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| Home > Theology > The Present Controvesy: Part, 4, "More on What's New" |
| The Present Controvesy: Part, 4, "More on What's New" | | Date Created: Nov 02, 2005, 09:40 PM |
The doctrinal development issue looms large over this whole controversy. Those who are most critical of the FV/AAPC men seem to have put the Reformed tradition in the deep freezer. They will tolerate no further light to break forth from God's Word. Everything has already been discovered. But such a stance can easily slip into a subtle form of idolatry and sometimes looks worse than Rome, which at least admits the tradition is "living" and therefore "growing."
We need to be careful not to lock the Spirit away in a box of our own making. Yeah, I know, that's something of a cliché. But do we really think that no new ground has been plowed in theology since the 17th century? That we have discovered nothing new, for example, in the area of apologetics or Christian epistemology? If we appreciate Cornelius Van Til, for example, we have to say yes. The reason I bring this up is because Van Til was far more iconoclastic than anyone in the FV crowd. I still wonder sometimes how he got away with it. Anyway, my point is this: Just because something is new doesn't mean it's false. In the end, sola scriptura will have to be the test. Tradition does indeed carry some authoritative weight. But unless it's a dead tradition, it has to leave room for incorporating new insights and growth towards maturity.
As Van Til once said, every generation has to stand on the shoulders of it's theological fathers in the faith. And each age brings forth things old and new. That's how I tend to frame it, anyway. On the one hand most everything the FV guys are saying has been anticipated by the Reformed catholic tradition. At least that's their contention. The seeds were all planted long ago.
Part of the problem here is that many of the critics define the Reformed tradition extremely narrowly and do not appreciate any insights from outside the English-Scottish Presbyterian and Puritan world. So to them, these views really are "new" and challenge their comfort zone. They haven't encountered this kind of Presbyterianism in their narrow reading and study. At the same time, I'd want to insist that even the things that might be genuinely new (e.g., I think Peter Leithart and Jim Jordan have truly broken new ground in several areas over the years) are essentially organic outgrowths of the tradition. In other words, this is not a de novo trajectory; we're just riding out old trajectories to a further point. The example of paedocommunion is a good case study: it has a history, tracing back to the early church; it's also consistent with the basic principles of Reformed ecclesiology, even if virtually none of the Reformers believed it. It's at once old and new.
Those who think they are just confessing the "vanilla Westminster tradition" are, in my opinion, a bit naive. John Leith's book on the Westminster Assembly does a really fine job showing how embedded the WCF is in the culture and philosophy of its day. Jordan dealt with this in the essay I referenced in Part 3. There is not a single person in 21st-century America who actually thinks like a mid-17th century British person. We cannot recreate the past; history is a river that only flows in one direction. Even those who are most rigidly traditionalist are really mentally updating the confession in a variety of ways, whether they are aware of it or not.
I also think a lot of this is exegesis and "biblical theology" versus "systematic theology." This is a discussion that has been going on long before the FV controversy. How does systematic theology (ST) incorporate new exegetical insights (which may be arrived at because of new historical info, better linguistic studies, etc.)? Or are we really going to suggest that the past 100 years has seen no new exegetical insights into the meaning of Scripture. One of the great examples is our understanding of the covenant. The whole redemptive historical paradigm has radically changed the way we read and understand the Old Testament. This is new. How can we act as if it's not.
For example, the whole idea of a "new perspective" is that we are looking at the same old stuff, but from a new angle. Since it's the same stuff, we're not going to come up with anything that's totally earth shattering, brand-spanking, overturns-everything-I-ever- believed new. But since it is, nevertheless, a new perspective, we're going to see things there that we never saw before.
So, for instance, looking at the NT through the lens of the Jew-Gentile question doesn't bear vastly different results than the traditional perspective, but it throws things into relief that were below the surface earlier. It opens up new avenues of application. It brings together aspects of the text where the connections were unclear before. But it's still the same text and the overall message is the same as before. It's not that we terribly misunderstood what was there along, but that there were dimensions to the text that we were not seeing.
But systematic theology is by nature a highly conservative discipline and is slow to react. It's no surprise the Bible guys in the seminaries are far more responsive to the "new" insights being set forth. If you study an open Bible all day long (esp the OT), you're immediately open to Wright's view of the "righteousness of God" in Romans because it fits so much data. (I'm not saying that everything Wright says about justification and Romans is correct. I'm making a specific point here: his interpretation of Rom. 1:17 seems to work better than the standard Lutheran version because we now look at the OT differently). But for an ST guy, it may look like a serious threat to the whole structure of theology. You have to rethink everything in light of a even one new insight in order to keep the system in tact. That's just one example. But I think this is behind a lot of the present flap.
If those who are most critical of the FV concerns would be a bit more patient, and just let the discussion run its course outside of church courts, I think things would turn out ok - the "new" things that they are saying that are helpful would eventually get incorporated into the wider tradition's consensus, and the places where they are wrong would be discarded. But we aren't being patient enough to let that happen. We're forcing the issue prematurely with court cases and hastily produced study committees. Does anyone really think the MVP report is the product of a careful and patient attempt to understand the issues? Given the amount of time and effort that must be poured into doing quality exegesis, I think these tactics are disastrous mistakes.
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