Federal Theology in the Sixteenth Century: Two Traditions?

By Lyle D. Bierma

Reformed Bible College, Grand Rapids, Michigan 49506

The last thirty years have seen a remarkable growth in interest in the early history of Reformed federal (or covenant) theology. Modern historians of Christian thought have acknowledged the Zwinglian roots of this theology ever since the mid-nineteenth century, but it is only relatively recently that the subject has gained the attention of a wider circle of scholars. What sparked this new interest was in large part the research of Perry Miller, whose essay “The Marrow of Puritan Divinity” (1935) and first volume of The New England Mind (1939) demonstrated the significance of the covenant idea for the life and thought of seventeenth-century Puritanism. Since then an increasing number of scholars have been investigating the origins of covenant thought on the continent and the extent of its influence across the channel.

The subject of this essay is a hypothesis that over the years has come to dominate much of this recent scholarship. It was first proposed on the pages of Church History in March 1951 in an article by Leonard J. Trinterud entitled “The Origins of Puritanism.”[1] Trinterud’s basic thesis was that at the heart of Puritan political and religious thought lay the notion of covenant; that the origin of the covenant idea in Puritanism could be traced in its secular form to the natural law, social contract theory in English medieval thought, and in its theological form to the early English Reformers Tyndale and Frith; and that whatever influence continental federal theology exerted on Puritan thought came not from Geneva and John Calvin but from Zurich and the Reformers of the Rhineland. Tyndale’s reading of Zwingli and Oecolampadius, Hooper’s two-year stay in Zurich, the flight to England of several prominent Rhinelanders following the Augsburg Interim of 1548, and the escape of many of the Marian exiles to the Rhineland in the 1550s, all put the earliest Puritans in touch with a developed covenantal scheme on the continent with which traditional English preaching and piety were blended.[2] The last part of Trinterud’s thesis is based on the argument that there were actually two distinct strains of covenant theology emerging in sixteenth-century Reformed Switzerland—one with Calvin in Geneva, the other with Zwingli and Bullinger in Zurich and the Rhineland. The differences Trinterud discerned between them can be summarized as follows:

Calvin	Zurich/Rhineland Reformers
1) The covenant is	1) The covenant is bilateral:
unilateral: God's	God's conditional promise
unconditional promise.	and the response of the human partner.
2) The burden of fulfilling	2) The burden of fulfilling
the covenant rests on God.	the covenant rests on the human partner.
3) The covenant is fulfilled	3) The covenant is fulfilled
in the incarnation, death,	in the obedience of the human
and resurrection of Jesus	partner and God's reciprocal reward.
	Christ.

It was Trinterud’s contention that the Rhineland, not the Genevan type of covenant thought “provided the initial impulses toward both the early and the final forms of the [Puritan] covenant theology.”[3]

Trinterud was certainly breaking new ground here. Perry Miller, of course, had also made much of the theological differences between Calvin and the Puritans, maintaining that Puritan covenant theology served to mollify the rigid predestinarianism of Calvin, who “hardly made any mention of the covenant.”[4] But Trinterud was now arguing both that Calvin “indeed used the word ‘covenant’ very frequently”[5] and that it was not so much his negative influence as the positive influence of the Zurich and Rhineland reformers that helped to shape Puritan covenant thought. The theological differences between Calvin and the Puritans could be attributed in part to the two views of covenant in Reformed Switzerland.

That Trinterud’s essay is now recognized as a “milestone in Puritan studes”[6] is due in large measure to the wide acceptance of this “two traditions” theory during the last twenty years. One of the first to adopt the thesis (though without mentioning Trinterud by name) was the Danish scholar Jens Møller in his article “The Beginnings of Puritan Covenant Theology” published in 1963.[7] Møller, too, insisted that there were “two fundamentally different ways of understanding the covenant” in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, one originating in Zurich, the other in Geneva.[8] The Genevan view stressed the role of God’s grace in the covenant; the Zurich view emphasized the human responsibility of obedience. As Møller put it, “Calvin’s covenant God certainly offered grace and demanded obedience, but he did not recompense obedience by offering grace.”[9] Like Trinterud, Møller discovered the Zwinglian understanding of covenant again in England in William Tyndale, but he also detected the Calvinist conception in those he called the “systematic puritan theologians.”

In his book England’s Earliest Protestants, 1520–1535 the next year,[10] William Clebsch warned of a lack of evidence for Trinterud’s claim that Tyndale actually borrowed his bipartite conception of covenant from the Rhineland theologians, and he denied that Frith held any such notion at all. But he did agree with Trinterud that Zwingli, Oecolampadius, and the Rhinelanders held to a concept of covenant which placed “the believer and God in a contractual relationship that obligated God to bestow rewards for the performance of the divine law.”[11] It could at least be said of Tyndale that he “adumbrated such a proto-Puritan conception of Christianity.”[12]

Four years later (1968) Richard Greaves published an essay in The Historian entitled “The Origins and Early Development of English Covenant Thought,”[13] in which he acknowledged his debt to Trinterud and Møller but refined their thesis somewhat. Greaves, too, noticed differences within Puritan covenant theology, but these were differences, he suggested, not between Tyndale and the later systematicians but between the separatist and nonseparatist traditions. The separatists held that human fulfillment of the condition of the covenant is itself a covenant blessing, that is, that divine grace actually moves the sinner to faith and repentance. The nonseparatists, however, believed that human fulfillment of the covenant condition lies outside of the promised rewards and that divine grace merely enables one to respond if one so chooses. What is noteworthy for our study here is Greaves’s conclusion that “an analysis of the development of covenant thought will show that the subtle distinction [between ‘moves’ and ‘enables’] with such important ramifications can be traced back to the differing emphases of the Zwingli-Tyndale and Calvinist traditions.”[14] For Calvin the covenant is God’s promise; for Zwingli, Oecolampadius, and Bullinger it is an agreement between God and man. For Calvin the covenant is fulfilled in Christ; for Zwingli it is fulfilled in and by us. For Calvin, finally, the sacraments bear witness to God’s fulfillment of the covenant in the past; for Zwingli they bear witness to the believer’s intention to fulfill the covenant from that point on.[15]

Still other examples of the acceptance of this “two traditions” thesis can be cited. In a short study in 1972 entitled “From Testament to Covenant in the Early Sixteenth Century,”[16] Kenneth Hagen compared Zwingli’s covenant doctrine with that of Luther, not Calvin, but still portrayed Zwingli’s doctrine in much the same way as Trinterud, Møller, Clebsch, and Greaves had before him: a bilateral commitment in which possession of the inheritance is contingent upon the testatee’s faithfulness to the stipulations of the covenant.

The most recent and elaborate defense of this thesis is J. Wayne Baker’s book Heinrich Bullinger and the Covenant: The Other Reformed Tradition (1980).[17] Baker argues that in early Reformed Protestantism two competing theological traditions were developing: one in Geneva under Calvin; the other in Zurich, initiated by Zwingli but “fully defined and to a large extent created by Bullinger.”[18] The differences between these two traditions were rooted in different understandings of the covenant. Calvin regarded the covenant as a divine pledge or promise, a unilateral testament. Bullinger understood it as a mutual pact, a bilateral agreement that included not only God’s promises but also certain conditions which the human partner was obligated to fulfill. These two views of covenant were closely related to different doctrines of predestination: Calvin’s unilateral testament was linked theologically to absolute double predestination, Bullinger’s bilateral covenant to election only. In the interests of unity among the Reformed churches of Switzerland, the Genevans and what Baker calls “the other Reformed tradition” of Zurich were able to smooth over their differences, but by the late sixteenth century these differences began to surface again in the theological debates that raged in Reformed circles well into the 1600s.

It should be pointed out that despite its wide dissemination and acceptance in the last twenty years, Trinterud’s thesis has not gone entirely unchallenged. In an unpublished dissertation in 1960 Hideo Oki accused Trinterud of not treating carefully enough the origins and development of the Calvinist covenant scheme and its historical relationship to either the Rhinelanders, the Anabaptists, or the Puritans. Oki still perceived what he termed a “typological difference” between the Genevan and Rhineland theologies of covenant, but he insisted that in the united Reformed attack on the Anabaptist view of covenant, differences within the Reformed camp had relatively little significance.[19] John F. H. New was equally convinced that Trinterud had drawn too sharp a distinction between Calvin’s unilateral and Tyndale’s reciprocal theory of covenant. New granted that one could find a “greater mutuality” in Tyndale’s covenant, but “reciprocity was not altogether absent in Calvin” either, since Calvin too “did not disoblige man from the duty of trying to fulfill the law, or of trying to live righteously.”[20] Victor Priebe, in his dissertation on Perkins’s covenant theology in 1967, concluded that Perkins’s view of the covenant was more in line with that of Calvin than that of the Rhineland reformers and either Trinterud’s thesis or Perkins’s influence in Puritan circles had to be reassessed.[21] Finally, J. W. Cottrell argued in a dissertation on Zwingli’s doctrine of the covenant (1971) that “Trinterud leaves an erroneous impression when he categorizes Zwingli with the whole host of Rhineland Reformers and English Reformers who posit a law-covenant in which the promise is conditional, over against Calvin’s idea of an unconditional covenant-promise.”[22]

It is interesting to note, however, that none of these challenges called into question the basic assumption of two covenant traditions. Oki still allowed for a “typological difference” between Geneva and the Rhineland; New wished only to blunt the sharpness of the distinction and did not, in fact, even mention the covenant theology of the Zurich or Rhineland Reformers; Priebe was uncomfortable only with that part of the thesis which dealt with continental influence on English Puritanism; and Cottrell wanted merely to remove Zwingli from the ranks of Trinterud’s Rhinelanders. The theory that there were two distinct forms of federal theology taking shape in sixteenth-century Switzerland remained intact, even among Trinterud’s critics.

For all its popularity, however, this “two traditions” thesis has never been very well documented, and it is our contention that it will not hold up under a closer scrutiny of the primary texts. Trinterud et al. have explored only certain strands of these early covenant doctrines and in so doing have not done justice to the larger theological contexts in which they appear and apart from which their meaning is easily distorted. We shall elaborate on this counter-thesis by examining two of the most prominent representatives of each of the alleged covenant traditions: Zwingli and Bullinger of the Zurich-Rhinelanders, and Calvin and Olevianus of the Genevans.

I. Zwingli

According to Trinterud, Møller, Clebsch, Greaves, and Hagen, Zwingli understands the covenant as a mutual pact in which God’s fulfillment of his covenant promises depends on the human partner’s fulfillment of the covenant conditions. As Møller described it, God recompenses human obedience with his grace. There is actually very little in Zwingli’s writings, however, to substantiate such a claim. It is true that Zwingli recognizes both a divine and human dimension to the covenant of grace. He makes very clear that an upright walk before God is one of the “principal parts” (fürnemmen stück) of the covenant and even one of the “conditions” (conditiones) of the Abrahamic pact in Genesis 17.[23] But Zwingli never describes the covenant relationship in such a way that God’s blessings of salvation depend upon human fulfillment of certain conditions. The covenant for Zwingli is not conditional in the sense that “the burden of fulfillment rests upon man.”[24] For Zwingli the distribution of divine covenant favor is based solely on God’s eternal decision, his free election. His covenant people are those whom he has selected long before they select him.[25] The faith by which they finally do respond is an unearned gift of God bestowed on his elect, and works of obedience are the natural outgrowth of that faith.[26] Thus while Zwingli does teach that God expects obedience as a covenantal response to his grace, there is nothing in his writings to suggest that God’s favor is founded upon that response. It is quite the other way around: loving and fearing God are the result, not the basis, of his favor. They are, in Zwingli’s words, a visible “sign of election.”[27]

The rather cursory way in which the sources have been treated on this point can be illustrated by Greaves’s article on the origins of English covenant thought. Greaves cites Zwingli’s commentary on Genesis 17 as evidence that

God, according to Zwingli, will be our God only if “we walk wholly according to His will.” Thus Zwingli conceives of the covenant relationship as an agreement or contract between two parties, with the result that man must fulfill certain conditions if he is to receive the promised blessing.[28]

An examination of this passage in Zwingli’s commentary, however, will show that Greaves has made a conditional out of a sentence where no condition whatsoever is present. The correct translation of the Latin is not, “The covenant of God with man is that he will be our God only if we walk wholly according to his will,” but “The covenant of God with man is that he is our God; let us walk wholly according to his will” (or “that we walk wholly according to his will”).[29] Nowhere here is there any indication that God’s promised blessing is contingent upon human fulfillment of certain conditions.

II. Bullinger

It would seem that Trinterud and his followers are on much firmer ground when they attribute to Bullinger a view of covenant in which the blessing of God is dependent upon human response. Like Zwingli, Bullinger does not look upon the covenant as exclusively one-sided. It consists rather of two parts: God’s promise to us and our obligation to respond to him.[30] Already in his covenanting with Adam God had made us “partakers of all his good and heavenly blessings” but had also bound “us unto himself in faith and due obedience.”[31] Human responsibility was set forth even more clearly in the Abrahamic covenant, where God explicitly enjoined us to walk before him and be blameless.32 Even the signs of the covenant of grace, whether circumcision, baptism, or the Lord’s Supper, all testify to a resolve on the part of the participants “to do their endeavor by pureness of living to win the favor of God, their confederate.”[33] Bullinger says about the OT covenant saints that “the blessing and partaking of all good things pertaineth to the circumcised, if they abide faithful to the Lord God entered into covenant with men.”[34] It is our covenant obligation, too, to acknowledge and trust God alone, to call upon him, honor him, worship him, remain faithful to him, and obey him.[35] All of this seems amply to support Trinterud’s argument. But one must be careful here because this is only a partial picture of Bullinger’s doctrine. While circumcision and baptism indeed testify to our responsibility in the covenant, they also testify to the fact, Bullinger says, that it is God who fulfills that responsibility in us and through us. They are signs that God, solely by his grace and goodness, bound himself in a covenant to justify and sanctify us through Christ, “who by his Spirit cuts from us whatsoever things do hinder the mutual league [covenant] and amity betwixt God and us; He also doth give and increase in us both hope and charity in faith, so that we may be knit and joined to God in life everlasting.”[36] Faith, Bullinger writes in the Second Helvetic Confession (16.2), is purely a gift of God imparted to his elect.[37] It is “neither of our own nature, nor of our own merits, but it is by the grace of God poured into us through the Holy Spirit, which is given into our hearts.”[38] And it is that same Spirit resident within us who inspires in us a love for God’s law and a life of obedience patterned after the law.[39] For Bullinger, therefore, as for Zwingli, the benefits of God’s covenant grace do not ultimately depend on faith and obedience; they include faith and obedience.

III. Calvin

We turn now to two of the most important representatives of the Genevan covenant tradition, Calvin and Olevianus. In Calvin, according to Trinterud, Møller, and Greaves, we encounter a view of covenant entirely different from that of Zwingli and Bullinger. The covenant for Calvin is a divine promise (not a mutual agreement) fulfilled by God (not by us) in the life and death of his son (not in human faith and obedience). Unlike the others, Baker did concede that Calvin speaks of a condition of obedience or piety that concerned the life of the faithful after God had given them faith.[40] He even admitted that at times Calvin appears to regard faith itself as a condition requiring human fulfillment. Nevertheless, he concluded, faith is really only a “hypothetical condition” for Calvin since this condition is fulfilled by God in the elect and is unable to be fulfilled by the reprobate.[41]

Once again, however, Trinterud, Møller, and Greaves have reconstructed only half the doctrine. It is certainly true that for Calvin the covenant established with Abraham includes a divine promise, the promise of a redeemer to come. So far as this promise is concerned, the covenant is “perfectly gratuitous”;[42] it does not “spring from either the worthiness or the merits of men” but rather “has its cause and stability, and effect, and completion solely in the grace of God….”[43] In this sense the covenant is unconditional.

But Calvin considers the covenant to be much more than a unilateral divine promise. If Zwingli and Bullinger no less than he emphasize divine initiative in the covenant, he no less than they leaves room for human response and responsibility, including the response of faith. For whereas “the covenant begins with a solemn article concerning the promise of grace, faith and prayer are required above all things to the proper keeping of it.”[44] The covenant with Abraham, he explains, had not one but two parts: God’s declaration of love and promise of happiness, on the one hand, and “an exhortation to the sincere endeavor to cultivate uprightness,” on the other.[45] This was a “mutual covenant,” containing a “mutual obligation” and requiring “mutual faith.”[46] As “mutual consent is required in all compacts, so when God invites his people to receive grace, He stipulates that they should give Him the obedience of faith….”[47] To the promise of redemption in Christ, therefore, “a condition was appended, to the effect that God would bless them if they obeyed his commandments.”[48] In fact, Ishmael, Esau, and others were cut off from their covenantal inheritance precisely because they had not kept this condition. They had not been faithful.”[49] Is there any reason, then,

why He should keep His promise, when we have broken His covenant? Yet when we reject His covenant, and set light by it through our wicked life, we may not look that He should be any longer bound to us. Why? For He has become our God upon this condition, that we also should be His people. And how shall we be His people? It is not by saying simply with our mouth, We are the people of God, …but we must show by our deeds that we are the people of God, in that we obey Him.[50]

There is a sense, then, in which the covenant for Calvin is also bilateral and conditional: “For as God binds himself to keep the promise given to us, so the consent of faith and of obedience is demanded from us.”[51]

One should not conclude from this, as Trinterud did about the Zurich theologians, that the burden of fulfillment rests on the human partner, that divine grace awaits human response. “As soon as the ignorant sort hears of the word ‘condition’,” Calvin states, “it appears to them that God makes some payment and that when he shows us any favor, he does it in recompense for our merits.”[52] Not at all. Both faith and works of obedience are the fruit not of our own efforts but of the renewing power of the Spirit within us.[53] That is to say, we can fulfill our obligations in the covenant only because the Holy Spirit stimulates us to do so. For Calvin, as for Zwingli and Bullinger, “whatever acceptable obedience man yields to God is itself inspired in him by God, and is therefore not properly his own, with respect to origin….”[54] That is why our pledges of obedience are really implicit pleas for divine help.[55]

It is puzzling, therefore, why Baker especially saw a fundamental difference between Bullinger’s and Calvin’s doctrines of covenant. Baker is correct in pointing to a tension in Bullinger’s theology between salvation sola gratia and a conditional covenant which takes human responsibility for faith and piety very seriously. But precisely the same tension is present in Calvin, and in all of early Reformed theology for that matter. To suggest, as Baker does, that Calvin resolves this tension by making faith a gift rather than a condition does justice neither to Calvin’s many references to the conditional nature of the covenant nor to Builinger’s own insistence that faith is a gift of God bestowed on those whom he has elected from eternity.

It is also curious that Baker ascribes the differences in Calvin’s and Bullinger’s views of the covenant to their doctrines of double and single predestination, respectively. Faith as a condition of the covenant of grace is only apparent in Calvin, he argues, because for Calvin this condition is always fulfilled for the elect, and the reprobate, by God’s will, can never fulfill it. Baker implies that Bullinger’s single predestination, on the other hand, helps to preserve the conditional nature of the covenant because the reprobate, not God, bear final responsibility for their rejection.[56] It is difficult to see, however, how these two views of reprobation affect the conditionality of the covenant. By locating the ultimate cause of reprobation in human unbelief Bullinger does not mean to suggest the possibility that reprobate persons after the fall are capable of fulfilling the condition of belief. The unregenerate continue to sin willingly, without coercion from the outside, but their wills are not free to the extent that they are able to love God or do any good.[57] That ability is a gift reserved for the elect, and the ultimate cause of one’s election is found, of course, solely in God.[58] The possibility of fulfilling the condition of the covenant, therefore, is really no greater in Bullinger’s view of predestination than in Calvin’s.

IV. Olevianus

Caspar Olevianus (1536–87) is perhaps best remembered as one of the authors of the Heidelberg Catechism, although the evidence for his participation in the Catechism is not as strong as many suppose.[59] What is not as well known is that Olevianus was also a significant covenant theologian of the sixteenth century, one of the first Reformed theologians, in fact, to employ the covenant as the central theme of his theology.

Baker argued that for Olevianus, too, the covenant of grace was unconditional, a gratuitous promise resting solely on the mercy of God. What we find in Olevianus, Baker claimed, is once again “the Calvinistic notion of unilateral testament.”[60] Once again, however, Baker is only partly correct. At times Olevianus does portray the covenant as an unconditional, unilateral testament, a statement of God’s saving intention, a promise of reconciliation through Christ. When Scripture speaks of God’s covenant (bund Gottes), he says, what it means is God’s oath (eyd Gottes), according to which he promises us his grace and thus binds himself to us.[61] It is even appropriate to call this covenant a “testament,” for like a last will and testament this covenant promise is ratified only by the death of its testator, Jesus Christ.[62]

In other contexts in his writings, however, Olevianus understands the covenant of grace in a broader sense than as God’s unilateral promise of reconciliation. He uses some of the same terms as before, but now to refer to a bilateral commitment between God and the believer. The covenant in this sense is the realization of the promise of reconciliation in the life of the believer through a mutual coming to terms. God not only binds himself to us in an oath that he will be our father, but we also bind ourselves to him in a pledge of acceptance of his beneficence. God promises that he will blot out all memory of our sins; we in turn promise that we will walk uprightly before him.[63]

While Olevianus never explicitly mentions this distinction between unilateral and bilateral covenant, it is difficult to make sense of his foedus doctrine without it. It explains why, for example, he can speak of the covenant with Abraham as both a promise confirmed in the sacrifice of Christ and a two-side Bund und Freundschaft;[64] why he can claim that the new covenant promised in Jeremiah 31 is established both by Christ through his atoning death and by God with us through faith;[65] why in the same sentence he can refer both to God’s testimony “by an everlasting covenant” that he will be our God and also to a it covenant of faith” into which we have entered with God;[66] and why, finally, the sacraments can demand our assent to the covenant (promise) offered in them and at the same time signify the mutual covenant of grace between God and us.[67] In every case Olevianus has in mind, first, the promise of reconciliation through Christ and, second, the reconciliation itself in the life of the believer; first, a monopleuric divine oath and, second, a dipleuric divine-human pledge.

Baker considered Olevianus’ covenant of grace to be strictly “unconditional.”[68] However, when Olevianus discusses the covenant of grace in its broader sense, that is, as a bilateral commitment between God and us, he, like his teacher Calvin, does not hesitate to use the term conditio. We see already in the establishment of the covenant with Abraham, he argues, that the covenant of grace has not one but two parts: not merely God’s promissio to be the God of Abraham and his seed, but that promise on the condition of Abraham’s (and our) repromissio to walk before him and be perfect.[69] Simply put, God confers the blessings of the covenant upon those who place their trust in him. It is to those who repent and believe that he binds himself in covenant.[70]

Olevianus is quick to point out, however, that this is not a conditional covenant in the ordinary sense of the term. It is not a contractus mutuus, based on full reciprocation.[71] That would imply that we come to the covenant with something to offer, that we are able to fulfill the condition of the covenant ex propriis viribus. The fact is that we are wholly incapable of meeting this condition. The fall of Adam so seriously corrupted the human race that no person has the inner resources to produce even a drop (gutta) of righteousness and eternal life.[72] The grace of the covenant is not simply ours for the taking. Were the work of faith left to us, we would never believe. Were the enjoyment of the benefits of the covenant dependent on our works, we would remain forever unfulfilled.[73]

God’s covenanting with us, then, is in no sense founded on our ability to meet the condition of the covenant by our own merits, or capabilities, or worthiness; it is founded rather on his goodness and grace. The fountain of salvation flows only in one direction—from God to us.[74] Since we in our own strength cannot fulfill the condition of the covenant, God fulfills it in and through us. The covenant is ratified with us not by our coming first to God in faith and obedience but by Christ first instilling in us an “eagerness” (studium) for reconciling ourselves to God and by Christ creating in us the faith and obedience that satisfy the stipulation of the covenant.[75]

Conclusion

It is our conclusion, then, that there were no substantial differences in the way the covenant was understood in the Zurich-Rhineland and Genevan theological traditions. That Zurich and Geneva were not in agreement on all points of doctrine and ecclesiastical practice is not to be denied, but these disagreements cannot be traced to fundamentally different views of the covenant. What scholars from Trinterud to Baker have failed to realize is that all the sixteenth-century Reformed covenant theologians—Zwingli, Bullinger, Calvin, Olevianus, Musculus, Ursinus, Perkins, etc.—recognized both a unilateral and a bilateral dimension to the covenant of grace within the context of a monergistic soteriology. The tension that Baker found in Bullinger’s theology between salvation by grace alone and a conditional or bilateral covenant of grace is present throughout early Reformed soteriology. The conditions of faith and obedience are conditions which the human partners are obligated to fulfill and which they do indeed fulfill when they believe and obey, yet only because God graciously creates in them a believing and obedient disposition.

Trinterud and other proponents of his thesis have missed this tension because of a somewhat hasty or, perhaps, incomplete reading of the primary sources. What they have done is to portray Geneva’s doctrine of the covenant as a doctrine of divine sovereignty and Zurich’s as a doctrine of human responsibility. In the former, God is the sole actor; in the latter, God and his people are virtually equal partners, independent agents meeting halfway in a contract of salvation. But these two pictures are really caricatures and represent only the extremes toward which certain later Reformed theologians (e.g., hyper-Calvinists and Arminians) began moving in their attempts to solve the mystery of the divine and human roles in acts of faith and obedience. The mainstream of Reformed theology in the sixteenth century—including both the Zurich and Genevan covenant traditions—flowed into the seventeenth century well between these two poles.

Notes

1. CH 20 (1951) 37–57.
2. Ibid., 50.
3. Ibid.
4. “The Marrow of Puritan Divinity,” Errand into the Wilderness (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1964) 57. For a helpful critique of Miller’s treatment of the covenant in Calvin and the Puritans see George M. Marsden, “Perry Miller’s Rehabilitation of the Puritans: A Critique,” CH 39 (1970) 99–104.
5. “Origins of Puritanism,” 56 n. 27.
6. Victor Priebe, “The Covenant Theology of William Perkins” (Ph.D. dissertation, Drew University, 1967) 64.
7. JEH 14 (1963) 46–67.
8. Ibid., 66.
9. Ibid., 67 (italics added).
10. (Yale Publications in Religion 11; New Haven: Yale University Press, 1964).
11. Ibid., 114, 199.
12. Ibid., 114.
13. The Historian 31 (1968) 21–35.
14. Ibid., 23.
15. Ibid., 23-26.
16. Sixteenth Century Journal 3 (1972) 1–24.
17. (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1980).
18. Ibid., xxiii.
19. “Ethics in Seventeenth Century English Puritanism” (Ph.D. dissertation, Union Theological Seminary, 1960) 47–48, 53–54.
20. Anglican and Puritan: The Basis of Their Opposition, 1558–1640 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1964) 92.
21. “Covenant Theology of Perkins,” 71–2.
22. “Covenant and Baptism in the Theology of Huldreich Zwingli” (Th.D. dissertation, Princeton Theological Seminary, 1971) 272.
23. “Antwort über Balthasar Hubmaiers Taufbuchlein,” in Huldreich Zwinglis Sämtliche Werke (Leipzig: M. Heinsius Nachfolger, 1927) 4.630. “Subsidium sive coronis de eucharistia” (ibid., 499).
24. Trinterud, “Origins of Puritanism,” 45. “Gegenüber dem mittelalterlichen Semipelagianismus wie gegenüber der humanistischen Willensfreiheit hat Zwingli bereits im Usslegen das servum arbitrium vertreten. Noch vor Luther hat er Erasmus geantwortet” (Gottfried W. Locher, Die Zwinglische Reformation im Rahmen der europäischen Kirchengeschichte [Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1979] 217).
25. “In catabaptistarum strophas elenchus,” in Zwinglis Werke (Zurich: Berichthaus, 1961) 6/1.176.
26. “De providentia dei,” in Huldrici Zwinglii Opera (Zurich: Ex Officina Schulthessiana, 1841) 4.121. Cf. Christof Gestrich’s comment that for Zwingli “gute Werke sind heilsnotwendig, weil sie in einer Ketter göttlicher Taten stehen, die den Menschen nur dann zum Heil führen, wenn kein Glied in der Ketter fehlt: Gottes Vorsehung führt zur Erwählung, Gottes Erwählung führt zum Glauben, der gottgewirkte Glaube führt zu guten Werken” (Zwingli als Theologe: Glaube und Geist beim Züricher Reformator [Studien zur Dogmengeschichte und systematischen Theologie 20; Zurich: Zwingli Verlag, 1967] 184).
27. “Signum enim electionis est, deum amare ac timere” (“Zwingli an Urbanus Rhegius,” in Zwinglis Werke [Leipzig: M. Heinsius Nachfolger, 1914] 8.738).
28. “Origins of English Covenant Thought,” 24 (italics added).
29. “Pactum dei cum homine est, ut ipse sit deus noster; nos integre ad voluntatem eius ambulemus!” (“Farrago annotationum in Genesim…” in Zwinglis Werke [Zurich: Berichthaus, 1963] 13.105). How one translates the sentence depends on whether the subjunctive mood of ambulemus has a hortatory force or is governed by the ut in the previous clause.
30. The Decades (ed. T. Harding, 5 vols; Cambridge: University Press, 1849–52) 3.170.
31. Ibid., 169.
32. Ibid., 171-72.
33. Ibid., 178; 5.321, 399–400.
34. Ibid., 5.321 (italics added).
35. Common Places of Christian Religion (trans. J. Stockwood; London: Tho. East and H. Middleton, 1572) 43a. This is a translation of Bullinger’s Summa christlicher Religion (1556).
36. Decades 3.174 (italics added).
37. Philip Schaff, ed., The Creeds of Christendom (3 vols; New York: Harper & Brothers, 1878) 3.268.
38. Decades 3.251.
39. Ibid; Second Helvetic Confession 16.5, in Schaff, Creeds of Christendom 3.269.
40. Bullinger and the Covenant, 195.
41. Ibid.
42. John Calvin, Calvin’s Commentaries (hereafter Comm. with biblical ref.; 45 vols; Edinburgh: Calvin Trans. Soc., 1844–56) Ps 132:12. Cf. Inst. 4.2.11.
43. Comm. Dan 9:4.
44. Comm. Ps 103:18 (italics added).
45. Comm. Gen 17:2.
46. Ioannis Calvini opera quae supersunt omnia (59 vols; Brunswick: C.A. Schwetschte et Filium, 1863–1900) 26.236 (serm. on Deut 4:44–49); Comm. Rom 9:4; Comm. Exod 16:5–9.
47. Comm. Exod 24:5.
48. Comm. Ps 132:12 (italics added); cf. also Calvini opera 28.286 (serm. on Deut 26:16–19).
49. Inst. 3.21.6.
50. Sermons cf Master John Calvin upon the Fifthe Book of Moses called Deuteronomie (trans. A. Golding; London, 1583) 915b (serm. on Deut 26:16–19). For this and the following quotations from Golding’s translation and for parts of this argument concerning Calvin I am indebted to Anthony A. Hoekema, “The Covenant of Grace in Calvin’s Teaching,” Calvin Theological Journal 2 (1967) 133–61. A cogent defense of this same thesis was offered ten years earlier by Elton M. Eenigenburg, “The Place of the Covenant in Calvin’s Thinking,” Reformed Review 10 (1957) 1–22.
51. Comm. Gen 17:9.
52. Sermons upon Deuteronomie, 322 (serm. on Deut 7:11–15).
53. Inst. 3.17.6; Sermons upon Deuteronomie, 1175 (serm. on Deut 32:44–47).
54. Eenigenburg, “Covenant in Calvin’s Thinking,” 10.
55. Inst. 4.13.6.
56. Bullinger and the Covenant, 27-54, 195.
57. Second Helvetic Confession 9.2, 3; 8.2, in Schaff, Creeds of Christendom 3.249–50, 247.
58. Second Helvetic Confession 16.2, Ibid., 268.
59. See Lyle D. Bierma, “Olevianus and the Authorship of the Heidelberg Catechism: Another Look,” Sixteenth Century Journal 13 (1982) 17–28.
60. Bullinger and the Covenant, 204-5.
61. “Nu aber ist es gewiss, dass wo die heilig Schrifft von dem bund Gottes…meldung thut, so verstehet sie den eyd Gottes, damit er uns seine gnad verheisset, unnd sich also uns bindet” (“Predigten von dem heiligen Abendmahl des Herrn,” no. 1, Der Gnadenbund Gottes [Herborn: C. Rab, 1593] 313–14).
62. “Apostolos interpretationem Bibliorum, ut tum versabatur in manibus Gentium retinuisse. Ii berit, id est, foedus, verterunt plerunque diatheke, dispositio sive Testamentum. Neque sine causa versionem illam retinuerent. Quia foedus hoc habet aliquid diversum ab aliis foederibus, & commune cum Testamentis, quia morte confirmatur, ut docetur ad Heb. 9” (In Epistolam D. Pauli Apostoli ad Romanos notae, ex Gasparis Oleviani concionibus excerptae, & a Theodoro Beza editae [Geneva: E. Vignon, 1579] 590–91 [Comm. on Rom 11:27]).
63. “Imprimis vero foedus gratias, quo se iuramento obstrinxit, se fore nobis in Patrem, & nos vicissim ipsi nos obstrinximus, velle nos in ipisus paterno affectu acquiescere” (Notae Gasparis Oleviani in Evangelia [Herborn: C. Corvinus, 1587] 87 [comm. on Matt 4:1–12]). “Quid foedus? Promissio ac iuramentum Dei, quod propter mortem Filii non meminisse velit peccatorum nostrorum: & repromissio, quod per gratiam Christi ei fidere velimus, & integre ambulare” (ibid., 42 [comm. on Luke 2:21]; cf. also n. 69 below).
64. “That same everlasting covenant that God had stricken with Abraham…the son of God…hath confirmed by satisfying the righteousness of God perfectly” (An Exposition of the Symbole of the Apostles, or rather of the Articles of Faith [trans. John Field; London: H. Middleton, 1581] 233). “Gott hat…diesen Bund und Freundschaft mit [Abraham] gemacht, dass er wolle sein Gott sein und seines Samens nach ihm und Abraham solle aufrichtig vor ihm wandeln” (“Predigten,” no. 1, in Karl Sudhoff, C. Olevianus und Z. Ursinus: Leben und ausgewählte Schriften (Elberfeld: R.L. Friderichs, 1857] 187–88).
65. “Ipsum autem Iehovam esse, qui testamentum seu foedus illud promittit, constat ex Ierem 31. cap. Eundem Iehovam esse qui idem testamentum morte sua confirmat, docetur ad Hebr. 8. cap. ac deinde 9. Ubi testamentum, inquit, mors testoris intercedat necesse est. Quo in loco eundem Christum, qui moritur, testamenti in Ieremia promissi conditorem dicit” (Expositio Symboli Apostolici, sive Articulorum Fidei [Frankfurt: Andreae Wechel, 1576] 183). “Promiserat autem Deus per Ieremiam Prophetam se percussurum nobiscum novum…. Hoc foedus in Christum per fidem nobiscum pactus est Dominus” (ibid., 10).
66. “…Deum, quocum foedus fidei iniimus, quique se nobis in Deum fore testatus est foedere sempiterno” (ibid., 46).
67. “…[Deus] testimonia visibilia instituit, quibus & assensum nostrum in gratuitum foedus in verbo oblatum…stipuletur” (De substantia foederis gratuiti inter Deum et electos [Geneva: E. Vignon, 1585] 311). “…sigilla…mutui foederis gratuiti” (ibid., 408).
68. Bullinger and the Covenant, 204.
69. “Itaque non est quod allegetis tantum unam partem foederis: quam Deus promiserit & confirmarit; sed addite etiam alteram qua conditione promiserit, sive quid vos repromiseritis, nempe vos fore integros & ambulataros coram ipsius facie…. Gen. 17. Ero Deus tuus & seminis tui: sub conditione repromissa, Ambula coram me & esto integer, id est, fidas mihi & serves mandata mea” (Ad Romanos notae, 108-110 [comm. on 2:17]).
70. “…dass allein, allein sage ich, in dem Leiden Jesu Christi und sonst nirgends die Vergebung der Sünden zu suchen sei und denselbigen (laut der Verheissung Gottes) gewisslich zugeeignet wird, die ihres Herzens Vertrauen darauf setzen” (“Predigten,” no. 1, in Sudhoff, 185–86). “Sic etiam Deus…non dubitavit ex mera bonitate vel iureiurando ac foedere se nobis resipiscentibus & credentibus, obstringere” (Expositio, 9-10).
71. “…non est hic contractus mutuus, exempli causa, facio ut tu facias vicissim, vendo, solvas. Nihil horum” (In Epistolam D. Pauli Apostoli ad Galatas notae [Geneva: E. Vignon, 1578] 68 [comm. on Gal 3:18]).
72. “Quomodo, inquis, faciam, ut non obiiciam gratiam Christi? Cogitare & sentire debes te ne guttam iustitiae & vitae aeternae ex propriis viribus habere” (ibid., 37 [comm. on Gal 2:21]).
73. “…nequaquam…(ut quidam imaginantur sparsam esse illam oblationis gratiam in aerem ut eam ad se rapiat qui volet)” (De substantial, 69). …oportet omnem supra positam substantiam perire sine fructu (quod fieret si ullam bonam cogitationem a nobis stipularetur)” (ibid., 211–12).
74. “…quod nuLla pars dilectionis Dei erga nos fundata est in nostra dignitate, viribus vel meritis, sed in sola bonitate Dei…. Ezech. 16: Aetemum foedus nominat, non quod nos ipsum diligamus, sed quod ipse diligat nos” (Ad Romanos notae, 404 [comm. on 8:35–6]). “Der brun laufft nicht den berg hinauf sonder herb zu uns” (ibid., 382 [comm. on 8:29–30]).
75. “Efficacia vero, qua ut Rex Ecclesiae primum corda ad agnitionem sui mali & divinae iustitiae considerationem adducit, & studiumque se reconciliandi Deo, & convertendi se ad ipsius voluntatem in iis creat. Deinde vero ita dispositis verbum reconciliationis offert, fidemque in iis generat” (Expositio, 4-5). “…acceptatio ex parte nostra etiam est gratuita, quia est Dei actio in nobis, qua promissionem suam obsignat cordibus, ut acti agamus, hoc est, effecti ab ipso credentes credamus & vivificati sive conditi a Christo ad bona opera in iis porto ambulemus, Ephes. 2.v.1 usque ad v. 10” (De substantia, 16). “Itaque interna mentis renovatio, sive internae qualitates & quae ex iis proficiscuntur cogitationes & actiones bonae, id est bona opera etiam non a nobis oriuntur, sed gratis a Deo dantur” (Ad Romanos notae, 434 [comm. on 9:11]).