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10. CT reads Christ into passages where He is plainly not in view and employs Him (particularly His first coming) as the lens through which Scripture must be understood.
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9. Though they would consciously deny the charge, it is undeniable that CT ‘s way of reading the Bible (as above) creates a major problem philosophically in that it strongly implies that God equivocates. More seriously still, the manner of equivocation means that equivocation belongs to the essential nature of the Godhead.
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8. CT thus interprets the Bible with different rules of hermeneutics depending on the aforementioned presuppositions.
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7. By allowing their interpretations of the NT to have veto over the plain sense of the OT this outlook creates massive discontinuities between the wording of the two Testaments. This is all done for the sake of a contrived continuity demanded by the one-people of God concept of the Covenant of Grace.
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6. By assuming, without sufficient warrant, that the New Testament must be used to [re]interpret the Old Testament, CT in practice denies to the OT its own perspicuity, its own integrity as inspired revelation, and creates a “canon within a canon.” To paraphrase George Orwell, in CT “all Scripture is inspired, but some Scripture [the NT] is more inspired than others [the OT]”.
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4. CT deals with everything it meets in the pages of Scripture using these false covenants.
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3. CT relies upon covenants found nowhere in Holy Writ.
If I were to challenge you to locate the covenants with Noah, Abraham, Phinehas, Moses, and David it would not take you very long. But what if I issued a challenge to find the covenants of redemption, works, or grace? And what if I told you that you could not run to any passage where the covenants to do with Noah, Abraham, Phinehas, Moses, and David were in view? How would you fair?
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2. CT starts its reading of the Bible in the wrong place.
In Part Two of this series I said that for CT’s having the NT to interpret the OT is like the introduction of color televisions to replace the old black and white screens. Whereas for people like myself it is better compared to a deconstructionist interpretation of a classic novel which all but ignores what the novel says and its way of saying it.
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1. CT is a mainly deductive approach to reading the Bible.
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We have arrived now at the point where I can turn my attention to a full-on critique of Covenant Theology. In doing so I want to remind my reader of what I wrote in Part Twelve of this series, where I recorded my very real appreciation for CT even as a dissenter from its tenets. But we are in a position now to record that dissent more plainly and categorically.
Before beginning, however, I will provide Vos’s summary quotation.:
