This one Covenant of Grace unites the household of faith, ties Scripture together as all normative in all ages, provides a timeless ethic, opposes pride based on human merit or achievement, and points to salvation by grace alone, based on our Sovereign’s great, eternal love—not our feeble attempts, which could never satisfy.

Dr. Scott Aniol is a friend, an insightfultheologian (see one of his excellent presentations at our recent worship conference, the recently announced Provost for a burgeoning college in Grand Rapids, and President of G3 Ministries. G3 is seeking to encourage both charity and conviction by a series of polite exchanges on key theological topics.

Recently, I was invited to contribute one of the four views on covenant theology. For those who wish to understand a little more of what makes the head cheerleader of this Substack tick, I include below a few snippets from my article in that series.

The Westminster Confession of Faith (hereafter, WCF) is distinctive but not unique in its articulation of covenant theology. Indeed, Westminster is a zenith of symbology on the topic, affirming (7:1) that the distance is so great between the perfect God and sinful man that apart from the “voluntary condescension on God’s part, which he has been pleased to express by way of a covenant,” we would never have salvation. However, it would be mistaken to think that these tenets were either idiosyncratic or novel, restricted only to one sector of the Protestant Reformation.

Before addressing the key questions of this series, readers may know that prior to Westminster (1643–1648), other Protestant creeds, confessions, or theologians affirmed a clear current on this theological subject, to wit:

• The Church of England’s Thirty Nine Articles (VII) affirmed as early as 1563 that “the Old Testament is not contrary to the New; for both…everlasting life is offered to Mankind by Christ, who is the only Mediator between God and Man.” Moreover, the same article condemns treating the “old Fathers” as if they were looking “only for transitory promises,” and affirms that the Moral Law is still to be obeyed, while the Civil Law is no longer binding.

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