Covenant Theology

Biblical, Theological, and Historical Perspectives

Guy Prentiss Waters, J. Nicholas Reid, John R. Muether, Guy P. Waters, J. Nicholas Reid, John R. Muether

• Publisher: Crossway
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781433560064
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Crítica e interpretación bíblicas

A Comprehensive Exploration of the Biblical Covenants

This book forms an overview of the biblical teaching on covenant as well as the practical significance of covenant for the Christian life. A host of26 scholars shows how covenant is not only clearly taught from Scripture, but also that it lays the foundation for other key doctrines of salvation. The contributors, who engage variously in biblical, systematic, and historical theology, present covenant theologynot as a theological abstract imposedon the Bible but as a doctrine that is organically presented throughout the biblical narrative. As students, pastors, and church leaders come to see the centrality of covenant to the Christian faith, the more the church will be strengthened with faith in the covenant-keeping God and encouraged in their understanding of the joy of covenant life.

Part 1

Biblical Covenants

1

The Covenant of Redemption

Guy M. Richard

Perhaps the most questionable element of historical federal theology is the covenant of redemption—the idea that there is a pretemporal agreement between the persons of the Trinity to plan and carry out the redemption of the elect. Many people today have reservations about the biblical warrant for such an idea.1 The biblical proof texts employed to support it have come under a fair amount of criticism in recent years. Moreover, there is a sense in which the covenant of redemption feels speculative and unnecessary, because it deals with things happening within the mind of God before the creation of time and because it seems to run counter to the unity of God. If God really is one God with one mind and will, then why would the persons of the Trinity need a covenant to establish agreement between them? Would there not already be agreement by virtue of the fact that all three persons share one and the same mind and will?2 The covenant of redemption has, for all these reasons, fallen on hard times within the Reformed community at large.

But as we shall see, the covenant of redemption was not always so suspect. It was, in fact, a commonly accepted idea from at least the middle part of the seventeenth century until the early twentieth century. From the moment it was formally expressed in writing, the covenant of redemption was embraced almost universally within the Reformed world with a speed that was quite astonishing. What led our forefathers in the post-Reformation period to embrace this doctrine so universally and so quickly? We seek to answer this question by exploring the biblical and theological rationale that made the covenant of redemption a staple within Reformed orthodoxy so quickly and for so long.3 My hope is that, in doing this, we will all be able to see the beauty that our forefathers saw in this doctrine. In the course of fulfilling my intended goal, this chapter surveys the origins and development of the covenant of redemption, and then it explores the biblical and theological rationale that have been used to support it.

Origins and Development

The precise origin of the covenant of redemption is difficult to pinpoint. David Dickson was apparently the first to speak of it by name in a speech he gave to the General Assembly of the Scottish church in 1638.4 After that, we see it appear in a good many treatises published in the 1640s.5 But there are hints that the covenant of redemption may have predated all these occurrences. Johannes Oecolampadius, for instance, specifically referred to a covenant between the Father and the Son in 1525. And it is quite possible that Martin Luther had this same idea in mind as early as 1519.6 Theodore Beza, too, may well have been speaking of a pretemporal covenant when in 1567 he said, in his translation of Luke 22:29, that the Father had “made a covenant with” the Son, which he linked to the eternal testament of Hebrews 9.7

These hints at the existence of a pretemporal intra-Trinitarian covenant continued to be visible to a greater or lesser degree throughout the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries in the writings of men like Guillaume Budé, John Calvin, Caspar Olevianus, Paul Bayne, William Ames, and Edward Reynolds. Even men from the opposite side of the theological spectrum were willing to speak of a covenant between the Father and the Son. James Arminius did so as early as 1603, and he defined this covenant as a voluntary arrangement to accomplish the salvation of humankind.8

It was not until later in the seventeenth century, however, that these hints became expressed much more concretely and the phrase covenant of redemption began regularly to appear. And within a very short period of time, this covenant secured a standard place in contemporary expressions of federal theology. A survey of the writings of men such as Thomas Blake, Anthony Burgess, Samuel Rutherford, John Bunyan, Patrick Gillespie, Herman Witsius, and James Durham and of confessional documents such as the Savoy Declaration, the Helvetic Consensus (1675), and the Second London Baptist Confession (1689) shows just how widespread the doctrine of the covenant of redemption became in the latter half of the seventeenth century.9

The surprising thing is how rapidly this happened and how little opposition there was to this covenant. Richard Muller has argued that “the seemingly sudden appearance of the doctrine as a virtual truism” within a relatively few years in the 1630s and 1640s suggests that the sixteenth-century references were in fact more than merely hints and that the covenant of redemption developed gradually over time from the very beginning of the Reformation. Although the terminology “covenant of redemption” was not used until Dickson’s speech in 1638, the groundwork that would later produce the doctrine was in place long before that.10

This evidence further suggests that this doctrine was perceived as being overwhelmingly evident to the ministers and theologians of the latter half of the seventeenth century. Rather than seeing the covenant of redemption as unbiblical, speculative, and unnecessary, these men saw it both as biblically and theologically essential and as exceedingly practical. The question is why. What biblical and theological rationale led these men to embrace this doctrine so overwhelmingly?

Biblical Rationale

The people of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries wholeheartedly embraced the covenant of redemption for one overarching reason: they believed that the Bible taught it. And they believed it did so in three main ways. They argued, first, that the language of Scripture pointed to the covenant of redemption; second, that the recorded dialogues between the Father and the Son also pointed to it; and third, that the teaching of several individual passages proved that it was true.

Language of Scripture

The Bible frequently uses language that is highly suggestive of a pretemporal agreement existing between the Father and the Son. According to Dickson, the Bible does this in three fundamental ways. First, it regularly speaks of the salvation of the elect in terms of buying and selling (e.g., Acts 20:28; 1 Cor. 6:20; Eph. 1:7; 1 Pet. 1:18). But as Dickson pointed out, buying and selling presume that the parties have reached prior agreement regarding the terms of the deal. Second, the titles given to Jesus in the Bible indicate that the Father and the Son must have made some kind of prior agreement. Thus, the fact that Jesus is called our “propitiation” in Romans 3:25 and 1 John 2:2 is evidence that an agreement must have been reached beforehand in...