Theopedia

1689 Federalism

Definition

1689 Federalism is the reading of covenant theology, retrieved by contemporary Baptist theologians from John Owen’s and Nehemiah Coxe’s own 17th-century arguments, on which the Mosaic covenant belongs to redemptive history’s outworking of the covenant of works rather than to an administration of the covenant of grace, and the New Covenant, not the Old, is that covenant of grace in its proper form. The name identifies the position with the 1689 Second London Baptist Confession, whose covenant chapter reflects this same reading.1

Confessional Witness

The 1689’s own chapter on God’s covenant does not describe the Mosaic law as an administration of the covenant of grace, unlike the Westminster Confession’s parallel chapter, which states the covenant of grace was “differently administered in the time of the law, and in the time of the gospel.”23 This difference in wording between the two confessions is the textual basis for reading the 1689’s own covenant theology as the Owen-Coxe position rather than Westminster’s.

Historical Development

John Owen argued at length in his exposition of Hebrews 8 that the Old and New Covenants differ in substance, not merely administration, though “the way of reconciliation and salvation was the same under both.”4 Nehemiah Coxe, a Particular Baptist minister who helped prepare the Second London Baptist Confession, argued the same case in his own treatise on the covenants God made with men before the law.5 John Gill continued this reading in the following century, treating the law given at Sinai as itself a covenant on the same pattern as the covenant God made with Adam, and reading the New Covenant’s own promise that all its members “know the Lord from the least to the greatest” (Jer. 31:34) as marking a real change in covenant membership, not merely of outward administration.67

The name “1689 Federalism” itself is a modern one. Daniel Scheiderer’s 2022 dissertation on Baptist covenant theology identifies it, alongside Progressive Covenantalism, as one of two positions “recently proposed among Calvinistic Baptists,” naming Pascal Denault’s The Distinctiveness of Baptist Covenant Theology and Samuel Renihan’s The Mystery of Christ, His Covenant, and His Kingdom (2019) as its leading contemporary statements.1

Opposing Views

Most Presbyterian and Reformed covenant theologians, following Westminster, hold that the Mosaic covenant was itself an administration of the one covenant of grace, differing from the New Covenant only in outward form. Within Calvinistic Baptist theology itself, Progressive Covenantalism has emerged as a related but distinct alternative: Scheiderer notes that although the two positions “advocate for a substantial difference between the old and new covenants” and share real similarities, they are not the same system.1

Related Doctrines

References

  1. Daniel David Scheiderer, “Conclusion: Eternity Summarized, or a Cumulative Case for the Eternal Covenant,” in “Eternal Covenant: The Trinitarian Shape of an Historic Baptist Doctrine” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2022), 207-208: “Two forms of covenant theology have recently been proposed among Calvinistic Baptists under the monikers 1689 Federalism and Progressive Covenantalism… though there are clear differences between them, there are also similarities between the two systems.” ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  2. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 7, “Of God’s Covenant,” text as reproduced by The 1689 Confession. ↩

  3. The Westminster Confession of Faith (1647), chap. 7, “Of God’s Covenant with Man,” para. 6. ↩

  4. John Owen, An Exposition of the Epistle to the Hebrews, in The Works of John Owen, ed. William H. Goold, vol. 23 (repr., Edinburgh: Banner of Truth Trust, 1991), commentary on Heb. 8:6-13. ↩

  5. Nehemiah Coxe, A Discourse of the Covenants that God Made with Men Before the Law (London, 1681). ↩

  6. John Gill, A Body of Doctrinal Divinity; or, A System of Evangelical Truths, Deduced from the Sacred Scriptures, 2 vols. (London: Printed for the Author, and Sold by George Keith, 1769), book III, chap. 7, “Of the Law Given to Adam, and the Covenant Made with Him.” ↩

  7. John Gill, A Body of Doctrinal Divinity, book IV, chap. 5, “Of the Abrogation of the Old Covenant, Or First Administration of It, And the Introduction of the New, Or Second Administration of It.” ↩