I’m reading J.I. Packer’s intro to Witsius’s Economy of the Covenants, and Packer gives testimony to what dropping the dark horse of covenant theology yields. He states that the Covenant of Redemption (i.e. the inter-Trinitarian Covenant to secure salvation for the Election) clarifies at least these three truths:
- The Love of the Father and the Son, with the Holy Spirit, to lost sinners is shared, unanimous love. The tri-theistic fantasy of of a loving Son placating an unloving Father and commandeering an apathetic Holy Spirit in order to save us is a distressing nonsense.
- As our salvation derives from God’s free and gracious initiative and is carried through, first to last, according to God’s eternal plan by God’s own sovereign power, so its ultimate purpose is to exalt and glorify the Father and the Son together. The man-centered distortion that pictures God as saving us more for our sake than for his is also a distressing nonsense.
- Jesus Christ is the focal figure, the proper center of our faith-full attention, throughout the redemptive economy. He, as Mediator of the Covenant of Grace and of the grace of that covenant, is as truly an object of divine predestination as are we whom he saves. With him as our sponsor and representative, the last Adam, the second “public person” through whom the Father deals with our race, the Covenant of Grace is archetypally and fundamentally made, in order that it may now be established and ratified with us in him. (”With whom was the covenant of grace made?” asks question 31 of the Westminster Larger Catechism, and the prescribed answer is: “The covenant of grace was made with Christ as the second Adam, and in him with all the elect as his seed.”) From the vital union that we have with Christ through the Holy Spirit’s action flows all the aliveness to God, all the faith, hope and love God-ward, all the desire for him and urges to worship him and willingness to work for him, of which we ever were, are, or will be conscious; apart from Christ we should still be spiritually dead (objectively, lifeless; subjectively, unresponsive) in our trespasses and sins. Christ is therefore to be acknowledged, now and for ever, as our all in all, our Alpha and Omega, so far as our salvation is concerned — and that goes for salvation subjectively brought home to us, no less than for salvation objectively obtained for us. The legalistic, sub-spiritual Roman Catholic theology of Mass and merit, whereby Christians are required by the Father, and enabled by the Son, to take part in the achieving of their own salvation, is a further distressing nonsense.
You can read the whole intro here.
