“One of the complaints of Federal Vision advocates is that they didn’t get a fair shake at the General Assembly.”

Where does this stuff come from? Nothing was done wrong at the Assembly debate. But there could be no “fair shake.” A stacked committee produced a report full of falsehoods (i.e statements about the Westminster Standards that were false; also maybe statement about what certain people believed, but I haven’t been tracking that as much because I’ve been too concerned about the former). Saying so would have just produced more opposition. How dare anyone disagree with the venerable R C Sproul, Lig Duncan, blah blah blah.
GA has never been a place to have serious theological discussion and this was no exception.

And by the way, the efforts of people trying do defend themselves from denominationally sanctioned libel (the nefarious act of mailing out the thirty questions) does not compare to the stacked committee in the first place. A rag tag group of people tried to resist the violence of the empire. And they didn’t succeed.

Yet.

Speaking for myself, I let the Novenson motion play out and then thought of something I thought would be constructive. At that point the Assembly voted to halt dabate. That was frustrating, but there was nothing unfair about it. The unfair thing was the falsehoods in the committee report and the ones told on the floor of the GA.

But those can always be dealt with in the blogsophere.

PS. I’m sorry there are going to be hurt feelings over statements about the content of the report. But the report not only says things are Westminsterian that are not Westminsterian, it says things that members of the committee are still teaching contrary to on their church website as in keeping with Westminster. The report claims that “precisely the point of the Standards’ use of the term and theological category of ‘merit.’ Merit relates to the just fulfillment of the conditions of the covenant of works” (LC 55, 174).” [lines 25-27, p. 2207] But Dr. Ligon Duncan still teaches from his lectures on his church website,

What God is doing is not merited. Adam has not merited this. We use the phrase Covenant of Works, not to say that man earned these blessings, but to express the fact that this original relationship had no provision for the continuation of God’s blessings if disobedience occurred. So it was a covenant contingent upon Adam continuing in his obligations. (emphasis all in the original).

So, according to the report, Dr. Duncan is teaching about the covenant of works contrary to what is teaching “precisely the point of the Standards’ use of the term and theological category of ‘merit.’” Honestly, like someone recently wrote, you couldn’t make this stuff up.  Yet this was an attack on an identifiable group of people for teaching the same thing as Dr. Duncan.  (Note, the declarations with Dr. Lucas GA explanation, are better than the committee report, but the report itself is still beset with this and other problems.)