So I looked into a few things. Number one, what is federal vision? Number two, is Doug a federal visionist? And when I looked into federal vision, I mean, I looked more into it, I came to the conclusion that federal vision is not about the Reformed faith, it is medieval Catholicism in Protestant clothes.

It is new perspective for the working class person. They have a different view of covenants, they have a different view of election, they have a different view of justification, they have a different view of law and gospel, they have a different view of ecclesiology, they have a different view of the sacraments, they have a different view of what a Christian is, they have a different view of pretty much everything important that a Christian should believe.

And Doug Wilson is indeed a federal visionist. A lot of people disassociate the heretical federal vision movement, which has a synergistic view of justification, a denial of the actual obedience of Christ as a basis of your justification, a view of faith that is instrumentally a mixture of my faithfulness and my receptivity in Christ.

I mean, like, it's a spider web where wherever you touch it, it is toxic and it will kill you. So it's not like some people like Lutherans will have some weird stuff here and other places, you know, like it'll be okay.

But everywhere you touch the federal vision system, it is a black hole that will suck the spiritual life out of you. So a lot of people feel positive about Doug because he has distanced himself from federal vision.

And then I looked into that and I noticed that he said he would no longer call himself a federal visionist, but he never renounced the theology of federal vision. He never renounced the statement that he authored and he didn't remove himself from the denomination that he started full of federal visionists.

And so he's very much a federal visionist. He just doesn't talk about it anymore because when he talks about his weird stuff about how Baptists saved you, about how you're temporarily elect and you're temporarily justified, when you start saying that stuff, your good old Baptist friends, your good old Presbyterian friends will be like, oh, that's a false teacher.

He stopped talking about those things. And now he just talks about masculinity and changing the culture and smashing the woke folks very, very, very tactically so. Because when he tried to, I'm rambling for a long time and I'll stop soon, when he came out with his federal visionist way back in the day and he was making a case for his federal vision and saying, well, I'm a federal visionist because of Calvin and I'm a federal visionist because the West has to buy.

When he came out with his views, the NAPARC world like smacked him in the face like a thousand times and we chased these guys out of the nominations. And so he realized that, well, they have the reform world broadly.

They don't like our, our system. So he became very quiet about it. He falsely disassociated himself with the movement, though he never renounced the movement. And he started talking purely and mostly about, you know, his ethical views about this and that and family and women.

So when I talk to people in my church about his aberrant, heretical views that damn people to hell, he said, well, I don't hear him saying that. And I was like, yeah, because he doesn't say that anymore because he knows that that'll get him.

So it won't get him his, he wants to be, you know, like the pope of like the new Christendom, you know, in the United States with Moscow is like the epicenter. That's not going to happen if he actually tells you what he believes.

So that's me jumping into the conversation.

Ethics Without the Gospel Foundation

No, I'm glad for that. And you know, it started off with, for you, I think, and for me, it's a pastoral issue, right? We look around, we see what our folks are doing. And some might say, well, why do you ever criticize the gospel coalition?

Well, because through the internet and other means, they're in the church, the local churches that we pastor. And it's the same thing with Wilson, right? He's a smart guy. He's a prolific writer. I used to read Credenda Agenda back at master seminary classes for New Testament survey class in 1992, because I needed something to do, funny stuff and all that.

And when I heard you talking on Presbycast, there definitely seems to be, let's not talk about baptismal regeneration. Let's not talk about covenant gnomism. Let's not talk about paedo-communion. Let's not talk about losing some of these benefits that we have in Christ if we don't obey.

Let's put that all on the side and talk about, oh, the government's overreaching. Oh, masks are bad. We don't close our churches. Masculinity. Like you said, homeschool. I mean, how many people buy Doug Wilson's stuff because of the homeschool movement?

And so I think you hit the nail on the head, Aldo, when you said, yeah, he's been very quiet about this main issue of federal vision because he knew he had to, right?

Yeah, yeah. And also, another thing about, if you think about this very carefully, if you are arguing for ethics, not strongly advocating for the foundation of your ethics, if you are promoting like a renewal of society and the church ethically, renewing the home, but you're not regularly articulating your categories that ground your ethics.

So if you're very much doing Ephesians 4 -6 conversations without Ephesians 1 -3 conversations, you're talking about Romans 12 -16 stuff and not Romans 1 -11 stuff, you're saying something very profound without saying it.

And what you're saying is, we don't need clear sociological, Christological categories to be transformational and ethical. How could you regularly be talking about things ethical, being renewed, without a very clear articulation of what is a Christological redemption of things that ground them?

And those things don't matter to Moscow because at the end of the day, like, sociology, definitive biblical sociology is not the Gospel. If you listen to the Moscow guys and the Moscow loving guys, the Gospel is everything.

The Gospel is free. Wherever something happens, wherever something changes, wherever something is renewed, it's Gospel. So if Gospel is very moralized, right, and imperitival, and not indicative and forensic, you don't really need to talk about it too much, you know what I'm saying?

And so the reason why they want to, you know, his theologian, what's interesting is that people need not just look at Doug, who are into Doug, but look at his circle. So one of the chief Federal Vision theologians who was his in-house at St. Andrew's theologian was Peter Lightheart.

Peter Lightheart has written a book about ending Protestantism and going back to Rome. Now Peter Lightheart doesn't like Mary worship, he doesn't like, you know, their view of the sacraments, but he has no problem with the soteriology of Rome.

So in the Moscow world, you can join, you know, all of these people that have a range of soteriology that's works-based, because at the end of the day, like, their Gospel is very much moralized. One of the things I said about them is think about Moscow as the social justice, the social Gospel for the conservative working man.

But it's the same thing. The Gospel is pretty much the effects and consequences that the Christian brings about in a society, simply from a conservative perspective, while the woke guy says the Gospel is all these things I'm doing that echo, reverberate, kind of like, you know, leftist transformationalism.

But yeah, they don't need to talk about definitive sociological categories, because their movement is not a sociological one at all. Let me give you a quote, a sociological one from a biblical sense. Let me quote something to show you, like, the way Doug sees salvation and Gospel.

Objectivity of the Covenant and Baptismal Regeneration

Okay, here we go. I want to, this is from his Reform Is Not Enough, page 45. I want to begin by saying that when we first start talking about the objectivity of the covenant, and it starts to sink in, in what we are saying, you mean that you're saying that a lesbian Eskimo bishop lady is a Christian?

She's not a Buddhist? She's not a Muslim? Yes. In the New Testament sense, she is a New Testament Christian. There's your sociology of Doug. If you're in the Church, you know, if you're not a Muslim, you're a Christian, you know?

Well, as long as you're baptized, right? Yes.

Yes. Yes. Yeah, he believes that, not that baptism is a science field of saving grace, you know, as the Westminster divines would define it, but baptism confers and creates saving grace. And if you listen to him and circle, and all the federal visionists that are all housed in his denomination, baptism gives you all the benefits of Christ, justification, regeneration, you know, definitive sanctification.

You have all the benefits of Christ given to you by the administration of the water because they have a sacerdotal, medieval, Catholic view of the sacrament, which Doug Wilson says he got from the Westminster divines.

Here's a quote that he says that's really interesting. He says, this is a quote from him, If you knew that the Westminster Confession taught baptismal regeneration, and then he says, quote, worthy receivers are saved by these effectual means.

So, when the Westminster Confession says that the Holy Spirit, through the Word, through faith, makes baptism an effectual means, he then reads that to be like, that baptism actually confers salvation.

One of the things that I'm trying to help people understand is that Doug is not reformed. He was never reformed in a reformed denomination. His denomination was created around him, and it wouldn't be considered to be reformed by any of the Napalc denominations that have historical roots with Presbyterians historically.

He created his own idea of reform, and he uses the terms and terminology, but he doesn't have a reformed view of election, or a reformed view of baptism, or a reformed view of anything. But he's reformed, and it's funny because he said, quote, Jared Longstore said, quote, not quote, let me paraphrase.

The Reformation was lost across the pond of England and the United States, and it was recovered in Moscow, okay? So the RPCNA, the OPC, the PCA, the RCUS, the ARP, all of them looked at the Federal Vision Circle and all of their documents and said, this is not Reformed Orthodoxy.

But Doug and his circle of fans have discovered something that almost a million, I'm trying to think of how many people are in the Napalc denominations, almost a million Napalc Reformed people don't know.

And that's the issue with Doug, is he's a self-made guy, a self-styled guy, who's organized a whole movement around himself. And, you know, we tend to, and Big Eva and Evangelicalism, we like these kind of figures.

We keep falling for these kind of figures, right? These astronomical personalities that create theological movements around themselves, where they become the standard. And it's like, how many times do we have to see this narrative play itself out in a catastrophe before we realize that it's probably not a good one, you know?

Confusion of Categories and Double Talk

Although thank you for that. We're talking to Aldo Leon today on No Compromise Radio. You can go listen to his four or five-hour shows on Gospel on Tap. You're going to change the name, right? What's it called now?

Not Gospel on Tap? It will be called and rebranded Kingdom Polemics. Yes, sir.

Okay. One of the things I was thinking about, Aldo, was confusion of categories. Doug Wilson's smart, and he knows how to write, and he knows how to be very, very specific when he wants to. And if he wants to say that the husband will be dominant over the wife, and that's exactly how a loving relationship should be, and that wives need to be led with a firm hand, and all these other things, he's very specific when it comes to that.

But when it comes to sola fide, that's where the blurring occurs. And I think I have to say, from my opinion, he does that on purpose. It's not like he can't say something specific. He won't, because he's trying to keep everything muddled so the untaught and uninitiated will buy into it.

Do you think that's a fair assessment? Yes.

Yes. If you're always confusing and confused, then you're this enigma that can never be really nailed down, and then you can kind of, I guess, advance whatever agenda you like. I said in the podcast, Doug Wilson reminds me of the millennial who no one understands him.

Well, he's very intelligent, and he intentionally doesn't want to be understood so that no one is the wiser about who he is. So he's a master at doing a few things to confuse people. Number one, he's a master of double talk.

So he will say justification is all of grace, based upon Christ's obedience, and then he will sign a federal vision statement which says, like actually, let me read what the joint federal vision statement that he co-authored and co-signed says about justification on active obedience.

He says, We deny that faithfulness to the gospel message requires any particular doctrine or formulation of the invitation of the active obedience of Christ. What matters is that we confess our salvation is all of Christ and not from us.

So he'll make a statement that appeals to someone who is orthodox, and then he'll make a statement totally different. So people will come up to me, and they'll be like, look, did you hear what Doug said?

And I said, yes, but he said this over here. And you guys know this, just from a psychological standpoint, when you have a person in a church or you have a person in a family that is saying one thing to somebody and something entirely different to somebody else, it's because they're intentionally manipulating the situation with the double talk.

Or what Doug will do is he'll use a word that he has defined entirely different. So when he says it, he's saying something from his own dictionary that he invented with his circle of quasi-Catholics.

So, for example, when Doug says justification by grace, you, Christian, immediately say, oh, okay, you're speaking my language. But he means corporate justification. He means temporary justification. God temporarily justifies the whole church that will be finally justified.

So when he says election, election by grace according to God's decree, well, when Doug says election, he doesn't mean God's decree before time that secures a Christian irrespective of anything that the Christian could undo in time.

When he says election, he means historic election. He means covenant election that is temporary and corporate. So Doug Wilson, actually, when he explains Romans 9, he explains Romans 9 the way Romantrance would.

So Romans 9 would say, when Paul says Jacob not Esau, it wasn't talking about individuals being elect. It's talking about people groups being elect. And amongst these people groups that are elect, some of those can be temporary elect, and some of those can be finally elect.

So he says one statement, and then he says another statement to keep everybody confused. And then he uses some terms and statements that mean entirely different things. Now, if you want to quote, when you talk to the antinomian about grace, they're not talking about the grace of God that teaches us to renounce ungodliness.

They're talking about the grace of God that perpetuates ungodliness. They use a term, but they mean something very different. So we need to understand not just what he uses, but how he speaks about the conversation holistically, and also what dictionary are these terms coming from.

When you do that kind of stuff, it's because you have an agenda, and you're being intentionally evasive. You're either a new convert who is confused, or you're a con man who is confusing people intentionally for some of your own end.

And in addition, to whom is he speaking? So when he talks to certain people, I remember Rick Warren, when he was interviewed by the White Horse Inn folks, and Horton asked him about something. And Rick Warren said on the White Horse Inn, I'm a monergist, and I subscribe to the Five Solas of the Reformation.

And I'm thinking, that's what you say to them, but that's not what you say to the congregation. So I can imagine, and I haven't watched the James White-Doug Wilson interview, but I imagine Doug has one answer for James, and then he has the other answers for everybody else.

Yeah, he knows what the people in the room want him to say. And he works the room. One of the things that I said about Doug Wilson, I think his popularity is more an indictment upon us than upon him, because we have bought into this YouTube, hashtag, Twitter, little bits and pieces of credibility.

We will listen to somebody based upon these tidbits and these little tweets and things and whatnot, and we won't consider somebody in the totality of all of their life, all of their writing, all of their ministry.

We just look at people in a very surfacey sense, and if you really want something personally in your life, you'll just listen to someone based upon the superficial statements that they make. Now, we're talking about esoteriology in this conversation, but there's a whole lot of other things that you could bring out.

But yeah, being a gospel guy is not, in a four-minute YouTube video, making a few statements about grace based on Christ. Being a gospel guy is you holistically, consistently, regularly, in every sphere you find yourself in, you're regularly conveying the Christological orthodoxy.

But we listen to one guy say one phrase, one thing here, and all of a sudden, yeah, we're like, oh, he's fine. And I think we're very superficial, I think, in the way we look at someone like Doug or anybody else.

No Compromise Radio with Pastor Mike Abendroth is a production of Bethlehem Bible Church in West Boylston. Bethlehem Bible Church is a Bible-teaching church firmly committed to unleashing the life-transforming power of God's Word through verse-by-verse exposition of the sacred text.

Please come and join us. Our service times are Sunday morning at 1015 and in the evening at 6. We're right on Route 110 in West Boylston. You can check us out online at bbcchurch .org or by phone at 508 -835 -3400.