It seems almost human nature to think that we can find something to do for God that will make Him do us favors. If we live more virtuously, or cut down on a vice or two, then God will have to reward us.

But the problem with this notion is that it doesn’t really comport with the idea of God at all. If God is God then He is infinite, independent, and eternal. He is self-sustaining. He doesn’t need anything we have to offer. We deal with fellow human beings all the time in ways that both obligate them to reward us and obligate us to reward them. Because we all have unmet needs, we require one another for life and happiness. Obviously, God is not in that sort of relationship with us. He doesn’t need anything from us so that we could put him in our debt.

Only pagans can believe in gods who we can relate to through what we offer rather than by the grace of God.

The pagans believed their sacrifices fed the gods the food they needed, so they could imagine that they really were in some sort of equal arrangement. In one of the pagan myths of the near-east there is a version of the flood story. In that tale, when the Noah-figure gets off the ark, and offers a sacrifice, the gods are said to be so hungry that they swarm on it “like flies.” The god who caused the flood is repudiated because by threatening the human race he threatened the source of food for the gods.

In that belief-system of finite gods it makes sense that people thought they could bribe these gods to do them favors and merit a reward. The Apostle Paul deals with this degenerate form of religion when he preached in Athens, “The God who made the world and everything in it, being Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in temples made by man, nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mankind life and breath and everything” (Acts 17.24, 25). God gives Himself to us over and over. We are in no position to trade. Everything we have comes from Him.

Adam did not live in a pagan reality, but the gracious reality–the gift of a gracious God

Some people think that, before sin entered the world, man was in a position to earn or merit blessing from God. But, while it is true that sin corrupts everything we do now, even apart from sin our works could never put God in our debt.  On the contrary, Adam was to respond in gratitude and faith to God’s gracious gifts and promises (which in his case, unlike ours, would entail sinless obedience).

Thus John Calvin wrote in 1536 in his first edition of the Institutes of the Christian Religion,

In order for us to come to a sure knowledge of ourselves, we must first grasp that Adam, parent of us all, was created in the image and likeness of God. That is, he was endowed with wisdom, righteousness, holiness, and was so clinging by these gifts of grace to God that he could have lived forever in Him, if he had stood fast in the uprightness God had given him. But when Adam slipped into sin, this image and likeness of God was cancelled and effaced, that is, he lost all the benefits of divine grace, by which he could have been led back into the way of life (emphasis added).

Twenty-four years later, Calvin still taught the same thing in his final version of the Institutes,

If man had no title to glory in himself, when, by the kindness of his Maker, he was distinguished by the noblest ornaments, how much ought he to be humbled now, when his ingratitude has thrust him down from the highest glory to extreme ignominy? At the time when he was raised to the highest pinnacle of honor, all which Scripture attributes to him is, that he was created in the image of God, thereby intimating that the blessings in which his happiness consisted were not his own, but derived by divine communication. What remains, therefore, now that man is stripped of all his glory, than to acknowledge the God for whose kindness he failed to be grateful, when he was loaded with the riches of his grace? Not having glorified him by the acknowledgment of his blessings, now, at least, he ought to glorify him by the confession of his poverty (2.2.1; italics added).

Indeed, it is a matter of Confessional orthodoxy for those in the continental Reformed tradition to affirm that upright, sinless creatures only live by the grace of God:

He also created the angels good, to be His messengers and to serve His elect; some of whom are fallen from that excellency in which God created them into everlasting perdition, and the others have by the grace of God remained steadfast and continued in their first state (The Belgic Confession, Article 12).

If even sinless angels are preserved by the grace of God for eternal life, why should Adam be any different?

The older Protestant theologians knew this. One of them, James Fisher, authored a “catechism”–a series of question and answers for the purpose of teaching children Christian doctrine–which included a question about the first human being: “Was there any proportion between Adam’s obedience, though sinless, and the life that was promised?” The answer is: “There can be no proportion between the obedience of a finite creature, however perfect, and the enjoyment of the infinite God.”

The catechism goes on: “Why could not Adam’s perfect obedience be meritorious of eternal life?” and answers, “Because perfect obedience was no more than what he was bound to, by virtue of his natural dependence on God, as a reasonable creature made after his image.” Finally, the questions is asked: “Could he have claimed the reward as a debt, in case he had continued in his obedience?” The answer is that all rewards are of God’s grace, his unmerited favor: “He could have claimed it only as a pactional debt, in virtue of the covenant promise, by which God became debtor to his own faithfulness, but not in virtue of any intrinsic merit of his obedience, Luke 17:10.” By “pactional” the author means that it was a only by an gracious decision to bind himself to a promise that God could be obligated in the first place.

This last answer is accompanied by a Scripture text, Luke 17.10: “Will any one of you who has a servant plowing or keeping sheep say to him when he has come in from the field, ‘Come at once and recline at table’? Will he not rather say to him, ‘Prepare supper for me, and dress properly, and serve me while I eat and drink, and afterward you will eat and drink’? Does he thank the servant because he did what was commanded? So you also, when you have done all that you were commanded, say, ‘We are unworthy servants; we have only done what was our duty.’”  Note that James Fisher uses a parable about the relationship of redeemed sinners to their Lord to explain the relationship between Adam and God before the Fall.

James Fisher was only one of many who understood the true God and therefore rejected all human merit. Reformed theologian John Ball writes the common consensus, appealing to the same text that Fisher uses:

In this state and condition Adam’s obedience should have been rewarded in justice, but he could not have merited that reward. Happiness should have been conferred upon him, or continued unto him for his works, but they had not deserved the continuance thereof: for it is impossible the creature should merit of the Creator, because when he hath done all that he can, he is an unprofitable servant, he hath done but his duty (A Treatise of the Covenant of Grace).

Unworthy servants are what we are, even when we have done all our duty! How much less can we ever rightfully claim to obligate God to reward us when we both fail to do our duty and actively violate God’s commands every day?

The fact is, when human beings are attracted to the idea of dealing with God on the basis of their merits, they are not only denying their own sinfulness before a Holy God, but they are denying who God is. Make no mistake, the issue here is not merely the sinfulness of sin but the deity of God. As the Westminster Confession states in chapter 2, paragraph 2:

God hath all life, glory, goodness, blessedness, in and of himself; and is alone in and unto himself all-sufficient, not standing in need of any creatures which he hath made, nor deriving any glory from them, but only manifesting his own glory in, by, unto, and upon them. He is the alone fountain of all being, of whom, through whom, and to whom are all things; and hath most sovereign dominion over them, to do by them, for them, or upon them whatsoever himself pleaseth.

To claim that we can earn from this God, that we can intrinsically merit from him some reward, is truly insane–an exchanging of the creature for the Creator. We might as well worship beasts as pretend that we could ever, under any circumstances, offer God works that are truly meritorious before him when he himself has enabled and ordained for us to do every good deed we produce.

Thus, the Westminster Confession goes on to affirm that we can never merit anything from God, not only because of our sinfulness in comparison to God’s holiness, but also because of our finitude in comparison to God’s transcendance:

We cannot by our best works merit pardon of sin, or eternal life at the hand of God, by reason of the great disproportion that is between them and the glory to come; and the infinite distance that is between us and God, whom, by them, we can neither profit, nor satisfy for the debt of our former sins, but when we have done all we can, we have done but our duty, and are unprofitable servants: and because, as they are good, they proceed from his Spirit; and as they are wrought by us, they are defiled, and mixed with so much weakness and imperfection, that they cannot endure the severity of God’s judgment (16.5; emphasis added).

Happily, God is gracious. Before sin entered the world, God established a gracious relationship with humanity in Adam whereby he would inherit eternal glory if he persevered in faith and obedience.

But Adam did not remain in the vine (John 15.1ff). In the words of the sixteenth-century Protestant French Confession of Faith, “by his own guilt he fell from the grace which he received.” Rather than destroying Adam and Eve in condemnation, God gave exponentially greater grace to deal with sin and restore man to the glory that he had failed to inherit. He sent His own Son to die in our condemnation on the cross in order to give Jesus the exaltation for us that Adam had failed to trust Him to give him.

Repenting and believing the Gospel is never about earning God’s favor or putting him in our debt by some sort of good work. It is simply the only appropriate response to the clear fact that God has already revealed that He loves us and freely offers us both salvation from sin and an eternal inheritance of incomprehensible glory. And even our response to that offer is God’s gift. If his Spirit did not overcome our obstinancy we would go on asserting the possiblity that we could merit something other than death from Him.

I post all this due to the palpably false charge that Peter Leithart has denied some alleged bi-covenantal scheme in the Westminster Confession of Faith and Catechisms.  I know it is too much to ask Presbyterians to read the Bible.  But I was hoping some would prove willing to deal with the confession.

Or maybe they could read Dr. Ligon Duncan:

What God is doing is not merited. Adam has not merited this. We use the phrase Covenant of Works, not to say that man earned these blessings, but to express the fact that this original relationship had no provision for the continuation of God’s blessings if disobedience occurred. So it was a covenant contingent upon Adam continuing in his obligations. (emphasis all in the original).

Now compare this to this claim on page 11:  “Leithart rejects this bi-covenantal structure…”  But I don’t see (and I may have missed it) any attempt to show that Dr. Leithart believes that there was, in the “original relationship” a “provision for the continuation of God’s blessings if disobedience occurred”?  The analysis used to condemn Peter reads like a Rorschach test.

As I have written before, here is the baseline:

“The first covenant made with man was a covenant of works, wherein life was promised to Adam; and in him to his posterity, upon condition of perfect and personal obedience.

I quote from the Westminster Confession’s chapter on God’s covenant. I don’t think we learn anything additional from the rest of the Westminster documents except that the name, “covenant of works” is not the only name one can use (if someone notices something I’ve missed, let me know). Perhaps we should also say the representative nature of the covenant is affimed outside the paragraph above. That too would be part of the doctrine.

To affirm the traditional doctrine of the Covenant of works then one must affirm and only affirm that

1. There was a covenant made with Adam that is now superseded.
2. That this was the first covenant with man.
3. That Adam’s and Eve’s works were acceptable to God.
4. That life was promised to Adam (and to him as a public person, not to himself alone but to his posterity)
5. That Adam would forfeit this promise and be eternally condemned (not only for himself but also for his posterity) if he refused to give God perfect and personal obedience as the condition for the covenant.

When considering whether someone teaches the covenant of works in an orthodox manner, it might be helpful to keep the traditional baseline in mind.  Where is the evidence that Leithart falls short?

Where is any interest shown in discovering any evidence that Leithart falls shorts.  We hear about “precise” theology and “precision” till our ears bleed from the points, and then, when it should really matters, we get slogans of “bi-covenantal structure” that could mean anything used as a basis for saying a minister of the Gospel must face a prosecutor?  This “sounds like” administration, so call for a trial?

This imprecision did not just happen; it was embedded in the first of “nine declarations” passed by a General Assembly in 2007.

As I wrote rather scathingly in May of 2007, quoting the first declaration and responding:

1. The view that rejects the bi-covenantal structure of Scripture as represented in the Westminster Standards (i.e., views which do not merely take issue with the terminology, but the essence of the first/second covenant framework) is contrary to those Standards.

The parenthetical remark is public notice that this declaration threatens no one except those with the wrong friends.

Crudely said, I suppose.  Perhaps I was too willing to come across as hostile.  But I still don’t see how my basic point is in any way inaccurate. There is nothing that Peter says that in the least contradicts the Standards on this point. And whatever one wants to do with any exceptions Peter might have to the Westminster Standards, one ought not invent them out of vague slogans but ask about the actual statements in the standards.