presuming to penetrate the mystery which naturally belong to it.” He realized it is not “expressly asserted” in the Bible but many texts are “equivalent to such direct assertions.”105 As a Reformed and Presbyterian minister Caruthers would have been in agreement with Hodge’s following criteria for a covenant:
When one person assigns a stipulated work to another person with the promise of a reward upon the condition of the performance of that work, there is a covenant. Nothing can be plainer than that all this is true in relation to the Father and the Son. The Father gave the Son a work to do; He sent Him into the world to perform it, and promised Him a great reward when the work was accomplished. Such is the constant repetition of the Scriptures. We have, therefore contracting parties, the promise, and the condition. These are the essential elements of a covenant.106
The lack of biblical grounds for the covenant of redemption and its implied agreement between the Father and Son was eventually questioned more directly by Karl Barth: “This is mythology for which there is no place in a right understanding of the Trinity.”107
As shown above, Covenant Theology or Federal Theology was a central heading under which a large amount of biblical material was organized and interpreted by Caruthers and his nineteenth-century Presbyterian contemporaries. The consensus of the Westminster Assembly regarding covenantal theology, however, was not successfully transmitted to all of its theological descendants. James Torrance’s objections to Covenant Theology have been described as “deep-seated and passionate.”108 Citing various sources of federalism, Torrance demonstrates that its adherents confuse a covenant with a contract and thus move the focus away from what Christ has done for us to what we do for ourselves. He also traces elements of anxiety and Pelagianism in Reformed congregations to the Westminster Confession of Faith’s doctrines of limited atonement, and complains of its failure to comprehend the meaning of Christ’s headship over all humanity by its imposition of a “radical dichotomy between the sphere of Nature and the sphere of Grace, of natural law and the Gospel, so that the Mediatorial Work of Christ is limited to the covenant of grace and the Church, the sphere marked out by the covenant of grace.”109
Rejection of Covenant Theology from within the ranks of Presbyterianism such as Torrance’s is rare but not only recent. In Caruthers’s own era Scottish pastor and theologian, John McLeod Campbell, one of Torrance’s influences and subject of his research, rejected Covenant Theology.110 Campbell was deposed from his ministry in the Church of Scotland in 1831 on the charge of heresy and eventually published his views in his major work, The Nature of the Atonement in 1856, to explain his views and restore an emphasis upon the fatherhood of God and his universal and unconditional love.111
In its role for Presbyterians as an “architectonic principle” of federal theology, the covenant has prompted an interminable debate, charitably described by its proponents as “historical development.”112 The continuing variation and disagreement within the reformed ranks over Covenant Theology substantiates MacCullough’s observation that the Old Testament speaks a great deal about the covenant between God and Israel as an agreement to keep his law, but that it also develops the idea in various ways, and it talks about covenants in different contexts, and with different implications.113
Although Reformed Presbyterians and others committed to federalism have not developed a consensus among themselves with regard to the covenant’s soteriological role, the legitimacy of the covenant form is mostly agreed upon within broader biblical studies. The amount of scholarly energy expended on the study of the covenant is impressive with varying results. Studies have tended to seesaw between the early twentieth-century judgments that the covenant did not become a working idea in Israel’s literature until the later Deuteronomic traditions and the later twentieth-century views of George Mendenhall, Walther Eichrodt, as well as others who view the covenant as “an early and constitutive notion in Israel.”114 Recent work generally tips in favor of the latter. The covenant’s place of importance seems certain in the earliest period of Israel’s worship of Yaweh. As such, for Mendenhall, the covenant concept embodies and represents Israel’s underlying conviction that its social, religious, and even global aspirations, are important lawful expressions of the nation’s relationship to Yaweh.115
The lawful dimension of the covenant can be seen as especially prominent in Caruthers’s emphasis upon God’s rightful claim upon the Africans. Caruthers sees Exodus as an expression of the covenant that authorizes not only God’s relationship with Israel but with all the nations of the earth. In her study of the covenant concept in Qumran literature Bilhah Nitzan utilizes aspects of Eichrodt’s work that views the covenant as both an early and “revolutionary factor in the relationship between human beings and their deity.” In her opinion, Eichrodt correctly understood that Israel’s “covenant detached religious faith from the feelings of anxiety and insecurity that characterized pagan religions” and established the more secure “covenantal relationship,” capable of regulating human life “according to fixed laws of retribution given by a single divine authority thereby providing hope for peace and security to those who kept the laws of the covenant.”116
Similar legal and binding overtones of divine authority are sounded in Caruthers’s use of the covenant promise against slavery. When he writes that “it was promised to Abraham,” and reminds his reader citing Gen 22:18, that “in his seed all the nations of the earth should be blessed,” Caruthers is drawing upon the legality of God’s claim not only upon Israel but all nations.117 Thus Africa and all other “heathen nations . . . stand pretty much,” he writes, “in the same relation to Him in which the descendants of Abraham, so far as they were included in the promise, stood to Him before their deliverance from Egypt.”118 Caruthers sees the Exodus text as an expression of the covenant that authorizes not only God’s relationship with Israel but with all the nations of the earth. God’s covenantal claim upon the enslaved African in the nineteenth century is thus no less legitimate than his claim upon the enslaved Hebrews in the Exodus account.
In Caruthers’s thinking enslaved Africans are “My people” because the claim of the Exodus text applies to all nations.119 The covenant is singular without temporal boundaries, lawful over all of redemptive history, and Africa is among the nations included in the Abrahamic promise as reiterated in Psalm 2. For Caruthers “the whole world was under condemnation and led captive by the devil at his will” but since “all nations were included in the covenant of redemption” in which Christ ransomed his people, then “no man and no act of men have a right to claim the services of any portion of his purchased inheritance.”120 This includes Africans and Anglo Saxons because “both were given him in the covenant of redemption and he has redeemed both by the same price.”121
Summary
For “the Christian reader,” Caruthers writes, “it is unnecessary to multiply quotations” from the Bible in proof of his point, but not before he has cited Psalm 72 and its prediction of “universal homage.”
