The Covenant of Redemption
Is there an eternal covenant between the Father and the Son for the elect?
Mixed
Background
By the 1640s a development was emerging in Reformed dogmatics: alongside the bi-covenantal scheme of works (with Adam) and grace (with the elect in Christ), some divines posited a third, eternal covenant between the persons of the Trinity — the *pactum salutis* or covenant of redemption, in which the Father appoints the Son as Mediator and the Son freely accepts the office for the elect. The idea had antecedents in earlier Reformed thought (Olevianus, Witsius drew on it later) but had not been confessionally stated. Cocceius, on the Continent, would later make it the architectural backbone of his system.
The Assembly’s handling
The Assembly was sympathetic but did not formalise the pactum as a distinct third covenant. WCF VIII.1 — 'It pleased God, in his eternal purpose, to choose and ordain the Lord Jesus, his only begotten Son, to be the Mediator between God and man' — gives the pactum its substance without the developed scholastic apparatus. The Larger Catechism Q. 31 goes a step further: 'With whom was the covenant of grace made? The covenant of grace was made with Christ as the second Adam, and in him with all the elect as his seed.' This is materially the pactum but stitched into the covenant of grace rather than detached as a third covenant. The Standards therefore *affirm-implicitly* without going as far as the Cocceian-Witsian tri-covenantal scheme.
Parties
The implicit-affirmation drafters
The substance of the pactum is biblical — the Father chooses the Son as Mediator (Ps. 2, John 17, Heb. 5) — and should be confessionally affirmed, but a formal third covenant is scholastic elaboration the Standards need not adopt.
- Anthony Tuckney (1599–1670)
- Edward Reynolds (1599–1676)
- Herbert Palmer (1601–1647)
- Edmund Calamy the Elder (1600–1666)
The explicit-developed wing
The pactum is a distinct eternal covenant between the persons, grounding the bi-covenantal structure of history. Rutherford's *The Covenant of Life Opened* (1655) develops the position at length.
- Samuel Rutherford (c. 1600–1661)
- George Gillespie (1613–1648)
- Thomas Goodwin (1600–1680)
Confessional language
WCF VIII.1: 'It pleased God, in his eternal purpose, to choose and ordain the Lord Jesus, his only begotten Son, to be the Mediator between God and man…' Larger Catechism Q. 31: 'The covenant of grace was made with Christ as the second Adam, and in him with all the elect as his seed.'
Ontology placement
This crux bears on the following attribute of the Westminster ontology. The Westminster baseline value is marked WCF.
II · God & Decree · Covenant of Redemption
Legacy
Witsius's *De Oeconomia Foederum Dei cum Hominibus* (1677), Boston's *A View of the Covenant of Grace*, and Hodge's *Systematic Theology* (1872-73) all develop the pactum as a formal third covenant on warrants the Standards provided. The Marrow men in early-18th-century Scotland made the pactum central to their preaching of the free offer. The 1689 Particular Baptist Confession adopted the substance of Westminster on this point but with a sharper distinction between the pactum and the covenant of grace.