Federal Vision

The Federal Vision is a movement within confessional Presbyterian and Reformed churches, associated with a 2002 pastors’ conference at Auburn Avenue Presbyterian Church, that recasts the covenant of grace as objectively conferring union with Christ on every baptized member of the visible church, rather than only on the elect, and that redefines the faith which justifies as inseparable from the works it produces rather than as a bare instrument that receives an imputed righteousness.¹² Several Presbyterian and Reformed denominations have found this recasting contrary to their own confessional standards.³

Historical Origin

The theological root most commonly traced for the Federal Vision is Norman Shepherd, who taught systematic theology at Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia from 1963, eventually succeeding John Murray in that chair.⁴ A lengthy controversy over Shepherd’s teaching on faith, obedience, and justification spanned 1976 to 1982 and ended with his departure from the seminary and, that same year, his formal transfer from the Orthodox Presbyterian Church to the Christian Reformed Church.² Samuel Waldron notes that Shepherd’s views “became controversial prior to the popularity of the so-called ‘new perspective on Paul,’” and so cannot be dismissed as simply a variant of it, and that they “have had a considerable influence, especially in Presbyterian circles.”⁴

That influence surfaced publicly at a 2002 pastors’ conference titled “Federal Vision,” hosted by Auburn Avenue Presbyterian Church (PCA) in Monroe, Louisiana. Steve Wilkins, John Barach, Steve Schlissel, and Douglas Wilson were its principal speakers, presenting what they called a new paradigm centered on “the objectivity of the covenant.”³ A colloquium hosted by E. Calvin Beisner in southern Florida in August 2003 brought seven Federal Vision proponents (Barach, Peter Leithart, Rich Lusk, Schlissel, Tom Trouwborst, Wilkins, and Wilson) into direct exchange with seven critics; the resulting papers were published as The Auburn Avenue Theology, Pros and Cons: Debating the Federal Vision.³ Several Presbyterian and Reformed denominations subsequently issued their own studies and rejected the movement’s teaching as contrary to their confessional standards, including the Presbyterian Church in America, the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, the United Reformed Churches, and the Reformed Church in the US; the Confederation of Reformed Evangelical Churches, not recognized by these bodies as a Reformed denomination in formal fellowship with them, became the movement’s principal ecclesiastical home.³

Core Tenets

The objectivity of the covenant and baptismal union with Christ

Federal Vision proponents hold that baptism places a person in a real, living union with Christ rather than only an external or legal relationship to the visible church. Steve Wilkins and John Barach state this claim in their own essays in The Federal Vision:

Some proponents of the Federal Vision teach that all baptized people are in union with Christ. Since they want to emphasize the objectivity of the covenant, they insist that through baptism, the baptized are in the covenant and also in a living union with Christ.¹

Carol Chen answers that the historic Reformed position distinguishes two relations at once: a legal relationship every baptized member of the covenant community holds, and a living communion with Christ that only the elect hold. Louis Berkhof, she notes, maintains this dual relation, holding that only those who are elect are “in the covenant life or in union and communion with Christ,” even though others may be members of the covenant legally.¹ On the historic Reformed reading, union with Christ is God’s act of grace given through effectual calling, not conferred by the sacrament itself.¹

Faith redefined as inseparable from obedience

Shepherd’s own writing is the source of this claim. Where the Reformation tradition held that faith justifies only as an instrument, receiving a righteousness that is not the believer’s own, Shepherd uses the same instrumental language while denying that faith can be isolated from the works it produces:

We are not justified because we believe. Faith serves rather only as an instrument to receive the righteousness of Jesus Christ. There is no ground in ourselves on the basis of which God can declare us righteous. God imputes the righteousness of Jesus Christ to us and on that ground we are justified.⁵

Despite this instrumental language, Waldron argues Shepherd in practice collapses the Reformation’s distinction between the works faith produces and the works it excludes, treating “a kind of works” as “necessary unto (or a condition of) being justified.”⁶ Waldron traces the same move in Federal Vision proponents generally: by distinguishing “works of merit,” which sola fide excludes, from “works of faith,” which it allegedly does not, they attempt to reconcile a works-conditioned justification with the Reformation formula rather than abandoning it outright.⁷

Critical Reception

Reformed scholarship, including from within the Southern Baptist and Presbyterian traditions that share the Federal Vision’s own confessional ancestry, has judged this a departure from the Reformation doctrine of justification by faith alone, not a restatement of it.

Distinguishing “works of faith” from “works of merit” does not rescue sola fide, because sola fide never turned on that distinction. Waldron argues that the Reformation tradition already held both that faith is itself a form of obedience and that faith produces obedience; what it denied was that faith justifies because it is obedient:

It was understood in the Reformation tradition that faith was a form of obedience. It was also understood that faith produced obedience. It was just that faith did not justify because it was obedient or virtuous, but because it rested in Christ. Resting in Christ and not working through love was the meaning of sola fide.⁷

On this reading, Shepherd’s and the Federal Vision’s works-of-faith distinction answers a question the Reformers were not asking. It leaves untouched the question they were pressing: whether any human quality, however produced, can be a condition of justification.⁷

Making covenant union depend on baptism rather than election reintroduces the confusion the historic Reformed distinction was built to prevent. Against the claim that all baptized persons are livingly united to Christ, Chen (citing Berkhof) presses the historic Reformed answer that legal covenant membership and living union with Christ are two distinct relations, and only the latter follows from God’s electing grace.¹ David VanDrunen classes Shepherd and those who identify with the Federal Vision as “Reformed revisionists” on justification.⁸

Comparison with the Reformed Confessions

The 2LBCF grounds justification in the imputation of Christ’s own obedience, received by faith alone, and explicitly excludes any human act, including the act of believing itself, from serving as the ground of that righteousness:

Those whom God effectually calleth, he also freely justifieth, not by infusing righteousness into them, but by pardoning their sins, and by accounting and accepting their persons as righteous; not for anything wrought in them, or done by them, but for Christ’s sake alone; not by imputing faith itself, the act of believing, or any other evangelical obedience to them, as their righteousness; but by imputing Christ’s active obedience unto the whole law, and passive obedience in his death for their whole and sole righteousness by faith, which faith they have not of themselves; it is the gift of God.⁹

This is the same Westminster-family formulation Shepherd’s seminary was built to teach and defend; the confession’s wording, “not… any other evangelical obedience,” directly excludes the works-of-faith category the Federal Vision’s account of justification depends on.

On baptism, the confession holds that grace and salvation are not tied to the sacrament’s administration: baptism’s efficacy “is not tied to that moment of time wherein it is administered,” and grace is given “according to the counsel of God’s own will, in his appointed time.”¹⁰ The same chapter restricts baptism itself to those who “profess repentance towards God, faith towards, and obedience to, our Lord Jesus Christ,”¹¹ a credobaptist formulation that rules out infant baptism conferring covenant membership, let alone saving union with Christ, apart from a credible profession of faith.

Related Doctrines

References

Carol Man Fen Chen, “Covenant Obedience in the New Covenant,” in “A Historical, Biblical, and Theological Interpretation of Covenants: Unconditionality and Conditionality in Relation to Justification and Sanctification” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2019), 257-316, n. 43: quoting Steve Wilkins, “Covenant, Baptism and Salvation,” and John Barach, “Covenant and Election,” both in The Federal Vision, eds. Steve Wilkins and Duane Garner (Monroe, LA: Athanasius Press, 2004), 58, 67, 37; and citing Louis Berkhof, Systematic Theology, 286-89. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵
Samuel Eldon Waldron, “Sola Fide in Norman Shepherd,” in “Faith, Obedience, and Justification: Current Evangelical Departures from Sola Fide” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2005), 163-194, at 163, 166-167. ↩ ↩²
R. Scott Clark, Westminster Seminary California faculty page, wscal.edu/clark/tuning.php. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴
Waldron, “Sola Fide in Norman Shepherd,” 163-164. ↩ ↩²
Norman Shepherd, “Justification by Faith Alone,” Reformation and Revival 11, no. 2 (Spring 2002): 76-77, quoted in Waldron, “Sola Fide in Norman Shepherd,” 171. ↩
Waldron, “Sola Fide in Norman Shepherd,” 182. ↩
Waldron, “Concluding Observations,” in “Faith, Obedience, and Justification,” 234-243, at 239. ↩ ↩² ↩³
Chen, “State of Contemporary Theological Discussion,” in “A Historical, Biblical, and Theological Interpretation of Covenants,” 24-52, n. 45, citing David VanDrunen, “Where We Are: Justification under Fire in the Contemporary Scene,” 48-54, and O. Palmer Robertson, The Current Justification Controversy (Unicoi, TN: Trinity Foundation, 2003). ↩
The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 11, “Of Justification,” para. 1. ↩
The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 29, “Of Baptism,” para. 3. ↩
The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 29, “Of Baptism,” para. 2. ↩