The new covenant is new; it is the fulfillment of God’s promises to Adam, Noah, and to Abraham. It is a new administration of the Abrahamic covenant. The typologies have been fulfilled…the NT reaffirms Abraham as the paradigmatic figure and carries out the Abrahamic pattern by initiating believers and their children into the administration of the covenant of grace. This is why the NT simply assumes the “household” pattern throughout Acts. This is the new administration of the Abrahamic covenant.

In the previous posts we’ve looked Jeremiah 31, Hebrews chapters 7–10, Galatians chapters 3–4. We’ve seen that the new covenant promised in Jeremiah 31 is not absolutely new. It is new relative to the Mosaic, old covenant that expired with the death of Christ. We’ve seen that the NT consistently interprets Jeremiah 31 this way.

This final installment of this series explores some of the implications for covenant theology of the passages examined and argues that the covenant theology held by most contemporary evangelical Baptists cannot be reconciled with the NT interpretation of Jeremiah 31 (and its corollaries in the Minor Prophets).

Insofar as a certain understanding of the new covenant is essential to all Baptist understandings of redemptive history, to that degree they all fail.

A Caveat About “Baptists”
Broadly there are two kinds of Baptists in the world: confessional and non-confessional. Confessional Baptists, e.g., those who hold the 1st (1644) or 2nd London Baptist Confession (1689), or the Philadelphia Baptist Confession (1742), tend to identify more closely with historic Reformed theology and thus tend to agree with the Reformed about the Sabbath and other ethical matters.

Some confessional Baptists read the history of redemption much like the Reformed in several respects. Nevertheless, on the matter of the nature of new covenant and on its relations to Abraham and to Moses, there remain significant differences and thus Reformed and confessional Baptists continue to come to significantly different conclusions about the nature of baptism and about its administration.

About the Sabbath and Baptism
A critical reader might wonder if the point of this series has been to vindicate the Reformed confessional view of Baptism and the Sabbath. That would be a misunderstanding of the nature of the relations between Baptism, the Sabbath, and Reformed theology. The latter is not built on the former.

Rather, Baptism and the Sabbath grow out of a hermeneutic, a way of understanding redemptive history, and a view of the church. This series is not an attempt to convince anyone about the Sabbath or Baptism. The intent of the series is to describe and demonstrate briefly and in broad strokes how Reformed theology looks at the new covenant and thereby to illustrate the differences between the Baptist view(s) of the new covenant and covenant theology generally and Reformed theology. If one adopts a Reformed view of redemptive history as outlined here, one will likely also adopt the Reformed view of the Sabbath and of Baptism.

Hermeneutical Differences
One of the great questions between Reformed and Baptist theology is the question of how to interpret Scripture. The Reformed have tended to let the New Testament not only interpret the Hebrew (and Aramaic) Scriptures but also to provide a pattern for how to interpret the typological revelation. Thus, not only do Romans, Hebrews, and Galatians give us specific direction about specific passages but they also demonstrate how other typological passages not specifically addressed in the NT ought to be interpreted.

Reformed theology has not always been consistent in the application of this principle. In the 17th century many Reformed readers were chiliasts, i.e., they believed in a literal 1000-year reign of Christ on the earth. Before the late 18th-century, most Reformed folk were also theocratic, a position that is very difficult to square with the hermeneutical theory which underlay the Reformed critique of the Romanist reinstitution of the Mosaic cultic system.

It is also quite difficult to square the earlier Reformed theocratic ethics with the equally early Reformed understanding of the history of redemption. In other words, until the modern period, there were unresolved tensions in Reformed theology. Gradually, the covenant theology worked out in the 16th and 17th centuries acted as a sort of leaven and most Reformed folk resolved those tensions in favor of their covenant theology what recognized the Mosaic covenant as a temporary, typological overlay upon the permanent and fundamental Abrahamic covenant of grace.

We recognized that if the Mosaic civil law had expired and if the Mosaic national covenant was unique then there are no theocratic, national covenants after the expiration of the old, Mosaic theocracy. In a similar way most Reformed folk realized through the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries that it was no longer plausible to reify a figurative passage in the most symbolic book in the NT (Rev 20).

Moses and Abraham
Our Baptist friends, however, operate on a different hermeneutical theory and especially as it regards the new covenant. Even confessional Baptists, who would agree with most Reformed hermeneutical theory, step off the train when it comes to Jeremiah 31 and the new covenant. Behind this dissent lies a different view of the relations between the Abrahamic and Mosaic covenants.

Baptists (whether confessional or non-confessional) tend to treat everything that happened before the incarnation as if it were under the “old covenant.” To be sure, in colloquial speech we might speak of the entirety of typological revelation and redemptive history as “the old covenant” but that would be a loose or broad (and perhaps even improper) way of speaking. As we’ve seen, the NT consistently identifies the “old covenant” with Moses and not with Abraham.

All of redemptive history prior to the incarnation is typological but it is not all Mosaic. All the typologies have been fulfilled in Christ but not all the typologies are Mosaic. Failure to recognize the distinction between Moses and Abraham (or Noah) lies behind the rejection of the Sabbath by most contemporary Baptists. They assume that the Sabbath was instituted under Moses. They do not recognize the category of creational ethics. There are reasons for this. More on this below.

In short, Abraham was not Moses. Remember, Paul reckons the Mosaic, Sinaitic, old covenant as a temporary, national, pedagogical, typological arrangement superimposed upon the Abrahamic covenant of grace. It is a layer of law in the form of 613 commandments summarized in the Decalogue (Ex 20; Deut 5) intended to teach the Israelites the greatness of their sin and misery and to point them to the promised Messiah.

The Abrahamic covenant, in contrast, is permanent in a way that the Mosaic, old covenant was not and could not be. Thus, the Abrahamic covenant of grace, even though it contained typological elements, could not be obsolete.

Administration of the Covenant of Grace
My Baptist friends tend to talk about the new covenant in ways that do not actually conform to what Scripture says about the new covenant. My Baptist friends tend to make the new covenant more eschatological than it actually is. Were the new covenant as eschatological as they seem to think we would not expect to find the sort of language about the administration of the covenant of the new covenant that one finds in Hebrews 10.

According to Hebrews 10:26–31 members of the new covenant church may find themselves in even more jeopardy than existed under Moses. If the new covenant has the sort of characteristics some would have us believe we would not have expected this sort of language:

Anyone who has set aside the law of Moses dies without mercy on the evidence of two or three witnesses. How much worse punishment, do you think, will be deserved by the one who has spurned the Son of God, and has profaned the blood of the covenant by which he was sanctified, and has outraged the Spirit of grace? (Heb 10:28–29)

In other words, the covenant of grace is not so eschatological that it does not need to be administered. It is not so eschatological that there are not members of new covenant assemblies who turn out to have been hypocrites. This reality, of course, lies behind our Lord’s institution of the ministry of the keys (Matt 16) and church discipline (Matt 18).

There are some who’ve been admitted to the visible covenant community (Heb 6), who have participated in the life of the new covenant church, who have probably even participated in the administration of the sacraments (“been enlightened” and “tasted of the powers of the age to come”) who nevertheless fall away. Reformed theology explains this phenomenon by observing that there are two ways of existing in the one covenant of grace (Rom 2:28; see also this booklet).

Not everyone who is admitted to the visible covenant community actually receives the benefits of the covenant of grace. Those benefits are received only by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone and only the elect ultimately receive them.

In other words, the new covenant is not described in Hebrews any differently than the Abrahamic covenant. Indeed, it is significant that the writer to the Hebrews compares the new covenant church to the church under the Mosaic covenant. He makes a lesser than-greater than comparison. If it was bad to do something under Moses, which was typological, how much more to do the same thing under the new covenant, under which administration the reality is present?

The Apostle Paul makes a similar argument in 1 Corinthians 10 when he compares the new covenant church to the church of the Exodus and wilderness wandering.
It is these sorts of considerations that lead Reformed folk to see a strong continuity between the Abrahamic administration of the covenant of grace, which required the initiation of covenant children and under which blessings were promised to believers and to their children, and the new covenant.

The covenant of grace had to be administered under Abraham. Under Abraham Ishmael was admitted to membership in the covenant community. He received the sign and seal of the covenant of grace, even though Scripture clearly says that he was not in the line of the promise. It’s hard for Reformed folk to see how a Baptist could have obeyed our Lord’s command to initiate Ishmael.

The new covenant is a new administration of the Abrahamic covenant. The typological elements have been fulfilled. The Mosaic overlay has expired. The bloodshed is finished. Circumcision is now indifferent. The pattern of initiating believers and their children into the covenant community continues. Baptists tend to argue that the command, in Acts 2:28 to “repent and believe” and the inclusion of Gentiles in v. 39 so conditions the clause, “for the promise is to you and to your children” that event that passage, in their reading, proves that, in the new covenant, only believers (or at least those who profess faith) can be baptized.

The different ways of reading Acts 2:38–39 illustrate the great gulf that lies between Reformed and Baptist hermeneutics. When Reformed folk look at v. 38 and the command to the heads of thousand of households to “repent and be baptized” we see the analogy with Abraham, who was not an infant, but who was also the head of a household. He was initiated into the covenant community as an adult and his children were initiated into the covenant community as infants. Those heads of those households were in the same position as Abraham. The analogy with Abraham is only strengthened by the invocation of the Abrahamic covenantal formula: “for the promise is to you and to your children.” The essence of the covenant of grace remains unchanged: “I will be a God to you and to your children.”

My Baptist friends object by pointing out the inclusion of Gentiles. I reply by saying, so what? The Reformed argument is not that Abraham was not typological. Of course Gentiles are being included! That is the fulfillment of the promise to Abraham, that God would make him the father of many nations. This is exactly what Paul argues in Romans 4. Abraham is the father of all who believe, both Jew and Gentile. The inclusion of Gentiles does not weaken the Reformed case; it strengthens it by completing the analogy with Abraham.

If Abraham is, as God’s Word says, the father of all believers, and if God promised blessings to believers and to their children, and if he commanded the initiation of covenant children, and those covenant promises and command remain in effect, then we must initiate children into the covenant community just as father Abraham did. Yes, females are also initiated as part of the administration of the new (Abrahamic) covenant. We don’t expect the Lord to call us to sacrifice our children on a mountain. The typological administration has been fulfilled.

Nature, Grace, and Eschatology in the New Covenant
The Baptists are not, strictly speaking, Anabaptists (even though they share a common view of Baptism and even though modern Baptists invoke the Anabaptists as their forebears when it suits them) but they do have one thing in common with them: an over-realized eschatology.

Where the medieval church thought of grace as perfecting inherently flawed (by finitude) nature, and the Protestants thought of grace (in redemption) as renewing nature in sinners, the Anabaptists thought about grace or salvation as the destruction of nature. The Baptist movements from 1611 continue a form of this eschatology and nature-grace relationship in the way they look at the new covenant.

Reformed covenant theology reads the promise of the new covenant in Jeremiah 31 in light of the new covenant explanation and we read it in the way prophetic literature is intended to be read. The new covenant is described in eschatological, absolute terms.

The coming of the Messiah is also described in prophetic literature in absolute, eschatological terms. We understand, however, in light of redemptive history that what was described in prophetic literature in absolute terms is fulfilled progressively. Christ did not bring the consummation in his first advent. He inaugurated the Kingdom of God but he did not consummate it. Arguably this is one reason why the Jews demanded his crucifixion, because he did not satisfy their demand for an earthly, millennial, glorious kingdom.

In discussions with my Baptist friends it seems as if this question, eschatology, is central element to the discussion. When Baptists speak about the new covenant they tend to speak in eschatological (consummation) terms rather than in semi-eschatological (inaugurated) terms. The new covenant is part of the inauguration of the last days but inauguration is a beginning not the end. Baptists, however, cannot initiate children into the new covenant community because that would contradict their over-realized eschatology. For them, the new covenant is what it is, and has to be what it has to be, because their eschatology is what it is. This is the usually unstated a priori assumption that Baptists make when then think and speak about the new covenant.

Baptists know that they, like Reformed congregations, have unregenerate members but by administering baptism only to those who make a profession of faith they are doing what they can to ensure a regenerate membership. From a Reformed view of covenant theology it is quite difficult to see how this is not, at bottom, a form of rationalism. If it is rationalism that would not be surprising since an over-realized eschatology, which Luther called a theology of glory (theologia gloriae is just another form of rationalism.

The new covenant is new, it is the fulfillment of God’s promises to Adam, Noah, and to Abraham. It is a new administration of the Abrahamic covenant. The typologies have been fulfilled.

The old covenant is the Mosaic covenant. It was obsolete and inferior. Such things are never said in the new covenant about the Abrahamic covenant. Instead, the NT reaffirms Abraham as the paradigmatic figure and carries out the Abrahamic pattern by initiating believers and their children into the administration of the covenant of grace.

This is why the NT simply assumes the “household” pattern throughout Acts. This is the new administration of the Abrahamic covenant.

R. Scott Clark is Professor of Church History and Historical Theology at Westminster Seminary in California (see his full bio here). This article first appeared at Scott’s Heidleblog and is used with permission.

[Editor’s note: Some of the original URLs (links) referenced in this article are no longer valid, so the links have been removed.]