Ward on Covenant of Works

Early in Ward’s book, he surveys mid sixteenth-century treatments of the effects of Adam’s sin, mainly to determine whether writers of that period conceived of God’s relationship with Adam as a covenantal one. His evidence suggests several important conclusions:

1) The early Protestant confessions do not describe Adam’s relationship to God as a covenant, nor do they speak about the imputation of Adam’s sin. There were theologians who spoke of a covenant with Adam and the imputation of sin, but they were not necessarily Protestant. Ward cites the Catholic theologian Ambrosius Catharinus Pilitus (1483-1553) as holding to the necessity of a covenant with Adam “so original sin might descend to the posterity of Adam” (this last summary of the question from John Salkeld, a Protestant writer).

2) The phrase “covenant of works” in its earliest usages referred not to the Adamic covenant but to the Mosaic covenant. Dudley Fenner (c. 1558-87) “employs the expression ‘covenant of works” to describe the covenant with Israel but does not apply it to the pre-fall relationshp.” Likewise, William Perkins (1558-1602) posited a legal and evangelical covenant, but the legal covenant was the Mosaic. An anonymous work of 1589, The Sacred Doctrine of Divinitie Gathered Out of the Worde of God , speaks of two sorts of righteousness, the first “requiring righteousness from ourselves, or by our own works, and propounding life everlasting if we do it, is call the Law, or the covenant of works, Rom 10:5; Gal 3:12.” In short, the caesura between covenant of works and covenant of grace was originally put at the cross rather than at the fall; these phrases were alternative ways of speaking about the “old” and “new” covenants.

What do we make of this? Of course, the fact that the covenant of works theology and the doctrine of the imputation of Adam’s sin was not taught by many Reformed theologians of the sixteenth century does not mean that these doctrines are wrong. Doctrine develops. Yet, it is clear that these writers did not see a covenant of works as being essential to the formulation of the gospel. Further, even if the later formulations are more fully biblical, we would do well to ask why the formulations changed. Was it simply a matter of deeper biblical study? What other factors were involved?