Does Doug Wilson Deny Faith Alone? | Theocast Clips

So that's who I was going to name. If you're wondering, is federal vision theology a thing, and is it influencing many people who would understand themselves to be Reformed? Yes. One name is all that needs to be named, and it's Doug Wilson.

Doug Wilson is famously known for being... He's well-known, and he's read by a lot of people in the Reformed world. He is an advocate, a proponent of federal vision. Whether it's Piper's articulation that you just stated, or whether it's more of a federal vision presentation that you're in by grace, but then you're going to persevere through cooperating with grace and doing good works and living a life of faithfulness.

Whatever the articulation, it sounds like Rome. I mean, that's where we're going. And we're not trying to be punchy here. We're not trying to be shock jocks and just clickbait. It's not what we're doing.

But we care about this very much because we do look around and agree that the biblical doctrine, the Reformation doctrine of assurance, is under assault all the time. And the sufficiency of Christ to save sinners is under assault all the time in every generation, and it is in ours.

And so we're trying to pound the desk to say, no, Jesus really is sufficient. And he's done enough not only to forgive you of your sins and wipe your slate clean and wash you and all that kind of stuff, the language you use.

He's done enough to save you because he's accomplished righteousness. That's all you could ever need, and it's already yours. You've received it through your union with him.

There are people who are going to listen to this and then say, well, John, Justin, Doug Wilson isn't part of federal vision anymore. And so he wrote an article called Federal Vision No Mas. If you read that article carefully, you will see he doesn't like the title anymore.

But he says, everything I've written and everything that I have taught, I still believe. He still does fatal communion. He still believes in this collapsing of the law and the gospel. So we're not trying to just pick on a guy and we're not being careless.

We've done our research. We try to be careful before we present this in there. But the reason why we bring this up is that there are well-known men who we loved and respect who seem to be doing things that are very confusing, even things like James White interviewing Doug Wilson and kind of setting Doug Wilson up to say, look, he's confessional, he's reformed.

But yet the issues that have been presented, James really didn't bring up some of those issues, which are really important for us to deal with, which is this kind of additive that happens to Sola Fide, where no, no, no, we believe in Sola Fide, but your obedience still matters.

And it's not necessarily the fruit of what's coming from, but it is the justifying of your faith. And your faith can never be justified by your actions. I'll leave it here and I know we'll add this thought and then I'll let you close this out.

But I said this to you before, and the podcast begins. If we just take the first law, the first requirement that's given to us as believers, which is to love God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength, how much does God require us to love Him to be enough of an evidence so that He will say justified?

Because you and I have never in our lifetime remotely touched 100 love with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength. So how much is it of Christ's righteousness covering it and how much of it is that our obedience?

And there is no way you can look at scripture to give that percentage. It can't happen. Nobody can answer the question.

Whenever we start to try to gauge things based upon our sincerity or whatever it may be, it's like nobody can quantify that. Nobody can tell you. It's one of the challenges. I think it's interesting, just a final observation here.

In the final justification view, I think one of the concerns is Christians need to live a life of obedience. And so here's how we should rightly understand these things. But then in the federal vision camp, it's very interesting.

The motivation on the front end was a little bit different. It's like, no, we want to fight for something more objective so that everything is not so subjective. The irony is when you jettison the confessions and when you jettison orthodox positions that have been held historically, and you try to come up with a new way in the interest of objectivity, you end up bringing subjectivity back into the thing, but you've doubled down on it.

It becomes a 400-pound gorilla, man. Because you're not maintaining these categories that people have thought through really carefully for centuries and centuries and centuries. In seeking to become more objective, the subjectivity of, well, cooperate and obey and live a faithful life is brought back in by necessity because you have re-altered the equation on the front end.

We've now got to insert faithfulness and obedience and cooperation with God on the back end, which sounds like.