Covenant and Eschatology: The Divine Drama

Trinity Journal, Spring 2003 by Karlberg, Mark W

Michael S. Horton, Covenant and Eschatology: The Divine Drama. Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2002. vii 351 pp. $29.95.

The author, Michael S. Horton, has written a kind of theological prolegomenon that employs Reformed covenant theology as the entrance into the field of biblical interpretation and church doctrine. Horton is a gifted writer and a popular communicator. This book represents his first attempt at constructing a weighty tome in theological systems, what constitutes merely the first in a series. Covenant and Eschatology is the introductory volume in a new project, a fresh presentation of Reformed federalism for the third millennium. How well does Horton succeed in restating the tradition? That is the question for his readership.

There is a great deal of good insight and interaction with contemporary theology, notably, the narrative theology associated with Yale University and Divinity School. In fact, Horton indicates that the major aim of this study is to engage the Yale school by means of a sympathetic, yet searching, critique of narrative theology, that school of contemporary interpretation which may benefit most, Horton hopes, from serious dialogue with (modified) Reformed federalism. (Horton was for two years a research fellow at Yale.) Regrettably, Horton's presentation, in my reading, is marred by a significant degree of inconsistency and contradiction. This leaves the reader in a quandary. Exactly what shape does Horton want Reformed covenant theology to take? His ties to the (new) Westminster school only underscore the gravity and importance of his undertaking.

Nine chapters are divided into two parts: "God Acts in History" and "God Speaks." The extended metaphor for Horton's brand of covenant theology is reflected in the subtitle of the book-in a word, it is drama. Though fresh and contemporary, Horton's accent on drama, in my judgment, tends to trivialize both the biblical narrative and the worship and witness of the church. More substantively, it entails a false understanding of the role of faith and life, doctrine and experience, in the interpretation of Scripture, specifically in the mistaken notion of theology as application. A student of John Frame (though his name does not appear in the book), Horton has been heavily influenced by his Westminster professor, one who has, in turn, been shaped by the school of linguistic analysis associated with Hans-Georg Gadamer. (In this formative period of his theological education, Horton is also indebted to the teaching of Yale professor Nicholas Wolterstorff.) The problem in much of contemporary theological interpretation is the urge to be creative, to say something new and intriguing. It is the aspiration on the part of church theologians to gain the attention of sleepy parishioners, while catching the eye of secular academicians. One may ask whether it is realistic to think that these two-church and public university-can ever meet. Horton yearns for "imagination" in theological discourse and interpretation of the Bible (p. 244). Rather than viewing the hermeneutical enterprise as creatively imaginative, as Horton recommends, interpreters within the tradition of historic Reformed Protestantism down through the ages have insisted that theology be constructively reinterpretive: we think God's thoughts after him. There is no room for creative thinking (in terms of new ideas). Rather, what we find in the history of Reformed doctrine is the recovery of biblical truth in the life and mind of the church. If Horton agrees, then that needs to be clarified in this book.

The opening "Introduction" lays out the program and goal of Horton's study in covenant theology. The aim is "to integrate biblical theology and systematic theology on the basis of Scripture's own intrasystematic categories of covenant and eschatology" (p. 1). Horton looks to the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century federalists as guiding lights, but is insistent that he does not favor a mere repristination of their thinking: "Our precritical forebears will be treated here as important, though not definitive. Much has happened since Ursinus and Turretin, and these erudite Christian thinkers would be among the first to insist that we take account of progress in relevant disciplines" (p. 4). Well and good. Then the question is: what shape does Horton wish to give to the theological system? And what is to be said of modern-day biblical criticism? Here Horton blurs the picture and confounds issues in his argumentation. A large part of the problem is Horton's reading of modern Dutch and Dutch-American covenant theology, including the biblical theology movement in Calvinist circles. Here lies the major flaw in Horton's study, namely, the confutation of two opposing theologies, Calvinism and neo-Calvinism, including Barthianism. Horton fails to distinguish properly between the views of theologians like G. C. Berkouwer, Herman Ridderbos, and Richard Gaffin, on the one hand, and those of Herman Bavinck, Geerhardus Vos, and Meredith Kline, on the other. The former repeatedly emphasize dialecticism with regard to the believer's present experience of salvation, the soteric benefits associated with individual union with Christ in the (traditional) ordo salutis. In this view, for example, the truth of the definitive, once-for-all justification of the saints is severely compromised, if not denied. Invariably, the traditional Reformed federalists and their modern-day practitioners are accused of separating the application of salvation (ordo salutis) from the accomplishment of salvation (historia salutis). "The result," writes Horton, "is that we often fail to recognize the revolutionary logic of biblical (especially Pauline) eschatology, in which the future is semirealized in the present and the individual is included in a wider eschatological activity" (pp. 6-7). Does Horton really believe that Protestant-Reformed Orthodoxy missed this basic teaching? If not, the author must exercise far greater care and provide specificity in his challenges to and modifications of traditional covenant theology.