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As demonstrated below, Rollock expanded upon this doctrine of divine covenants considerably in his 1593 Romans commentary. But even this terse comment about God’s twofold covenant in 1590 raises questions about the supposed English Puritan, or at least Perkinsian, influence upon Rollock. There is, to be sure, affinity between Rollock’s comments here and Perkins’ comments in the 1591 Armilla, not only in the recognition of God’s covenant as duplex, but in the recognition (and statement of such in the immediate context) of God’s covenant as the means by which God executes his decree of election. But, needless to say, the earlier date of Rollock’s comments in this regard precludes the possibility of his indebtedness to Perkins on these matters. Indeed, the earlier date of Rollock’s comments establish the possibility (however slight) that influence moved in the opposite direction (that is, from Scotland to England), particularly so in light of Perkins’ decision to replace “proclamation of the Word” with God’s duplex covenant as the means by which God executes his saving decree in the 1591 edition of his work.22
Of course, Rollock’s reflections upon God’s foedus duplex from 1590 do not prohibit the possibility of Fenner’s influence on him. Indeed, they might even strengthen the case for Fenner’s influence since Rollock’s earliest apparent reference to God’s twofold covenant bears a noticeable degree of affinity to Fenner’s reference to the same in his Sacra theologia (1585). Fenner introduced the subject of “God’s covenant” in the fourth book of his Sacra theologia, immediately on the heels of a discussion of sin. Having defined Foedus Dei as “the covenant concerning life and death, established with man and his descendants,” and having noted that God’s covenant involves two voluntary actions (God’s stipulatio and man’s reception of the same), he observed that “God’s covenant is duplex,” comprising “the covenant of works” and “the covenant of gratuitous promise.” He then defined “the covenant of works” as “that covenant in which the annexed condition is perfect obedience,” and outlined a duplex function for that covenant “in the realization of predestination.” The covenant of works, he explained, served to “shut the mouth of the whole world and render it liable to God’s condemnation (Rom 3.19),” and to “make apparent man’s sin and misery” in order that elect sinners “might be impelled to seek restoration in the gratuitous covenant.” Whether Rollock was familiar with Fenner’s Sacra theologia, published in London in 1585 and again in Geneva in 1586 and 1589, is difficult to establish with any degree of certainty. Regardless, it should be noted that Rollock’s earliest reference to a “natural” covenant—a covenant that he rebranded foedus operum in 1593, using terminology by then employed by both Fenner and Perkins—explicitly situates that covenant before the fall (“established in creation itself”), a unique feature of Rollock’s doctrine vis-a-vis both Fenner’s and Perkins’s teachings, and one that received considerable elaboration in his Romans commentary and 1596 catechism.23
In any case, widening our scope to include Rollock’s more detailed considerations of God’s covenant of works with man from 1593 onward immediately brings into focus aspects of his teaching that increasingly distinguish it from both English Puritan and continental predecessors. Of course, “nothing comes from nothing,” a principle argued by Parmenides and popularized by Maria that applies to histories of doctrine as well as anything else. But Rollock does genuinely seem to have been an innovative thinker when it came to the particular subject of God’s covenant with man prior to the fall.
Rollock’s Covenant Theology Reconsidered in Light of the Present Translation
In turning to consider the texts translated in whole (the catechism) or in part (the Romans commentary) in this book, I should note that, despite the preceding comments, it is not ultimately my intention to advance any particular argument (or counter-argument) regarding influences on Rollock’s covenant thought, and/or to champion any detailed grand narrative regarding the development of covenant theology within post-Reformation Reformed theology. I do intend, rather more simply and mundanely, to highlight unique aspects of Rollock’s teaching on the covenants, or more precisely, unique aspects of his teaching on the pre-fall covenant, that become apparent from the broader survey of Rollock’s writings on the covenant that the translations offered here allow. The particular aspects of Rollock’s teaching I have in mind will, I suspect, be recognized by students of seventeenth-century Reformed thought as fairly standard features of the more developed Reformed covenant theologies of that (and later) period(s). Such, I think, reflects Rollock’s influence on subsequent Reformed covenant theologians, both in Scotland and abroad. To all appearances, Rollock left his stamp upon a certain trajectory within Reformed theology that made increasing use in subsequent years of the covenant motif to structure accounts of specific doctrines such as Scripture, anthropology, or soteriology, as well as surveys of salvation history in toto and/or accounts of Reformed doctrine as a systematic whole.
Ideally a claim regarding unique features in Rollock’s doctrine of the pre-fall covenant would proceed from a thorough survey of earlier treatments of that supposed entity by Reformed thinkers. Such a survey would include consideration of published comments on the pre-fall covenant/foedus operum by Zacharias Ursinus, Caspar Olevianus, Johannes Piscator, Fenner and Perkins (whose comments are sufficiently noted above), Robert Howie, and Amandus Polanus in the years leading up to Rollock’s 1596 catechism, as well perhaps as unpublished (as of 1596) comments on the subject by Thomas Cartwright and Franciscus Junius. Such a survey cannot realistically be included here.24 Suffice it to say that Reformed comments on a pre-fall covenant or foedus operum prior to 1596 are generally as abbreviated, or even more so, than those by Fenner and Perkins reviewed above, and rarely if ever move beyond those by Fenner and Perkins in detailing any theological significance to such a covenant. In my judgment, Amandus Polanus’s comments on the foedus operum in his 1590 Partitiones theologicae represent the fullest treatment of that subject prior to Rollock’s, but even those comments barely fill a single page of text. Polanus, much in the vein of Fenner, named God’s “eternal covenant”—that is, the “covenant in which God promises man eternal life”—as duplex, embracing both “the covenant of works and the covenant of grace.” He defined the foedus operum as “God’s pact [pactum] made with man concerning eternal life, to which is joined both a condition of perfect obedience to be fulfilled by man and a threat of eternal death should he not render perfect obedience.” Significantly, Polanus’s citation of Gen 2:17 to support this definition of the foedus operum and subsequent note that “repetition of the covenant of works was made by God” at Sinai mark that explicit situating of the foedus operum before the fall that is lacking in Fenner and Perkins. Polanus, finally, identified four functions to the covenant of works (as such is encountered in the moral law): it serves, first of all, to excite men to obedience; secondly, to render all men liable to God’s punishment on account of their failures in obedience; thirdly, to expose sin and wickedness; and fourthly, to impel men to seek restoration in the covenant of grace.25
The abbreviated nature of comments on the pre-fall covenant prior to the publication of Rollock’s catechism in 1596 points to the first and rather obvious unique aspect of Rollock’s teaching—namely, that he treats the pre-fall covenant at much greater length than earlier writers. Indeed, Rollock constitutes the first Reformed writer to treat the covenant of works beneath its own discrete heading. His catechism is divided into three overarching sections, the first titled “Concerning, first of all, God’s covenant in general, and then the covenant of works,” the second titled “Concerning the Covenant of Grace,” and the third titled “Concerning the Sacrament in General.” The apparently unprecedented decision to give the covenant of works its own discrete heading lends itself, of course, to a more robust discussion of that entity. Of the 102 questions and answers that Rollock ultimately devotes to the covenants, 28 (qs. 3–30) are specifically dedicated to the covenant of works, a continuous section spanning roughly eight pages of text. Yet such figures only partially reflect the extent of Rollock’s engagement with the covenant of works in his text, since that subject figures into substantial sections of his discussion of the covenant of grace (see qs. 31, 37–38, 41–42, 57, 64, 72–73, 76, and 89–90) and his
