(Co-Authored with Garret Walden)

“What do you think about Doug Wilson?” is a question we receive often as pastors, and it’s sometimes hard to know exactly how to answer. He has a remarkable wit that he sometimes uses to defend biblical positions in a hostile society, which accounts for much of his appeal among conservative and Reformed-minded Christians. But we have deep concerns about his ministry practices and, even more importantly, the theology that stands behind those practices.¹

Kevin DeYoung has written an incisive critique of “the Moscow mood,” primarily addressing how the content coming out of Moscow, Idaho (the headquarters of Wilson’s ministry) falls short of the character and virtue revealed in Scripture, and taught and modeled by Christ. In this essay, we continue in this stream of brotherly critique by focusing on just one pillar of “the Moscow doctrine,” specifically Wilson’s problematic doctrine of faith and its relationship to justification. We draw attention to historical and theological points that have been too easily overlooked by many of Moscow’s recent and sometimes unsuspecting acolytes. At the heart of these serious errors is the understanding of faith’s relationship to justification as expressed by the Federal Vision (abbreviated FV), which bears several striking similarities to the doctrines of Richard Baxter (1615–1691). We conclude that Baxter’s doctrine is similar to the FV on justifying faith, that both reject the Reformed position on this issue, and that Wilson can rightly be considered neo-Baxterian on this point. Therefore, just as our confessional Baptists forefathers responded to Baxter’s errors, contemporary Baptists should respond firmly and decisively to Wilson’s similar errors.

Read the rest here.