A Critique of the Covenant of Works in Contemporary Controversy

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Protestant Reformed Theological Journal external circumstance may have already caused them to appreciate the covenant concept.” 3 Herman Bavinck states fundamentally the same position: “The relation in which believers have come to stand to God by Christ is repeatedly described in Scripture with the term ‘covenant.’ Zwingli and Bucer already seized upon these scriptural thoughts to defend the unity of the Old and New Testaments against the Anabaptists.” 4 The doctrine of the covenant—a covenant of God’s sovereign grace—expounded by the early Reformed theologians was successively elaborated upon in Reformed theology as a peculiar treasure of Reformed doctrine. The Covenant with Adam in the Tradition One aspect of covenant theology that the Reformed theologians developed “with special predilection,” especially from the seventeenth century onward, was a covenant of God with Adam. 5 However, the idea that the relationship between God and Adam was a covenant was not original with the Reformed. Already in the fifth century Augustine stated that God and Adam were in covenant: But even the infants, not personally in their own life, but according to the common origin of the human race, have all broken God’s covenant in that one in whom all have sinned. Now there are many things called God’s covenants besides those two great ones, the old and the new, which any one who pleases may read and know. For the first covenant, which was made with the first man, is just this: “In the day ye eat thereof, ye shall surely die.” 6 3 Geerhardus Vos, The Covenant in Reformed Theology, trans. S. Voorwinde and W. VanGemeren (Philadelphia: K. M. Compbell, 1971), 3. 4 Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, vol. 2: God and Creation, ed. John Bolt, trans. John Vriend (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2004), 567. 5 Ibid. 6 Augustine, The City of God, trans. Marcus Dods, Great Books of the Western World, vol. 18, ed. Robert Hutchins (Chicago: William Benton, 1952), 439. 4 Vol. 44, No. 2
Critique of the Covenant of Works Herman Bavinck recognized that Augustine and others spoke of a covenant of God with Adam long before the Reformed theologians of the seventeenth century: The relationship in which Adam originally stood vis-à-vis God was even described by Augustine as a covenant, a testament, a pact; and the translation of the words keadam by “like Adam” [in Hosea 6:7] led many to a similar view. Materially, therefore, the doctrine of what was later called “the covenant of works” also already occurs in the church fathers. Included in Adam’s situation, as it was construed by the Scholastics, Roman Catholics, and Lutheran theologians, lay all the elements that were later summed up especially by Reformed theologians in the doctrine of the covenant of works. 7 Although Bavinck’s account does not give a very propitious provenance for the doctrine of the covenant of works—Scholastics, Roman Catholics, and Lutherans—the Reformed perpetuated and expanded on the idea of the covenant of God with Adam in paradise. The Reformed described the relationship between God and Adam in paradise as a covenant not so much because others did it before them, but because all of God’s dealings with men are in covenant, and because the Scriptures teach it. Specifically as the tradition developed they began to define that covenant of God with Adam as a covenant of works. The covenant of works has a long pedigree in Reformed and Presbyterian theology. Depending on whom one reads, the history may be longer or shorter, but its presence in Reformed theology for hundreds of years cannot be debated. No one does. It is frankly admitted by all, even by the men of the Federal Vision (FV), that the pedigree of the covenant of works in Reformed and Presbyterian theological history is impeccable. Copious citations from Reformed theologians showing what they taught about the covenant of works, therefore, does not constitute an adequate answer to the arguments presented against the doctrine by 7 Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, 2:567. April 2011 5
Page 1 and 2: P R O T E S T A N T R E F O R M E D
Page 3 and 4: Editor’s Notes Welcome once again
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Herman Bavinck on Covenant and Elec
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eral.” He does not mean that a co
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Bavinck thinks so. “Into that ent
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tration of the covenant: “In its
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On the Way to Calvary: Isaac Does N
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On the Way to Calvary (James 2:14).
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1611-2011 Celebrating the 400th Ann
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A Critique of the Covenant of Works in Contemporary Controversy

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