JUDICIAL WARFARE
Christian Reconstruction and Its Blueprints For Dominion
by Greg Loren Durand

Chapter One:
An Overview of Historic Covenant Theology

       Before commencing an exposition of the theonomic foundation of Reconstructionism, it is necessary to outline the theological premise upon which this book will proceed — that of historic Covenant theology as taught in the Westminster Standards and the other creeds and confessions of the various Reformed denominations. While Covenant theology was first systematized in sixteenth-century Zurich and Geneva, its doctrinal roots go deep into the patristic period.⁽¹⁾ Of course, Covenant theologians would argue that it is, in fact, the theology of the Bible and that to whatever extent one departs from it, he departs from biblical Christianity. J. Ligon Duncan described Covenant theology as follows:

       Covenant theology is the Gospel set in the context of God’s eternal plan of communion with his people, and its historical outworking in the covenants of works and grace (as well as in the various progressive stages of the covenant of grace). It explains the meaning of the death of Christ in light of the fullness of the biblical teaching on the divine covenants, undergirds our understanding of the nature and use of the sacraments, and provides the fullest possible explanation of the grounds of our assurance. Put another way, covenant theology is the Bible’s way of explaining and deepening our understanding of: (1) the atonement (the meaning of the death of Christ); (2) assurance (the basis of our confidence of communion with God and enjoyment of his promises); (3) the sacraments (signs and seals of God’s covenant promises — what they are and how they work); and (4) the continuity of redemptive history (the unified plan of God’s salvation). Covenant theology is also a hermeneutic, an approach to understanding the Scripture — an approach that attempts to biblically explain the unity of biblical revelation.
       Covenant theology is a blending of biblical and systematic theology. It is biblical theology in the sense that covenant theology recognizes that the Bible itself structures the progress of redemptive history through the succession of covenants. It is systematic theology in that it recognizes the covenants as a fundamental architectonic or organizing principle for the Bible’s theology. Thus it proceeds to integrate the biblical teaching about the federal headships of Adam and Christ, the covenantal nature of the incarnation and atonement, the continuities and discontinuities in the progress of redemptive history, the relation of the Jewish and Christian scriptures, law and gospel, into a coherent theological system.⁽²⁾

       Covenant theology teaches that when God created man in the Garden of Eden, He entered into a Covenant of Works (or Covenant of Life) with him in which Adam, the federal head of mankind,⁽³⁾ was promised eternal (glorified, or eschatalogical) life as the reward for perfect fulfillment of the terms of the covenant,⁽⁴⁾ which Covenant theologians agree was perfect obedience to the moral law for a limited time.⁽⁵⁾ This condition was focused in the one positive commandment to abstain from eating of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil (Genesis 2:16-17), in which commandment was contained the whole of Adam’s duty to both God and his fellow man (his posterity).⁽⁶⁾ Though these specific terms are not found in the Genesis account, the covenantal concept is nevertheless present and the pre-lapsarian relationship of man to God is expressly described in covenantal terms later in Scripture (Job 31:33; Hosea 6:7). In fact, it forms the basis of Paul's comparison between the "two Adams" in Romans 5:19.
       It is impossible to know how long Adam's probation was intended to last before he would have received the promised reward, but that point is irrelevant given that the Fall was foreordained.⁽⁷⁾ In transgressing against the covenant, Adam substituted his own will for that of his Creator and violated the entire moral law at once,⁽⁸⁾ resulting in a loss of innocence and the imposition of the threatened curse — spiritual death and separation from God for both himself and his posterity (Isaiah 24:5; Romans 5:12).⁽⁹⁾ He was thereafter cut off from access to the Tree of Life, banished from the Garden, and sent out into a cursed world where the effects of sin would wreak havoc on his physical body and eventually put him into the grave.⁽¹⁰⁾ The Covenant of Works did not contain a clause of mercy, so had God not intervened by establishing a second covenant with Adam, commonly called the Covenant of Grace, through which He promised a Redeemer (Genesis 3:15), mankind would have been irreconcilably cut off from any possibility of salvation and immediately consumed by divine wrath.⁽¹¹⁾
       Following God’s own example (Genesis 3:21), hope in the promise was kept alive by His people through the offering of animal sacrifices,⁽¹²⁾ but as the centuries passed, mankind began to drift into the pagan belief that man may appease the Deity by his own works.⁽¹³⁾ This proves that the obligation to the moral law under the Covenant of Works was universally understood and that it is, in fact, ingrained into man's nature that there is a God to whom he is responsible for his sins. Fallen man does not need special revelation to know his predicament, for nature itself testifies to him of his obligations to his Creator and of his failure to meet them (Romans 1:18-32). What is hidden from the natural man — what he is incapable of knowing apart from special revelation — is the mystery of the Gospel that God Himself would enter human history to become man's Redeemer from the curse of the broken covenant (1 Corinthians 2:14; Ephesians 3:4-6; 1 Timothy 3:16).
       The Old Testament is a record of how God providentially arranged and directed human events over many centuries in preparation for the advent of the Redeemer. First, He called Abraham out of his homeland and established a covenant with him and his descendants, the only condition of which was simple faith (Genesis 15; Galatians 3:6). The New Testament makes it clear that these descendants are not merely his physical posterity (as Dispensationalism teaches), but those who share the faith of Abraham out of every "nation, tribe, and tongue" (Galatians 3:29; Revelation 5:9). Ultimately, according to the Apostle Paul, the "seed" of Abraham is Christ Himself (Galatians 3:16), and so it is safe to conclude that the Abrahamic covenant was a further development of the Covenant of Grace which was first announced in Genesis 3:15. This covenantal relationship was passed from Abraham to Isaac, and then to Jacob, through whom the twelve tribes of national Israel came.
       Following the death of Joseph, the Israelites were enslaved for four hundred years in Egypt (Exodus 1:8-14). During that period, the faith of Abraham suffered corruption and by the time God raised up Moses as their deliverer, the influence of paganism upon Israelite religion had become substantial.⁽¹⁴⁾ In fact, there is reason to believe that worship of the Egyptian sun-god had largely supplanted that of the true God. At the exodus, God directed the Israelites to Horeb, where He entered into covenant with them, reaffirming and expanding the covenant previously made with Abraham. This was a blood covenant, sealed by a ceremonial sprinkling of the people (a clear symbol of Christ's death in behalf of His elect), and it included the "first edition" of the Decalogue, written on stone tablets by the finger of God Himself. During Moses' lengthy absence on the mountain-top, the Israelites grew impatient and the greater part of them quickly reverted back to their former worship of the sun-god, symbolized by Apis or Hapi, the golden calf (Exodus 32:1-4). Upon his return, Moses responded to this religious defection by smashing the stone tablets to pieces (Exodus 32:19) and ordering the execution of thousands of the rebels (Exodus 32:27-28).
       There has been some historic speculation that “the evangelic part of the Sinai transaction”⁽¹⁵⁾ was terminated as far as the violaters were concerned, and the fact that Moses was required to go back up the mountain to receive a new set of commandments — dictated to him (Exodus 34:27-28) rather than being written with the “finger of God” Himself as before (Deuteronomy 9:10) — suggests that the covenant thereafter made with the people was different in nature from the initial one.⁽¹⁶⁾ The "second legislation" of the Decalogue was also not ratified by the sprinkling of blood, perhaps signifying the absence of Christ’s presence as Mediator. Whereas the first covenant had been a further expansion of the Abrahamic covenant, the second placed the nation under the heavy yoke of a localized covenant of works, consisting of 613 statutes which regulated even the most mundane detail of life, an intricate sacrificial system, and an establishmentarian joining of the religious element to the civil.⁽¹⁷⁾
       Whether or not one accepts this particular theory, it is nevertheless true that the Sinatic covenant, which dominates the rest of the Old Testament, is reflective of the original Covenant of Works with its blessing for obedience (Leviticus 18:5) and cursing for disobedience (Deuteronomy 27:26). This national covenant, referred to by Paul as a “parenthesis epoch,”⁽¹⁸⁾ or a temporary addition to the promise of the Abrahamic covenant and its fulfillment in Christ (Galatians 3:15-18), is the basis of all of God’s lawsuits against Israel through His prophets. Even though it demanded perfect and personal obedience, and pronounced expulsion from the land and ultimately death for covenant-breaking, the Mosaic law was nevertheless a gracious provision to His people for two reasons: first, it prevented their absorption into the surrounding pagan nations, thereby preserving the line through which the Messiah would eventually come, and, secondly, its testimony to the absolute moral demands of God would drive the elect within the nation to despair of their own righteousness and thus to faith in the promised Redeemer as He was foreshadowed in the ceremonies (Galatians 3:24).⁽¹⁹⁾ As such, the Mosaic law was never intended to be a civil “model” for the rest of the world, and it therefore ceased to operate with the expiration of the nation.⁽²⁰⁾ In fact, the Gentile nations, not having this special covenantal relationship to God under the Mosaic legislation, were left under the unwritten natural law of the Adamic covenant and thus deprived of any true knowledge of a Redeemer (Ephesians 2:12).⁽²¹⁾
       By the First Century, God's covenant people had been narrowed down to the tribe of Judah and the remnant from the other tribes which had joined themselves to Judah. Christ was born as a Jew and was therefore bound, along with the rest of His kinsmen according to the flesh, to perfect obedience to the Mosaic law (John 6:38; Galatians 4:4). As the "last Adam" (1 Corinthians 15:45), He therefore did not come to destroy the law, but to fulfill it (Matthew 5:17-18). In fulfilling the righteousness required by the Siniatic covenant (Matthew 3:15; John 17:4), He likewise fulfilled the more general Covenant of Works in behalf of God's elect outside of Israel. Christ’s death on the cross satisfied the penalty of the broken covenant (John 19:30), and His perfect obedience (Romans 5:18-19) is imputed to the believer through faith alone (Ephesians 2:8). At the very moment of faith, the believer is forever and completely justified before God (Romans 3:21-24; 2 Corinthians 5:21); he is no longer "in Adam" — under the Covenant of Works — but is now "in Christ" — under the Covenant of Grace (1 Corinthians 15:22). If a Jew, he is reckoned as having fulfilled every jot and tittle of the Mosaic law; if a Gentile, he is reckoned as having fulfilled the Adamic covenant (Romans 3:31). Either way, the Christian is "no longer under the law," but is a free man under grace (Romans 6:14; 1 Corinthians 7:22). He is not merely restored to the probationary position of Adam in the Garden, but is instead seated in the heavenly places with Christ Jesus (Ephesians 2:5-6). He has eternal life (Romans 6:23; 1 John 5:13) — the very promise held forth in the original Covenant of Works.⁽²²⁾ It is the purpose of this book to show how Theonomy seriously undermines this Gospel.

Endnotes

1. Jennifer Petrik, "The Covenant in Patristic Thought," available online at http://accensus.files.wordpress.com/2008/12/xmcovenantandpatristics.pdf.

2. J. Ligon Duncan, "Covenant Theology is Historic Christianaity," available online at www.fpcjackson.org/resources/apologetics/Covenant%20Theology%20&%20Justification/ligon_ctheology.htm.

3. “A federal head is a common representative, or public person; a person, as it were, dilated into many; or many persons contracted into one, appointed to stand in the stead of others: so that what he doth, as acting in that public capacity, is as valid in law, to all intents and purposes, as if those, whom he represents, had in their own persons done it” (Ezekiel Hopkins, The Doctrine of the Two Covenants [London: Religious Tract Society, 1846], page 62).

4. Westminster Confession of Faith, Chapter 7, Section 2; Chapter 19, Section 1; Westminster Larger Catechism, Question 20.

5. Larger Catechism, Question 92. See also Thomas Boston, “A View of the Covenant of Works From the Sacred Records,” in Samuel M’Millan (editor), The Complete Works of the Late Reverend Thomas Boston (London: William Tegg and Company, 1853), Volume II, page 195; Robert Lewis Dabney, Lectures in Systematic Theology (Saint Louis, Missouri: Presbyterian Publishing Company of St. Louis, 1878), page 305.

6. John Colquhoun, A Treatise on the Law and the Gospel (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Soli Deo Gloria Publications, [1816] 2009), page 12; Boston, “A View of the Covenant of Works,” page 194.

7. Westminster Shorter Catechism, Question 7. This is not to deny that Adam sinned by an act of his own free will: “...God set man’s will only toward good; yet it was movable to evil, and that only by man himself; to whom God gave a sufficient power to stand in his integrity, if he had pleased” (Ebenezer Erskine, Ralph Erskine, and James Fisher, The Westminster Shorter Catechism Explained [Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: Presbyterian Board of Publications, n.d.], Volume I, page 64). An important distinction must be maintained between God’s causal and permissive decrees.

8. Edward Fisher explained how Adam violated the entire moral law, as it is summarized in the Ten Commandments:

1. He chose himself another god when he followed the devil.
       2. He idolized and deified his own belly; as the apostle's phrase is, "He made his belly his God."
       3. He took the name of God in vain, when he believed him not.
       4. He kept not the rest and estate wherein God had set him.
       5. He dishonoured his Father who was in heaven; and therefore his days were not prolonged in that land which the Lord his God had given him.
       6. He massacred himself and all his posterity.
       7. From Eve he was a virgin, but in eyes and mind he committed spiritual fornication.
       8. He stole, like Achan, that which God had set aside not to be meddled with; and this his stealth is that which troubles all Israel — the whole world.
       9. He bare witness against God, when he believed the witness of the devil before him.
       10. He coveted an evil covetousness, like Ammon, which cost him his life, and all his progeny (The Marrow of Modern Divinity [Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: Presbyterian Board of Publication, 1850], pages 35-36).

9. Westminster Confession, Chapter 6, Section 2; Larger Catechism, Question 22.

10. Larger Catechism, Questions 25-28.

11. Fisher, Marrow of Modern Divinity, page 48.

12. That early men associated animal sacrifice with God’s promise of a Redeemer is proved by Abel’s obedient offering of the best of his flocks (Genesis 4:4), and of Noah’s later offering of some of “every clean beast, and of every clean fowl” on “an altar unto the LORD” (Genesis 8:20).

13. Alexander Hislop, The Two Babylons (Neptune, New Jersey: Loizeaux Brothers, 1916), Chapter Four, Section Two, pages 144ff. Cain was the originator of this heresy, as evidenced by his offering of grain, the work of his own physical labor (Genesis 4:3).

14. John Brown, An Exposition of the Epistle of Paul to the Galatians (Edinburgh: William Oliphant and Sons, 1853), page 150.

15. Thomas Bell, A View of the Covenants of Works and Grace (Glasgow, Scotland: Edward Khull and Company, 1814), page 37.

16. This theory was advanced in Justin Martyr's Dialogue With Trypho, a Jew, Chapters XVIII ff. and Ireneaus, Against Heresies, Book IV, Chapter 15 and again in the Third Century document, Didascalia Apostolorum (see Appendix Two). In the Seventeenth Century, Dutch Reformed theologian Johannes Cocceius reiterated the opinion that "when the Jews had provoked the Deity by their various transgressions, particularly by the worship of the golden calf, the severe and servile yoke of the ceremonial law was added to the decalogue, as a punishment inflicted on them by the Supreme Being in his righteous displeasure" [Rev. Charles Buck, "Johannes Cocceius," A Theological Dictionary (Philadelphia: Joseph J. Woodward, 1829), page 101. In his notes in Fisher’s Marrow of Modern Divinity, Thomas Boston presented a variation of this idea when he saw “two covenants to have been delivered on Mount Sinai to the Israelites” — “first, the covenant of grace made with Abraham, contained in the preface... to which were annexed the ten commandments, given by the Mediator Christ... as a rule of life to his covenant people,” and “secondly, the covenant of works made with Adam, contained in the same ten commands, delivered with thunderings and lightnings....” According to Boston, this “twofold consideration” of the Decalogue is required by the fact that they were “twice written on tables of stone, by the Lord himself... [and] the second tables, the work of Moses, the typical mediator....” (pages 56-57) In 1816, Scottish presbyterian John Colquhoun proposed an identical scenario in his book, A Treatise on the Law and the Gospel (page 62).

17. It is important to note that the Sinatic covenant is here spoken of in its national capacity only. This is not to say that the believing remnant within the nation were ever under any other spiritual covenant than the Covenant of Grace (Romans 11:4-7).

18. The usage of this term is not intended to suggest an interruption in the flow of redemptive history, as in the Dispensational concept of the parenthetical “church age” which supposedly halts the “prophetic clock” with regards to God’s dealing with Israel, but rather the subservience of additional subject matter (the works-inheritance principle of the Old Covenant) not directly related to the main subject (the grace-inheritance principle of the New Covenant). Such is how the usage of parentheses is generally understood in standard grammar. At no time did God abandon, or temparily set aside, His purpose to save an elect people as promised in the Abrahamic covenant. Redemptive history, according to Covenant theology, is continuous, not halting.

19. Such a purpose was corrupted by the unbelieving Jews, particularly the Pharisees of Christ’s day and the Judaizers of Paul’s day, who believed that strict observance of the law would merit God’s favor. Of course, as Jesus pointed out in Matthew 5:20ff and Paul in Galatians 3:10, such men had lessened the law’s demands and were not really observing it as they claimed.

20. Westminster Confession, Chapter XIX:4.

21. Herman Witsius, The Economy of the Covenants Between God and Man (London: R. Baynes, 1822), Book IV, Chapter IV:30.

22. Witsius, Economy of the Covenants, Book III, Chapter XII:22.