Doddering philosopher
R. Scott Clark is right to feel embarrassed for his colleague Paul Helm regarding Helm's incompetent take on Calvin and Covenant Theology.
Philosophers (outright like Helm, or wannabee like 99% of Reformed apologists) tend to not on-the-mark theologians make. Especially when the subject is apostolic biblical doctrine needing the Spirit to be discerned.
Read Geerhardus Vos' Doctrine of the Covenant in Reformed Theology to understand Calvin vis-a-vis things like the Covenant of Works.
But whoever has the historical sense to be able to separate the mature development of a thought from its original sprouting and does not insist that a doctrine be mature at birth, will have no difficulty in recognizing the covenant of works as an old Reformed doctrine.
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Below is the Helm post in question. When the book it is from is published he will remove the post from his blog, so...
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Tuesday, July 01, 2008
4 - Calvin and Covenant Theology
Calvin had a very strong sense of the theological unity of Scripture, and especially of the unity of the two Testaments. What they have in common is greater than what divided them, for they plot the progress of one divine economy of grace begun shortly after the Fall and identifiable in successive eras, through Abraham, Moses, David, and the prophets. This succession culminated in the Incarnation, ministry, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, the answer to the prayers of a faithful remnant of the Old Testament and the fulfilment of their prophecies.
All whom, from the beginning of the world, God adopted as his peculiar people, were taken into covenant with him on the same conditions, and under the same bond of doctrine, as ourselves…it is of no small importance to establish this point.
There were clear discontinuities between the Testaments as well, of course. In particular, at the Incarnation the Jewish theocracy came to an end, the Levitical law was superceded, and through the apostolic preaching the privileges of God's grace were extended beyond the Jewish people. Through Christ all peoples of the earth would be blessed. So for Calvin, the Manger, Calvary and Pentecost were not discontinuous, intrusive events, they completed the trajectory of the Old Testament. As we saw earlier, it is this sense of unity and continuity that enabled him to invoke aspects of the political arrangements of the Old Testament to inform (though not to be a blueprint for) his idea of Christian magistracy in Geneva.
So the covenant between God and man, the device through which God by his promise binds himself to Abraham at first and through him to a chosen people, to be their defender and Saviour, is one covenant differing only its various dispensations. 'The covenant made with all the fathers is so far from differing from ours in reality and substance, that it is altogether one and the same: still the administration differs'. In both dispensations believers had the hope of immortality, the covenant was established not by their merits but by God's grace; and finally, Christ is revealed as the Mediator of this covenant.
In the 1570's and 1580's the covenant motif was extended by certain Reformation theologians (for example Zacharias Ursinus (1534-83) and Caspar Olevianus (1538-87) of Heidelberg, and Robert Rollock (1555-99) of Edinburgh), to become a controlling theological idea, alongside a more scholastic development of the various topics of Reformed theology. For such ‘covenant theologians’ the covenant became the chief tool in interpreting Scripture, enabling people readily to identify the cause of the Reformation with that of Old Testament heroes, and their enemies with the villains.
More interestingly, perhaps, the original arrangements made by the Lord with Adam also came to be regarded as covenantal. So with Adam was made a covenant of works, which, upon the Fall, the covenant of grace superceded; and Christ the last Adam, prefigured in the Old Testament, and at work then in various ways, is the Mediator of this new covenant. Most interestingly of all, not only is the covenant motif extended to govern all the divine-human dispensations, prelapsarian and post-lapsarian, but also the covenant of grace is seen as the historical outworking of an eternal, pactum salutis made between Father, Son and Spirit, the economic working of the Trinity. According to this scheme God the Father covenanted to elect an untold number of men and women and boys and girls to salvation, God the Son covenanted to redeem men and women by his death, and God the Spirit covenanted to apply the merits of Christ's work to the people of God. So election is assigned primarily to the Father, reconciliation to the Son, and the application of that redemption to the Spirit. The three persons being the three persons of the one God, there is no tension or disharmony between these various roles, but each contributes to the glory of God in the salvation of the church.
This theology found later expression in the work of the Dutch theologians Johannes Cocceius (1603-1669) and Herman Witsius (1636-1708), and in numerous other theologians such as the Englishman John Ball (1585-1640), and was given precise confessional expression in the Westminster Confession of Faith (1647). The idea of the covenant extended into politics, as in the Solemn League and Covenant, (1643). So it became influential if not dominant wherever that Confession was influential, and found many popular expositions, as in Thomas Boston's (1713-67), Human Nature in its Fourfold State.
This methodical arrangement of the biblical revelation under the overarching concept of the covenant has a number of pedagogic advantages. The resulting theology has one readily understandable theme and a number of variations. Covenanting is the activity of people: the three persons of the Trinity agreeing together in the covenant of redemption, the Lord establishes a covenant with Abraham, and so on. Such theology is conveyed not in abstract categories (such as election, predestination, redemption, grace) but in personal terms: promising, trusting, obeying, sending, giving, and redeeming.
Is such covenant theology a legitimate development of Calvin's theology? Perhaps it is, if by that question is meant, would Calvin have become a covenant theologian had he lived longer? Yet while this question is not pure speculation, it is fairly speculative. What we know for certain is that while Calvin's theology is broadly covenantal in the way already described, there are important aspects of it that the more developed covenant theology is at odds with. So in order to have become a fully-fledged covenant theologian Calvin would have had to have changed his mind on some of these matters and made up his mind on others. We can mention them briefly.
First, Calvin has no conception of the covenant of works. It receives little or no treatment in the Institutes, and in his Genesis commentary he is silent on the matter. All he says is that if Adam had remained upright he would have gained the gift of perseverance and a 'primal and simple knowledge' of God would have ensued. There is no suggestion that the Lord made a covenant with Adam, or even that the Lord's relations with Adam are best understood in that way. Rather, had there be no Fall, the race would have enjoyed an orderly progression in the knowledge of God, a 'simple and primitive knowledge, to which the mere course of nature would have conducted us, had Adam stood upright.’
Nor does he develop Paul’s Adam-Christ parallel (Rom. 5, I Cor. 15) in a covenantal direction. The idea, which had a tendency to creep into covenant theology, that in some sense Adam would have merited what would follow had he remained upright, would have been abhorrent to Calvin. One imagines, too, that he would have had to be persuaded that the idea of an eternal, inter-Trinitarian, covenant of redemption was a legitimate piece of 'accommodation'.
Secondly, what of Adam's relation to the race? When the covenant theologians pressed the parallel between Christ and Adam it became natural for them to think of Christ and Adam exercising their respective covenantal roles in representative capacities. For, as the Adam-Christ parallel developed, it was odd to suppose that those who are redeemed by Christ are metaphysically one with him as the race is one in Adam in the Augustinian scheme. Such a direct parallel is not plausible even if one stresses the idea of personal union with Christ, as Calvin did.
In developed covenant theology it became natural to think as follows: as Christ was the representative of his people, so was Adam the representative of the race. But perhaps though covenant theology and a representative relationship between Adam and the race have gone together, they do not need to go together. Perhaps one might tolerate an inexact parallel between Adam and Christ at this point.
What did Calvin himself think on this matter? The evidence is not altogether clear. Being an Augustinian as he was, we might expect Calvin to have held Augustine's view, the view that Adam in his own person encapsulated the race, that the race was metaphysically one thing in Adam, so that when Adam fell the human race, being 'in him', fell too. In the Institutes he says that Adam is not a simply a single person, that the command of God not to eat of the tree tested his obedience, that to treat Adam simply as an individual person is Pelagian, and that in Adam the race lost righteousness and in Christ that righteousness is recovered and communicated.
But he does not commit himself to a more precise view of the relationship of the race in Adam beyond saying that all are made guilty by the guilt of one who is the 'root of human nature'. There are words in his Romans Commentary that seem to be deliberately ambiguous: 'For as Adam at his creation had received for us as well as for himself the gifts of God's favour, so by falling away from the Lord, he in himself corrupted, vitiated, depraved, and ruined our nature'.
However, there is an interesting short section in his Sermons on Galatians in which he states, somewhat speculatively you may think, that God could have created us stronger and more perfect than he chose to, and that God could have ensured that only Adam fell. This suggests a rather fuzzy understanding of Adam's role, but one that tends in a non-Augustinian direction, since if God could have ensured that only Adam fell then it cannot be that the race is really ‘in Adam’. Calvin seems to allow that it is possible that Adam need not even have represented the race. On the other hand, perhaps not too much emphasis ought to be given to one paragraph in one sermon.
This brief discussion illustrates the general difficulty of making clear judgments, based upon an extrapolation of Calvin's ideas as they are found in his various writings, as to whether he would have endorsed this or that theological development that occurred within the Reformed community after his death. There is the ever-present danger of anachronism, and often, as in the case of Calvin and covenant theology, the evidence drawn from what Calvin wrote does not point uniformly in one direction.
Posted by Paul Helm at 5:46 AM
"Doddering philosopher" may seem un-called for, and I agree. I mean something like: philosophy is a maker of doddering theologians, whatever their age.
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