The Doctrine of Social Covenanting and the Covenant of Grace
Rev. Benjamin Glaser
For my Seventeen82 article for April I would like to touch on something that undergirds the entire teaching of the Seceder church on the question of social covenanting and the gospel. And that is the role and place of this blessing in life of the Christian in light of the promise found alone in the covenant of grace. Whenever one may hear a phrase like covenant of duty you might immediately begin to think of the covenant of works. However, responsibilities are not antithetical to promises. As descendants of Ebenezer Erskine we certainly believe in the free offer of the gospel and the inherent legalism that would require any merited labor before one could rest in the peace of Christ for salvation. Yet, if you take a look at the covenants that we associate (no pun intended) with Abraham, Moses, David, etc... that are administrations of the one covenant of grace there is without a doubt an expectation of evangelical obedience which should follow. We are to have no other gods before the one true and living God because He has brought us out of bondage to sin and misery caused by Adam’s transgression. Abraham is to live peacefully in the land because God called him out of the land of Chaldees to rest in the place of promise. Christ bids His sheep to come onto Him, away from the yoke of weighty shame and take on the light yoke of His righteousness.
Even when we move away from these expressions of the good news and into more practical matters we see the same truth expressed by way of the covenant of promise. For instance, when ministers are ordained they profess oaths to perform certain actions, do certain things, and to abstain from others. No one would call those vows an administration of the covenant of works because they require performance on the affirming, and consequence for the breaking. When it then comes to what our forefathers called social covenanting the same truth applies, even in the case of National covenants. As the Solemn League and Covenant makes clear the yeahs and amens of the swearers are grounded not in the power of their own flesh, but in the finished work of the Redeemer with whom the covenant has been made. All this in light of His mediatorial essence and authority under which all men are bound as the King of the Nations and the Head of the Church.
Second generation Associate pastor Adam Gib is helpful here. He writes, “Such a covenant no way interferes with the Covenant of Grace; as it means not a laying any new ground of dependence and expectation before God. It only means a solemn avouching of the Lord and engagement to him, upon the ground of his Covenant of Grace.”. We would not call a tree sprouting in a forest a new forest anymore than we would call this type of covenant of some other kind since it springs from the ground saturated with the blood of Christ.
Gib continues, “As the engagement unto, and performance of duties, is not anv condition of obtaining life from God, but is a consequence of embracing the gift of life in the covenant of grace, and of dependence on the promises of that Covenant.”. We see yet again that the ruling of the Lord from Heaven in the new covenant means that just as we are no longer under the old covenant as a tutor since the teacher has come, so to as we exist in the covenant of grace all that we then do is to be guided by the assurance found alone in the mediator of this new covenant. It is in these things that we also are reminded that there are a number of practical applications whereby we take social covenants all the time. Each and every time we swear on a Bible in a court of law or for any other occasion, like in an installation to public office we are doing nothing less than taking a social covenant with Jesus Christ as the guaranteer, the in whom the covenant has force and weight.
The very nature of the National Covenant of 1638 and the Solemn League and Covenant of 1643 are nothing more than these type of vows made instead of on an individual personal level, at a state level with the nation as a person, which Scripture itself gives precedence for. We act too much like Baptists when we demure from the covenantal relationship between human beings in a society. Our Scots and Scots-Irish forefathers engaged in the Revolution not for individualistic glory, but in the defense of home and hearth, a concept bigger than themselves. While the poison of libertarian independency was in the water thanks to Locke, Rousseau, and other liberals the Tennessee and Virginia Overmountainmen would have tossed their lot in with the redcoats rather than believe the new nation they were covenanting to save was to only enshrine I, me, and mine as the motivating philosophy. Not only is the kind of onlyism we take for granted in our selfish society inimical to conservatism, but it is also to Presbyterianism as well.
As I noted in my previous post on Seventeen82 the way we understand our Confession of Faith in light of the word adherence members of the Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church even when they join their local congregation are testifying to their bond to the ARP as a whole. As we speak about the Chester ARP Church or the Bethel ARP Church or the Providence ARP Church we are as much focusing on that as if the middle word is the controlling one. It would be good for us to think about the names of churches as being in this order: The ARP Church at Chester. Here is part of the reason why I demure from adjective and verbal names for congregations. We don’t represent emotions, but communities of faith.
When our forefathers church planted out west (i.e. – Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, Texas, etc...) they did so not for generic evangelical reasons. It was because they believed in what those letters ARP meant. To be an Associate Reformed Presbyterian means not only that we hold to the free offer and the boundless love of Christ for sinners, for He is dead for them, but that we understand that our whole of life is grounded in the covenant of grace and the kind of social covenanting promise of those who founded our churches. In a sense the Great Commission is a social covenant that Jesus swore to His disciples. When we bind ourselves to pray at Synod for works of the Synod we are making a social covenant grounded in our desire to see Christ’s covenant of grace flourish. It may seem as if this post has gone of the rails a little from its desired purpose, but all that we do from foreign missions to local church ministry is bound up in our unity in calling and grace. How we name our churches is as much an act of faith in the power of God to build covenant nations and communities as it is a marketing tool to attract goats, or confuse sheep as to what we are really on about. Merely being soteriologically Calvinist does not make one an ARP. It goes back to this whole concept of the social covenant and what we do as ARPs.
As we think about the covenant of grace and its totality of meaning and the kind of glory we participate in due to the promise of Christ it only encourages us to the duty that we affirmed in our yes vote to be a member and/or minister in His church, and the kind of life we would like to see in our nation. No country will ever be great outside of the covenant of grace and the preaching of the gospel, nor will one be great unless it covenants itself to Christ in light of who He is and what He has done, and what He will do for those with bow their knee to Him in love.
There is so much more to be said, and we’ll have a follow up to get into more of this, but remember that the Associate Presbytery and the Reformed Presbytery were both founded by men who were called Covenanters. That’s not a monicker that only the RPCNA gets to use. We in the ARP are Covenanting Seceders, and as we embrace that heritage and live in light of the covenant of grace in all areas of life: social, church, and state as well as personally, we can only rest in the promise of God’s blessings, not for earthly power or glory, but in His flourishing assurance by how He keeps His covenantal promises from generation to generation for those who love Him.
Blessings in Christ,
Rev. Benjamin Glaser
Pastor, Bethany ARP Church