a point at which its divergence from historic Christianity is prominent, has to do again with an erroneous interpretation of the meaning of the salvific covenant between God and man. It is sufficient for our present purposes to confine comment to one essential point from among many that are discussed in the literature referred to below. It has to do with what is to be understood as the significance of the church’s sacrament of baptism and its relation to the meaning of God’s covenant.
By the administration of the sacrament of baptism, it is claimed by the Federal Vision theology, one is admitted to covenant membership in the fullest sense and one is thereby joined in union to Christ. Now the high doctrine of the Christian believer’s union with Christ is to be carefully guarded, and that union conveys to the Christian the highest privilege that admission to the kingdom of God implies. It provides the foundation, the entry point, to the fellowship with the Father of which the apostle John, for example, speaks at great length in his first epistle. But it is precisely at that point that the Federal Vision theology has had a seriously corrupting influence.
A prominent proponent, Rich Lusk, crystallizes the issue in his summary statement that “In baptism we are brought covenantally and publicly out of union with Adam and into union with Christ. When this occurs, one is ‘born again,’ not in the sense we have come to speak of regeneration . . . but in the covenantal sense of being brought out of Adam’s family into God’s family. . . . In this relationship, one has, in principle, all the blessings in the heavenly places delivered over to him as he is ‘in Christ.’”16 That formulation, and the confusion regarding the covenant that it carries with it, might appear to be rescued by the words “not in the sense we have come to speak of regeneration.” But what Lusk has done is to point up the very difficulties of the Federal Vision theology at that point. For on the one hand the Federal Vision theology argues that by baptism one is joined to Christ in the fullest sense and meaning of that privilege, and at the same time it is said that one may subsequently fall away from and surrender the benefits and privileges that were previously enjoyed. Lusk himself goes on to make the point. He says that “these blessings [are] considered from the standpoint of the covenant rather than the eternal decree, [and] are mutable.”17 But what is thereby proposed is that what is “mutable” are, in fact, the highest benefits that baptism at first conferred, namely nothing less than union with Christ. The theological problem thereby brought to the surface is the attempt to draw a distinction between, as Lusk has stated it, the grace of regeneration on the one hand and the reality of union with Christ within the terms of the covenant of grace on the other. For union with Christ, in the full sense that the Federal Vision theology in one breath claims, and “all the blessings in the heavenly places delivered over to him as he is ‘in Christ’” are, as the Scriptures present it, precisely what is conferred by the conveyance to an individual of the Holy Spirit’s grace of regeneration.
More extensive reference to Federal Vision texts confirms that in similar ways baptism is understood to confer on the one who is the subject of the ordinance the highest reality of union with Christ. But at the same time, the Federal Vision theology envisages one’s possible apostasy from that high position. Douglas Wilson, for example, expands the confusion when he raises the question of what he refers to as “reprobate” individuals who have received the benefits of baptism: “Baptism is covenantally efficacious. It brings every person baptized into an objective and living covenant relationship with Christ, whether the baptized person is elect or reprobate. Baptism is always to be taken by the one baptized as a sign and seal of his ingrafting into Christ. If the person is reprobate, he will be cut out of the vine . . .”18 The doctrinal problem in Wilson’s argument is highly significant. It is recognizable on two levels. First, that highly questionable teaching claims that the “seal” implicit in baptism has been understood to have been conveyed to the reprobate person. Second, when, at a later time, the reprobate person has been “cut out of the vine,” it is from that high status of having been “sealed” into “living relationship with Christ,” sealed not merely into a notional relationship but, as Wilson claims, a “living” relationship, that the “cutting out of the vine” occurs.19
Errant theologies beyond those to which we have drawn attention trouble the church and call in question the integrity of its evangel. It is argued by some that Christian subscription automatically, but in respects that cannot be clearly defined, endows the believer with material prosperity. The spirituality of the kingdom of Christ is diminished, and the world with its persuasions and predilections is invited into the church and given, it would seem, gaping accommodation. In newly emerging churches new fashions of thought and worship are more readily identifiable with contemporary postmodern culture than with the historic gospel.20 In short, in more instances and in more ecclesiastical communions than need to be identified at length, the reduction of the biblical gospel is due to the fact that the view of Christ and his redemptive accomplishment is too low because the view of man is too high.
There is substantial reason to conclude that the new theologies being proposed to the church would take it far outside the limits of its classic and historic confessional standards. In doing so, those theologies are aimed to puncture the church’s confessional reliance on the biblical revelation on which its stance has hitherto been based. It is therefore extremely difficult to understand the manner in which certain confessionally Reformed churches have at the present time permitted to remain within their credentialed communities those whose professed alliance is with one or the other of the errant theologies we have briefly noted.
A Preliminary Summing Up
The preceding discussion has established two reference points whose significance will throw their light on what follows. First, it becomes clear from even a less than complete survey of the history of opinion that the assumption of the autonomy of man, the assumption of the explanatory competence of unaided human reason, has been accorded determining status in the explanation of affairs and conditions in the world. And further, that assumption of autonomy has affected and infected the theology of the church. Second, the struggle for the preservation of the church’s theology is not only set against the thought forms and pressures of the world in the respects just implied, but also against tendencies to errant doctrinal formulation within the church itself. The negative influence of the assumption of human autonomy and the impact, as a result, on the church’s theology can be illustrated in a respect in which the testimony of the church has been severely tarnished in the present time.
Consider, for the moment, the respect in which that assumption of human autonomy, or, again, the postulate of the primacy of the human intellect, has come to expression in the doctrines of the church. Reflect, that is, on the competence of the mind as it exists in the human state characterized by the post-Adamic and fallen condition. An important debate directed to precisely that condition occurred in the fourth century between the great Augustine and a Celtic monk named Pelagius. The outcome of the Augustinian-Pelagian controversy determined important aspects of subsequent orthodox theological doctrine relating to sin and salvation. Pelagius, in short, argued that Adam’s fall did not convey to his posterity any disability in the faculties of soul, and that after the fall men were in precisely the same state as to their competence of will as they had enjoyed in their initial created state. The will was free to turn to God or not to turn to God at any time, it was claimed. It was the duty of man to obey God, and he was both obliged and free to do so. He should obey God, and if he chose to do so he could.
The Roman Catholic doctrine took up and consolidated the essence of the Pelagian scheme. But it can be said to be “Semi-Pelagian” in the following respect. Pelagius had said, in effect, that as to the faculties of soul, man in his postlapsarian state was perfectly healthy. The medieval theology that followed him said, to the contrary, not that man was completely healthy but that he was sick and in need of assistance. Man, that is, needed the assistance of the grace of God in his
