Some Questions and Answers about God’s Covenant and the Sacrament That Is a Seal of God’s Covenant. Robert Rollock
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his own day as a biblical commentator (reflected both in Beza’s praise for his work, noted above, and in the multiple editions of his commentaries), Rollock is best remembered today for the role he purportedly played in the development of covenant theology (a.k.a. “federal theology” or “federalism”) in the Reformed tradition.9 Indeed, it is difficult to find scholarly treatments of Rollock today that approach him from any other angle.10 The present work is no exception, though it does hope to offer something new—both in the translations that constitute the body of this work and here in the introduction to the same—to scholarly perspectives on Rollock’s significance as a covenant theologian.
To date, scholarly analysis of Rollock’s covenant thought and the role he played in the development of Reformed covenant theology has been almost entirely based on Rollock’s discussion of God’s covenants with man in the first several chapters of his 1597 Tractatus de vocatione efficaci.11 Very little attention—indeed, none at all by most scholars—has been given to Rollock’s 1596 Quaestiones et responsiones aliquot de Foedere Dei: deque Sacramento quod Foederis Dei sigillum est, or to relevant passages in his biblical commentaries that explore the subject of God’s covenants with man. This is partially due to the substantial overlap between the content of Rollock’s 1596 catechism and those chapters of the 1597 work on effectual calling that treat the covenants. In other words, Andrew Woolsey, who does make mention of Rollock’s catechism, is largely correct to observe with reference to the same that “the substance of this rare work was incorporated into a larger treatise on effectual calling, and published the following year as Tractatus de vocatione efficaci (1597).”12 Neglect of Rollock’s catechism and commentaries in discussions of his covenant thought stems more substantially, however, from the relative inaccessibility of those works in comparison to the 1597 work on effectual calling. Shortly after Rollock’s death, a London preacher named Henry Holland produced an English translation of the 1597 Tractatus titled A Treatise of God’s Effectual Calling (1603). That work was incorporated into a two-volume edition of Rollock’s works (in English translation) by the Wodrow Society in the nineteenth century, which edition was reprinted in 2008 by Reformation Heritage Books. Neither Rollock’s catechism nor his biblical commentaries, by way of contrast, have been translated or reproduced in modern editions/reprints.13
Exclusive attention to Rollock’s 1597 Tractatus in judgments about his role in the development of Reformed covenant thought is attended by certain problems. For one thing, there are aspects of Rollock’s thinking on the divine covenants that surface much more clearly in his catechism and commentaries than in his treatise on effectual calling. So, for example, the way in which Rollock’s ideas about God’s covenants (both before and after the fall) inform his thinking on the sacraments (both before and after the fall) becomes apparent from the catechism, which takes both covenant and sacrament as its themes, but not from the 1597 Tractatus, which contains scarcely a word on the sacraments. More substantial problems, perhaps, attend the oversight of Rollock’s catechism and commentaries in efforts to parse how and when discrete covenantal concepts appeared in Reformed writings of the late sixteenth-century, or in closely related (if arguably unfruitful) efforts to determine who influenced whom in the progress of covenantal ideas.
An example of the latter problem presents itself in the tendency to situate Rollock to the right of certain English divines—especially Dudley Fenner and William Perkins—in chronological surveys of early modern Reformed treatments of a pre-fall covenant, and/or to assume that Rollock was directly indebted to those English divines in his own thinking about such a covenant.14 Thus Woolsey: “Rollock’s teaching on the legal and evangelical covenants clearly followed the pattern of Perkins.”15 Such a move supports the more general conclusion that “the covenantal thought of . . . early Scottish theologians stands in the mainstream of Reformed theological tradition, its headwaters originating in Geneva and flowing through Heidelberg and Elizabethan Puritanism.”16 The supposition of some “influence of . . . English Puritan sources” on Rollock’s covenant thought in particular rests on the observation that Fenner and Perkins published writings contrasting the covenants of works and grace in 1585 (Fenner’s Sacra theologia) and 1590 (Perkins’s Armilla aurea) respectively, six years before Rollock published his catechism on God’s covenants and subsequent Tractatus. Rollock’s familiarity with Perkins’ writings by 1596 is taken for granted, perhaps rightly. His familiarity with Fenner’s work cannot so easily be assumed; Woolsey does, however, note that one of Rollock’s own printers, Robert Waldegrave, published two of Fenner’s works (though not the Sacra theologia) in Edinburgh in 1592, thereby rendering Rollock’s familiarity with Fenner by the time he began carving out his own covenantal ideas likely.17
Yet closer scrutiny of Perkin’s work and a quick glance at Rollock’s commentaries soon problematizes this narrative. There is, first of all, the fact that Perkins actually makes no mention of a pre-fall covenant or foedus operum (“covenant of works”) in the 1590 Armilla aurea. In 1591 Perkins published a second—and very much expanded—edition of the Armilla, which edition served as the basis for an English translation completed the same year.18 In that (and later) editions Perkins named “God’s covenant [foedus] and the seal of that covenant” as the “external means” by which God executes his eternal decree of election. He went on to define “God’s covenant” as “his pact [pactum] with man concerning the obtaining of eternal life under certain conditions,” and to name God’s covenant as duplex, comprising “the covenant of works [foedus operum] and the covenant of grace.” He further defined foedus operum as “the covenant of God that includes a condition of perfect obedience and is expressed in the moral law.” And finally, he named the Decalogue as “the epitome of the whole law and the covenant of works.”19 In 1590, by way of contrast, Perkins identified “the preaching of the Word and the administration of the sacraments” as the “external means” by which God executes his decree of election. He named the Word as duplex, comprising “both law and gospel,” and proceeded to an examination of the Decalogue as the “epitome of the whole law” without a single reference to God’s covenant(s).20
Such nitpicking about the precise date of Perkins’ first reference to “the legal and evangelical covenants” assumes some significance, perhaps, when juxtaposed with Rollock’s comments on God’s covenants in his 1590 Ephesians commentary, a work based on his lectures from the late 1580s. Commenting on Eph 1:7, Rollock noted that every spiritual benefit ultimately enjoyed by believers is founded upon God’s decree. He identified God’s promise in time as God’s means of executing his eternal decree, and then added:
But the promise should be referred to the covenant. Therefore, something should be said briefly about the covenant, which we acknowledge as the source of this benefit of our redemption. God, then, has established a twofold covenant [foedus duplex] with man from the beginning: one natural, established in creation itself, containing the law; the other a covenant of grace, established with man after the fall, containing the gospel.21
As demonstrated below, Rollock expanded upon this doctrine of divine covenants considerably in his 1593 Romans commentary. But even this terse comment about God’s twofold covenant in 1590 raises questions about the supposed English Puritan, or at least Perkinsian, influence upon Rollock. There is, to be sure, affinity between Rollock’s comments here and Perkins’ comments in the 1591 Armilla, not only in the recognition of God’s