The next essay in Covenant, Justification, and Pastoral Ministry is by Bryan Estelle, and is entitled “The Covenant of Works in Moses and Paul.” Estelle is plainly acquainted with a vast amount of theological and biblical studies literature, and his close handling of that literature is obviously competent. If footnotes were biceps, this thing would be a regular gun show.
Even so, I am not going to respond in point-by-point detail for one basic reason. Like many scholars, Estelle tends, frankly, to miss the point. He spends a great deal of time establishing and proving things that no one in this controversy would dispute. One of the things that ancient rhetoricians taught well was the ability in a polemical exchange to identify the stasis — the issues that were actually in dispute, and upon which the whole debate turned. As it is, this article argues up and down the waterfront and never actually engages with the central arguments that have been raised against the traditional concept of the covenant of works. I certainly don’t dispute that Adam was in a probationary state in the Garden, that he was being tested, that his fall was entailed upon all his descendants, and that the last Adam’s obedience brought about the great reversal of this disaster. We all agree, so why couldn’t we just start there and go on to discuss whether or not the covenant of works was gracious, whether the covenant of works was recapitulated at Sinai, and whether the Bible teaches that the merit of obedience can be extracted from obedience? That would have been a genuine advance in the discussion.
That said, there are a couple things I do want to point out. One was a place where the scholarly persona rubbed a little thin, and something else peeped out. “Lusk reaches the pinnacle of his vitriolic criticism of the covenant of works when he says: ‘In short, the doctine of a meritorious covenant of works has a dangerous Gnosticizing tendency on theology as a whole'” (p. 92). I know . . . I hate it when Rich flies off the handle like that.
The second thing is this. Estelle says that he does not plan to get into a discussion of the recapitulation of the covenant of works at Sinai, but then he devotes a major part of his argument to Galatians 3:10, applying it (without missing a beat) to the covenant of works. But Paul is quoting Deuteronomy 27:26, the culmination of the words of self-malediction spoken from Mt. Ebal by Reuben, Gad, Asher, Zebulun, Dan, and Naphtali. Deuteronomy 27:26 was not spoken by Adam in the Garden.
This covenant [of grace] was differently administered in the time of the law, and in the time of the gospel: under the law it was administered by promises, prophecies, sacrifices, circumcision, the paschal lamb, and other types and ordinances delivered to the people of the Jews, all foresignifying Christ to come; which were, for that time, sufficient and efficacious, through the operation of the Spirit, to instruct and build up the elect in faith in the promised Messiah, by whom they had full remission of sins, and eternal salvation; and is called the old Testament (WCF 7.5).
The book of Deuteronomy is all about this aforementioned adminstration of the covenant of grace, and the people of Israel bound themselves to the covenant of grace on Mt. Ebal with a series of curses. Huh, says you. As well you might.
This is probably the central complaint I have about the prelapsarian covenant of works. I believe there was such a covenant but why call it by that name? The name throws just about everybody off, including Estelle. In the Pauline vocabulary works and grace are antithetical. So when you say works, you don’t think Adamic probation, you think of your standard issue Pharisees. And when you think of them, you think of their distortions of the Old Testament grace into their Ishmaelite system of works. And then you read their distortions of Sinaitic grace back into the Old Testament, and then you read that back into the Garden. How else could Galatians 3:10 get applied so easily to the pre-fall Adam?
Put another way, if the warp of the Old Testament law is the covenant of grace, and the woof is the recapitulated covenant of works, may I make a humble request? May I ask anyone who believes that to swear off (for the rest of their natural lives) any accusations they might want to make against others for blurring the important distinction between the covenant of grace and the covenant of works? Thanks.
Estelle concludes:
“This essay demonstrates, however, that the innovators and innovations suggesting revision to the covenant of works have been weighed in the scales of classic Reformed orthodoxy, modern biblical scholarship, and modern linguistics and have been found wanting” (p. 135).
But I conclude differently — it does nothing of the kind.