Unpacking the Covenant of Works
Every advocate of covenant theology will hold their own view is the correct one. I must admit that I am no different in this respect. One of the difficulties, then, in distinguishing a “proper” view into the covenants versus its alternatives is to make equally clear that some alternatives are altogether unorthodox, while others are simply erroneous. Now, if this bit of charity was all there was to it, things would not be so difficult. On the other hand, not all technically orthodox errors are equal. Error is not static. It does not exist in isolation from other doctrines.
Consequently, some of the errors regarding covenant theology—and, in particular, those which emerged in the twentieth century flight from classical, metaphysical thinking—will create larger, gaping holes in the system of Christian orthodoxy than others. When we examine such errors about the covenant of works, we notice a series of paradoxes. We have things that (perhaps, at first glance) may not seem to go together. What I maintain is that traditional Reformed covenant theology saw a unity of these things, whereas more modern varieties have tended to pit one of these elements against another.
Those four unities are as follows:
(i.) Adam’s arrangement was gracious and legal;
(ii.) Adam’s objectives were natural and covenantal;
(iii.) Adam’s ability was perfect and extrinsic;
(iv.) Adam’s sin came to us by generation and imputation.
Let us examine each in turn.
Adam’s Arrangement Was Gracious and Legal.
The first problem here is often a matter of semantics, though, when pressed, reveals a creeping biblicism. Beeke and Jones point out,
that most seventeenth-century Reformed theologians understood grace in a more general sense than simply equating it with redemptive favor … Primarily, grace refers to God’s free favor to His creatures and the blessings He gives to them. In the covenant of works, Adam received the grace of benevolence; in the covenant of grace, he received the grace of mercy.1
Roberts gives two reasons to establish this fact:
First, “God — the creator of Adam and all things — has an absolute supremacy over all, and as absolute a liberty to dispose, as he will, of all. He might as creator have dealt only in a supreme way of command, requiring duty from Adam without any promise of reward: but he condescends to Adam, enters into a covenant and promise with him of his mere good pleasure, being no way necessitated or obligated thereunto. And that was mere grace.”
Second, “Adam thought perfect and upright, and though perfectly preserving in that integrity, could merit no reward, nor any promise of reward. For when he had done all he could, he should have been an unprofitable servant, having done nothing but what was duty.”2
We often overlook the most obvious facts, and even the most obvious words. Recall the words blessed and given: “And God blessed them … ‘Behold, I have given you’” (Gen. 1:28, 29). And then, by way of contrast, “Then the LORD God said, “It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper fit for him” (2:18).
If that state of affairs was not good, and God did something about it that was its perfect remedy, then the opposite state of affairs would have to be good—more blessing, more creational grace. How did such grace play a role in Adam’s moral duties God had given him? “Adam needed help from God to obey the law.”3
I have hinted in passing that objections to our doctrine of the covenants can come in the form of historical revision. Sometimes these errant paths can even be based on historical truths. Barthians, “For example,” insisted that,
“the [Westminster Confession of Faith’s] distinction between a prefall covenant of works and postfall covenant of grace … is not found in the writings of John Calvin, and was only first expressed among the Reformed in the writings of Zacharias Ursinus, an author of the [Heidelberg Catechism].”4
What motivated Barth and his followers, theologically speaking? In the first place, there can be no revelation of God back behind Christ, and there cannot be any “static” conception of God in which His being determines His act, but He must be wholly free. Long story short, he must relate creation and covenant to each other in a way that maintains these two presuppositions or theological values. So the creation is “the external basis for the covenant,” and the covenant is “the internal basis of creation.”5 “Thus,” Barth wrote, “the covenant is the goal of creation and creation the way to the covenant.”6 Or elsewhere, “If creation takes precedence historically, the covenant does so in substance.”7 That greater “internal,” driving force is the love of God, so that it is not enough that creation or nature or morality or works have a gracious element. One gets the sense that anything objective in God’s world or in man’s thoughts are only a trellis in relation to the true vine of God’s free acts of salvation, and if the trellis no longer supports the growth of this grace, then so much for the nature of those things.
In this monocovenantal view of the Scriptures, Barth saw the whole as the covenant of grace. This is just one of several features of this theology that caused critics to try to pin him down as a universalist. If this is a saving grace and covers the whole, then this is a particular grace—but particular only as to what it does. If it does leave anyone out, it is not clear how it does so. Of course, it also helps to know that Barth could not really consider the Genesis account to be literal history. Consequently, the change of man’s state from innocence to sinner under wrath, must also be minimized if not outright denied. What then did Barth think of the tradition of the Westminster Standards concerning this covenant of grace? In short, it amounted to legalism. It suggests that our natural relationship to God is fundamentally merited and less personal.
Holmes Rolston III took the Barthian premises to a more strident set of conclusions.8 Briefly summarized, his view was this: If the Westminster doctrine of the covenant of works is true, then salvation by grace alone is not true. They both cannot be true. That “condition of perfect and personal obedience” (WCF. VII.2) implies merit. The conditionality of the Mosaic covenant—“if a person does them, he shall live by them” (Lev. 18:5)—is said to be read back into Eden. But if that original promise was really one of fellowship with God, then that rests our relationship to God on our merit. Beyond that, Rolston saw that classical Reformed covenant theology made the natural law inseparable from this covenant, and this, Venema writes, “binds man’s conscience perpetually as a creature … which is sharply distinguished from the sphere of God’s grace toward his people in Christ.”9
Engaging in the usual Barthian revision of Calvin toward their ends, Rolston wrote, that Calvin,
Speaks often of both the order and of the divine grace first instituted. The part given to man is reflexive of grace. From the start Calvin transcends the concept of order as primarily moral and legal and places this under the higher order of grace. What is paramount is that God is gracious and requires acknowledgment of his grace.10
In other words, the Barthian tradition sees the priority of grace before law to be the priority of special grace, yet over all mankind.
Returning to the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, we have seen the dominant view that it was symbolic and sacramental. Alternatives can also be ruled out. In the first place, we can rule out that there was some inherent quality to the tree, as if these qualities in God or even in man should depend upon a lower source. In the second place, we can rule out that this tree would cause Adam and Eve to know things in a better way, since to grasp at knowledge above and beyond what is appropriate to the creature is not better but worse. And they were already reasonable and moral beings.11 Thirdly, while there is a connection between the serpent’s use of those words in 3:5, at the core of his temptation, the lie is a twisted truth, not the truth a straightened lie—as Roberts says, “can we probably imagine that God would denominate this the tree of knowledge from the devil’s impudent lie in the serpent?”12
The point of considering this tree here is to show the legal character. It is simple positive law, but (remember), not so as to be “arbitrary” in the modern, meaningless sense of that word. But by God’s kind and good will, a boundary between creaturely good and the Uncreated, which can never belong properly to the creature.
That’s what makes it law. It is difficult to explain this element of the account as anything but a thing forbidden, linked to a threat of punishment, and execution of the same. This is a law to which disobedience corresponds. Such a law, in order to be just, must be intelligible. Such a body of intelligible words in the form of commands implies a personal relationship. Contrary to the Barthians: Law is not impersonal; it implies personal relationship. Reformed theologians go beyond this and say that this was a test. They use the word “probationary” to describe that time period in between the command itself and the disobedience of that command. What was at stake, and what went into the name “of the knowledge of good and evil,” so said Beeke and Jones, in summarizing another Westminster divine, Anthony Burgess, was “that ‘the divine decree and appointment of God’ limited Adam from knowing more than what God had appointed.”13 As with all other divine law, this is good for man. It is good for creatures to know that they are creatures, to be content with being creatures, and to not attempt to be anything but creatures.
Above all, perhaps, the harmony of grace and law can be found in God’s providence to superintend both covenants in one decree. Samuel Rutherford is summarized in teaching that, “God’s threat in the garden was actually partly legal and partly evangelical insofar as the threatening of death was ‘executed upon Christ,’ which spared His elect from the second death, but not from the first death.”14 But notice that God had this all in mind in opening up particular grace to Adam and Eve by the end of Genesis 3, where it had been shut at the outset of Genesis 3. The command in Genesis 2—the intent of the threat of death was not inconsistent with this. Had God meant to wipe them out to the fullest, at the moment of sin, they would have been wiped out.
Adam’s Objectives Were Natural and Covenantal.
By “objectives” here I mean it in the broader teleological sense of the design of a thing. So it has both its first and final cause in view. In other words, I do not simply mean those things that Adam consciously had before him, having all of the information that human beings would ever have on the subject. I mean all of the objects—intellectual and moral—that make Adam the actor that He was meant to be and make the stage what it was meant to be, with all of its props, and scenes, and other characters in the play.
Shortly summarizing the point we read from Francis Roberts last time, Beeke and Jones write that, “The moral law possessed primary significance in the covenant of works … Since Adam was created in God’s image, the law of God was written on his heart.”15 One member of the Westminster Assembly, John Lightfoot, put it in this way: “Adam heard as much in the garden, as Israel did at Sinai, but only in fewer words and without thunder.”16
That this implies the whole substance of first and second table is relevant for the state of man in the Garden. But that brings nature and covenant together. As Thomas Goodwin described the original power of the law of nature being more than simply a set of moral obligations, but including the nature to love and to do, this “required that God himself should become [their] object, … and so to give man a power to know and delight in him.”17
Now, prior to the fall, Adam was inclined by God to wholly approve of that moral law; and, after the fall, Adam had inclined his own heart differently, and, in fact, poisoned his own heart with a distaste for that moral law—but that there is a moral law etched into the heart of man, which makes man what a man is, that “mannishness of man,” as Francis Schaeffer once called it, is continuous before and after the fall.
The good man became a bad man—but the man did not become a non-man. And moral law shaping belongs to the nature of man as man. Romans 2:14-15 demonstrates this as well, as Paul’s words about the Gentiles obviously refers to the postlapsarian situation.
It is not only written on the hearts of everyone, but it becomes a basis both for their conscious moral action and for their excusing themselves when they go against it. As with the natural theology implication in Romans 1, so with the natural law implication in Romans 2. The critic of objective nature cannot say that this was merely divine speech and not, in any sense, human knowledge, since there would be no way for man to consciously, deliberately perform blameworthy actions with that knowledge if they did not know anything at all.
It should be recalled that in the section on God’s law in the Westminster Confession, the relationship between moral law and that natural continuity transcending the pre and postlapsarian change of states, is covered; and so clearly that we must say that the twentieth century Reformed contingents that turned inward against objective nature are out of step with their confessional standards here as well. Let us examine the first two points of Chapter 19 in the Confession to see it.
God gave to Adam a law, as a covenant of works, by which he bound him and all his posterity to personal, entire, exact, and perpetual obedience; promised life upon the fulfilling, and threatened death upon the breach of it; and endued him with power and ability to keep it.
This law, after his fall, continued to be a perfect rule of righteousness; and, as such, was delivered by God upon mount Sinai in ten commandments, and written in two tables; the first four commandments containing our duty towards God, and the other six our duty to man.18
All of this reflects the view of Roberts, that Adam was created in the covenant, whereas for Johannes Cocceius, Adam was created for the covenant—that is, the covenant relationship was an additional development. As we saw with the statement by Vos last time, the distinction between nature and covenant is a logical distinction and not a temporal sequence. Edward Fischer, a contemporary of the Westminster divines, argued that the moral and natural law was the matter of the covenant of works whereas the positive law command of Genesis 2:16-17 was the form of the covenant of works.19
I will offer one example of how the natural law existing with this covenant has implications for moral action down to the present day. Adam’s federal headship has implications for the natural order of male and female as well.
That Adam was the sole audience to the announcement of the covenant, and that he later taught it to Eve, has the support from several features of the text. First, the words central to the covenant (Gen. 2:16-17) are described prior to the description of the creation of Eve (Gen. 2:21-22). Second, to quote Roberts, “when God forbids the eating of the tree of knowledge under pain of death (wherein the promise of life contrariwise is implied), he speaks only in the singular number, namely: to Adam only.”20
Adam’s Ability Was Perfect and Extrinsic
Recall how the Confession adds that little detail with respect to Adam’s creaturely capacities. These capacities were perfect in the way that a creature may be called perfect—lacking in nothing in proportion as it is made. But if there is anything intrinsic to the creature, it is precisely what it lacks. Here is the Confession’s statement on the creation of man and woman.
After God had made all other creatures, he created man, male and female, with reasonable and immortal souls, endued with knowledge, righteousness, and true holiness, after his own image, having the law of God written in their hearts, and power to fulfil it; and yet under a possibility of transgressing, being left to the liberty of their own will, which was subject unto change (IV.2).
Having discussed the objective nature of both Adam and the moral universe he inhabited, it is necessary to also speak of that subjective nature—that is, his performance within the covenant and the prospects of him succeeding. And the clue in the Confession are those last words: “being left to the liberty of their own will, which was subject unto change.”
Alongside of that perfection of humanity that Adam had to work with internally, covenant theologians will also stress the perfect circumstances in which Adam acted. This is especially practical because it shows us how great an evil it was to sin when there was “no good reason to”. “The greater God’s lovingkindness to Adam,” Roberts remarked, “the deeper Adam’s unkindness to God.”21
Roberts is a good example of a covenant theologian, within the context of Reformed orthodoxy, who applied the Augustinian explanation of the origin of evil within this study. He asks the question about the causes of Adam’s breach of the covenant.
The causes of Adam’s sin and covenant-breach, thus brought to pass, were several. The instrumental cause remote was the serpent and the devil in him; immediate was the woman, Adam’s wife. The efficient cause of Adam’s sin is hard to be found out. Properly, Adam’s sin had no efficient cause at all, for God made man upright, and God, as he cannot be tempted with evil, so he tempteth no man to evil. But Adam — being created mutable, though upright, and having a will flexible to good or to evil, and not being confirmed and established immovably in good, but left to his own power and liberty (for God was not bound to confirm, and uphold him) — he declined unto evil, and became like the beasts that perish.22
All of this is to say that Adam’s ability to obey—while perfect insofar as he was upheld by God’s grace—was extrinsic to him. That is, this was not an intrinsic or self-sufficient ability. If God should will that Adam be left to his own mutable qualities, then that which was mutable could do nothing but mutate. That which was made ex nihilo has nowhere to go but ad nihilo. There is additional support for this from Paul’s statement,
“For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of him who subjected it, in hope” (Rom. 8:20).
Now our inability is of a far greater kind. To say that we cannot satisfactorily obey the law of God is to say that we cannot keep the covenant of works, yet unlike Adam, we are born into the world in a different state. What matters in this early stage of our study is that we see the cause of that state as bound up in that action of Adam in which we were included.
Adam’s Sin Came to Us by Generation and Imputation.
Another implication of that federal, or representative, principle, is that in entering into this covenant with the first man, God also entered that same covenant with all of Adam’s posterity. Many who come to Reformed theology without also making a study of covenant theology think they are distancing themselves from the Pelagian error, and from the man-centered exaltation of the will as causal to God’s grace, but who do not see the inseparable relationship between inheriting Adam’s sin and inheriting Adam’s guilt. The Reformed doctrine does not content itself with affirming that all are born into the world, as members of Adam’s race, having an altered state that the Reformed have called by the name total depravity. The Reformed doctrine goes further in seeing that this state of spiritual death and the biological death that is contained within the same curse is all a unity. We get a sense of both in the Shorter Catechism, Question 16.
Q. Did all mankind fall in Adam’s first transgression?
A. The covenant being made with Adam, not only for himself, but for his posterity; all mankind, descending from him by ordinary generation, sinned in him, and fell with him in his first transgression.
See how more is being claimed than that Adam’s sin permanently distorted our nature. Adam’s sin covenantally included us as sinners in his sin, as guilty within his guilt.
I mentioned that in Romans 5:12-21, Paul is giving us an analogy between Adam and Christ, as well as an analogy between the way in which Adam’s action had consequences for his offspring and the way in which Christ’s action had consequences for his offspring. Let us then read the whole text and pay careful attention to the analogies.
Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all sinned—for sin indeed was in the world before the law was given, but sin is not counted where there is no law. Yet death reigned from Adam to Moses, even over those whose sinning was not like the transgression of Adam, who was a type of the one who was to come. But the free gift is not like the trespass. For if many died through one man’s trespass, much more have the grace of God and the free gift by the grace of that one man Jesus Christ abounded for many. And the free gift is not like the result of that one man’s sin. For the judgment following one trespass brought condemnation, but the free gift following many trespasses brought justification. For if, because of one man’s trespass, death reigned through that one man, much more will those who receive the abundance of grace and the free gift of righteousness reign in life through the one man Jesus Christ. Therefore, as one trespass led to condemnation for all men, so one act of righteousness leads to justification and life for all men. For as by the one man’s disobedience the many were made sinners, so by the one man’s obedience the many will be made righteous. Now the law came in to increase the trespass, but where sin increased, grace abounded all the more, so that, as sin reigned in death, grace also might reign through righteousness leading to eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.
The first obstacle must be removed as to the very word imputation, since some will say that this is not even a biblical word. This is another instance of biblicism. In this case, the absence of the English word form ignores that synonyms of this English word are used to translate the Greek word logizomai in its various forms. Those synonyms include the words “count,” “account,” “consider,” and “reckon.” It is obvious enough in context that these mean the same thing as each other.
When it comes to imputation, Charles Hodge gave an excellent basic definition and theological application. He said,
To impute is simply to attribute to, as we are said to impute good or bad motives to any one. In the juridical and theological sense of the word, to impute is to attribute anything to a person or persons, upon adequate grounds, as the judicial or meritorious reason of reward or punishment.23
The fact of death by itself proves imputed guilt. That we tend not to see that only means that we have not yet put the premises together, or else that we are unaware of the biblical teaching supporting each premise. But so it is, that, if,
(1) Death is the legal consequence of sin (Rom. 6:23; Ezk. 18:4);
(2) All human beings born to Adam’s race by ordinary generation are born spiritually dead and thus on their way to physical death (Eph. 2:1-3);
(3) The cause of this death was prior to their birth, and thus prior to them having done anything either good or bad (1 Cor. 15:22, Rom. 5:12);
(4) Therefore, it follows that all of us born to the race of Adam are sentenced with that punishment delivered for his original sin.
How should we respond to the objection that this is not fair? If we follow the teaching of Paul in Romans 5, for example, and if we want to be consistent, such a one would also need to complain that it is not fair that Christ represented His people by His act just as Adam did with his. God has made of reality His story, and not ours. And it has pleased Him to make Adam represent the first humanity, and Christ (the Second Adam) represent the new.
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1. Beeke and Jones, A Puritan Theology, 229-30.
2. Roberts, God’s Covenants, I:121.
3. Beeke and Jones, A Puritan Theology, 230.
4. Venema, Christ and Covenant Theology, 4.
5. Venema, Christ and Covenant Theology, 6.
6. Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, 3.1: The Doctrine of Creation (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1958), 97.
7. Barth, Church Dogmatics, 3.1.231-32.
8. Holmes Rolston III, John Calvin versus the Westminster Confession (Richmond, VA: John Knox, 1972).
9. Venema, Christ and Covenant Theology, 9-10.
10. Rolston III, “Responsible Man in Reformed Theology: Calvin versus the Westminster Confession,” Scottish Journal of Theology 23, 2 (1970): 139.
11. Roberts mentions those who erroneously believed it was “to confer the use of reason to our first parents, who are imagined to be created like infants without the use of reason” (God’s Covenants, I:137).
12. Roberts, God’s Covenants, I:138.
13. Anthony Burgess, Vindiciae Legis, 103, quoted in Beeke and Jones, A Puritan Theology, 224.
14. Samuel Rutherford, The Covenant of Life Opened, 4, quoted in Beeke and Jones, A Puritan Theology, 225.
15. Beeke and Jones, A Puritan Theology, 221.
16. John Lightfoot, Miscellanies Christian and Judiciall, quoted in Beeke and Jones, A Puritan Theology, 221.
17. Thomas Goodwin, Of the Creatures, in Works, 7:44, quoted in Beeke and Jones, A Puritan Theology, 222.
18. Westminster Confession of Faith, XIX.1-2.
19. Edward Fischer, summarized in Rowland Ward, God and Adam: Reformed Theology and the Creation Covenant (Wantira, Australia: New Melbourne Press, 2003), 102.
20. Roberts, God’s Covenants, I:115.
21. Roberts, God’s Covenants, I:155.
22. Roberts, God’s Covenants, I:147.
23. Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology, II:194.
