The Covenant
The Covenant
The Covenant | Savoy and London Compared with Westminster - Westminster Standards
Westminster, chapter VII:
II. The first covenant made with man was a covenant of works, wherein life was promised to Adam, and in him to his posterity,
upon condition of perfect and personal obedience.
V. This covenant was differently administered in the time of the law, and in the time of the gospel: under the law it was administered by promises,
prophecies, sacrifices, circumcision, the paschal lamb, and other types and ordinances delivered to the people of the Jews […]; and is called the Old Testament.
VI. Under the gospel, when Christ the substance was exhibited, the ordinances in which this covenant is dispensed,
are the preaching of the Word, and the administration of the sacraments of Baptism and the Lord's Supper […]; and is called the New Testament.
There are not, therefore, two covenants of grace differing in substance, but one and the same under various dispensations.
Savoy, chapter VII:
V. Although this covenant hath been differently and variously administered in respect of ordinances and institutions in the time of the law, and since the coming of Christ in the flesh;
yet for the substance and efficacy of it, to all its spiritual and saving ends, it is one and the same;
upon the account of which various dispensations, it is called the Old and New Testament.
London, chapter VII:
III. This covenant is revealed in the gospel; first of all to Adam in the promise of salvation by the seed of the woman, and afterwards by farther steps,
until the full discovery thereof was completed in the New Testament; and it is founded in that eternal covenant transaction that was between the Father and the Son
about the redemption of the elect; and it is alone by the grace of this covenant that all the posterity of fallen Adam
that ever were saved did obtain life and blessed immortality […].
What changes. Savoy abridges: it merges paragraphs V and VI of Westminster into one, removes the enumeration of the ordinances of each age
(circumcision and the paschal lamb; baptism and the Supper) and keeps the central affirmation: one covenant, the same in substance, under various dispensations.
London goes further. It deletes paragraph II, so that the chapter on the covenant no longer names the covenant of works; it deletes IV;
and it replaces the paragraphs on the administration of the covenant with the one quoted above. In it the covenant of grace is no longer "administered" under the law and under the gospel:
it is "revealed" by steps, from the promise made to Adam to the New Testament. The closing sentence of Westminster, that of "one and the same under various dispensations", disappears.
In its place there enters an idea which Westminster does not mention in this chapter: the eternal covenant between the Father and the Son.
Why. Here lies the root of all the rest. For Westminster, circumcision and baptism are ordinances of the same covenant in two ages; that is why the children of believers, who received the one, receive the other. Savoy still believes it, and so its retouching is one of length only. London cannot say it. If the covenant of grace was already administered in circumcision, the baptism of infants follows; if it was only revealed and promised, and is not established until the New Testament, circumcision belongs to another covenant and nothing follows from it. The Baptists did not first change the chapter on baptism: they changed this one.
What this shows. One must be fair to what London keeps. It does not deny the covenant of works: it names it in chapter XX, which it takes from Savoy, and affirms in chapter VI that Adam stood "in the room and stead" of all mankind. And it confesses with Westminster that no one has ever been saved but by the grace of this one covenant. What it abandons is the unity of its administration, and with it the continuity of the people of God: the church of the Old Testament and that of the New are no longer, in the same sense, one and the same church with the same members. Westminster rested that unity on Galatians 3:14,16, Romans 4:11 and Hebrews 13:8. From that difference, which fits within a paragraph, come the chapter on the church and the chapter on baptism.