On The New Covenant (Part 4)

by on August 8, 2025

Administration of the Covenant of Grace

My Baptist friends tend to talk about the new covenant in ways that do not actually conform to what Scripture says about the new covenant. My Baptist friends tend to make the new covenant more eschatological than it actually is. Were the new covenant as eschatological as they seem to think we would not expect to find the sort of language about the administration of the new covenant that one finds in Hebrews 10.

According to Hebrews 10:26–31 members of the new covenant church may find themselves in even more jeopardy than existed under Moses. If the new covenant has the sort of characteristics some would have us believe, we would not have expected this sort of language:

Anyone who has set aside the law of Moses dies without mercy on the evidence of two or three witnesses. How much worse punishment, do you think, will be deserved by the one who has spurned the Son of God, and has profaned the blood of the covenant by which he was sanctified, and has outraged the Spirit of grace? (Heb 10:28–29)

In other words, the covenant of grace is not so eschatological that it does not need to be administered. It is not so eschatological that there are not members of new covenant assemblies who turn out to have been hypocrites. This reality, of course, lies behind our Lord’s institution of the ministry of the keys (Matt 16) and church discipline (Matt 18). There are some who have been admitted to the visible covenant community (Heb 6), who have participated in the life of the new covenant church, who have probably even participated in the administration of the sacraments (“been enlightened” and “tasted of the powers of the age to come”), who nevertheless fall away. Reformed theology explains this phenomenon by observing that there are two ways of existing in the one covenant of grace (Rom 2:28).1 Not everyone who is admitted to the visible covenant community actually receives the benefits of the covenant of grace. Those benefits are received only by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone, and only the elect ultimately receive them.

In other words, the new covenant is not described in Hebrews any differently than the Abrahamic covenant. Indeed, it is significant that the writer to the Hebrews compares the new covenant church to the church under the Mosaic covenant. He makes a lesser than-greater than comparison. If it was bad to do something under Moses, which was typological, how much more to do the same thing under the new covenant, under which administration the reality is present? The apostle Paul makes a similar argument in 1 Corinthians 10 when he compares the new covenant church to the church of the Exodus and wilderness wandering.

It is these sorts of considerations that lead Reformed folk to see a strong continuity between the Abrahamic administration of the covenant of grace, which required the initiation of covenant children and under which blessings were promised to believers and to their children, and the new covenant. The covenant of grace had to be administered under Abraham. Under Abraham Ishmael was admitted to membership in the covenant community. He received the sign and seal of the covenant of grace, even though Scripture clearly says that he was not in the line of the promise. It is hard for Reformed folk to see how a Baptist could have obeyed our Lord’s command to initiate Ishmael.

The new covenant is a new administration of the Abrahamic covenant. The typological elements have been fulfilled. The Mosaic overlay has expired. The bloodshed is finished. Circumcision is now indifferent. The pattern of initiating believers and their children into the covenant community continues. Baptists tend to argue that the command in Acts 2:38 to “repent and believe” and the inclusion of gentiles in verse 39 so conditions the clause, “for the promise is to you and to your children,” that even that passage, in their reading, proves that, in the new covenant, only believers (or at least those who profess faith) can be baptized.

The different ways of reading Acts 2:38–39 illustrate the great gulf that lies between Reformed and Baptist hermeneutics. When Reformed folk look at verse 38 and the command to the heads of thousands of households to “repent and be baptized,” we see the analogy with Abraham, who was not an infant, but who was also the head of a household. He was initiated into the covenant community as an adult and his children were initiated into the covenant community as infants. Those heads of those households were in the same position as Abraham. The analogy with Abraham is only strengthened by the invocation of the Abrahamic covenantal formula: “For the promise is to you and to your children.” The essence of the covenant of grace remains unchanged: “I will be a God to you and to your children.” My Baptist friends object by pointing out the inclusion of gentiles. I reply by saying, so what? The Reformed argument is not that Abraham was not typological. Of course gentiles are being included. That is the fulfillment of the promise to Abraham, that God would make him the father of many nations. This is exactly what Paul argues in Romans 4. Abraham is the father of all who believe, both Jew and gentile. The inclusion of gentiles does not weaken the Reformed case; it strengthens it by completing the analogy with Abraham.

If Abraham is, as God’s Word says, the father of all believers, and if God promised blessings to believers and to their children, and if he commanded the initiation of covenant children, if and those covenant promises and command remain in effect, then we must initiate children into the covenant community just as father Abraham did. Yes, females are also initiated as part of the administration of the new (Abrahamic) covenant. We do not expect the Lord to call us to sacrifice our children on a mountain. The typological administration has been fulfilled.

Nature, Grace, and Eschatology in the New Covenant

The Baptists are not, strictly speaking, Anabaptists (even though they share a common view of Baptism and even though modern Baptists invoke the Anabaptists as their forebears when it suits them), but they do have one thing in common with them: an over-realized eschatology. Where the medieval church thought of grace as perfecting inherently flawed (by finitude) nature, and the Protestants thought of grace (in redemption) as renewing nature in sinners, the Anabaptists thought about grace or salvation as the destruction of nature. The Baptist movements from 1611 continue a form of this eschatology and nature-grace relationship in the way they look at the new covenant.

Reformed covenant theology reads the promise of the new covenant in Jeremiah 31 in light of the new covenant explanation, and we read it in the way prophetic literature is intended to be read. The new covenant is described in eschatological, absolute terms. The coming of the Messiah is also described in prophetic literature in absolute, eschatological terms. We understand, however, in light of redemptive history that what was described in prophetic literature in absolute terms is fulfilled progressively. Christ did not bring the consummation in his first advent. He inaugurated the Kingdom of God, but he did not consummate it. Arguably this is one reason why the Jews demanded his crucifixion, because he did not satisfy their demand for an earthly, millennial, glorious kingdom.

In discussions with my Baptist friends, it seems as if this question, eschatology, is a central element to the discussion. When Baptists speak about the new covenant they tend to speak in eschatological (consummation) terms rather than in semi-eschatological (inaugurated) terms. The new covenant is part of the inauguration of the last days, but inauguration is a beginning, not the end. Baptists, however, cannot initiate children into the new covenant community because that would contradict their over-realized eschatology. For them, the new covenant is what it is, and has to be what it has to be, because their eschatology is what it is. This is the usually unstated a priori assumption that Baptists make when they think and speak about the new covenant.

Baptists know that they, like Reformed congregations, have unregenerate members, but by administering baptism only to those who make a profession of faith they are doing what they can to ensure a regenerate membership. From a Reformed view of covenant theology, it is quite difficult to see how this is not, at bottom, a form of rationalism. If it is rationalism, that would not be surprising since an over-realized eschatology, which Luther called a theology of glory (theologia gloriae), is just another form of rationalism.

The new covenant is new, it is the fulfillment of God’s promises to Adam, Noah, and to Abraham. It is a new administration of the Abrahamic covenant. The typologies have been fulfilled. The old covenant is the Mosaic covenant. It was obsolete and inferior. Such things are never said in the new covenant about the Abrahamic covenant. Instead, the New Testament reaffirms Abraham as the paradigmatic figure and carries out the Abrahamic pattern by initiating believers and their children into the administration of the covenant of grace. This is why the New Testament simply assumes the “household” pattern throughout Acts. This is the new administration of the Abrahamic covenant.

Note

  1. See R. Scott Clark, “Baptism and the Benefits of Christ :The Double Mode of Communion in the Covenant of Grace,” The Confessional Presbyterian 2 (2006), 3.

Editor’s Note: This article was originally published on the Heidelblog in 2011.

©R. Scott Clark. All Rights Reserved.

You can find the whole series here. 

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  • R. Scott Clark
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    R.Scott Clark is the President of the Heidelberg Reformation Association, the author and editor of, and contributor to several books and the author of many articles. He has taught church history and historical theology since 1997 at Westminster Seminary California. He has also taught at Wheaton College, Reformed Theological Seminary, and Concordia University. He has hosted the Heidelblog since 2007.

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