According to Burgess, Paul is not saying that the Mosaic covenant is not gracious, or that it did not administer salvation to the saints in the Old Testament.  Paul is saying that the Mosaic covenant, as misinterpreted by his opponents, kills and is a ministry of condemnation.  2 Corinthians 3, therefore, does not contradict the Westminster Standards’ view that the Mosaic covenant is a gracious covenant.

The Westminster Standards teach that the post-fall covenants in Scripture are gracious.  Although the covenants are distinct and different in some respects, they are the same in substance.  This is why the Standards speak of one covenant of grace “under various dispensations” and that one covenant “was differently administered in the time of the law, and in the time of the gospel.”  Westminster Larger Catechism 101 says that the preface to the ten commandments teaches us that God “is a God in covenant, as with Israel of old, so with all his people.”

There are, however, a number of texts that would seem to contradict this confessional teaching.  One such text is 2 Corinthians 3, where Paul refers to the old covenant as a ministry of condemnation and death.  Meredith Kline, for example, has argued that it was only because Paul believed that the “old (Mosaic) covenant order” was “governed by a principle of works” that he could say that it was “an administration of bondage, condemnation, and death in contrast to the new covenant, which he characterized as one of freedom, righteousness, and life.”

A proper defense of the covenant theology of the Westminster Standards, therefore, cannot ignore or dismiss 2 Corinthians 3.  Anthony Burgess, a leading member of the Westminster Assembly, understood this and addressed the passage in his book Vindiciae Legis, or, A vindication of the morall law and the covenants.

Burgess draws our attention to a number of points that we have to consider in order to properly interpret Paul’s negative statements on the old covenant in 2 Corinthians 3.  One point is that if the Mosaic covenant was “rigidly” and universally a ministry of death, then the Socinian interpretation would be correct.  The Socinians argued that “there was no grace, or faith, nor nothing of Christ, vouchsafed unto the Jewes.”  But this is clearly wrong in part because “we reade that [the Jewes] had the Adoption.”

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