Basic HTML Version
198
IV. Man in the Covenant of Works
The discussion of the original state of man, the status integritatis, would not be complete
without considering the mutual relationship between God and man, and especially the origin
and nature of the religious life of man. That life was rooted in a covenant, just as the Christian
life is today, and that covenant is variously known as the covenant of nature, the covenant of
life, the Edenic covenant, and the covenant of works. The first name, which was rather common
at first, was gradually abandoned, since it was apt to give the impression that this covenant was
simply a part of the natural relationship in which man stood to God. The second and third
names are not sufficiently specific, since both of them might also be applied to the covenant of
grace, which is certainly a covenant of life, and also originated in Eden, Gen. 3:15. Consequently
the name “Covenant of Works” deserves preference.
A. THE DOCTRINE OF THE COVENANT OF WORKS IN HISTORY.
The history of the doctrine of the covenant of works is comparatively brief. In the early Church
Fathers the covenant idea is seldom found at all, though the elements which it includes,
namely, the probationary command, the freedom of choice, and the possibility of sin and
death, are all mentioned. Augustine in his de Civitates Dei speaks of the relation in which Adam
originally stood to God as a covenant (testamentum, pactum), while some others inferred the
original covenant relationship from the well known passage of Hos. 6:7. In the scholastic
literature and in the writings of the Reformers, too, all the elements which later on went into
the construction of the doctrine of the covenant of works were already present, but the
doctrine itself was not yet developed. Though they contain some expressions which point to
the imputation of Adam’s sin to his descendants, it is clear that on the whole the transmission
of sin was conceived realistically rather than federally. Says Thornwell in his analysis of Calvin’s
Institutes: “Federal representation was not seized as it should be, but a mystic realism in place
of it.”[Collected Writings I, p. 619. Cf. Calvin, Institutes II, 1.] The development of the doctrine
of the covenant of grace preceded that of the doctrine of the covenant of works and paved the
way for it. When it was clearly seen that Scripture represented the way of salvation in the form
of a covenant, the parallel which Paul draws in Rom. 5 between Adam and Christ soon gave
occasion for thinking of the state of integrity also as a covenant. According to Heppe the first
work which contained the federal representation of the way of salvation, was Bullinger’s
Compendium of the Christian Religion; and Olevianus was the real founder of a well developed
federal theology, in which the concept of the covenant became for the first time the
constitutive and determinative principle of the entire system.[Cf. the valuable chapter on Die
Foederaltheologie der Reformirten Kirche in Heppe’s Geschichte des Pietismus, pp. 204-
240.] From the Reformed Churches of Switzerland and Germany federal theology passed over