What Have Medieval Thought and Reformed Covenant Theology to Do with One Another?
Did Adam need grace before the fall? "Righteous by Design" shatters medieval theology, revealing how Christ's perfect obedience—not our works—unlocks salvation's door. Your faith will never be the same!
The Medieval era is the least familiar period of church history for most Christians. Good reasons explain why it seems so foreign to us. Not only are many of the ideas very difficult and complicated. In addition, the sources are often locked behind the language barrier in untranslated Latin sources. What if, however, engaging this period of history was ripe with opportunity to clarify why Reformed covenant theology is so important?
The distinction between the law and the gospel has been an important feature of Protestant theology since the Reformation. It has helped us see more clearly that the responsibilities we have before God are not the same as the good news about what Christ has done for us in salvation. Although those two realities are not always opposed to one another, they are always distinct. One or the other must be the reason for why we enter everlasting life. Believers know that sinners need to receive that life from Christ as offered only in the gospel. Was that true for Adam as well though?
My recent book in the REDS series, Righteous by Design: Covenantal Merit and Adam’s Original Integrity, defends the distinction between law and gospel through the lens of our doctrine of the image Dei. In medieval thought, there was consensus that grace enabled merit. Although theologians differed and disagreed about how best to apply that principle, they all seemed to share that the premise applied to Adam before the fall and to sinners after the fall. Of course, they usually saw that sinners needed more grace than Adam.
From a Reformed perspective, our understanding that Adam bore God’s image by creation meant that he had knowledge, righteousness, and holiness. These aspects of his original constitution meant that he did not need grace to fulfill the duties required of him as God’s creaturely servant. God did not have to elevate his nature. Still, God did condescend to covenant with Adam to offer him even greater blessings than he had provided when he created Adam.
In this paradigm, the covenant of works explains how God offered heavenly reward to Adam for his obedience. But when Adam sinned, he broke that covenant and damaged human nature. We are no longer able to perform our duties by that condition of original righteousness. Thus, we can no longer fulfill the works required to enter everlasting life. In contrast to Rome, Reformed theology is best served by focusing on these covenantal considerations for Adam rather than on the medieval paradigm of grace before the fall.
You can probably already tell that several big ideas are at work in Righteous by Design. The major challenge in writing this book was to keep several complicated concepts clear on their own and then also tie them together cogently. Readers will have to decide how well I achieved that goal!
The book’s aim, however, is to magnify Christ’s work in doing what Adam should have done. Jesus has rendered perfect obedience and merited everlasting life for his people. Jesus is the sole ground for why we enter his heavenly kingdom. He has done it all, and we gain from his reward by receiving and resting upon him by faith alone.
I hope this book forges a backstop against inconsistencies and compromises in our understanding of the Reformation doctrines of salvation. When we bring considerations of covenant and anthropology into the conversation, we have greater resources to build a unified explanation of Christ’s saving work that lines up also with how God created us as his image bearers. These issues do have complicated aspects. But the fruit of tackling those challenges is a richer understanding of what God made us to be and what Christ has done for us.
