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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covenant’s foundation (q. 6), promise (q. 7), condition (q. 8), historical location (q. 15), manner of establishment (q. 16), repetition in redemptive history (q. 18), manner of repetition in redemptive history (q. 19), function in redemptive history (q. 21), initial violation (q. 25), subsequent violation (q. 27), penalty (q. 28), and location in the biblical canon (q. 30) all serve, ultimately, to emphasize contrasting features of the covenant of grace. To note one example of how he develops such contrasts: Rollock identifies in q. 62 the condition of the covenant of grace as “faith in the mediator,” notes that faith is a product of grace rather than man’s innate powers (q. 63), and then observes, alluding to his earlier consideration of the pre-fall covenant’s condition (q. 8), that faith as the gracious covenant’s condition necessarily excludes “those good works of nature that were named as the condition of the covenant of works,” since “Christ and God’s mercy, which are the objects of faith, cannot—in the justification of man—consist with the powers of man’s nature or the works that proceed from that nature” (q. 64). At the risk of stating the rather obvious, this particular contrast between the covenant of works and covenant of grace ultimately serves to reinforce Protestant teaching on the exclusive and instrumental role that faith plays in justification.
Thirdly, Rollock’s teaching is unique in the way that it employs the covenant of works to frame an account and analysis of Christ’s obedience (as itself an aspect of Christ’s work). Rollock, in other words, is the first Reformed theologian to my knowledge to refer to Christ as one “born under the covenant of works” and “liable to the same” (q. 37), or as one who has “fulfilled the covenant of works,” (q. 38) both “by doing [agendo] and by suffering [patiendo]” (q. 39). These claims, for Rollock, lead on to a substantial discussion about Christ’s life of obedience and his passion, and how both contribute to man’s ultimate salvation (qs. 40–49). At one level, of course, the move to frame an account of Christ’s work by reference to the covenant of works is obvious and inevitable once man’s pre-fall experience has come to be defined with reference to that covenant. Christ, after all, is named in Scripture as the second (or last) Adam (cf. 1 Cor 15:45 & Rom 5:15), and as one “born under the law” (Gal 4:4), which “law” Reformed theologians recognized as promulgated upon tables of stone at Sinai but equally, and previously, written upon man’s heart in creation.26 Nevertheless, the concrete move to place the second Adam “under the covenant of works” and to frame an account of his work with reference to the same (over and above the law) was not without theological consequence. An understanding of Christ as one born under and fulfilling that covenant which God established with man before the fall found expression in, and had bearing upon, a number of intramural Reformed debates of the seventeenth century, such as that on the imputation of Christ’s active obedience to believers, or that on what man’s eschatological future would have been—heavenly, glorified life or perpetual, earthly existence—had Adam remained upright. It also found expression in, and had bearing upon, discussions about the meritorious nature of Adam’s hypothetical obedience in the covenant of works. Rollock, interestingly, denies in his catechism that Adam’s good works would have had the proper essence of merit in the foedus operum (qs. 12–13). In the seventeenth-century an increasing number of Reformed theologians demurred on this point and, with an eye towards the meritorious nature of that obedience rendered by the second Adam under the covenant of works, argued that the first Adam’s obedience would likewise have been meritorious, even if “merit” was ultimately defined by such thinkers not with reference to any intrinsic value of said hypothetical works but to God’s free determination of an appropriate reward for the same.27
A fourth and final unique aspect of Rollock’s teaching on the pre-fall covenant does not present itself in the translations offered below, but nevertheless warrants mention here in order to round out our consideration of Rollock’s significance to the development of Reformed covenant theology. This final, unique aspect of Rollock’s teaching presents itself in the chapter on original sin in Rollock’s 1597 Tractatus, in which chapter Rollock suggests—a first among Reformed thinkers, at least to my knowledge—that the pre-fall covenant per se functioned as the actual basis for humankind’s solidarity with Adam, and thus for humankind’s voluntariety of, and culpability for, Adam’s actual transgression in the Garden. Having asked “from whence” that transgression—that is, Adam’s eating of the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden—derived its “power [efficacia] to be propagated to each and every descendant of Adam,” Rollock contends that such “power” sprung not from the reality of any natural or intrinsic relationship between Adam and his descendants, but from “a certain covenant of God which he established with Adam in the first creation.”28 To state the matter otherwise, Rollock understands humankind’s culpability for Adam’s transgression to rest ultimately on God’s institution of solidarity between Adam and his descendants, which institution found expression from the very first in God’s explicit statement that “if man should stand firm in that innocence in which he was created, he would stand firm for himself and his descendants, but if on the contrary he should not stand firm and should rather fall, he would fall for himself and for his descendants.”29
Previous Reformed theologians had, of course, accepted humankind’s solidarity with Adam and culpability for Adam’s transgression, but they had been content to let humankind’s physical descent from Adam and universal participation in human nature jointly serve as the theoretical basis for that solidarity and culpability. Even those who had identified the law written on Adam’s heart—or, like Augustine, the law prohibiting consumption of the forbidden fruit—as a covenant, and thus either explicitly or implicitly named Adam’s offspring in toto as covenant-breakers, had so implicated Adam’s descendants by virtue of an acknowledged solidarity with Adam ultimately premised upon the concept of human nature.30 Subsequent Reformed theologians, on the other hand, would increasingly follow Rollock’s lead, acknowledging both a federal relationship—that is, a relationship premised upon the pre-fall foedus—between Adam and his posterity serving as the basis for humankind’s culpability for Adam’s sin, and a real/natural relationship between the same serving as the basis for humankind’s inheritance of corruption and perversity.31 Thus, for instance, Anthony Burgess in his book on original sin: “by God’s covenant we were looked upon as in [Adam].”32
While Rollock apparently constitutes the earliest Reformed thinker to explicitly premise humankind’s solidarity with Adam and culpability for Adam’s sin upon a covenant between God and Adam in the garden, he was not the first theologian per se to do so in his century. In a series of publications between 1532 and 1551, and during proceedings of the Council of Trent in 1546, an Italian Dominican friar named Ambrogio Catarino had challenged the adequacy of the concept of universal human nature to explain universal solidarity with Adam and culpability for Adam’s sin, and had promoted the idea that God established a covenant with Adam in the Garden that served as the basis for said solidarity and culpability. Catarino’s doctrine of a pre-fall covenant—a covenant specifically serving to establish humankind’s voluntariety of, and culpability for, Adam’s sin—was forcefully rejected by his Dominican contemporary Domingo de Soto (among others), but was embraced, at least in some form, by a number of contemporary and immediately subsequent Roman Catholic thinkers, including Juan Morillo (who, interestingly, converted to the Reformed faith in the early 1550s), Alfonso Salmeron, Gabriel Vasquez, Francisco Suarez, and Adam Tanner.33 Rollock was very likely familiar with Catarino’s teaching on the covenant (and perhaps to some extent with the minor controversy Catarino’s doctrine caused in Roman Catholic circles)—he engaged Catarino’s overall teaching on original sin in the course of his own chapter on the subject in the Tractatus.34 To all appearances, then, Rollock’s own insistence that God’s covenant with Adam in the Garden constitutes the proper basis for humankind’s solidarity with Adam and culpability for Adam’s sin marks a concrete—albeit unacknowledged, for obvious reasons—debt to Catarino.35
Further unique aspects of Rollock’s treatment of the pre-fall covenant vis-a-vis earlier Reformed treatments of that doctrine could, I suspect, be noted. The four unique aspects of his doctrine just identified, however, should serve to establish Rollock’s place as a pivotal figure in the development of Reformed covenant theology, particularly so since the aspects in question increasingly became, as intimated previously, standard features of seventeenth-century Reformed teaching on the divine covenants.
Notes