Proclaimer Blog
Republication and all that
You may have been following the republication debate in the US. Or not. Essentially this is a question of whether the Mosaic Covenant is a republication of the covenant of works with Adam or something entirely different. This is more than an academic exercise for preachers as it gets to the heart of the question of how we preach law books (not just “the Law” in its totality). I’ve been greatly helped by Michael Brown’s little book Christ and the Condition. It is an assessment of Samuel Petto (1624-1711) and his views on the subject. Garry Williams first put me onto Samuel Petto but I confess to finding him a bit impenetrable. This book is a great help, not least because it surveys many of the Reformers and Puritans with a paragraph on each and their views: a really useful overview.
What becomes clear is that even amongst the Westminster Divines, for example, there were a variety of views within Reformed thinking – interesting given that some of those views are now dismissed rather abruptly with pejorative names. Samuel Bolton does a good job of summarising the five views on the law of Moses:
- A covenant of works, yet not opposed to the covenant of grace
- A covenant of grace, more legally dispensed
- A mixed covenant, mixed of nature and of grace
- A subservient covenant given to Israel
- No covenant in itself but a republication of the covenant of works with Adam