It has been on the fringes of a number of discussions I’ve had in recent months. It often comes up (unseen) in discussions about baptism with Calvinistic credo baptists. It has been at work in discussions about the relationship between law and gospel, and the Old and New Covenants. “It” is New Covenant Theology (NCT).
Let’s start by realizing that this is a matter of disagreement within The Gospel Coalition. There is freedom to disagree on this issue. This is not a matter that puts one “outside the camp” but one that creates some significant differences of opinion within the camp. Often we can’t resolve those differences on non-essentials because we ultimately are disagreeing about whether we should embrace Covenant Theology (CT) or NCT (yes, some of the Gospel Coalition guys are Dispensational).
I’ve been meaning to do a post on this for months now but haven’t had the time to really process things. I probably still haven’t processed things as clearly as I want to. As a young Christian, I drank from the Dispensational cistern via Hal Lindsey (I worked at a book store at the time of conversion and didn’t know any better). I’ve since read books by Ryrie and others. I “grew” out of it. By that I mean that no one really showed me anything better or beat me up about it. No one, as Dr. Nicole would say “disabused me” of this theology. As I continued to read Scripture, I discovered it didn’t fit. Scripture itself took Dispensationalism out of the picture for me. But I was essentially left with nothing in its place when I arrived at RTS Orlando.
There I was grounded in CT, even if it took me years to embrace and/or understand all of the implications. Baptism was the tough one for me, but I got there eventually (2 years after seminary). I haven’t studied NCT itself as much, but have read many who espouse it (like D.A. Carson and other Trinity guys).
Last night someone sent me a link to the Desiring God website. It was a short article meant to briefly describe Dispensationalism, CT & NCT. The author went on to say that Piper’s own views are probably closest to NCT and farthest from Dispensational Theology. NCT agrees with CT in seeing Scripture structured by Covenants, not Dispensations. It agrees with Dispensationalism by seeing a discontinuity between the Old and New Covenants. I’m not really interested in rehashing the Dispensational thing, so let’s look at the brief descriptions of CT & NCT and say a few things about each.
Covenant Theology
Covenant theology believes that God has structured his relationship with humanity by covenants rather than dispensations. For example, in Scripture we explicitly read of various covenants functioning as the major stages in redemptive history, such as the covenant with Abraham, the giving of the law, the covenant with David, and the new covenant. These post-fall covenants are not new tests of man’s faithfulness to each new stage of revelation (as are the dispensations in dispensationalism), but are rather differing administrations of the single, overarching covenant of grace.
Cavman Considers 