Covenant of Grace

“For this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, declares the Lord: I will put my laws into their minds, and write them on their hearts, and I will be their God, and they shall be my people.”

— Hebrews 8:10

The Covenant of Grace is God’s gracious covenant with the elect in Jesus Christ, made after mankind’s fall left it incapable of earning life through the Covenant of Works. In it God freely offers sinners life and salvation through Christ, requiring faith of those who receive it, and promising his Holy Spirit to those ordained to eternal life. First announced to Adam in the promise of a deliverer, it unfolds through the covenants God made with Noah, Abraham, and David, and reaches its full disclosure in the new covenant sealed in Christ’s blood.

Confessional Witness

The Westminster Confession (1646), the Savoy Declaration (1658), and the 1689 Second London Baptist Confession agree on how the covenant begins. Man, “having brought himself under the curse of the law by his fall,” left himself unable to attain life by the covenant of works, so:

“It pleased the Lord to make a covenant of grace, wherein he freely offereth unto sinners life and salvation by Jesus Christ, requiring of them faith in him, that they may be saved; and promising to give unto all those that are ordained unto eternal life, his Holy Spirit, to make them willing and able to believe.”¹

Westminster and Savoy state the same point in almost identical wording.² Where the confessions differ is in length: the Baptist confession’s chapter runs three paragraphs against Westminster’s six, since it stops short of Westminster’s further claim that the Old and New Testaments are “one and the same” covenant of grace under different administrations.³ In place of that claim, the 1689 confession adds its own paragraph describing how the covenant was revealed by stages rather than administered as one covenant throughout:

“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 further 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.”⁴

A recent study of Baptist federal theology calls this “the most original paragraph” in the confession’s covenant chapter among the wider Reformed confessional family.⁵ The reasoning behind the Baptist confession’s shorter chapter, an argument from Hebrews 8 associated with John Owen and Nehemiah Coxe, runs deeper than this article’s own scope; what the two confessional traditions share, that God graciously offers life and salvation to sinners through Christ alone, is common ground between them.

Biblical Basis

Scripture first announces the covenant of grace to Adam in the promise that the woman’s offspring would crush the serpent’s head (Gen. 3:15), then unfolds it through the covenants God made with Noah, Abraham (Gen. 17:7), and David, each building on what came before without annulling it (Gal. 3:15-18). David’s own testimony calls it “an everlasting covenant, ordered in all things and secure” (2 Sam. 23:5), a text Thomas Boston points to as evidence enough on its own that Scripture knows such a covenant.⁶ Its fullest statement is Jeremiah’s promise of a new covenant written on the heart rather than on tablets of stone (Jer. 31:31-34), which Hebrews quotes at length as the ground for calling Christ mediator of “a better covenant, enacted on better promises” (Heb. 8:6-10).

Paul grounds the covenant’s fulfillment in Christ’s own blood, offered as a propitiation received “through faith” rather than earned by keeping the law (Rom. 3:21-26), and traces its origin further back still, to “eternal life, which God, who never lies, promised before the ages began” (Titus 1:2). Hebrews twice more calls Christ “mediator” of this covenant (Heb. 9:15; 12:24), each time pairing the word with “new” or “better.” A. A. Hodge takes this pairing as marking what the phrase actually refers to: not the covenant of grace considered simply in itself, but “that new dispensation of that eternal covenant which Christ introduced in person,” in contrast to its earlier, less complete administration under Moses.⁷ The writer to the Hebrews closes by naming Christ’s resurrection an act “through the blood of the eternal covenant” (Heb. 13:20).

Doctrinal Significance

John Gill draws out what follows from a covenant that is “entirely free” and “ordered in all things”: because its terms rest on Christ’s own merit rather than the believer’s future performance, and the mercy funding it is “from everlasting” rather than newly decided in time, its promises carry a security no covenant resting on human faithfulness could offer.⁸ Effectual calling, justification, adoption, and final glorification are each administered under this covenant rather than earned apart from it, so that the whole application of redemption to the elect takes place within its terms.

Historical Development

Within the broader system of covenant theology, two further episodes bear specifically on how the covenant of grace itself has been defined and defended.

The Marrow Controversy

Edward Fisher’s The Marrow of Modern Divinity (1646) taught that Christ’s sacrifice carries a “legal, federal sufficiency” for all humanity, a claim used to ground a free, universal offer of the gospel without teaching that Christ died savingly for everyone.⁹ The book was republished in Scotland by James Hog of Carnock in the early eighteenth century, and Thomas Boston, together with the brothers Ebenezer and Ralph Erskine, defended its teaching as the so-called “Marrow Men” against the Church of Scotland’s General Assembly, which judged the book’s language dangerous to sound doctrine.¹⁰ Herman Bavinck describes the dispute as Scotland’s own “neonomian conflict over the doctrine of justification.”¹¹ The Marrow Men distinguished God’s “giving love,” extended to all in the gospel offer, from his “electing love,” reserved for the elect alone, so that the offer of the covenant could be made freely to every hearer without implying that Christ died to secure the salvation of every hearer.¹⁰ Boston’s own A View of the Covenant of Grace, published after his death in 1734, sets out at length the position he defended in the controversy: the covenant’s promise of life is “absolute and free” to the elect, resting on Christ’s own fulfillment of its terms rather than on any condition performed by the sinner.¹²

One covenant of grace, or the eternal covenant by another name

Reformed and Particular Baptist theologians of the same period did not all draw the line between the covenant of grace and the eternal covenant of redemption in the same place. Boston follows the more common usage, in which the covenant of grace is what God administers with the elect in history, resting on a prior covenant of redemption made with Christ in eternity. John Gill’s A Body of Doctrinal Divinity (1769) instead applies the name “covenant of grace” to that eternal transaction itself, describing it as “a compact or agreement made from all eternity among the divine Persons, more especially between the Father and the Son, concerning the salvation of the elect.”¹³ The difference is chiefly a matter of terminology rather than a disagreement over what actually took place, but it means the phrase “covenant of grace” did not carry one fixed technical sense even within Reformed and Baptist federal theology of the same century.

Opposing Views

The Canons of Dort (1619) reject a family of positions in which the covenant’s benefits ultimately turn on the sinner’s own will rather than on election and Christ’s merit: that perseverance is “a condition of the new covenant, which… man before his decisive election and justification must fulfill through his free will,” rather than a fruit of election secured by Christ’s death, resurrection, and intercession.¹⁴ A related error, condemned in the same document, holds that God simply reckons faith itself, even though imperfect, as if it were the law’s own perfect obedience, rather than faith laying hold of Christ’s righteousness imputed to the believer.¹⁵ Both positions keep the vocabulary of a gracious covenant while relocating its ground from Christ’s finished work to the sinner’s own performance.

A separate and long-running dispute, internal to the Reformed tradition itself, concerns whether the Old Testament covenants with Israel are themselves administrations of the covenant of grace, as Westminster teaches, or whether only the new covenant inaugurated in Christ is properly the covenant of grace, as Owen, Coxe, and the Particular Baptist tradition behind the 1689 confession argued. Both sides agree that there was one way of salvation, by grace through faith in the promised Christ, in every era; Covenant theology sets out the two readings of Hebrews 8 that divide them.

Objections and Responses

Doesn’t calling faith a condition of the covenant make it a kind of works-covenant? Gill answers that the covenant is “entirely free,” so that “God was not induced to make it from any motive and condition in men.”⁸ The Canons of Dort make the same point from the opposite direction, condemning the view that God simply counts faith itself, however imperfect, as equivalent to the law’s own perfect obedience: Scripture instead teaches that believers are “justified freely by his grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus… through faith in his blood” (Rom. 3:24-25), so that faith is the instrument by which a sinner receives a righteousness that is Christ’s own, not a substitute performance God accepts in place of the law.¹⁵

If the covenant was settled in eternity, why does the gospel command sinners to believe and repent? A. A. Hodge answers that the covenant’s execution in time must be “ethical and not magical,” proceeding “by the revelation of truth, and the influences of motives,” so that it is “voluntarily appropriated by the subject as an offered grace.”¹⁶ The Marrow Men gave a more specific version of the same answer: because Christ’s sacrifice has a “legal, federal sufficiency” for every hearer of the gospel, the offer of the covenant can be pressed on all without waiting to know who among them is elect.⁹

Related Doctrines

References

The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (London, 1677), chap. 7, “Of God’s Covenant,” para. 2. ↩
The Westminster Confession of Faith (London, 1647), chap. 7, “Of God’s Covenant with Man,” para. 3. ↩
Westminster Confession of Faith, chap. 7, para. 6: “There are not, therefore, two covenants of grace differing in substance, but one and the same under various dispensations.” ↩
Second London Baptist Confession, chap. 7, para. 3. ↩
Daniel David Scheiderer, Eternal Covenant: The Trinitarian Shape of an Historic Baptist Doctrine (2022), introduction. ↩
Thomas Boston, A View of the Covenant of Grace (Aberdeen: George and Robert King, 1853), “Advertisement.” ↩
Archibald Alexander Hodge, Outlines of Theology (New York: Robert Carter and Brothers, 1879), 372-373. ↩
John Gill, A Body of Doctrinal Divinity, 2 vols. (London: Printed for the Author, and Sold by George Keith, 1769), book II, chap. 15, “Of the Properties of the Covenant of Grace.” ↩ ↩²
Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 16, “The Exalted Lord Christ.” ↩ ↩²
Hodge, Outlines of Theology, 417-418. ↩ ↩²
Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, chap. 2, “The History and Literature of Dogmatic Theology.” ↩
Boston, A View of the Covenant of Grace, 469. ↩
Gill, A Body of Doctrinal Divinity, book II, chap. 7, “Of the Everlasting Covenant of Grace, Between the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit.” ↩
Canons of Dort (Dordrecht, 1619), Fifth Head of Doctrine, Rejection of Errors, Error 1. ↩
Canons of Dort, Second Head of Doctrine, Rejection of Errors, Error 4. ↩ ↩²
Hodge, Outlines of Theology, 367. ↩