"Covenant Creatures"? Don’t Buy It!

“God’s very existence is covenantal: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit live in unceasing devotion to each other, reaching outward beyond the Godhead to create a community of creatures serving as a giant analogy of the Godhead’s relationship. Created in the image of the Triune God, we are by nature outgoing, interdependent relationship establishers, finding ourselves in the other and not just in ourselves. Unlike the persons of the Trinity, we at one time did not exist. But when God did decide to create, his decree was not that of a lonely monarch, but of a delighted Father, Son, and Holy Spirit establishing a creaturely, finite analogy of their eternal giving and receiving relationship. We were not just created and then given a covenant; we were created as covenant creatures-partners not in deity, to be sure, but in the drama that was about to unfold in history. As covenant creatures by nature, every person has a relationship with God. What exactly the nature of that relationship happens to be after the fall will be taken up at some length in this book, but there can be no doubt: everyone has a relationship with God, and that relationship is covenantal. Since that is true, it stands to reason that we would want to know more about the nature of that relationship.” (Michael Horton. Introducing Covenant Theology (p. 10). Kindle Edition.)

True, everyone is in relationship with God (either His friend or His enemy). But the Bible does not define the heart of this relationship as covenantal, nor does it teach that we are “covenant creatures” by nature. For that matter, it nowhere defines the inter-Triune relationship as covenantal. Unless we have biblical warrant, we should not simply assume that community or devotion equals covenant.

This matters because the rest of Covenant Theology’s teaching (e.g. infant baptism, perpetuation of the Mosaic Law, etc.) hangs on buying this assumption. Don’t buy it.

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