Covenant Theology Goes All the Way Back to AD 120 #covenanttheology #reformed

[00:00:00]So, if you're typical American Evangelical, and you have not read the the Church Fathers, and that would be just about all American Evangelicals, uh you haven't actually read you know, Reformation and Reformed Theology for yourself. If you only know about the Fathers and about the Reformation what you've been told by others, then you may have no idea that we've been teaching Covenant Theology for a very long time. In church historical terms, um probably the first sort of serious Covenant Theologian wrote about AD 120.

[00:00:37]AD 120. And this work is called the Epistle of Barnabas. It's not the biblical Barnabas, but that's the name given to this Epistle. We don't think we know who who wrote it, right? But but it's not uh any older than AD 150. So, it's certainly no later than the middle of the 2nd century, but most scholars today would date it because of internal evidence uh to about AD 120, somewhere around that. So, the first quarter of the 2nd century.

[00:01:09]And in that Epistle, uh Barnabas argues extensively uh for uh and actually writes a kind of Covenant Theology. It's pretty serious Covenant Theology. If you took what Barnabas wrote in AD 120 against his critics, and you planted it in the early 16th century, say in the 1520s or 1530s, when for example, Heinrich Bullinger published his treatise on Covenant Theology against the Anabaptists, uh he wrote a treatise called De Testamento in Latin, and he did it in German as well, in I think 1534. All right, if you if you took Barnabas, and you planted it in in the early 16th century, everybody in the early 16th century, by everybody I mean all the Protestants, uh that is the Lutherans and the Reformed, they would all have said, "Yeah, that's what we're saying against the Anabaptists what Barnabas was saying." And if you took Bullinger or Zwingli, the stuff the covenant theology they were writing or Oecolampadius, the covenant theology that he was writing in the 1520s, right?

[00:02:16]Zwingli is starting to make recognizably covenantal arguments against the against the Anabaptists in 1524 and his major treatise is in 1527.

[00:02:27]Uh if you you if you took that and and planted that in the early second century, Barnabas would look at that and say, "Yeah, that's right.

[00:02:35]That's exactly what I'm saying." So,