Theopedia

Protoevangelium

“I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers; he shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel.”

— Genesis 3:15 (ESV)

Definition

The protoevangelium (from Greek proto, “first,” and euangelion, “gospel”) is God’s pronouncement in Genesis 3:15, spoken to the serpent immediately after the Fall, that the seed of the woman would crush the serpent’s head. Interpreted in light of later Scripture, “the seed of the woman means the Redeemer, and… bruising the serpent’s head means his final triumph over the powers of darkness,” making the verse the Bible’s first announcement of the gospel.1

Confessional Witness

The 1689 Second London Baptist Confession names this text directly, in what Daniel Scheiderer calls “the most original paragraph” in the confession’s covenant chapter relative to the Westminster and Savoy family.2 The covenant of grace

“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.”3

The same paragraph grounds that promise in “that Eternal Covenant transaction, that was between the Father and the Son, about the Redemption of the Elect.”3

Biblical Basis

The seed of the woman as the Redeemer

Charles Hodge treats Genesis 3:15 as the opening of a single thread of prediction Scripture later ties to Christ by name. He argues the promised triumph over Satan requires more than a human agent: “the nature of the triumph which he was to effect, in the subjugation of Satan, proves that he was to be a divine person,” so that “in the earliest books of Scripture, even in Genesis, we have… clear intimations” both that the Redeemer would be truly human, as the woman’s own seed, and truly divine, as the one who alone could defeat Satan.1 Hodge reads the later promise that blessing would come through “the seed of Abraham” the same way, pointing to Paul’s own statement that this seed “does not refer to his descendants collectively, but to Christ individually” (Gal. 3:16), and to the fulfillment: “it is not through the children of Abraham as a nation, but through Christ, that all the nations of the earth are blessed.”4

An individual Messiah or the woman’s offspring generally?

Geerhardus Vos cautioned against reading the woman’s “seed” in Genesis 3:15 as an individual rather than her offspring collectively.5 Micah McCormick argues the verse itself favors the individual reading, since it goes on to use a singular pronoun, “he shall bruise your head,” rather than a plural one.5 On either reading, the verse sets the woman’s offspring against the serpent’s in a conflict that Scripture continues to trace through the rest of Genesis, as when Cain, whom Eve seems to have hoped was this promised deliverer, instead murders his own brother (Gen. 4:1, 8).6

Historical Development

Reformed covenant theologians read Genesis 3:15 as the first stage of a single covenant of grace unfolded gradually across both Testaments rather than as an isolated prediction. On this account, “the covenant of grace (the gospel) was first revealed in the protoevangelium (Gen. 3:15), was renewed and applied to the patriarchs, and then progressively expanded and unfolded in the Old Testament,” a process that “continued until the climatic event of the incarnation of the mediator in the New Testament when redemptive promises of the covenant of grace were fulfilled by Christ.”7 Later Old Testament promises to Abraham, David, and through the prophets are, on this reading, successive installments of the same promise first given in Eden, each adding detail Scripture confirms was fulfilled in Christ rather than in the Jewish nation collectively.4

Related Doctrines

References

  1. Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology, vol. 1 (New York: Charles Scribner and Company, 1871), 483-484. ↩ ↩2

  2. Daniel David Scheiderer, “Introduction,” in “Eternal Covenant: The Trinitarian Shape of an Historic Baptist Doctrine” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2022), 10-11. ↩

  3. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 7, “Of God’s Covenant,” para. 3. ↩ ↩2

  4. Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology, vol. 2 (New York: Charles Scribner and Company, 1872), 366-367. ↩ ↩2

  5. Micah John McCormick, “Messiah’s Obedience for Eternal Life Foreshadowed,” in “The Active Obedience of Jesus Christ” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2010), 184. ↩ ↩2

  6. McCormick, “Messiah’s Obedience for Eternal Life Foreshadowed,” 185. ↩

  7. Carol Man Fen Chen, A Historical, Biblical, and Theological Interpretation of Covenants: Unconditionality and Conditionality in Relation to Justification and Sanctification (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2019), 133-134. ↩