The Reformed Heartland

I read Doug Wilson with a great deal of caution and copious grains of salt. He can be both wonderfully thoughtful but he can also be way off the mark. I loved what he had to say today about unity in the Reformed camp in his post Centers and Edges:

The fact is that the center of the Westminster Assembly was so obvious that we easily overlook the fact that it had edges. The Assembly is identified by its center, and not by its edges. The exact shape of the United States is changing all the time, as the tide goes in and out. Nevertheless, Nebraska remains right where it is. We should labor to identify the Reformed heartland, and take our time working our way out to the beaches.
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Our modern form of tending to orthodoxy errs (in my view) by running concertina wire around the edges instead of building up the center. This is not to say that border security should be entirely neglected (of course it should not), but that is not where the central action is. The central action should be — and this is admittedly my own view — at the center.

That is good stuff. Many of my fellow Reformed believers are so caught up in defending this minutiae of doctrine or that one that they miss the center of what makes the Reformed...reformed.