Another name for Reformed Theology is Covenant Theology. The idea is that God relates to man through the structure of a covenant. Covenants are what structures redemptive history and even the intra-Trinitarian decision to redeem a people for God. So when Covenant Theologians (myself included) look at redemptive history, we see an eternal covenant (Hebrews 13:20); a covenant with Noah to not destroy the world again with water; a covenant with Abraham that promises a land, a people and his seed to bless the nations; a covenant with Moses that shows many things about redemption and reconciliation with God; a covenant with David that promises and eternal king and the New Covenant where all these promises are enacted.
But many (most?) of us also see a covenant in the garden of Eden. A slightly smaller subset of us see two covenants in the garden. The second of the two covenants is the less controversial of the pair. Covenant Theologians call it the Covenant of Grace. God articulates this covenant after the fall when he cursed the serpent. In that curse he promised a victor over Satan, his scheme, and his minions. The way Covenant Theologians see it, this covenant is administrated or carried forward through the rest of God’s redemptive covenants. Incidentally, that is where the name of this blog comes from. The 1689 London Baptist Confession does a masterful job of articulating the covenant of grace. In the chapter on God’s Covenants [1] it reads:
This covenant is revealed in the gospel; first of all to Adam in the promise of salvation by the seed of the woman, and afterwards by farther steps, until the full discovery thereof was completed in the New Testament…
As I’ve said, this covenant is the least controversial. The other one, the older one is less agreed upon. It is called the Covenant of Works and I think the name may be part of it’s problem. Let me explain a bit and then defend some. The Covenant of Works is the covenant that God made with Adam when he created him and placed him in the garden. It is the covenant that Adam broke. When God made Adam he made the garden of Eden for him and gave him one rule: Don’t eat from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. That was it. He could climb in it, put a swing up in it, even build a tree fort and live in it if he wanted to. He just had to not eat the fruit of the tree. Next God created Eve and put both of them in the garden. It was Adam’s job to tell Eve this rule and they were set. They had been created to live eternally and as long as they didn’t do that one thing they remained alive. That’s the Covenant of Works.
There are men whom I really respect who don’t agree with this. John Piper and John Murray are the big two who come to mind. website says [2] that “he does see some merit in the concept of a pre-fall covenant of works, but he has not taken a position on their specific conception of the covenant of grace.” For Murray, see “The Adamic Administration” in his collected works, volume II. Having read their objections it seems to me that the definition of the Covenant of Works could be better termed. They both make decent points but neither really convinced me that the concept is wrong. A little defense is in order.
Hosea 6:7 says “But like Adam they transgressed the covenant; there they dealt faithlessly with me.” What this verse means is complicated and debated. I don’t want to really dig into it but just make a few observations. The phrase “like Adam” could be translated as “like mankind” (KJV) or “at Adam” (TNIV). The problem with taking “Adam” as “mankind” there is that all of humanity didn’t break a covenant with God. Or, if they did, it must have been done early on by a single representative like Adam in the garden. The problem with taking “Adam” as a place is that the only place in the Bible that “Adam” is a location is in Joshua 3:16 where God and Israel are being faithful to the covenant and not violating it. This interpretation does have the fact that the second half over the verse says “there they dealt faithlessly with me” which would seem to indicate that God is referring to a location. But given the difficulty with taking the first half of the verse as a location, this seems unlikely. Perhaps the second half is not referring to the first but to the situation in Hosea’s time. The next verse begins by mentioning the city of Gilead, perhaps the second half of the verse is setting us up for what comes next. It seems best to recognize that Adam was in a covenant with God and that he violated it. The only covenant that could have been was the Covenant of Works.
But was the Covenant of Works a covenant of works righteousness or was it a grace-filled covenant? I’ve given that answer away in the title of this post. Consider this for a moment. Adam didn’t earn eternal life in that covenant, God granted it. Remember when God instituted the covenant he gave Adam one rule: don’t eat from that tree. But the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil wasn’t the only special tree in the garden. There was another one called the Tree of Life and of that tree Adam and Eve were free to eat. It would provide them eternal life. After they’d fallen, God removed them from the garden because he feared that Adam might “reach out his hand and take also of the tree of life and eat, and live forever.” (Gen 3:22) How horrible would that have been to live eternally in a fallen state? Today we’d call that hell literally. So before the fall Adam and Eve had eternal life but after the fall it was removed from them and both the offer and the retraction were God’s grace.
| website says [2] that “he does see some merit in the concept of a pre-fall covenant of works, but he has not taken a position on their specific conception of the covenant of grace.” For Murray, see “The Adamic Administration” in his collected works, volume II. |
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