Further, the notion of the law as specially imposed by God with a view to reward also points to the absurdity of seeing Christ as under law for his own sake: again, the hypostatic union itself was quite sufficient to make Christ’s human nature worthy of eternal life for itself. Here we see the obvious doctrinal intersection of the covenant of works and that of redemption in the context of Christology and mediation [...] [A]s a representative human being, Christ must both fulfill the law positively on behalf of humanity because of Adam’s abject failure so to do, and he must undergo punishment of death because of Adam’s breaking of the original covenant. It is not Christ’s ontology as the Divine-human person which requires this, but his covenantal status as representative which demands it.

Carl Trueman, “John Owen on Justification”. Justified in Christ (New York: Mentor, 2007), 89.

A common question in Sabbatarian circles is whether or not believers should go out to eat on Sunday. The line of reasoning is that even though the believer may be observing the Sabbath, he or she is not letting the people who are serving him or her observe the Sabbath. Meredith Kline has an interesting paragraph on the subject in Kingdom Prologue, p. 81.

Whether the Sabbath is viewed as God’s promise of the consummation of the covenant order or as man’s pledge of devotion to the covenant suzerain, it is always a sign of the covenant. In this primal sign the covenant receives comprehensive expression, for the Sabbath brings out the nature of the covenant as both personal relationship and historical kingdom program. For Israel the Sabbath was the sign of the covenant par excellence (Exodus 31:16, 17). That the Sabbath was appointed to the covenant community at the creation suggests that it is of perpetual validity, as long at least as that community experiences life and history as a succession of days. However, if we appreciate this essential connection of the Sabbath with the covenant, and especially if we recognized that the Sabbath is always covenantal promise and privilege as well as duty, we will avoid thinking of it abstractly as at any time after the Fall a universal ordinance of general application to the world at large. The Sabbath belongs to the covenant community exclusively.

According to Kline, it seems that so long as the people serving you are not in the covenant, there should not be a concern. Presumably, if they were in the covenant, they would not be working on the Lord’s Day. However, it still may not be prudent to [even indirectly] encourage people in their anti-covenantal activities. This is a very sticky situation, for one could suggest a multitude of examples where we may be encouraging people in this direction.

Please feel free to add to this discussion with comments.

The distinction between the covenant as a theological concept and as a metaphysical concept is one of degree rather than of principle.¹ The Bible is not silent about things metaphysical. If we use the broadest possible definition of metaphysics as the theory of the nature of being, the Bible must be allowed to set the perimeters of any such metaphysic. If the Bible tells us truth about God’s being, we are given most important metaphysical teaching. In this section we shall first treat the nature of the being of God, then the nature of the being of nature. viz. creation, and finally the nature of man’s being in particular and how these three “kinds” of being relate. (Continue Reading…)

1. That is, if we take metaphysics to be not autonomous but rather subject to biblical teaching as a subset of philosophy in its ministerial (rather than magisterial) use, as we need to understand it.↩

Current discussion on the nature and substance of covenant theology has centered around biblico-theological as well as systematico-theological questions. While these discussions will have some bearing upon the subject of this paper, I want to focus mainly on the philosophical and apologetical ramifications of the concept of covenant. More narrowly, I want to investigate into the relationship between the concept of the covenant and epistemology. I will argue that the theological concept of the covenant can provide some needed solutions to epistemological impasses in philosophy. If man is in everything everywhere and always “coram deo” and epistemology is at bottom covenantally construed, this will have consequences for our apologetics. The results of the best of Reformed covenant theology, both biblico-theologically and systematico-theologically, will then feed into a uniquely biblical epistemology which will, in turn, ground a powerful apologetic for our times and issue a covenantal call to repentance. (Continue Reading…)