Medicine of Immortality "It's a cold, and it's a broken, 'Hallelujah!'"

What the Federal Vision isn’t doingPosted by Rick on August 29th, 2007

I get a little bit annoyed when people say the Federal Vision pushed them into Rome or into Orthodoxy. If this is the case, then it was only because they were ignorant (I use the word literally: “lacking knowledge”) of Christian history, and the Federal Vision exposed them to the history of the Church.

For example, a friend mentioned that it was Jordan’s merit and maturity article that pushed him into Orthodoxy. Fair enough. But it wasn’t Jordan and the FV crowd that pushed him into Orthodoxy. It was exposure to the teaching of the Church Fathers (even though Jordan doesn’t really cite the Fathers, he is just rehashing an old argument); Orthodox Christians have always believed this.

Another friend returned to Rome after reading some exegesis that Rich Lusk had done on some passage or another. Fine, but it wasn’t Lusk’s original thinking. After pointing me to Lusk’s exegesis, I recognized it as a summary of Augustine.

The only thing the FV men are doing is just rehashing old ideas in new ways. Most of it really isn’t anything new. Some of it is really insightful, to be sure. Some work on the Trinity and justification is from a new perspective (!!), but it’s not really new (this serious theological work isn’t the stuff that’s driving people out of Protestantism anyway).

I’m just kind of tired of this. It gives the Southern Presbys something to gloat about, and that gloating stems from their own ignorance too.