Covenant of Works

“And the LORD God commanded the man, saying, ‘You may surely eat of every tree of the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.’”

— Genesis 2:16-17

In covenant theology, the Covenant of Works is the first of the three theological covenants: the pre-Fall arrangement in which God, by his own gracious condescension rather than any obligation owed him by Adam, promised Adam and his posterity life on condition of perfect and personal obedience, focused in the single command not to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, with death as the penalty for disobedience. Adam stood in it as the federal head of the whole human race, so that his transgression brought sin and death upon all his natural descendants.

Confessional Witness

The Westminster Confession (1646) devotes a chapter to the doctrine by name:

“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.”¹

The 1689 Second London Baptist Confession has no chapter titled “covenant” that treats this pre-Fall arrangement the way Westminster’s chapter 7 does, but it states the same content under its chapter on the law of God:

“God gave to Adam a law of universal obedience written in his heart, and a particular precept of not eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil; by which he bound him and all his posterity to personal, entire, exact, and perpetual obedience; promised life upon the fulfilling, and threatened death upon the breach of it, and endued him with power and ability to keep it.”²

A later paragraph in the same chapter names the arrangement directly, denying that believers remain under it as a way of salvation: “true believers be not under the law as a covenant of works, to be thereby justified or condemned.”³ The confession’s chapter on the fall states the same substance again in its own words, that God “gave [Adam] a righteous law, which had been unto life had he kept it, and threatened death upon the breach thereof.”⁴ And the confession’s opening statement on God’s covenant with man grounds the whole arrangement in condescension rather than obligation: “The distance between God and the creature is so great, that although reasonable creatures do owe obedience to him as their creator, yet they could never have attained the reward of life but by some voluntary condescension on God’s part, which he hath been pleased to express by way of covenant.”⁵

A. A. Hodge’s own catechetical treatment of the doctrine points to the same set of Westminster loci as its confessional basis: the Confession of Faith, chapter 4 section 2, chapter 7 sections 1-2, and chapter 19 section 1, together with the Larger Catechism’s Question 20 and the Shorter Catechism’s Question 12.⁶ Within the Particular Baptist tradition itself, John Gill gives the doctrine two full chapters of his own systematic theology, treating it at length despite the confession’s lack of a chapter naming it.⁷

Biblical Basis

The forbidding of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, with its attached promise and threat, is the text on which the doctrine rests (Gen. 2:16-17). Eve’s own words to the tempting serpent, “God has said, ‘You shall not eat of it, neither shall you touch it, lest you die,’” (Gen. 3:3) show that the first pair already understood the command’s terms and its penalty, which Gill reads as evidence of Adam’s own assent to the covenant, a “restipulation” answering God’s own offer.⁷

Hosea’s charge that Israel, “like Adam, transgressed the covenant” (Hos. 6:7), is the passage most directly cited for calling the pre-Fall arrangement a covenant at all, since the word itself does not appear in Genesis 2-3. Gill reads the verse as naming Adam’s own transgression of “the covenant God made with him,” the pattern Israel’s own covenant-breaking repeats.⁸

Paul makes Adam “a type of the one who was to come” (Rom. 5:14), drawing a sustained parallel in which “as by the one man’s disobedience the many were made sinners, so by the one man’s obedience the many will be made righteous” (Rom. 5:19), and in Adam “all die” just as in Christ “all shall be made alive” (1 Cor. 15:22). The law’s own terms for the covenant of works appear throughout Paul’s argument in Galatians: “cursed be everyone who does not abide by all things written in the Book of the Law, and do them” (Gal. 3:10), and “the one who does them shall live by them” (Gal. 3:12), the same “Do this and live” language Watson and A. A. Hodge both point to as the covenant’s own terms.⁹⁶

Doctrinal Significance

Bavinck ties Adam’s federal headship in the covenant of works to how the image of God is realized in humanity as a single moral, not merely biological, unity, the same unity the imputation of Christ’s righteousness depends on:

“Only in Reformed understanding of the covenant of works does the ethical, not the physical, unity of mankind come into its own… Just as Christ is the cause of our righteousness and our life, so Adam is the cause of our sin and our death… The covenant of works and the covenant of grace stand and fall together.”¹⁰

A. A. Hodge draws out what follows once the covenant is broken and fulfilled: having been broken by Adam and its conditions fulfilled on behalf of his people by Christ, “the second Adam,” the covenant of works is “henceforth abrogated under the gospel” as a way of obtaining life, yet its underlying principle, that “he that doeth these things shall live by them,” still stands and still condemns apart from Christ, so that the law in this sense continues to act “as a schoolmaster to bring them to Christ.”¹¹ This is the doctrinal ground for double imputation: Christ’s fulfillment of the covenant’s own condition of perfect obedience, credited to his people, alongside his bearing of its threatened penalty in their place.

Historical Development

Patristic roots, Reformation development

Bavinck traces the covenant idea’s substance, if not yet its later technical vocabulary, into the patristic period itself: “materially, the doctrine of what was later called ‘the covenant of works’ also already occurs in the church fathers,” Augustine included, who similarly appealed to Hosea 6:7.¹² The developed, technical covenant theology by which this pre-Fall arrangement came to be named and systematized is a Reformation and post-Reformation achievement, however. Bavinck traces its line from Zwingli’s polemic against the Anabaptists, through Bullinger and Calvin, to the German Palatinate theologians Caspar Olevianus and Zacharias Ursinus, and then to the English Puritans Robert Rollock, William Perkins, and William Ames, whose work fed into the Westminster Confession’s own chapter 7.¹³

Cocceius and the covenant’s later disputes

Among the Dutch Reformed, Johannes Cocceius made the covenant concept the organizing principle of dogmatics as a whole, but his scheme of successive historical abrogations of earlier covenants drew sustained polemic from other Reformed theologians for leaving the covenant of grace’s own stability uncertain. Bavinck’s own judgment is that the covenant concept was not what Cocceius’s critics actually objected to; the trouble was his historicizing biblical-theological method, “by construing the covenant of grace exclusively in negative terms, as a gradual, historical, and successively unfolding abolition of the covenant of works.”¹⁴ A. A. Hodge cites Herman Witsius’s own catalogue, in his On the Covenants, of symbolic “seals” attached to the covenant of works: Paradise itself, the tree of life, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and the Sabbath.¹⁵

Opposing Views

Reformed theologians who affirm the doctrine’s substance have not always agreed on the word “covenant” itself. John Murray preferred “Adamic Administration,” judging that “the elements of grace entering into the administration are not properly provided for by the term ‘works.’”¹⁶ This is a difference of emphasis and terminology within confessional Reformed theology rather than a rejection of the underlying arrangement Murray still affirmed: that God promised Adam life on condition of obedience, with death as the penalty for transgression.

Karl Barth rejected the doctrine more fully, arguing that a covenant of works of this kind “nullifies God’s grace in eternity” and removes the need for a mediator between God and man.¹⁷ Where Murray’s objection concerns whether “covenant” is the right word for God’s grace-filled dealing with Adam, Barth’s is a rejection of the doctrine’s substance, that any part of humanity’s original relationship to God could rest on a legal arrangement of works and reward distinct from grace in Christ.

Objections and Responses

Doesn’t calling Adam’s obedience the ground of a promised reward imply that a creature could put God in his debt, when a creature already owes God perfect obedience by nature? The 1689 Confession answers this directly in its opening statement on the covenant itself: creatures “could never have attained the reward of life but by some voluntary condescension on God’s part, which he hath been pleased to express by way of covenant.”⁵ Pictet makes the same point: Adam, “if he had done this, would have been pronounced righteous, and would have acquired a right to eternal glory, not indeed as if he had properly merited it, for the creature can merit nothing from the Creator, but according to the free promise and covenant of God.”¹⁸ Gill states the identical principle from the Baptist side: since obedience is what God has “a prior right unto” regardless of any promise attached to it, “if… God thinks fit… to promise in covenant any good, it is all condescension, it is all kindness.”⁷

Is it just for all humanity to be implicated in the sin of one man? Gill answers that Adam’s posterity have no standing to complain of the arrangement, since they would equally have shared in the benefits of Adam’s obedience had he stood: “if they would have received good things through him, had he stood, why should they complain of receiving evil things through his fall?”⁷ He adds that God, being under no obligation to consult his creatures at all in the matter, was free to appoint a representative head for the race, and that no one could have been a fitter choice than “the first man, that was their natural parent.”⁷

If “covenant” never appears in the Genesis narrative itself, is the label just imported from later theology? Gill points to Hosea’s own description of Israel’s sin as being “like Adam” in transgressing “the covenant” (Hos. 6:7) as Scripture’s own retrospective naming of the arrangement.⁸ The forbidding of the tree, with its explicit promise and threat, “if therefore he eat of it he should surely die,” which implies life on the condition of abstaining, already supplies the formal elements of a covenant, a promise and a threatening, whether or not the word itself is present at Genesis 2.⁷

Related Doctrines

References

The Westminster Confession of Faith (London, 1647), chap. 7, “Of God’s Covenant with Man,” para. 2. ↩
The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (London, 1677), chap. 19, “Of the Law of God,” para. 1. ↩
Second London Baptist Confession, chap. 19, para. 6. ↩
Second London Baptist Confession, chap. 6, “Of the Fall of Man, Of Sin, and of the Punishment Thereof,” para. 1. ↩
Second London Baptist Confession, chap. 7, “Of God’s Covenant,” para. 1. ↩ ↩²
Archibald Alexander Hodge, Outlines of Theology (New York: Robert Carter and Brothers, 1879), chap. 17, “The Covenant of Works,” 309. ↩ ↩²
John Gill, A Body of Doctrinal Divinity; or, A System of Evangelical Truths, Deduced from the Sacred Scriptures, 2 vols. (London: Printed for the Author, and Sold by George Keith, 1769), book III, chap. 7, “Of the Law Given to Adam, and the Covenant Made with him in his State of Innocence.” ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶
Gill, A Body of Doctrinal Divinity, book III, chap. 8, “Of the Sin and Fall of our First Parents.” ↩ ↩²
Thomas Watson, A Body of Practical Divinity: Consisting of Above One Hundred and Seventy-Six Sermons on the Lesser Catechism (London: Thomas Parkhurst, 1692), 73-74. ↩
Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 11, “The Image of God.” ↩
Hodge, Outlines of Theology, 314. ↩
Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, 4 vols. (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2003-2008), 2:567, quoted in Micah John McCormick, “The Active Obedience of Jesus Christ” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2010), 118n117. ↩
Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, chap. 14, “The Only Begotten Son of the Father.” ↩
Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, chap. 14. ↩
Hodge, Outlines of Theology, 313, citing Herman Witsius, On the Covenants, vol. 1, chap. 6. ↩
John Murray, Collected Writings of John Murray (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 1976-1982), 2:49, quoted in McCormick, “The Active Obedience of Jesus Christ,” 129n110. ↩
Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, vol. IV/1, trans. Geoffrey Bromiley (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1956), 54-66, characterized in McCormick, “The Active Obedience of Jesus Christ,” 129n109. ↩
Benedict Pictet, Christian Theology, trans. Frederick Reyroux (Philadelphia: Presbyterian Board of Publication, 1845), 311. ↩