Trinity Without Hierarchy by Michael F. Bird

Author:Michael F. Bird
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Kregel, Incorporated
Published: 2019-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

A. Covenants, Covenantal Relation, and the Covenant of Redemption

For the most part, seventeenth-century moral debates regarding the nature of contractual agreements were developed in reference to the concept of natural law. That is because the rights and obligations which arise from any voluntary agreement are guaranteed by more fundamental moral principles inscribed upon the law of nature by our Creator. Nature logically precedes act. So, voluntary agreements can formalize a new kind of relation between covenanting parties, in which the agreed rights and obligations of the covenant accrue to each party by virtue of their voluntary participation in the covenant. But since any covenantal relation is voluntary in character, it must ultimately supervene upon those relations (along with their attending rights and obligations) that the covenanting parties maintain by the law of nature. It was therefore the operative presupposition that any account of the proper nature of a covenant must be consonant with (or at the very least, not contradictory to) the wider dictates of the law of nature. Indeed, where a covenant explicitly stands in contradiction to the order of nature, there cannot be a covenant. As we will see below, this point will be relevant for our understanding of the pactum salutis and the mission of the Son.

With respect to the general nature of a covenant, Owen argues that a covenant is “complete” or “equal,” that is, a legitimate and true covenant, if it meets the conditions below. Owen justifies some of these conditions biblically, but it would be a mistake to assume that the necessity of these claims is primarily exegetical. The biblical justifications here are relatively thin and, in any event, these conditions were fairly common tropes in seventeenth-century philosophical and legal texts treating the nature of contracts. As such, their necessity is likely as much indebted to local convention and wider forms of moral reasoning as it is to any strictly biblical consideration. Of course, Owen does not take these to be mutually exclusive, either—indeed, to his mind, the moral universe forms the broader context of the biblical narrative, and so he expects the two to be mutually reinforcing. Nevertheless, it is worth remembering that the following conditions are supported and informed by a wider network of biblical, theological, and moral judgments. They are as follows:

(1)A covenant must be between distinct persons. Owen bases this judgment, formally at least, on Galatians 3:20, which claims that “a mediator is not of one,” and so suggests that there must be diverse parties between which Christ mediates. The implicit assumption is that, as Christ acted on behalf of his people in the formalising of the covenant, the covenant of redemption must be between distinct parties.24

(2)It must be a voluntary agreement. Owen’s stated reason for this is that the biblical term for covenant (berith) derives from a root meaning “to choose.” Accordingly, a proper covenant is one in which both parties enter freely into an agreement, without coercion and unconstrained, but with a “due consideration and right judgment” of its terms.

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