A Defense of Proclamation Theology!
Attention! the ‘a’ and ‘o’ are easy to miss
and mix up the two words idealogy and ideology
and their proper application
The Evolution of Reformed Covenant Theology
Covenant theology, a concept that emerged from the gospel proclamation of Christianity, has undergone a significant transformation. Initially, it served as a means of articulating the relationship between God, humanity, and salvation. However, over time, it evolved into an idealogy—a theological system that, while internally coherent, risks becoming rigid, restrictive, and a distorting reductionism.
This shift differs from the development of ideologies in the political realm, as theological idealogues strive to articulate divine truth rather than promote secular or material objectives. Nevertheless, this transformation has profound implications for contemporary theological discourse, particularly in the shadow of the field of historical Jesus scholarship.
Similar blind spots in covenant theology hinder a deeper engagement with the biblical text and the Zits im Leben, raising questions about the accuracy and reliability of our understanding of the historical Jesus and the original context, not just a Reformational polemic against Rome, as Romans and Galatians are often read and certainly preaches. The Zits im Leben, or “setting in life,” emphasizes that biblical texts must be understood within their historical, cultural, and theological contexts rather than being retroactively framed through idealogical constructs.
Covenant theology initially served as a framework for proclaiming the gospel—correctly so—out of the years that ensued after the Council of Trent. However, just as Reformational readings of Paul have sometimes overshadowed his first-century Jewish context, modern historical Jesus scholarship has frequently fallen into the same anachronistic tendencies.
The Westminster School of Theology in the 20th century absorbed aspects of Princeton theology while also engaging with Wellhausian source criticism, which sought to reconstruct the biblical text through an Ancient Near Eastern (ANE) lens.
This led to an increasing tendency to impose external ANE frameworks onto Scripture, often treating the Bible as merely another ancient religious document rather than divine revelation.
While ANE studies provide valuable historical insights, their dominant methodological presuppositions frequently privilege comparative analysis over true biblical theology based in the Abrahamic Covenenant and properly understadning Esau and Edom, and thus reducing the text to a product of its surrounding pagan cultures rather than a unique revelation of God.
This approach, seen in some Westminster theological circles, mirrors historical Jesus scholarship’s dependence on higher criticism, which seeks to reconstruct Jesus through modern ideological assumptions for social justice rather than the biblical narrative itself.
These methodologies, whether Reformational polemics, Wellhausian ANE impositions, or ideological historical Jesus reconstructions, share a common flaw: they risk obscuring the biblical text’s theological intent by subjecting it to external frameworks rather than allowing Scripture to interpret Scripture.
The covenant of works highlighted God’s moral law, which demanded absolute obedience and revealed humanity’s sinfulness preaches all humans responsibility. As the covenant of grace proclaimed the good news of salvation through Christ, who fulfilled the law and bore its curse on behalf of sinners.
These two covenants collectively illustrated the gospel’s structure: the law’s demands and humanity’s failure under the covenant of works paved the way for the grace of redemption in Christ.
This gospel-centered framework found early expressions in the writings of the Church Fathers. Although they did not explicitly employ covenantal language, figures like Augustine of Hippo and Irenaeus of Lyons articulated similar theological insights. Augustine distinguished between the law, which exposes sin, and grace, which offers salvation—a dichotomy that echoes the covenant of works and grace.
Irenaeus, through his “two Adams” typology, framed Christ as the one who rectified Adam’s failure and inaugurated a new creation. These early theological concepts reflect a dynamic, proclamation-oriented theology centered around communicating the gospel message.
McGiffert’s article, From Moses to Adam: The Making of the Covenant of Works, illustrates how Puritan theology evolved from a proclamation-based framework into a more systematic ideology. Initially tied to Moses and the Old Testament law, the covenant of works underwent reinterpretation between 1585 and 1615, ultimately shifting to Adam. This transformation broadened the covenant’s scope, highlighting humanity’s collective failure under the law and reinforcing the absolute necessity of grace through Christ.
Beyond its theological implications, this shift also carried political and social significance. The Treaty of Westphalia (1648), which ended the Thirty Years’ War, institutionalized the principle of cuius regio, eius religio—allowing rulers to determine the religion of their states.
Around the same time, the Westminster Assembly (1643-1653) formalized Reformed orthodoxy, codifying covenant theology as both a doctrinal and political framework. By universalizing moral law, Puritan theologians provided a theological foundation that aligned with emerging ideas of social contracts and governance.
This ideological transition reflects the broader Zeitgeist of the Reformation and early Enlightenment. The covenant of works, once a theological construct, became intertwined with legal and political thought, influencing figures like John Owen and Samuel Rutherford. Rutherford’s Lex, Rex (1644), for instance, argued that civil authority should be limited by divine law—an idea that would later resonate in constitutional governance.
Furthermore, various Puritan theologians formalized and refined covenant theology into a systematic framework, aiming to enhance the gospel’s proclamation. However, this pursuit of doctrinal precision inadvertently prioritized precision over the dynamic, pastoral essence of the gospel message.
The covenant of works and covenant of grace, once instruments for calling sinners to faith, became components of an intricate theological structure that could potentially overshadow the simplicity and immediacy of gospel proclamation and the call to an obedience of faith in Jesus Christ and the teaching of the New Testament writers.
It’s crucial to distinguish between theological idealogy and political ideology. While ideology refers to political or materialistic worldviews aimed at shaping society, idealogy pertains to the systematization of theological ideas within a religious framework. In the context of covenant theology, the transition from gospel proclamation to idealogy represents an attempt to articulate divine truths in a systematic manner. Unlike political ideologies, which often seek power or social transformation, theological ideologies aim to preserve and communicate the gospel’s truths. However, both ‘ideo-alogies’ share a common danger: they can become rigid, self-referential systems that obscure the dynamic realities they were meant to serve.
Barth and the Evolution of Reformed Covenant Theology
Karl Barth’s engagement with covenant theology serves as both a critique of its idealogical tendencies and an attempt to recover its gospel-centered proclamation. His rejection of the covenant of works and his reframing of covenant theology as entirely Christocentric highlight the tensions within Reformed theology—between systematization and proclamation, between legal frameworks and divine revelation.
Karl Barth’s engagement with covenant theology serves as both a critique of its idealogical tendencies and an attempt to recover its gospel-centered proclamation. His rejection of the covenant of works and his reframing of covenant theology as entirely Christocentric highlight the tensions within Reformed theology—between systematization and proclamation, between legal frameworks and divine revelation.
Barth saw the traditional Reformed distinctions between the covenant of works and the covenant of grace as a theological construct that, while internally coherent, ultimately distorted the biblical witness. He argued that these categories imposed a rigid legalism onto Scripture, turning covenant theology into an ideological system rather than a dynamic testimony to God’s self-revelation in Christ.
For Barth, the covenant is not a legal arrangement that human beings either succeed or fail to keep, but rather the very structure of divine election itself. In his doctrine of election (Church Dogmatics II/2), Barth famously asserted that Jesus Christ is both the electing God and the elected man, collapsing traditional distinctions between the covenants and replacing them with a single, unified covenant in Christ. Close but no Cigar!
This approach fundamentally reoriented covenant theology away from anthropological concerns—such as human obedience under the covenant of works—and placed it entirely within the framework of divine grace which is a ‘slippery slope’ into anti-nomianism. However, while Barth rightly critiqued the legalism of Reformed scholasticism, his own system risks making the covenant too abstract, detaching it from the historical and communal realities in which biblical covenants were enacted.
This is especially evident in the ultimate covenant with Abraham, which unfolds through Ishmael, Isaac, Jacob, and Esau—not as a mere theological construct but as a lived, generational reality that shapes the destiny of nations and the unfolding of divine revelation in history.
Barth’s critique resonates with the broader concerns of this discussion: the danger of turning covenant theology from a proclamation of the gospel into an idealogy—a rigid theological system that prioritizes doctrinal precision over the living, revelatory character of Scripture.
Just as Marxist and nationalist frameworks impose ideological grids onto biblical interpretation, Barth saw covenant theology as having become overly systematic, reducing the Bible’s covenantal narrative into a set of logical categories rather than a dynamic interaction between God and His people. In this sense, Barth’s rejection of Reformed scholasticism aligns with the need to resist ideological distortions—whether they arise in theological polemics, historical Jesus scholarship, or political theology.
Yet, while Barth provides a necessary corrective to rigid covenantal frameworks, he also falls into his own version of theological systematization. His radical Christocentrism, while emphasizing God’s gracious initiative, can lead to an overcorrection that minimizes the covenant’s historical unfolding through Israel, the Torah, and the communal nature of divine-human relationships. Barth’s attempt to dismantle covenant theology’s legalism is valuable, but his systematization of Christ as the sole covenantal reality risks abstracting the biblical narrative, removing the very Zits im Leben that contextualizes God’s revelation. Thus, while Barth helps us recognize the dangers of theological idealogy, his own approach must also be evaluated critically—lest we replace one rigid system with another.
The Jewish understanding of Edom serves as a crucial corrective to both Barth’s abstraction of covenant and the Reformed theological systematization that turns covenant theology into an idealogy. In Jewish thought, Edom—often associated with Rome and later Christendom—represents not merely a nation or empire but a theological distortion: the attempt to impose a rigid, hierarchical structure upon divine revelation, reducing covenantal relationship to legalistic or imperial frameworks.
The Midrash and later Jewish commentators depict Edom as the force that turns Torah into burden rather than life, transforming divine instruction into a tool for domination rather than communion. This critique applies both to Reformed covenant theology, which systematizes the covenant into rigid categories of works and grace, and to Barth, whose abstraction of covenant into a purely Christocentric event risks severing it from the lived reality of all Israel’s historical covenantal journey. The Jewish perspective on Edom reminds us that covenant is neither a cold legal contract nor a detached theological principle but a living, dynamic relationship that unfolds in history—one that must be engaged with in its fullness rather than reduced to secular ideological or religious idealogical constructs.
Karl Barth’s universalized election in Christ fundamentally misunderstands the covenantal structure of Scripture, particularly the tension between Jacob and Esau, Israel and Edom. By collapsing election into a singular Christ-event, Barth erases the biblical categories of covenantal participation and exclusion, making Paul’s argument in Romans 9-11 unintelligible.
Esau’s rejection was not arbitrary—it was a theological warning against despising the covenant. Edom, throughout Scripture, represents rebellion against divine order, culminating in its association with Rome. Barth’s system, by removing these distinctions, diminishes the role of human agency in faith and obedience, turning election into an abstraction rather than a lived covenantal reality. His theology, while corrective in some respects, ultimately cannot sustain a fully biblical understanding of divine election, covenant, and salvation history.
Marxist Ideologies & Christian Nationalist Idealogies
As hinted, the dangers of systemic rigidity—whether political or theological—are evident in both Marxist materialism and Christian nationalist movements, each imposing reductive frameworks that distort the complexity of human experience and divine revelation. Marxist ideologies, by reducing history to class struggle and economic determinism, dismiss the transcendent and moral dimensions of human life, framing faith as either an opiate for the oppressed or a tool of the ruling class. This reductionism strips the gospel of its spiritual depth, redefining redemption not as the work of Christ but as a mere socio-political revolution.
Similarly, Christian nationalist idealogies hijack covenantal theology to conflate divine election with national identity, often subordinating the gospel’s universal message to ethnocentric or political aims. This results in a distorted vision where God’s redemptive purposes are no longer centered on Christ but on political supremacy, cultural hegemony, or legislative dominion.
These distortions are also present in left-leaning historical Jesus scholarship, which often reduces Christ to a political figure—a revolutionary, a social reformer, or an advocate for economic justice—rather than the incarnate Son of God. Many modern scholars approach Jesus through the lens of Marxist critique, portraying him as a proto-socialist leader fighting against economic oppression, or a radical prophet championing class struggle. While Jesus undoubtedly confronted injustice, this ideological framing strips his mission of its theological depth, reducing his identity to a political category rather than the fulfillment of God’s redemptive plan.
Both leftist reinterpretations of Jesus and nationalist distortions of covenant theology share a fundamental flaw: they instrumentalize faith for political purposes, and this is ultimately blasphemy, rather than allowing the gospel to shape human hearts and societies organically. Instead of encountering Scripture as the living word of God, both Marxist and nationalist readings force biblical interpretation into rigid socio-political categories, turning faith into either a tool for class struggle or a banner for nationalistic pride. The antidote to these distortions is a return to the gospel’s radical proclamation of grace and transformation, which neither reduces salvation to economic conditions nor confines divine purpose to national or cultural boundaries.
Recovering the Gospel’s Proclamation
The biblical text, with its rich interplay of law and grace and the truth of the Torah that cannot change, calls us to encounter the living God rather than merely analyze systems of thought. In today’s context, reclaiming a gospel-centered approach requires a renewed commitment to proclaiming Christ’s redemptive work dynamically and experientially. By resisting the pull toward rigid ideologies, we can engage more deeply with Scripture as the living word of God. In doing so, we honor the gospel’s power to transform lives and illuminate the deeper realities of God’s covenant with humanity—realities that transcend and should not be conflated with Reformed Covenant Theology.
McGiffert, Michael. “From Moses to Adam: The Making of the Covenant of Works.” The Sixteenth Century Journal, vol. 19, no. 2, 1988, pp. 131–155.
