Robert Reymond

Overview

Robert Lewis Reymond (1932-2013) was an American Presbyterian theologian best known for his one-volume A New Systematic Theology of the Christian Faith (1998), which he wrote while teaching at Covenant Theological Seminary and later at Knox Theological Seminary.¹ He held to supralapsarianism in the order of God’s eternal decrees.² Two of his arguments are still quoted in Reformed scholarship today: that regeneration causally precedes and produces faith rather than the reverse, and that the persons of the Trinity are distinguished by three “subjective personal apprehensions” even as they share one “objective omniscience.”³

Life and Ministry

Reymond earned his B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. degrees from Bob Jones University and was ordained in the Reformed Presbyterian Church, Evangelical Synod (RPCES) in 1967.¹ He pastored an RPCES congregation in Hazelwood, Missouri from 1968 to 1973 and, that same year, joined the faculty of Covenant Theological Seminary in St. Louis as associate professor of theology and apologetics, a post he held until 1990.¹ During this period he also served as interim pastor of an RPCES congregation in Waterloo, Illinois, from 1981 to 1985.¹ When the RPCES merged into the Presbyterian Church in America in 1983, Reymond’s ministerial credentials transferred with it.¹ In 1990 he moved to Knox Theological Seminary in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, where he held the chair of Systematic Theology until his retirement in 2008; afterward he continued supplying the pulpit at Holy Trinity Presbyterian Church in Fort Lauderdale.¹ Besides A New Systematic Theology of the Christian Faith, his published works include The Justification of Knowledge (1976), Paul Missionary Theologian (2003), Jesus Divine Messiah (2003), a biography of John Calvin (2004), and Contending for the Faith (2005).¹ He died on September 20, 2013.¹

Theological Contribution

Monergistic regeneration and effectual calling

On the ordo salutis, Reymond holds that regeneration is not a response to faith but its cause: “The conclusion cannot be avoided that God’s regenerating work must causally precede a man’s faith response to God’s summons to faith.”⁴ Matthew Barrett cites this argument in his dissertation on monergistic regeneration, alongside Reymond’s definition of total depravity: fallen man’s “understanding is darkened, his mind is at enmity with God, his will to act is slave to his darkened understanding and rebellious mind, his heart is corrupt, his emotions are perverted, his affections naturally gravitate to that which is evil and ungodly, his conscience is untrustworthy, and his body is subject to mortality.”⁵

Reymond also departs from John Murray’s narrower construal of effectual calling, in which the Father’s summons and the Spirit’s regenerating work are kept distinct offices of distinct persons. Reymond argues instead that effectual calling is an act of all three persons of the Godhead together: the Father’s summons “is effectual through the regenerating work of the Spirit of God, which the Spirit executes by and with God’s summons in the hearts of the elect, to effect faith which does unite the sinner to Christ.”⁶ He points to the Spirit’s descent from Christ at Pentecost (John 15:26; Acts 2:33) as evidence that the Spirit who regenerates “is not only the Father’s Spirit, he is Christ’s Spirit as well” (Rom. 8:9-10).⁶

The Trinity: eternal generation and personal consciousness

Reymond’s A New Systematic Theology takes a distinctive position on the eternal relations within the Godhead. Following John Calvin’s concern that the traditional language could compromise the Son’s full deity, Reymond “appealed to John Calvin to reject the language of the Son’s eternal generation,” while still affirming “the Son’s eternal, immanent filial relation” to the Father.⁷ He accounts for the unity and distinction of the three persons by distinguishing a single shared “objective omniscience” from three distinct “subjective personal apprehensions”:

“While there is one objective omniscience in the Godhead, that is to say, each Person knows all there is to know (hence, one omniscience), there are also three subjective personal apprehensions in the Godhead of all there is to know, which apprehensions cannot be reduced to one personality, that is to say, each Person knows all there is to know in the manner distinctly peculiar to his own Person.”³

He illustrates the distinction with the crucifixion: “Both the Father and the Spirit … knew the objective fact that the Son would die on the cross but neither ever thought, ‘I will die on the cross.’ Only the Son subjectively thought that.”³ For Reymond, the only warrant available for saying anything further about these eternal, immanent relations is the eternal covenant of redemption among the three persons.⁸

Covenant theology

Reymond also addresses the covenant idea’s place in the wider Reformed tradition. On Calvin’s Institutes, he holds that while “Calvin makes extensive use of the covenant idea in his Institutes (see, e.g., II.ix-xi), … because he developed his Institutes along Trinitarian lines the covenant concept is not the architectonic or governing principle in that work.”⁹ By contrast, he credits the Westminster divines with a more central role for the covenant concept: “the framers of the Westminster Confession of Faith placed the concept of the covenant in the foreground of their confessional deliverance, giving creedal status to the covenant of works and the covenant of grace.”¹⁰

Historical Significance

Reymond’s one-volume systematic theology is still cited as a Reformed reference work. Recent doctoral dissertations have engaged his own arguments on regeneration and effectual calling,⁴ the Trinity,⁷ and covenant theology.¹⁰

Related Doctrines

References

Wikipedia, s.v. “Robert L. Reymond,” accessed 2026-09-17. No library-held source treats Reymond’s own biography as its subject; these bare career facts (degrees, ordination, pastorates, and teaching posts) are sourced to this non-library encyclopedia entry, the same convention used for bare biographical facts in robert-letham.md, philipp-melanchthon.md, and r-l-dabney.md. His theological positions are sourced to library-held works throughout. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸
Robert L. Reymond, A New Systematic Theology of the Christian Faith, 2nd ed. (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1998), 488-502. ↩
Reymond, A New Systematic Theology, 322, quoted in Bagwell, “The Command from His Father,” 204-5nn84-85. ↩ ↩² ↩³
Reymond, A New Systematic Theology, quoted in Matthew Michael Barrett, “The Scriptural Affirmation of Monergistic Regeneration,” in “Reclaiming Monergism: The Case for Sovereign Grace in Effectual Calling and Regeneration” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2011), 222. ↩ ↩²
Reymond, A New Systematic Theology, 450, quoted in Barrett, “Reclaiming Monergism,” 172n2. ↩
Reymond, A New Systematic Theology, 717, quoted in Matthew Michael Barrett, “Exploring the Relationship Between Effectual Calling and Regeneration in the Reformed Ordo Salutis,” in “Reclaiming Monergism,” 467-68. ↩ ↩²
Reymond, A New Systematic Theology, 322; 336-38, quoted in Kyle William Bagwell, “The Theological Case for ERAS: A Model of Trinitarian Relations Consistent with the Traditional Principle of Redoublement,” in “The Command from His Father: Begotten not Made, Submissive not Subservient, Assigned not Subjected” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2023), 204. ↩ ↩²
Reymond, A New Systematic Theology, 337-38, quoted in Bagwell, “The Command from His Father,” 205nn86-87. ↩
Reymond, A New Systematic Theology, 504, quoted in Carol Man Fen Chen, “John Calvin’s Doctrine of Twofold Grace,” in “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), 53-108. ↩
Reymond, A New Systematic Theology, 505, quoted in Carol Man Fen Chen, “Post-Reformation Development of Covenant Theology,” in “A Historical, Biblical, and Theological Interpretation of Covenants,” 109-207. ↩ ↩²