Theopedia

Covenant of Redemption

“…the counsel of peace shall be between them both.”

— Zechariah 6:13

Definition

The Covenant of Redemption is the pre-temporal agreement among the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit to plan and carry out the redemption of the elect: the Father appointing the Son as Mediator and Redeemer, the Son undertaking that office, and the Spirit engaged to apply what the Son would accomplish.1 Also called the eternal covenant, the covenant of peace, or, in Latin, the pactum salutis, it is the ground in eternity of the Covenant of Grace that unfolds in history, and stands with the Covenant of Works as one of the three theological covenants of covenant theology.2

Confessional Witness

Neither the Savoy Declaration nor the 1689 Second London Baptist Confession devotes a chapter to a doctrine titled “covenant of redemption,” but both state the covenant itself in their opening paragraph on Christ the Mediator:

“It pleased God, in His eternal purpose, to choose and ordain the Lord Jesus, his only begotten Son, according to the covenant made between them both, to be the mediator between God and man; the prophet, priest, and king; head and saviour of the church, the heir of all things, and judge of the world; unto whom he did from all eternity give a people to be his seed and to be by him in time redeemed, called, justified, sanctified, and glorified.”3

The Savoy Declaration states the same paragraph in nearly identical wording.4 The Westminster Confession’s own parallel paragraph opens the same way, “It pleased God, in his eternal purpose, to choose and ordain the Lord Jesus, his only-begotten Son, to be the Mediator,” but without Savoy and the Baptist confession’s phrase “according to the covenant made between them both.”5 The doctrine is present elsewhere in the Reformed confessional family, but on this specific point the Congregationalist and Baptist confessions share language the Westminster divines’ own chapter does not.

The Baptist confession’s chapter on God’s covenant states the same point from the other direction, grounding the covenant of grace revealed in history in a prior, eternal transaction: it “is founded in that eternal covenant transaction that was between the Father and the Son about the redemption of the elect.”2

Biblical Basis

Zechariah’s prophecy of the coming Branch, who will build the temple, bear royal honor, and sit as “a priest on his throne,” adds that “the counsel of peace shall be between them both” (Zech. 6:13), a text Reformed divines from Cocceius and Witsius to John Owen read as naming a council between the Father and the Son over the redemption to come.6 Herman Bavinck cautions that this verse “does not prove anything” taken alone, but argues the doctrine is nonetheless “rooted in a scriptural idea” that rests on a wider set of texts.7

Paul locates the plan of salvation before creation itself: believers were “predestined” and “chosen in him before the foundation of the world,” in Christ, and “sealed with the promised Holy Spirit, who is the guarantee of our inheritance” (Eph. 1:3-14), a passage in which the Father’s choice, the Son’s redeeming work, and the Spirit’s sealing are together placed outside of time.8 Paul elsewhere grounds eternal life in a promise “God, who never lies, promised before the ages began” (Titus 1:2), and describes grace as “given us in Christ Jesus before the ages began” (2 Tim. 1:9).

Within the Son’s own words, Christ addresses the Father in prayer as one who was given “work to do” and who now asks for the glory he “had with [the Father] before the world existed” (John 17:4-5), the same undertaking Hebrews reads in Christ’s own words entering the world: “a body have you prepared for me… Behold, I have come to do your will” (Ps. 40:6-8; Heb. 10:5-7). John Gill reads this exchange as itself the shape of a covenant, stipulation answered by restipulation.9 The Father is likewise said to “assign” a kingdom to the Son as the Son assigns it to his own people (Luke 22:29), and the New Testament repeatedly applies to Christ the royal and priestly oath of Psalm 2 and Psalm 110, texts in which the Father addresses the Son directly and swears an oath establishing his office (Ps. 2:7-8; Ps. 110:1, 4; cf. Heb. 1:13, 7:1-22).10

Doctrinal Significance

Because the covenant of grace given to sinners in time rests on this prior eternal transaction rather than on anything decided or discovered in history, its security does not depend on human faithfulness at all. Bavinck writes:

“The benefit to the believer is in knowing that the covenant of grace executed and revealed in time and history nevertheless rests on an eternal, unchanging foundation, the counsel of the triune God.”7

Historical Development

Origin in post-Reformation Reformed theology

The doctrine that Father and Son entered an eternal transaction over the redemption of the elect has roots earlier still, but the term “covenant of redemption” itself is first attested in a recorded address by David Dickson to the 1638 General Assembly of the Kirk of Scotland, arguing against Arminian theology:

“Their [the Arminians’] maine errour is this… not knowing the Scriptures, and the power of God in the matter of the Covenant of redemption betwixt God and Christ… for the Covenant of Salvation [Grace?] betwixt God and man is ane [one] thing, and the Covenant of Redemption betwixt God and Christ is ane uther thing. The Covenant betwixt God and Christ was done and endit before ever there was a word of it in the world.”11

Over the following decades the doctrine was developed at length by Reformed theologians on the Continent and in Britain, among them Cocceius, Herman Witsius, John Owen, and Patrick Gillespie, whose The Ark of the Covenant Opened (1677) was the first monograph devoted to the subject.12

Reception among Particular Baptists

The doctrine was received and expounded at length by early Particular Baptist theologians. Benjamin Keach devoted some three hundred and fifty pages of published sermons to it in the 1690s, and John Gill gave it two full chapters of his A Body of Doctrinal Divinity (1769): one on the eternal council among the divine Persons that “leads on” to the covenant, and one on the covenant itself.69 Gill, however, departed from the two-covenant scheme reflected in Dickson’s own language above. He held that “covenant of redemption” is simply another name theologians give to the very same eternal transaction elsewhere called the covenant of grace, not a second covenant standing behind it:

“There can be no foundation for such a distinction between a covenant of redemption in eternity, and a covenant of grace in time.”13

Opposing Views

Reformed theologians who affirm the doctrine have disagreed over who, exactly, is party to it. J. V. Fesko’s own survey of the tradition, as reported by Samuel Parkison, finds a majority “Christological model,” in which the covenant is struck between the Father and the Son alone (Dickson, Witsius, Gillespie, Owen, Charles Hodge, Geerhardus Vos, Louis Berkhof), against a minority “Trinitarian model,” in which Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are each party to the agreement (Thomas Goodwin, Abraham Kuyper, Herman Bavinck).1 Bavinck’s own chapter reflects the Trinitarian reading:

“The work of salvation is an undertaking of the one God in three persons in which all cooperate and each one performs a special task.”7

A separate and long-running debate concerns whether the covenant of redemption is properly a distinct covenant at all, prior in eternity to a second covenant of grace made in time, or whether both names refer to a single eternal transaction. Gill argued for the latter, applying the name “covenant of grace” to the eternal compact itself rather than reserving it for its administration in history;13 the more common Reformed and Baptist usage, reflected in Dickson’s 1638 address and in Thomas Boston’s later writing, keeps the two names for two distinct, though inseparably connected, transactions.11

Objections and Responses

Doesn’t calling this an eternal “covenant” improperly stretch a term that Scripture and ordinary usage both apply to temporal, historical arrangements? John Murray held to something close to this narrower, terminological objection: he judged that “covenant” implies temporality, and so preferred not to apply the word to God’s eternal plan of salvation, without thereby denying the underlying reality the doctrine describes.14 Reformed proponents of the doctrine answer that Scripture’s own covenantal language for the transaction between Father and Son, in texts such as Luke 22:29’s language of the Father “assigning” a kingdom to the Son as a covenant deed, together with the confessions’ own use of “covenant made between them both,” is warrant enough for the traditional name.3

Does positing a covenant among the divine Persons introduce three separate wills into the Godhead, dividing the one undivided will of God and tending toward tritheism? Robert Letham raises this objection: applying covenant concepts to the Trinity, he argues, “implies that the Trinitarian persons each have their own will, entailing something approaching tritheism.”15 Karl Barth raised a related charge, dismissing the doctrine as “mythology.”16 Parkison answers that the pactum salutis poses no more a problem for the one undivided divine will than the church’s own long-accepted distinction between the Persons’ eternal processions and their temporal missions, since it is “fitting for the Son, not the Father nor the Spirit, to be sent by the Father to assume a human nature,” without that fittingness requiring three separate wills any more than the temporal missions do.17

Is the doctrine merely speculative, resting on texts that don’t actually teach it? Paul Williamson has challenged the doctrine’s exegetical foundations directly.18 Proponents point in response to the cumulative weight of several passages together rather than to any single proof text: Ephesians 1:3-14’s placement of the elect’s predestination “before the foundation of the world,” the New Testament’s repeated application of Psalm 110’s oath between “the LORD” and “my Lord” to Christ, and Christ’s own prayer recalling glory he had with the Father “before the world existed” (John 17:5).8

Related Doctrines

References

  1. Samuel G. Parkison, “Irresistible Beauty: Beholding Triune Glory in the Face of Jesus Christ” (PhD diss., Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2021), 165, quoting J. V. Fesko, The Trinity and the Covenant of Redemption (Ross-shire: Christian Focus, 2016), 131. ↩ ↩2

  2. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (London, 1677), chap. 7, “Of God’s Covenant,” para. 3. ↩ ↩2

  3. Second London Baptist Confession, chap. 8, “Of Christ the Mediator,” para. 1. ↩ ↩2

  4. A Declaration of the Faith and Order Owned and Practised in the Congregational Churches (London, 1658), chap. 8, “Of Christ the Mediator,” para. 1. ↩

  5. The Confession of Faith (London, 1647), chap. 8, “Of Christ the Mediator,” para. 1. ↩

  6. 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 II, chap. 6, “Of the Everlasting Council Between the Three Divine Persons, Concerning the Salvation of Men.” ↩ ↩2

  7. Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 14, “The Only Begotten Son of the Father,” §”The Covenant of Redemption, of Nature, and Election.” ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  8. Parkison, “Irresistible Beauty,” 169. ↩ ↩2

  9. Gill, A Body of Doctrinal Divinity, book II, chap. 7, “Of the Everlasting Covenant of Grace, Between the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit.” ↩ ↩2

  10. Parkison, “Irresistible Beauty,” 167. ↩

  11. Daniel David Scheiderer, “Eternal Covenant: The Trinitarian Shape of an Historic Baptist Doctrine” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2022), 2-3, quoting Church of Scotland, “Records of the Kirk of Scotland, Containing the Acts and Proceedings of the General Assemblies from 1638 Downwards” (Edinburgh, 1838), 1:158-59. ↩ ↩2

  12. Scheiderer, “Eternal Covenant,” 1, 9-10. ↩

  13. Gill, A Body of Doctrinal Divinity, book II, chap. 7: “there can be no foundation for such a distinction between a covenant of redemption in eternity, and a covenant of grace in time.” ↩ ↩2

  14. Scheiderer, “Eternal Covenant,” 9-10, characterizing John Murray, “The Plan of Salvation,” in The Collected Works of John Murray: Systematic Theology (Carlisle, PA: Banner of Truth, 1977), 2:130-31. ↩

  15. Robert Letham, The Holy Trinity: In Scripture, History, Theology, and Worship, rev. and exp. ed. (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing, 2019), 319, quoted in Parkison, “Irresistible Beauty,” 170n18. ↩

  16. Scheiderer, “Eternal Covenant,” 9-10, characterizing Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, vol. IV/1, The Doctrine of Reconciliation, ed. G. W. Bromiley and T. F. Torrance, trans. T. H. L. Parker et al. (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1957), 65. ↩

  17. Parkison, “Irresistible Beauty,” 170-171. ↩

  18. Scheiderer, “Eternal Covenant,” 9, characterizing Paul Williamson, “The Pactum Salutis: A Scriptural Concept or Scholastic Mythology?,” Tyndale Bulletin 69, no. 2 (2018): 259-81. ↩