Here's where the Baptist view (if we can grant a certain universality on this point) has the same problem as the FV. Now that I have your attention...

It over-eschatologizes the New Covenant. The NC is so divorced from all that has gone before it that it threatens to become Marcionite.

In redemptive history the covenant of grace since Adam's fall has always had two elements: decree and administration. Not everyone in the Abrahamic covenant was a participant in the decree of election. Not everyone mixed the gospel with faith (Heb 4) not everyone was elect but they all participated in administration of the covenant of grace. So, as the FV has everyone in the covenant of grace IN THE SAME WAY ("head for head," "all or nothing"), thus conflating the administration with the decree (so that the admin swallows up decree) so the Baptist view conflates the decree and administration so decree swallows up administration. They are two different sides of the same mistake.

The New Covenant is a New relative to Moses not to Abraham. See Rom 3-4. There remains a decree and an administration. All the elect participate in the decree and the reprobate participate only in the administration, but they still participate in that. Malone's view seems to erase the category of administration from the New Covenant, hence the complaint about an over-realized eschatology.

A reading of the NT reveals, however, that the church since the apostolic age has always been mixed with folk who are elect, who come to faith, who participate in both the administration and the decree and with folk who are members of the covenant of grace but who participate only outwardly in the covenant of grace. The old Reformed writers called this participating "externally."

If the New Covenant is so utterly different from Abraham, then why is Abraham the father of all who believe, both Jew and Gentile?

We need both the decree AND the administration and we need NOT to confuse them.

See the Heidelblog for more on this.

__________________
R. Scott Clark, D.Phil
Professor of Church History and Historical Theology

"For Christ, His Gospel, and His Church"
Associate Pastor
Oceanside URC
The Heidelblog