Theopedia

Johannes Cocceius

Overview

Johannes Cocceius (1603-1669) was a Dutch Reformed theologian and Hebraist who taught at Bremen, Franeker, and Leiden. His Doctrine of the Covenant and Testament of God (1648) organized the whole of dogmatics around the covenant idea, making him, together with Johannes Cloppenburg, one of the two theologians who set the covenant as “the fundamental premise and controlling principle” of Dutch Reformed theology.1 The distinctive scheme of successive covenantal abrogations he built on that foundation gave rise to a “Cocceian” school that stood opposite the Voetian party in seventeenth-century Dutch Reformed orthodoxy.2

Life and Ministry

Cocceius was born at Bremen in Germany in 1603 and studied at Hamburg and at Franeker, where Sixtinus Amama was among his teachers.3 He held professorships at Bremen from 1630, Franeker from 1636, and Leiden from 1650 until his death in 1669, succeeding Friedrich Spanheim the elder in the Leiden chair.43 At Franeker he taught first in the chair of Hebrew and added the chair of theology in 1643.3

Theological Contribution

In The Doctrine of the Covenant and Testament of God, Cocceius divided the whole of dogmatics under the covenant idea, presenting the result as a more biblical-theological, anti-Scholastic alternative to the received method of Reformed dogmatics.5 Where a human covenant is made for “mutual benefits,” he held, God’s covenant with his people is “nothing other than the divine declaration of the way of receiving the love of God and obtaining union and communion with him.”6

What distinguished his own construction of that covenant was a doctrine of successive covenantal abrogations: the covenant of grace unfolds across redemptive history as a gradual, historical setting aside of the covenant of works.5 Bavinck calls the resulting scheme “eccentric,” judging that it distinguished the several covenant dispensations so sharply from one another that the underlying unity of God’s covenant promise was put at risk.1

Historical Significance

Bavinck argues that the Reformed polemic against Cocceius targeted his historicizing, biblical-theological method more than his covenant concept itself. Critics focused specifically on his view of the Sabbath, his account of the church’s continuity across the old and new economies, and his reading of Old Testament forgiveness as a mere “passing over” (paresis) rather than a full remission of sin.1 Bavinck traces a broader disparagement of the Old Testament among later thinkers such as Spinoza, Kant, Hegel, and Schleiermacher back to the same historicizing turn Cocceius had begun.1

Cocceius’s theology continued as a named party within the Dutch Reformed academy after his death, opposed by the Voetians. At Duisburg, for instance, Johann Hugenpoth carried on his predecessor Martinus Hundius’s “advocacy of the Cocceian covenant theology” against the Voetian Christoph Crell on the same faculty.7 Bavinck writes that the scholastic theology of Voetius and his allies was eventually “eclipsed by Cartesian and Cocceian theology.”2 Later writers still weighed his exegesis on other questions as well. John Gill names Cocceius, alongside Heidegger, De Dieu, Herman Witsius, and John Owen, among the “learned men” who read Zechariah 6:13’s “counsel of peace” as the eternal covenant of redemption between the Father and the Son. Gill had first favored a different reading of the verse, but came to accept theirs as a legitimate sense of the text.8

Related Doctrines

References

  1. Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 14, “The Only Begotten Son of the Father”: “Cocceius had an eccentric view of the covenant, notably the notion of successive covenantal abrogations, which in fact undermined the key element of grace, making it uncertain. The polemic against Cocceius was directed against his view of the Sabbath, his understanding of the church in the two economies, and forgiveness … in the Old Testament.” ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4

  2. Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, chap. 2, “The History and Literature of Dogmatic Theology.” ↩ ↩2

  3. Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th ed. (1911), s.v. “Cocceius, Johannes.” ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  4. Adriaan C. Neele, “Funeral Oration,” in Petrus van Mastricht, Theoretical-Practical Theology, vol. 1, Prolegomena, trans. Todd M. Rester, ed. Joel R. Beeke (Grand Rapids: Reformation Heritage Books, 2018), 79n48, citing Johannes Cocceius, The Doctrine of the Covenant and Testament of God, trans. Casey Carmichael (Grand Rapids: Reformation Heritage Books, 2016). ↩

  5. Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, chap. 1, “Dogmatic Theology as a Science.” ↩ ↩2

  6. Steven J. Duby, God in Himself: Scripture, Metaphysics, and the Task of Christian Theology, Studies in Christian Doctrine and Scripture (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2019), 146. ↩

  7. Adriaan C. Neele, “Petrus van Mastricht (1630-1706): Life and Work,” introduction to Mastricht, Theoretical-Practical Theology, vol. 1, 34-35. ↩

  8. 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 II, chap. 6. ↩