The Covenant Is Not an Abstraction: Forty Years in the Wilderness?
It has been nearly forty years since R.C. Sproul published The Holiness of God (1985).
It has been over forty years since Francis Schaeffer issued his final warnings in The Great Evangelical Disaster (1984).
And it has been nearly forty years since Cornelius Van Til, the covenantal apologist of the Reformed world, passed into glory (1987).
A generation has passed.
Forty years—the biblical span of wandering, testing, and judgment.
Forty years—the measure of forgetting and remembering, of covenant lost and recovered.
And what have we done with the legacy they left us?
Sproul gave us awe.
Schaeffer gave us tears.
Van Til gave us structure.
Schaeffer gave us tears.
Van Til gave us structure.
But none of it has fully healed the wound.
Instead, we stand now in a wilderness of our own making:
• Christian nationalism confuses covenant with conquest.
• Apologetics sinks into evidentialism and control.
• Theology becomes abstraction without encounter.
• Christian nationalism confuses covenant with conquest.
• Apologetics sinks into evidentialism and control.
• Theology becomes abstraction without encounter.
The olive tree was cultivated. We forgot it.
The covenant was a wound. We systematized it.
The holiness of God was a call. We turned it into a brand.
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The covenant was a wound. We systematized it.
The holiness of God was a call. We turned it into a brand.
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Sproul: Preacher of Covenant Encounter
Sproul’s genius was that he preached holiness as an encounter.
Not a concept. Not a system. But a terrifying, beautiful collision between the unholy and the Holy One.
In his retelling of Luther’s terror before God, and Isaiah’s trembling in the temple, Sproul gave voice to true covenantal confrontation.
Luther did not fear an abstract attribute; he feared the binding righteousness of the covenant God.
Isaiah did not tremble before infinite being; he trembled before the covenant Lord whose glory fills the earth.
Sproul touched the burning coal.
He made others feel it.
But his theological framework — rooted in scholastic Reformed traditions — often pulled him back toward abstraction after the encounter had seized the soul.
Holiness remained, for many, primarily an ontological otherness, not a relational nearness.
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Van Til: The Covenant Guarded, But Cold
Cornelius Van Til, on another front, saw that all knowing is covenantal.
There is no neutral ground between God and man.
Every thought bows either in faithful worship or covenant rebellion.
Van Til’s Creator-creature distinction was a defense of covenant realism against the acid of modernity.
But he rarely communicated it to the heart, though he exemplified it with his life.
His apologetic was technical, often combative, and inaccessible to most beyond the academy.
He defended the olive tree, but few tasted its fruit.
Van Til’s covenant theology remained locked behind philosophical walls.
Where Sproul made people tremble, both made us argue over them.
Both glimpsed a truncated covenant. What about Esau Edom? Just an abstraction.
Neither fully healed the wound.
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Schaeffer: The Prophet Who Wept
And then there was Francis Schaeffer — perhaps the most wounded of them all.
Schaeffer saw what was coming before most.
And then there was Francis Schaeffer — perhaps the most wounded of them all.
Schaeffer saw what was coming before most.
He wept over the collapse of truth into relativism, the rise of pragmatism within the church, the seduction of political power, and the loss of covenantal faithfulness.
His call was simple, and devastating:
“There must be a return, in the church and in our own lives, to a full acceptance of the Bible as the Word of God without error in all it teaches…”
“There must be a return, in the church and in our own lives, to a full acceptance of the Bible as the Word of God without error in all it teaches…”
”…a return to the practice of truth, to the holiness of God, to the reality of true spirituality.”
Schaeffer understood that holiness is not just transcendence — it is truth practiced in love.
It is presence in the world without being of the world.
He saw the coming captivity of the church not to culture alone, but to power — a captivity that would reforge covenant theology into political platforms and ideological battles.
Schaeffer wept.
But few listened.
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But few listened.
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A Generation Passed — and the Olive Tree withered
Forty years later, the consequences are plain.
• Covenant has been abstracted into doctrinal systems.
• Holiness has been turned into slogans.
• Apologetics has been reduced to evidential arguments.
• Politics has supplanted pilgrimage.
• The wound of God — the covenant binding Himself to His people — has been forgotten.
Forty years later, the consequences are plain.
• Covenant has been abstracted into doctrinal systems.
• Holiness has been turned into slogans.
• Apologetics has been reduced to evidential arguments.
• Politics has supplanted pilgrimage.
• The wound of God — the covenant binding Himself to His people — has been forgotten.
We have wandered far from the cultivated olive tree.
We have turned faithfulness into faction.
We have traded awe for strategy.
The covenant was never about owning the truth.
It was always about being owned by the Truth — the Truth that binds, bleeds, and bears.
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The Wound That Heals
The covenant is not a mechanical system.
It is the pierced side of Christ.
It is the burning coal that purifies lips to proclaim mercy.
It is the grafting of the wild branches into the cultivated tree — by grace, by trembling, by faithful presence.
Jude, the brother of the Lord, reminds us:
Remember the faith once for all delivered.
Remember that holiness is covenantal love, not abstraction.
Remember that we are kept, not by our certainty, but by His binding mercy.
Remember the faith once for all delivered.
Remember that holiness is covenantal love, not abstraction.
Remember that we are kept, not by our certainty, but by His binding mercy.
Forty years have passed.
But the wound remains.
And through it, healing still flows — if we will return.
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But the wound remains.
And through it, healing still flows — if we will return.
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Benediction
May we not revere a God we do not know.
May we not wield a covenant we have not suffered.
May we abide again in the wound that binds the Holy One to the broken, and through which the world will be healed.
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May we not revere a God we do not know.
May we not wield a covenant we have not suffered.
May we abide again in the wound that binds the Holy One to the broken, and through which the world will be healed.
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R.C. Sproul, The Holiness of God (Wheaton: Tyndale House, 1985).
Francis Schaeffer, The Great Evangelical Disaster (Westchester, IL: Crossway, 1984).
Cornelius Van Til, The Defense of the Faith, 4th ed., ed. K
