R. Scott Clark
Puritan Board Senior
Sebastian Heck's response
Recent Reviews of RRC Heidelblog
Yes, posting Sebastian's reply is self-serving--mea culpa--but he did a better job of responding than I did:
Recent Reviews of RRC Heidelblog
Yes, posting Sebastian's reply is self-serving--mea culpa--but he did a better job of responding than I did:
Disappointing indeed, as was Dr. Strange’s presentation at the “Animus Imponentis Conference” earlier this year.
First, Strange misses the “irenical” character of RRC when he says:
“What it means to follow the Reformed confessions (note now the plural)—to develop one’s theology, piety, and practice from such—is more textured and varied than Clark lets on in this book. It is not accurate to present such a thin slice of what it means to be Reformed and argue as if that constricted view is exhaustive of the Reformed faith. Clark occasionally cites Richard Muller in support of his approach, as if Muller’s project of showing concord between Calvin and the Calvinists was intended to present a narrow, uniform Calvinism in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.”
The way I understood RRC, the use of the singular “Reformed confession” did not narrow the focus at all, but rather broaden it into the broad consensus of what the Reformed have historically held in common.
Second, so the archetypal/ectypal distinction is NOT “confessionally warranted” according to Dr. Strange? If so we probably need to discuss what WCF 1.1 and 7.1 actually mean.
However, where Dr. Strange’s review gets really disappinting is when he says “we need more than these things…” and then launches into how we need more emphasis on union with Christ and communion with God and each other etc. Come on! Is that his recipe for reformation?
Then, he defines “orthodoxism” as, quote, “an emphasis on the forms, on the means of grace, for example, in which the means threaten to become ends in themselves”. True, the latter would be bad, but the former? So, back to Kant and the old argument of form vs. content, eh?
Showing, as you do in RRC, the dangers of an Edwardsian QIRE, does NOT mean, as Strange alleges, an inability “to profit from a remarkably sin-sensitive, Christ-centered writer.” It just ain’t the same thing. One can warn of consequences of a certain view and still profit from it in part.
When Dr. Strange quotes WCF 21.6 to disprove your view in RRC that “private prayer is not a means of grace”, he shows no awareness of the age-old discussion of the function of prayer as a means of grace in the Continental Reformed confessions and the Westminster Standards. Again, Strange misses Clark’s irenical case for an understanding of prayer that does justice to BOTH the Cont. Ref. confessions AND the Westminster tradition.
Finally, when Strange says, “We need restoration in which the outer follows the inner. This was the dynamic of the great Reformation of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.”- I beg to differ. The genious of the Reformation, and with it, of the Reformed confession (singular!) is the unity between the outer and the inner, call it sacramental union or something else, and decisively NOT that a hollow “outer” follows some pietistic “inner”.
This review is nothing that gives me no second thoughts whatsoever about what I have read, appreciated and enjoyed in RRC. Keep up the good work!