The Auburn Avenue Chronicles, Volume 1: The Complete Collection of Blog & Mablog Posts on the Federal Vision

by Douglas Wilson

In January 2002, four Reformed ministers spoke at a pastors conference in Monroe, Louisiana. A few months later, the Reformed world and the Internet blew up with heresy accusations (and condemnations) and heated debates over the theology presented at the conference. Two names stuck—the name of a conference, The Federal Vision, and the name of the host church, Auburn Avenue.In April 2004, one of the four ministers, Douglas Wilson, set up shop at Blog & Mablog (dougwils.com), and over the next thirteen years wrote over a third of a million words on the Federal Vision theology and surrounding controversy, all of which have been collected in this volume.From the “It must be confessed that this thing is kind of a slab of theological controversial writing, and so I do confess it. But at the same time, I believe there is a lot of edifying theology here—distinctions that the Reformed used to make still need to be made as long as the people of God need to be pastored. I trust that the experience of reading this will be edifying over all. Don’t try to get through it in one sitting.”Volume One contains the Introduction as well as posts written between April 2004 and July 2007.

Genres: Theology

476 pages, Kindle Edition

Published August 3, 2020

About the author

I write in order to make the little voices in my head go away. Thus far it hasn't worked.

Reviews

[Zach de Walsingham · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ok. It seems Douglas Wilson was using his English skills to try and overcome the lack of common ground regarding theological terms, and he uses such to describe semi-scholastic positions that many on both sides had not read, at least in 2007. This makes for easy misunderstandings. I'll give an example from his interactions with Green Baggins (Lane Keister, an officer in the OPC):

"Lane responds to this by asking (quite respectfully) if I have read and interacted with Muller on this. The answer there is (with equal respect) that I have not. I have Muller’s big monga-set, but haven’t read it yet. I have read and appreciated his work elsewhere, and I guess I am not quite sure how the sentiments I expressed above would differ with how Lane is representing him here. I don’t believe that the Reformed scholastics were rationalists, but I also believe that the apostle Paul would have been quite amused with any detailed displays of Ramian logic."

Ramian? He is describing Richard Muller's Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics as Ramian? I would never have classified his (Protestant) scholastic theological retrieval project as such.

On to volume 2...