How was covenant theology used by the church fathers? Dr. Ligon Duncan provides a brief historical overview of how the covenants were used by the church fathers to point to Jesus in early Christian theology.
Sometimes I’ve been asked about the church fathers and covenant theology. I actually studied the covenants in the church fathers in my doctoral work many, many years ago, and I usually include a little section on this in my covenant theology course. I was interested in that question too. That’s why I actually picked up that topic of study and I found several things.
There’s actually a rich resource in the earliest teaching of the church about the divine covenants that all of us would benefit from knowing more about.First of all, covenant theology was used by the church fathers to help instruct Christians in the Christian faith. There’s a little book by Irenaeus who was an early church theologian in Lugdunum, an area we call now Lyon in France. He wrote a book called The Demonstration of the Apostolic Preaching, where he sketched out the covenants as a way of teaching early Christians biblical theology as they prepared to join themselves to the church.
Then covenant theologians used covenant theology to argue against the Gnostics that denied that the Old Testament was the Word of God, and they showed how the New Testament fulfilled the prophecies of the Old Testament and the covenants of the Old Testament, and that Christ himself was the one who brought about the realization of the Abrahamic and the New Covenant in his life and death and resurrection. They also used covenant theology to show how the whole Bible held together. And the Reformers actually went back and learned from the church fathers as to covenants in their own teaching on covenant theology in the 16th century. So there’s actually a rich resource in the earliest teaching of the church about the divine covenants that all of us would benefit from knowing more about.
