“As the mountains are round about Jerusalem, the Lord is round about His people” (Psalm 125:2)
A covenant is an oath-bound relationship between two or more parties. The term covenant is based on the Latin phrase con venire, meaning “a coming together.” That is, “two or more parties come together to make a contract, agreeing on promises, stipulations, privileges, and responsibilities.” Examples of covenants between people include marriage vows and the swearing-in process at a court trial. A covenant between people bonds their relationship.
Divine covenants, delivered from God, appear in the Old Testament. God makes promises to prophets, who then make the covenant known to the general population. In all biblical covenants, human events are determined by God and lead to the eventual redemption of people’s sins by Jesus Christ. According to many Bible scholars, covenants connect the Old Testament promises of God to the life of Jesus in the New Testament.
The Ligonier podcast “What is Reformed Theology?” claims that when we study religion from a human perspective, we examine how people with spiritual beliefs behave: they’re involved in prayer, worship, sacrifice, singing, and devotions, “the trappings of human religions.” A theology, such as covenant theology, goes beyond religious practices. It shapes religious practices.
What Is Covenant Theology?
Covenant theology is the theology some Bible scholars use to understand Biblical history and the Bible’s spiritual themes. From the beginning, particular covenants have bound God and humans.
Covenant theology is also a tool Bible scholars use to structure God’s plan to save fallen people from their sins and separation from God. God announces His covenants and keeps their promises of justice and grace with His children.
Many study Bibles contain a list of the specific covenants that catalog Old Testament history. Lisa Baker’s Christianity.com article on covenant and dispensational theology lists biblical covenants in the Bible. Here are the major covenants, as they are usually referred to:
1. The Protoevangelium Covenant (Genesis 3): God promises triumph over the sins Adam and Eve committed in the Garden of Eden. God restores humanity and reconciles the relationship between Himself and people, broken by Adam and Eve’s original sin. Adam and Eve will produce offspring and “live forever,” but it will be by the sweat of men’s brows and women’s difficulty in childbirth.
2. The Noahic Covenant (Genesis 9:8-9): God promises never to destroy the land and living creatures again by a flood. The forgiving spirit of God’s covenant of grace—formalized in the Davidic Covenant—is already operating in the Noahic Covenant. God continues to forgive the sins of many of His children.
3. The Abrahamic Covenant (Genesis 12:1-3): God promises Abraham he will be the father of a great nation, blessed by God.
4. The Mosaic Covenant (Exodus 19:3-6): God chooses Moses to free Abraham’s descendants from slavery in Egypt and lead the Israelites to the Promised Land. The Jewish people, called by the Abrahamic covenant to be a holy nation, are ordered by God to follow His laws presented by Moses. The first of the ten commandments is, “Thou shalt have no other gods before Me” (Ex. 20:3). The second commandment is, “Thou shalt not make unto thyself any graven image” (Ex. 20:4). The Hebrews repeatedly broke the mosaic covenant’s conditions by worshipping false gods.
5. The Davidic Covenant (2 Samuel 7): God promises King David that through David, He will construct a home for the Hebrew people, a temple separate from the oppression of “wicked people.” God also promises there will be a royal successor to David with a very important role:
“I will establish his kingdom. He is the one who will build a house for me, and I will establish his throne forever. I will be his father, and he will be my son. I will never take my love away from him, as I took it away from your predecessor [Saul]. I will set him over my house and my kingdom forever; his throne will be established forever” (1 Chronicles 17:11-13).
Thus, these Old Testament covenants follow a direct course from Adam to Jesus, the royal successor of David. The Davidic Covenant, thanks to its promise of a Messiah, is understood to be a “covenant of grace” and “the new covenant." God’s grace will be completed by a Savior of the world, Jesus Christ, who fulfills the Davidic Covenant with His sacrifice on the cross.
What Makes Covenant Theology Unique?
Five things especially make covenant theology unique.
1. Covenant theology is a belief system, a worldview with God at the center. For example, the Pharisees criticized Jesus for not being religious when He did not follow Jewish laws outlined in the Torah. Jesus followed a higher law, the covenant of grace.
2. When people fail to abide by the terms of a covenant, keeping God at the center of their lives, God restores the covenant agreement or creates a revised covenant. For example, in the Old Testament, the Israelites worship false gods and do not keep the first commandment of the Law of Moses, “Though shalt have no other gods before me” (Exodus 20:3). Again and again, prophets of God tell the Hebrew people that God will give them another chance at redemption if they stop worshipping the idols of foreign lands. God finally made the Davidic Covenant with His people, saving them through the grace of Christ’s sacrifice for their sins.
3. Rather than emphasizing specific religious differences, Covenant Theology advocates for the unity of all believers with no national separations. Its theology says the covenants of the Christian church include every believer, Jewish or Gentile. In Romans 11:1 and Romans 11:25-26, Paul affirms that Christians and believing Jews are equally part of Christ’s kingdom.
4. Biblical covenants are not two-sided agreements. Biblical covenants are one-sided. God initiates the agreement, determines the terms of the covenant, and confirms a covenant with humanity. People are recipients of God’s covenants, called to accept the covenant fully as offered and keep it as God demands.
5. Covenant theology is based on Old Testament covenants, constant over time. In contrast, dispensational theology is based on the idea that God reveals His nature to people in newly created plans as historic time unfolds.
Where Does Covenant Theology Come From?
Covenant theology became a mindset—or paradigm in philosophical terms—during the Christian Reformation of the early 1500s, which is why Covenant Theology is sometimes referred to as Reformed Theology. Christian Reformation leader Martin Luther, a professor at the University of Wittenberg and a Catholic monk, questioned the practices of the Roman Catholic Church. In the medieval period (500-1500 A.D.), the Roman Catholic church spoke of grace as the power to keep the law to be justified with God. Major theologians of the middle ages claimed God only gave grace to righteous people. In the Christian church, the word “covenant” became synonymous with “law.” The Reformation movement was in direct opposition to the theology of the medieval Christian church.
Martin Luther advocated that Scripture alone was authoritative and justification was by faith, not by works. Luther believed in “... a clear understanding of the original model of true humanity that is found in Christ. And that’s a matter of theology.” Luther believed covenant theology could reform the Christian church. He viewed a covenant as an important tool in managing the kingdom of God.
The Westminster Confession of Faith, written by an assembly of mainly Scottish Presbyterians and Puritans during the 1640s, sought to unify several Christian sects and “correctly handle the word of truth” (2 Timothy 2:15). The Westminster Confession of Faith has stood the test of time and remains a seminal document supporting Reformed Christians’ beliefs. The Westminster Confession of Faith recognizes Adam and Christ as the two “covenant heads” between God and man. God speaks directly to these covenant heads, or group leaders, and blesses them with the responsibility of administering a covenant with their people—with plenty of guidance and help from God.
The Westminster Confession of Faith outlines three basic covenants in the Bible:
- The redemption covenant, agreed upon between Father, Son, and Holy Spirit before time began. The redemption covenant states that the Father chose that his Son would be the redemptive mediator through His birth in the flesh, submission to death, resurrection, and rise to heaven.
- The works covenant, or covenant of creation, places Adam as the head of humankind—by God’s decree in Genesis.
- The covenant of grace is a series of covenants from the time of Adam to Jesus. Originally agreed upon with God’s chosen people, the Hebrews, God expands it reach to include all Christians.
Who Are Some Well-Known Covenant Theologians?
An article by Westminister Seminary California teacher R. Scott Clark chronicles the work of covenant theology’s founders. Clark writes that in the early 1520s, the Swiss Reformed theologian Johannes Oecolampadius (1482–1531) taught that the covenant of redemption refines the legalism of the covenant of works and the covenant of grace. Heinrich Bullinger (1504–75) is mentioned in Clark’s article as the publisher of the first Protestant book devoted to explaining the covenant of grace. John Calvin (1509–1564) gets credit for developing the Reformed Church’s theology of the three covenants. Zacharias Ursinus (1534–1583) and Caspar Olevianus (1536–1587) wrote the Heidelberg Catechism in 1563, which supported the covenant of grace.
Contemporary writers Stephen Wellum and Peter Gentry shared their ideas on covenant theology in their 2016 book Progressive Covenantalism: Charting a Course between Dispensational and Covenant Theologies. Wellum and Gentry state:
“Covenantalism emphasizes that God’s plan unfolds through the covenants and that all of the covenants find their fulfillment, telos, in Jesus Christ . . . the covenants are not necessarily the center of Biblical theology or the unifying theme of Scripture, but they do form the ‘backbone’ of Scripture’s metanarrative or storyline.”
Each theology looks at the unity of Scripture and our relationship with God in its own way, and Covenant Theology is no exception. From God’s restorative covenant with Adam and Eve to his calling Abraham, Jacob, Moses, and David as leaders of His Hebrew people, God’s hand is in Bible history events (Romans 9:13-18). The Israelites of the Old Testament did not remain faithful to their covenantal vows, yet God assured them He would hold them fast and fulfill all of His promises to them, and He did—through the Davidic Covenant, the covenant of grace.
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