A Defense of Proclamation Theology
And Why There Is No
“Covenant of Works”
and “Covenant of Grace”
in the Text of Scripture
The history of Christian theology is filled with attempts to preserve the truth of the gospel by giving it conceptual clarity. At its best, such labor is necessary and faithful. The church must speak truthfully about God, sin, redemption, and the covenantal shape of divine revelation. Yet theology is always tempted by a subtle danger: what begins as proclamation can harden into system; what begins as witness can become abstraction; what begins as a living response to the text can become a structure imposed upon it. This danger is especially evident in the evolution of Reformed covenant theology.
The distinction between a covenant of works and a covenant of grace has often functioned in Protestant orthodoxy as a master key for the whole of Scripture. Whatever value these categories may have as retrospective theological shorthand, they do not appear in the Bible as formally named covenants in the dogmatic sense later required of them. Scripture does not present a prelapsarian covenant of merit followed by a postlapsarian covenant of grace as a ready-made architectonic. Rather, it presents a covenantal history: Adam, Noah, Abraham, Sarah, Hagar, Ishmael, Isaac, Jacob, Esau, Israel, exile, remnant, Messiah, and the nations. That history is generational, familial, juridical, liturgical, and political all at once. It is not reducible to a neat binary without remainder.
This matters because theology does not merely summarize Scripture; it also trains readers to expect certain things from Scripture. Once a conceptual grid takes on determinative force, exegesis easily becomes confirmatory. Texts are no longer allowed to speak with their own covenantal density, historical tension, or narrative irregularity. They are gathered into a pre-existing design. In that sense, the problem is not simply that covenant theology became elaborate. The deeper problem is that proclamation gradually gave way to what may be called theological idealogy: the construction of an internally coherent theological system that, precisely because of its coherence, risks distorting the very revelation it seeks to defend.
The term is useful if carefully distinguished from political ideology. Political ideology seeks to organize society, power, and material life around a comprehensive vision. Theological idealogy aims at something nobler: the articulation and preservation of divine truth. Yet both share a common temptation. They can become self-referential worlds. They can begin to govern what may be seen, heard, and said. They can replace reality with a system of explanation. In that sense, theological idealogy is not secular ideology, but it can fall prey to similar formal distortions. Reformed covenant theology, especially in its scholastic and post-scholastic forms, gives us one of the clearest examples.
I. From Gospel Proclamation to Covenantal Architecture
Covenantal reasoning did not begin as a sterile exercise. It emerged in the context of proclamation. The Reformers and their heirs were wrestling with law, promise, judgment, grace, sin, and assurance in the face of late medieval confusion and ecclesial corruption. Covenant language helped articulate the relation between divine holiness and human failure, between Adam and Christ, between demand and gift. In that sense it was evangelical, even when polemical. It gave shape to the announcement that humanity stood condemned in Adam and redeemed in Christ.
Yet over time, what served proclamation came to govern it. Distinctions that had functioned rhetorically and pastorally were elevated into architectonic principles. The more the system matured, the more the Bible’s covenantal history was re-read through a pair of dogmatic covenants not directly presented as such in the text itself. The result was a shift in theological gravity. The story increasingly served the schema rather than the schema serving the story.
The Bible’s own covenantal movement is more textured than later formulations allow. Abraham’s line does not run through a simple abstraction called “grace” opposed to a prior abstraction called “works.” It runs through Sarah and Hagar, through Ishmael and Isaac, through Jacob and Esau, through blessing, rivalry, election, judgment, hospitality, exile, and promise. Israel’s history is not merely the outworking of a dogmatic contrast between merit and mercy. It is the unfolding of a divine purpose through peoples, lands, priesthoods, kingships, failures, chastisements, and restorations. Even the Torah itself is not reducible to a bare legal principle. It is covenant instruction embedded in a national and liturgical life, given to shape a people in relation to the God who redeemed them.
For this reason, the classic Protestant binary of works and grace often says both too much and too little. It says too much when it claims formal biblical status for distinctions that are in fact theological constructions. It says too little when it compresses the covenantal drama into a scheme that cannot bear the full historical, familial, and political freight of Scripture.
II. The Deeper Problem: Sola Scriptura and the Return of a Sadducean Posture
The difficulty, however, lies not only with covenant theology. It lies also with the doctrine of Scripture that increasingly underwrote it. One of the great ironies of Protestant history is that a movement which rightly sought to recover the authority of Scripture also helped create the conditions for Scripture’s abstraction. The issue is not that Luther or Calvin honored Scripture too highly. Their protest against a compromised church was often necessary and, in many respects, faithful. The issue is that the principle of sola scriptura, once detached from thick communal practices of discernment, inherited wisdom, liturgical continuity, and ecclesial judgment, could easily harden into something else: not merely Scripture over against corruption, but Scripture isolated from the covenantal life in which it had always functioned.
Here the comparison with Second Temple Judaism becomes illuminating. The conflict between Pharisees and Sadducees was not only about discrete doctrinal disputes. It also exposed a deeper question about authority. The Sadducean tendency, in broad terms, moved toward a more restricted and reductionist posture. The Pharisaic stream, whatever its later dangers, insisted that Israel’s life with God could not be reduced to the written text conceived as a free-standing object. Authority was carried in the text, but also in its transmission, performance, adjudication, and reception within a people shaped by covenantal practice.
The analogy is not exact, but it is instructive. In important strands of Protestant development, sola scriptura became a kind of Christianized Sadducean reduction. Scripture was affirmed, but increasingly as something self-standing, self-interpreting, and detachable from living communal judgment. Once that posture entered print culture, democratic individualism, and modern epistemology, fragmentation followed almost inevitably. “Bible alone” did not create a unified people under the Word; it created a proliferation of competing readers, confessions, and experts, each claiming direct scriptural warrant.
This also helps explain why Protestant biblicism so often required an increasingly elaborate post-biblical scaffolding in order to preserve coherence. Once Scripture had been severed from the thicker life of communal transmission, it had to be stabilized by system. Thus the very traditions that spoke most strongly of Scripture’s sufficiency often became the traditions most dependent on conceptual architecture outside the formal wording of Scripture itself. The covenant of works and covenant of grace are not accidental additions to this process. They are among its most telling symptoms.
The problem, then, is not simply doctrinal rigidity. It is a deeper shift in the doctrine of authority. Scripture ceased to be heard primarily as the Word given to a people and increasingly became a text available for extraction, arrangement, and deployment. From there the slide into expert control, private interpretation, and endless denominational division was difficult to avoid.
III. Sitz im Leben, Historical Texture, and the Loss of Scriptural Hearing
This abstraction has had consequences not only in dogmatics but also in biblical interpretation more broadly. Romans and Galatians, for example, have often been read as though Paul were anticipating the sixteenth century. Certainly the Reformers heard genuine gospel truth in those letters. Yet Paul was not arguing against Trent. He was addressing first-century questions concerning Jews and Gentiles, Torah and Messiah, table fellowship, inheritance, idolatry, flesh, Spirit, and the obedience of faith. His letters arise from a concrete covenantal struggle within Israel’s story and the nations’ inclusion into that story.
To read those texts almost exclusively through later Protestant polemics is therefore to displace their Sitz im Leben, their actual setting in life. One begins with a theological contest already defined and then uses Paul as its champion. The result may be rhetorically powerful, but it is historically thinning. The same distortion appears in other forms when the biblical text is governed by extra-textual programs—whether Enlightenment rationalism, historical criticism untethered from theological judgment, Ancient Near Eastern comparativism elevated into a controlling method, or ideological reconstructions of Jesus as primarily social revolutionary, political dissident, or psychological symbol.
In each case the method comes first. Scripture becomes material to be arranged. Revelation is subordinated to reconstruction. Theology, history, and criticism all have their place, but once an external lens becomes sovereign, the text’s own theological intentionality is muted.
This is why proclamation theology cannot be reduced to dogmatic summary, nor can it be replaced by historical reconstruction alone. Proclamation theology must begin by letting the text speak from within its own covenantal world. That means hearing Abraham before hearing Westminster, hearing Acts 15 before hearing a post-Reformation dogmatic manual, hearing Israel’s family tensions before collapsing them into a universalized law-grace binary.
IV. Karl Barth’s Necessary Protest—and His Failure
Karl Barth saw, with great force, that Protestant theology had often converted covenant into a mechanism. His rejection of the classic covenant of works was therefore not without justification. He recognized that the old scholastic arrangement risked turning God’s relation to humanity into a rigid legal framework. In response, he sought to ground the covenant entirely in Jesus Christ. Election, covenant, and grace were all gathered into Christological concentration. Christ becomes both the electing God and the elected man; covenant is no longer divided into legal stages but unified in the one divine act of grace.
This was a necessary protest against formalism and legal abstraction. Barth understood that the gospel cannot be reduced to a moral economy in which Adam might have earned eternal life and Christ merely repairs the damage. He knew that revelation is God’s act, not a human mechanism.
Yet Barth’s correction does not finally solve the problem. He rightly dismantles one abstraction, but he risks replacing it with another. His radical Christocentrism can become so total that the historical structure of the covenant is weakened. Israel’s concrete story, the covenant’s generational texture, the real tensions of inheritance, exile, and promise, and the abiding significance of Abraham’s house can all become subordinate to the universal claim that all covenantal reality is simply concentrated in Christ. The danger is not too much Christ, but too little covenantal history.
This weakness becomes particularly apparent where Scripture insists on the concrete drama of Jacob and Esau, Israel and Edom, election and warning, covenantal participation and covenantal despising. These are not dispensable ornaments of salvation history. They are part of the grammar of revelation itself. A theology that collapses them too quickly into a single Christological principle risks losing the very historical reality through which God chose to speak.
In that sense, Barth is indeed “close, but no cigar.” He saw the problem of system, but he remained a system-builder. He opposed legalism, but not always abstraction. He recovered proclamation, but often by dissolving the thickness of covenantal history into a christological totality that can become strangely detached from Israel’s lived world.
V. Torat Edom as a Corrective to Both Reformed Formalism and Barthian Abstraction
A crucial corrective appears in the Jewish insight associated with Torat Edom. Edom is not merely a geopolitical enemy in the biblical imagination. It becomes, over time, a theological figure: the brother who resists, the empire that hardens, the power that converts what should be covenantal relation into domination, hierarchy, and distortion. In later Jewish reflection, Edom often names not only Rome but the theological spirit of imperial religion.
Under this light, both Reformed scholastic covenantalism and Barthian abstraction can be seen as susceptible to an Edomite distortion. The former turns covenant into a fixed legal architecture; the latter risks turning covenant into a totalized christological principle detached from the familial and historical wound through which Scripture actually unfolds. In both cases, the covenant is flattened. It ceases to be the lived relation between God and a people and becomes instead either juridical system or theological absolute.
Torat Edom presses in the opposite direction. It insists that covenant is neither cold contract nor pure abstraction. It is lived history. It unfolds through brothers, through wound, through inheritance and estrangement, through judgment and preservation. It is carried not only in universal principles but in the stubborn particularity of Israel’s story. That story includes Ishmael as well as Isaac, Esau as well as Jacob, exile as well as return. It must therefore be read with a patience and thickness that resist both doctrinal compression and universalized abstraction.
This also exposes a central weakness in some classic Reformed readings of Paul. Romans 9–11 cannot finally be understood if Esau and Edom are treated merely as tokens in a decretal argument. Nor can they be understood if Israel’s covenantal vocation is dissolved into a generalized church principle. Paul is not writing a metaphysical treatise on predestination abstracted from history. He is wrestling with Israel, the nations, divine faithfulness, mercy, warning, and hope. The grammar is covenantal before it is systematic.
VI. Contemporary Case Studies: Fesko, the New Perspective, and Political Distortions
The continuing power of theological idealogy can be seen in contemporary defenses of the covenant of works, such as those of J. V. Fesko. Such work is often learned, careful, and deeply conversant with the Reformed tradition. Yet it illustrates the methodological concern at issue here. The question is not whether the argument is coherent, but whether the text itself necessitates the framework, or whether the framework governs the reading of the text. Once a dogmatic grid acquires sufficient authority, exegesis tends to become confirmatory. The system tells us in advance what kinds of texts matter and how they must function. The result is that proclamation is subordinated to architecture.
The New Perspective on Paul, especially in N. T. Wright’s influential form, attempts to break this older Protestant mold by relocating Paul within Jewish covenantal concerns. This correction has exposed genuine caricatures, especially where Judaism was falsely reduced to a religion of self-salvation. Yet the New Perspective also risks its own reduction. By placing such weight on covenant membership, ecclesial identity, and boundary markers, it can mute the direct evangelical force of justification as God’s verdict upon the ungodly. The danger here is different, but no less real: the gospel is absorbed into a communal and covenantal framework without sufficient attention to the personal reality of guilt, forgiveness, and atoning grace.
Political distortions then complete the picture. Marxist readings reduce history to material struggle and recast Jesus as a revolutionary agent of socio-economic change. Christian nationalist readings instrumentalize covenant and election for civilizational or ethnic projects. Left and right alike seize Scripture for programmatic ends. In each case proclamation is replaced by agenda. The text becomes useful rather than revelatory. Such distortions differ in content, but they share a form: all subordinate the biblical witness to a controlling grid.
VII. Recovering Proclamation Theology
What is needed, then, is neither anti-intellectualism nor doctrinal vagueness. It is the recovery of proclamation theology: theology that arises from the text’s own covenantal and historical logic, serves the announcement of God’s redemptive action, and resists the temptation to master Scripture by means of closed conceptual systems.
Such a recovery requires more than simply rejecting one theological school in favor of another. It requires a reconfiguration of authority itself. Scripture must once again be heard not as a free-floating object available for immediate extraction, but as the living Word given to a people, read in continuity with communal faithfulness, and discerned under the Spirit. Acts 15 provides a better model here than modern biblicism. There the church does not simply hurl texts at a problem; it listens, remembers, discerns, judges, and says together, “it seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us” (Acts 15:28). That is neither Roman magisterialism nor Protestant individualism. It is covenantal discernment.
This means that the authority of Scripture is not weakened by being restored to its covenantal home. On the contrary, it is strengthened. Scripture becomes more authoritative when it is no longer isolated as a weapon of private certainty or expert control, but heard as the divine address shaping a people for obedience.
For the same reason, the later categories of covenant of works and covenant of grace must be handled with caution. They may at points illuminate aspects of the biblical drama, but they must not be allowed to rule it. They are theological constructs, not the Bible’s own formal headings. Likewise, Barth’s protest must be received but not absolutized. He saw the danger of legal formalism, but his christological concentration could not finally preserve the historical thickness of the covenant. Between Reformed scholasticism and Barthian abstraction there remains a more demanding path: to hear Scripture as covenantal history, to read it in its lived setting, and to proclaim its gospel without compressing it into a system that neutralizes its texture.
The task, then, is not to abandon theology, but to de-absolutize the theological grid. Abraham must be allowed to remain Abraham. Jacob and Esau must remain within the argument. Israel must retain her covenantal thickness. Paul must be heard as a first-century Jew proclaiming Messiah within Israel’s story, not merely as a proto-Reformer or an ecclesial theorist. The nations must be gathered not into a theological abstraction but into the obedience of faith.
Only then can theology breathe again. Only then can covenant be heard not as frozen architecture, but as the living and demanding faithfulness of God.
Endnotes
1. On the development of the covenant of works in early modern Reformed theology, see Michael McGiffert, “From Moses to Adam: The Making of the Covenant of Works,” The Sixteenth Century Journal 19, no. 2 (1988): 131–155.
2. For a contemporary defense of the covenant of works within confessional Reformed theology, see J. V. Fesko, Adam and the Covenant of Works (Fearn: Mentor, 2021).
3. On Barth’s reconfiguration of covenant and election, see Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, II/2, trans. G. W. Bromiley and T. F. Torrance (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1957).
4. On the communal and ecclesial reading of Scripture against privatized biblicism, see Stanley Hauerwas, Unleashing the Scripture: Freeing the Bible from Captivity to America (Nashville: Abingdon, 1993).
5. On the wider fragmentation associated with the unintended consequences of the Reformation, see Brad S. Gregory, The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2012).
6. On communal discernment and the “Rule of Paul” in radical Reformation contexts, see John Howard Yoder, Body Politics: Five Practices of the Christian Community Before the Watching World (Scottdale, PA: Herald Press, 1992), especially the chapter on binding and loosing.
7. On theological interpretation of Scripture as distinct from merely historical-critical procedure, see Stephen E. Fowl, Engaging Scripture: A Model for Theological Interpretation (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998); Daniel J. Treier, Introducing Theological Interpretation of Scripture (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2008).
8. On contextual theological interpretation, see Bo H. Lim, Contextual Theological Interpretation (2025).
9. For the New Perspective in its most influential form, see N. T. Wright, What Saint Paul Really Said (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997), and Paul and the Faithfulness of God (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2013).
10. On the Second Temple Jewish background to the Pharisee-Sadducee divide and the importance of lived tradition, Josephus remains an important though not unproblematic witness; see especially Antiquities 13 and 18, and The Jewish War 2.
11. The argument here does not deny the usefulness of theological synthesis as such. It argues rather that synthesis must remain subordinate to the scriptural drama, especially the Abrahamic and Israel-centered covenantal unfolding that later doctrinal systems too easily compress.
12.The appeal to Torat Edom in this essay functions as a Rabbinical Hillite Pharisaical Jewish theological diagnostic against imperial, abstract, and dominating forms of religion. It names a recurring distortion within Christendom rather than serving merely as an ethnic or geopolitical label.
