Covenant Theology

History

Roots

Covenant theology grew out of an argument about babies. When Zurich’s radicals refused to baptise infants in 1525, Huldrych Zwingli answered that God made one covenant with Abraham and his children, that circumcision was its sign, and that baptism now takes circumcision’s place (Colossians 2:11–12). If the covenant is one, the children of believers belong in it now as they did then. The Anabaptist break and the covenant argument were born together.

Zwingli’s successor Heinrich Bullinger turned that argument into a way of reading Scripture. His short Latin treatise A Brief Exposition of the One and Eternal Testament or Covenant of God treated the whole Bible as the story of a single covenant, and by the 1550s he was using covenant as a category for theology as a whole (Wikipedia, secondary). John Calvin made the same point about continuity in the Institutes: the covenant made with the patriarchs “is so far from differing from ours in reality and substance, that it is altogether one and the same: still the administration differs” (2.10.2). He used it to defend Infant Baptism against the Anabaptists (4.16).

Classic shape

The second generation at Heidelberg added the other half of the system: a covenant before the fall. Zacharias Ursinus spoke of a covenant of creation in 1562, and the term “covenant of works” (foedus operum) first appears in the English Puritan Dudley Fenner in 1585 (Wikipedia, secondary). Caspar Olevianus, also at Heidelberg, wrote On the Substance of the Covenant of Grace between God and the Elect (1585). The Heidelberg Catechism (1563) already grounds infant baptism in the covenant: infants “are included in God’s covenant and people,” and baptism replaced circumcision as its sign (Q&A 74).

The note dates the position to 1646, when the Westminster Assembly finished its Confession. The sixteenth-century confessions (French, Scots, Belgic, Heidelberg) do not name a covenant of works (Wikipedia, secondary); Westminster set the two covenants side by side and made them the teaching of whole churches. Its chapter 7 is the classic statement (text):

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. (7.2)

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. (7.3)

Johannes Cocceius gave the scheme its first full treatment two years later, in Summa doctrinae de foedere et testamento Dei (1648). He read the covenants as a history that unfolds in stages, an early form of what is now called biblical theology, and his school spent half a century quarrelling with the followers of Gisbertus Voetius, who preferred a topic-by-topic system (Wikipedia, secondary). Herman Witsius wrote The Economy of the Covenants between God and Man (1677, Archive.org, 1803 English edition) partly out of grief at that quarrel, hoping to reconcile the two sides (Wikipedia, secondary). It became the standard Reformed handbook on the covenants.

Influence

Covenant theology became the backbone of seventeenth-century Reformed orthodoxy in the Netherlands, Scotland, England and New England, and it still frames Presbyterian and Continental Reformed teaching on Original Sin, justification and the sacraments. Particular Baptists in England adopted it with one change, which became the “1689” Reformed Baptist tradition (below). In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries Dispensationalism rose as its main Protestant rival, and most American debates over Israel, the law and the millennium since then have been fought along that line.

Key ideas and contributors

The covenant of works. God made Adam the representative (“federal head,” from Latin foedus, covenant) of the human race and promised life on condition of obedience, with death as the penalty for eating from the forbidden tree (Genesis 2:16–17). Westminster’s proof texts are Romans 5 and Galatians 3. Defenders also point to Hosea 6:7, “like Adam they transgressed the covenant.” Because Adam stood for all his descendants, his guilt is counted to them, and Christ, the second Adam, stands for his people in the same way (Romans 5:12–21). This is how Reformed theology reads Original Sin in Genesis 3.

The covenant of grace. After the fall God offered “unto sinners life and salvation by Jesus Christ, requiring of them faith in him,” and promised the Holy Spirit “to make them willing and able to believe” (Westminster 7.3). The first announcement is the promise of the woman’s offspring in Genesis 3:15. The covenants with Noah, Abraham, Moses and David are stages of this one covenant.

One covenant, two administrations. Under the law the covenant of grace was administered “by promises, prophecies, sacrifices, circumcision, the paschal lamb, and other types,” and under the gospel by preaching, baptism and the Lord’s Supper. “There are not, therefore, two covenants of grace differing in substance, but one and the same under various dispensations” (7.5–6). Old Testament believers were saved by faith in the Christ to come, as Abraham was (Genesis 15:6).

The covenant of redemption. Many covenant theologians add a third covenant behind the other two: an eternal agreement in which the Father gave the Son a people to redeem and the Son undertook to become their head. Cocceius and John Owen were among its first writers on it, with hints earlier in Olevianus (Wikipedia, secondary). Westminster does not name it. The 1689 Baptist Confession does, calling the covenant of grace “founded in that eternal covenant transaction that was between the Father and the Son about the redemption of the elect” (7.3).

Children in the covenant. The practical fruit is paedobaptism. Westminster teaches that “the infants of one or both believing parents are to be baptized,” citing Genesis 17:7 (“to be God to you and to your offspring after you”) with Colossians 2:11–12 and Acts 2:39 (28.4). If the covenant is the same in substance, and its sign was given to children before, nothing in the New Testament revokes their place now.

Promises fulfilled in Christ. Covenant theologians read the promises to Abraham through Paul: “the promises were made to Abraham and to his offspring… who is Christ” (Galatians 3:16), and all who belong to Christ “are Abraham’s offspring, heirs according to promise” (3:29). The land promise is widened to the renewed earth, and the church of Jews and Gentiles is the one people of God continuing Israel.

Later contributors: O. Palmer Robertson, whose The Christ of the Covenants (1980, Archive.org) is a standard modern introduction; and Meredith Kline, who compared biblical covenants with ancient Near Eastern treaty forms and defended the covenant of works against twentieth-century revisers (Wikipedia, secondary).

Key controversies

Baptists inside the covenant: 1689 federalism. English Particular Baptists kept Westminster’s theology but rewrote its covenant chapter. The Second London Baptist Confession (1689) says the covenant of grace “is revealed in the gospel; first of all to Adam in the promise of salvation by the seed of the woman, and afterwards by farther steps, until the full discovery thereof was completed in the New Testament” (7.3). Nehemiah Coxe’s A Discourse of the Covenants (1681, Archive.org) set out the reasoning. On this reading the old covenants promised the covenant of grace but were not themselves it; the covenant of grace is formally established only in the new covenant, whose members all “know the Lord” (Jeremiah 31:31–34). So the confession limits baptism to “those who do actually profess repentance towards God, faith in, and obedience to, our Lord Jesus Christ” (29.2). Presbyterians answer that the new covenant, like the old, has an outward membership that includes children and unbelievers, and that Genesis 17:7 was never revoked. This is the main live dispute between Infant Baptism and Believer’s Baptism among Calvinists; see also Baptist.

New Covenant Theology and progressive covenantalism. Since the late twentieth century some Baptists have gone further. New Covenant Theology, set out in Tom Wells and Fred Zaspel’s New Covenant Theology (2002), treats the Mosaic covenant as a temporary covenant with national Israel, fulfilled and ended at the cross, and holds that Christians live under “the law of Christ” rather than the Ten Commandments as such (Wikipedia, secondary). Many of its writers also doubt the covenant of works. Peter Gentry and Stephen Wellum’s Kingdom through Covenant (2012) calls a similar middle path “progressive covenantalism”: the biblical covenants unfold one plan and climax in Christ, but they are not administrations of one covenant of grace. Classical covenant theologians reply that this loses the unity of the people of God and the abiding moral law. Dispensationalists reply that it still absorbs Israel into the church.

Dispensationalism. The sharpest dispute is with Dispensationalism, which grew from John Nelson Darby and the Brethren and spread through the Scofield Reference Bible (1909). Charles Ryrie’s Dispensationalism Today (1965, Archive.org) named its essentials: a consistent distinction between Israel and the church, a consistently literal hermeneutic, and God’s glory as the purpose of history. Covenant theology holds the opposite of the first: “God has one people, one people of God throughout redemptive history, called ‘Israel’ under the Old Testament, and called ’the church’ under the New” (Wikipedia, secondary). Dispensationalists hold that God’s promises of land and kingdom to Abraham’s physical descendants are unconditional and still to be kept, usually in a future millennium (Premillennialism; Romans 11:25–29). They charge covenant theology with spiritualising prophecy and with replacing Israel with the church; Reginald Showers’ There Really Is a Difference (1990) makes the case. From the other side, John Gerstner’s Wrongly Dividing the Word of Truth (1991, Archive.org) argued that dispensationalism departs from historic Protestant teaching on salvation and the law. Progressive dispensationalists since the 1990s have narrowed the gap, and conversations like the Blaising–Wellum exchange below show how much ground the two now share.

Is there a covenant of works? Not every Reformed theologian accepts the first covenant. Karl Barth, Klaas Schilder and John Murray each moved toward a single covenant of grace; Murray kept a works principle for Adam but preferred to call it the “Adamic administration” rather than a covenant (Wikipedia, secondary). Defenders reply that without a works arrangement Christ’s obedience has nothing to fulfil, so the imputation of his righteousness to believers loses its ground. The argument flared again in the Norman Shepherd controversy at Westminster Theological Seminary in the late 1970s and in the Federal Vision debates of the 2000s, which also drew on the New Perspective on Paul.

Is it in the text? Critics outside the Reformed world ask whether “covenant of works” and “covenant of redemption” are biblical categories or theological constructions read back into Genesis. Hosea 6:7 can be translated “at Adam,” a place, rather than “like Adam” (NRSVUE). Defenders answer that the elements of a covenant (parties, condition, promise, penalty) are all present in Genesis 2, whether or not the word is.

What remains unresolved

Covenant theology’s claim is that the Bible tells one story with one people and one way of salvation. Its critics agree on the one way of salvation but dispute the one people. The real fault lines are two questions: does the new covenant include children of believers as the Abrahamic covenant did, and are the promises to Israel kept in Christ and the church or still owed to ethnic Israel? Presbyterians, Reformed Baptists, New Covenant theologians and dispensationalists each answer those two differently, and how a reader answers them decides most of what they do with Genesis 17.