The Covenant of Works in Dutch and German Reformed Theology

Wilhelmus Schortinguis was a pastor who served in German and Dutch Reformed churches until he died in 1750.  Though not all of his work was widely accepted and read, his booklet that summarized the Christian faith in catechetical form was quite popular.  The title of this booklet is Essential Truths in the Heart of a Christian.  Here are a few of his questions and answers that have to do with the covenant of works and covenant of grace. 

“What is the covenant of works?  The agreement of God with the righteous man [Adam] in which God promised life and threatened death, with the stipulation of perfect obedience to his law.  If man met the stipulation, he would enjoy eternal life (Hos. 6:7, Job 31:33).

“Did man have the ability to fulfill these demands?  Yes, indeed; because he was created in God’s image (Gen. 1:31, Ecc. 7:29), he was perfectly good and completely upright.”

“What do you learn from this covenant?  1) The happiness of the first man in the original state; 2) the privilege of the believer, who now lives in another, unchanging covenant; 3) never to seek salvation in a covenant of works, but as a miserable sinner to seek it in Christ in the covenant of grace (Matt. 11:28, Prov. 18:10). 

“What does God promise and demand in the covenant of grace? He promises all the essential benefits here and especially for eternity.  He promises: ‘I shall be a God to you (Jer. 31:33).  And he demands faith and conversion (Acts 16:31; Ezek. 33:11), both of which he promises to provide (Eph. 2:8, Ezek. 36:27).

William Schortinghuis, Essential Truths in the Heart of a Christian, p. 56-57, 66.

rev. shane lems

The Law/Gospel Distinction in Old Holland

One thing I’ve mentioned quite a bit here over the last five years is how the law/gospel distinction is part of the veins and sinews of historic Reformed theology.  More narrowly, the law/gospel distinction is also part of the Dutch Reformed theological tradition.  Here’s a great later example of this by Herman Bavinck, found on pages 410-411 of Our Reasonable Faith which was first published in Dutch in 1909 (called Magnalia Dei).

“Law and gospel are the two component parts of the Word of God.  The two are distinguished from each other but they are never separated.  They accompany each other throughout Scripture, from the beginning to the end…. [The terms law and gospel designate] two entirely different covenants.  The law really belongs to the so-called covenant of works which was concluded with the first man and which promised him eternal life in the way of perfect obedience.  But the gospel is the proclamation of the covenant of grace which was made known for the first time after the fall of man, and which gives him eternal life by grace, through faith in Christ.”

“The covenant of grace is, however, not the discarding or annihilating, but rather the fulfilling, of the covenant of works.  The difference between the two is mainly that in our stead Christ fulfills the requirements which God by reason of the covenant of works can bring to bear on us.  Hence it is that the covenant of grace, although in itself is pure grace, can from the very beginning put the law of the covenant of works in its service, unite itself with that law, and by the Spirit of Christ bring it into fulfillment in the believers.  The law keeps its place in the covenant of grace, not in order that we by keeping it should try to earn eternal life, for the law cannot do this because of the weakness of the flesh, but, in the first place, in order that through it we should come to know our sin, our guilt, our misery, and our helplessness, and struck down and stripped by the consciousness of guilt, should take refuge in the grace of God in Christ (Rom 7.7 and Gal 3.24), and, in the second place, in order that we, having died and been raised with Christ, should walk in newness of life and so fulfill the righteousness of the law (Rom 6.4 and 8.4).”

“There is no room in Christianity for antinomianism, for despising or violating the law.  Law and gospel should go together, as in the Scriptures, so also in preaching and teaching, in doctrine and in life.  They are both indispensable and real constituent parts of the one complete word of God.”

“All the same, identifying the two is as bad as separating them.  Nomism, which makes of the gospel a new law, is in error no less than antinomiansim.  Law and gospel differ from each other not in degree but in kind.  They differ as demand and gift differ, as commandment and promise, and as question and offer differ.  It is true that the law as well as the gospel comprises the will of God, and that it is holy, wise, good, and spiritual, but it has become impotent by reason of sin, does not justify but rather aggravates sin, and provokes wrath, doom, and death.  And over against this stands the gospel which has nothing but grace, reconciliation, forgiveness, righteousness, peace, and eternal life.  What the law demands of us is given us in the gospel for nothing.”

Herman Bavinck, Our Reasonable Faith.

rev. shane lems

Infant Baptism and the Reformation

Why do Reformed churches baptize infants along with adults?  That’s a huge question, obviously.  Using a few paragraphs from Bryan Holstrom’s Infant Baptism and the Silence of the New Testament, I’m only going to deal with one small part of a bigger discussion in this post.  Here’s Holstrom:

“For years… [since becoming a Christian and joining a Baptist church] I had heard that infant baptism was a relic of the past, a holdover from the Roman Church, assumed by the Reformed churches as a matter of expediency, and resulting in what one noted author and pastor has described as an ‘incomplete Reformation.’  And I had simply bought into such a notion without any further investigation of my own.  After all, it seemed to be a perfectly reasonable argument.  I couldn’t find any place in Scripture where parents were commanded to baptized their children, nor could I locate a single explicit reference to the rite being administered to any child of tender age in the New Testament.”

“Nevertheless, as I continued to read the great writers of the past, men with names such as Luther, Calvin, Zwingli, Knox, Henry, Baxter, Owen, Edwards, Dabney, Hodge, and Warfield, I couldn’t help noticing that, although these men came from slightly different Reformed backgrounds (some were Presbyterian, some were Congregationalist, and a few were Anglican or Lutheran), they all agreed on this – that the practice of infant baptism was a scriptural one.”

“To be fair, there were some great writers of the Baptist persuasion from those centuries as well, men such as John Gill, John Bunyan, and Charles Spurgeon.  But it struck me that there were far fewer of them.  Of course, there have been times in the history of the church when only the brave few were engaged in fighting for the truth of a scriptural principle against the overwhelming tide of theological opinion.”

“But such did not seem to be the case here, for the men who had embraced infant baptism were all beholden to the truth of Scripture, and it didn’t seem fitting to attribute their belief in the practice to one of expediency.  These men never determined anything on the basis of what was expedient.  In many cases, they risked their very lives to stand on the principle of truth, and they were not men who were given to simply accepting received traditions of the past without requiring a full-fledged biblical basis for them.”

“An untold number of traditions, including that of baptismal regeneration, were abandoned by the Reformers of the sixteenth century for the lack of biblical basis, sometimes in the face of widespread popular sentiment in favor of them.  To argue that these great men had somehow allowed an unscriptural practice to be retained in the church because they were too lazy or indifferent to the truth concerning it was nothing short of slander, especially when you consider that the Reformed and papal theologies of baptism bear no resemblance whatsoever to one another.”

Holstrom goes on to argue that the “argument of silence” in the NT actually works to prove the biblical foundation for infant baptism (you’ll have to get the book to explore that!). 

Here I simply want to encourage our dear Baptist brothers and sisters in Christ not to argue that infant baptism is a holdover from Rome, or that the Reformation was “incomplete.”  The argument is invalid (i.e. fallacy of ignoring the counterevidence); it does not follow.

The above quotes are found on pages 17-18 of Bryan Holstrom, Infant Baptism (Greenville: Ambassador International, 2008).

shane lems

The Significance of the Chronicler’s Genealogies

  While reading through the Solomon accounts in Chronicles, I’m using The IVP Biblical Background Commentary.  Though it is a brief commentary, I’ve really appreciated it.  Recently I ran across a helpful paragraph entitled, “The Significance of Genealogies to [a] Postexilic Audience.”  In other words, what would the Chronicler’s genealogies mean to the 5th and 6th century exiles?

“Though most of the material of Chronicles covers the history of the preexilic period, it is written for those who returned from the Babylonian exile in the sixth and fifth centuries and reestablished themselves in the land.  Genealogies to them represented the charter of their identity.  Their covenant with the Lord had established them as an elect people of God living in the land promised by him.  Their family lineage was their certificate of membership.  It was their heritage and their legacy.”

“Often in the ancient world genealogies served sociological rather than historical functions.  Instead of offering a strictly sequential report of the order of generations, they were designed to use continuity with the past as an explanation of the current structure and condition of society.  Israel carried along with this an additional theological emphasis and significance that was inherent in their genealogical reports.  Continuity with the past would give meaning to their current theological situation.”

“Individuals in the ancient world found their identity not in their individualism, but in their solidarity with the group.  This included not only those that made up their contemporary kinship group but extended throughout the generations.  The genealogies were their way of fitting themselves into this pangenerational solidarity.  Every generation is not necessarily represented.  One might compare the selective list of heroes of the faith in Hebrews 11.  Americans today take pride in being able to trace their ancestry back to those who crossed on the Mayflower or those who signed the Declaration of Independence.  The difference is that in Israel these connections gave rights and privileges rather than being simply status symbols” (p. 413).

These paragraphs are helpful to remember as we consider the long list of names in 1 Chronicles – and other genealogies in the Bible.  I especially appreciate the emphasis on covenant, solidarity, history, and sociology – not to mention the fact that genealogies weren’t meant to be exhaustive.  There is more to say about genealogies, but this is a good start.

The IVP Bible Background Commentary: The Old Testament Ed. Walton, Matthews, & Chavalas (Downer’s Grove, IVP Academic, 2000).

The Mosaic Covenant: Works or Grace?

In his helpful book, An Exposition of the Westminster Confession of Faith, Robert Shaw (d. 1863) discussed the Mosiac (or Sinaitic) covenant in a way similar to Francis Turretin and other Reformed theologians.  Here’s what Shaw wrote in his comments on WCF 19.2.

“It may be remarked, that the law of the ten commandments was promulgated to Israel from Sinai in the form of a covenant of works.  Not that it was the design of God to renew a covenant of works with Israel, or to put them upon seeking life by their own obedience to the law; but the law was published to them as a covenant of works, to show them that without a perfect righteousness, answering to all the demands of the law, they could not be justified before God; and that, finding themselves wholly destitute of that righteousness, they might be excited to take hold of the covenant of grace, in which a perfect righteousness for their justification is graciously provided.”

“The Sinai transaction was a mixed dispensation.  In it the covenant of grace was published, as appears from these words in the preface standing before the commandments; ‘I am the Lord thy God, which have brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage;’ and from the promulgation of the ceremonial law at the same time.  But the moral law, as a covenant of works, was also displayed, to convince the Israelites of their sinfulness and misery, to teach them the necessity of an atonement, and lead them to embrace by faith the blessed Mediator, the Seed promised to Abraham, in whom all the families of the earth were to be blessed.”

“The law, therefore, was published at Sinai as a covenant of works in subservience to the covenant of grace.  And the law is still published in subservience to the gospel, as ‘a schoolmaster to bring sinners to Christ, that they may be justified by faith’ (Gal. 3:24).”

Robert Shaw, An Exposition of the Westminster Confession of Faith (Ross-shire: Christian Focus, 2008), 256.  For more info on this topic, be sure to see Michael Brown’s Christ and the Condition.

shane lems