What’s the Difference Between Covenant Theology and Dispensationalism? with Harrison Perkins

This transcript has been lightly edited from an automated transcription for clarity and readability. While we've worked to preserve each speaker's words faithfully, errors may remain.

1. 00:00

   Harrison Perkins

   And so then when you come to something like dispensationalism, they're going to see more big differences as the Scripture plays out than Reformed covenant theology does. We see an underlying unity, or at least emphasize that than dispensationalists often will. And I think one of the key aspects, though, of it is that doctrine of the covenant of grace, where we say the covenants that God made with his people throughout redemptive history all have the same substance. Now, that can sound tricky, but really what it means is that under every covenant that God made with his people, people were saved by Jesus Christ, by believing in him even before he came. And whether that's on the label of the 10 for dispensationalism or not—and I think that that differs according to individuals who express it—that ought not to be a controversial thing to affirm. Covenant theology is our way in Reformed theology of explaining how that works.

2. 01:14

   Adriel Sanchez

   Pastor Adriel here with Sola Media. I'm joined by my good friend Harrison Perkins. Harrison, it's good to be with you. And you live in Michigan now, so—Harrison used to be local to where I'm at in San Diego. We actually served as interns together for a brief stint of time, which was really wonderful. If you don't know Harrison, he is currently the pastor of Oakland Hills Community Church—I have something I want to say about that in just a second—got his PhD from Queen's University Belfast in historical theology, and is the author of a number of books.

3. 01:46

   Adriel Sanchez

   And there's some new ones coming out soon: Reformed Covenant Theology, which actually my wife started reading it before I did, which is pretty awesome, and Righteous by Design. That's the latest book. And so I have both of them. I'm working through them and excited to spend some time with you right now. By the way, what I wanted to mention about your church is for hip-hop fans, if there are any out there: his church is on Eight Mile Road. And so I imagine there's probably a lot of hip-hop as part of—

4. 02:16

   Harrison Perkins

   The OPC—that is right on brand for us.

5. 02:20

   Adriel Sanchez

   Not a ton of people who probably even aware of what's happening there.

6. 02:23

   Harrison Perkins

   Yeah, absolutely.

7. 02:25

   Adriel Sanchez

   Well, pretty interesting nonetheless. And so wanted to spend some time talking with you about covenant theology, because you've done so much work in covenant theology, and maybe even the doctrine of justification as it relates to covenant theology. And just to begin, because I know that this is one of those topics that a lot of people can be confused about: imagine you're talking to a dispensationalist guy who's, "Covenant theology? What's that all about?" Or just somebody who—they're not familiar with these categories. How would you explain covenant theology to somebody like that?

8. 03:01

   Harrison Perkins

   Even before we get to the sort of disagreements between classic Reformed covenant theology and dispensationalism, for everybody, whether you know what it is or not, there's a fundamental reality that every single person has a relationship with God. Now, for Christians, it's a good one because of Jesus Christ. But everybody in the world has some relationship to God. And covenant theology is a framework for explaining our relationship with God. And that means it pertains to everybody in some form or fashion. And the covenant that God made with Adam before the fall, as Reformed people see it—well, that explains how we fell into sin, why all of us are counted sinners because of what Adam did, and also why the world is the way it is now, and why some people are alienated from God if they don't believe in Jesus Christ. On the other hand, the covenant of grace, which is this overarching plan of salvation, this one way of salvation by faith alone in Christ alone in every period of redemptive history—well, that explains how people can be reconciled, how sinners can be reconciled to God. And so in all of these ways and more, it is about the most important things.

9. 04:25

   Harrison Perkins

   That isn't to say that someone who disagrees or doesn't know what covenant theology is can't understand these most important realities. But I think it's a framework for explaining clearly well and biblically well how these things work, how our relationship with God is framed, formed, fashioned both by creation and by salvation. And so then when you come to something like dispensationalism, they're going to see more big differences as the Scripture plays out than Reformed covenant theology does. We see an underlying unity, or at least emphasize that than dispensationalists often will. And I think one of the key aspects, though, of it is that doctrine of the covenant of grace, where we say the covenants that God made with his people throughout redemptive history all have the same substance. Now, that can sound tricky, but really what it means is that under every covenant that God made with his people, people were saved by Jesus Christ, by believing in him even before he came. And whether that's on the label of the 10 for dispensationalism or not—and I think that that differs according to individuals who express it—that ought not to be a controversial thing to affirm. Covenant theology is our way in Reformed theology of explaining how that works.

10. 06:02

    Adriel Sanchez

    Super helpful. I remember as a newer Christian thinking about those Old Testament sacrifices and the laws that God gave through Moses and wondering, okay, is it that people in the Old Testament were saved by keeping these laws and performing these rites, these sacrifices, and then all of a sudden in the New Testament, things change radically? Total different substance, right? So now God is gracious in the New Testament; in the Old Testament, it was really heavy, legalistic, that sort of a thing. But appreciate the way you're presenting this, because it does highlight just the practical nature of covenant theology. We're thinking through: How has God administered his salvation, his grace, throughout redemptive history?

11. 06:47

    Harrison Perkins

    It's really not niche.

12. 06:48

    Adriel Sanchez

    Yeah. This is very important and fundamental, I would say, to a proper understanding of the Scripture.

13. 06:56

    Harrison Perkins

    Yeah. I think sometimes that the assumption—in a conservative, biblical, evangelical sort of context, I think most people are going to say, yeah, God always gave grace to his people, and that bit is accepted. But whether it's been thought out or not, the assumption there may be God gave grace by giving some mechanism to obtain salvation. And in the Old Testament, under that, if the mechanisms are different, the assumption is, then, well, Old Testament believers were saved by these sacrifices, by the animals for giving them, as their blood was spilled, or something like that.

14. 07:39

    Adriel Sanchez

    Which Hebrews says impossible.

15. 07:42

    Harrison Perkins

    Right, right. And then another spin on that might be, well, it's not that those things saved them, but that Old Testament believers didn't go to heaven when they died. They didn't truly enter the presence of God. Most evangelicals would hesitate to say purgatory, but kind of a holding tank of sorts—a place that wasn't hell, but it wasn't heaven. And they weren't truly let in to the heavenly city. And I don't think that's a helpful way either.

16. 08:16

    Harrison Perkins

    And the reason I noted is it's actually becoming popular again. And I don't think we need to burn the bridges down as we talk about that topic, but I'm a little bit concerned about it too, as it comes to popularity again, because I think that if we recognize that covenant theology teaches us that God gave means of grace that were different in different eras of redemptive history—well, all those means of grace were still about word, sacrament, and prayer, and the sacraments changed. That's really the thing that shifted throughout redemptive history. Well, all of these means of grace were given to create, confirm, and cultivate faith in Jesus Christ. Now, Old Testament believers trusted in Christ who would come. We trust in Christ who has come. It's a difference of perspective of our faith, but not a difference of kind or quality. It's always salvation by faith in Jesus Christ.

17. 09:19

    Adriel Sanchez

    I'm reminded of the fact—you think of what Paul says in Galatians, in Galatians chapter 3, where he's talking about Abraham having the gospel preached to him, and of course, the initial promise of the gospel that you mentioned way back in Genesis 3:15. So something we see—it's all there. I want to get to talking a little bit about the doctrine of justification, but before we get there, just one objection that I've heard I'd love for you to respond to. Sometimes people will say, okay, well, the Bible does talk about covenants. You have these biblical covenants, like the Abrahamic covenant or the Mosaic covenant or the new covenant. But oftentimes people who believe in covenant theology, they bring in these theological covenants like the covenant of works—you mentioned that covenant that was made with Adam in the garden—or this idea of a covenant of grace. And those are theological covenants that are imposed upon the biblical text. How would you respond to that? This argument that—well, are those really even biblical covenants?

18. 10:18

    Harrison Perkins

    Christians have long accepted the fact, really, that sometimes we have to use terms that aren't right there in the Bible to bring together a lot of things that are happening in Scripture to give us a shorthand way of referring to them. So Jude verse 5 talks about how—Jude's writing and says, "I want to remind you, although you once fully knew it, that Jesus, after saving a people out of the land of Egypt, destroyed those who did not believe." It's astounding that Jude would use the incarnate name of the Son to refer to, well, his activity in the Old Testament. And so much so—it's so astounding that New Testament scholars commenting on text-critical stuff say the best evidence for these manuscripts has "Jesus," but there's no way—that's just too theological. He couldn't have said that. But the thing is, Paul basically says the same thing in First Corinthians 10, where he's talking about Israel in the wilderness, and the rock that followed them was Christ—the mediatorial designation of the Son, the Christ, the Messiah. These types, shadows, ordinances in the Old Testament were about Jesus Christ and even were ways that he was present with the people of God in that time.

19. 12:01

    Adriel Sanchez

    And so, okay, this is just reinforcing the reality, the substance of the covenant—that grace that God has offered in the gospel throughout redemptive history is the same.

20. 12:12

    Harrison Perkins

    Right. And so then we have—whether you like the phrase "the covenant of grace" or not, I really like it, I think it's helpful—but it's just referring to this reality that I've invoked. I haven't done tricky exegesis there. I've just invoked passages that say Christ was there—just the Bible. Yeah. And I'm not trying to shift all the way to hardcore biblicism, but I don't think that this is actually something that we're imposing or reading into it.

21. 12:44

    Harrison Perkins

    I think it's something we're codifying with this doctrine of the covenant of grace, giving some framework, giving some explanation. We have to think about the New Testament arguments, I think, to shift us to what you were saying about the doctrine of justification. In Romans 4, Paul argues for Christians that we are justified by faith alone. And he appeals to the example of Abraham. It's a similar thing in Galatians 3, like you were talking about. But he's explaining the mechanics of justification by faith alone in Romans 4, and he says, think about Abraham. Now, I think that the step that we can miss as we process that—because, of course, Paul's going to appeal to the Old Testament; what else would the New Testament do?—but the only way that that argument works is if Abraham was justified in the same way we are, the exact same way. And that's by faith in Jesus Christ. And so the covenant of grace is also just about this reality of Romans 4, that Abraham and David in Psalm 32—they're talking about the same way of salvation and receiving the same way of salvation that we receive in the new covenant.

22. 15:03

    Harrison Perkins

    It's hard to argue against that, because the New Testament argues from Old Testament figures for the doctrine of justification. So it's hard to reject that if you believe the Scripture. And the covenant of grace is just saying, well, these benefits came from Jesus Christ always, even before he came in the incarnation. His work was applied beforehand.

23. 15:28

    Adriel Sanchez

    You mentioned some people might not like the language of covenant of grace. I'm sure you've noticed this: I feel like what comes under attack more, or is more controversial, is the language of covenant of works—this idea that there's this sort of works relationship in the context of salvation with Adam in the garden. And so could you talk about what is the problem that people have with that language? And then how does that specifically relate to our understanding of justification and the benefits of Christ?

24. 16:02

    Harrison Perkins

    So in some older discussions, the first objection to the doctrine of the covenant of works—because this is a doctrine about a covenant that God made with Adam before the fall—previously, some people said, "I don't see even a covenant taught there." And so there was some pushback to the inferential nature of those arguments. We see the features of a covenant. There's examples, I think, later in Scripture that call that—yeah, Hosea 6:7—that call it a covenant. So, but nonetheless, I'm happy to admit, well, we've inferred this and put the pieces together to call it that. So that's an older objection that still hangs around a little bit.

25. 16:51

    Harrison Perkins

    But I think even mainstream scholarship that isn't Reformed by brand is accepting that biblical theology suggests a covenant between God and Adam—that there were covenantal contours to what was going on there. So I think that one has gone away a little bit. And I think it's important for hearers to know that the objections are shifting, and that helps us kind of contextualize: Well, what are we hearing? Is the objection that somebody's bringing to me kind of outdated?

26. 17:26

    Harrison Perkins

    And if objections are shifting—not that that can never be helpful, to hear out the thing, hear out the objections—at the same time, it almost seems like people are looking for objections if they have to find new ones and not sort of hammer down on the same arguments that have panned out. The newer objections that I think are coming are more about not that there's a covenant, but how we have called it a covenant of works, and that it rests—even though God created Adam good, upright, with knowledge, righteousness, and holiness, after the image of his Creator, and gave him blessed life in the Garden of Eden with the prospect to be fruitful, multiply, and fill the earth.

27. 18:20

    Harrison Perkins

    That was an amazing life, free from sin, free from burden. Joy. He had a task, but there was joy in his task, and it wasn't toilsome. Well, God, in addition to that blessing, offered this higher reward of glorified life, eschatological existence, if Adam would fulfill the law, namely with the sort of pivotal point of passing this test, this probationary tree that put his obedience under examination. It's interesting—some of the ancient writers, Tertullian in particular, writes an extensive passage about how that tree actually kind of had a sacramental function, encapsulating the demands of the moral law. When Adam sinned, he murdered his brothers. He murdered the whole human race by plunging us into death by taking and eating from that tree that God told him wasn't his. He stole from God something that God said, "That's not yours."

28. 19:32

    Harrison Perkins

    And he goes through basically the moral law—that is, as summarized in the Ten Commandments—and says Adam broke the moral law by breaking this sort of symbolic test. But the pivotal point there is, if Adam had obeyed, he would have received this glorified life. And it's the same sort of life that we hope for when Christ comes back and raises us from the grave—that eschatological existence beyond the effects of sin, confirmed in holiness and goodness, forever to have consummate fellowship with God—that was held out to Adam. Now, I think that you can go too far on the works thing in one respect, because we don't want that to be cold. And that's one of the objections: "This is a transactional covenant." No, God was kind.

29. 20:33

    Harrison Perkins

    This was a relationship where God showed his immense love for Adam. He didn't have to offer him better blessings, but he did. And he also told Adam how to reciprocate that love: "You're made in the image of God, so reflect my character by keeping the moral law." And actually, that was just what Adam was supposed to do. And yet God said, "I'll reward you for doing what you're supposed to do." That actually—it shows God's kindness and immense generosity. And even as much as God gave Adam by creation, God is always able to outgive himself. So I don't think the covenant of works is cold. And then people say, "Well, it's works-based, and that can never happen." And it's like, well, okay, but God covenanted to say, "Adam, if you do what you're supposed to do, I'll give you this blessing." God isn't on the hook unwillingly, as if a creature can just force God's hand. God committed himself to this.

30. 21:47

    Harrison Perkins

    And one of the reasons why this is really important, to get to that other aspect of things, is, well, that condition in that first covenant of perfect obedience—that if you fulfill the law, that obtains entry into eschatological life. Well, so what we see there is fulfillment of the law—not just avoiding sin, which Adam should have done, and we should try our best to do too, but not just avoiding sin, but also fulfilling the law in a positive sense. If my parents told me to mow the grass and I don't, there's two things that come out of this. One, I'm going to get grounded—ten-year-old Harrison. Well, there's a penalty for not doing what I was told to do. I'm also going to have to do what I was told to do. There was a task to complete. And in the structure of the covenant of works, when Adam completed a task, that was the condition.

31. 22:53

    Harrison Perkins

    And that was: fulfill the law. That was the condition for entry into this eschatological life. And that sets us up for what Christ did as the second Adam. He fulfilled all righteousness, and he fulfilled the law, completed the things that—he didn't only forgive the things that we shouldn't do. He did that as he bore the curse of our sin, but he also did everything that we failed to do. And so he's completed every condition for entry into eschatological life for everyone who trusts in him.

32. 23:33

    Adriel Sanchez

    It really does speak to the fact that at the heart of good covenant theology is the gospel, is the work of the Lord Jesus Christ as the second Adam, fulfilling the works that we fail to do, the works that obviously Adam in the garden failed to do. He's coming as the new Israel, who's perfectly obeying the law of God, born under the law, like Paul says, and that that is somehow given to us, credited to us by faith in his name through the doctrine of justification. Again, it just really gets to the heart of the gospel.

33. 24:11

    Harrison Perkins

    It's a shame that covenant theology has come to be associated with debate. I really think that that is a tragedy of sorts. And also sad that so many books on covenant theology have felt like their reason for being written is to respond to some foil, a debate partner. I think covenant theology is about God's love, God's kindness, and Jesus Christ. And those are wonderful, heartwarming realities, not about our arguments with one another. And in that sense, it ought to delight our souls and feed us and nourish us. And are there disagreements? Sure. And they're important, and they're worth talking about, and we shouldn't shy away from them. But the first thing is, when I think covenant theology, I think Jesus Christ earning blessings for his people.

34. 25:14

    Adriel Sanchez

    Harrison, I think that's something that comes through in Reformed covenant theology. And so I just commend it to our listeners. And thank you for the work that you're doing. May the Lord continue to bless you and use you. Thanks for joining us.

35. 25:28

    Harrison Perkins

    Thanks, brother. I've been so glad to be with you, and good to see you again.

36. 25:30

    Adriel Sanchez

    Amen.