I Will Be A God To You And To Your Children (15-Part Podcast Series on Covenant Theology)

by R. Scott Clark

Part 1: Introduction to the Series
One of the most frequent topics and questions for discussion on the Heidelblog has been this: Who should be baptized and why? To anticipate an objection: some will say that the Heidelcast should not be addressing this subject because it causes needless division. That’s wrongheaded. First, the Scripture teaches a covenant theology and, we confess, it teaches that the promise God made to Abraham is still in effect: I will be a God to you and to your children. The Heidelblog and the Heidelcast exist to help the church recover her confession and we confess a covenant theology and infant baptism. These are essential aspects of Reformed theology, piety, and practice. Further, we live, relative to American evangelical religion, in a predominantly Baptist culture. This means that many American evangelicals have never heard a biblical case for infant baptism. Among them it is widely assumed that we baptize infants because we have not fully divorced ourselves from the influence of Rome. Others, it is assumed that infant baptism is merely about sentiment. In this series we will walk through the biblical and confessional teaching about God’s covenant with Abraham and what it means for how we read Scripture, how we understand the old covenant, how we relate the old covenant to the new, and what that means for the practice of baptism.

Part 2: How We Read the Scriptures; Hermeneutics
This is part 2 of the series: I Will Be A God To You And To Your Children. We’re talking about how to read the Scriptures, about what Scripture says about the covenant of grace, its administration, and baptism. One of the first things we need to discuss is how to read a text, particularly, how to read the Scriptures. History and experience tell us that Christians study the same Bible, but we often read it differently. As we noted in the previous episode, we come to such different conclusions because we begin with different assumptions about the nature of things and authority and because we do not always agree on how to read Scripture. These different methods and starting points lead to different conclusions.

Part 3: The Covenant of Grace
Last time we looked at some of the challenges we face in learning how to interpret Scripture properly and how the Ancient Christian Churches and the Reformed churches read the Scriptures, with Christ at the center. One way to understand this unity is to account for the biblical teaching about the covenants. This would seem to be fairly obvious thing to so since Scripture uses different terms for “covenant” about 295 times. The first time we find it is in Genesis 6:18, “But I will establish my covenant with you, and you shall come into the ark, you, your sons, your wife, and your sons’ wives with you” (ESV). This is not the first time, however, the idea of the covenant appears in Scripture. It is in Genesis 2:17, which is an expression of the covenant of works: “do this and live.” In Genesis 3:15 we see the substance of the covenant of grace, when our Lord promised the seed of the woman to crush the head of the serpent. The first covenant the Lord made with Noah was an expression of the covenant of grace, that promise of God’s free favor to sinners, to be a God, to be a Savior, to his people.That promise is repeated again and again throughout the Hebrew and Greek Scriptures. Nevertheless, it’s not unusual for evangelicals, which movements have been heavily influenced by Anabaptist theology, piety, and practice since the early 19th century to deny the very existence of the covenant of grace.

Part 4: The Substance of the Covenant of Grace and its Accidents (or its Outward/External Administration through Redemptive History)
This is part 4 of the series: I Will Be A God To You And To Your Children. Last time we considered whether it’s right to speak of a “covenant of grace.” We saw that, from the very beginning of redemptive history, immediately after the fall, God made a promise to Adam, a covenant, to send a Savior and he administered that promise through Noah, Abraham, Moses, David, the prophets, and finally fulfilled it in his well-beloved Son, Jesus. In this episode we’re thinking about what ties the covenant of grace together under the types and shadows and under the new covenant. The way one of our earlier covenant theologians spoke was to speak of the substance of the covenant of grace as distinct from its accidents. This is an older set of categories. Substance refers to that which makes a thing what it is. What is it that makes a car what it is? It has an engine, it has wheels, it has a place to sit, and a way to steer. The color, the number of seats, the size of the engine and the number of wheels (e.g., 3 or 4) doesn’t change its essence. Those things affect what sort of car it is but not whether it is a car.

Part 5: Continuity of the Old and New Testaments
This is part 5 of the series: I Will Be A God To You And To Your Children. Last time we looked at the distinction between the substance of the covenant of grace and its accidents or its outward (external) administration throughout redemptive history. We also considered Caspar Olevianus’ (1536–87) explanation of Jeremiah 31:31–34. In this episode we consider one of the bigger hurdles that evangelicals face in getting to grips with historic, confessional Reformed theology: the problem of continuity and discontinuity between the Old Testament and the New. It is widely assumed that Noah, Abraham, Moses, and David were all the same thing and that they were all fulfilled at the cross, in the same way, and that they have all been abrogated in the same way. The New Testament itself distinguishes very clearly between the Old Covenant and the New. It explains repeatedly what is permanent from the period of types and shadows and what was temporary. One of the first things we must understand is what the New Testament means by the phrase “old testament.” We also must understand the nature of types and shadows and how they are fulfilled.

Part 6: Covenant Formula of Genesis 17
This is episode 6 of our series: I will be a God to You and to Your Children. Last time we began looking at how types and shadows help us sort out what, in the history of redemption, is temporary and what is permanent. Are there any clues in the types and shadows themselves? How do the Hebrew Scriptures speak about the types and shadows and do the prophets give us an indication of what they consider to be temporary and permanent? When the New Testament looks back on the history of redemption what does it see, what do the writers of the New Testament see as temporary in the period of types and shadows and what do they see as permanent? This is important because one of the objections that my Baptist friends make to infant baptism is to say that the act of initiating children into the visible covenant community, into the visible church, is part of the types and shadows. Is that true? That’s what we’re exploring in this episode. Last time we looked at Genesis chapters 3, 6, 12, and 15. In this episode we will consider the covenant formula of Genesis 17 and more examples of types and shadows to see if we can find a pattern, to see if we can learn what is permanent and what is temporary.

Part 7: The Covenant of Genesis 17 and Its Sign
This is episode 7 of our series: I will be a God to You and to Your Children. For the last two episodes we have been thinking about what is temporary and what is permanent in the history of redemption. We have looked at the formula of the covenant of grace as expressed in Genesis 17:8 and 9. We have looked at how the prophets and the New Testament writers adopted and adapted that formula. In contrast, we have seen how sacrifices were inherently temporary. Even before the new covenant, the prophets were already telling us that the Lord did not care much about the blood of bulls and goats but the very same prophets continued to invoke the Abrahamic formula of the covenant of grace: I will be a God to you and to your children. In this episode we will look a Genesis 17:10-14. God not only instituted a covenant of grace with Abraham and his sons but he also attached to it a sign. In this episode we consider what is temporary and typological about circumcision and what is permanent.

Part 8: Relation of the Mosaic and Abrahamic Covenants
This is episode 8 of our series: I will be a God to You and to Your Children. Last time we looked at circumcision, about which we saw that, just as with the bloodshed of the sacrifice of pigeons, bulls, goats, and lambs, by the time we get to the prophets, Yahweh seems positively disinterested in physical circumcision. Jeremiah 4:4 and 9:25-26 speak of a figurative, spiritual circumcision. In those places, we have explicit evidence that physical circumcision, like animal sacrifice, was intended to be temporary and typological. It was never intended to be permanent. By contrast, however, we do not see the same revocation of initiation of infants into the visible, covenant community. Instead, what we do find (as we have seen in earlier episodes) is the continuing Abrahamic pattern: I will be a God to you and to your children. In this episode we want to tackle head-on the question of the relation of the Mosaic and Abrahamic covenants.

Part 9: The New Covenant, Children and Jeremiah 31:31–33
Last time we looked at how the Scriptures speak about the Abrahamic covenant in contrast to how they speak about the Mosaic covenant and we saw that the Mosaic covenant had a twofold character. It was both an administration of the covenant of grace and it had a typological legal, temporary character. The Abrahamic covenant was also clothed in types and shadows but, in distinction from Moses, it did not have a legal character. We also saw that circumcision, as a bloody typological, forward-looking, sacrament, that anticipated the righteousness and death of Christ was like animal sacrifices. Both were intentionally temporary and typological. In contrast, to the sacrifices and circumcision, the Abrahamic formula, “I will be a God to you and to your children” was not temporary or typological. My Baptist friends are convinced that the inclusion of children into the visible covenant community by a sacrament was typological and therefore not part of the new covenant. We can test that theory, however, in Scripture. Ask this question: The prophets told us that sacrifices and circumcision were typological and temporary but where do they do tell us that the inclusion of children into the visible covenant community is temporary and typological? We can’t just assume that it does. What do the Scripture actually say about children and the new covenant? In this episode we will begin looking closely at Jeremiah 31:31–33.

Part 10: The New Covenant and Hebrews 7-8
In the last episode, in this episode and in the next, we’re looking at what Scripture says about the new covenant. We’ve looked at what Jeremiah 31:31-34 actually says, how Paul interprets it, and now we want to turn our attention to the book of Hebrews where the pastor to these Jewish Christians, was facing the possibility of the defection of these Jewish Christians back to the Mosaic system and to Judaism. In response he has to show how, relative to the New Covenant, the old, Mosaic covenant is fading, obsolete, and inferior, that he argues that the “former commandment,” has been “set aside because of its weakness and uselessness” (Heb 7:19). According to Hebrews, Jesus is the “surety of a better covenant.” He argues from the inferiority of the old covenant priesthood and for the superiority of Christ’s priesthood (Heb 7:27–8:5).The old covenant of which he writes refers not to Abraham nor to Noah but to Moses. Failure to observe this distinction will result is significant confusion about the message of the writer to the Hebrews. It also leads to confusion about how to understand the history of redemption and about the nature of the new covenant itself.

Part 11: The Identical Nature of Jeremiah 31:31-34 and the Abrahamic Covenant
In this episode we  see that the benefits of the New Covenant are the benefits of the covenant of grace. There are some who see a strong discontinuity between the promises made to Abraham and the new covenant promised Jeremiah 31. There are reasons, however, why this is not the best way to understand Jeremiah 31:31–34. As we have already seen in this series, each of these benefits was already promised under the covenant of grace to Abraham. The Lord himself characterized his covenant with Abraham as featuring just these benefits. Further, the New Testament interprets Jeremiah 31 and the Abrahamic covenant as being substantially identical.

Part 12: What is Baptism Itself? How Do We Define It? What is a Sacrament?
We are just about ready to immerse ourselves, as it were, in the question of baptism but we have at least one more thing to discuss before we get to baptism and that is this: what is baptism? In the Reformed tradition, we ask “what is a sacrament?” In biblical-theological terms we could ask, “what is a covenant sign and seal?” Are there sacraments in the Bible or are they just rituals made up by the church? Do sacraments create the reality they signify or they means that God uses? These are some of the questions we’ll be considering in this episode.

Part 13: Covenant Infant Baptism
With this episode now we dive into the question of baptism itself. So far we have been setting the stage because, from the historic, confessional Reformed point of view, the debate about infant baptism is really a debate about how to understand the history of redemption and how to interpret the Scriptures. For example, in my experience, the two most frequent objections to infant are these: first, that there are no examples of infant baptism in the NT and second, that the only example of anything like infant baptism is infant circumcision under Abraham, but he belongs to the Old Testament. Well, if you think this, then you need to go back and listen to the previous 8 episodes. Again, if you haven’t listened to the previous episodes, this episode won’t be as useful.

Part 14: The Overarching Covenant View of Scripture, How the NT Interprets the OT, And the History of Redemption
This series has really been about how to interpret Scripture.  Christians study the same Bible, but we often read it differently. Sometimes we begin with different assumptions about the nature of things and authority. These different methods and starting points lead to different conclusions. True Bible study requires comparing Scripture with Scripture and especially comparing clearer passages with those which are less clear. In this case, that means allowing the New Testament not only to interpret specific Old Testament passages but also allowing the NT to teach us how to interpret the OT.  In this series I have been making the case for a particular was of reading and understanding the history of redemption.

Part 15: Listener Call-ins and Questions
This is the 15th and final episode of our series, “I Will Be A God to You And to Your Children.” If you are just finding us, the series starts at episode 105. As we wrap up the series it seemed to be a good time to take some calls and answer some lingering questions and we have some good ones from England, Belfast, and St Louis among other places. Thanks to everyone who called and wrote in with questions.

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