Redemptive history

Redemptive history names the pattern of God’s saving acts as they unfold across time, from creation toward their culmination in Christ. Reformed theology treats that unfolding as itself historical, not merely logical: the covenant of grace “does not leap from individual to individual but perpetuates itself organically and historically. It passes through a history and through different dispensations.”¹ The phrase also names the discipline that traces this pattern in Scripture’s own terms, more often called biblical theology, which situates a text within the Bible’s unfolding story rather than arranging its content topically the way systematic theology does.²

Confessional Definition

The 1689 Second London Baptist Confession has no chapter devoted to redemptive history or biblical theology as such. Its own framework for God’s historically unfolding saving purpose is the covenant of grace, “founded in that eternal covenant transaction that was between the Father and the Son about the redemption of the elect,” administered under Old and New Testament alike as “one and the same” covenant “under various dispensations.”³ The confession’s covenant chapter, not a separate treatment of redemptive history, is where this dispensational unfolding is stated.

Historical Development

Reformed theology has practiced attention to Scripture’s own historical unfolding long before “biblical theology” existed as a named academic discipline. Irenaeus (c. AD 130-200) already offered an account of redemption’s progress through history that later students of the field recognize as close kin to their own work.⁴ The specialized discipline itself dates from the Enlightenment: Johann Philipp Gabler (1753-1826) argued for separating “biblical theology,” understood as a purely historical-critical cataloging of what each biblical author believed, from dogmatic theology’s constructive task. Gabler’s own program bracketed inspiration, gathered the “concepts and ideas of the individual Bible writers” as data, and treated the discipline as bound by definition to “distinguish between the several periods of the old and new religion.”⁵

Reformed federal theology had already tried something related a century earlier, from within dogmatics rather than against it. Johannes Cocceius’s Doctrine of the Covenant and Testament of God (1648) reorganized systematic theology itself around the covenant idea, in what Cocceius intended as a more biblical, less scholastic dogmatics. Bavinck’s later verdict on the attempt is critical: Cocceius so sharply distinguished the covenant’s successive dispensations that he treated “the history of the covenant of grace as a series of abrogations, an abolition of the covenant of works,” losing sight of the covenant promise’s underlying unity, and more broadly dissolving “any boundary between the history of revelation and the content of dogmatics,” so that “the distinctive work of dogmatic theology is subsumed under a specious ‘biblical theology’ which undermines it.”⁶

The concept of tracing God’s dealings through distinguishable stages nonetheless has real standing in Reformed scholasticism apart from Cocceius’s particular scheme. Francis Turretin described a “threefold school of God, of nature, grace, and glory” spanning humanity’s unfallen state, the present administration of grace, and the future state of glory, a periodization of God’s dealings with his people that does not collapse into Cocceius’s disputed covenant-abrogation scheme.⁷ Contemporary systematic theology continues to draw on the same category: Duby situates the entire task of theology proper within “the scriptural narrative of redemptive history,” including “the development of” the church’s knowledge of God “in redemptive history on the way to the state of glory.”²

Objections and Responses

Doesn’t organizing theology around Scripture’s own historical unfolding dissolve systematic theology’s constructive, rational structure into a mere retelling of the biblical story? Bavinck raised this concern against Cocceius specifically, not against biblical theology as such: a scheme that treats the covenant of grace across history as a series of clean abrogations loses the covenant promise’s underlying unity, and more broadly, collapsing the line between the history of revelation and the content of dogmatics leaves dogmatic theology’s own distinctive work “subsumed under a specious ‘biblical theology’ which undermines it.”⁶ On Bavinck’s own account, this is not a reason to abandon attention to Scripture’s historical unfolding, since he elsewhere grounds the covenant of grace’s own organic, historical character in the same terms Cocceius was reaching for;¹ it is a caution that biblical theology and systematic theology are different disciplines with different tasks, and that letting one absorb the other costs something real in either direction.

Related Doctrines

• Covenant theology
• Kingdom of God
• Providence of God
• Sovereignty of God
• Salvation
• Biblical typology

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

2. Steven J. Duby, God in Himself: Scripture, Metaphysics, and the Task of Christian Theology, Studies in Christian Doctrine and Scripture (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2019), chap. 1, “Theologia Within the Divine Economy,” 11. ↩ ↩²

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

4. Samuel G. Parkison, “Irresistible Beauty: Beholding Triune Glory in the Face of Jesus Christ” (PhD diss., Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2021), chap. 2, “The Metaphysics of Divine Beauty,” excursus “Metaphysics and Hermeneutics,” 75-76. ↩

5. Parkison, “Irresistible Beauty,” 77. ↩

6. Bavinck, chap. 1, “Dogmatic Theology as a Science.” ↩ ↩²

7. Duby, God in Himself, chap. 1, 40. ↩