through-one-man-sin-through-one-man-righteousness-july-august-2000

WHAT IS FEDERAL THEOLOGY | CHRIST THE SECOND ADAM | DAVID WELLS ON EVANGELICALISM

MODERN REFORMATION

Through One Man Sin Through One Man Righteousness VOLUME

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THROUGH ONE MAN SIN, THROUGH ONE MAN RIGHTEOUSNESS

16 Covenant Theology Illustrated: Romans 5 on the Federal Headship of Adam and Christ Some theologians argue that it is unjust for God to impute Adam’s unrighteousness to all of his descendants. But if so, Paul asks, then how can Christ’s righteousness be imputed to his spiritual descendants? by S. M. Baugh Plus: 8 Sidebars on the Biblical Covenants, starting on page 19

24 A Lutheran–Reformed Conversation on the Covenant of Works/Covenant of Grace Distinction Reformed believers generally think that they have a great deal in common with Lutherans, though Lutherans have been less sure of this. Covenant theology provides an excellent occasion for having this conversation in the open.

by Charles P. Arand and Michael Horton

33 The Covenantal Summons: When God Gathers His People in Worship The “dialogical” nature of worship—God speaking, and his church responding in repentance and praise—must be understood in its covenant context.

by Michael Horton

38 The New England Antinomian Controversy The 1630s controversy over whether Boston-area ministers were unhelpfully emphasizing external morality resulted in the banishment of Anne Hutchinson and followers, and quite nearly caused the destruction of the entire colony.

by Paul Schaefer

45 Our Promise Keeping God COVER PHOTO BY PHOTODISC

Excerpts from plenary addresses delivered at this year’s Philadelphia Conference on Reformation Theology.

by James M. Boice, Harry Reeder, and Joel Nederhood In This Issue page 2 | Letters page 3 | Ex Auditu page 6 | Guest Editorial by David Wells page 10 Speaking of page 13 | Between the Times page 14 | Resource Center page 28 Free Space with Darrell L. Bock page 48 | Reviews page 51 | On My Mind page 56 J U LY / A U G U S T 2 0 0 0 | M O D E R N R E F O R M AT I O N 1

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MODERN REFORMATION Editor-in-Chief

Dr. Michael Horton

Covenant Theology

Executive Editor

Benjamin E. Sasse Vice President

Diana S. Frazier

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ederal theology—or Covenant theology—seeks to explain how Adam acted as the

Assistant Editor

Ann Henderson Hart Production Editor

head of all humanity in our sinfulness. He declared rebellion against God and fathered

Irene H. DeLong Book Review Editor

a line of willing rebels proud of the family tradition. We are guilty, our world is under

the curse, and—as the Heidelberg Catechism indelicately phrases it—all of us are “inclined by nature to hate God and [our] neighbors.”

Perhaps the best shorthand for the human predicament is simply that we are “in Adam.”

The well-catechized Christian retorts, however, that there is more to the story of Federal theology: Believers are now also “in Christ.” By the miracle of redemption, Jesus has become our new, faithful head. By his initiative, we have been united to the “second Adam”—and consequently our identification with the old Adam, though always persistent in this age, is genuinely being put to death.

But there is an important point here that we frequently overlook: We know that Christ atoned for Adam’s and our disobedience on the cross, but we often forget that Christ’s work was not merely negative or “passive” (enduring the curse). Our Lord was also “actively” obedient, fulfilling the law on our behalf. Those united to Christ stand not only neutral or guilt-free before the father, but actually as those reckoned positively righteous, as if we ourselves have clothed the naked, fed the hungry, and kept the whole law. Like the criminal on the cross, we have done these things “in Christ.”

The background for understanding the active and passive obedience of Christ (again, actively keeping the law and passively suffering in the place of law-breakers) is the covenant that God made with Adam. This agreement in the Garden—called the covenant of works—was not based on grace, but on merit.

God promised Adam eternal life and blessings for obedience, and the curse of death for disobedience.

After the fall, God mercifully offered a new covenant, this one a covenant of grace.

Next Issue But we must distinguish Distinguishing clearly here: The the Kingdoms covenant of grace did

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Dr. Mark R. Talbot Column Editor

Brian Lee

not render the covenant of works obsolete; the Gospel did not do away with justice.

Rather, the good news of the second covenant was that God would send a messiah to fulfill the first covenant. God promised a mediator, who would be obedient where the first Adam had proved disobedient.

The covenant of works and the covenant of grace then both require perfect, perpetual obedience. The difference between them is that where the covenant of works required Adam’s personal obedience, the covenant of grace provided his faithful descendants with a second Adam who would fulfill perfect, perpetual, substitutionary obedience.

In an important sense, there are not two paths of salvation: faith or works. There is only one way—and it is by works. But the question is whether salvation comes by our personal works, or by the substitutionary work of another. The covenant of grace then is actually a path to fulfill the covenant of works—which hasn’t gone away and which those of us born of Adam cannot personally fulfill. The important distinction here is not before versus after the Incarnation (Old Testament/New Testament). Rather, the chief distinction for all historical epochs is between seeking to fulfill the law ourselves (covenant of works) and relying by faith on the lawkeeping of our mediator (covenant of grace).

Benjamin E. Sasse Executive Editor

Copy Editor

Alyson S. Platt Layout and Design

Lori A. Cook Proofreader

Mary Beth McGreevy Production Assistant

Kathryn Baldino Marketing Assistant

John J. McClure Alliance Council

The Rev. Alistair Begg Dr. James M. Boice Dr. J. Ligon Duncan, III Dr. W. Robert Godfrey Dr. John D. Hannah Dr. Michael Horton Mrs. Rosemary Jensen The Rev. Ken Jones Dr. J. A. O. Preus Dr. Rod Rosenbladt Dr. R. C. Sproul Dr. Mark R. Talbot Dr. Gene E. Veith, Jr. Contributing Scholars

Dr. Allen C. Guelzo Dr. D. G. Hart Dr. Carl F. H. Henry Dr. Arthur A. Just Dr. Robert Kolb The Rev. Donald Matzat Dr. John W. Montgomery Mr. John Muether Dr. Richard A. Muller Mr. Kenneth A. Myers Dr. Tom J. Nettles Dr. Leonard R. Payton Dr. Lawrence R. Rast Dr. Kim Riddlebarger Mr. Rick Ritchie Dr. David P. Scaer Dr. Rachel S. Stahle Dr. David F. Wells Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals

© 2000 All rights reserved. The Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals exists to call the church, amidst our dying culture, to repent of its worldliness, to recover and confess the truth of God’s Word as did the Reformers, and to see that truth embodied in doctrine, worship and life.

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Is Liberty a Slippery Slope?

I’m deeply disappointed in the latest edition of your magazine. By your thinking, we can sin as much as we want as long as the Bible does not explicitly forbid it. What a bunch of junk you have offered a world that is expressing itself exactly as you have in your ungodly position. You of all people should be well aware of our world’s ungodly culture and yet you say: go and enjoy yourself to the fullest.

As a nonpracticing alcoholic (over twenty years) I’m tempted to jump off the wagon after reading your stupid article on the consumption of alcoholic beverages. Don’t you realize what dangers and deceptions you are dealing with? You seem to have no limits when it comes to “Christian liberties”! The attitudes in your magazine are

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insist or persevere with rights or wrongs. All five have left the church along with our grandchildren.

Some attend occasionally but none regularly. I honestly believe if I had raised them as I was raised they would at least be members of a Christian Church. Can you not see there have to be laws, rules, and regulations? There should not be any gray areas…. Cancel my subscription.

Marv Kok Lynden, WA

In his article, “Recovering the Art of Christian Prudence,” Dr. Horton seems to use…his attendance at the movie Fatal Attraction as an example of Christian prudence. Is our Lord really pleased with this example? The Bible, specifically God’s law, is our instructor and convicting agent regarding sin. Is it necessary or right to use a secular movie produced by godless people to mirror our godless culture, a movie that Satan loves to use to lure one into sin—is it really prudent for a Christian to go to such a movie as a way for God to instruct him on the sinfulness of sin?

Pastor Robert Heerema Immanuel Chapel ow about an MR issue explicitly devoted to an expositional of the Law of God, Upton, MA

and its various uses? exactly the ones expressed in the late 1950s and ’60s that I fell for hook, line, and sinker. After living a life filled with so-called “Christian liberty” (dancing, drinking, movie attendance, card playing, etc.) for twenty years, I finally came back to my childhood teachings and traditions of the LAW, and I praise the Lord for it.

It is a very slippery slope you guys are treading…. Married in 1950, I decided not to raise my children as a strict disciplinarian. I told them what we thought was right or wrong, but did not

I find it appalling that, after Bob Jones University declined to discuss their rules of conduct with you (and why are they obligated to?), you would spitefully invade their privacy by printing those rules. This thinly veiled attack upon another Christian institution smacks of jealousy and an astonishing sense of spiritual superiority that qualified you to sit in judgment of their beliefs….

Even more, I am grieved at the mind-set you are displaying before young people. If you have not reaped it in your own children, don’t be surprised if you do.

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This kind of attitude puts me—along with that university—“outside of your circles.” Cancel my subscription immediately.

Betty VanIten Girard, IL

It is plain from the excerpts you offer that the rules stated are for Bob Jones University students, and not the whole of Christendom. They are a statement that those in authority believe to be biblical, and that any student coming under the banner of Bob Jones University, whether they agree with those rules or not, will abide by them

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The issue on Christian Liberty is outstanding!

You are to be commended for writing on an issue that is often misunderstood. Churches seem to go to extremes on the issue and Dr. Horton’s comments on prudence were enlightening. This is one magazine that challenges me to think.

Pastor Bloomquist Wichita, KS

Regarding your “Between the Times” story on the opposition in Chicago to the Southern Baptists’ plan to send 100,000 missionaries here this summer: I agree that the alarmists are way out of line, claiming that this will he critics of thoughtful Christianity continually allege that doctrines and creeds spark hate crimes and such.

However, wouldn’t it be “divide us.” They certainly do: they divide the true religion from all others. wiser for the SB’s to work with some of Chicago’s out of respect for the institution…. [You have Christian churches, rather than act as though only] taken elements of a fundamental- Christianity is unknown in this city, just because it ist/dispensationalist theological construct, plugged is not a Southern Baptist stronghold?

Blane Conklin them into a Reformed/Calvinistic theological Chicago, IL construct, and shown that they do not fit. You offer this and a presumptuous interpretation of those excerpts as your proof; that is, you put words in their mouths such as your argument required…. Is the “Redemptive-Historical” Hermeneutic Too Man-Centered?

Stephen Aivazis In a number of MR articles, I find fault with the Wittman, AZ position that the Scriptures are Christ-centered.

For in reality, the focus is on God the Father—his On behalf of my many Christian friends who honor and glory. Even the work of Christ was in “imbibe,” I want to thank you for your biblical honoring and glorifying him. That we have been article on drinking. It is refreshing to see someone redeemed is of secondary importance. Christ’s and an organization like you have the courage to perfect obedience, which culminated on the cross, write on this matter. was the Son of God glorifying his Father. That was I especially liked Rev. West’s explanation of the joy set before him. offending a brother. It is interesting that many of When we look at Scripture as a history of us simple laymen have come to this conclusion redemption, we run the risk of becoming through our study of the Scriptures, and we homocentric. For we find God reacting to man. wonder why many of the Bible “teachers” of today Man sins and God discusses amongst himself with still hold to prohibition. (I guess “tradition” is a the result that his Son volunteers and succeeds in hard thing to break.) redeeming those who God has chosen to redeem.

Jim Boruff In this Jesus dies for a man and not for God. A fine Via Internet line? No. Why is it an important distinction?

Because our Lord thought the Father’s honor and glory were worth dying for. We should not so Thank you for your labors. I look forward to quickly declare Christ and our redemption as key each issue of MR and always find it a profitable to understanding Scripture. read and good food for thought. With your Michael A. Lamping permission, we would like to publish Jim West’s Monroe, WA article, “A Sober Assessment of Reformational Drinking,” on our church Web site.

Editors’ Reply G.H. Via Internet Indeed, there is an important sense in which the Glory of God is the end of all his works, both of

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creation and of redemption.

Thus, the Westminster Shorter Catechism rightly teaches that the chief end of man is “To glorify God and enjoy him forever.” But here an important distinction must be made between the ultimate and immediate goal of a created thing (the Bible, in our example). All things ultimately glorify God, but they do so only when they properly fulfill their immediate goal or purpose. A workman’s tool shows forth its maker’s ingenuity when it is used properly—a hammer ought not be used to serve tea. Likewise, Christ reproves the Jews because they were using the Scriptures improperly: “You search the Scriptures, because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is these that bear witness of me” (John 5:39). True, these Scriptures glorify God, but they do so by bearing witness to Christ. It appears that the risen Christ was particularly concerned to instruct his disciples in the proper understanding of Scripture, as he opened their minds to understand that all Scripture, from the books of Moses to the Prophets, were written about himself, about the death and resurrection of the Messiah (Luke 24:27, 45-48).

The fact is, the Scriptures and the redemptive mission of Christ to which they testify are in this sense entirely man-centered! Christ came down from heaven that he might raise up on the last day all of those whom the Father has given him (John 6:38-40). It is only in the saving of man (the immediate goal of Christ’s work) that the Father is ultimately glorified. But we also err if we distinguish too sharply between the glory ultimately due to God in general and God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Christ prays that the Father may be glorified (John 12:28), yet he also prays that the Father may glorify his Son, so that the Son may glorify him, and also that they may be glorified together (John 17:1-5). Of course, the Nicene Creed reminds us that we are remiss if we neglect the third person of the Trinity, who “with the Father and Son is worshiped and glorified.”

Because of our sin, God’s glory in creation is nothing but a curse for us. Thus it is absolutely necessary that we know this God in the Christ who was sent to redeem us. So Calvin writes: “For this reason, Christ tells his disciples to believe in him, in order that they might have a distinct and complete belief in God, ‘Ye believe in God, believe also in me.’ For although properly speaking, faith rises from Christ to the Father, he intimates that even when it leans on God, it gradually vanishes away, unless he himself interpose to give it solid strength. The majesty of God is too high to be scaled up to by mortals….” (Institutes, II.vi.4).

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Ruth 4:1–17

Your Lord Is Faithful to Complete Your Redemption

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ou’ve doubtlessly had something like this happen to you: I’ll be talking to a recent acquaintance, and they’ll say, “Kingsbury. That’s British, isn’t it? Is your family from England?” I’m always tempted to say, “No, we’re Americans; I can show you my passport if you’d like.”

Americans have a peculiar obsession with learning their own and other people’s ancestry, whether Swedish, Polish, English, Korean, Mexican, ad nauseam. Most of us feel our roots in this country are rather short and shallow, so if we can trace them back to someplace else we’ll somehow achieve a more permanent identity. Just being an American isn’t enough; we need something more long-lasting. So where is your identity? In America? In your family name? Or is it in the Lord?

The book of Ruth is about identity, particularly about being identified with the Lord. By entering Judah with Naomi, Ruth claimed the promise of the Covenant for herself. That promise is the one the Lord made to Abraham when he said, “I will be a God to you and your children” (Gen. 17:7). Ruth claimed the Lord as her God. She proved her trust in him by her obedience to God’s Covenant laws as she lived in Bethlehem, but her faith was demonstrated most clearly when she gladly went beyond any legal duty by proposing marriage to Boaz in order to provide an heir for her deceased husband Elimelech’s family. There, on the threshing floor, Naomi and Ruth’s redemption was accomplished. In chapter four, the Lord—through Boaz—will publicly identify Ruth as one of his own by redeeming her and Naomi, and their redemption will be applied. In so doing, the Lord will identify himself as the Great Covenant

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Redeemer. The faithfulness of the Lord is displayed in this passage so you might rejoice in the lovingkindnesses of your Redeemer.

The Lord is your Redeemer.

The Lord Your Willing Redeemer Boaz is a picture of the Lord’s faithfulness to redeem you as he goes about the work of redeeming Ruth and Naomi. At the end of Pastor of Park Hill chapter three, Boaz set off to Presbyterian Church ensure their redemption, and Denver, Colorado in chapter four he gets right to it. To begin the process he gathers witnesses, particularly the elders of the city.

But note how our passage repeatedly stresses that the people of the town were also watching the proceedings. This combination, the elders and the people, serves to represent all of Israel. They are necessary to certify an action that will officially bring Ruth into full membership in the Covenant community, and also restore the name of a lost Covenant member.

This is not just a legal action. It is religious, because the redemption of Elimelech’s name is a testimony of hope in the coming Messiah. Along the same lines, Ruth’s profession of faith in the Lord will become formalized when she again marries an Israelite. This action is, therefore, also cultural, because she will no longer be a Moabitess, but a Jewess. This is, in short, a Covenantal proceeding, as a loss from God’s people will be restored and his family extended.

From MATTHEW KINGSBURY

Nonetheless, this is at least formally a legal negotiation, and its groundwork needs to be laid.

Note that Boaz refers to Elimelech as his and the kinsman-redeemer’s “brother.” This doesn’t mean the three of them all had the same set of parents; indeed, the assumption of the rest of the book is that these two were only distantly related to Elimelech. But Boaz describes their relationship with the intimate term “brother” because he wants to establish that the levirate law of Deuteronomy 25 will have some important bearing on the proceedings.

One might also wonder how Boaz knew about this field of Naomi’s, previously unmentioned in the story. I think we can safely assume it was discussed by Ruth and Boaz the previous night.

The narrative doesn’t have to be absolutely complete; it tells us what we need to know. And we didn’t really need to know the details of the field to understand the important point of chapter three: Ruth and Boaz desired to raise up a child to carry on Elimelech’s name because of their hope in the Messiah. As we have seen in chapter two and three, presumably Naomi had not attempted to sell the field when she returned to Judah because of her bitterness against the Lord. She sells it now because it’s too much for a widow; she can’t work it by herself, and certainly doesn’t have the means to hire workers to do it for her. By giving it up for redemption, the land would be kept in the extended family, and her physical needs met.

The structure of the negotiation itself is set up to draw a deliberate contrast between Boaz and the unnamed kinsman-redeemer. Indeed, we might title verses 1-8 “The Unwilling and the Willing Kinsman-Redeemers.” We can understand the unwilling kinsman-redeemer’s motives by examining his responses to the two different scenarios Boaz gives him.

At first, he thinks all he will have to do is buy the field and provide a pension for Naomi. If that’s it, then he will permanently increase his estate.

Because the land will stay in the family, he won’t have to return it at the year of Jubilee (Lev. 25:817). In fact, there won’t be anybody to whom he could return it! Since Naomi is past menopause, he can’t be required to marry her to raise up an heir for Elimelech. The expenses of Naomi’s upkeep will be nominal in comparison to the income potential of the land, and he’ll have a larger inheritance to leave to his own children. Basically, his initial investment will bring a long-term personal gain.

But once Ruth comes into the picture, his calculations change. Instead of expanding, his estate would be jeopardized. Even though he would pay for the field, he would have to give it up

to Elimelech’s heir. He would never be able to recover his initial investment with income from the field, and would also be responsible for feeding Naomi, Ruth, and the potential child who would not even bear his name. Rather than increase, his net worth would go down drastically. In short, redeeming the field and Ruth will require a great cost, with no financial return. So he gives up his right of redemption rather than take a financial hit.

While Ruth 4:7-8 may seem nothing more than an anthropological note, it in fact alludes to Deuteronomy 25:7-10: And if the man does not wish to take his brother’s wife, then his brother’s wife shall go up to the gate to the elders, and say, “My husband’s brother refuses to perpetuate his brother’s name in Israel; he will not perform the duty of a husband’s brother to me.” Then the elders of his city shall call him, and speak to him: and if he persists, saying, “I do not wish to take her,” then his brother’s wife shall go up to him in the presence of the elders, and pull his sandal off his foot, and spit in his face; and she shall answer and say, “So shall it be done to the man who does not build up his brother’s house.” And the name of his house shall be called in Israel, “The house of him that had his sandal pulled off.”

In Ruth 4 the unwilling kinsman-redeemer places his own name and his own inheritance at a higher value than the necessity of keeping his brother’s from disappearing. Now, he is not, technically, Elimelech’s brother, so he is not legally bound to keep the levirate law for him. But the text makes clear his actions are not praiseworthy. He removed his own sandal, and so the text implicitly judges him by never giving his name. He cared nothing for Elimelech’s name, but it is his name which was dropped from the annals of Scripture.

Contrast this with Boaz, the willing kinsmanredeemer. It is clear in chapter 3 that Boaz’s hope was not in his property, but in the coming Messianic seed who would crush the head of the serpent, as promised in Genesis 3:15. He is glad to buy the land because that will ensure Naomi is provided for permanently, not merely by living off of gleanings. Marrying Ruth means Elimelech’s and Mahlon’s names will be continued in Israel. Boaz’s motives are grounded in keeping God’s Covenant people whole, not in his own profit, and so he gladly redeems Naomi and Ruth. He will do so, even at the risk of financial ruin, in order to fulfill the Lord’s Covenantal plan of redemption and to maintain the Messianic line. Ultimately, the reason

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the author draws the contrast between the two men is not simply to make the other kinsman look bad, but to underscore the extraordinary faith of Boaz.

His faithful actions point us to the reality that has come in Jesus Christ, for in him you have a willing Kinsman-Redeemer. Read the words of Philippians 2:6-11: Who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form he humbled himself and became obedient unto death, even death on a cross. Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name, which is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.

Jesus did not esteem himself highly, but gladly gave up his rights as God. He humbled himself, becoming a man like you so he could reconcile you, a horrendous sinner, to God. Praise him, for he is your Redeemer. His work on the cross was for you, so you might have hope in his name. His

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Moabitess? What right does she have to be considered a member of the Lord’s Covenant people? Well, remember she married Mahlon, an Israelite. By marriage, she should have been considered an Israelite citizen. But because her first husband was a Covenant breaker, that marriage brought the grief of Covenant cursing for disobedience rather than the rejoicing of Covenant blessing. Now, however, the testimony of all Judah, the elders and the people, is that Ruth is certainly a blessed Israelite, even like the “founding mothers,” Rachel and Leah. Ruth was born a stranger, but now claims hope in the name of the Lord. By her marriage to Boaz, the Lord definitively claims Ruth for his own. This is seen especially in how he opens up her womb. As he did with Rachel and Leah, he gives her conception, and she bears a son. The last time this family felt the intervention of the Lord, he was visiting them with death because of their faithlessness (1:19-21).

Now he brings life, the hoped-for child who is the evidence of his faithfulness to his promises.

In Christ, you who were dead in your sins and trespasses have been made alive. You have been restored from death in Adam to life in Jesus Christ.

God has called you by his name, identifying himself with you. He has made you righteous by giving you the righteousness of Christ. So place your trust

ou, a sinner, are redeemed because this sinful family was redeemed. In the face of one weak family’s annihilation, the Lord preserved the coming Seed, the Root of Jesse, the Hope of Israel, the Light of the Gentiles.

death was sufficient to pay the judgment for your sins; have confidence in the perfection of his work for you. But if you do not know Christ as your Redeemer, then he is not your hope, but your judge. Repent of your sins and trust in him for salvation so that, with every tongue in heaven and on earth, you may gladly sing his praises.

The Lord Is Your Restorer

By Boaz’s work of redemption, Elimelech’s name was restored. In chapter one, the deaths of Elimelech and his sons meant the end of their family. The line was in effect dead, for there was no way to bring about children and a future. But now, through Boaz and Ruth, Elimelech’s family has been resurrected. The testimony of Israel’s hope in the coming Messiah is maintained.

Ruth, too, has been restored to her rightful place as a Covenant member. That word, “restored,” may surprise you. After all, isn’t she a

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in his faithfulness to make you whole. He who began a good work in you will surely bring it to completion. He will bring you out of the afflictions and sorrows of this life and into the abundant, heavenly blessings which you have in Christ.

The Lord Is Your Certain Hope Notice how the Lord blesses Naomi, his accuser. In 1:20-21, Naomi challenged the women of Bethlehem with an accusation against the Lord, and they fell silent. Now they respond; their answer has been delayed while the Lord vindicated himself. We ought to pay attention: The experience of affliction over a period of time, or having to wait for an answer to prayer, or even a delay in the experience of God’s blessing, does not mean he is unfaithful or has abandoned you. We laugh at children who can’t seem to wait a week for a promised trip to an amusement park, but how patient are you with the Lord’s work in your life?

Time will tell. Because of his faithfulness, you can be sure he will bring an end to all your sorrows; if not in this life, then certainly when he brings you into his immediate presence, when you meet him face to face before his throne.

The women of Bethlehem respond to Naomi’s accusation against the Almighty by blessing her in his name. What better picture of God’s grace than this? Even when you sinfully accuse the Lord, he continues to love you and bless you with all the gifts he gives his Church. You are indeed his beloved. Praise him for all his loving kindnesses!

The women of Bethlehem praise the Lord because he has provided a kinsman-redeemer for Naomi. Who is the kinsman-redeemer? Boaz? No; look again at verse 15. Naomi’s kinsman-redeemer is Obed, the child of Ruth! He will be brought up, at least in part, by Naomi, because he is the son who replaces her sons and husband. The language of verse 16, of holding Obed on her bosom, is that of mothering. Obed will grow up to become Naomi’s protector and provider. His name means servant, and he will serve Naomi as her kinsman-redeemer, the provider of her old age. He came to her not through a route which Naomi may have expected, but by Ruth, the daughter-in-law whom she tried to send back into Moab. Ruth is better than seven sons, and certainly better than the two sons whose loss Naomi so frantically mourned. For Ruth loved the Lord as her God, and, therefore, cared for Naomi. Naomi’s family of Covenant-breakers has been replaced with Covenant-keepers, and she is blessed by the faithfulness of the Covenant-keeping Lord of Israel.

Through this family, the Lord also blesses Israel with the Davidic line. Judah had been wracked by famine, but the Lord would not leave them in a cursed state. By restoring Elimelech’s family, the Lord preserved the line that would produce the great king David, the prototypical man after God’s heart. God used a family of faithless Bethlehemites, a woman from cursed Moab, and one faithful Israelite to provide a blessing for the entire nation.

Instead of leaving them with Saul, a wicked king like the despotic kings of the nations, the Lord provided a faithful king in a most surprising way.

More importantly, however, the Lord blesses you with Christ through his work in this family. Though David was a great king, he was merely a forerunner, a type, of the Great King, Jesus Christ. David was a fallen sinner, redeemed only by his trust in the work of his descendant, the true Savior of Israel. You, a sinner, are redeemed because this sinful family was redeemed. In the face of one weak family’s annihilation, the Lord preserved the coming seed, the root of Jesse, the hope of Israel, the light of the

Gentiles. Because he was the hope of Boaz, Naomi, and Ruth, Jesus Christ is your hope today.

So where are you from? You who had no name now have a name: Christian, member of the Church of Jesus Christ. Your identity is in him because he has claimed you for himself. You have been redeemed and restored by Jesus Christ, the hope of Israel. Because of the Lord’s faithfulness to his Covenant promises, you can have confidence in the sufficiency of Christ’s work for you, and in the certainty you will receive all the blessing of his Spirit purchased for you. You have Jesus Christ as your bridegroom. He is your daily strength, by the work of his Spirit. The Lord’s Supper, where Christ comes to meet with you, is a foretaste of the heavenly blessings you will have with him forever.

You who were not a people have been made the people of Christ Jesus your kinsman-redeemer.

Rejoice in his loving kindnesses, now and for eternity.

Matthew Kingsbury (M. Div., Westminster Theological Seminary in California) is pastor of Park Hill Presbyterian Church in Denver, Colorado. He first preached this sermon on October 18, 1998.

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aul teaches this when he says in Gal. 3:13, “Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law, being made a curse for us.” That is, the law condemns all men, but by undergoing the punishment of sin and becoming a sacrifice for us, the sinless Christ took away the right of the law to accuse and condemn those who believe in him, because he himself is their propitiation, for whose sake they are now accounted righteous. But when they are accounted righteous, the law cannot accuse or condemn them, even though they have not really satisfied the law. He writes to the same effect in Col. 2:10, “You have come to fullness of life in him.” It is as though he were saying, “Though you are still far away from the perfection of the law, still the remnants of your sin do not condemn you, because for Christ’s sake we have a firm and sure reconciliation through faith, though sin still sticks to your flesh.”

— Apology of the Augsburg Confession, Article 4.

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Classical Theism and the State of the Evangelical Movement Within the evangelical movement in recent years, a number of outspoken theologians have begun to question the historically orthodox belief in the incommunicable attributes of God (e.g., his impassibility, immutability, omniscience, omnipotence, omnipresence, aseity, etc.). We devoted the September/October 1999 issue of MR—“God in Our Image? Why Some Evangelicals are Challenging the Traditional View of God”—-to exploring this dangerous departure. Then in February, the once-theologically conservative magazine Christianity Today made an unprecedented leap in publishing an editorial sympathizing with the new theology of God’s “openness” to the future.

Here, distinguished Gordon-Conwell theologian David Wells considers this development and what it reveals about the state of the evangelical movement. The complete editorial, of which only a small portion is presented in this issue, can be accessed on our website, at www.AllianceNet.org. The entire commentary will also serve as the foreword to a new volume on Evangelicalism, forthcoming from Gary Johnson. — EDS.

David Wells Professor Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary

The weakness of the evangelical Church today I believe is in its knowledge and experience of God. That is why it was an ill omen when Christianity Today magazine descended from its perch, which is usually far above the fray, and published an editorial which took aim at “classical theism” and which gave heart to the process theology being advocated by theologians Clark Pinnock, John Sanders, and Greg Boyd (“God vs. God,” Christianity Today, February, 7, 2000, 34-5).

It was a curious piece. Rarely do editorialists at Christianity Today get enmeshed in discussions about the difference between analogical and univocal language (or language with similar meanings as opposed to only one meaning) and how anthropomorphisms work. That’s pretty heady stuff. And rarely do they take aim at a significant part of the evangelical world, in this case, those who are Reformed. But that is what was done by this nameless editorialist. And rarely has Christianity Today’s timing been so off. To rebuff so large a part of the evangelical world successfully requires considerable moral authority. That is the kind of authority which Christianity Today has now forfeited.

The editorialist who wanted to set the evangelical world straight began by dismissing the

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“boring concept” of God presented by “philosophical theism.” Now if this anonymous author had meant the classical arguments for God’s existence, such as the argument from design or the ontological argument, he or she might even have been able to enlist John Calvin in making the objection. Calvin thought that while the traditional arguments for God’s existence did at least have the merit of “stopping the mouths of unbelievers” we must nevertheless turn to God’s own self-revelation in the biblical Word to know who he is. As it turned out, however, that was not really the point in this editorial. By the end of this little essay, it is clear that it is the Reformed tradition in its scholastic form, as epitomized by Princeton theologian Charles Hodge and Dutch American theologian Louis Berkhof, that is being assaulted.

This, apparently, is the source of so many illconceived, unbiblical, and boring ideas about God. Well, what would Christianity Today like to see in its place? The nameless editorialist is a little coy about what should be advocated in place of Reformed ideas but by the end of the essay the door has been opened, with a caution here and there, to the Pinnock-Sanders-Boyd proposal that God is

genuinely baffled about the future, cannot see its outcomes, is limited in power, but is nevertheless struggling mightily in the adverse circumstances of life to save us because he loves us so much. (And this, we are to suppose, is not itself “philosophical theism” of a different kind!) The editorialist cites as evidence for this understanding of God the biblical references to his changing of his mind. No word studies are undertaken and no justification offered for this conclusion. The editorial simply assumes that because God is said to “repent” that means that the Reformed view of God has been invalidated. That is where the heavy stuff about anthropomorphisms, analogical and univocal language comes in.

It is true that the debate on the meaning of naham, which is sometimes translated to mean repent, has tended to follow two different paths.

There are those who think that the word, when applied to God, means a change of mind or attitude without any necessary association with the feelings and there are those who believe that it is principally about the feelings which accompany the change of mind or attitude. Let me suggest, however, that there is a way of putting together an understanding of these texts which does not get us entangled in the complexities of analogical and univocal language and, what is more important, does not entail the entire recasting of the being of God in the image of the postmodern philosophical self.

The basic confusion in the editorial is that it imagines that those who believe in the immutability (or changeless quality) of God necessarily believe also that he is static and immobile, that he is a lifeless statue far removed from the cut and thrust of everyday life and remains rather unaffected by it all. Statements, such as the one cited by the editorialist in James 1:17 that with God “there is no variation or shadow due to change” or the psalmist’s declaration that “The counsel of the Lord stands forever” (Ps. 33:11), however, speak to his unchanging character and his fixed and steady purposes. They say nothing about his remoteness from life which is what the editorialist apparently thinks is the Reformed position and finds so boring. Given God’s immutability, then, what are we to make of the references to his repenting?

We should begin by remembering that some of our English translations do not always capture the full range of meaning in the original languages. In this instance, naham (in the niphal), is translated thirty five times in the LXX as either metamelomai, meaning a change of heart or changed feelings, or by metanoeo, repenting or thinking differently about something. Thus, these references to divine “repentance” carry several slightly different

meanings which the Revised Standard Version captures better than other translations: when the Lord saw the early wickedness on earth, he said “I am sorry that I have made them” (Gen. 6:7); the psalmist says that despite the disobedience of God’s people “He remembered for their sake his covenant, and relented according to his abundance of his steadfast love” (Ps. 106:45); then, again, the word can be translated as “pity” as when we read that “the Lord was moved to pity by their groaning because of those who afflicted and oppressed them” (Judg.

2:18). So, what are we to make of the twentyseven occasions when God is said to relent, have a change of heart, or have pity?

Scholars across the centuries have pondered these verses including Philo in the time of Christ.

The impression given in the editorial that the full weight of these texts has been largely ignored until Pinnock, in a small hotel room, brought the whole matter to light is therefore a bit misleading.

However, despite this considerable tradition of thought there is no clear consensus as to how we should understand these texts although not all are problematic.

In a number of instances, repenting language is used of God to convey the thought of how pained he was by human behavior just as we are told, in the same language, that “Samuel grieved over Saul” (I Sam. 15:35). The text already cited in Gen. 6 is a good example, that God was “sorry” that he had made humanity. Given the overall biblical context, however, the onus rests on the “openness of God” proponents to show that when God said this, he was not merely saying that he was deeply pained by them but that what he really meant to say was that he had just then realized what a monumental mistake he had made. Alongside of this sense of God being pained are those texts which speak, as it were, of an emotional release through the exercise of wrath as when God says to Isaiah that “ I will vent my wrath on my enemies” (Isa. 1:24; cf: Ezek.

16:42). When applied to humans, this same word, in some instances, still carries an emotional sense but that of being comforted or consoled.

The more interesting use of naham in relation to God concerns those cases where there is a clearly built-in understanding that God will act in judgment if his people do not change their ways but will relent or repent if they do. In those cases where the people of God did repent in this way, then, God himself is spoken of as “relenting” or even “repenting.” The principle is stated in Jer. 18:7-8: “If at any time I declare concerning a nation or a kingdom, that I will pluck up and break down and destroy it, and if that nation, concerning which I have spoken, turns from its evil, I will repent

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of the evil that I intended to do to it.” The repenting of God here says nothing about the changing of his mind and everything about the changing of the behavior of his people. This repenting has to do with the retraction of a proposed course of action on God’s part when his people have a change of mind or it may mean the withholding of blessing when they do not.

At the heart of the prophetic message was this built-in understanding of how God would respond to sin. And when God does “relent” because people have repented it is because of his unsurpassed goodness. This was what Jonah, in an ill moment lamented. When the Ninevites repented, God “repented of the evil which he had said he would do to them” (Jon. 3:10). Then Jonah lamented that he knew this would happen if the Ninevites repented “for I knew that thou art a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love, and repentest of evil” (Jon. 4:2). It is these four divine characteristics which Nehemiah cites as the reason why God did not forsake his people even when they were rebellious (Neh. 9:16-7).

What may seem more difficult to explain are those passages where God apparently changes his mind as to what he has said he will do because of intercessory prayer. A good example of this is found in the life of Moses as he prayed that the wrath of God would be turned away from the Israelites who had made the golden calf. “Turn from thy fierce wrath and repent of this evil against thy people,” he prayed (Ex. 32:12). Then Moses went down the mountain, rebuked the people, smashed the calf, called upon those of faith to destroy the idolaters, and then led those who remained in a deep, penitential prayer. God then judged them but, in answer to Moses’ prayer, he did not destroy them. What are we to make of this? The best explanation, I believe, is that this is a variation on the principle that there is a built-in condition to God’s pronouncements. In this case, he allows the prayers of a righteous person to function in a vicarious way on behalf of the offenders.

It is a little rash to assume, as this Christianity Today editorialist does, that what we are looking at in these texts is a cognitive change of mind on God’s behalf. That ought to be apparent from I Sam. 15. First, we read that God says, “I repent that I have made Saul king” (I Sam. 15:11) but then, in the very same chapter, Samuel declares that “the Glory of Israel will not lie or repent; for he is not a man that he should repent” (I Sam. 15:29). This is one of nine texts which state that God does not repent, another example being, “The Lord has sworn and will not change his mind” (Ps. 110:4).

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This editorial in Christianity Today is simply one illustration among many that could have been chosen of how confused the evangelical Church has become. More than that, it shows that the growing definitional fogginess within Evangelicalism is now reaching into our understanding of God himself. It is one thing to debate the wisdom of using inerrancy; it is something entirely different to imagine that God is as hobbled and as baffled by life as we are.

The truth of the matter is that the fraying at the edges of the evangelical world has now turned into an unraveling at its center. First came the new definitions about who evangelicals were. Then the boundaries were shifted. Then they were crossed.

And now the reality of God is redefined and made altogether more accommodating to our postmodern culture. It is for these reasons that I believe Evangelicalism is now in a free fall. I therefore hope that my writing will play an important role in bringing the Church back to a more cogent biblical understanding, a more serious mind, a greater love of truth and righteousness, and a closer walk with God.

David Wells (Ph.D. Manchester) is the Andrew Mutch Professor of Historical and Systematic Theology at GordonConwell Theological Seminary, South Hamilton, Massachusetts. His books include No Place for Truth: Or Whatever Happened to Evangelical Theology? and Losing Our Virtue: Why the Church Must Recover Its Moral Vision. This editorial will also appear as the foreword to a forthcoming volume edited by Gary Johnson.

SPEAKING OF “‘There is still an illusion to the effect that a magazine is a periodical in which advertising is incidental,’ the advertising executive James Collins told a congressional committee in 1907. ‘But we don't look at it that way. A magazine is simply a device to induce people to read advertising. It is a large booklet with two departments— entertainment and business. The entertainment department finds stories, pictures, verses, etc. to interest the public. The business department makes the money.’”

— T. J. Jackson Lears, “Mass Culture and Its Critics,” Encyclopedia of American Social History, 3:1605.

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or if by the one man’s offense death reigned

through the one, much more those who receive abundance of grace and of the gift of righteousness will reign in life through the One, Jesus Christ.

Romans 5:17.

n the one hand the covenant is unconditional. There is in the covenant of grace no condition that can be considered as meritorious….

On the other hand the covenant may be called conditional. There is a sense in which the covenant is conditional.

If we consider the basis of the covenant, it is clearly conditional on the suretyship of Jesus Christ. In order to introduce the covenant of grace, Christ had to, and actually did, meet the conditions originally laid down in the covenant of works, by His active and passive obedience. Again, it may be said that the covenant is conditional as far as the first conscious entrance into the covenant as a real communion of life is concerned. This entrance is contingent on faith, a faith, however, which is itself a gift of God. Louis Berkhof, Systematic Theology, 280.

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wo qualifications must be present if one is to be a propitiator. In the first place, there must be a Word of God to assure us that God is willing to have mercy and to answer those who call upon him through this propitiator. For Christ there is such a promise (John 16:23), “If you ask anything of the Father, he will give it to you in my name.”… The second qualification in a propitiator is this: His merits must be authorized to make satisfaction for others and to be bestowed on them by divine imputation, so that through them we may be accounted righteous as though the merits were our own. If one pays a debt for one’s friend, the debtor is freed by the merit of another as though it were his own.

Apology of the Augsburg Confession, Article 21.

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he method of salvation presented in the Gospel is no compromise of principle, no lowering of terms.

Christ fulfills the old legal covenant absolutely; and then, on the foundation of what he has done, we exercise faith or trust, and through that trust we are made sharers in his righteousness and beneficiaries of his grace. Faith is not a work which Christ condescends in the Gospel to accept instead of perfect obedience as the ground of salvation—it is only the hand whereby we clasp the person and work of our Redeemer, which is the true ground of salvation.

A. A. Hodge, The Confession of Faith, 125.

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Pentecostal Identity and Growth Pains Scholars David Barrett and Patrick Johnstone, in association with the U. S. Center for World Mission, report that the world’s Pentecostal and Charismatic churches are currently growing nearly five times as rapidly as the population.

This growth rate renders the movement the fastest expanding religious community in the world, with an estimated 500 million followers—and counting.

American events in recent months reveal, though, that numerical success does not come without identity crises.

In the reemergence of a battle that flared many times in the 1990s, debate currently rages over the heterodox positions on the Trinity promoted in some Pentecostal circles. The Christian Research Institute (CRI), known primarily for its study of cults, published a report earlier this year arguing that national bestselling author and evangelist T. D. Jakes espouses modalism. Modalism is an antiTrinitarian theology that rejects the orthodox belief that God is one God in three persons, and instead teaches that God, who is only one person, merely assumes the different “roles” or “manifestations” of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Jakes, who pastors Potter’s House Church of Dallas and

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U.S. Bishop J.D. Ellis of the Pentecostal Church of Christ in Cleveland, speaking in Rome’s Santa Susanna chapel, praises Pope John Paul II’s efforts to reach out to American Pentecostal leaders.

leads a network of Pentecostal congregations, called Higher Ground Always Abounding Assemblies, admitted to Charisma magazine that he has indeed been shaped somewhat

by Oneness Pentecostalism.

Nonetheless, he countered, Christians should learn to judge each other not by “the nuances of semantics, but by our love for the sweet fruit of Christ in our lives.”

Hank Hanegraaff, president of CRI, insists that this indifference to theology and to continuity with the church across time is not unrelated to the increasing attention paid to “signs and wonders” in Pentecostalism and in Evangelicalism in general. Symptomatic of this credulity is the widespread attention in revivalistic circles the last few years to reports of dental fillings being turned to gold by the Holy Spirit. Because of the prevalence of such claims not only in the United

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States, but in evangelical communities in Latin America and the U. K. as well, veteran Los Angeles Times religion reporter Teresa Watanabe set out for some data. Wanting to learn if the ubiquitous reports of divine dentistry were true, she initiated her search in the Sacramento Valley, site of America’s most famous gold rush in 1849.

Beginning with Pastor Rich Oliver, head of the hundred-church California Revival Network, Watanabe listened to claims that the Spirit had converted Oliver’s crown to gold last year, and furthermore, that his network’s school could train other pastors how to perform similar miracles. When the Times acquired information identifying the dentist who had actually installed the gold, Watanabe confronted the minister. “I’d have to say I was absolutely wrong,” he admitted, but “none of it

distracts from the fact that I know God is a healer.” As the organization’s Web site did not come clean but rather continued to report this and related miracles, Watanabe persisted in her search.

Eighty inquiries later (mostly dental matters, though some cancer as well), she had identified a number of blatant frauds but couldn’t verify a single miraculous claim.

Obviously, none of this reflects on Pentecostalism as a whole.

Yet, given the movement’s rapid growth and assimilation, as well as the related decline of many ecclesiastical structures in Evangelicalism more broadly (Watanabe reports Oliver’s “bemusement” at the sins of “organized religion,” such as “decorum in services” and “bans against [ordaining] women”), it does raise some sobering questions. What should the Church passively allow the watching world to regard as orthodox Christianity? At

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what point do confessional denominations have an obligation to speak up?

The problem is compounded as labels such as “evangelical” and “Protestant” become less precise, and as modern Roman Catholicism actively seeks to woo “separated brethren”— Vatican II Catholicism’s term for Protestants. The last few years have produced a number of ecumenical documents—ranging from “Evangelicals and Catholics Together” (ECT) to the Lutheran/Catholic “Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification” (JDDJ)— claiming to have resolved many of the key Reformation disputes between Rome and the reformers’ lineal descendants. Thus far in 2000, though, the boundaryerasing activity appears to center on Pentecostals.

First, the new president of the National Association of

ÍPollster George Gallup reports that 46 percent of Americans now describe themselves as evangelicals— compared to only 36 percent as recently as 1994.

And what is an “evangelical”?

Gallup’s definition has three components: belief that the Bible is God’s Word, a conversion experience, and a commitment to seeking the conversion of nonChristians. ÍThe National Council of Churches (NCC), the ecumenical association of mainline denominations,

Evangelicals (NAE), Kevin Mannoia, initiated his tenure at NAE by bringing together the heads of various and nonPentecostal Pentecostal denominations and groups in Dallas. Saying he wanted these leaders to be “vulnerable” with each other, he reported that “vibrant” groups helped established denominations think about recapturing their vision, while the Pentecostal groups listened for counsel on how to avoid “becoming what you’ve become.”

In an unrelated but similar event, 170 delegates from twenty-seven Pentecostal denominations recently traveled to Rome to compare notes with the Catholic Church and Pope John Paul II. Associated with the Cleveland-based Joint College of African-American Pentecostal Bishops, the group explained the purpose of the trip: “We come with a

says it “rejoices in this new opportunity to draw closer” to the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE), following the NAE’s decision to allow NCC members to join the NAE, and vice versa. Since the NAE’s founding in the 1940s—as a theologically conservative alternative to the theologically liberal NCC—the NAE had prohibited “dual membership” on the grounds that belonging to the NCC was inconsistent with an evangelical

fervor and fire they may be missing, but they come with order and structure we may be missing.”

Stateside as well, Roman Catholic and Pentecostal officials have been proclaiming the millennial year a “time to build some bridges and tear down some walls.”

Catholic priest Kilian McDonnell, president of the Institute for Ecumenical and Cultural Research, took it upon himself to travel to the annual meeting of the Society for Pentecostal Studies. There he apologized to representatives of the Assemblies of God (AOG) and the Pentecostal Holiness Church for the “intolerance, discrimination, and exclusion” of Pentecostals. Frank Macchia of the AOG responded in kind, asking Catholics to forgive Pentecostals for accusing “the Catholic Church [of] spiritual harlotry and idolatry,” and for

understanding of the faith. ÍThe Southern Baptist Convention, which held its annual assembly in Orlando June 13-14, 2000 announced that its North American Mission Board (NAMB) has “sent” its first missionary to the Internet.

Siam Rogers, a Georgian with a telecommunications background, manages NAMB’s Internet evangelism sites (which claim over 140,000 visitors per month), hosts chatroom prayer meetings, and trains others how to share

assuming that Catholics “advocate salvation by works.”

In one sense, given certain cultural trends, the decay of theological distinctives is not surprising. Yet, in another sense, given the importance that evangelicals place on reading culture, this development does raise some eyebrows.

For just as evangelicals are shedding their unique identity, one of America’s leading scholars of religious trends, Professor Wade Clark Roof, is reporting that American adults and especially teens are more attracted to “strict doctrines” and honest belief than at any time in decades.

He writes, “Where the youth movements of the 1960s and ’70s were liberationist, movements [attracting young people] are now constrictionist, all about setting limits.”

the Gospel on-line. ÍBased on current rates, the Vatican expects 30 million pilgrims to Rome this year in search of the indulgence recently offered by the pope. The “holy door” at St. Peter’s Basilica is the main site of this year’s “plenary indulgence” (total remission from the punishment of sin), but John Paul has suggested that those unable to travel can still receive benefit by visiting the needy or abstaining from smoking for short periods.

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THROUGH ONE MAN SIN, THROUGH ONE MAN RIGHTEOUSNESS

Covenant Theology Illustrated: Romans 5 on the Federal Headship of Adam and Christ Understanding Covenant Theology et me make a bold assertion about Covenant theology: It is not incidental to Reformed theology—it is Reformed theology. In the United States, the debate with Dispensationalism in the twentieth century led many to define Covenant theology more narrowly as “NotDispensationalism.” Consequently, Covenant theology’s scope for many was narrowed to the relation of Old Testament Israel with the New Testament church.

But it is much more extensive and, frankly, more interesting than this.

Covenant theology is as vast as any systematic theology, touching on all the standard theological loci (topics), because it is simply systematic theology focused on the Bible’s own organizing principle of covenant. Nineteenth century Reformed theologian and Princeton professor, Charles Hodge, points out the benefits of this approach:

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As this [covenant] is the Scriptural mode of representation, it is of great importance that it should be retained in theology. Our only security for retaining the truths of the Bible, is to adhere to the Scriptures as closely as

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possible in our mode of presenting the doctrines therein revealed.1 Notice that covenant is a “mode of presenting … doctrines” for Hodge, not just one doctrine among many. Other theologies display the structure of more parochial interests—for example, liberation theology or feminist theologies—but Covenant theology is an attempt to capture the theology of the whole of Scripture.

Covenant, then, is not itself a locus (topic) of our theology like the Trinity, Christology, or justification. Rather, covenant is a main organizing principle of our theology and correlates with all— or nearly all—the loci. While covenant’s most direct impact is in soteriology (the doctrine of

define covenant are necessarily operating in a passage to see covenant at work much as we all do with many other doctrines of Scripture.

The Two-Covenant Schema ntegral to all Covenant theology is the twocovenant schema of the covenant of works and the covenant of grace. These two overarching covenants are classically expressed in the Westminster Larger Catechism of 1648 (WLC), which is still used today as an expression of faith and instruction by Reformed communions worldwide.

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Q. 20. What was the providence of God toward man in the estate in which he was created?

A. The providence of God toward man in the estate in which he was created, was the placing Paul’s comparison between Adam and Christ underlines the fact that if Adam’s him in paradise, appointing him to dress it, covenant disobedience had real consequences leading to condemnation, then in giving him liberty to eat of the fruit of the earth; putting the creatures analogous fashion Christ’s covenant obedience had real consequences for all of under his dominion, and ordaining marriage for his those represented by him as well. help; affording him communion with himself; salvation), it extends far beyond this. For instituting the sabbath; entering into a covenant of life with him, upon condition of example, the economical doctrine of the Trinity personal, perfect, and perpetual obedience, is described in classic Covenant theology in of which the tree of life was a pledge; and terms of an eternal, intra-Trinitarian covenant, forbidding to eat of the tree of the knowledge commonly called the pactum salutis (or, covenant of good and evil, upon the pain of death of redemption).2 The Scriptures themselves can be seen as having the form of binding covenant [emphasis added]. documents (e.g., Rev. 22:18-19). This does not even speak of the doctrines of the person and Q. 30. Doth God leave all mankind to perish in the work of Christ (i.e., Emmanuel, “God with Us”— estate of sin and misery? a covenant formula), the Church, and the A. God doth not leave all men to perish in Sacraments, which are all addressed within the the estate of sin and misery, into which they biblical rubric of covenant. fell by the breach of the first covenant, Hence, Covenant theologians see the concept commonly called the covenant of works; but of of covenant operating in scriptural passages where his mere love and mercy delivereth his elect there are no explicit references to the word out of it, and bringeth them into an estate of “covenant.” Fundamental theological principles salvation by the second covenant, commonly often give shape to biblical material without being called the covenant of grace. explicitly stated. For instance, there are no explicit references to Trinity in the Bible, but every Q. 32. How is the grace of God manifested in the orthodox Christian affirms that the biblical second covenant [emphasis added]? material is shaped by—and thereby attests to—a A. The grace of God is manifested in the second Trinitarian concept of God.3 We could also point to covenant, in that he freely provideth and offereth the Davidic covenant. The word “covenant” does to sinners a mediator, and life and salvation by not occur when God makes his covenant with him; and requiring faith as the condition to David in 2 Samuel 7:8-16 (parallel in 1 Chron. interest them in him, promiseth and giveth his 17:1-14), but Scripture explicitly calls this a Holy Spirit to all his elect, to work in them that covenant later (Ps. 89:30-36; Jer. 33: 21). In such faith, with all other saving graces; and to enable cases, it is sufficient to show that the concepts that them unto all holy obedience, as the evidence

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of the truth of their faith and thankfulness to God, and as the way which he hath appointed them to salvation [emphasis added].

Q. 33. Was the covenant of grace always administered after one and the same manner [emphasis added]?

A. The covenant of grace was not always administered after the same manner, but the administrations of it under the Old Testament were different from those under the New [emphasis added].4 The catechism teaches that there was a covenant of works (or covenant of life) with Adam, which required of him, particularly personal obedience sanctioned by the curse of death (Gen. 2:17; 3:2324).5 When Adam broke this covenant, God immediately instituted a promissory covenant, which the WLC calls the “second covenant,” and the “covenant of grace” (Gen. 3:15; cf. Eph. 2:12). This covenant of grace was administered differently under the different dispensations (e.g., “from Adam until Moses”; Rom. 5:14), but its substance was the same in every epoch after Adam’s fall in that it focused on a covenant mediator.6 The essential difference between the covenant of works and covenant of grace is well expressed by Herman Witsius, a prominent seventeenth century Dutch theologian: In the covenant of works there was no mediator: in that of grace, there is the mediator Christ Jesus.… In the covenant of works, the condition of perfect obedience was required, to be performed by man himself, who had consented to it. In that of grace, the same condition is proposed, as to be, or as already performed, by a mediator. And this substitution of the person, consists the principal and essential difference of the covenants.7 Keep in mind that the covenant of works was a covenant imposing personal obligation upon Adam.

He was bound to its stipulations and its curses fell on him for breaking it. Under the covenant of grace, however—whether in its administration before the coming of Christ or after Christ, for its effects are eternal and benefit both the Old Testament and New Testament household of God together (e.g., Heb. 3:5-6; 9:15; 11:39-40; 13:20)—the essential character is the substitution of the Mediator and Guarantor who himself fulfills its terms exactly and takes upon himself the curses of the broken covenant on behalf of others.

Furthermore, in the covenant of works, Adam

What Is a Covenant?

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od reveals himself throughout the Scriptures as a covenant-making God: “I will establish my covenant with you” (Gen. 6:18). A covenant is primarily a legal arrangement between two parties, usually established with an oath and defined by the divinely sanctioned commitments involved. There are only two ways in which a covenant may be treated by the parties: observation and violation. The covenant itself dictates blessings or curses contingent upon this outcome. Thus, covenants function as instruments of God’s kingly rule, determining his relationship both with man in general, and with his particular people.1 Thus, covenants are neither always redemptive, nor always gracious.

All men relate to God via covenants.

The objection that this is a “legalistic” way of viewing God is unfounded and misunderstands the fundamental nature of a covenant, which is flexible enough to express both pure justice and perfect love—both law and Gospel. It does not lessen a father’s love for a son if this is expressed by the father’s unconditional pledge to care tenderly for him, come what may. Nor is the love between man and wife lessened because it is sealed with an irrevocable covenant.

In the following pages we will seek to establish a series of key distinctions.

First, there are three major covenants in the Scriptures as determined by the parties involved: 1) The Creator’s covenant with man; 2) The Father’s covenant with the Son; 3) The Lord’s covenant with his Church. Second, these covenants are informed either by the basic principle of works or grace. Third, we must properly distinguish between the various administrations of the Lord’s gracious covenant with his church throughout the history of redemption.2

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was a “publik person.” The more modern term is that Adam was the “federal head” of the human race.8 As covenantal or federal head, Adam acted on behalf of his whole race in the covenant of works. This is not entirely without analogies today. For example, when the president of the United States signs a treaty, it binds all the citizens he represents to uphold that treaty. Should the president break the treaty through his official actions, the whole country may be accountable. The covenant of grace has as its head, the “second man,” and the “Last Adam” (1 Cor. 15:47, 45), the Lord Jesus Christ.

answers the question, “Why did God give them over?

The rationale: because they refused to glorify him.”10 Although the preceding view on the “therefore” in Romans 5:12 has some merit, I believe that Paul, in his own inimitable way, is actually connecting Romans 5:12-21 more narrowly to one point that he had been stressing in the immediately preceding passage. It is a fundamental point of the Pauline Gospel: that Christ died on our behalf while we were weak and helpless (5:6), guilty sinners (5:8), and God’s rebellious enemies (5:10). Christ hardly died because we were personally righteous and, therefore, deserving of acquittal at his judgment Federal Headship in Romans 5 seat (cf. 5:7), nor did he die only after our et’s see how Covenant theology illumines a renovation. The question should arise in our minds particular passage, Romans 5:12-21, one of from this “on our behalf”—as it does in Paul’s— the more profound passages in a book full of how can there be this kind of exchange? How can profundities. This is the centerpiece for Paul’s Christ die in the place of someone else? “No man exposition of the federal headship of Christ. It is can redeem the life of another or give to God a rightly regarded by confessional Lutherans as a ransom for him—the ransom for a life is costly, no clear exposition of forensic justification, but what payment is ever enough” (Ps. 49:7-8).11 Covenant theology contributes to this essential How is it then that Christ could give his life in Protestant viewpoint is that imputation works exchange for ours when no one else can do this for within the biblical structure of covenant. another? How can Jesus Christ act as our Substitute?

Justification is not forensic in an abstract sort of This is the thread in Romans 5:6-11, which Romans 5:12-21 picks up and answers, The covenant of works was a covenant imposing personal obligation upon Adam.... and the “therefore” in verse 12 makes the connection: Christ died on our behalf, therefore, we In the covenant of grace, however, the essential character is substitution of the must see that the workings of this exchange is just as in Mediator who himself fulfills its terms exactly and takes upon himself the curses of Adam … so also in Christ. In biblical theology, this the broken covenant on behalf of others. substitution is the act of a way. Neither is Paul appropriating principles from federal representative, or using biblical terms, a Greco-Roman jurisprudence, which are foreign to “Mediator” or “Guarantor of the new covenant” the biblical conceptions. What is working here is (Heb. 7:22; 8:6; 9:15; 12:24; cf. 1 Tim. 2:5).

What then is the precise basis for this great covenant jurisprudence and goes back to the beginnings of God’s revelation, indeed, to Adam exchange of Christ for us? Paul answers in Romans himself and the Adamic covenant of works.

5:12-21 by introducing Christ as the Last Adam (1 The passage opens referring to what precedes it: Cor. 15:45), summarized briefly in other letters: “Therefore, just as sin entered the world.”9 Some “[O]ne died for all, and therefore all died. And he commentators take this Greek conjunctive phrase died for all, that those who live should no longer (dia touto), rendered “therefore” or “for this reason,” as live for themselves but for him who died for them relating what Paul says in Romans 5:12-21 to all of and was raised again” (2 Cor. 5:14-15). But how what he has said from Romans 1:18 up to this point, can one die for all? Paul’s answer: “For since death particularly to his indictment of both Jews and came through a man, the resurrection of the dead Greeks (a comprehensive division of mankind) under comes also through a man. For as in Adam all die, the divine condemnation (e.g., Rom. 3:9-20). The so in Christ all will be made alive” (1 Cor. 15:21basis of this view is that the “therefore” normally 22). His answer then is that Christ functions as identifies the preceding thoughts as forming the covenant representative in a way analogous with rationale for something that follows: “For although Adam (granting certain ways in which the analogy they knew God, they neither glorified him as God breaks down, which he mentions in Romans 5:15nor gave thanks to him.… Therefore God gave them 17). This is the substance of the issue and the over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual answer that Paul provides in a little more detail in impurity.… “ (Rom. 1:21, 24). The connection here Romans 5:12-21 than elsewhere in his writings.

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The Adam—Christ Comparison hen you read through Romans 5:12-21, it is clear that Paul’s main topic is the Adam-Christ comparison.

He introduces the comparison in verse 12, “just as through one man,” but then breaks off in midcomparison to make some important qualifying statements about the workings of covenant law and imputation in redemptive history (vv. 13-14).12 Some interpreters do not believe that Paul breaks off his comparison of Adam with Christ in verse 12 and instead mistakenly think that Paul is comparing Adam with us, the “all” and “the many” descendants of Adam. In its pure form, this is a Pelagian teaching: “As long as people sin as Adam sinned, they likewise die.”13 In other words, just as Adam sinned, so also we all sin. Adam stands in this schema as merely a symbol for Everyman and death comes to us all only because we all personally sin.

The Pelagian reading of Romans 5:12 fails for several reasons, most importantly, because of what Paul says in the passage. Paul does not say “just as Adam … so also everyone …” in verse 12, which would indicate the second half of a comparison (as in Rom. 5:18-19, 21; 6:4; 1 Cor. 11:12; Gal. 4:29; Eph. 5:29; Col. 3:13; etc.). Instead, the words rendered “and in this way” (NIV) in verse 12 introduce the result of Adam’s sin for “all men” not part of a comparison. Paul is not comparing the “one man” with “all men,” but asserting that Adam’s sin was itself the sin of all people.14 Furthermore, the Pelagian interpretation of verse 12 must ignore other verses in the passage.

Paul repeatedly shows in verses 15-21 that he is not comparing us with Adam, but Christ with Adam and that the cause of our death was not our trespass, but Adam’s. Paul is not ambiguous if you read the whole passage. For instance: “Sin entered the world through one man … in this way death came to all men … the many died by the trespass of the one man … judgment followed one sin and brought condemnation … by the trespass of the one man, death reigned through that one man … the result of one trespass was condemnation for all men … through the disobedience of the one man the many were made sinners” (vv. 12, 15-19; NIV).

And finally, Paul explicitly denies the comparison of Adam’s sin with our sin (I paraphrase): “death reigned … even over those who did not sin in the same way that Adam did, by breaking a curse-sanctioned commandment” (v.

14).15 All sin is law-breaking (1 John 3:4), but our sin is not comparable with Adam’s because he was the federal representative of the whole race in whom all fell, and we are not.

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Covenant of Creation

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he kingdom of God as it existed in Eden prior to the fall has often been identified as being governed by a covenant, established between the Creator God and Adam, usually known as the covenant of works, or the covenant of creation.3 Though “covenant” isn’t mentioned in the text of Genesis 1 to 3, the Scriptures later use this very language to describe that arrangement.4 More importantly, the substance of a covenantal arrangement is present in the account. The relationship between God and man was established through divine words and acts of commitment. These include both the creative word itself (1:3ff.), as well as the clear commands to rule the earth, cultivate the Garden, and abstain from eating the tree of the knowledge of good and evil (1:28, 2:15ff.). The sanction of death on the basis of disobedience (2:17) is an explicitly stated curse, with an implied promise of continued life based on obedience. What’s more, there is even a strong implication of a greater reward of confirmation unto eternal life.5 It is essential to grasp that the covenant of creation was fundamentally informed by the principle of works: “Do this and you shall live!” (Lev. 18:5).

Whether it resulted in blessing or curse depended entirely upon Adam’s obedience, God promising only to mete out the just reward. This conditionality is the primary hallmark of works covenants.

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Adam as Federal Representative aul carefully distinguishes between “sin” and “transgression” in Romans 5:14, which directly relates to a covenantal reading.

Those who died from Adam until Moses did sin (v.

14; cf. e.g., Gen. 6:5, 11-12), but it was not like the transgression of Adam, because Adam was under a covenant of works sanctioned by a curse for disobedience: “In the day you eat of that tree you will die.” That is the distinction between the preFall Adamic period and afterward—the covenantal arrangement was different.16 This covenant with Adam demanded of him personal obedience and personally obligated him to keep all of God’s holy law written on his heart as a creature made in the divine image (cf. Rom 2:14-15) and the special probationary commandment not to eat of the one tree. Adam was already the natural head of the race by the creation order (1 Cor. 11:89; 1 Tim. 2:13), but by issuing the commandment sanctioned by a curse for disobedience, God was displaying Adam as a special federal representative of the whole race. To a Jewish audience, the issuing of a death-sanctioned commandment was tantamount to the issuing of a covenant: “For the covenant from of old is ‘You will surely die’” (Wisdom of Ben Sirach 14:17; II cent. B.C.; emphasis added).17

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Adam as Type of Christ aul profoundly shows the interrelationship of Christ with Adam in Romans 5:14 when he says that Adam “was a pattern [Greek typos] of the one to come.” Paul could have said that Adam was a “pattern of Christ,” since this is what he means. Instead, he reveals in a subtle way that Christ was already in view when Adam was set up as federal representative of his race: Adam was a “pattern for the [Last] Adam to come” who was destined to serve as the head over all things in the future.18 In other words, though Adam was first in time, Christ’s headship in the new covenant was already in view in God’s counsel. This is the link that validates Paul’s comparing Adam’s transgression with Christ’s act of obedience and their respective outcomes.

So far we’ve focused on the covenant of works and the Adamic connection with the race and how Paul interrelates Adam and Christ, but it should be emphasized that Paul’s overriding purpose here— as always!—is the overwhelming glory of grace (i.e., the point of vv. 15-17). The comparison between Adam and Christ underscores the fact that if Adam’s covenant disobedience (v. 19) had real consequences leading to condemnation (v. 18) because all were judicially constituted sinners by the transgression of Adam (v. 19), then in an

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analogous fashion Christ’s covenant obedience (v. 19) had real consequences, too. In Christ, the newly re-created covenant people (Eph. 2:14-18) are judicially constituted righteous (v. 19)—even though they are not righteous in themselves (Rom. 5:7; cf. 1 Pet. 3:18)—and, therefore, they are justified by the covenant obedience of their Surety and Mediator. All who reject Christ, must themselves bear the full obligation to keep the whole law personally (especially Gal. 5:2-3). Yet in Adam they are already condemned by the “eternal covenant” (Isa. 24:5-6).

Given that this threatened curse of God’s law is ever in the background (e.g., Deut. 27:15-26; Gal. 3:10-14), the Old Testament prophets looked ahead to forgiveness of sins and eternal communion with God in the new covenant (e.g., Jer. 31:31ff.; Ezek. 16:61-63; Zech. 9:11). With the coming of Christ, God has now displayed the judicial basis for the fulfillment of the new covenant promises: the exchange of his incarnate Son’s life for the life of his people who would otherwise fall under the inexorable curse of his covenant law for the transgression of Adam as well as for their own sins (Rom. 3:25-26; Gal. 3:13; 2 Cor. 5:21; Heb. 9:14-15). And all of the preliminary manifestations of the covenant of grace under the Old Testament displayed this primary fact: that by the one the many receive the promised inheritance. The covenant with Noah brought deliverance from the flood-judgment to his whole household (Gen. 6:18; Heb. 11:7); the Israelites received the typological inheritance of Palestine because of God’s covenant with Abraham (e.g., Exod. 3:6-7; Lev. 26:42); when Phinehas received God’s “covenant of peace” his descendants benefited with a perpetual priesthood (Num. 25:12-13) and the heirs of the Davidic covenant inherited special treatment as sons of God (2 Sam. 7:8-16; cf. Rev. 21:7).19 The “covenant of peace” extended to Phinehas is particularly interesting because it is later interpreted in Psalm 106 as being tantamount to receiving imputed righteousness: “This was credited to him as righteousness for endless generations to come” (Ps. 106:31; emphasis added). These are the same terms used of Abraham who was credited as righteous by faith (Gen. 15:6) and shows the organic connection of thought between imputation and covenant in the Bible that Paul is developing in Romans 5:12-21.

The Importance of Covenant ovenant is the fabric of the whole Bible.

Once this fundamental schema of covenant in the Scriptures comes clear, all the patterns of God’s relations with the sons and

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daughters of Adam unfolds into a rich tapestry unifying the Scriptures.

We have seen that Adam in Romans 5:12-21 was the federal representative of his race under the covenant of works. Some theologians reject this understanding of Paul’s teaching outright, because it “violates all sense of justice.”20 But if we are to use our “sense of justice” as an ultimate criterion for judging the truths of Scripture, then shouldn’t we deny all covenant imputation as well? If sin cannot be imputed from one to many, conversely it cannot be imputed from many to one. Under this method, how can we maintain that “He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree” “the righteous for the unrighteous” (1 Pet. 2:24; 3:18; cf. Isa. 53)? Shouldn’t this violate our sense of justice, too? And if our sins were not imputed to Christ, neither can his righteousness become ours (e.g., 1 Cor. 1:30; 2 Cor. 5:21). Then we would all be cut off from Christ and personally obligated (as was Adam), to keep all of God’s holy law ourselves (Gal. 5:2-3 again).

In contrast to this grim prospect, Covenant theology offers a fresh restatement of classic Protestant insights into the essential truths of justification as the imputed righteousness of Christ by grace alone and received by faith alone. What makes imputation work is covenant, for covenant is the forensic instrument by which God faithfully extends his blessings to the heirs of the covenant of grace. The curse on Adam was not the last word on covenant in the Bible. This is what excites Paul in Romans 5:12-21 and what excites covenant theologians as well: God’s grace and the gift that came by the grace of the one man, Jesus Christ, overflow to the many (v. 15) … the gift followed many trespasses and brought justification (v. 16) … those who receive God’s abundant provision of grace and of the gift of righteousness reign in life through the one man, Jesus Christ (v.

17) … the result of one act of righteousness was justification that brings life for all men (v.

18) … through the obedience of the one man the many will be made righteous (v. 19) … grace might reign through righteousness to bring eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord (v. 21; NIV). ■

Editors’ note: Some of the New Testament texts have been translated from the Greek by the author.

S. M. Baugh (Ph.D., University of California, Irvine) is associate professor of New Testament at Westminster Theological Seminary in California.

Covenant of Redemption

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hile it is common to associate redemption exclusively with grace, this oversimplification fails to account for the essential role that works play in our redemption—the works of Christ. “For as by one man’s disobedience many were made sinners, so by the obedience of one shall many be made righteous” (Rom. 5:19). God’s redemptive plan answers Adam’s disobedience (in the works-oriented covenant of creation) with the Last Adam’s perfect obedience (in the similarly works-oriented covenant of Redemption). In this sense, the works principle underlies all biblical covenants.

Much confusion results from the failure to recognize this fact.

The eternal agreement between the Father and Son to save sinners (Eph. 1:4, 3:11) takes the form of a covenant, with divinely sanctioned commitments and promised blessings. Thus, the Father gives the Son a commandment to obey (John 10:18), and Christ accomplished the work given him to do (John 17:4), fulfilling all righteousness (Matt. 3:15).

Christ covenants not only to actively obey God’s law but also to bear man’s impending curse. As a result of his obedience, Christ receives blessings, expressed in explicitly covenantal language: “My Father has covenanted unto me a kingdom.”6 Discerning a works covenant within the Godhead’s eternal plan to save is far from idle speculation. It is absolutely necessary to properly understand Christ as our substitute, one who stands in our place “under the Law” (Gal. 4:4) and fulfills what is required of us in its entirety. This idea of a substitute is most clearly expressed in Paul’s description of the first and last Adams (Rom. 5, 1 Cor. 15), which supports the parallel works nature of these two covenants of Creation and Redemption.

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THROUGH ONE MAN SIN, THROUGH ONE MAN RIGHTEOUSNESS

Does the Covenant of Works Confuse the Law/G LUTHERAN

Yes.

This Reformed formulation minimizes the radical contrast between God’s right and left hands.

The concept of the covenant obviously has historical origins that pertain to establishing an orderly and amicable existence in a wide range of human affairs. But theologically, the idea of covenant provides a helpful description of God’s people as well to describe their response to his initiative. Biblical scholars in the twentieth century highlighted the importance of covenant as one of the dominant leitmotivs throughout the Scriptures.

It has even been identified as “the major metaphor used to describe the relation between God and Israel (the people of God).”1 Given its prominent place within the Scriptures, it is not surprising that both biblical and systematic theologians have also made use of the covenant theme in their particular disciplines. But biblical and systematic theologians often interpret “covenant” within different contexts and for different purposes.

Biblical theologians highlight the uniqueness of covenant in the biblical revelation for embracing the divine as well as the human role in the drama of salvation.2 Thus, the language of covenant “depicts God in action to redeem lost sinners; they, enabled by faith, react to this undeserved gift, as they accept it and resolve to conform their lives to the will of their Creator.”3 No other Hebrew, Aramaic, [ C O N T I N U E D O N PA G E 2 6 ]

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s/Covenant of Grace Schema Gospel Distinction?

REFORMED

No.

Lutherans are correct to insist on the law/Gospel contrast, but they have sadly failed to grasp that this is exactly what Covenant theology does.

Sound bites are increasingly in demand these days: “Net it out for me,” a friend told me just the other day. Not a lot of time. On the go. Don’t have the luxury of immersing myself in a systematic theology: just cut to the chase and give it to me in a nutshell. Craftsmanship used to take time. Cutting corners meant an inferior wine, a makeshift house, or a one-dimensional novel.

Today, however, forget complexity, maturity, and depth: Give me the short version.

This is true in the Church today, of course, where the complexity of diverse discussions from quite different periods from a wide variety of committed churchmen, the maturity of centuries of testing by reflection and practice, and the depth of wisdom in exegesis on the part of that “cloud of witnesses,” can all be so easily dismissed. They can’t reach us—they don’t have cell phones.

Distilling Reformed theology to a few essentials simply won’t work. It can’t be reduced to the Five Points of Calvinism or to the solae of the Reformation (“only scripture/Christ/grace/faith”). Confessional Lutherans have, generally speaking, done a better job than American Calvinists at keeping their coherence intact. One doesn’t observe many Lutherans—at [ C O N T I N U E D O N PA G E 3 1 ]

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Yes.

[ C O N T I N U E D F R O M PA G E 2 4 ]

or Greek word embraces both roles at the same time. Covenant provides a one-word epitome of humankind’s reunion with its creator, and serves to highlight both the continuity and the discontinuity of God’s work before Christ and after Christ.

Accordingly, biblical theologians will track the similarities and differences of the various covenants established by God from Noah (Gen. 6ff.), through Abraham (Gen. 12, 15, 17), Moses (Ex. 19 through the end of Deut.), Phinehas (Num. 25:1031), David (2 Sam. 7), as well the establishment of the new covenant spoken by Jeremiah (Jer. 31), Jesus (Last Supper), Paul (Gal. 3-4), and the author to the Hebrews (Heb. 9:16-17).

Systematic theologians, building on the work of the biblical theologian, pick up the importance of the covenant theme but tend to interpret it within the analogy of faith in addition to the original historical setting. Thus, they put it to a broader use and for other purposes depending upon the pastoral needs and polemical exigencies of their time. For example, they will often expand it and test its usefulness as a comprehensive and coherent way of speaking about all of God’s relationships. In a similar way, Lutheran theology uses the word “justification” dogmatically not only as referring to the dikaiosune word group in the New Testament, but as synecdoche for speaking about the many and various expressions of the Gospel. As a part (dikaiosune) for the whole (Gospel), justification can be used to encompass many other biblical ways of talking about the Gospel such as ransom, reconciliation, propitiation, victory, new creation, and so on.

Covenant as a Category in Lutheran and Reformed Theology f the two major Reformation traditions to emerge from the sixteenth century, the Lutheran and Reformed, the latter has certainly given greater prominence to—and made greater use of—the biblical language of covenant than the former. The Westminster Confession, for example, devotes an entire locus to the subject.4 Other Reformed theologians have followed suit and often have given it a prominent place within their dogmatics. Thus, in his Systematic Theology,5 Louis Berkhof devotes nearly forty pages to the subject, “Man in the Covenant of Grace.” Like the Westminster Confession, Berkhof situates the locus on covenant between the loci of sin and Christology. In each of these cases, the concept of covenant is expanded beyond its biblical usage and is used to embrace the comprehensive coherence of God’s dealings with human beings. For this reason, the

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Westminster Confession can speak of “a covenant of works” with reference to Adam and Eve even though the Bible itself does not use the language of berith or diatheke to speak of this relationship.

The Augsburg Confession, by contrast, contains no similar locus devoted to covenant as a topic.

Indeed, in the entire Lutheran Confessional corpus, very little explicit discussion of the theme takes place.

This is perhaps because covenant was a favored expression of certain late medieval theologians: these “nominalists” argued that God made a pact that if people do what they are capable of doing, he would provide the grace to help them. Other Lutheran theologians in the sixteenth century such as Philip Melanchthon and Martin Chemnitz do include a locus on covenant in their dogmatics but do so for a different purpose than the use to which it is put in the Westminster Confession. Rather than discussing covenant as an overarching framework for addressing the unity of God’s dealings with human beings, they utilize the covenantal (especially the old and new covenant) language in order to maintain a radical difference between the two ways in which God carries out his work among his human creatures.

The different uses of covenant in the two traditions thus go beyond the mere mention or location of covenant within their respective theological systems and often go to the heart of the contrast between their respective theological worlds. Does covenant provide the primary framework for considering the coherence of God’s work or does the distinction between law and Gospel provide the conceptual framework for finding the coherence of his work?

From a Lutheran perspective, the touchstone for understanding the two approaches for an understanding of covenant lies in the role that the law has to play in relation to the Gospel and, hence, the contribution that the law makes in establishing a person’s righteousness. The Lutheran critique generally sees the Reformed use of the covenant concept as a way of bridging and harmonizing the distinction between law and Gospel so that the radical contrast between God’s two works are minimized. The traditional Lutheran treatment of the covenant, by comparison, focuses on maintaining the stark contrast between the law and the Gospel as God’s two ways of dealing with his human creatures.

The Lutheran Treatment of the Old and New Covenants brief perusal of Chemnitz’s Loci Theologici quickly shows that he is thoroughly familiar with the covenant language of the Bible.6 For him (and Melanchthon upon whose Loci Communes he builds), however, the key to understanding the

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covenant lies not in its continuity throughout the Bible, but in the difference between the Old and New Covenants. The emphasis on the difference between the Old and New Covenants grows out of the Lutheran view of the Gospel as victory over the law and hence the Lutheran distinction between law and Gospel. Indeed, Melanchthon and Chemnitz use the terms as metonymies for law and Gospel.

This is in no way a simplistic distinction between the Old and New Testaments that renders the Old Testament as law and the New Testament as Gospel.

Instead, they affirm that the old and new covenants exist side by side throughout both parts of the Bible.

With this distinction between law and Gospel and its corollaries of the distinction between the two kingdoms and two kinds of righteousness, the law is fitted into a comprehensive Christocentric view of Scripture in which the twofold event of Christ’s death and resurrection stands at the center. For Lutherans, the Gospel rests entirely upon maintaining such a distinction.

The distinction between law and Gospel leads Lutherans to distinguish between two arenas of God’s work—the horizontal and vertical realms— that he has established for his creative and redemptive purposes respectively. In the horizontal realm, or earthly kingdom, the law rules so that works are performed for the sake of one’s neighbor.

In the vertical realm, or heavenly kingdom, the Gospel rules so that a person becomes righteous coram Deo by faith apart from works. The law plays a different function in each of these realms. In the horizontal realm, the law finds its original use, its “civil” or “political” use, in which the claims of the law rule over our lives on earth and promote works which are good for our neighbors (coram hominubus).

These claims do not make us righteous “in heaven” (coram Deo).7 When people use the law and its works as the foundation of their righteousness before God (thereby confusing the horizontal and vertical realms), they find that the law forces “its way accusingly into our consciences, where it condemns us as sinners and kills our self-righteousness.” Thus the law acquires a “theological” or “spiritual” function that now becomes the law’s most important function. In this vertical realm, the law conflicts with the Gospel: The law kills; the Gospel makes alive. It participates in our salvation only by preparing the way for the Gospel.

The Lutheran Critique of Covenant Continuity utherans jealously guard this fundamental distinction between the works of God’s left hand (law) and right hand (Gospel) in the matter of righteousness before God in order that the Gospel may always remain the radical word of good

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The Unified Covenant of Redemptive Grace

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hrist’s obedience as substitute is the foundation for the gracious restoration of covenant relations between God and man after the fall. Among the blessings he receives for his faithfulness is the redemption of his Church: “As my Father covenanted to me a kingdom, so I covenant to you to participate with me in the glory of the royal court.”7 Thus, Christ as Lord pledges to share his blessings with the church. It is on the basis of this gracious covenant alone— founded upon Christ’s work alone—that sinners enter into a saving relationship with God. The history of this saving covenant stands at the forefront of the Scriptures, a single, unified pact administered in diverse arrangements from Genesis 3 to Revelation 22.

Among the three major covenants in the Bible, this covenant alone is informed by grace.8 The distinctive characteristics of such grace are preeminently displayed at the foundation of this saving covenant in Genesis 3:15, where the Gospel is proclaimed for the first time in the midst of God’s judgment upon the serpent. It is God alone who pledges future performance, namely, putting enmity between the serpent and the woman, and ultimately crushing the serpent’s head.

Though this “enmity” entails certain human participation, God promises to bring it about. The covenant is thus inviolable, with no “either/or” based on human performance.9 Furthermore, this covenant is founded upon the work of a substitute, “the seed of the woman,” who both suffers the bruise and claims the victory. This child of promise is the object of hope for all the saints of the Old Testament. Paul tells us explicitly that Christ was this substitute (Gal. 3:16).10

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In Print July/August Book Recommendations The Confession of Faith A. A. Hodge The younger Hodge was gifted with the ability to communicate theology in a satisfying and pleasant style. His commentary on the Westminster Confession of Faith demonstrates this quality.

B-HODG-1 HARDCOVER, $26.00 Paul: An Outline of His Theology Herman Ridderbos This is the English translation of the monumental study of the theology of the Apostle Paul by the Dutch theologian and Biblical scholar, Herman Ridderbos.

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B-VOS-1 PAPERBACK, $20.00 The Unfolding Mystery: Discovering Christ in the Old Testament Edmund Clowney Clowney takes a fascinating walk through the Old Testament, revealing Christ in places where he is usually overlooked.

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C-SPR-26 AUDIO CASSETTES, $12.00 V-SPR-17 VIDEO CASSETTTES, $30.00 The Christ of the Covenants O. Palmer Robertson Robertson presents the richness of a covenantal approach to understanding the Bible.

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On Tape From the Alliance Archives Our Promise Keeping God: Four Thousand Years of the Covenant 2000 Theology Conference What is a covenant? How are the biblical covenants established? Who are the parties to a covenant? And how do human covenants differ from the divine covenant? In this conference series speakers Eric Alexander, James Boice, Joel Nederhood and Harry Reeder remind us that the covenants God has made with human beings go back not only to the birth, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, but also to the covenant God made with Abraham. In this celebration of God’s eternal, unchanging covenants we are reminded that the greatest covenant, that of redemption, was formed within the Godhead in eternity past and will endure to eternity future.

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Recent White Horse Inn Programs on Tape, $5.00 each * Doctrine of God, C-WHI-471-72 * Christian Liberty, C-WHI-474-75 * Commercialization of Christianity, C-WHI-476-77 * Question & Answer #3, C-WHI-478-79 * Question & Answer #4, C-WHI-485-86 * Question & Answer #5, C-WHI-490-91 * Question & Answer #6, C-WHI-496-97 The World, the Flesh, and the Devil White Horse Inn series Ours is a world polluted with sin. No matter who you are, where you go or what you do, temptations and sin abound. By virtue of Christ’s imputed righteousness, each Christian must be at war with the tempting forces around him or her. In this four-part series hosts Michael Horton, Kim Riddlebarger and Rod Rosenbladt examine the true nature of spiritual warfare as well as the sure defenses against temptation demonstrated in Scripture.

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news that it is. Yet it is precisely this concern that has prompted Lutheran theologians to criticize the use of covenant language in Reformed thought. They see in its use a concept that brings the law and the Gospel into a peaceful harmony, and when that happens, the law stands in a position once again to become the foundation upon which people seek to deal with God rather than the Gospel. These concerns by Lutherans appear justified by the exposition of covenant in the Westminster Confession.

The Westminster Confession identifies several types of covenants. The first was a covenant of works made with Adam and Eve prior to the fall.

Life was promised to Adam and his posterity “upon condition of perfect and personal obedience.”8 After the fall, God made a second covenant, this time a covenant of grace. In it he offered sinners life and salvation in Christ, requiring of them faith in him, and “promising to give unto all those that are ordained unto life his Holy Spirit, to make them willing and able to believe.” The Confession then notes that the covenant of grace was administered differently in the time of the law and the time of the Gospel. Under the law it was administered by promises, prophecies, sacrifices, circumcision, the paschal lamb, and other ordinances. These all prefigured Christ, but “which were for that time sufficient and efficacious.”9 Under the Gospel, “when Christ the substance was exhibited,” the covenant came to be dispensed through the preaching of the word, the administration of the Sacraments of Baptism and the Lord’s Supper.

Though possessing less outward glory than the Old Testament ordinances, they contained more fullness, evidence, and spiritual efficacy, to all nations, both Jewish and Gentile. The Westminster Confession concludes that there are not “two covenants of grace differing in substance, but one and the same under various dispensations.”

At first glance, the distinction between a covenant of works and a covenant of grace as outlined in the Westminster Confession evokes images of the Lutheran distinction between law and Gospel. But upon closer inspection, as Gustaf Wingren, a contemporary New Testament theologian, points out, the covenant of works is limited to the period of time before man’s fall into sin. When man failed to keep that covenant, God made a new covenant of grace, a covenant that embraces both God’s giving of grace and his subsequent imposing of obligations upon his covenant people. For Lutherans, this move appears to remove the law from God’s realm of creation, the horizontal realm in which God’s demands apply to all people for the sake of neighbor (as well as the Ten Commandments), and make them a distinctively (if not exclusively) Christian concern

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(hence an emphasis on the literal Sabbath, graven images, etc.). As part of the covenant of grace, Gospel and law both become God’s means for bestowing new life.

Lutherans, thus, see this use of covenant as an overarching framework within which law and Gospel are brought into harmony by modifying the conflict between them. Law and Gospel are fitted into a superior, wider concept, the “covenant,” which includes partly election (“those that are ordained”) and grace (“salvation in Christ”), and partly the demands arising from election (law).”10 Lutherans would not deny the unity of God’s gracious work through the entire Bible, but they do oppose using the covenant when it is used to unite the two works of God, law and Gospel, into one single work. From this perspective, the Westminster Confession limits the distinction between law and Gospel covenants to one of differing dispensations rather than one of substance. God gave it one way under the law and another way under the Gospel. In this context, the mortifying function is no longer the proper office and work of the law. Instead, by being included in the superior “covenant,” the law’s proper office becomes a vivifying function, which is carried out by law and Gospel together. In the process, the centrality of Christ is potentially lost.

The Concept of Covenant he strength of the Reformed approach to covenant lies in observing that it corresponds better with the various biblical covenant accounts (especially those that highlight both God’s grace and his subsequent expectations).

This strength highlights the potential weakness of the Lutheran view, namely, that it appears to split up what is an organic whole in the texts. In other words, the biblical text speaks of a whole, namely, an election and a deliverance in the Old Testament that often passes over immediately into a demand or direct law-giving (the flood, Abraham, the Red Sea).11 Conversely, the Lutheran approach provides a salutary warning against using the term “covenant” in order to remove the radical distinction between the law and the Gospel that finds its crux in the work of Christ. Lutherans locate the unity of law and Gospel not in some overarching concept of covenant, but in God, who acts “with his left hand” (law, anger, judgment) and “with his right hand” (forgiveness, Gospel) for the sake bringing people to faith in Christ.12 ■

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Charles P. Arand (Ph.D., Concordia Seminary) is chairman of the department of systematic theology at Concordia Seminary, St. Louis, Missouri. He is the author of Testing the Boundaries: Windows to Lutheran Identity, Concordia Publishing House.

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least conservative Lutherans—arguing against the Book of Concord’s doctrine of the Lord’s Supper and still calling themselves “Lutheran.”

But the label “Reformed” is applied to a variety of groups today who reject some of the most integral elements of the confessions and its system.

Maybe this is because of the relative cultural as well as ecclesiastical isolation of confessional Lutherans, whereas Presbyterian and Reformed bodies have often blended in with the culture and its generally “enthusiastic” religion. There are many who hold to all five points and all four solas and yet are not Reformed. This is an important point not because we want to exclude brothers and sisters from other backgrounds, but because we think that Reformed theology, as expressed in our confessional statements, is the most consistent summary of God’s revealed Word. To reduce that summary to a few points is to miss the point entirely.

At the same time, there is one motif that is particularly essential—without which even a person who believes in the doctrines of grace cannot really recognize the heart and soul of Reformed Christianity. More than being merely a doctrine in the system, “covenant” is the matrix of the system.

As Steven Baugh underscores in his article in this issue, covenant is not just a locus in Scripture—a topic of doctrine, but the Bible’s own way of organizing its diverse material. One can prefix the adjective “covenantal” to nearly any doctrine in Scripture.

God’s eternal election is only understood in terms of Jesus Christ as the mediator of the covenant of redemption (pactum salutis) and its outworking in redemptive history in the covenant of works (failed federal heads in Adam and Israel, but fulfilled in the second Adam and True Israel, God’s faithful Son), and in the covenant of grace (the Son’s obedience dispensed to undeserving sinners through the promise made to Adam after the fall and to Abraham and his true heirs). The Church is God’s covenant community (Gal. 3:26-29), the Sacraments his signs and seals of the covenant (Rom. 4:11; Matt. 26:28), the kingdom of God the “eschatologized” expression of the covenant, the Scriptures themselves the charter and constitution of the covenant.

Martin Luther was right to be nervous about the whole notion of covenant, given the way it was treated in the schools in his day. In the late medieval school known as “nominalism,” the covenant idea was used as a synonym really for contract: You do your part, and God will do his. “God will not deny his grace to those who do what lies within them”: that dreadful summary of late medieval theology was at the center of the Reformation’s critique. But Philip

Melanchthon, recognizing how essential the doctrine is to all of Scripture, began to mine its resources. His students, a few of whom became Reformed theologians (viz., Heinrich Bullinger, author of the Second Helvetic Confession and Zacharius Ursinus, coauthor of the Heidelberg Catechism), pursued these lines more fully and before long there was a rising generation of federal theologians. “Federal theology” derives its name from its emphasis on double imputation (Adam’s guilt and Christ’s righteousness) within a framework of covenantal obligations that was at once forensic (legal) and personal (relational). Christ personally obligated himself to keep all that God commanded, legally meriting everlasting life and reconciliation with God, and he did so as one who was not acting in his own person alone but in the office of federal representative of his covenant people.

Historically, Federal or Covenant theologians saw themselves as not only using the Bible’s own organizing structure, but as also safeguarding the Gospel that had been threatened by contractual ways of thinking. Confusing law and Gospel is “one of the principal causes of the corruption of the church,” Theodore Beza (Calvin’s successor) insisted. Ursinus declared that the “law-Gospel” hermeneutic (way of interpreting all of Scripture) is essential not simply as an article of faith but as a theological method. The Second Helvetic Confession emphasizes the importance of the distinction—and, in finding peace with God, the absolute contrast, between law and Gospel. It fills the pages of Calvin’s commentaries and Institutes.

Law-Gospel Distinction harles Arand is convinced that the law-Gospel distinction is characteristically Lutheran and inimical to the Reformed covenantal model, but this does not account for the fact that the Federal theologians explicitly championed the law-Gospel model and saw themselves as providing a key, through the covenant motif, of guarding that very perspective.

Professor Arand’s piece focuses on the historical development of Lutheran exegesis on this matter, so I will interact briefly with his thoughtful analysis. First, Melanchthon and Chemnitz interpreted Old Covenant and New Covenant “as metonymies for law and Gospel.” The assumption is that Reformed theology did not. However, that is not the case. The usual argument among the Reformed (Federal) theologians went something like the following account.

The covenant of works—an arrangement in which God issued commands and prohibitions, with sanctions leading to eternal life for obedience and eternal death for disobedience—is discernable in

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relation to Adam before the fall. “Do this and ye shall live” is the arrangement. Nothing could be clearer from the Genesis account and from its subsequent interpretation in the Bible, culminating in Romans 5.

After the fall, there is a surprise: Instead of executing the just sentence upon Adam and his posterity, God gives a new covenant, promising to crush the serpent’s head and to bring redemption through another covenant mediator, “the seed of the woman.”

people redeemed from Egyptian servitude. But they did not serve the Lord; instead, they turned to other gods that could not redeem.

The Old Covenant contains both the covenant of works (the typological land with its conditional promises) and the covenant of grace (heavenly land with its unconditional foundation in Jesus Christ who has fulfilled the covenant of works).

The law is fulfilled at last, not set aside. The wicked are justified under a Does the covenant of grace involve responsibilities on our part? Of course it new federal head. And the conditional promises in the does—it requires repentance/faith. Does this make it conditional on our action Old Covenant are interpreted as applying solely after all? Of course not—for this is divinely-given…. to the national Israel under the law, bearing its curses So what about the Old Covenant and New with its eventual expulsion from the land. Rather Covenant? Is that “law” and “Gospel,” respectively? than simply pitting the Old Covenant against the Yes and no. But before our Lutheran brethren respond New, then, we recognize a disparity even within too quickly that this equivocation is precisely the the Old Covenant itself, as the theocracy based on confusion they suspect, let me explain. After all, the Mosaic laws fails and yet is left with faithful Lutheran theology itself denies that there is only law prophets with their fingers pointing forward to a in the Old Testament and only Gospel in the New, so future fulfillment: “Behold, the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world.” we have to be careful here of easy contrasts.

This is how we understand Jeremiah 31, with the As Reformed theologian Meredeth Kline has underscored, the Mosaic administration is a promises of the New Covenant. It is precisely this covenant of works with the covenant of grace covenantal explanation that Paul uses to make sense nevertheless still alive and well, running throughout of things in Galatians, especially in 4:21-31. There, and under his administration. The Mosaic economy, the two covenants are represented by two mothers, enshrined in the theocracy, could never have Hagar and Sarah, and by two mountains, Sinai and supplanted the Abrahamic covenant of grace, Zion. Shocking to the Judaizers, Paul identifies although both coexisted in the theocratic period Hagar–the mother of Ishmael, with the earthly (Gal. 3:15-18). How can this be? It is clear from Jerusalem “in bondage with her children,” while numerous texts that there are conditional promises Sarah and her children are free, belonging to Zion, and unconditional promises. In the Abrahamic “the Jerusalem above.” At least Paul sees Federal Covenant, God himself walked through the severed theology as the structural way of presenting the halves of sacrificial animals, taking personal law-Gospel distinction in its sharpest features.

Does the covenant of grace involve responsibility by himself for all the covenantal sanctions. “May the judgment fall upon me if this responsibilities on our part? Of course it does. It covenant is broken,” God is telling Abraham in this requires repentance and faith. Does this make it mysterious dream in Genesis 15. It is repeatedly conditional after all? Some Federal theologians, called an “everlasting covenant” that will result in a especially some of the later Puritans who were Seed who will be their Savior and in whom all the justifiably worried about an overemphasis on this nations of the earth will be blessed. This is an “I will side of things, refused to acknowledge repentance do this” covenant, with God doing the talking, not and faith as “conditions,” since God gives them both an, “If you do this, I will do that” sort of arrangement. as gifts. But whether or not we call them conditions, But a different set of promises is given as well. surely our Lutheran brothers and sisters would agree They pertain not to all the earth, but to Abraham’s that they are necessary for salvation—not as works physical descendants, and they pertain to an earthly or a basis, but as the divinely given response to God’s land, not to the heavenly rest. These promises are objective and completed work in Christ. ■ distinguished further by their obvious conditionality.

As long as his descendants obey, they will live long in the land, just as Adam’s inheritance was dependent Michael Horton (Ph.D., Wycliffe Hall, Oxford and the University on his personal fulfillment of the covenant’s of Coventry) is associate professor of historical theology at conditions. Israel was God’s servant, like Adam. It Westminster Theological Seminary in California and serves on the was God’s theocracy, his presence in glory among his Council of the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals.

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THROUGH ONE MAN SIN, THROUGH ONE MAN RIGHTEOUSNESS

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Covenantal Summons: When God Gathers His People in Worship hat are we doing on the Lord’s day, especially when we are gathered as God’s people in church? How do we understand Christian growth and discipleship—as chiefly corporate or individual, as nourished by the preached Word and the divinely instituted Sacraments or by self-approved “means of grace”? Would an outsider coming into our worship services be immediately impressed with the centrality of preaching, baptism, and the supper, or would he or she be more likely to notice the importance given to performance?

All of these questions were at the heart of the Reformation debate as part and parcel of recovering the Gospel. But they are just as acute in our day, when we have sought a bewildering array of means of grace. This article will focus on the nature of worship as a service of covenant renewal.

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The Biblical Story of Redemption Our non-Reformed readers will hardly be surprised to learn that I would begin a brief biblical sketch of worship with the covenant. But no one can doubt that this is central to the biblical story of redemption. Even after the fall, God promised Eve a son who would crush the serpent’s head, and although Cain murdered Abel, God provided another son, Seth. While Cain’s descendants were building their own proud city of rebellion (Gen. 4:15-24), “Seth also had a son, and he named him Enosh. At that time men began to call on the name of the LORD” (v. 26). Thus, the two cities—cult (i.e., worship) and culture, fully integrated in creation, were now divided and pursued two separate ends through distinct means. Jesus’ warning that the world will hate his disciples and Paul’s contrast between the wisdom of this world (works-righteousness) and the

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wisdom of God (the righteousness which comes by faith) are not borne out of any hostility toward the world per se. Rather, it is the world in its sinful rebellion that the biblical writers have in mind.

After calling Abram out of Ur, God commanded a ritual sacrifice as a way of making the covenant. (In fact, the Hebrew word for covenant, berith, comes from the verb, “to cut.”) In ancient Near Eastern politics and law, a suzerain (i.e., great king or emperor) would enter into a treaty with a vassal (i.e., the king or ruler of a smaller territory) by cutting various animals in half. Then, walking together between the halves, both partners agreed to perform all of the conditions of the treaty with the following sanction: If I should be unfaithful for my part, may the same end befall me as has befallen these animals. In Genesis 15, when God makes his covenant with Abraham and his descendants, this ancient Near Eastern treaty is the pattern: But Abram said, “O Sovereign LORD, how can I know that I will gain possession of it?” So the LORD said to him, “Bring me a heifer, a goat and a ram, each three years old, along with a dove and a young pigeon.” Abram brought all these to him, cut them in two and arranged the halves opposite each other.… As the sun was setting, Abram fell into a deep sleep, and a thick and dreadful darkness came over him.

Then the LORD said to him, “Know for certain that your descendants will be strangers in a country not their own, and they will be enslaved and mistreated four hundred years.

But I will punish the nations they serve as slaves, and afterward they will come out with great possessions.… When the sun had set and darkness had fallen, a smoking firepot with a blazing torch appeared and passed between the pieces. On that day the LORD made a covenant with Abram…. (v. 8-18) Two sorts of things are promised by God in this covenant: a holy land (Canaan) and everlasting life. What especially distinguishes this suzerainty treaty is the fact that although God and Abram are covenant partners, the Lord (appearing as a smoking firepot with a blazing torch) walks alone through this path, placing on his own head all of the sanctions and assuming on his own shoulders the curses which he himself has imposed, should the treaty be violated by either party. Then in chapter 17 there is another cutting ceremony: Abram fell facedown, and God said to him, “As for me, this is my covenant with you … I will establish my covenant as an everlasting

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covenant between me and you and your descendants after you for the generations to come, to be your God and the God of your descendants after you.… This is my covenant with you and your descendants after you, the covenant you are to keep: Every male among you shall be circumcised. You are to undergo circumcision, and it will be the sign of the covenant between me and you.” (v. 3-12) This ceremony signified the cutting away of uncleanness, especially of original sin that is passed on from Adam through every subsequent father.

But here, instead of the knife being plunged into the body to bring down the curses of the transgressors (yes, even fresh from the womb we are in this class), it instead is used to cut away the sin so that the recipient may live.

Eventually, God’s promise was fulfilled: Israel did inherit the land. As mentioned previously, God promised a holy land and everlasting life. As becomes clearer with the progress of redemption, the land was (like Adam’s enjoyment of Eden) dependent on works—the obedience of the Israelites. The Mosaic covenant, with its ceremonial and civil as well as moral laws, promised blessing for obedience and judgment for disobedience. Once again, God would fight for his people and give them a new Eden, a land flowing with milk and honey.

God would be present among his people in the temple as long as they were righteous.

But (also like Adam) Israel failed and in its rebellion violated the treaty with the great king, provoking God to enact the sanctions of this works covenant. The lush garden of God became a wasteland of thorns and thistles, as God removed his kingdom back up into heaven, the children of Israel being carted off to Babylonian exile. After these years of exile, a remnant returned to rebuild Jerusalem. Ezra and Nehemiah report this remarkable event and the tragic infidelity and infighting that went along with it. Despite human sinfulness, under Nehemiah’s leadership the remnant rebuilt the walls of Jerusalem and its magnificent temple which God’s evacuation had left desolate and ransacked by invaders. The poor were cared for. But the centerpiece of this event appears when the Torah is rediscovered for a generation of Israelites that had never read or heard the Scriptures read except perhaps from their grandparents’ memory: When the seventh month came and the Israelites had settled in their towns, all the people assembled as one man in the square before the Water Gate. They told Ezra the scribe to bring out the Book of the Law of

Moses, which the LORD had commanded for Israel. So on the first day of the seventh month Ezra the priest brought the Law before the assembly, which was made up of men and women and all who were able to understand.

He read it aloud from daybreak till noon as he faced the square before the Water Gate in the presence of the men, women and others who could understand. And all the people listened attentively to the Book of the Law. Ezra the scribe stood on a high wooden platform built for the occasion.… Ezra opened the book.

All the people could see him because he was standing above them; and as he opened it, the people all stood up. Ezra praised the LORD, the great God; and all the people lifted their hands and responded, “Amen! Amen!” Then they bowed down and worshiped the LORD with their faces to the ground. (Neh. 8:1-6) Even during their exile the Israelites were reminded by Jeremiah’s prophecy of the divine promise—not to restore ethnic Israelites to the geopolitical territory of Palestine as God’s kingdom on earth, but to save a remnant from both Israel and the nations of the world. Although the Mosaic covenant had been thoroughly violated, God, you will recall, was still carrying the entire burden for the Abrahamic covenant of grace. Thus, again and again in the prophets we read, “Not for your sakes, but for the sake of the promise made to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.… ” So through Jeremiah God declares, “The time is coming,” declares the LORD, “when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah. It will not be like the covenant I made with their forefathers when I took them by the hand to lead them out of Egypt, because they broke my covenant, though I was a husband to them,” declares the LORD. “This is the covenant I will make with the house of Israel after that time,” declares the LORD. “I will put my law in their minds and write it on their hearts. I will be their God and they will be my people.… For I will forgive their wickedness and will remember their sins no more.” (Jer. 31:31-34) This new covenant “will not be like the covenant I made with their forefathers” under Moses, says the Lord, but will be an everlasting and unbreakable covenant. It will be based not on the national election of Israel, but on the eternal election of individuals whom the Son redeemed: “and with your blood you purchased men for God from every tribe and language and people and nation. You

The Two Covenants of Genesis 6–9

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he flood episode occasions two distinct covenants. In the face of rising wickedness, God determines to blot out the entire race, saving only Noah and his kin.

Here we see God’s faithfulness to his promise of Genesis 3:15, for precisely when the serpent’s seed threatens to wipe out all hope of promise (only one faithful family remained!), God saves his people through judgment. The first use of the term “covenant” in the Scriptures (Gen. 6:18) refers to a special arrangement God establishes with Noah, for the express purpose of saving him in the midst of this crisis. Though Noah was already saved by grace, this typological arrangement serves a limited purpose (deliverance from waters of judgment) and furthermore points forward to Christ. At this typological level, the works principle is operating. This is clear in that the covenant is conditioned on Noah’s obedience to the terms—he must build an ark and get on board (6:14-18). Noah, like Christ, was faithful in doing all that was commanded of him (6:22), and thus delivered his people.11 The second covenant is a covenant of common grace, established between God and all living creatures (9:12). The flood interrupts common grace, God’s judgment intruding into history in anticipation of the last day (2 Pet. 3:1-7).

As a result, God must reestablish his promise to maintain the order of creation and delay judgment, implicit in Genesis 3. While this covenant is universal in its scope, it is not eternal in its duration. In promising explicitly temporal blessings only for the duration of the earth (8:22), this common grace covenant contrasts with the unending blessings promised in redemption.12

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have made them to be a kingdom and priests to serve our God and they will reign on the earth” (Rev. 5:9). The Sabbath rest which Israel forfeited in the Holy Land because of disobedience is now freely given to sinners, Jew and Gentile. Even Joshua, Moses’ lieutenant who led the Israelites into the land, was looking for a greater land, a more excellent kingdom, with a firm and unshakable foundation: “For if Joshua had given them rest, God would not have spoken later about another day.

There remains, then, a Sabbath-rest for the people of God; for anyone who enters God’s rest also rests from his own work, just as God did from his” (Heb. 4:8). Thus, the New Testament Gospel is identical to that which Abraham believed when he was credited with the perfect righteousness of Christ through faith alone, apart from works (Gen. 15:6; Rom. 9:8; and Gal. 3:6-14). This is not the Mosaic covenant, an administration based on our faithfulness, but the Abrahamic covenant, an administration of God’s faithfulness and grace.

The Covenant Renewal Ceremony t is in this context that we talk about the “covenant renewal ceremony,” then, which is how Reformed folk often talk about the worship service. Whenever we gather for Word and Sacrament, it is because we have been summoned.

That is what “church” means: ekklesia, “called out.” It is not a voluntary society of those who come together regularly with the chief concern to share, to build community, to enjoy fellowship, and so forth. Rather, it is a society of those who have been chosen, redeemed, called, justified, and are being sanctified until one day they will finally be glorified in heaven. We gather each Lord’s day not merely out of habit or social custom, but because God has chosen this day as a foretaste of the everlasting Sabbath day that will be enjoyed fully at the marriage supper of the Lamb. God has called us out of the world: that is why we gather.

We also gather to receive God’s gifts. And this is where the emphasis falls—or should fall.

Throughout the Scriptures, the service is seen chiefly as God’s action. The one who brought us up out of the land of Egypt and made us his people takes the initiative in salvation and throughout the Christian life. The shadows of Christ in the Mosaic covenant, especially the detailed legislation for the sacrifices, are fulfilled in the advent of the Messiah.

Therefore, we do not worship in an earthly sanctuary, but in the heavenly sanctuary where we are seated with Christ in heavenly places. Hence, Jesus’ statement to the Samaritan woman in John 4:23-24. Like the smoking firepot with a blazing torch, God walks down the middle of the aisle

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assuming the judgment his own justice requires and his own mercy satisfies. He circumcises our hearts, with the baptismal font prominently centered. He creates faith in our heart from the preaching and confirms us in this faith through the Sacraments.1 As in all covenants, there are two parts to the covenant of grace. God speaks and delivers; we respond in faith and repentance. And yet this faith and repentance is not “our part” in this covenant in the sense of providing some of the grounds for our participation in it. God even grants faith and repentance. And yet God does call us to respond, to grow in grace, and to persevere to the end. The triumphant indicative concerning God’s action in Christ establishes a safe foundation on which to stand as we meet the divine imperatives. That’s why worship is “dialogical”: God speaks and we respond. That is the form that we find in the Psalms: God’s wondrous works in creation, preservation, judgment, and redemption are extolled; it is only then that it makes sense to respond, whether in confession, praise, thanksgiving, lament, or whatever else might be appropriate to the divine activity that is announced. Unlike the Psalms themselves, many of the hymns and praise choruses of the last century and a half have become increasingly human-centered. Even with praise choruses that paraphrase a psalm, the response section of the text is often torn from the indicative section proclaiming who God is and what he has done. Thus, the focus of worship seems to be on what we are doing, how we are feeling, and how we intend to respond: “I just want to praise you”; “We will lift you up”; “Let’s just praise the Lord”; “I am joyful,” etc. But this is to separate the law from the Gospel, the imperative from the indicative, and to make at least the singing part of the service predominantly the former rather than the latter.

If worship is a covenant renewal ceremony, the service must reflect the divine initiative in the covenant itself. There must be response—and there will be response, if there is something to which we are inclined to respond. God meets his people in Christ as the Holy Spirit works through the liturgy, the preaching, and the Sacraments. It is the person and work of this Triune God that must be front and center, as this God actually confronts us just as he did in the assembly when Ezra read God’s Word. It is the Word, not Israel’s response to the Word, that is central in that account, and yet the report does not fail to inform us that “all the people listened attentively” (v. 3) and, later, that they even “lifted their hands and responded, ‘Amen! Amen!” followed by bowing down “with their faces to the ground” as they wept because of their sense of their own sinfulness and God’s amazing grace (vv. 5-6, 9).

No wonder, then, that at Pentecost a similar event occurs. Peter addressed the crowd in Jerusalem, announcing the fulfillment of Joel 2:2832 and that despite the people’s culpability in crucifying Jesus, God had all along planned to save his people through the death and resurrection of the Savior. He drew on the Psalms as well to make the point that Jesus is the “seed of the woman,” the “Son of David,” the one promised to Abraham in whom all the nations would be blessed. Out of this preaching the new covenant church was established.

And what was the pattern of this weekly covenant renewal ceremony? “They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and to the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to the prayers” (Acts 2:42).

It is a new and better covenant, with Christ himself rather than Moses as its mediator. The Lord’s Supper is neither a mere memorial of Christ’s death nor a resacrificing of Christ (as if we preferred the shadows of Moses to the reality in Christ), but is a participation in the very body and blood of Christ Jesus (1 Cor. 10:16). “This cup is the new covenant in my blood,” we read in the words of institution. No wonder the writer who so strongly urges believers to recognize the superiority of the new covenant to the old also charges us not to give up the covenant renewal ceremony which God enacts each Lord’s day: Therefore, brothers, since we have confidence to enter the Most Holy Place by the blood of Jesus, by a new and living way opened for us through the curtain, that is, his body, and since we have a great priest over the house of God, let us draw near to God with a sincere heart in full assurance of faith, having our hearts sprinkled to cleanse us from a guilty conscience and having our bodies washed with pure water. Let us hold unswervingly to the hope we profess, for he who promised is faithful. And let us consider how we may spur one another on toward love and good deeds. Let us not give up meeting together, as some are in the habit of doing, but let us encourage one another—all the more as you see the Day approaching.

(Heb. 10:19-25) ■

Michael Horton (Ph.D., Wycliffe Hall, Oxford and the University of Coventry) is associate professor of historical theology at Westminster Theological Seminary in California, and serves on the Council of the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals.

God’s Covenant with Abraham the Believer

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he Apostle Paul clearly tells us that the gospel of justification by faith was “preached beforehand” in the covenant God made with Abraham.13 In a series of revelations (Gen. 12-17) God promises three distinct blessings to Abraham: a royal heir, a great nation as his offspring, and a promised land. While the carrying out of this covenant includes stipulations—including Abraham’s departure from his homeland and obedient reception of the covenant sign of circumcision—the fundamental principle informing this covenant is grace. Abraham is justified by faith, not on the basis of his obedience (Gen. 15:6, Rom. 4).

The graciousness of this covenant is emphasized by the ratification ceremony recorded in Genesis 15:9ff. Here it is God himself who is bound by oath to fulfill his word. God’s faithfulness, not Abraham’s, will secure the promised blessings.14 Indeed, in Genesis, Abraham and his kin are characterized by their unfaithfulness, while God continues to fulfill his promises despite them.

Finally, it is essential to realize that each of these promises is fulfilled in two distinct stages, first according to type and finally according to fulfillment. Thus, the history of the nation of Israel fulfills the first stage of God’s promises to Abraham; the king, great nation, and promised land are all attained for a limited time. Yet this very same history points forward to a greater consummation in Christ. Paul tells us that only the children of Abraham by faith are the “true” Israel, and Hebrews 11 informs us that Abraham all along was seeking a heavenly country.15

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THROUGH ONE MAN SIN, THROUGH ONE MAN RIGHTEOUSNESS

Covenant — A Coin with Two Sides: The New England Antinomian Controversy ’m for free grace and you’re just a legalist.” … “No, I believe that growth in grace is a necessary consequence of true faith in Christ and you just want a license to sin.” Such sentiments are common among evangelical Christians today. Indeed the debate over the relationship between free forgiveness and the call to discipleship has been a concern throughout much of Christian history. It also bears directly on the subject of “covenant,” namely in what way is the covenant of grace unilateral (“one-sided”— the focusing on sovereign grace) and in what way is it bilateral (“two-sided”—the focusing on human responsibility under grace).

This issue is significant in a discussion of Covenant theology. It helped inform the debate between Luther and Agricola, John Calvin and the Libertines, and many others. It also finds expression today in the debate over the Lordship of Christ as related to salvation.1 For our purposes, we will examine the way in which John

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Cotton and Thomas Shepard, important New England Puritan preachers of the first generation of the New England Way, discussed this issue in what is termed the “Antinomian controversy.” Such historical reflection should offer present implications for modern Reformation churches that hope to have a holistic Covenantal theology.

The New England Antinomian Controversy y 1636, both John Cotton, teacher of Boston’s First Church, and Thomas Shepard, pastor across the Charles River at Cambridge, had grave concerns about the future of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Over the next two years, and to some extent even after, the new colonial experiment, of which each was an integral part, was almost divided by what came to be known as the “Antinomian Controversy.” Modern scholars have written numerous books that highlight this controversy.2 It has been looked at from a variety of angles and continues to intrigue students of early American history. While the different angles are vital if one wishes to understand New England Puritanism, the theological, ecclesiological, and pastoral contexts bear directly on the development and practice of a Covenant theology.

While much remained the same, some things changed for Puritan clergy seeking to apply a theology of the covenant once they arrived in the New World. They still preached to a society in which the members were expected, and even required, to hear the Word regularly, but the makeup of such congregations had altered. English Puritan theologians had worked under a “visible church” model in which all baptized English people, unless excommunicated, were members of the visible covenant communion. The New England Puritans advocated a “visible saints” Congregational model in which one had to give testimony of a work of grace in order to have full communicant membership.

In New England, however, one was not a member of the church covenant simply because one lived there. Even baptism, which was still administered to infants, needed a further testimony of grace once the child came of age for one to have full church membership and right to the sacrament of the supper. While the Church was still “visible,” it now only included “visible saints.” Although the New England divines developed a strong notion of the “judgment of charity” when asking young (or older) adults to give testimony of their faith in Christ, it nevertheless remained that New England congregations consisted of the “churched” and the “unchurched.”

Given this, the teaching elders had to develop slightly different strategies to warn their people of

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the danger either of living by a “mere morality” or of “casual presumptuousness,” based on their flight from old England and commitment to the “New England Way.” And this proves problematic for their inherited Covenant theology, with the twin stress on God’s sovereign grace in Christ and on the call for the elect to live godly lives under that grace could develop into either extreme antinomian excesses or legalistic proclivities.3 The fact that a number of New England settlers appear to have imported these tendencies only exacerbated the situation.

John Cotton, more than any other minister, found himself at the center of this controversy. His arrival in Boston and subsequent calling as teacher to the Boston congregation produced great excitement.

Many professed faith and joined the Boston church: “In the six months following John Cotton’s admission to membership in September 1633, sixty-three persons—or nearly half the number of members acquired during the previous three years—joined the church.” Revival attended Mr. Cotton’s preaching of the Word. The Colony’s Governor, John Winthrop, exclaimed: “More were converted and added to [the Boston] church, than to all the other churches of the Bay.… Divers profane and notorious evil persons came and confessed their sins, and were comfortably received into the bosom of the church.”4 The religious fervor faded by 1635, however. In the meantime, Anne Hutchinson, who would in the years 1636 to 1638 come to be viewed as the leader of both the “opinionists” and “antinomians,” arrived in Boston in 1634 and joined the Boston church. At her conventicle, or religious assembly, Hutchinson noticed with great distress that some women (and she surmised the colonists at large) based their relationship with God on their piety, religious duty, and good works. She blamed the clergy, excluding Cotton, for approaching the doctrine of covenantal assurance before God through a “legal” method.

During her trial in November 1637 for inciting sedition, Hutchinson declared to the Magistrates that even before leaving England, she had learned to distinguish between godly and ungodly ministries: He that denies the testament [of free grace] denies the testator, and this [the Lord] did open unto me to give me to see that those which did not teach the new covenant had the spirit of the antichrist.… Since that time I have been more choice and he hath let me to distinguish between the voice of my beloved and the voice of Moses, the voice of John Baptist, and the voice of antichrist.5 Even though she cautiously refused to accuse the other clergy as “voices of the antichrist,”6 she

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certainly thought that Mr. Cotton’s words echoed “the voice of my beloved.”

Hutchinson, who apparently had deep religious sensibilities and a strong grasp of the Scriptures, sought to abate the spiritual anxieties which flooded the colony in the aftermath of the revival of 1633 to 1634. At these conventicles, perfectly proper small group forums according to Puritan belief,7 she reviewed the previous week’s sermon and tried to bring renewal to what was, by 1635, a spiritually depressed community. By the time the controversy became public, many from the Boston congregation, including the young Sir Henry Vane, John Winthrop’s successor as governor, joined her meetings. A whispered undercurrent, positive toward what they were sure was Cotton’s position and strongly censorious to the other clergy, swept through these gatherings.

By the time the controversy ended in 1638, Hutchinson and her followers had been tried civilly and found guilty of sedition, tried ecclesially and found guilty of antinomian heresy. They were subsequently banished as well. In the end, Cotton stood with the elders against Mistress Hutchinson and her followers (although Thomas Shepard privately ruminated that he was not so sure as he mused, “Mr. Cotton repents not, but is hid only”).8 In the Way of Congregational Churches Cleared, an apologia of the New England Way, written in the controversy’s aftermath, Cotton reflected upon his relationship with Hutchinson in light of the charge made by the Scot Robert Baillie that “Mistress Hutchinson was dear unto me …”: [I]f he speak of her as my dear friend, till she turned aside, I refuse it not. But yet thus much I must profess to him. That in the times of her best acceptance, she was not so dear unto me, but that (by the help of Christ) I dealt faithfully with her about her spiritual estate. Three things I told her made her spiritual estate unclear to me. 1. That her Faith was not begotten nor (by her relation) scarce at any time strengthened, by publicke Ministry, but by private Meditations, or Revelations, onely.… 2. That she clearly discerned her Justification (as she professed:) but little or nothing at all, her Sanctification: though (she said) she believed such a thing there was by plain Scripture.… 3. That she was more sharply censorious of other men’s spiritual estates and hearts, then the servants of God are wont to be, who are more taken up with judging of themselves before the Lord, then of others.9

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What was it about covenant teaching that helped make this into an ecclesial firestorm?

Probably unbeknownst to Cotton and Shepard, it was the way in which each man focused on one side of the covenantal coin—namely, the unilateral foundation in Cotton’s case or the bilateral stipulations in Shepherd’s.

A Controversial Sermon Series on the Covenant of Grace Around 1636, Cotton began an extended sermon series on the covenant of grace. Based on Acts 7:8, the sermons explored the “order and manner of the giving and receiving of the covenant to the elect.” In so doing, Cotton attacked the notion that a “creature” could do anything by nature “to purchase God” or God’s favour. Rather, God gave the covenant to the elect “not [by] obedience first, nor faith first, nor anything else first, but [God] himselfe [gives] all goodnesse.” Cotton explained that God dispensed this covenant of grace to his people by a “double act” whereby God “prepared” their hearts to receive the covenant and “invested” them “with the blessings of this covenant [of grace].”10 Superficially, this sermon was neither original nor even controversial. Indeed, it sounded similar to his spiritual father, English Puritan Richard Sibbes. As Cotton unfolded his thesis about the nature of the covenant of grace, however, one detects the seeds of what would later blossom into the supposedly antinomian leanings of his parishioners. For example, Cotton strongly inveighed against the idea that “preparation” brought with it any “saving qualifications” to the soul: “If the Lord doe give any saving qualification before Christ, then the soul may be in a state of salvation before Christ, and that would be prejudicial unto the grace and truth of Christ.” Also, in treating whether the sanctification wrought within a person by grace could be used for consolation and proof of one’s justification, Cotton replied: “Trulie it is hard to perceive [between a temporary believer and a true believer] when men differ, and therefore it is not an easie matter to make such use of sanctification, as by it to beare witnesse unto justification.”11 Once again, rather than marking a significant departure from his Reformation and Puritan theology, these beliefs actually accorded fairly well with his Reformed inheritance. The primary difference laid in the intensity with which Cotton treated these ideas. Cotton determined that if one stressed covenantal duty in the preaching of the covenant of grace, one might end up with “visible moralists” but not “visible saints.” That his fellow elders’ views were more tempered than he initially granted (Cotton indeed was involved in a

pamphlet war with the neighboring clergy throughout the controversy) was not his primary concern here. Instead, he wanted to sound an alarm against the moralism he deemed all too rampant. Also, he did not completely reject the testimony of sanctification. While definitely repudiating comfort from sanctification as a “first” approach toward peace with God, he accepted it “as a witness of God unto our faith, [and as such] we may lawfully hear what it speaketh.”12 Being ethically upright, Cotton exhorted, was never enough; what one needed was a radically new orientation altogether: [H]erein standeth … our coming to be in Christ, and in God the Father, by this Spirit of God that taketh possession of the heart and hath not only burnt up the root and branch of our legal righteousness but hath also melted us into a soft frame to yeeld up ourselves unto the Lord; and now we are fit for anie dutie, the Lord having possessed us with his powerful presence; herein lieth our effectual calling.…

[This is] built not upon any conditional promise of Grace praeexistent in us.13 True grace precluded any leaning on a “reformation” of manners by the soul.

Cotton’s The Covenant of Grace (TCG) reflected his pastoral concern that the people in his congregation also not use their spiritual growth as a measure of acceptance with a holy God: “[A] man’s person must first be accepted, otherwise all his work will not go beyond the work of a legal Christian.” Building on any foundation other than the free grace of God in Christ proved “unsafe” and produced a spirituality of “hay and stubble” rather than true godliness. True godliness, he claimed toward the end of the treatise, arose only as the Spirit applied the word of grace in the Bible to the elect for both justification and sanctification. He demanded that his listeners forsake any reliance on an “enlightened conscience … which is but a creature.” Instead, the Spirit must provide all grace and light to the soul or else one “build[s] castles in the air, which in the time of temptation will vanish away.”14 Cotton probably never intended the result of emboldening a party of antinomians. He had a pastoral concern in mind. He preached “free grace” not to cause a disruption in the New England Way but to remind a people whom he believed were focusing on duties that God’s grace must reign supreme in all discussion of Christian truth and indeed in the very lives of those who claimed to be saved.

Moralism denuded the centrality of grace and only produced self-satisfied and legally righteous people.

Moses: A Typological Covenant of Works

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he Apostle Paul often contrasts the Mosaic law (works) with the Abrahamic promise (grace). He assumes that these two principles are fundamentally opposed: “For if the inheritance is based on law, it is no longer based on a promise” (Gal. 3:18). Since Paul tells us that the law did not invalidate the previous promise, how are we to understand the Mosaic Covenant?

First, we must note that the Mosaic Covenant is founded upon the Abrahamic promises. In Genesis 15:1316, God promised Abraham that he would bring his descendants out of bondage, and in Exodus 3, it is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob that chooses Moses to lead his people out of Egypt.

There is fundamental continuity. God’s promises flow from Abraham through Moses to Christ.

But this covenant also functions on a typological level. For the nation finds itself in a covenant based on works, where future temporal blessings are entirely conditioned upon the people’s obedience.

Whereas the Abrahamic Covenant was ratified with God’s oath, the covenant at Sinai is ratified by Israel’s pledge of performance: “All that the Lord has spoken we will do” (Ex. 24:7). As such, law comes to the forefront of the nation’s existence, though individual Israelites are still saved by grace (Ps. 51).16 The history of Israel in the promised land relives Adam’s history in the Garden, their disobedience resulting in forced exile.

When Jeremiah prophesies of a new covenant that is unbreakable (gracious, irrevocable) in contrast to that which Israel has already broken (works, conditional), he is contrasting the consummation of the Abrahamic promises in Christ with the typological existence of the Israelite nation—just like Paul.

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Shepard’s Parable as a Rejoinder hile space does not permit an extensive elaboration of the response by the other clergy, some remarks from Thomas Shepard’s Parable of the Ten Virgins, preached in the same years as Cotton’s TCG, show some of the concerns. Shepard’s agenda differed from Cotton’s. Cotton desired to show why one was redeemed in order to proclaim how one could know one was in Christ whereas Shepard wanted to show what the redeemed life looked like in order to mark how true believers could distinguish themselves from nonbelievers who might appear just as godly as they. The why of Cotton and the what of Shepard both demanded sola gratia but used the sola gratia refrain to achieve different purposes.

Shepard was just as concerned as Cotton with the danger of moralism.

Warning against “build[ing] your assurance from a mingled covenant of works and grace,” Shepard encouraged his listeners to “gather your evidence of God’s love primarily and chiefly from your subjection to the second covenant … for Adam’s righteousness that did tie him to God [in the covenant of works], it brake; hence no life, no evidence from that; but faith is an everlasting, invincible grace, upheld by the mighty power of God, and hence here will be everlasting evidence and peace.” He concluded: “[T]hough duties be never so good, yet not to advance Christ is to pull down Christ.”15 Thus, both Shepard and Cotton warned against a creeping moralism that could easily invade the young colony. Yet, whereas Cotton sharply criticized those who looked to sanctification that such a glance might in reality be a legal righteousness and so they should cleave first and last to Christ alone, Shepard blasted those who felt secure because they now belonged to “virgin churches”:

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[W]e have all our beds and lodgings provided, the Lord hath made them easy to us; we never looked for such days in New England; the Lord hath freed us from the pain and anguish of our consciences; we have ordinances to the full, sermons too long, and lectures too many, and private meetings too frequent; a large profession many have made; but are you not weary? if weary not sleeping, not slumbering? … Let me knock again: is it not so? … Have you not forgot your God and forgot your work also? the business for which you made this great undertaking.16 Shepard refused to allow those who immigrated to the New World for the sake of conscience to content themselves that all was now well because of

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this. Although he wholeheartedly endorsed the idea of a “visible saints” model for the New England churches, Shepard also recognized that even in such “virgin churches,” wise and foolish virgins would coexist. While wanting to combat the danger of moralism as much as Cotton, it seems that Shepard thought the greatest danger arose from those who had no change in life but nevertheless felt themselves to be Christians. While he demanded that “all men living nakedly, considered in themselves, have lost all power to do anything that is good” and that “whatever work is not done by virtue of the Lord Jesus is a dead work, which a living God, and a living Christ, and a living Spirit loathe,”17 he nevertheless strongly believed that sight of the change wrought

by Christ through the Holy Spirit served as the best way to distinguish “visible saints” from “visible moralists” or, even worse, “visible spiritists”: If it be replied, the Lord Jesus makes the difference—it is very true, those that are in covenant, they have God to be their God; that makes one difference; but if there be not some peculiar workmanship of the Spirit in them, though they have God their God, yet the second part of the covenant is destroyed; i.e., they are not the Lord’s peculiar people that have more than a common wash-work. For we are not only the Lord’s people by choice and purchase, but by new creation also.18 Election in Christ meant both justification and sanctification.

Even with the emphasis on godly living, Shepard seemed aware that one might think one had somehow deserved God’s blessing. He retorted against such that through “contenting themselves with their common graces and gifts,” they had in actuality “shut out” the Holy Spirit. Working from a true “inward principle” meant something different: “[The inward principle] consists of two parts: 1. Our life in Christ by faith. 2. Christ’s life in us by his Spirit. Faith empties the soul, and looks upon it as dead, and sees its life laid up in Christ; and hence forsakes itself, and embraces the Lord of glory.

Secondly, the Spirit comes and possesseth a forsaken, empty house, and there lives and dwells.”19 Within TCG, moreover, Cotton made other points that tempered what some might have deemed the radicality of his views. For one, he actually began the treatise by speaking of the necessity of preparation of people by a “spirit of bondage” before “the same Spirit worketh faith in the soul, to yeeld himselfe unto the Lord, to receive the Lord Jesus Christ.” While he further contended that such a “spirit of bondage” might be aborted by the

nonregenerate, and thus no one should find any comfort from such a preparation, the elect themselves were almost always brought into the covenant of grace “by a double work of [God’s] Spirit, which are manifest in all the seed of Abraham.”

Cotton, therefore, never repudiated the idea of a preparationism, but rather contextualized it as first being God’s preparation and not the human agent’s, and secondly, by stressing the absolute necessity and the sheer gracious character of the “spirit of adoption” as that to which one should cling: [T]his is truly a saving work; the person [by the grace of the Spirit working faith in the soul] now submitteth unto the will of God; so that the Spirit of God becometh unto the soul not only as a spirit of burning, to consume all that is stubble; but doth also melt the iron stone of the heart and formeth it into flesh that the word may take deep impression in it … he seeth there is no former safe hold of his covenant that he can plead nor any righteousness of his own.20 Also, Cotton never abandoned the call that the elect see the importance of the Moral Law as a guide for godliness. What he rejected was any idea in which people counted themselves worthy for fulfilling it. He denied, nonetheless, that the law was “utterly antiquated.” Since God had “given it, we take ourselves bound to be subject to it.” Cotton rejected any perfectionism in this life, of course, since glorification was reserved for heaven, yet he also noted that while one could not keep the law “perfectly” one should live by grace “sincerely” and thus listen to God’s ways. “The Law should be the rule of holinesse and righteousnese unto [God’s] people: hence it is, that the children of God, though they be not under the covenant of the Law, yet [they] take themselves to be bound to the obedience of it.”

Indeed, the free justification of the free covenant of grace “doth establish the obedience of the Law.”21 Cotton indeed scorned any who took the free covenant as an excuse for lawlessness: “If any shall accuse the doctrine of the covenant of free grace of Antinomianism, and say it teacheth now freedom from the Law of Moses; and if they commit any sin, they plead they are not bound unto the Law; we see how false such an aspersion would be.” He retorted against such “antinomians” that while most certainly true that true believers had forsaken the law as a “covenant,” that same law was still a “commandment” to them: There is none under the covenant of grace that dare allow himselfe in any sin, for if a

The Fullness of Time

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s an Israelite, Christ was born into a works covenant: “Born under the Law, in order that He might redeem those who were under the Law” (Gal. 4:4).17 From the beginning, the promise of the covenant of grace depended upon a substitute—the seed of the woman—who would both fulfill the positive requirements of the law and bear the requisite curse for the broken covenant of creation. The completion of his life’s mission at Calvary was also the founding of a New Covenant community in his shed blood (Luke 22:20). The blessings that the Father grants to him on the condition of his obedience, he now grants to his church graciously—again, on the condition of his own obedience (Luke 22:29-30; John 6:37-40; 17:20-26).

This is a new covenant in relation to the Mosaic Covenant, for the typological kingdom has been supplanted by the kingdom reality. Yet there remains continuity between the gracious covenant promised in the garden, confirmed to Abraham, and fulfilled in Christ, as is plain from Romans 4 and Galatians 3.18 Now come in its fullness, it crowds out and cancels all other typological anticipations of its reality.

Precisely because this one covenant between Christ and his church has been fulfilled, the New Testament overwhelmingly indicates that a new age has dawned, the promised consummation breaking in even now upon history—”Like a peninsula protruding into the sea.”19 Since Christ, our firstfruits reign in the heavenlies, and we are members of him, our voice of praise one with the heavenly chorus (Heb. 12, Rev. 4-7).

Resurrection life is now ours in the midst of a dying world.

Brian J. Lee (Ph.D. candidate in Theology. Calvin Theological Seminary) is a staff editor.

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man should negligently commit any sin, the Lord will schoole him thoroughly and make him sadly to apprehend how he hath made bold with the treasures of the grace of God.22 Cotton’s Unilateral Stress in the Covenant Remarkably, these points seemed unheeded in the midst of the controversy. Perhaps because Cotton so stressed the unilateral and free side of the covenant, those holding more radical views, i.e., the “opinionists,” simply may have bypassed these warnings in favor of Cotton’s more forthright denunciations of conditions, works, etc. In the pamphlet war with the other elders, Cotton’s beliefs seem to have been obscured as the elders pressed him about other issues.

The elders never denied the Christocentric nature of the covenant and Cotton never denied, although he may have come close, the believer’s responsibility under the grace of God. Instead, they focused upon differing truths within a common covenantal framework. Without reflection, the remarks might make Cotton sound like a cryptoantinomian (who seemingly forgot that God’s covenant of grace in Christ brought both declarative justification and renewing progressive sanctification) or the elders sound like crypto-Arminians (who seemingly brought human ability into the picture “through the back door”). Neither seems to be the case however; in reality they seemed to be looking at their agreements through different lenses. They also seemed incapable, at least for a time, of granting the viability of the others’ lens.

Even though Shepard demanded that his hearers be committed to Christian growth in godliness, he pointed his hearers to Christ in Word and Sacrament as the basis for such growth in grace: “Repair to the fountain of life, for a principle of life from him, and fetch it from him.” He further warned that such “fetching” arose “not from a man’s own striving” or from “the law.” No, spiritual life, the life necessary to live godly, “is in the blood and death of the Lord of life.… Many a man feels a blind, dead heart, and all duties dead; and hence uses many persuasions to himself, yet they continue still, because he never looks to the blood.

There is this excellency in Christ’s blood, not only to cleanse from guilt [justification] and power of sin, but from dead works, and none else can.”23 To the further question of how one “repaired to the blood,” Shepard answered that first one must “prize” it and “rest in it” because “the Lord himself [is] sufficient.” Without Christ, no one ever strived for godliness. But in and through Christ, Christ gave to his people both pardon from sin and power to act in a godly way: “Without Christ a Christian

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can do nothing; but how doth Christ do all by his Spirit without graces (I speak not of conversion where it is without graces as causes.) No truly, as he acts, we act in part.… whereas before conversion [we are] stark dead to act, now [we are] alive, and [are] not dead.” Therefore, Shepard exhorted: “O put it forth. I know all strength is from Christ, but there is a permanent strength in you. You are not dead to act; you wrong the Lord and his grace if you think so.” In such acts of faith, one was to “famish the contrary principle” (mortification) and “put on the Lord Jesus,… his righteousness, his life, his graces, [making] ‘no provision for the flesh’” (vivification).24 Shepard’s Bilateral Stress in the Covenant hepard focused on the “bilateral” side of the covenantal coin because he wanted believers to recognize the twin blessings of the covenant of grace, namely justification and sanctification. Nevertheless, within the demand for a life of ever-increasing godliness, Shepard laid down certain rules that set boundaries and priorities on what it meant for a heart to grow in the habits of grace—boundaries and priorities moreover that reminded the saints that sola gratia, sola fide, solo Christo formed the necessary focus of one’s Christian life:

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And, therefore, a man may know his blessed estate by a work; only let me put in three cautions. 1. Take heed you do not in your judgment, or in your practice, go about to move the Lord to love you by your works, though it be of his making. For all works are fruits, no causes of the Lord’s love; for this is Popery, indeed, and hypocris.… 2. Take heed you do not sit contented with the work, and quiet yourselves with that, never looking to behold his face that gave it, that wrought it.… 3. Do not look to see the work or promise yours, nor receive any consolation from either, unless the Lord appear in both.… But, O, fetch it from heaven.… You reason, and others tell you, and yet you are full of fears and doubts; and thou criest, Lord persuade me…; yea, hold you here, now you are where you ought to be. Do you think Christ is filled with grace and life for you, and not with consolation for you too? Only use means [i.e., Word and Sacrament] and look up to him.25 ■

Paul Schaefer (D.Phil., Oxford) is associate professor of religion and philosophy at Grove City College, Grove City, Pennsylvania.

THROUGH ONE MAN SIN, THROUGH ONE MAN RIGHTEOUSNESS

Our

Promise Keeping God The following are excerpts from plenary addresses delivered at this year’s Philadelphia Conference on Reformation Theology. The theme was “the Covenant of Grace.”

Genesis 3 James Montgomery Boice, Senior Minister, Tenth Presbyterian Church, Philadelphia …Verse 21: “The Lord God made garments of skin for Adam and his wife and clothed them.” It’s an obvious picture. We see it much clearer today this side of the cross, but it’s an obvious picture of being clothed in the righteousness of Christ as the fruit of his atonement. It is a picture of our justification! Justification which follows faith, without which there’s no salvation.

I think we ought to put ourselves in the mind of Adam as he stood there on that occasion. What we’re told is that God made garments of skin. He had to kill animals to do that, and Adam and his wife were there; they were watching, and they must have seen God kill the animals. They hadn’t seen death before, so far as I am aware, and here for the first time before their eyes was death. It must

have been a shocking thing for them.

I don’t know what these animals were. In view of the symbolism that we find throughout the Bible, it’s natural to suspect that they were lambs.

Jesus is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world; that’s the picture. Here are these frisky, lovely, little lambs, or some other animal, and God kills them, and Adam and Eve must have said, “Oh, so that’s what death is! I had no idea death was so bad.” So when they saw the death of the animals they must have said in shocked amazement, “Sin really is bad if this is what it does.”

But they would have said something else, too.

You have to remember now, Adam had been instructed by God. He was in an unfallen state just moments before. He hadn’t lost that intelligence that he must have been created with, and certainly he would have figured out that God is doing something, and he must have said to himself something like this: “Here, God has killed these animals. Look, that’s a terrible thing, but I don’t want to get entirely hung up on that; there’s something else involved there. What I remember

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is that God said to me ‘The day in which you eat of that tree you will surely die.’ This is the day I ate of it, but I did not die. Does that mean that God is not keeping his word, gracious as it may be for him not to submit us to execution?”

“No, no,” Adam said, “we have not died, but the animals died. They died in our place. That’s what’s going on here. What do I call it? That’s the principle of substitution. That’s what it is. The animals are our substitutes. What’s more, they are innocent. They didn’t do anything wrong. An innocent dying—it’s vicarious. It’s really a vicarious atonement.” Furthermore, Adam would have said, “When God has taken those skins and has clothed us with them instead of those fig leaves of our own righteousness, God is pointing to a restoration— by his grace!—of something which we have no opportunity of achieving. We had an original innocence once, we lost it. There’s no way we can ever go back to that original innocence, but thank God we can go forward to the cross and receive there the righteousness of Jesus Christ.”

And so, though Adam didn’t know this name, he had the idea. He said, “God has clothed us with the skins to show that he will give to us a righteousness which we do not have.” Furthermore, that’s what he believed. And it was through that trust that he was reckoned right before God.…

Genesis 15 Harry Reeder, Senior Pastor, Briarwood Presbyterian Church, Birmingham …God signs, seals and affirms this covenant himself.

Abram’s still wondering now, not [only] about his seed, [but also], “What about that land you said, Lord? What about that land? How do I know I possess that land?”

And God cuts the covenant. “Go get a heifer. Go get the goat. Go get the ram. Get the pigeon; get the dove.” And you’ll note, Abram needs no instructions here, for he knows how the covenant is cut. And he cuts it.

But then something amazing happens. Unlike all of the other covenantal enactments that he would be familiar with, it is not Abram that takes the oath of fidelity and walks through the covenant, walks through the carcasses to the king.

It is the King of Kings himself. The smoking oven, the lighted oven, the theophany—it is the one whom we just sung. The fire, the pillar, the cloud, the smoking oven. It is God himself that comes through the covenant for Abram. He not only

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initiates it sovereignly—he achieves it personally, by oath, and he walks through it himself. Thus he enacts it, he affirms it, he signs it, and he seals it. …What should it mean for you who are the children of Abraham by faith?… I’ve got a word for you from this covenant of grace. The first is this: my friend, live confidently and courageously in Jesus Christ and heed the exhortation of the covenant: do not fear. Do not fear! Your Savior has ratified this document. Do not fear.

Don’t fear Satan, not because you’re greater than he, but because greater is he that’s in you than he that’s in the world. Don’t fear Satan! We will not fear him. Why? Our Savior has triumphed over him. We won’t fear what is around us, though the world would rise up as a flood to overwhelm us.

We will not fear eternity; we will not fear death; we will not even fear the reality of our own sins. Why? For we have cast it all aside and put our trust in Jesus Christ. He is our defender. He is the one that paid for the sins. “So if you confess your sins, he is faithful and righteous to forgive you of your sins.” He is faithful and just—he tells the Father: “Father, forgive them. I paid for it.” He is your defender…. Cower not at the steps of the grave, either, for your Savior has overcome sin, death, hell and the grave, and has the keys of everlasting life.

We will not fear.

And the last exhortation I would give you is this: a covenant of grace has been given, that you would come to the one who ratified it. I am asking you: fix your eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of your faith, who for the joy set before him endured the cross. This one, who has sat down at the right hand of the Father, fix your eyes on him. And never let them be moved. And glory in the cross, the cross alone.

I praise God for the empty tomb, for he tells me he’s won the victory. And I praise God for the ascension, because I know he’s coming again. But I ask you first to fix your eyes on the cross! Glory only in Christ and him crucified, for there, at that cross, you see the need of grace, don’t you? Don’t you see the need of grace there?

For one time in human history, two thousand years ago, men and women had God where they could put their hands on him—and what did they do? They crucified him! Jew, Gentile, Roman, religious, non-religious—they all cried out for it!

That’s the heart you and I are born with. That’s why this covenant of grace is so dear to us. For we have a Christ-killing heart! We have a heart of cosmic treason and rebellion against God. I don’t need self-help from God. I need God to save me from my sin. Jesus didn’t come to send me a Nike message, “do it!” He didn’t come to say, “Get

better!” He didn’t come to one who was wounded— he came to one who was absolutely impotent, absolutely dead in his sins, and I have no hope apart from him! I need his grace. I need it every hour….

Friend, can you see not only your need of grace and this Christ who ratifies this covenant? Can you not also see the victory of grace? Can you not see that moment when God’s Son goes to the cross? Two thousand years ago, God’s wrath and judgment (hear me out here; I’m not being irreverent, but I want to get the point across)— God’s wrath and judgment fell from heaven two thousand years ago to the one place and upon the one person it had no right to go! But God himself took the oath. God himself walked through the covenant and died for our sins.

And the Father was pleased to crush him, that we might have everlasting life.

Can you not imagine in that moment how the legions of angels (I don’t know how many are there), but can you not see how they must, at that moment, peering into this world—how they must have somehow been tethered? Can you not know how they would want to come and rescue this one whom they sing his praises, whom they glory in, this one whom they serve, now on a cross—dying, naked, mocked, ridiculed, at the very hands of men and women—how they would not yearn to come to take him from there, and wreak absolute havoc and judgment upon all of us?!

But it is the Savior who goes to the cross, and he speaks to those angels: “Stay! Stay! I am saving my people from their sins.”

That’s the grace we have in the covenant. Fix your eyes on Jesus and be fearless—for he is your courage and your confidence. You will never be moved.

Hebrews 8-9 Joel Nederhood, Radio Minister, The Christian Reformed Church …All that which occurred in the Old Testament era in the tabernacle, and all the sacrifices that were brought—were pointing forward to the fact that there would come a day when God would shed his own blood.

Oh, let us not be too squeamish about this tonight.

We Reformed people, with our theology (oh, it is a beautiful theology, and of course I love it), but we often talk about election and predestination, and God’s decrees and an atonement that occurred in the courts of heaven when Jesus died on Calvary’s

cross. But let us not forget that all that theology must be understood in terms of blood!

I just turned to the book of Ephesians, first chapter, where we read of predestination: “For he chose us in him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight. In love he predestined us to be adopted as his sons through Jesus Christ.” And then in verse seven: “In him we have redemption through his blood”—his blood.

Our salvation had to be achieved in history—in history, just as we live in history, right now, celebrating two thousand years from the birth of Jesus Christ, four thousand years from Abraham.

God had to come here, into this place, into this world, where we live. He had to come into history!

And he had to walk the road, and take the steps, and make the journey from Bethlehem to Calvary.

Every step had to be taken, and he had to die. And so we speak of the “holy mystery” of redemption.

We gaze at it, and we try in this season [of Lent] somehow to think about the fact that this man Jesus had to endure so much, and he did. The sheer physical nature of his suffering is terrible. But that’s not what we have on this page. The blood was the great sacrifice of the second person of the Trinity, bringing that sacrifice, precisely the sacrifice that was necessary—he was bringing to his Father in the power of the eternal Spirit exactly what was necessary in order that all of this sin that we’ve just been thinking about—this sin could be removed and paid for.

And so the covenant finally comes to this.

Think of it. The God who wanted so much to enter into a covenant-love relationship with his created image-bearer finally, after humankind had stumbled again and again along the road of the centuries— finally God had to come himself and pay the price.

So we stand at the cross tonight and we think about what he did there. The blood of goats and animals were of no value compared to this.

This was a new and better sacrifice. This was a man who hung there! He was one of us! He was the last Adam, the second Adam. As Adam was our representative there in the garden and he fell so horribly, this is our Covenant Head upon a cross bringing the sacrifice, and it’s perfect. The holy mystery. We try to understand what happens when we read all those things about the tabernacle in the Old Testament. We scratch our head and we say, “What was that really all about?”

But tonight we look at this—when God himself fulfilled the covenant—and we say, “Something happened here. Something happened here that we will never understand. God did what we never could.” ■

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Interview with Darrell L. Bock

Does the New Testament Reshape Our Understanding of the Old Testament?

Many evangelicals find Covenant theology new and difficult. Frequently, this is a function of years spent under premillennial dispensational teaching. As such, we thought it would be helpful to allow an important dispensationalist to criticize Covenant theology head on.

Additionally, given that there have been a number of significant changes in dispensationalism the last few years (largely associated with the emergence of “progressive dispensationalism” as distinct from the more traditional variety), we wanted to ask Professor Bock both to help us understand the distinction, and to comment on the likelihood of the “progressives” being more open to Reformation theology. —EDS. MR: Were you always dispensational or was it something of which you became convinced later in your Christian life?

Darrell L. Bock Research Professor of New Testament Dallas Theological Seminary

DB: I became a Christian during my time in college and was certainly influenced by people who came out of the dispensational background. I grew up in Texas and went to the University of Texas at Austin.

I also had exposure to the reformed tradition, though not to the same extent. However, dispensationalism is something about which I became steadily more convinced as I worked with the biblical text (Daniel’s seventieth week; Acts 3:1925; Rev. 20; hosts of Old Testament passages on the future about the nation of Israel). Those who know me, know that I am an independent thinker in how I relate to tradition. This was something that I became convinced of in my own study of Scripture.

MR: What do you see as the key differences between Covenant and Dispensational theologies?

DB: I would regard Covenant theology as being, generally speaking, more canonically built and developed. Dispensational theology is more sensitive to biblical theology in its classic sense.

What I mean by that difference is that Covenant theology works with the whole of Scripture and

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argues a kind of New Testament priority hermeneutically for different themes. Whereas dispensationalism tends to want to take the Old Testament on its own terms, the New Testament on its own terms, and then combines the two testaments together so that they have harmony with one another. In contrast, the reformed tradition has a supercessationist kind of hermeneutic, where the New Testament appears to redefine categories from the Old Testament or at least from what the Old Testament appeared to be teaching. I realize these descriptions are a bit loaded in the weight that they are carrying. But generally speaking, when you listen to a Covenant theologian he will say that the New Testament is really not what it originally appeared to be but is what the New Testament explains to be the case. Or, they say that the meaning gets pictured in the Old Testament but the real meaning is found in the New Testament, where it is not clear on its own terms, is what dispensationalists question. It raises questions in my mind about the perspicuity of Scripture. Hermeneutically, there is a difference between the two approaches. Although I think the distance is lessening significantly as a result of more recent discussion. There is room for a better conversation between the two camps today.

A second key difference—content-wise—has to

do with the role of national Israel. And I don’t necessarily mean the future of the Jews per se, ethnically, as some in the reformed camp see the possibility of a significant number of Jews coming to Christ in the end. I am speaking specifically of a role for national Israel. The issue is whether national Israel as an administrative structure is still in the plan of God. Dispensationalists answer this question “yes” and Covenant theologians tend to answer “no.” In my view, the presence of the church or even of one people of God does not necessarily exclude a role for national Israel in the future.

A third difference, which normally gets raised but I don’t think applies, concerns law and Grace. It is often said that Covenant theology and Dispensational theology differ on this theme. But I don’t think this is correct. Some dispensationalists teach the Gospel and offer the Gospel in such a way that there appears to be a difference. But many dispensationalists affirm a Gospel that recognizes the authority or Lordship of Christ as a part of the Gospel right at the front end. This obviates against a major distinction between law and Grace. A variation of this is to argue that dispensationalists tend not to want to deal with the content of the Gospels, while Covenant theologians deal with the whole of the New Testament in putting their theology together. Again, I think this is a misreading of what is going on today in dispensational circles.

Many dispensationalists argue that the Gospels are as integrated to the early church theology and apply to the Church as much as the Epistles do. My technical work all stems from a commitment to teaching and preaching the gospels for the Church.

MR: There has been a lot of discussion about “progressive dispensationalism,” and evidently its adherents have been criticized from more traditional dispensationalists. Where are you in all of this and what distinguishes the progressive type?

DB: It is true that progressive dispensationalism has received criticism from traditional dispensationalists.

Some of the criticism has softened as they understand it better, but for others, this new view is a major concern. They feel like our emphasis on the continuity of Scripture and on the fact that the covenants of the Old Testament do have an initial realization today in the Church, which is the emphasis of progressive dispensationalism, undercut the distinction between Israel and the Church.

Progressives, on the other hand, argue that this continuity does not undercut a distinction between Israel and the Church.

Progressive dispensationalists get their name because they argue that each dispensation, or each administrative period, in the plan of God builds on the previous

one and advances the plan of God. There is a unity to the plan tied to God’s people in terms of salvation benefits. There are no parentheses for the Kingdom in progressive dispensationalism. So the Abrahamic Covenant, the Davidic Covenant, and the New Covenant all have an initial realization that is focused in Jesus Christ and that has been inaugurated as a result of his initial coming and his resurrection. Those benefits go to the Church.

Fuller benefits await God’s people in the Millennium to come. This coming period will involve the restoration of national Israel not as a superior to the nations but as an equal among the nations. Still national Israel will be important because Israel will be the place from which Jesus one day will rule before we eventually end up in the eternal state. My role in all of this has simply been to write about these continuities in Scripture and to emphasize them, particularly with regard to the initial realization of Davidic Covenant hope in the New Testament and in the Early Church period.

MR: It seems that the differences between Covenant and Dispensational theologies are not superficial, but deeply hermeneutical.

In other words, we just read the Bible differently. One focuses on continuity of law and Gospel, the covenant of grace (sealed in the Sacraments), and the Church throughout both testaments; the other favors discontinuity. One sees the Bible as the unfolding of a single redemptive plot centered in Christ, whereas the other tends (or at least has tended) to concentrate on end times scenarios centered on the earthly temple in Jerusalem. Is that a fair contrast?

DB: I don’t think that contrast works anymore or as clearly as it may have either in the middle of the last century or in the 1930s.

Progressive dispensationalists are quite content with the idea of a single plan of God for a united people of God. What they want to be careful about is what these people are called at different stages in that plan, that is, what structure they belong to in a given period.

Thus, they hesitate to use the word “church” in any kind of significant way for Old Testament saints.

Progressives see a unity in the people of God, but that unity is connected to a distinct structure in the Old Testament, theocratic national Israel through which God is working in that period. Today, they would argue that Jew and Gentile are connected to the Church as the structure through which God is working, and in the future they will see believers as connected to a third structure in the plan, the Millennial Kingdom. Now the structures are different but every group in each age is part of the people of God. But the Church is not Israel and neither is the Church—or Israel—the Millennium.

They are different structures. Dispensationalists want to keep those structures distinct. They are the

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keys to the discontinuities dispensationalists see.

Concerning the distinction between the law and Gospel, I am not sure that the contrast ever worked entirely, though there are some parts of dispensationalism that made a distinction between law and Gospel. Even someone like popular Bible teacher John MacArthur, who is an avowed dispensationalist, does not make this distinction. I would not regard myself as having a great distinction in this either. I’m not even sure MacArthur would call himself a progressive dispensationalist, so we have both traditional and progressive dispensationalists who do not have a law and Grace contrast. There has always been a greater variety in dispensationalism than Covenant theologians have tended to see. Unfortunately, many caricatures exist in our discussions.

It is fair to say that dispensationalists have tended to concentrate on end times scenarios and an earthly temple in Jerusalem in their writings, particularly in their popular writings. This is in part because they see this as a way of highlighting how God completes his promises and is faithful to his promises made to national Israel in the Old Testament. The issue of the future of the kingdom for Israel is related to the faithfulness of God. Nonetheless, I think it is an oversimplification to say that hope focuses inordinately on the earthly temple in Jerusalem. Rather, the focus is on God completing commitments that he has made to his people—a specifically named people, namely, Israel. Israel has not become something else or has not been expanded in such a way as to exclude those to whom the original promise was given. The issue of God’s grace and God’s faithfulness are very much wrapped up in the hermeneutical commitment that national Israel has a future. His commitment is to Israel as a part of irrevocable promises made to Abraham, even after seeing that the promises to Abraham were also for the world.

MR: Many of our readers were reared in dispensational churches where the relationship of Israel and the church was that of “Plan A” and “Plan B,” respectively. Some of us actually recall being told that God offered Israel the kingdom—that this was the whole plan in sending Christ, but that God, his plan having been thwarted, decided to take a “time out” with Israel while he worked briefly (a “parenthesis” it was called) with Gentiles. Is this the approach that progressive dispensationalism has trouble retaining?

DB: I am not sure I like the way the question is asked. We don’t have any trouble retaining anything that we think is biblical. When the Bible confronts tradition, the Bible should have first place regardless of the results for our systematic systems.

However, progressives are arguing there is no parenthesis in the plan. Neither is there a delay of the arrival of the Kingdom. Certainly with regard

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to past views of dispensationalism, where a parenthesis has been emphasized, this is a significant change. I do think, however, that the older dispensational view can be defended to a degree, as I think they were onto something important, though it was overdrawn. Let me explain. From the standpoint of national Israel and her involvement in the plan what appears to be taking place for her, although not for humanity, is a delay in the realization of the plan. To that extent “parentheses,” if you put it in quotes or if you restrict it strictly to national Israel, is a good description of how the plan is proceeding for her as a nation.

There is a “break” for her. For me, Daniel’s seventieth week, yet unfulfilled, belongs here.

However, I think older and more traditional dispensationalists fail to notice this distinction between national Israel and all nations and in the process made a general category out of something that was much more specific. In the meantime, the plan of God with regard to the Kingdom was moving on. Jesus brought an initial phase of the Kingdom with him in his first coming to both Jew and Gentile that ended up manifesting itself in the Church. That is what progressive dispensationalists teach. Thus this era, beginning with Pentecost, is the natural extension of an initial realization of promises made in the Old Testament in the covenants especially as they relate to forgiveness of sins and the indwelling Spirit, the heart of the Gospel. These promises are realized in the Church now, but the mass of Israel will respond one day.1 MR: Considerably easier than predicting the end of the world, what do you think is the future of progressive dispensationalism?

DB: I think it has a good future. It is yet another way to talk about the continuity of Scripture while trying to be sensitive to the discontinuities in Scripture that exist between structures like Israel, Church, and Millennium. I think it provides another premillenial model for thinking through this alongside particularly historical premillennialism. It raises the question of God’s promises and faithfulness with regard to the nation of Israel. These, in turn, relate to both the issue of his promises and his faithfulness to us in the Church. All of us are—or will be—in Christ; for both groups are tied to covenant commitments realized ultimately both now and in the future in Jesus. My hope would be that the discussion between the various camps, which now proceeds on a more irenic and even-keeled basis than it has previously, can engage on matters of biblical theology in a way that will be beneficial to the entire Church.

Hopefully, it will encourage us to embrace all of God’s word and rest in his grace and faithfulness.

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| The Person of Christ

A Christology From Above: Understanding Jesus in the Resurrection’s Light

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his orthodox work on Christology, which is part of InterVarsity’s “Contours of

This involves more than method, for Macleod is Christian Theology” series, is long overdue. Such books are necessary given the troubled by how modern Christologies that begin with ever-mounting challenge by many contemporary biblical scholars to discredit Jesus’ humanity fall short of the “above” dimension. and dismantle Chalcedonian orthodoxy. Witness the rash of adoptionist-oriented That challenge pushes to the forefront Christologies that start “from below,” and then yet again the central question: “What subtly reflect the arrogant assumption that “we can makes Christ different?” assert nothing of Christ which we cannot assert of In answer, Scottish theologian man.” Yet the New Testament’s approach is based Donald Macleod presents a Christology upon Christ’s deity, for “by the time [the Gospels] that integrates Holy Scripture and the were written, Christ was already ‘above,’ and the great ecumenical creeds with sound selection, arrangement and presentation of reasoning that is spiced with debate and materials were determined by that fact.” The gospel laced with challenge, comfort, and wit. writers—who, Macleod asserts, are most qualified All of this serves to drive home his thesis: to give us access to the real Jesus—looked at him in Jesus Christ “is different because he is the resurrection’s light. If this approach seems God incarnate.” biased, it is no more so “than that which insists that Macleod writes consciously from the we must treat Christ as ‘just another ordinary man’ perspective of the Christian community and the gospels as ordinary literature.”

It is refreshing to see a Christian scholar build and for its benefit. He argues unapologetically from a position of faith that swims against the his case upon the objectivity of the God who The Person of contemporary current by opting “for a ‘Christology creates, reveals, sustains, and judges life justly rather than naïvely to assume that objectivity can Christ from above.’” This, he explains, be found within the limits and corruptions of the creature. More credulity is required by the latter

by Donald Macleod does not mean that I do not take the humanness of Jesus seriously. I take it very seriously assumption than the former.

InterVarsity Press, 1998. indeed…. But if I had opted for a Christology Macleod develops themes by referencing key $16.99, 303 pages from below, it would have been a pretence. I creedal statements and then “surveying the am not starting from below. I am starting from questions and answers proffered by Christian faith, convinced before I put pen to paper … thought from Tertullian to Barth … from Praxeas to that Jesus Christ is the eternal Son of God. [16] Edward Irving.” It is presumptuous, he reminds us,

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to speak before we have listened to the giants upon whose shoulders we must stand to be farsighted. Of course, we must not just parrot the past—a vigorous Christology must continually reappraise the evidence and express truth anew. Readers will appreciate his respect in representing past and present figures. He states their objections, sifts their logic, clarifies their questions, acknowledges known difficulties, debates them at their strongest points, and gives credit where due. He does not shrink from exposing the harmful implications a view may have for other doctrines, worship, and faith.

He is scriptural throughout. This will delight those who lament the fog often arising between Scripture and theology. He skillfully uses God’s Word—and especially John, Hebrews, and Paul— as a plumb line by which to harmonize his various foci. At the risk of being at times thick and ponderous, but not unnecessarily technical, he highlights essential texts, defines terms, specifies meanings, and elaborates significance.

Macleod establishes that only the Jesus of the New Testament can explain the Christ of faith.

Central to the Church is Jesus’ own selfconsciousness of his divine status. How central is it?

“Christianity, as a religion, depends on the deity of Christ as it does no other single doctrine.” The implication of this truth is set down unambiguously: “The bottom line here is that Jesus of Nazareth saw himself as the Son of God. Whatever we do afterwards, we must first decide what to do with this.

If he was correct, we must fall down and worship him. If he was not correct, we must crucify him.”

Thus, a serious dilemma and danger accompanies the skepticism of critical scholarship, for their “attenuated Christ … could not have built a mousetrap, let alone a church.” By rejecting the biblical evidence, such scholars fail to see that unbelief as well as belief are spiritual matters: The central feature of Christianity is (and always has been) the worship of Jesus. Any credible account of its origins must explain the rise of such worship. Where can that be found except in Jesus’ understanding of himself as divine? To reject that is not only to deprive Christian worship of its legitimacy but to convict the church itself of self-deception and duplicity. [119] Comforting is the overall sense that Macleod can be trusted with his topic, as well as that he is able to lead us to the heart of an issue and confront the pivotal questions.

The book is divided into two parts. The first part develops the Nicene motif “Very God of Very

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God” in chapters on “The Virgin Birth,” “The Preexistence of Christ,” “Christ, the Son of God,” “The Jesus of History,” and “The Christ of Faith: ‘Very God of Very God.’” The second part examines the motif “Very God, Very Man,” heralded at Chalcedon, in chapters on “The Incarnation,” “Chalcedon: ‘Perfect in Godhead, Perfect in Manhood,’” “Kenosis: Making Himself Nothing,” “The Sinlessness of Christ,” and “No Other Name: The Uniqueness of Christ in Modern Times.”

There is also an epilogue that opens new horizons, an abundance of meaty endnotes, and an adequate indexing of biblical references and subjects.

Some, especially North American, readers may be dismayed to find Macleod’s scholarship somewhat dated (e.g., Bultmann, Hick) and limited in scope (e.g., Anglican Unitarians, Liberation theology). In spite of the value of all of what Macleod has done, we are still left facing the serious challenges of narrative views, reader-response theories, feminist philosophies, and others such as the notorious “Jesus Seminar.” Those of a Lutheran persuasion will certainly want to take issue with his general critique of the doctrine of the communication.

And while salvation is central, more elaboration would have been warranted concerning the Christ of eschatology.

Macleod, nevertheless, has laid the groundwork for us to anticipate and meet future as well as current heresies. But his own goal is not so much to chase down the latest theory as to give to the evangelical church sufficient grounds for confidently declaring, in this eclectic age, the absolute sufficiency of Christ. He has also magnificently reminded us that the Church rightly honors Christ’s name and rule when, and only when, its theology remains closely tied to the clear meaning of the Scriptures.

Rev. Evan C. Hock Covenant Presbyterian Church Wheat Ridge, Colorado

BO OK RE V IE W God, Revelation and Authority

by Carl F. H. Henry Crossway Books, 1999. $120.00 (six volumes, paper), 3,054 pages.

In conjunction with Southern Baptist Theological Seminary’s recent launch of the Carl F. H. Henry Institute for Evangelical Engagement, Henry’s magnum opus has been republished. This six-volume series began to appear in 1976 and was completed in 1983.

As Henry states in a new preface, God, Revelation and Authority represents his effort “to challenge the course of modern theology” by exhibiting the cognitive defensibility of scriptural Christianity. This primarily involves showing how evangelical Christianity’s truth-claims can be integrated into a “unified system of truth” covering all that we justifiably believe or know. As he observed in introducing the series in 1976, our culture has come to view religion as “a matter of personal preference rather than [as] a truth-commitment universally valid for one and all.” But this, in effect, shears faith and theology off from everyday life in a way that makes many “far more sure of the landing of astronauts on the moon” than they are “of God’s incarnation in Jesus Christ, more sure of scientists propelled into outer space than of the Logos ‘that came down from heaven’ (John 3:13, KJV) as the eternal Word become flesh (John 1:14).” The remedy for this is to recognize that appeals “to God and revelation cannot stand alone.” We who believe that God has spoken and still speaks must strive to reach some agreement with our nonbelieving contemporaries “on rational methods of inquiry, ways of argument, and criteria for verification” so that our Christian assertions can be seen in a context where they have some chance of commending themselves to rational reflection.

Henry’s six volumes represent his own massive effort to put the fundamental Christian assertions in such a context. The first four volumes, all subtitled The God Who Speaks and Shows, concentrate on analyzing the nature of religious knowledge.

The last two volumes, subtitled The God Who Stands and Stays, explore the nature of the God who makes Himself known through his gracious revelation. “Theology,” Henry insists in his first volume, “sets out not simply with God as a speculative presupposition but with God known in his revelation.”

Volumes II to IV are especially noteworthy for their articulation and defense of fifteen theses about divine revelation, all arising out of Henry’s conviction that “God heralds his unchanging truth to man once for all and ongoingly; man meanwhile asserts a multiplicity of contrary things about God and his Word.” One of Henry’s great strengths is his ability to restate fundamental Christian truths in striking ways. Here Henry’s first thesis hints of the richness of all the rest: “Revelation is a divinely initiated activity, God’s free communication by which he alone turns his personal privacy into a deliberate disclosure of his reality.”

As is to be expected with so large an effort, some aspects of Henry’s work are not fully satisfying. One is that much of the scholarship is dated—and indeed was so even when the set first went to press. Another—and an aspect that is especially aggravating to a philosopher—is that sometimes Henry buttresses his own positions too much by merely citing authorities rather than by carefully arguing for their truth.

Yet the set remains invaluable and a necessary starting point for those who would explore the great doctrines about God and Scripture that were at the Reformation’s heart. Indeed, this is especially true now that modernism has given way to postmodernism, with, as Henry puts it, “its vengeful repudiation of any objective conception of deity, truth, and

goodness.” Now, even more than when this set first appeared, we need to learn from Henry’s attempt to show that evangelical Christianity is the final truth that holds for and indeed judges all human beings. Even for Henry’s postmodern evangelical critics, the proper way forward in evangelical theology goes through and not around his efforts.

Dr. Mark R. Talbot Wheaton College Wheaton, Illinois

E N D N O T E S Covenant Theology Illustrated by S. M. Baugh Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1981 [repr.]), 2:355.

1

Cf., for example, Ps. 110:4; Gal. 3:18-20; John 17. Not all covenant theologians

2

today believe that the Scriptures teach an intra-Trinitarian pactum, but it is a classic doctrine held by such notable theologians as Oecolampadius, Olevianus, Cocceius, Owen, Witsius, C. Hodge, Bavinck, and Berkhof, to name a few. 3The argument against Covenant theology’s method is like questioning an analysis of the U.S. Constitution as being shaped by “democracy” or, more accurately, “republicanism,” because neither of these words appears in the Constitution. No one doubts the importance of these concepts for shaping the Constitution, even though the words do not appear. 4Other questions and answers in the WLC relating to Covenant theology are: 22, 31-32, 34-36, 57, 79, 97, 101, 162-66, 174-76; and cf. the related Westminster Confession of Faith (WCF), especially chapters VII and XIX. 5The biblical notion of covenant involves a bond, which has been solemnly secured, usually with stipulations fleshing out the nature of the relationship and sanctions to be imposed should one party breach the relationship. Modern Old Testament scholars have confirmed that personal obligation is sometimes a central significance of “covenant”; e.g., M. Weinfeld: “[B]erith [Hebrew for “covenant”] implies first and foremost the notion of ‘imposition,’ ‘liability,’ or ‘obligation’” (TDOT, 2:255). 6Modern covenant theologians are not alone in reading Romans 5 as teaching an Adamic covenant. The idea is clearly taught by the great fifth century church father, Augustine (City of God, 16:27). Augustine uses the Latin word testamentum for “covenant,” but this was the normal Vulgate word used for Hebrew and Greek “covenant” (hence Old Testament and New Testament, not simply “last will and testament” as it sounds in modern English, but covenant). The nearly synonymous Latin words for “covenant,” foedus and pactum (treaty, compact), became more common in later theological writings. I am not sure how fully Augustine integrated this covenantal viewpoint of Adam into the rest of his anthropology, but he is clearly part of the ancestry of modern Covenant theology in his reading of Romans 5 and the Adamic covenant. 7Herman Witsius, The Economy of the Covenants between God and Man: Comprehending a Complete Body of Divinity, 2 vols. (Escondido: den Dulk Christian Foundation, 1990; repr. of 1822 translation), 1:49. Witsius is an excellent example of a classic covenant theologian; another is Francis Turretin in his Institutes of Elenctic Theology (G. Giger trans.; J. Dennison, ed.; Phillipsburg: P&R, 1994), 2:169-269. 8The term “federal” simply means “covenantal” being derived from foedus, a Latin term for “covenant.” 9I will be using either the New International Version or my own translation. 10See Rom. 4:16 and 13:6 for some other places where the conjunctive phrase dia touto is also used.

If I seem to have belabored a simple point here, it is because perplexing sections of

11

Paul’s writings are often greatly illumined after working to get a clear view of what question Paul is trying to answer. Otherwise, his profoundly connected arguments

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may seem disjointed and rambling. They are not! 12Paul indicates that he is resuming the

IL: 1980); David Lovejoy, Religious Enthusiasm in the New World (Cambridge, MA:

broken off comparison in verse 18 by saying in effect, “so then (back to the point) …” and

1985); Edmund Morgan, The Puritan Dilemma: The Story of John Winthrop (Boston,

Pelagius, Pelagius’s

1958); Emil Oberholzer, Delinquent Saints: Disciplinary Action in the Early Congregational

Commentary on St Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, T. de Bruyn, ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press,

Churches of Massachusetts (New York, 1956); Amanda Porterfield, Female Piety in Puritan

1993), 92. 14Paul’s teaching on Adam is in line with common Jewish interpretations of the

New England (Oxford, 1992); Darret Rutman, Winthrop’s Boston: A Portrait of a Puritan

period: “And you laid upon him [Adam] one commandment of yours; but he transgressed

Town, 1630-1649 (Chapel Hill, NC: 1965); William K. B. Stoever, “A Faire and Easie

it, and immediately you appointed death for him and for his descendants” (4 Ezra 3:7);

Way to Heaven”: Covenant Theology and Antinomianism in Early Massachusetts (Middletown,

“O Adam, what have you done? For though it was you who sinned, the fall was not yours

CT: 1978); Selma Williams, Divine Rebel: The Life of Anne Marbury Hutchinson (New York,

alone, but ours also who are your descendants” (4 Ezra 7:48 [118]); “For when Adam

1981); Larzar Ziff, Puritanism in America: New Culture in a New World (Oxford, 1973); J.

then repeating the substance of the comparison of verse 12.

13

sinned and death was decreed against those who were to be born, the multitude of those

Rodney Fulcher, “Puritan Piety in New England: A Study in Spiritual Regeneration

More literally verse 14 reads:

from the Antinomian Controversy to the Cambridge Synod of 1648 in the

“death reigned … even over those who did not sin in the likeness of the transgression of

Massachusetts Bay Colony” (Ph.D. dissert., Princeton University, 1963); Norman

who would be born was numbered” (2 Baruch 23:4).

15

Adam.” The NIV reads: “death reigned … even over those who did not sin by breaking

Brooks Graebner, “Protestants and Dissenters: An Examination of the Seventeenth

a command” (v. 14). 16For more on the phrase “from Adam until Moses” see especially

Century Eatonist and New England Antinomian Controversies in Reformation

Meredith G. Kline, “Gospel until the Law: Rom. 5:13-14 and the Old Testament,” Journal

Perspective” (Ph.D. dissert., Duke University, 1984); James W. Jones, III, “The

of the Evangelical Theological Society 34 (1991), 433-46. 17This is just part of the rationale for

Beginnings of American Theology: John Cotton, Thomas Hooker, Thomas

reading the Adamic arrangement as a covenantal phenomenon. See also, for instance,

Shepard, and Peter Bulkeley” (Ph.D. dissert., Brown University, 1970); Michael

Hosea 6:7: “Like Adam, they have broken the covenant” (NIV), which clearly implies an

Joseph Schuldiner, “The Doctrine of Spiritual Growth and Church Polity in Early

Adamic covenant. This reading has been challenged by some through the years, but a

America” (Ph.D. dissert., Kent State University, 1979); and, William G. Wilcox,

good analysis is still: B. B. Warfield, “Hosea VI. 7: Adam or Man?” in Selected Shorter

“New England Covenant Theology: Its English Precursors and Early American

Writings of Benjamin B. Warfield, Vol. 1 (Phillipsburg: P&R, 1970), 116-29. 18Cf. Col. 1:18-

Exponents” (Ph.D. dissert., Duke University, 1959). 3For a fine discussion of Puritan

20. The Greek translated “the one to come” can also be rendered “the future one” or “the

Covenant theology, see John von Rohr, The Covenant of Grace in Puritan Thought

destined one” depending on context. The same form is used for “future things” as

(Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1986.) 4Two prominent books devoted to Cotton are Ziff,

opposed to “present things” (Rom. 8:38; 1 Cor. 3:22), and is used in two interesting

The Career of John Cotton that treats his life chronologically, and Everett Emerson, John

passages (Col. 2:17 and 1 Tim. 1:16), which parallel Romans 5:14 grammatically. 19For

Cotton, revised edition (Boston, 1990) which examines Cotton’s theology through his David Hall, “Historical Introduction,” in the Antinomian

other examples of curse and blessing flowing from one to many, see: Gen. 9:25-27;

published writings.

19:12, 16, 26; Num. 16:32; Josh. 6:22-25; 7:24-26; 2 Sam. 12:13-14; and Lam. 5:7. 20H.

Controversy, 1636-1638: A Documentary History (Durham: Duke University Press, 1990),

Orton Wiley, Christian Theology (Kansas City: Beacon Hill Press, 1958), 2:116-17.

14, hereafter AC. Hall’s source for this information can be found in “Boston Church Records,” Collections of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts, 39: 12-18. John Winthrop,

Yes by Charles Arand

History of New England, James Savage, ed. (Boston, 1825), 1:144. Also see Edmund

Anchor Bible Dictionary, ed. David Noel Freedman (New York: Doubleday, 1992), 1:1179.

Morgan, Visible Saints, 98-100, and David Hall, “Historical Introduction,” in AC, 14-

For an excellent overview of covenants in the Bible, see Walter R. Roehrs, “Divine

15. 5 “The Examination of Anne Hutchinson,” in AC, 336-37 hereafter “Examination

Covenants: Their Structure and Function,” Concordia Journal 14 (January 1988): 7-27.

of AH.” 6During the examination she never fully censured the other elders for

1

2

Roehrs, 24. Quotations from the Westminster Confession are taken from Creeds of the

preaching a “covenant of works” as the way of salvation, and when Cotton was asked

Churches: A Reading in Christian Doctrine from the Bible to the Present, ed. John H. Leith

what he recalled of a private conversation between Hutchinson and some of the

(Richmond, VA.: John Knox Press, 1973). 5(Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1941).

elders (including himself), he could only state: “I do remember that she looked at

Martin Chemnitz, Loci Theologici, tr. J. A. O. Preus, vol. 2 (St. Louis: Concordia

them [the other clergy] as the apostles before the ascension.… You do put me in

3

4

6

Publishing House, 1989), 651-66. 7Gustaf Wingren, “Law and Gospel and their

remembrance that it was asked her why we cannot preach a covenant of grace?

Implications for Christian Life and Worship,” Studia Theologica 17(1963), 80. 8Leith, 203.

Why, saith she, because you can preach no more than you know.… Now that she

Leith, 203. 10Wingren, 79. 11Wingren, 79. 12Wingren, 78.

said you cannot preach a covenant of grace [at all] I do not remember such a thing.”

9

“Examination of AH,” in AC, 334-35. 7See Gura, 242-43: “Hutchinson’s The Covenantal Summons by Michael Horton

establishment of a private religious meeting itself was not enough to warrant her

1

Heidelberg, no. 65.

condemnation, for the practice of organizing conventicles … formed one of the

Covenant—A Coin with Two Sides by Paul Schaefer

Nevertheless, she did face consternation from the elders and the magistrates over her

1

For a good discussion of the basic issues at stake, see Louis Berkhof, Systematic Theology,

teaching of men. See “Examination of AH,” in AC, 314-17. 8Thomas Shepard,

new edition with introduction by Richard Muller (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1996), 262-

Autobiography, Nehemiah Adams, ed. (Boston, 1832), 386. 9 “Way of Congregational

301. For an excellent discussion of the soteriological issues at stake, the reader is also

Churches Cleared,” in AC, 413. 10John Cotton, The Covenant of Grace (London, 1671),

encouraged to read the works of Jerry Bridges published by NavPress. For a discussion

hereafter TCG. In this instance, the quotation is taken from the subtitle in the

of the Lordship of Christ debate and a good bibliography for classic and present works,

preface of the 1654 edition. 11TCG, 35. 12TCG, 117. 13TCG, 19. 14TCG, 215. 15All

most important components of Puritanism’s extraparochial organization.”

see Michael Horton, ed., Christ the Lord (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1994). See, for example,

references in this paragraph are from Thomas Shepard, The Parable of the Ten Virgins

the following: Emery Battis, Saints and Sectaries: Anne Hutchinson and the Antinomian Controversy

(Ligonier, PA: Soli Deo Gloria Reprints, 1990), 82, hereafter Parable. 16Parable, 375.

in Massachusetts Bay Colony (Chapel Hill, NC: 1963); Philip Gura, A Glimpse of Sion’s Glory:

17

Puritan Radicalism in New England, 1620-1660 (Middletown, CT: 1983); David Hall, Worlds

paragraphs are from TCG, 14-19.

of Wonder, Days of Judgment: Popular Religious Belief in Early New England (New York, 1989);

81-84. All references in this paragraph are from TCG, 97-98. 23All references in this

Lyle Koehler, A Search for Power: The ‘Weaker Sex’ in Seventeenth Century New England (Urbana,

paragraph are from Parable, 291-93. 24Parable, 273. 25Parable, 217-18.

2

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Parable, 55. 18Parable, 300. 19Parable, 288-89. 20All references in the preceding two All references in this paragraph are from TCG,

21

22

forsaking the serpent, God promises the future performance of this duty. Election is

Ex Auditu 1

The “kinsman-redeemer” is Elimelech’s closest living relative, who therefore has primary

inherent in a covenant of grace, for man’s faith is itself a promised blessing received

responsibility in “redeeming” Elimelech’s property in time of poverty: “The land,

from God (Eph. 2:8). In this way alone can God promise the future enmity of his

moreover, shall not be sold permanently, for the land is Mine; for you are but aliens and

saints against the devil. 11It is essential that we grasp the complex relationship

sojourners with Me. Thus for every piece of your property, you are to provide for the

between the overall advancement of God’s redemptive plan, which always saves men

redemption of the land. If a fellow countryman of yours becomes so poor he has to sell

only by grace, and the typological overlay of a works covenant, wherein the works

part of his property, then his nearest kinsman is to come and buy back what his relative

principle operates within certain limitations. As we shall see, this same dynamic is

has sold” (Lev. 25:23-25).

also at play during the more extensive duration of the Mosaic administration.

Ultimately, it is this relationship between works and grace covenants that allows us

Free Space

to affirm both God’s love and justice. If we don’t recognize the works principle (and

Acts 1:9-11; 3:19-21—note the Old Testament tells “the rest of the story” of what

therefore God’s justice), we will necessarily undermine his gracious love. 12The

1

happens when Jesus returns; Romans 11:25-27.

rainbow is here also given as a “sign” of the covenant, an important ingredient in the maintenance of covenant relations. The “bow” is represented here as hanging

Covenant Sidebars by Brian Lee

horizontally in a gesture of peace, as opposed to being bent at the ready in a sign of

1

God covenants with man in general in the creation covenant and in the covenant of

warlike judgment (Ps. 7:12). This is a tangible ratification of God’s promised

common grace (Gen. 1-3, 9), while he covenants with particular people in the unfolding

forbearance, a visible assurance that the Lord will follow through on his promise.

work of his redemption (Gen. 6, 15; Ex. 19, Matt. 6:26ff). 2The following series of

Sacraments likewise confirm us in the covenant of grace. 13Gal. 3:9. 14The covenant

sidebars depend heavily both in content and organization upon the work of Meredith

ratification recorded in Genesis parallels a common oath-taking ceremony in the

Kline, both in his self-published text Kingdom Prologue (Meredith G. Kline, 1993) and in

literature of the day. In passing between the two halves of severed animals, the oath-

lectures delivered at Westminster Theological Seminary in California in 1996

taker swore that this very fate would befall him were he to break the covenant. For

(“Pentateuch”). Other sources include Herman Witsius, The Economy of the Covenants Between

our purposes, it is important to note that God himself, represented by the smoking

God and Man, translated (from the fourth edition, 1712) by William Crookshank, D.D.

oven and flaming torch, passes through the midst of the slain animals. This particular

(London: R. Baynes, 1822). Reprinted by the den Dulk Christian Foundation in 1990;

ratification ceremony also indicates what lengths God would have to go to fulfill this

Gerhardus Vos’s Biblical Theology: Old and New Testaments (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth,

oath, his own Son taking on the curse of the severed animals on behalf of covenant-

1975); and Louis Berkhof’s Systematic Theology (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1941).

breaking men. See Meredith Kline’s Kingdom Prologue for a full treatment of this oath

Berkhof is especially helpful in providing a brief history of the development of this

ceremony. 15Geerhardus Vos’s Biblical Theology is particularly helpful in describing this

doctrine. Kline prefers “covenant of creation” because it doesn’t obscure the fact that the

twofold fulfillment. While David was the first stage fulfillment of royalty, it is Christ

3

works principle is not found only here. As we shall see below, the covenant of

who reigns eternally as the “Son of David, Son of Abraham” (Matt 1:1). While the

Redemption between the Father and the Son is similarly works oriented. 4Most notably

nation of Israel under Solomon is numbered “like the sand on the seashore” (2 Sam.

in Isa. 24:5 and Hos. 6:7: “But like Adam they have transgressed the covenant; there they

17:11), the New Testament clearly distinguishes Abraham’s “children of promise”

have dealt treacherously against me.” Both of these texts are contested. Also, Jer. 31:35-

from his children of flesh, telling us that it is “those who are of faith who are sons of

37 taken in conjunction with 33:20-21 seems to suggest that God’s creative fiat was

Abraham” (Rom. 9:7, Gal. 3:7ff.). Finally, though Israel possesses all the land

inherently covenantal, implying a pledge to sustain the creation order. It is important to

promised to Abraham (Josh. 21:43-45), the New Testament throughout recognizes

note that the Scriptures give us a precedent for describing such a similarly unnamed

the Abrahamic promise terminating in a heavenly country (Heb. 11:10, 16). The

arrangement as a covenant in the case of God’s promise to David in 2 Sam. 2:7 (referred

second stage of fulfillment is not a mere “spiritualizing” of the promises in opposition

to as a covenant in 2 Sam. 23:5 and Ps. 89:3). 5The fact that man is created in the image

to a literal reading, as proponents of Dispensationalism claim. The heavenly country

of God implies that he like his Creator will consummate his works and enter the

that Abraham desired is a real, physical land, occupied by actual resurrected saints.

promised blessing of Sabbath rest (1:26, 2:3). The presence of the Tree of Life further

16

Further, we must note that types abound in the sacrificial system established at

This is a justifiable,

Sinai that point to Christ and bespeak grace, which nevertheless don’t undermine

if somewhat unusual, rendering of Luke 22:29-30. The more typical English rendering,

the works principle at the national level. While the forgiveness of sins is here

suggests a blessed goal of confirmation in righteousness (2:9, 3:22).

6, 7

“The Lord has appointed me a kingdom,” obscures the fact that the root of the verb

prominently displayed in a manner that points to Christ, even this display was

“appointed” (diatithemi) is shared with the Greek noun for “covenant” (diatheke). This

shadowy. The New Testament suggests that even this promise of forgiveness was

translation is all the more warranted by the fact that the context for this teaching is the

cloaked in a certain bondage and futility that led Old Testament saints onward

establishment of the Lord’s Supper, “This cup which is poured out for you is the new

toward a greater hope (cf. Hebrews). 17Note that for Paul, not only Israel is

covenant in my blood” (Luke 22:20). Grace here is precisely understood as “divine favor

condemned by law, for the Gentiles continue to be born as sinners into the works-

in the face of demerits,” in contrast to any more ambiguous understanding of grace as

based covenant of creation (Rom. 1-3). This is particularly evident in the simple fact

God’s goodness, faithfulness, etc. This is important, because though God is revealed as

that all men die (Rom. 5:12). 18In this sense, it is important to realize that the most

good, powerful, and even loving by his works of creation and preservation (Rom. 1:20),

fitting model for the church in the world is provided by the patriarchs, not by the

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“grace” properly understood is only evident after the fall, in the face of man’s demerits.

nation of Israel. Like Abraham, we are pilgrims seeking a heavenly land and ruled

This is manifested both savingly in gracious redemption and more generally in common

only by a risen King (Heb. 11) 19This is the favorite expression of Gerhardus Vos for

grace (God’s patience in delaying the full fury of his wrath against sin until the final

this majestic in breaking.

judgment). 9God therefore promises not only to offer salvation to man, but to actually apply it to a certain number, i.e., faith is a gift given by God (Eph. 2:8). The doctrine of election is thus a necessary component of the redemptive covenant of grace, and a denial of election necessarily introduces the component of works. 10Note that even though this covenant entailed certain performance on man’s part, i.e., putting his trust in the seed and

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James Montgomery Boice

Whatever Happened to Singing?

M JAMES MONTGOMERY BOICE Senior Minister, Tenth Presbyterian Church

y personal assistant has a friend who is a mail carrier in a small southern town,

halls to keep up their spirits during the two world wars. and one of the changes he says he has noticed over the years he has been They sang patriotic tunes and love songs, ethnic ballads and delivering mail around the neighborhood is that people today no longer sing. old favorites. They were trying to be happy. But not They used to. The windows of their homes would today. We live in a frantic but joyless culture, and be open in the spring and summer months, and he while people sometimes understand the words of would hear people singing around the piano or as the songs they are hearing they do not join in. they did their work in the kitchen or outside in the Music is now for the spectator (i.e., MTV), not the yard. But he no longer hears his neighbors singing. participant. One of the saddest things about today’s That is an interesting observation, and it is true not youth culture is that the youth do not sing. They only for small southern towns. It is true of Western are world-weary, jaded. Joy is gone. culture in general.

About the only place left in Western culture It is also very sad. where people do sing is in church where it is done One thing I have noticed as I have been studying by Christian people. And the reason is obvious: We the worship of God described in Revelation 4 and 5 have something to sing about. We know the God is that the worship of heaven is mostly expressed in who has created us and has redeemed us from sin by song. These two chapters are filled with hymns, five the death of his Son Jesus Christ. Like the saints in in all, and there are even more hymns later on in the heaven, we want to praise God “with heart and soul book (Rev. 7:10, 12, 15-17; 11:15, 17-18; 12:10-12; and voice,” and singing the praises of God together 15:3-4; 16:5-7; 18:2-8; 19:2-8). Isn’t it interesting is how we do it best. And always have! Throughout that in heaven the worship of God is expressed in Church history, the people of God have written and sung great songs. They have embodied their words set to music, in words that are sung?

It is more than interesting, of course. It is also greatest theological convictions and have expressed extremely important, for music is a gift from God their awe and gratitude to God in great hymns.

Are we losing that tradition in our churches? We which allows us to express our deepest heart responses to truth in moving and memorable ways. may be, as performance music tends to take over.

It is a case of the heart joining with the mind to say, Let’s not allow this important part of our worship “Yes! Yes! Yes!” to the truth we are hearing. and sharing with one another to pass silently away.

As I have reflected on the absence of singing in Let’s guard against becoming mere spectators, today’s world, I have come to believe that it is especially in church. Let’s spend more time singing because most of our contemporaries are unable to and less time listening to others make music for us. feel anything or respond to anything at a very deep According to Revelation the four living creatures, level. They are overloaded with external stimuli the twenty-four elders and the vast host of the holy and seldom respond deeply to anything. We have angels are singing the praises of God in heaven even music, of course. We can’t escape it. Muzak is now. We participate in that great choir rightly, piped in everywhere—in waiting rooms, stores, wisely, and joyously when we sing. shopping malls, even elevators. The latest popular songs blast us from ubiquitous Walkmans or Dr. James Montgomery Boice is the president of the Alliance of Discmans. But people do not sing. They used to Confessing Evangelicals and senior minister of Tenth Presbyterian sing around the piano in the 1920s and in the music Church, Philadelphia.

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