Avoiding Hyper-factionalism

Douglas Wilson has a great endorsement and critique of Michael Horton’s article on NT Wright. Here is a snippet:

This is all to the good, but then, in the last column of the article, the whole thing starts to go south on Horton. He offers this complaint — “Wright also has a clear agenda to get Christians to transform the world by ‘living the gospel.'” What? Like Calvin didn’t? Like Knox didn’t? Like Cranmer didn’t? Like Beza didn’t? Like Owen didn’t? Like Edwards didn’t? Like Bucer didn’t? Like Tyndale didn’t? Like Machen didn’t? Like Kuyper didn’t? Horton has made a big deal out of Wright not being able to “footnote” his negative assessments of the Reformed tradition. But if that is the standard, Horton is not able to footnote how a radical Klinean departure from centuries of Reformed social and cultural theology is in any way consistent with being really Reformed — or, if I may dare say it, with being truly Reformed. You want a footnote on Reformed cultural theology? How about this? “See the first 400 years of Reformation history.” On this point, and it is not an insignificant one, N.T. Wright is squarely in the Reformed tradition, and Michael Horton is not.

The whole thing is worth reading as endorsement of Reformed catholicity, here.

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