I was recently reading a book by Joel Beeke on godly piety. He made this fascinating comment:
"A life of devotion to the God of the covenant is a life of obedience to His moral law. Traditions deprived of these covenantal sensibilities have had much greater difficulty asserting the abiding validity of the Decalogue as the moral law. That inability to move theologically from God’s work on Sinai to Gods work in Zion has injected an instability into their understanding of what constitutes a life of piety. Indeed even within the broader Reformed tradition, those communities that have downplayed the continuity of God’s covenant of grace have had to use agile circumlocutions to retain the Decalogues “principles” while regulating its form to a past era of redemptive history. At its best, however, Reformed theology has articulated a robust covenant theology that keeps the ten commandants squarely within the lives of God’s covenant people as part and parcel of the covenant of grace."
[Reformed Piety: Covenantal and experiential]
Some questions:
"A life of devotion to the God of the covenant is a life of obedience to His moral law. Traditions deprived of these covenantal sensibilities have had much greater difficulty asserting the abiding validity of the Decalogue as the moral law. That inability to move theologically from God’s work on Sinai to Gods work in Zion has injected an instability into their understanding of what constitutes a life of piety. Indeed even within the broader Reformed tradition, those communities that have downplayed the continuity of God’s covenant of grace have had to use agile circumlocutions to retain the Decalogues “principles” while regulating its form to a past era of redemptive history. At its best, however, Reformed theology has articulated a robust covenant theology that keeps the ten commandants squarely within the lives of God’s covenant people as part and parcel of the covenant of grace."
[Reformed Piety: Covenantal and experiential]
Some questions:
- Am I correct in assuming the OPC report basically came to the same conclusion as Beeke?
- I think this is what Dr Venema argued in his chapter on the Mosaic Covenant in "Christ and Covenant theology".
- When Beeke states "That inability to move theologically from God’s work on Sinai to Gods work in Zion has injected an instability into their understanding of what constitutes a life of piety. Indeed even within the broader Reformed tradition, those communities that have downplayed the continuity of God’s covenant of grace have had to use agile circumlocutions to retain the Decalogues “principles” while regulating its form to a past era of redemptive history" it seems to me this is a problem with 1689 Federalism when it argues that the Covenant of Grace was promised in the Old Covenant, but is reluctant to say the covenant of grace was *actually* there.