Steve Wilkins' Letter to Louisiana Presbytery Regarding the “9 Declarations" of PCA General Assembly’s Ad-Interim Committee’s Report on the Federal Vision/New Perspective”:
http://www.auburnavenue.org/documents/Wilkins9DeclarationsResponse.pdf
This about sums it up:
How does he come to this conclusion?
He then admits:
http://www.auburnavenue.org/documents/Wilkins9DeclarationsResponse.pdf
This about sums it up:
It's the old "We agree with the WCF but Scripture uses these terms more broadly".Here it appears, however, that the committee is using the terms "justification, adoption and sanctification" as the Westminster Confession defines them, i.e., as blessings given exclusively to the decretally elect and not to each member of the visible church. If I am correct with this assumption, then I agree with this declaration. However, I do believe that Paul uses these same terms in a broader way in the Scriptures.
How does he come to this conclusion?
Paul addresses all the members of the visible church as "members of Gods household" (Eph. 2:19) and thus seems to view every member as "adopted" in some sense. The apostle does not appear to restrict the phrase "members of God's household" only to the decretally elect.
He then admits:
Except, Pastor Wilkins, these other two ways would not merely "...also be Confessional...." This assumes that Pastor Wilkin's first reading is Confessional. It is not.If I am wrong in my reading of these texts, then I am left with two other ways of understanding them that would also be consistent with the WCF. Paul could be addressing these statements exclusively to those who are decretally elect and not to the rest (i.e., in accordance with the Westminster Confession’s stipulated definitions). Or, he could be giving, as some suggest, a form of "charitable judgment" to all the members of the church (i.e., rather than saying what is objectively or covenantally true, he is simply saying what he charitably assumes to be true, though he cannot be certain). Though neither of these options seem as compelling to me, they would be consistent with the Confession.