Writer of Fancy: The Playful Piety of Jane Austen

Solomon Among the Postmoderns

The Baptized Body

1 & 2 Kings
Brazos Theological Commentary

The Promise Of His Appearing: An Exposition Of Second Peter

A Great Mystery: Fourteen Wedding Sermons

Deep Comedy: Trinity, Tragedy, And Hope In Western Literature

Miniatures & Morals: The Christian Novels of Jane Austen

The Priesthood of the Plebs: A Theology of Baptism

A Son To Me: An Exposition of 1 & 2 Samuel

Against Christianity

From Silence to Song: The Davidic Liturgical Revolution

Ascent to Love: A Guide to Dante's Divine Comedy

Blessed Are the Hungry: Meditations on the Lord's Supper

A House For My Name: A Survey of the Old Testament

Heroes of the City of Man: A Christian Guide to Select Ancient Literature

Brightest Heaven of Invention: A Christian Guide To Six Shakespeare Plays

Wise Words: Family Stories That Bring the Proverbs to Life

The Kingdom and the Power: Rediscovering the Centrality of the Church

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Theology - Covenant: Covenant kin

In a recent article on Ruth 1:16-17 in CBQ, Mark Smith comments on the relation between covenantal and familial terminology in Ruth and elsewhere.  Even when covenants have political dimensions, as in international treaties, they are fundamentally mechanisms for extending kin ties beyond immediate blood relations.  Smith writes:

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Theology - Covenant: Covenant of Life

Did Adam have to earn access to the tree of life? Not at all. Nothing could be clearer in Genesis 2: God offers every tree of the garden, and makes one - count ‘em - one exception, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. The tree of life was there for the taking. Adam had only to accept God’s offer, take, and eat.

After the fall, God kept Adam from the tree of life, until Life itself appeared in the flesh to be heard, seen, touched, and eaten.

Theology - Covenant: Faith and Creaturehood

Did Adam have to exercise faith in the garden, prior to sin?

Of course. He was a creature.

Creatures are utterly dependent on the Creator for everything, absolutely everything. That’s what it means to be a creature. An utterly dependent being is a being whose stance must be one of expectant trust.

God said, Eat from the trees. But how could Adam produce the fruit? He couldn’t. He had to trust God for food.

God said, It’s not good for man to be alone. Could Adam find a helper suitable to him? He had to trust God.

God put Adam into deep sleep and tore him in two. Adam has to entrust himself to Yahweh just as surely as Abraham did when Yahweh told him to sacrifice Isaac.

Adam went into deep sleep exercising the faith of Hebrews 11 - hoping for something delightful that he had not yet seen.

Theology - Covenant: Sloganizing

The term “mono-covenantalism” has been tossed around wildly in the last few years. Apparently, mono-covenantalism is really scary and bad. The PCA FV report insists on “bi-covenantalism” as the structure of “Scripture.”

So, is there one covenant, or are there two?

Might as well ask if Indian and African elephants are one species or two. Are you mono-elephantine or bi-elephantine?

The answer, of course, depends on what features you’re attending to. Nobody believes that the Adamic covenant in the garden was the same in every respect as the postlapsarian covenants. If nothing else, there’s the difference of Adam’s location: In the first covenant, he’s in the garden; the postlapsarian covenant presumes his exclusion from the garden.

Yet, most everyone agrees that there are fundamental similarities: Both covenants have identical parties - God and Adam; both are initiated by God; both include promises and threats; and so on.

Carrying on a debate between bi- and mono-covenantalism is just that - carrying on. It’s sloganizing, not theology.

If the scholastics taught us nothing else, and they taught us much, they would be valuable for introducing the word “quoddamodo” (”in a certain sense”) into theological discourse.

Theology - Covenant: Merit, Adam’s and Jesus’

A few weeks ago, I criticized an article by Cal Beisner and Fowler White for introducing the notion of “merit” into the inter-Trinitarian relations. On reflection and having read some of Joel Garver’s recent discussion of the PCA Federal Vision study report (at sacradoctrina.com), I want to nuance my criticism a bit.

If saying that the Son “merits” the Father’s good pleasure in the Spirit means that the Son is worthy of the Father’s love, attention, regard, pleasure, then that is certainly the case. This does not mean that the Son initially lacked worthiness and had to earn it; He has always been worthy of the Father’s love, and vice versa, and the Spirit too.

Even this probably needs to be massaged a bit.

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Theology - Covenant: Barth on Covenant of Works

Barth offers a challenging critique of the covenant of works. Let me summarize three points, briefly.

First, Barth points out that the covenant of works sets law and works as the framework for the entire account of redemptive history and God’s dealings with man. The work of Jesus is understood in these terms, as the fulfillment of the covenant of works, and he argues that even the Christian life is guided by law, in the sense that the law provokes our repentance and guides our obedience. God’s relation to man is centrally that of Lawgiver and servant.

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Theology - Covenant: Beisner and White Reply

Last week, I posted a critique of the argument of Cal Beisner and Fowler White concerning the connection between the covenant of redemption and the covenant of works. Beisner and White replied, and I post their reply here with their permission.

We offer our sincere thanks to Dr. Leithart for his thoughtful interaction with our observations on the relationship between the doctrine of a meritorious covenant of works and the doctrine of God. We agree with him that reflections on that relationship promise to shed useful light on matters of dispute in the FV controversy. In what follows, we present our response to his evaluation of our thinking.

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Theology - Covenant: God and Law

All theology is theology proper.

Michael Horton says that human beings are created “wired” for the law: “It belongs to us by nature in creation, while the gospel is an announcement of good news in the event of transgression. It has to be preached, whereas the law belongs to the conscience of every person already. Therefore, the original relationship of humanity to God is one of law and love, not of grace and mercy.”

This makes grace, not law and judgment, the “strange work” of God. Grace comes, apparently, from the “left hand.” Is this not a fundamental reversal of Luther?

Theology - Covenant: Adam’s faith

What should Adam have done when the serpent started talking to Eve? What would you do?

You’d scream, probably. But then you’d pray, hard. Because you’d know that only God can deliver you from a dragon.

We sometimes think that Adam should have stepped up and handled the serpent bare-handed. Perhaps; but that confrontation would have been a confrontation of faith, Adam relying not on his own strength but wholly on God.

Unfallen Adam, in short, should have cried out in faith to his Savior Yahweh to save him. To remain unfallen, he needed to be saved.

Theology - Covenant: Irenaeus on the covenant of works

Horton cites Irenaeus as an early theologian who anticipated the federal theologians by distinguishing between “the ‘covenant of law’ and the ‘covenant of grace.’” In a footnote, he claims that “Irenaeus even distinguishes between ‘an economy of law/works’ and a ‘Gospel covenant,’” citing Against Hereies 4.25.

I don’t find the phrases Horton uses in that section of Irenaeus, but perhaps we’re looking at different translations. More substantively, it’s clear that Irenaeus is talking not about the covenant with Adam and the covenant with Christ, but the Abrahamic/Mosaic covenant of circumcision and law and the new covenant. His interpretation of Romans 4 anticipates N. T. Wright more than the federal theologians:

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Theology - Covenant: Natural capacity

In his recent book on the covenant, Michael Horton says that under the covenant of works Adam was “a righteous and holy human servant entirely capable of fulfilling the stipulations of God’s law.” If this is taken in the sense that Adam had no sinful inclinations, and was posse non peccare, fine.

But Horton repeats this description a page later in a context that suggests he means something else. Adam was enduring a test, he says, to see whether he would obey God or not: “Created for obedience, he was entirely capable of maintaining himself in a state of integrity. Therefore, it is anachronistic to require grace of mercy as the foundation of creation and covenant in the beginning, as Karl Barth and many recent Reformed theologians do.” He goes on to point out, quite rightly, that law is an expression of God’s character, and that “love and law go hand in hand in Scripture.”

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Theology - Covenant: Jesus and Covenant of works

In what sense did Jesus fulfill the covenant of works? He is clearly the last Adam (Rom 6), and reverses the work of the first Adam. But unless we assume that Torah is a straightforward republication of the covenant of works, then any claims about Jesus fulfilling the covenant of works has to be qualified by the fact that he comes into an Israel under Torah. And if the Torah is a dispensation of the covenant of grace, then Jesus comes to fulfill the terms of the covenant of grace. Besides: Does the covenant of works have any provisions for redemptive sacrifice? In Eden before the fall, does God give Adam the hope of salvation from death if he should break covenant? It would appear not: Dying you shall die. The possibility of substitutionary atonement comes with the covenant of grace that is formed with Adam after the fall when the Lord sacrifices for Adam and covers him. So, if Jesus fulfilled the covenant of works, he fulfilled a modified form of that covenant.

Theology - Covenant: Natural/Supernatural in Adamic Covenant

Mark Karlberg charges that Francis Junius introduced a natural/supernatural scheme into the Reformed doctrine of the covenant of works. In Karlberg’s summary, “The covenant, according to Junius, was established with our first parents by God the Father in the love of his Son. It held out the promise of supernatural life for obedience and the curse of death and separation from God for disobedience. . . . Although Adam was obliged to render complete and perfect obedience to the law of God by virtue of his debt as a creature (ex puris naturalibus), the covenantal reward of life eternal was strictly one of grace and mercy (ex pacto).”

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Theology - Covenant: Double Adamic Covenant

Many of the Protestant Scholastics argued that a covenant of some sort is “natural” to man, not a “supernatural” addition to a pure, non-covenantal existence. But the “natural” covenant is often distinguished from the specific terms of the covenant of works, the prohibition of the tree of knowledge.

Heidegger fulsomely describes the natural covenant in this way: “It may also be recognized naturally, that there is a covenant intervening between God and man. Man’s conscience keeps asserting that to God the Creator and Lord of man obedience on his part as a creature is bound to be enjoined and He must be loved singly as the most excellent and the Author of all good. In such obedience and love moreover consists the duty which God requires of man. . . .

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Theology - Covenant: Pactum Salutis

Barth (CD, 4.1) offers this challenging evaluation of the Protestant Orthodox notion of a Trinitarian covenant:

“For God to be gracious to sinful man, was there any need of a special decree to establish the unity of righteousness and mercy of God in relation to man, of a special intertrinitarian arrangement and contract which can be distinguished from the being of God? If there was need of such a decree, then the question arises at once of a form of the will of God in which this arrangement has not yet been made and is not yet valid. We have to reckon with the existence of a God who is righteous in abstracto and not free to be gracious from the very first, who has to bind to the fulfillment of HIs promise the fulfillment of certain conditions by man, and punish their non-fulfillment. . . .

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Theology - Covenant: Calvinism and Chosenness

John Milbank’s opening essay in the recently-released Radical Orthodoxy and the Reformed Tradition (edited by James KA Smith and James Olthuis) is a challenging critique of Calvin and the Reformed tradition, one that I hope to interact with more in the future.

One particularly striking passage had to do with how the conception of the relation of Old and New affected racial conceptions within Calvinism. Milbank contrasts Calvin’s view that the “old alliance [was] salvific in its own right” to the Catholic view that the old covenant foreshadowed and proleptically shared in the new covenant: “It is already for Calvin as if God provides a way for Gentiles to be Jews, rather than the notion that the Jews proleptically participated in a universally human salvation,” which latter conception is “the only possible nonracist theology.”

He goes on: “It is not an accident that Calvinism’s tendency to think that God made ‘new Jews’ led sometimes to racism in Calvinist thought - especially in the case of South Africa and in the United States South where the theological undergirding of racism was overwhelmingly Calvinist (and no so much Baptist). One could mention also Northern Ireland. This incidence of racism has then a tradically ironic relationship to a laudable absence of anti-Semitism, since it is grounded in a certain kind of Philo-Semitism.”

In my opinion, Calvin is closer to the “Catholic” position than Milbank lets on, but the portrait he draws of certain strands of later Calvinism rings true. And I suspect it’s not only bound up with Old-New, but also with construals of covenant of works-covenant of grace.

Theology - Covenant: Covenant and Consent

How does God’s covenant with Israel bind generations that did not consent to the covenant? asked Isaac Abravanel in his 15th-century Commentary on the Pentateuch. This problem was raised in particular by a rabbinic claim that “A person can be benefited without being present, but cannot be obligated without being present.” His answer to his question was that through the exodus Yahweh acquired Israel as His property, as His slaves. He acquired their bodies as slaves, their souls by granting them “spiritual perfection through giving them His Torah,” and their land through the gift of land.

A couple of other possible answers to Abravanel’s question are possible. One, that personal consent is not a necessary element of obligations; two, that the obligation is less one of law and slavery than of gift. At least the first part of the rabbinic claim correct - benefits obligate those who are not present. The covenant at Sinai thus binds future generations as a covenant of grace. If the second part of the rabbinic dictum is correct (a debatable point), then the covenant at Sinai binds future generations only as a covenant of grace, and would not bind future generations if it were a covenant of works.

Theology - Covenant: The Promise of Covenant Theology

Covenant theology has great promise: it highlights the fact that redemption takes place in the real world, that redemption involves the creation of a new community, and that the community is necessarily marked out by signs, rites, words, conduct. But the language of covenant theology sometimes leaves the impression that the whole institutional apparatus of Israelite polity and worship was established to bolster and support individual personal faith. NO! The institutional apparatus was the OC (Adamic) organization of human life under Yahweh. Covenant community and structure do not exist simply for the sake of individual faith, nor is individual faith swallowed up. Community and structure are part of the communal life of faith.

Theology - Covenant: Lovingkindness to Many Generations

Baptists have a hard time grasping how God might be God not only to a believer but also to his children. But a human analogy is readily at hand: Suppose I have a faithful friend who has helped me out of various difficulties, protected me when I was under threat, defended me against slanders, lent money and assistance when I needed it. Now, what is that friend’s attitude going to be toward my children? Suppose my son gets into financial difficulty and I am unable to help him. Can I reasonably expect my old friend to assist my son? Of course. That’s what friends do.

God shows His lovingkindness from generation to generation because he is a “family friend.”

Theology - Covenant: More from Ward

One of the most illuminating chapters of Ward’s book on the covenant of works is his discussion of grace and merit in chapter 17. Some highlights:

1) He notes that the word “grace” is used in the NT “without any notion of favour in the presence of demerit,” citing Lk 1:30, 2:53; Acts 2:47 and adding that the word “is widely used in this more general sense in the 17th century Calvinistic writers.”

2) He says that the covenantal arrangements in Eden were an act of “undeserved kindness and grace.” Some writers said that God “could have left man in the state of nature without a covenant of works, and terminated his existence at his pleasure.” But others taught that “the character of God is such that he cannot hold his love and all its effects from a holy and innocent creature made in his image. God is love and it is the nature of love to seek union and communion with the beloved. On this view it is still gracious of God to create humanity knowing that the necessity of his nature would require self-giving in covenant to the holy creature.” He cites Witsius: “Whatever … is promised to the creature by God, ought all to be ascribed to the immense goodness of the Deity… Nor can God on account of this his goodness refuse to communicate himself to, or give the enjoyment of himself to, an innocent, an holy creature…He does not love in reality, who desires not to communicate himself to the object of his affection.” On this point, Witsius definitely has the better argument: Once God has acted to create Adam, can He forget to be gracious?

3) The reward offered in the covenant of works is neither condignly nor congruently meritorious. Adam’s obedience would not have had any intrinsic worth to earn wages, and it was not congruent merit in the sense of “merit not truly adequate but accepted as sufficient.” Thus, “the distinction between merit as meaning something obtained and merit as meaning reward due for the intrinsic worth of something should be kept in view; the former is acceptable, the latter not.” Patrick Gillespie put it bluntly: “Though Justice had some place in this Covenant, yet merit had none at all. . . Merit had as little place in man’s integrity as demerit.” As Turretin puts it, “There was no debt (properly so called) from which man culd derive a right, but only a debt of fidelity, arising out of the promise by which God demonstrated his infallible and immutable constancy and truth.” Merit could be understood only de pacto, and arises, for Turretin, more from the faithfulness of God to His pledge of reward than from any imputed value in human obedience. Obadiah Sedgwick’s claim that “The covenant of works, if we could attain unto it, would now be matter of glorying in ourselves” as “an anomaly in the Puritan and Reformed tradition and possibly reflects a rhetorical flourish on the popular preachers’ part.”

4) Ward suggests that dispensationalism was prepared for by certain tensions and ambiguities in covenant theology’s evaluation of the Mosaic covenant. The majority position held that the Mosaic covenant as an administration of the covenant of grace, but “acknowledged a legal aspect which looked like a covenant of works, and a minority actually regarded it as a covenant of works although subservient to the covenant of grace.” This notion of a “mixed covenant” led to a “dualistic” tendency, illustrated by Isaac Watts, who claimed that the “covenant of works” aspect “related to temporal blessings in the land fo Canaan,” while the “covenant of grace” aspect had to do with spiritual blessings and eternal life. The Jews’ error was “to mistake the way of justification on the temporal level (works) with the way of justification on the spiritual level (faith).” This view, expressed earlier than Watts by a minority of scholars, was not dispensationalist in itself, but the confusion about the nature of the Mosaic covenant gave a “foothold” to alternative explanations.

Debates on infant baptism also contributed to the rise of dispensationalism. Some Baptists even considered the Abrahamic covenant a mixed covenant, with the “natural seed” receiving temporal benefits and the “spiritual seed” receiving gospel blessings. Thus, the OC, even in its Abrahamic form, is radically different from the NC, since the NC is completely a “covenant of grace.”

(Ward includes in a footnote a wonderful passage from John Owen, who is rebutting a Roman Catholic view: “I cannot but somewhat admire how it came into the heart or mind of any man to think or say, that God ever gave a law or laws, precept or precepts, that ’should respect the outward man only, and the regulation of eternal duties.’ A thought of it is contrary to all the essential properties of the nature of God. . . . The life and foundation of lal the laws under the old testament was, ‘Thou shalt love the LORD thy God with all thy soul’; without which no outward obedience was ever accepted with him.”)

5) Ward claims that “clarity in regard to Adam’s original status as a son has only come into its own in the 20th century.” Adam’s filial position is still regularly denied. Donald Macleod argues taht “the primary relationship between God and man is a relationship of works and obedience.” This is also seen in the view of some 17th century writers that there was a two-stage covenant prior to the fall: First, God created Adam in a servile position, and then, in Gen 2, graciously added a covenant. He notes that many recent Reformed writers have argued that man is in covenant relationship with God from the moment of his creation, and that this relationship is essentially a filial one.

6) Interestingly, Ward notes that the issue of the covenant has been developed largely in relation to infant baptism over the past several decades. Earlier, it was developed mainly in the context of justification: “discussions in the last 50 years on the covenant have not been in the setting of justification, nor have they been well informed on the classic period of Reformed theology in the 17th century.”

7) Ward’s discussion of justification is less than completely compelling. He is especially interested in showing the systematic correlation of the covenant of works doctrine and justification by faith. He makes the following points: 1) God must have required perfect obedience from Adam, else why should it be required of Jesus? 2) If there is no probation in the covenant of works, then how does Christ, as the Last Adam, do anything more than restore us to the Adamic position? He does, but how does this work, if Adam’s obedience had only maintained him in his original condition. 3) Justification is more than forgiveness of sin, and therefore the obedience of Christ in life “comes into its own.” 4) Adam and Jesus both had to obey from faith and trust in God. The sinner is “called to faith in Christ, to union and communion with him in all the virtue of his saving acts.” 5) Good works are the fruit of true faith.

With #1 and 2, I have no objection; I agree that Adam and Christ both were required to obey without sin, and believe that there is an eschatological trajectory already within the protological Edenic situation.

With #3, Ward’s claims are vague. We are treated as if we have fully obeyed, he says, and this means that Christ’s obedience “comes into its own.” But how, exactly? Does “come into its own” mean “imputed”? Or is there another way that Christ’s active obedience could “come into its own” without positing the imputation of Christ’s active obedience? It would seem so: Christ obeyed perfectly, fulfilling the law without sin; Christ subjected Himself to the judgment of the Father on our sin, obeying “passively”; the Father was pleased, and judged Jesus to be the Righteous One, declaring that verdict by raising His Son from the dead; in raising Jesus, the Father was saying, “I judge My Son to be the one who has obeyed perfectly even unto death; by union with Christ, that verdict is also passed on us. In this construction, there is no “independent” imputation of the active obedience of Christ, nor even of the passive obedience for that matter; we are regarded as righteous, and Christ’s righteousness is reckoned as ours, because of our union with Him in His resurrection. What is imputed is the verdict, not the actions of Jesus, and this is possible and just because Christ is our covenant head acting on our behalf.

With #4, what Ward leaves unsaid is as important as what he says. Is the believer not called to obedience?? If we are united to Christ “in all the virtue of his saving acts,” does this not include union with Christ in the “virtue” or power fo sanctification? If Ward agrees with this, it’s not clear exactly how he differs from Shepherd (whom he criticizes). If not, then how does he avoid antinomianism (which he also criticizes)? He claims that Shepherd’s view leaves us with a basically Arminian doctrine of justification: “The obligation in the covenant for the believer today is the same obligation Adam had pre-fall. In short, Christ has secured forgiveness by his death but logically we are put in a position where our covenant faithfulness is the way to salvation.” What is missing from this is the crucial reality of union with Christ. Yes, we do have the same obligation that Adam (and Abraham, and Moses, and David, and Jesus) had, namely, the obedience of faith. And, yes, covenant faithfulness is the way to salvation, for the “doers of the law will be justified” at the final judgment. But this is all done in union with Christ, so that “our” covenant faithfulness is dependent on the work of the Spirit of Christ in us, and our covenant faithfulness is about faith, trusting the Spirit to will and to do according to His good pleasure. This does not damage the present reality of justification, since we have been judged righteous by virtue of union with Christ, the same union by which we are being sanctified.

#5 is correct, but it would be nice to see Ward do more to integrate the points he makes in #4 (and his criticisms of Shepherd) with his welcome emphasis on the importance of good works.

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