Progressive Covenantalism

Definition

Progressive Covenantalism is a contemporary evangelical hermeneutical system, associated with Peter Gentry and Stephen Wellum, that reads the biblical covenants as unfolding progressively toward their fulfillment in Christ, each covenant a typological pointer whose pattern is fulfilled and transformed rather than merely repeated in the New Covenant. Daniel Scheiderer’s dissertation on Baptist covenant theology names it, alongside 1689 Federalism, as one of two positions “recently proposed among Calvinistic Baptists,” noting it has largely replaced the earlier New Covenant Theology.¹

Historical Development

Progressive Covenantalism’s classical statement is Peter Gentry and Stephen Wellum’s Kingdom through Covenant (2012), which argues that each Old Testament covenant, Noahic, Abrahamic, Mosaic, Davidic, establishes a typological pattern that finds its own fulfillment and transformation, not mere continuation, in the New Covenant inaugurated by Christ.² Wellum and Brent Parker’s edited volume, Progressive Covenantalism: Charting a Course between Dispensational and Covenant Theologies (2016), positions the system explicitly between the two older frameworks it draws from and revises.¹

Opposing Views

Progressive Covenantalism and 1689 Federalism agree that the Old and New Covenants differ substantially rather than merely in administration, and both grew out of contemporary Baptist efforts to work out covenant theology apart from Presbyterian paedobaptist assumptions.¹ Oren Rhea Martin, writing from a 1689 Federalist perspective, engages Progressive Covenantalism’s own account of typological fulfillment directly rather than treating it as a settled advance: while commending Gentry and Wellum’s application of the New Testament’s “already, not yet” character of the kingdom to the land promise, Martin argues their reading “does not do full justice to the New Testament presentation of the already-not yet character of the kingdom or the nature of typological fulfillment in Scripture.”²

Most Presbyterian and Reformed covenant theologians, following Westminster, hold instead that the biblical covenants are successive administrations of a single covenant of grace rather than typological patterns awaiting transformation.

Related Doctrines

• Covenant theology
• 1689 Federalism
• Mosaic Covenant
• New Covenant
• Abrahamic Covenant
• Dispensationalism

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… New Covenant Theology… has largely been replaced by Progressive Covenantalism.” ↩ ↩² ↩³

2. Oren Rhea Martin, “Conclusion,” in “Bound for the Kingdom: The Land Promise in God’s Redemptive Plan” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2013), 281-282, citing Peter J. Gentry and Stephen J. Wellum, Kingdom through Covenant: A Biblical-Theological Understanding of the Covenants (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2012), 704. ↩ ↩²