A Framework Built on Covenants
Many believers have read a study Bible, sung a hymn, or heard a sermon shaped by covenant theology without ever hearing its name. It is the framework of Presbyterian and Reformed churches, and Reformed Baptists hold a Baptist form of it. It reads the whole Bible as one story of God redeeming a people for Himself, and it organizes that story around covenants.
A framework for reading the whole Bible that sees God's primary purpose in history as the redemption of a people, and that orders Scripture under theological covenants: a covenant of redemption within the Godhead before creation, a covenant of works with Adam, and a covenant of grace with fallen mankind in Christ, administered through the biblical covenants from the fall to the end of history.
A Foundation and a Framework
Covenant theology and dispensationalism are both frameworks: ways of fitting the whole Bible together. Both rest on the same foundation, the authority of Scripture, which many call sola Scriptura (Scripture alone). A framework is more specific than that foundation. It sets boundaries, like guardrails along a road, that keep a reader from interpretations the Bible does not allow. It also helps a reader place hard passages in their larger setting, so that he can see why they are there.
A framework is a servant. It can help, but it never stands over the text it serves. The Bereans tested even an apostle's preaching by asking whether those things were so (Acts 17:11). Covenant theology must face that question, and so must ours.
Covenant theology is not the view this platform teaches. We hold a dispensational and Baptist reading of the covenants, set out in What Is Dispensationalism? and God's Covenants with Israel. But this series begins by stating covenant theology the way its own teachers state it, so that a Presbyterian reading it would recognize his convictions. Many covenant theologians are careful, faithful expositors of the Word. They are our brothers, and we have learned much from them.
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For Deeper Study
- Introducing Covenant TheologyAmazon Michael HortonReformed. A clear, warm introduction by a Presbyterian scholar, first published in 2006 as *God of Promise*. Read it to hear covenant theology in its own words.
- The Christ of the CovenantsAmazon O. Palmer RobertsonReformed. A respected presentation (1980) of the biblical covenants as one unfolding covenant of grace.
- There Really Is a Difference! A Comparison of Covenant and Dispensational TheologyAmazon Renald E. ShowersA readable side-by-side comparison of the two frameworks from a dispensational teacher.
- The Distinctiveness of Baptist Covenant TheologyAmazon Pascal DenaultReformed Baptist. Compares the covenant theology of the Westminster Confession with that of the Second London Baptist Confession, and shows why 1689 federalism baptizes believers only.
- Kingdom through Covenant: A Biblical-Theological Understanding of the CovenantsAmazon Peter J. Gentry and Stephen J. WellumProgressive covenantalism (2012), a Baptist middle position between covenant theology and dispensationalism. It differs from our view on Israel's national promises.
- Foxe's Book of MartyrsAmazon John FoxeThe classic Protestant record of those who died for the faith, from the early church to the English Reformation.
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Where Covenant Theology Came From
Covenant theology took shape after the Reformation, from Zwingli's defense of infant baptism against the Anabaptists in 1520s Zurich, through Bullinger, Heidelberg, Westminster, Cocceius, and Witsius, while the free churches and later the Baptists answered it from the New Testament.
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