3. The Nature of the Covenant of Redemption: A Covenant of Works in the Work of Christ

The covenant of redemption was of primary importance in Kline’s theology. The works-principle has its origin in the original heavenly covenant between Father and Son. Kline insisted on using the term “works” in naming this covenant,

By continuing the use of the term “works” we preserve an important advantage that the traditional name, “Covenant of Works,” has when combined with use of “Covenant of Grace” for redemptive covenant—the advantage of underscoring the fundamental law-gospel contrast. And our additional terms, “Creator’s” and “with Adam,” will serve to bring out the parallelism between this covenant of works and what we shall be calling “The Father’s Covenant of Works with the Son” (i.e., the eternal intratrinitarian covenant), namely, the parallelism of the two Adams scheme, each of these covenants involving, as it does, an Adam figure, a federal representative under probation in a covenant of works.[1]

This second covenant of works (with Christ) is the eternal covenant, which we shall call “The Father’s Covenant of Works with the Son.” The series of temporal administrations of redemptive grace to God’s people are subsections of what we shall call “The Lord’s Covenant of Grace with the Church” (or, for brevity’s sake we may use the traditional ‘Covenant of Grace’).[2]

The messianic mission performed on earth began in heaven: “For I came down from heaven, not to do my own will, but the will of him that sent me” (John 6:38). Jesus was sent forth from heaven to earth on a covenantal mission with covenantal oath-commitments from his Father. . . . the Son of God in prayer recalled the Father’s commitment to him in love before the foundation of the world, a commitment to grant him as obedient messianic Servant the glory he had with the Father before the world was (John 17:5, 24). He presented his claim of merit as the faithful Servant who had met the terms of the eternal covenant of works by obediently fulfilling his mission: “I have glorified thee on the earth; I have finished the work which thou gavest me to do” (John 17:4). And then he made his request that the grant of glory proposed in that covenant now be conferred: “And now, O Father, glorify thou me with thine own self with the glory which I had with thee before the world was” (John 17:5).  Jesus, the second Adam, standing before his judgment tree could declare that he had overcome the temptation to eat the forbidden fruit and that he had accomplished the charge to judge Satan, and, therefore, he could claim his right of access to the tree of life.[3]

Coming as the second federal head, the Son of Man, whose origins were in heaven, would undergo probation in another covenant of works, the covenant which he made with the Father before he left heaven and for the fulfillment of which he came to earth as the seed of the woman. The covenantal commitments made in eternity in the intratrinitarian counsels must be fulfilled on earth in historical time. In the world of the generations of Adam and the woman the second Adam, as the representative of God’s elect, must gain the reward of the covenanted kingdom for himself and for them, as had been decreed in Genesis 3:15. By his obedience in the earthly probation phase of his eternal covenant of works the champion of the woman’s seed would open the way for the Covenant of Grace, whose proper purpose is to bring salvation to the rest of the woman’s seed and to bestow on them the kingdom of the Glory-Spirit won by their messianic kinsman-redeemer. Indeed, in suffering the bruising of his heel the messianic seed would ratify this new covenant.[4]

Vos explains, “The covenant of redemption is the pattern for the covenant of grace. However, it is more than that. It is also the effective cause for carrying through the latter.”[5]

4. The Nature of the Mosaic Covenant: A Republication of the Covenant of Works?[6]

The most controversial aspect of Kline’s covenant theology is his rendering of the Mosaic covenant. The range of understanding within Post-Reformation thought is nonetheless essentially unified in seeking to account for the presence of a works principle in the Sinai covenant.[7] Geerhardus Vos puts it succinctly as he summarizes the perspective of historical theology:

The older theologians did not always clearly distinguish between the covenant of works and the Sinaitic covenant. At Sinai it was not the “bare” law that was given, but a reflection of the covenant of works revived, as it were, in the interests of the covenant of grace continued at Sinai.[8]

Kline believed that the covenant of works in Moses was an overlay with a substratum of grace running through it. The works principle evident in the Sinai covenant functioned typologically and pedagogically as a republication of the covenant of works. The Mosaic Covenant is “governed by a principle of works.”[9]

Most familiar of the instances of the introduction of a works principle in a premessianic redemptive economy is the Mosaic Covenant. According to the emphatically and repeatedly stated terms of this old covenant of the law, the Lord made Israel’s continuing manifestation of cultic fidelity to him the ground of their continuing tenure in Canaan. . . . another notable example of the pattern which finds the principles of works and grace operating simultaneously, yet without conflict, because the works principle is confined to a separate typological level. Paul, perceiving the works principle in the Mosaic law economy, was able to insist that this did not entail an abrogation of the promises of grace given to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob centuries earlier (Gal 3:17), precisely because the works principle applied only to the typological kingdom in Canaan and not to the inheritance of the eternal kingdom-city promised to Abraham as a gift of grace and at last to be received by Abraham and all his seed, Jew and Gentile, through faith in Christ Jesus. The pedagogical purpose of the Mosaic works arrangement was to present typologically the message that felicity and godliness will be inseparably conjoined in the heavenly kingdom, or, negatively, that the disobedient are forever cut off from the kingdom of the eschaton.[10]

The typological objective in the case of the Israelite kingdom was to teach that righteousness and prosperity will be conjoined in the consummated kingdom. For the purpose of keeping that symbolic message readable, persistent wholesale apostasy could not be allowed to accompany possession of the promised inheritance. But, on the other hand, the pedagogical point of the typological arrangement could be satisfactorily made, in a positive fashion, in spite of the inevitable imperfections of the people individually and as a nation.[11]

By virtue then of both the filling of the land of Canaan and its characterization as a sabbath-land, this first level, Canaanite fulfillment of the land promise is seen to be an anticipatory portrayal of the consummated kingdom-land, the Metapolis kingdom-city of the new heavens and earth which the Creator covenanted to man from the beginning.[12]

Besides preparing an appropriate context for the messianic mission, a broadly pedagogical purpose was served by the typal kingdom in that it furnished spiritual instruction for the faithful in ages both before and after the advent of Christ (1 Cor. 10:11). Thus, in addition to calling attention to the probationary aspect of Jesus’ mission, the works principle that governed the Israelite kingdom acted as the schoolmaster for Israel, convicting of sin and total inability to satisfy the Lord’s righteous demands and thereby driving the sinner to the grace of God offered in the underlying gospel promises of the Abrahamic Covenant.[13]

Hand-in-hand with the pedagogical function of the typal kingdom went its purpose of contributing to the preservation of the covenant community on earth. . . . This end was furthered by constant reminders, as in the system of things clean and unclean, of their holy distinctiveness as God’s people.[14]

The story of the typological kingdom of Israel was an historical parable in which mankind under the covenant of works in Adam was represented by Israel under the law. For according to Jeremiah the Torah-covenant viewed as a grant of the land of Caanan to Israel for a temporal, typical inheritance was another breakable works-arrangement, unlike the new covenant of grace to be made in the days to come (Jer. 31:31). The apostle of the new covenant, the apostle of justification by faith, proclaimed justification through Christ from all things “from which you could not be justified by the law of Moses” (Acts 13:39). “That no man is justified by the law before God is evident,” said Paul, “for, ‘The righteous shall live by faith,’ and the law is not of faith, but ‘He that doeth them shall live in them’” (Gal. 3:11,12). And again, “For if the inheritance is of the law, it is no more of promise” (Gal. 3:18). It is the typological story of Israel’s history under its covenant of works that provides the symbolism of the prophet’s gospel for mankind in Zechariah 3.[15]

The Old Covenant order, theirs by national election, was one of highest historical privilege. And while a works principle was operative both in the grant of the kingdom to Abraham and in the meting out of typological kingdom blessings to the nation of Israel, the arrangement as a whole was a gracious favor to the fallen sons of Adam, children of wrath deserving no blessings, temporal or eternal. The Law covenant was a sub-administration of the Covenant of Grace, designed to further the purpose and program of the gospel. By exhibiting dramatically the situation of all mankind, fallen in and with Adam in the original probation in Eden, the tragic history of Israel under its covenant-of-works probation served to convict all of their sinful, hopeless estate. The Law thus drove men to Christ that they might be justified by faith. All were shut up in disobedience that God might have mercy on all (Rom. 11:28–36; Gal. 3:19–25).[16]

Kline’s depiction of the Mosaic Covenant displays a rich eschatological trajectory, which as a republication of the Edenic covenant, fleshs out a picture of protological Paradise, which in turn looks forward to a consummated cosmos. Accenting the legal dimension, rather than reducing the Mosaic Covenant to an arid irrelevance, or a crippling legalism, Kline has limned for us the typology of heaven, or the “Heaven Land.” “What is true of Heaven is true of its divinely ordered type, the Theocracy. For though the Theocracy was in the world of common grace, as a type of Heaven it transcended its environment and anticipatively shared in the world to come.”[17]

WCF 19, by inference, identifies the Mosaic covenant as a covenant of works alongside its being also a covenant of grace. “This law [given to Adam as the covenant of works, 19.1], after his fall, continued to be a perfect rule of righteousness; and, as such, was delivered by God upon Mount Sinai, in ten commandments. . . . Although true believers be not under the law as a covenant of works, to be thereby justified, or condemned . . .” (WCF 19.2, 6). Even when referring to it as an administration of the covenant of grace, the Confession calls it the “time of the law,” implying the centrality of a works principle (WCF 7.5). It also makes clear that there can be no eschatological inheritance without fulfillment of the covenant of works, typified in the Mosaic covenant. Both Scripture and the Confession refer to the Mosaic administration as a “law” covenant. “For the law was given through Moses, but grace and truth came through Jesus Christ” (John 1:17). But the revival of the covenant of works in the Mosaic administration is in the interests of revealing both the need for and God’s provision of grace in the mediator, Jesus Christ. Those who were saved under the Mosaic covenant were saved the only way sinners can be saved since our first federal head failed, through the grace of the second federal head, Jesus Christ.

5. Continuity and Discontinuity in One Covenant of Grace

Kline did not consider the Mosaic covenant a separate covenant. While he used various language to describe the legal aspect of this covenant in relation to it being an administration of the covenant of grace, he most often referred to it as “overarching.” For example, as early as 1953 Kline had formulated his basic understanding of the nature of the Mosaic theocracy as part of the development of the covenant of grace forming an organic unity throughout redemptive history: “This covenant (Israel at Sinai) was pursuant of the earlier covenant promises made to Abraham.” Kline goes on to quote Vos in his Biblical Theology to the effect that the theocracy was unique in that it “typified nothing short of the perfected kingdom of God, the consummate state of Heaven.”[18]

Much later in 1991 Kline observes,

Classic covenantalism recognizes that the old Mosaic order (at its foundation level—that is, as a program of individual salvation in Christ) was in continuity with previous and subsequent administrations of the overarching covenant of grace. But it also sees and takes at face value the massive Biblical evidence for a peculiar discontinuity present in the old covenant in the form of a principle of meritorious works, operating not as a way of eternal salvation but as the principle governing Israel’s retention of its provisional, typological inheritance.[19]

In Kingdom Prologue Kline notes,

Preeminently the Covenant of Grace finds expression in the new covenant, but it also includes all those earlier covenantal arrangements wherein the benefits secured by the obedience of Christ in fulfillment of God’s eternal covenant with him were in part already bestowed during premessianic times, in each case according to the particular eschatological phase of covenant history.[20]

Then in his last published book, God, Heaven, and Har Magedon, in 2007 Kline says,

The overarching Covenant of Grace, which was to unfold in several premessianic administrations (including the Noahic, Abrahamic, and Mosaic covenants) and have its full, culminating expression in the New Covenant, was inaugurated by the divine declaration of Gen 3:15 and the divine act of symbolic sealing recorded in Gen 3:21. . . . Carrying forward the Abrahamic Covenant as they do, both the Old and New Covenants are, like it, administrations of the Covenant of Grace.[21]

Redemptive history enters a distinctive new stage with the Abrahamic Covenant but without interrupting the underlying continuity and coherence of the Covenant of Grace.[22]

Charles Hodge, whose Systematic Theology is considered a standard exposition of Reformed orthodoxy, expresses himself in much the same way as Kline on the discontinuity between the Mosaic and new covenants, and the essential continuity of the covenant of grace underlying both. In commentaing on 2 Corinthains 3:6 he says,

These words [letter and spirit] therefore express concisely the characteristic difference between the law and the gospel. . . . How is it that the apostle attributes to the Mosaic system this purely legal character, when he elsewhere so plainly teaches that the gospel was witnessed or taught both in the law and the prophets? . . . Every reader of the New Testament must be struck with the fact that the apostle often speaks of the Mosaic law as he does of the moral law considered as a covenant of works; that is, presenting the promise of life on the condition of perfect obedience. He represents it as saying, Do this and live; as requiring works, and not faith, as the condition of acceptance. Rom. 10:5–10. Gal. 3:10–12. He calls it a ministration of death and condemnation. . . . On the other hand, however, he teaches that the plan of salvation has been the same from the beginning; that Christ was the propitiation for the sins committed under the old covenant; that men were saved then as now by faith in Christ; that this mode of salvation was revealed to Abraham and understood by him, and taught by Moses and the prophets. . . . To reconcile these apparently conflicting representations it must be remembered that the Mosaic economy was designed to accomplish different objects, and is therefore presented in Scripture under different aspects. What, therefore, is true of it under one aspect, is not true under another. 1. The law of Moses was, in the first place, a re-enactment of the covenant of works. The covenant of works, therefore, is nothing more than the promise of life suspended on the condition of perfect obedience. The phrase is used as a concise and convenient expression of the eternal principles of justice on which God deals with rational creatures, and which underlie all dispensations, the Adamic, Abrahamic, Mosaic, and Christian. . . . It is this principle which is rendered so prominent in the Mosaic economy as to give it its character of law. Viewed under this aspect it is the ministration of condemnation and death. 2. The Mosaic economy was also a national covenant; that is that it presented national promises on the condition of national obedience. Under this aspect also it was purely legal. But 3, as the gospel contains a renewed revelation of the law, so the law of Moses contained a revelation of the gospel. It presented in its priesthood and sacrifices, as types of the office and work of Christ, the gratuitous method of salvation through a Redeemer. This necessarily supposes that faith and not works was the condition of salvation. . . . As the old covenant revealed both the law and the gospel, it either killed or gave life, according to the light in which it was viewed. [23]

Confessional or Innovative?

For those who question Kline’s confessional orthodoxy on his doctrine of the covenants, especially on the covenant of works and its relationship to the Sinai covenant, it is my contention that they have erred in one of three ways: 1) from ignorance of Post-Reformation dogmatics, in which the doctrine of the covenants was being developed;[24] 2) from a misunderstanding of the taxonomy of the Post-Reformation theologians;[25] or 3) from a simple lack of a close reading of Kline. The central contours of Kline’s theology of the covenants are classic federal theology. Then there are aspects that have historical precedent in the minority.

Genetically Kline’s doctrine of the covenants, and the covenant of works in particular, can be traced through Geerhardus Vos, back to Charles Hodge, and to Francis Turretin.[26] Turretin’s Institutes of Elenctic Theology (1679–85) was used as a textbook by Charles Hodge at Princeton Theological Seminary until he published his own from 1871–73.

Brenton Ferry developed a very helpful Reformed taxonomy of works in the Mosaic covenant. Within that taxonomy he suggests that Kline fits in the category described by Roland Ward as “the Mosaic covenant as an administration of the covenant of grace.” Ferry refers to this with his own rubric, “typological, formal republication.” “Kline believes that the Mosaic covenant is organically part of the covenant of grace, yet at the administrative level it is a typological covenant of works.”[27] In By Oath Consigned, Kline notes,

For all its difference, the New Covenant of Jeremiah 31 is still patterned after the Sinaitic Covenant. In fact, Jeremiah’s concept of the New Covenant was a development of that already presented by Moses in the sanctions section of the Deuteronomic renewal of the Sinaitic Covenant (Deut. 30:1–10). According to Jeremiah, the New Covenant is a writing of the law on the heart rather than on tables of stone (v. 33; cf. 2 Cor. 3:3), but it is another writing of the law. It is a new law covenant. Hence, for Jeremiah, the New Covenant, though it could be sharply contrasted with the Old (v. 32), was nevertheless a renewal of the Mosaic Covenant. It belonged to the familiar administrative pattern of periodic covenant renewal (of which the cycle of sabbatical years was an expression), and renewal is the exponent of continuity. . . . But if the distinctiveness of the New Covenant is that of consummation, if when it abrogates it consummates, then its very discontinuity is expressive of its profound, organic unity with the Old Covenant.[28]

Organic unity was not a new concept to Kline. He had learned it well from Vos. In his 1953 article “The Intrusion and the Decalogue,” explaining the place of the judgement of the Exodus conquest of the land of Canaan by Israel, he refers to the underlying unity of the covenants, “within this temporary periphery of the Intrusion there is a permanent core. . . . Finally, this concept of Intrusion Ethics does not obscure the unity of the Covenant of Grace throughout its various administrations.”[29]

Finally, Kline contributed to federal theology in significant ways that were helpfully innovative. He showed that the covenant relationship is inherent, not extraneous, to the Creator-creature relationship. He clarified the importance of using grace properly in defining the various biblical covenants in order to protect and elucidate biblical soteriology. More comprehensively he pursued a program of understanding classical covenant categories through biblical, theological exegesis, building on Vos’s Reformed biblical theology. A superb example of his profound exegetical skill is seen in his reinterpretation of Genesis 3:8,[30] in which he reinterpreted “the cool of the day” within the context of eschatological judgment. In so doing he explored the major theme of probation in its relationship to heavenly entitlement. Finally, he expounded the typology of heaven throughout covenant history. In sum, Kline’s theology of the covenant of works was thoroughly eschatological.[31]

6. Conclusion

Kline’s theology of the covenant of works is set in the context of a rich account of the continuity of the history of redemption rooted in the detailed exegesis of the text of Scripture within the framework of confessional orthodoxy. His defense of the covenant of works clearly demonstrates that by muting probationary works before the fall, one ends up undermining grace after the fall—grace based on the merits of the Second Adam, which is our only entitlement to heaven. Nothing less than the gospel is at stake. “May Machen’s heirs not let go of their commitment to covenant theology but continue to cherish it, and in particular its precious doctrine of the righteousness secured for us by the active obedience of Christ. As Machen said: No hope without it.”[32]

Endnotes

[1] Kline, Kingdom Prologue, 21.

[2] Kline, Kingdom Prologue, 138.

[3] Kline, Kingdom Prologue, 139–40.

[4] Kline, Kingdom Prologue, 144–5. “This covenantal commitment to the Son was renewed in the course of the historical administration of the covenant of grace.” Kline, Glory in Our Midst: A Biblical-theological Reading of Zechariah’s Night Visions (Overland Park, KS: Two Age Press, 2001), 222.

[5] Geerhardus Vos, “The Doctrine of the Covenant in Reformed Theology,” in Redemptive History and Biblical Interpretation: The Shorter Writings of Geerhardus Vos, ed. Richard B. Gaffin, Jr. (Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1980), 252.

[6] Cf. the “Report of the Committee to Study Republication,” presented to the Eighty-third (2016) General Assembly of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church.

[7] Brenton Ferry, “Works in the Mosaic Covenant: A Reformed Taxonomy,” in Bryan D. Estelle, J. V. Fesko, David VanDrunen, eds., The Law Is Not of Faith: Essays on Works and Grace in the Mosaic Covenant (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R, 2009), 76–105.

[8] Vos, “The Doctrine of the Covenant in Reformed Theology,” 255.

[9] Kline, Kingdom Prologue, 320. See also Turretin, Institutes of Elenctic Theology, 2:227. Turretin refers to the Mosaic covenant as “a rigid legal economy.”

[10] Kline, Kingdom Prologue, 237.

[11] Kline, Kingdom Prologue, 239–40.

[12] Kline, Kingdom Prologue, 338–39.

[13] Kline, Kingdom Prologue, 353.

[14] Kline, Kingdom Prologue, 353–4.

[15] Kline, Glory in Our Midst, 105.

[16] Kline, God, Heaven, and Har Magedon, 128.

[17] Kline, “The Relevance of the Theocracy,” 27.

[18] Kline, “The Relevance of the Theocracy,” 26–7.

[19] Kline, “Gospel until the Law,” 434.

[20] Kline, Kingdom Prologue, 138.

[21] Kline, God, Heaven, and Har Magedon, 75, 96.

[22] Kline, Kingdom Prologue, 292.

[23] Charles Hodge, An Exposition of the Second Epistle to the Corinthians (1859, repr. Grand Rapids: Baker, 1980), 54–58. See also Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology, 3 vols. (1878, repr. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1975), 2:375.

[24] See D. Patrick Ramsey, “In Defense of Moses: A Confessional Critique of Kline and Karlberg,” WTJ 66 (2004): 373–400.

[25] See the critique offered by Brenton C. Ferry, “Cross-examining Moses’ Defense: An Answer to Ramsey’s Critique of Kline and Karlberg,” WTJ 67 (2005): 163–68.

[26] Cf. Turretin, Institutes of Elenctic Theology, 2:637.

[27] Ferry, “Works in the Mosaic Covenant,” 79–80, fn. 11.

[28] Kline, By Oath Consigned, 75–6. Cited in Ferry, “Works in the Mosaic Covenant,” 80 fn. 14.

[29] Kline, “Intrusion and the Decalogue,” 4, 13. Cf. 7.

[30] Cf. Bryan D. Estelle, “The Covenant of Works in Moses and Paul,” in Covenant, Justification, and Pastoral Ministry, ed. R. Scott Clark (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R, 2007), 115, f.n. 101.

[31] Cf. Geerhardus Vos, “Eschatology of the Psalter,” The Princeton Theological Review 18 (Jan. 1920): f.n., 3. “In so far as the covenant of works posited for mankind an absolute goal and unchangeable future, the eschatological may be even said to have preceded the soteric religion.”

[32] Kline, “Covenant Theology under Attack,” last sentence of electronic version cited above. Machen’s last words from a telegram sent sent to Professor John Murray, January 1, 1937. Ned B. Stonehouse, J. Gresham Machen: A Biographical Memoir (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1955), 508.

Gregory Edward Reynolds is pastor emeritus of Amoskeag Presbyterian Church (OPC) in Manchester, New Hampshire; and editor of Ordained Servant: A Journal for Church Officers; and author of The Word Is Worth a Thousand Pictures: Preaching in the Electronic Age. Ordained Servant Online, October, 2024.