Covenantal and Dispensational Theologies

Four Views on the Continuity of Scripture

Brent E. Parker, Richard J. Lucas, Brent E. Parker, Richard J. Lucas

• Publisher: IVP Academic
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781514001127
• eBook ISBN: 9781514001134
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

How does the canon of Scripture fit together?

For evangelical Christians, there is no question about the authority of Scripture and its testimony to the centrality of Jesus Christ in God's salvation plan. But several questions remain: How do the Old Testament and New Testament relate to each other? What is the relationship among the biblical covenants? How should Christians read and interpret Scripture in order to do justice to both its individual parts and its whole message? How does Israel relate to the church?

In this Spectrum Multiview volume, readers will find four contributors who explore these complex questions. The contributors each make a case for their own view—representing two versions of covenantal theology and two versions of dispensational theology—and then respond to the others' views to offer an animated yet irenic discussion on the continuity of Scripture.

Views and Contributors:

• Covenant Theology: Michael S. Horton, Gresham Machen Professor of Systematic Theology and Apologetics, Westminster Seminary California
• Progressive Covenantalism: Stephen J. Wellum, professor of Christian theology, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary
• Progressive Dispensationalism: Darrell L. Bock, Senior Research Professor of New Testament Studies, Dallas Theological Seminary
• Traditional Dispensationalism: Mark A. Snoeberger, professor of systematic theology and apologetics, Detroit Baptist Theological Seminary

Spectrum Multiview Books offer a range of viewpoints on contested topics within Christianity, giving contributors the opportunity to present their position and also respond to others in this dynamic publishing format.

1

Covenant Theology

MICHAEL S. HORTON

Although there are many versions of “covenant theology” in use today across various disciplines of biblical studies and theology, I use it here to refer to the system of doctrine of classic, confessional Reformed orthodoxy. Highlighting both continuity of the one covenant of grace stretching from Genesis 3:15 to Revelation 22:21, covenant theology also recognizes the distinction between covenants based on the principle of law (“Do this and you will live”) and those based on the principle of promise (“I will do this and you will live”). Behind these covenants lies the eternal covenant of redemption (pactum salutis) between the persons of the Trinity that provides the foundation for God’s gracious purposes in Christ the Mediator.

Many evangelicals today, especially in North America, identify Reformed theology with the “TULIP” acrostic (i.e., the “Five Points of Calvinism”). However important these doctrines indeed are in Calvinist soteriology, they are not the center, much less the circumference, of Reformed theology. Since the nineteenth century, intellectual historians sought to identify an all-controlling idea from which all the parts of various systems are deduced. This method was highly contrastive (exaggerating distinctive emphases over against other systems) and reductionistic. Consequently, “Calvinism” was characterized by friend and foe by the sovereignty of God, often in contrast with other systems. B. B. Warfield recognized the dangers in such an approach—especially false contrasts of Reformed and Lutheran systems.1

I. John Hesselink observes, “Reformed theology is simply covenant theology.”2 But this is not to reduce the former to the idea of covenant as an organizing principle, the font of distinctiveness from all other systems. Precisely because Reformed theology recognizes different types of covenants, it cannot be reduced to a single idea. The Bible itself consists of two constitutions or covenant charters, Old and New, uniting by one unfolding covenant of grace from Genesis 3:15 to Revelation 22:21. Covenant theology is the architectural design or framework of Scripture itself. Unlike a central dogma, the framework of a building is spread out among a network of crossbeams and studs; even when invisible to the naked eye, the framework connects all the parts. My goal in this brief essay is to expose that covenantal framework.

ARCHITECTURAL DESIGN

Beyond affirming “covenant theology,” we must define it. If dispensationalism (from a Reformed perspective) adds too many divisions in God’s unfolding plan, the opposite danger—probably the dominant one in much of contemporary New Testament (NT) scholarship and systematic theology—is to reduce biblical history to a single covenant. The mature consensus among Reformed churches is summarized succinctly in the seventh chapter of the Westminster Confession of Faith:

The distance between God and the creature is so great, that although reasonable creatures do owe obedience unto him as their Creator, yet they could never have any fruition of him, as their blessedness and reward, but by some voluntary condescension on God’s part, which he hath been pleased to express by way of covenant. The first covenant made with man was a covenant of works, wherein life was promised to Adam, and in him to his posterity, upon condition of perfect and personal obedience. Man, by his Fall, having made himself incapable of life by that covenant, the Lord was pleased to make a second, commonly called the covenant of grace: wherein he freely offered unto sinners life and salvation by Jesus Christ, requiring of them faith in him, that they may be saved, and promising to give unto all those that are ordained unto life, his Holy Spirit, to make them willing and able to believe.

But how did this architectural system develop, and what are its basic components?

Law and gospel. The most basic distinction is that between law and gospel. Influenced in part by Augustine’s Spirit and Letter, Martin Luther said that whoever can make this distinction well should be given a doctorate.3 “As the Reformers saw it,” Otto Weber notes, “Paul was really understood here . . . [as] the distinction between law and Gospel, between the letter and the spirit, was brought to full theological validity.”4

Law and gospel are commands distinguished from promises. Yet it goes deeper than a mere cataloging of Scripture into indicatives and imperatives. God is the speaker, and he is doing different things through the words he employs. Through the law God kills—extinguishing all hope of being justified by one’s own will and effort—and through the gospel God makes alive, justifies, and sanctifies. Philipp Melanchthon, Luther’s associate and author of the Augsburg Confession (1531), added a “third use” of the law—to guide believers in godly living, which attained confessional status in the Book of Concord (Solid Declaration VI). Article 4 of the Apology of the Augsburg Confession (1531) states, “All Scripture ought to be distributed into these two principal topics, the law and the promises.” This is not a Marcionite opposition between Old and New Testaments, the article adds, since the free remission of sins in Christ is found along with the law in the Old Testament (OT).5 According to the fifth article of the Formula of Concord, “We believe, teach, and confess that the distinction between the law and the Gospel is to be maintained in the Church with great diligence.”6

The Zurich Reformer Ulrich Zwingli was not entirely sympathetic with this distinction.7 However, all other Reformed leaders not only agreed with Luther’s distinction but with its importance. “We wish to affirm that Gospel should be distinguished from law and law from Gospel,” wrote Peter Martyr Vermigli. “But this cannot be done by those who ascribe justification to works, and confuse them.”8 Even Zwingli’s successor, Heinrich Bullinger (1504–1575), concurred, including the distinction in the Second Helvetic Confession: “The Gospel is indeed opposed to the law. For the law works wrath and pronounces a curse, whereas the Gospel preaches grace and blessing.”9

Like Melanchthon, Calvin continued to speak of law and gospel in two senses: (1) as referring to the OT and NT and (2) as referring to condemnation and justification. This important nuance is found explicitly even in Paul, where he refers to “law” in both of these senses even in the same sentence: “But now the righteousness of God has been manifested apart from the law, although the law and the Prophets bear witness to it” (Rom 3:21). Calvin himself acknowledges these two senses: “The law has a twofold meaning; it sometimes includes the whole of what has been taught by Moses, and sometimes that part only which was peculiar to his ministration, which consisted of precepts, rewards, and punishments.” The goal of his ministry was to lead the people of God “to despair as to their own righteousness, that they might flee to the haven of divine goodness, and so to Christ himself. This was the end or design of the Mosaic dispensation. . . . And whenever the word law is thus strictly taken, Moses is by implication opposed to Christ: and then we must consider what the law contains, as separate from the gospel.”10 And, along with Melanchthon and the Lutheran tradition, the Reformed churches also taught an abiding third use of the law: namely, to guide believers in this life.

As early as the first page of his Commentary on the Heidelberg Catechism Zacharius Ursinus (primary author of the Heidelberg Catechism) stated, “The doctrine of the church is the entire and uncorrupted doctrine of the law and gospel concerning the true God, together with his will, works, and worship.”11 He then elucidates what was to be a typical Reformed statement of the distinction that was held in common with the Lutheran confession:

The doctrine of the church consists of two parts: the law, and the Gospel; in which we have comprehended the sum and substance of the sacred Scriptures. . . . For the law is our schoolmaster, to bring us to Christ, constraining us to fly to him, and showing us what that righteousness is, which he has wrought out, and now offers unto us. But the gospel, professedly, treats of the person, office, and benefits of Christ. Therefore we have, in the law and gospel, the whole of the Scriptures comprehending the doctrine revealed from heaven for our salvation. . . . The law prescribes and enjoins what is to be done, and forbids what ought to be avoided: whilst the gospel announces the free remission of sin, through and for the sake of Christ.12

Furthermore, because it is grounded in the covenant of creation, “The law is known from nature; the gospel is divinely revealed.”13 Theodore Beza included in his Confessio a section on “Law and Gospel” as “the two parts of the Word of God,” adding the warning that “ignorance of this distinction between Law and Gospel is one of the principle sources of the abuses which corrupted and still corrupt Christianity.”14

Law-gospel and covenant theology. As biblical theologian Geerhardus Vos observed, “The contrast of law and gospel is brought to bear on the contrast between the covenant of works and the covenant of grace.”15 While essential, the law-gospel distinction by itself is static. For example, what happens when we are preaching through Deuteronomy and meet its inexorable demands and threats? Most basically, one should be able to distinguish the law from the gospel and recall that life is not to be sought in the law. However, the passages promise life on the basis of obedience. Are we simply to impose a universal rule on these passages? It becomes essential to be able to distinguish not only law and gospel but different covenants in which the law is functioning. There are commands in the NT and gospel promises in the Old. The question is which functions as the basis of the covenant blessings.

The distinction between covenants of law and covenants of promise is evident as far back in the tradition as Irenaeus.16 The bishop of Lyons grouped various periods of history under “two covenants”: Sinai and the new covenant.17 The first he identifies as a period—“the law of works”—reigning from Moses to John the Baptist.18 The covenant of grace, which was promised to Abraham through his single offspring, Christ, is the basis for the new covenant, which he calls a “new economy of liberty.”19 It is important to note that this emphasis on distinct covenants was part of a strategy to refute the ahistorical speculations of Gnosticism. Ever since, an interest in covenant theology has gone hand in hand with an interest in the historical development of God’s plan from promise to fulfillment. And the story of Abraham, with the promise of a worldwide family, has been a central feature of that broader narrative.

The first appearance of a special emphasis on the covenant motif is in the anti-Anabaptist polemics of Zurich under Zwingli.20 “Christian people are also in the gracious covenant with God, in which Abraham stood,” he argued. Therefore, “it is clearly proved that our children are no less God’s than Abraham’s.”21 Zwingli’s case for infant baptism rested to a large extent on the unity of a single covenant of grace spanning the whole of redemptive history.22 While recognizing the unity of the covenant of grace, Zwingli’s antipathy to the law-gospel distinction encouraged him to blend the Abrahamic and Sinai covenants.23

But, once again, as the tradition matured, a consensus coalesced around the covenant of works/grace distinction.24 The former was also called the covenant of law, nature, and life. All of these terms highlighted the same idea: that the first covenant was a commandment of life based on law (“Do this and you shall live; disobey and you will surely die”), made with Adam as covenant head in a state of nature prior to grace.25

Yet behind these two covenants stood a third: the covenant of redemption. This is an eternal pact between the persons of the Trinity for the salvation of the elect from the mass of condemned humanity. Reformed theologians pointed out that Jesus speaks of having been given a people by the Father before all ages (Jn 6:39-44; 10; 17:1-5, 9-11). In addition, Paul speaks of God’s “eternal purpose in election” (Rom 8:28-31; 9:11; Eph 1:4-5, 11; 3:11; 2 Tim 1:9), the writer to the Hebrews speaks of the “unchangeable oath” that rests on God’s promise rather than on human activity (Heb 6:17-20), and represents Jesus as announcing in his ascension, “Here am I, and the children God has given me” (Heb 2:13 NIV). Thus, lying behind the covenants with human beings in history, it is this eternal covenant, grounded in the free love and mercy of the Trinity, that gives the covenant of grace its absolute and unconditional basis.

COVENANT OF WORKS

Prior to the fall, these formative theologians argued, humanity in Adam was neither sinful nor confirmed in righteousness. Adam was on trial: would he follow his covenant Lord’s pattern of working and resting, subduing and reigning, or would he go his own way and seek his own good apart from God’s Word? Created for obedience, he was entirely capable of maintaining himself in a state of integrity by his own free will. In this perspective, love and law are not antitheses; law prescribes in concrete terms what love looks like in relation to God and fellow humans.

Most Calvinists today (one hopes) would recognize a denial of the doctrine of unconditional and particular election as an injury to the Reformed system. Yet exceptions to the covenant of work...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction to Covenantal and Dispensational Theologies: Four Views on the Continuity of Scripture: Brent E. Parker and Richard J. Lucas
• 1 Covenant Theology: Michael S. Horton
• 2 Progressive Covenantalism: Stephen J. Wellum
• 3 Progressive Dispensationalism: Darrell L. Bock
• 4 Traditional Dispensationalism: Mark A. Snoeberger
• 5 A Covenant Theology Response: Michael S. Horton
• 6 A Progressive Covenantalism Response: Stephen J. Wellum
• 7 A Progressive Dispensational Response: Darrell L. Bock
• 8 A Traditional Dispensational Response: Mark A. Snoeberger
• Conclusion: Brent E. Parker and Richard J. Lucas
• Contributors
• General Index
• Scripture Index
• Notes
• Praise for Covenantal and Dispensational Theologies
• About the Authors
• More Titles from InterVarsity Press
• Copyright