Deciphering Covenant Theology (Part 1)
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This series is bound to annoy covenant theologians who stop by to read it. To them I want to say that my purpose here is certainly not to irritate anyone. If a CT has any problem with what is asserted in these posts he is very welcome to challenge it (giving proof where necessary).
For those readers who want a quick historical intro to CT perhaps my “A Very Brief History of Covenant Theology” will help.
First Things First
I have been reading covenant theology (CT) for many years; close to thirty. In that time, I have read numerous Systematic Theologies by covenant theologians, including Hodge, Dabney, Bavinck, Frame, Horton, Reymond, as well as expositions of CT by the likes of Warfield, Packer, Horton, Vos, Witsius, Owen, Turretin, and Robertson. I attended a staunchly Reformed CT seminary in England. I went to several churches where CT was preached for extensive periods. By far the majority of books I have read in the last thirty years have been written by covenant theologians. I know covenant theology.
But even though I am well acquainted with CT, I do not agree with it. I have been sympathetic for a long time to Dispensationalism (DT), and from there to construct Biblical Covenantalism. But Biblical Covenantalism could not have come into existence without CT and its emphasis upon teleology or purpose. I do respect CT and admire many of its adherents. At the real risk of losing many dispensational readers, I think CT is superior to DT is several respects: it is more Christological, more teleological, more cohesive, and more prescriptive. Because of all these things CT is theologically richer and deeper than DT.
I shall have more to say about that controversial statement further on. However, I want to go on record to say that if it had not been for the teleological (i.e., purpose-focused) genius of Covenant Theology I would never have come up with Biblical Covenantalism, for I would not have the perspective I needed to see things the way I needed to see them, nor know the question that needed asking.
This series will attempt to introduce Covenant Theology to the outsiders and uninitiated. I have found that among dispensationalists there is as much ignorance and misunderstanding of CT as there is vice versa. I have thought long and hard about the best way to present this study and the right sources to use. As far as presentation is concerned, I shall describe aspects of CT via quotations and summaries, which I shall then go on to critique. As far as the choice of authorities to employ, I think too many would muddy the waters, and too many quotes from the 16th and 17th centuries would lose half my readers. I have therefore decided to interact with five sources while adding material from elsewhere wherever necessary. My main sources are these:
- O. Palmer Robertson – The Christ of the Covenants
- Richard P. Belcher, Jr. – The Fulfillment of the Promise of God: An Explanation of Covenant Theology
- Guy P. Waters, J. Nicholas Reid & John H. Muether, eds., Covenant Theology: Biblical, Historical and Theological Perspectives.
- Michael Brown & Zach Keele – Sacred Bond: Covenant Theology Explored
- Herman Witsius, The Economy of the Covenants Between God and Man.
All these are relatively recent yet authoritative texts on CT. Of course, in the case of Baptist CT these books will have to be supplemented. For that purpose, I will repair to the excellent work of Pascal Denault, The Distinctiveness of Baptist Covenant Theology, and also to Greg Nichols’ Covenant Theology: A Reformed and Baptistic Perspective on God’s Covenants.
My procedure will be to provide an accurate statement of the aspect under discussion (e.g., covenant of redemption, covenant of grace, infant baptism, federalism, Israel and the Church) before giving a more in-depth description supplemented with quotations.
CT is usually tied to Calvinist Reformed Theology (indeed, R.C. Sproul said that Covenant Theology is Reformed theology1), but that is not quite true. Jacob Arminius was a covenant theologian as anyone familiar with his works is aware. But in the main Sproul’s conviction is correct.
In the First Place – Watch for Deductions!
Before moving into the first descriptive part of this study, I feel the need to make something clear. A person will not understand CT unless they grasp two basic things. Firstly, CT reads the OT through the lens of the NT. Actually, that is not quite right. I should say that CT reads the OT through its own understanding of the NT. Which brings me to the second matter. To understand CT, one must comprehend the reasoning. CT is heavily deductive in its approach to Scripture and Theology. Let me explain what I mean.
Covenant theologians tell “stories.” The stories are persuasive because they are God-centered, Christological, NT oriented, and coherent (at least apparently). But they are stories, nonetheless. Often bits of the story get interpolated into the exegesis and explanations, so that at one moment you are reading something from Genesis, and the next a theology of Calvary via Paul is freighted in. It is difficult to many to see but there is a theological agenda always running in the background. Occasionally the veil slips a little and the background assumption can be seen. When this happens, one must pay special attention. Certain things are being taken for granted. One of the best places to see this is when CT’s are dealing with the actual covenants of God mentioned in the Bible; the Abrahamic, the Davidic, and the New particularly. Covenant theologians major on “theological interpretation.” For example, in reference to Genesis 3:15 Brown & Keele say,
[God] promises to form a community of people for himself whom he will set apart from the offspring of the devil and one day rescue from the latter’s fierce hostility…This community can be traced throughout redemptive history…not by bloodline, but by those who believe in God’s promise. As Paul says to Gentile Christians in Galatians 3:29: “And if you are Christ’s, then you are Abraham’s offspring, heirs according to the promise.” Thus, Genesis 3:15 reveals God’s first formation of his church.2
There are all kinds of assumptions inserted into this story. There is the assumption (based upon debatable exegesis) that the so-called “godly line” (which they will identify with the line of Seth), is set apart for God. There is the assumption that this “community of people,” though clearly a bloodline in Genesis, will become a community not based upon bloodlines, but is the same community, nonetheless. Then there is the drafting into the picture Paul’s words addressed to the churches of Galatia. Finally, there is the assumption that the church can, and indeed must exist prior to the resurrection of Jesus.
But let us remind ourselves of Genesis 3:15:
And I will put enmity
Between you and the woman,
And between your seed and her Seed;
He shall bruise your head,
And you shall bruise His heel.
I realize that this “proto-evangelium” is supposed to promise a Savior, but does it? The remarks are addressed to the serpent and imply his doom. There is nary a word about redemption from sin. Satan’s conqueror will not be unscathed, but Satan will be destroyed. In the quotation from Brown & Keele above what is being woven into the fabric of Genesis 3:15 from the outside? Well, as a matter of fact, everything! There is not one assertion in the above quote which matches what is being stated in Genesis 3:15. The statement is setting you up for the story. Two groups are being set forth, a godly line and an ungodly line, the plan of “redemptive history” which the story will rely on is mentioned. Then the apostle Paul’s reference to Abraham in Galatians 3:29 is introduced and voila! the church is equated with the godly line of Genesis 3:15 and therefore “Genesis 3:15 reveals God’s first formation of his church.”
I have not begun to describe what Covenant Theology is, but I believe it necessary to put this “warning” before the reader’s eyes before doing even that. You will not be able to comprehend CT if you fail to grasp the deductive nature of its pronouncements.
One more thing: a look through systematic theologies by CT’s will reveal how important their theological covenants are to that discipline as well as biblical theology. he same cannot be said of the role of dispensations to Dispensational systematics! Think about that a while.
Photo by Mick Haupt on Unsplash.
Notes
1 R. C. Sproul, What Is Reformed Theology?: Understanding the Basics, 117f.,
2 Michael Brown & Zach Keele – Sacred Bond: Covenant Theology Explored, 62.
Paul Henebury Bio
Paul Martin Henebury is a native of Manchester, England and a graduate of London Theological Seminary and Tyndale Theological Seminary (MDiv, PhD). He has been a Church-planter, pastor and a professor of Systematic Theology and Apologetics. He was also editor of the Conservative Theological Journal (suggesting its new name, Journal of Dispensational Theology, prior to leaving that post). He is now the President of Telos School of Theology.
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Looking forward to this one Paul. I also read your “Very Brief History…” and enjoyed it.
While I agree with you about the isogesis in Gen. 3:15, a principle of hermeneutics that we both share is “how would the original audience have understood it?”. It seems that Satan would at least understand that the Seed of the woman would defeat him completely (head crushing is pretty permanent). It’s also seems that he would understand the continuance of sin throughout the race. Maybe not all the way to a Savior exactly but he had to have known that his defeat would spell a defeat of the curse right?
I agree, with the exception of the fact that I personally would not describe it as a prot-evangelium, even though it is hinted at.
Dr. Paul Henebury
I am Founder of Telos Ministries, and Senior Pastor at Agape Bible Church in N. Ca.
I’ve been mulling that statement for quite a while. I’ve come to the conclusion that it is impossible to tell. We can’t talk to anyone to ask them, and it’s unlikely that everyone in the “original audience” would understand it the same way. What this boils down to is more akin to “what do I understand this to mean.” We assume that the original audience would have understood it the same way, but there is no way to know that. I’m afraid it’s closer to WWJD (what would Jesus do) than we care to acknowledge. (I’m ducking now.)
G. N. Barkman
Greg, I respectfully disagree. We can consider things like the original hearer’s prior understanding, and culture to get a pretty decent understanding of what they believed. Especially in those instances where they say what they believe.
How do we know the original hearer’s prior understanding? We can learn about his culture, but even then, can only speculate as to how that culture shapes his understanding. It looks to me like 90% guessing with, perhaps, 10% accuracy. I agree that we can know in those instances where someone tells us what they believe. That’s accurate and helpful. Everything else is pretty much speculation.
G. N. Barkman
The real issue is, what did the author intend?
JSB
Exactly. That’s what we want to know. If our interpretation is accurate, it will correspond to what the author intended. But experience tells us that our interpretations are not always accurate because we see too many examples of capable and thoroughly orthodox scholars who reach differing conclusions about the meaning of a passage. They both believe they understand what the author intended, but it is impossible that both are correct.
We compound the possible error when we also assume that our interpretation is what the original audience understood. Even if our interpretation is correct, we have no way of knowing if the original audience understood it the same way. Unless they tell us, we are merely speculating. They may have misunderstood it, but we understand it correctly. Or they may have understood it correctly, but we misunderstand it. But again, how do we know what they understood unless they tell us? It appears to me that this is a fool’s errand.
G. N. Barkman
By the way, the original audience of Genesis 3:15 was the Children of Israel under Moses.
JSB
[G. N. Barkman]Exactly. That’s what we want to know. If our interpretation is accurate, it will correspond to what the author intended. But experience tells us that our interpretations are not always accurate because we see too many examples of capable and thoroughly orthodox scholars who reach differing conclusions about the meaning of a passage. They both believe they understand what the author intended, but it is impossible that both are correct.
We compound the possible error when we also assume that our interpretation is what the original audience understood. Even if our interpretation is correct, we have no way of knowing if the original audience understood it the same way. Unless they tell us, we are merely speculating. They may have misunderstood it, but we understand it correctly. Or they may have understood it correctly, but we misunderstand it. But again, how do we know what they understood unless they tell us? It appears to me that this is a fool’s errand.
I don’t have time to respond in detail tonight but allow me a short response. The grammatical-historical method of interpretation calls for us to consider the original meaning (yes we are trying to discover what God intended) given the language used and how that would be understood at that time. What is a threshing floor? Would an inner-city teen understand that term without doing a historical study? How about wheat and chaff? The “horns of their altars”(Jer. 17)? Should we just say “I wonder if the people of that day could have understood? Oh well, no way to know.” I don’t see how we could ever really understand anything with that hermeneutic. It seems a pretty straightforward corollary of perspicuity that God communicated His word to people in a way that was understandable in their time/place.
CTs are quick to point to “apocalyptic genre“ ‘in interpreting Revelation. They do this because they claim that the Revelation reflects contemporary literature. They base a highly metaphorical interpretation on supposed affinities with literature of that genre at that time. How can they know how apocalyptic literature would be understood?
[J. Baillet]By the way, the original audience of Genesis 3:15 was the Children of Israel under Moses.
Is it a historically accurate rendering of what God said to Satan though? If so, Satan was the first to hear those words.
“What did the author intend?” and “What did the original readers understand” should be the same thing. We should assume the author wrote with the intention that his readers understood what he was trying to say. So there is no dichotomy, or at least significant dichotomy, between these two.
Can we know this? Of course we can with a large degree of clarity. Perfectly? Perhaps not. But it is not so cloudy as some would have us believe. I think often the idea that “We can’t really know” is code for “I don’t believe what it seems clearly to say so it must say something else.”
At the end of the day, if we can’t understand the author’s intention, what can we possibly do with the text? We are now in the position of reader authority where the text means whatever I think it does, and if you think it means something different, it is all good because there is no mediator to determine the meaning.
And if we can’t understand the author’s intention, at what point did that start? The first reader? the second generation? the third? It seems to me that even by the time of Jesus (1500 years later), Jesus expected his contemporaries to understand what Moses intended them. And he held them responsible for it.
So did the clarity of the author’s intention end with the crucifixion? Or the resurrection? Where did it end? Or does it still continue?
The bottom line is that God held his people responsible for the meaning of the text. “I didn’t understand it” was not an excuse for disobedience. “My neighbor thought it meant something different” was not an excuse for disregarding it. So if you think authorial intention and original hearers are not authoritative, then when did that stop?
I think one of the great downfalls of Covenant Theology is related to this question. The first Christians, the Jews, would not have seen Covenant Theology in the text (for obvious reasons). Kaiser puts it this way:
The first New Testament believers tested what they had heard from Jesus and his disciples against what was written in the Old Testament. They had no other canon or source of help. How, then, were they able to get it right?
Thus, from a methodological point of view, reading the Bible backward is incorrect historically as well as procedurally. … [The early Christians] could not have tested what was established (and true) for them (possessing only the Old Testament) by what was being received as new (the New Testament). (Kaiser 2003, 26)
If the apostles were going to convince Jews that Jesus was the Messiah of the OT, they were going to have to use the OT in a way that made sense to Jews. You actually had the use the OT. The idea that we interpret the OT in light of the NT is a modern phenomenon. The apostles didn’t do that because they couldn’t. Jesus didn’dt do that. Neither appealed to some special hermeneutic or later revelation. Both said, “You should believe because you can see it there.” And we should follow in their footsteps.
When someone appeals to later revelation, they are doing something that Jesus and the apostles did not do. The later revelation most simply put, was, “See what was already said.”
…in light of what has now come to pass. Much OT prophecy was Not understood by the Jews until it was fulfilled. The use of the OT scriptures to convince the Jews that Jesus was the Messiah was linked to NT fulfillment of OT prophecy. There are so many examples of this in the NT that I find it surprising to have to argue this point. One example: Christ’s apostles seeming inability to accept His pending death and resurrection. The NT says that it was only after the resurrection of Christ that they “remembered” the prophecies regarding this. It took the NT fulfillment to clarify the OT statements. Yes, we should and must read the OT in light of the New. Any other approach is to ignore divinely given explanation of the Old.
G. N. Barkman
Larry is correct that what the author intended and what the original readers understood should be the same thing. But that’s not what we observe. Sometimes, even the human authors failed to clearly understand what they wrote. (What the ultimate author, God intended. see I Peter 1:10,11) The scriptures are replete with examples of people who failed to understand what was written. Very few Jews understood that the promised messiah would be a suffering messiah, a major reason for the rejection of Jesus. Did the OT fail to reveal this truth? No. It was plainly declared, but seldom understood. How do we know it was not understood? Because so many first century readers of the OT, both believers as well as unbelievers, failed to understand it. We know what they understood (or failed to understand) because NT authors told us. Otherwise, we can only speculate as to what they understood.
Our supposed ability to know what the original readers understood is an illusion. We don’t know except when the Bible tell us. To imagine that our understanding of an OT text is what the original readers understood is to nurture a false confidence in our ability to interpret scripture correctly.
G. N. Barkman
Brother Barkman, With due respect, I think you have to believe that given your theological precommitments. But remember the NT itself.
Jesus said, “These testify about me.” In other words, it’s already there and you should see it.
Or when he rebukes the two men on the road to Emmaus. He does not tell them it’s unfortunate they didn’t have the NT fulfillment. He condemns them for being slow and foolish not to believe all that the prophets had written. In other words, the problem wasn’t lack of clarity. It was lack of belief.
Even your reference to the disciples remembering was specifically connected to his temple comment (something not found in the OT), and when Jesus rose from the dead, “Then they believed the scripture and the words that Jesus had spoken.” In other words, it was already there to be believed. The problem wasn’t in some lack of clarity but in a lack of belief.
You cite 1 Peter 1:10-11 as evidence of a lack of knowledge, but did you read the passage? (I speak as a fool. Of course you did. But let’s read it again.) What they did not understand was the person or time. In other words, they didn’t which baby was the fulfillment or the particular time of that baby’s birth. It wasn’t that they didn’t understand what they were writing. They understood exactly that they were predicting the coming of Christ, the sufferings of Christ, and his glory to follow. Again, there was no confusion as to what they were talking about. The “careful searches and inquiries” were simply about the person and timing.
So I think you strike out on all these accounts.
But let’s press in just another second here. You say,
Our supposed ability to know what the original readers understood is an illusion. We don’t know except when the Bible tell us. To imagine that our understanding of an OT text is what the original readers understood is to nurture a false confidence in our ability to interpret scripture correctly.
If this is true, how do we know we understand the NT correctly? After all if the OT is not clear without the NT, what do we need to make the NT clear? Or is the NT sufficient on its own to be understood? And if it is, why isn’t the OT?
Furthermore, if this is true how can we understand the vast majority of the OT for which there is no NT guidance? Let’s face it, very little of the OT is cited in the NT. Some 600 times I believe EJ Young said. We might perhaps double or triple that in the interest of being generous. But that would be very generous because the NT is about 1/4 the length of the OT and contains much original material. Which means that there isn’t much room for a lot of the OT. So how can we possibly know what that part of the OT means if we can’t trust the words? And if we can trust the words for that part of it, why can we not trust the words for the other part of it?
If the OT is so confusing to people, then why does God condemn them for failing to believe something that they couldn’t understand to start with? And why do Jesus and the apostles consistently point back to “what was written” or “what has been written” if it was unintelligible to begin with?
In sum, once you remove meaning from the words and put them in some later interpretation of the words, you have opened up a can of worms that will make communication impossible. You can’t even really know what I am saying, or what you are saying.
Discussion