My approach assumes that all other covenants are not as the paedobaptists would have us believe, simply different administrations of the one covenant of grace, but conditional covenants, separate from the covenant of grace or new covenant. These conditional covenants were dependent upon man’s obedience for their temporal blessings; an obedience he was incapable of providing. One can think of it as the ‘carrot and stick’ principle. These conditional covenants held up the carrot of temporal blessings upon obedience, with these serving as a type of the antitype that is found in the new covenant. They served to show human inability, for if man was incapable of attaining temporal blessings, then how much less is he capable of attaining that which is spiritual and eternal. Inevitably, Israel failed to abide by the covenantal conditions, and when her sin became overbearing to the point of endangering the nation, God, through his prophets, would remind her of her covenantal responsibilities, and the consequent temporal punishment. This punishment was the stick. Even this temporal punishment served as a type, typifying that which awaited those who refused to believe in the promised Messiah. What we essentially have then is a covenant(s) whose conditions have to be obeyed to secure blessings and the threat of punishment for failing to fulfill the conditions. Israel would always fail and, in her failure, God would point to another covenant, one in which all the conditions had been kept by the Messiah spoken of in the prophets.
The problem with the Jews was that they afforded the subsidiary covenants an efficacy they never possessed. These covenants spoke of temporal curses and blessings, and were in themselves typical of the eternal blessings available to all those in the new covenant. Only, of course, with the latter, all the conditions have been fulfilled by Christ. The Jews wrongly believed the old covenant to be unto salvation, associating it with those eternal blessings that lay only in the domain of the new covenant. This is very much what we see in the new perspective, for example, in his exile motif Wright speaks of Israel’s exile under the old covenant, and rightly says that this was the result of the Deuteronomic curse, but he then makes the mistake of interpreting Jesus’ curse-bearing death in this context, while failing to emphasize the fact that Jesus’ death and the reconciliation he has accomplished for both Jews and Gentiles was the antitype, that of which the Deuteronomic curse was but a type. The punishment or exile of Israel served to typify the exile Jesus saves his people from, which is nothing less than the separation from God under the original covenant of works. This is again a major weakness with the paedobaptist paradigm, believing the old covenant to be an earlier version or administration of the covenant of grace, they then ascribe to the old what only belongs to the new covenant, and thereby they invest the old with a degree of efficacy it never possessed. This will become more apparent as we proceed. It is important to keep in mind the fact that the only covenant of which Jesus Christ is the mediator is the new covenant, it, therefore, makes no sense to look for salvation outside of this covenant.
1. Although I refer to this in the singular, it needs to be borne in mind that there are many new perspectives.
2. Many speak of the covenant of grace, I will, however, refer to this as the new covenant because this is the only covenant where salvific grace is found.
3. Frame, Systematic Theology, 79–80.
4. Woolsey, “The Covenant in the Church Fathers,” 42–43.
5. Owen, Works, 22, 147.
The Old Perspective
The old perspective is that understanding of salvation associated with the Protestant Reformers; men like Luther, Calvin, and Zwingli. It is often referred to as the Lutheran Perspective, principally because of the emphasis Luther placed on sin and justification in his answer to the question, “What must I, a sinner, do to be saved?” Along with the doctrine of total depravity, the most important doctrine to come out of the Reformation was Luther’s rediscovery of justification by faith alone. This rediscovery was the spark that ignited the Protestant Reformation.
Luther’s tumultuous life as an Augustinian monk and his quest to find acceptance with God came to an end when he understood that God had provided in his Son both the forgiveness of sins and a positive righteousness. On coming to a knowledge of the truth as revealed in Romans 1:17, “The righteous shall live by faith,” Luther commented: “Then I grasped that the justice of God is that righteousness by which through grace and sheer mercy God justifies us through faith. Thereupon I felt myself to be reborn and to have gone through open doors into paradise . . . This passage of Paul became to me a gate to heaven.”6 It was justification by faith alone that became, as Calvin declared, “the main hinge on which religion turns,”7 and by “religion” he meant the Protestant Faith.
The Reformers believed all humanity to be by nature sinful. All fell in Adam, and we have all inherited Adam’s sin and sinful disposition. We are all guilty before God, not only because of the first or original sin but because of our own actual sins. It is because of sin that we are all estranged from God and exiled, and incapable of being reconciled to him by anything we might do. What is needed is for another to take our place and do what we are incapable of doing, thereby making God propitious toward us by taking away his punishment, and, also, securing a righteousness without which, none can stand in the presence of the holy God.
The old perspective, or so Wright would have us believe, saw in first-century Judaism a legalistic religion, where the Jews believed that through their own works, or as Wright says, “pulling themselves up by their own moral bootstraps,”8 they could achieve salvation. This, however, is something of a caricature. The Jews believed that they were God’s special people because they were the recipients of the law, they were God’s covenantal people. It was because of this that they believed their works were acceptable to God. They were, however, as we shall see, looking to the wrong covenant; one that offered no possibility of life, but only condemnation and death.
The law as revealed on Mount Sinai was a revival of the covenant of works made with Adam, only where there was a possibility for Adam to provide covenant obedience, there was now, since the fall of Adam, no such possibility; it is now a law, because of the weakness of the flesh, only unto death. This is shown in the manner in which the law was given, in “blazing fire and darkness and gloom and a tempest” (Heb 12:18). Indeed, so terrifying was the sight that Moses said, “I tremble with fear” (v.21). This all signified condemnation.
The Reformation view tells us that God sent his Son into the world to do what sinful man is incapable of doing. God himself became a man like us, yet without sin, to bring man unto himself. He was born in the natural way, born under God’s law, in order that he might redeem his people from that law (Gal 4:4). He did this through his vicarious obedience to both the law’s penal and preceptive demands. Traditionally this has been expressed in terms of Christ’s active and passive obedience. This formula, if it might be referred to as such, is used simply to, “emphasize the two distinct aspects of our Lord’s vicarious obedience.”9 In the former, Jesus met the preceptive demands of the law by perfectly obeying God’s commandments. God the Father