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Originally Posted by cih1355  I have another question about dispensationalism. Are the doctrines of the Covenant of Redemption and the Covenant of Works compatible with dispensationalism? |
Man 'innocent' and the Covenant of Works correspond. Both say that God gave man a duty, he failed to do it, and man suffered the judgment (curses of the covenant).
Covenant of Redemption is more wholistic than the dispensations listed after the fall. While we (covenant theology) recognize that God has various 'sub-administrations' of the same covenant of grace, we recognize that everything after the fall has been covenant of grace....man saved the same way in all eras.
The dispensations put too much of a division between God dealing with men after the fall and they fail to recognize (even though Ryrie tries in his revised version of
Dispensationalism back in 1994) the overall unity of all the 'dispesnations' in terms of man's responsibility toward God and His graciousness toward His visible people during the time before Christ.
The average, better-read dispy would disagree with me and say that they do acknowledge it, but a simple reading of all the classic, modified and modern material up to this point will show otherwise. The progressives have recognized this and that's why their system has developed (as a corrective to the shortcomings of both modified and most of modern dispensationalism). Many of the modern dispensationalists today are becoming more MacArthur-ish as their theology becomes better informed. You'll find a lot more concessions on older-dispensational theology to covenant theology in writers like Paul Enns (Moody Handbook of Theology).