Theopedia

Covenant theology

“Behold, the days are coming, declares the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah.”

— Jeremiah 31:31

Definition

Covenant theology (also called federal theology) organizes the history of redemption around three covenants rather than around a sequence of dispensations. Behind the others stands the covenant of redemption, the eternal agreement within the Godhead by which the Father appointed the Son to redeem the elect; Bavinck locates the whole system’s foundation here: “the covenant of grace executed and revealed in time and history nevertheless rests on an eternal, unchanging foundation,” the pactum salutis between Father and Son.1 The covenant of works, made with Adam in Eden, promised life for obedience and death for transgression. When Adam broke it, God established the covenant of grace, offering life in Christ to all who believe. Hodge distinguishes this covenant of grace sharply from the covenant of redemption that grounds it, since Scripture reveals both: “the two, however, ought not to be confounded… they differ as to the parties, as to the promises, and as to the conditions.”2

Confessional Definition

The 1689 Second London Baptist Confession grounds the covenant of grace in that same eternal transaction: “it is founded in that eternal covenant transaction that was between the Father and the Son about the redemption of the elect,” offering “unto sinners life and salvation by Jesus Christ, requiring of them faith in him, that they may be saved.”3 Its chapter on the covenant runs to three paragraphs, noticeably shorter than the Westminster Confession’s six: the Baptist framers omitted Westminster’s closing paragraphs describing the Old and New Testaments as two administrations of one covenant of grace, concluding “there are not, therefore, two covenants of grace differing in substance, but one and the same under various dispensations”4 — the deliberate mark of the Owen-Coxe position described below.

Historical Development

Covenant theology’s classical statement runs through Johannes Cocceius in the seventeenth century and Herman Witsius’s Economy of the Covenants, arriving at the confessional formulations of the Westminster Assembly (1647) and, among Particular Baptists, the Second London Baptist Confession (1677/1689). In America the Princeton theologians and, in the Netherlands, Bavinck carried the same three-covenant structure forward.1

Within this shared framework, John Owen argued in his exposition of Hebrews 8 that the Old and New Covenants are not two administrations of a single covenant of grace but two distinct covenants differing in substance, not merely in dispensation, “though the way of reconciliation and salvation was the same under both.”5 Nehemiah Coxe, a Particular Baptist minister who helped prepare the Second London Baptist Confession, argued the same case at length in his own treatise on the covenants God made with men before the law.6 This Owen-Coxe reading, now often called “1689 Federalism,” is why the Baptist confession’s covenant chapter is shorter than Westminster’s: it simply does not assert that the Old Covenant was an administration of the covenant of grace.

Opposing Views

Most Presbyterian and Reformed covenant theologians follow Westminster in treating every biblical covenant after the fall (Noahic, Abrahamic, Mosaic, Davidic, New) as an administration of the one covenant of grace, differing only in outward form. Bavinck states this unity-of-substance view directly: in both Testaments “we are presented one faith, one covenant, one way of salvation.”1 On the Owen-Coxe view held by the Baptist framers, the Mosaic covenant belongs instead to redemptive history’s outworking of the covenant of works, and only the New Covenant, inaugurated in Christ, is the covenant of grace in its proper sense; the older covenants revealed and typified it without themselves being administrations of it. The two views agree that there was one covenant of works with Adam and one way of salvation, by grace through faith in the promised Christ, throughout every era; they disagree over whether Israel’s own covenant at Sinai should itself be called an administration of the covenant of grace.

Related Doctrines

References

  1. 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.” ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  2. Charles Hodge, “Chapter II. The Covenant of Grace,” in Systematic Theology, Volume II (New York: Charles Scribner and Company, 1872), 357. ↩

  3. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 7, “Of God’s Covenant,” paras. 1-3, text as reproduced by The 1689 Confession. ↩

  4. The Westminster Confession of Faith (1647), chap. 7, “Of God’s Covenant with Man,” para. 6. ↩

  5. John Owen, An Exposition of the Epistle to the Hebrews, in The Works of John Owen, ed. William H. Goold, vol. 23 (repr., Edinburgh: Banner of Truth Trust, 1991), commentary on Heb. 8:6-13. ↩

  6. Nehemiah Coxe, A Discourse of the Covenants that God Made with Men Before the Law (London, 1681). ↩