Among some representatives of 1689 federalism, this dialectical tension wherein the covenant of grace both communicated Christ’s benefits and was not administered ends up breaking the wrong direction. Although the covenants of the old economy “carried the promise of another covenant,” they revealed but did not apply the substance of this covenant of grace.
More specifically, “Through typology, the Old Covenant portrayed salvation in Jesus Christ, but it did not offer salvation in and of itself.” This point becomes clear as Renihan argued: “The covenant of grace is the in-breaking of the covenant of redemption into history through the progressive revelation and retroactive application of the New Covenant.” For Reformed covenant theology, the ordinances of the OT covenants serve as means of grace to apply Christ and his benefits proactively, namely in advance, to believers before Christ came. The 1689 federalist position that new covenant blessings retroactively applied to OT believers entails that those saints did not receive the full experience of saving benefits until after Christ inaugurated the new covenant. Far from reading too much into infelicitous words, Renihan has written a whole volume explicitly defending the notion that OT saints did not enter heaven until after Christ came in the incarnation. Although he affirmed that OT believers trusted in Christ, which guaranteed their future rescue from Sheol as a place of privation, he nonetheless resolved the dialectical tension about the lack of administration for the covenant of grace by rejecting that OT believers had the full experience of Christ’s blessings, specifically in that they did not enter heaven until Christ came in the incarnation.

Harrison Perkins, “Peering Over the Fence: Presbyterian Reflections on Baptist Neighbors Doing Covenant Theology,” The Southern Baptist Journal of Theology 29/3 (Fall 2025), 28–29.

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Post authored by:

• Harrison Perkins

  

  Harrison Perkins (PhD, Queen’s University Belfast; MDiv, Westminster Seminary California) is pastor of Oakland Hills Community Church (OPC), a member of the of the Heidelberg Reformation Association, a Senior Research Fellow at the Craig Center for the Study of the Westminster Standards,  online instructor in church history at Westminster Theological Seminary, a visiting lecturer in systematic theology at Edinburgh Theological Seminary, and author of Reformed Covenant Theology: A Systematic Introduction. You can read more from him at Pastor Perks.

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