Happy Birthday, Covenant Theology: Born Switzerland, 1525

Five hundred years ago, covenant theology was born.  There were complications at the birth.  It would be simple to say that it happened at Zurich, but Basel and Kappel have a share in the claim.  The family physician was Zwingli, but Oecolampadius and Bullinger were also in attendance. Nevertheless, of the date, we can be sure.

1525 was the year in which Zwingli made what Pierrick Hildebrand[1] calls his ‘covenantal turn’: for the first time, Zwingli argued from the position of covenantal unity and continuity.  Up until his Subsidium of August 1525, he had opposed the Roman Catholic view of the Lord’s Supper from a position of covenantal discontinuity.  Now, he turned and argued from a different direction.  This was not a volte face.  Andrew Woolsey[2] points out that Zwingli had maintained both unity and discontinuity in the biblical covenants prior to that time, but the polemic in which he was engaged caused him to change emphasis.  With the new approach came a more detailed exploration of the unity of the covenant of grace.  He had been examining pattern and reality, now he was exploring promise and fulfilment.  What fueled his thinking was his exegetical studies in Genesis, particularly chapter 17.  Then, in November 1525, the arguments which had begun in polemic against the Roman Catholics (and perhaps Lutherans) over the Lord’s Supper were developed further as the dispute with the Anabaptists over infant baptism intensified.

1525 was also the year in which Oecolampadius published his commentary on Isaiah.  In it, he discussed how God’s covenant can be both absolute and conditional and how to preserve the unity of the covenant while differentiating between the old and new covenants.  He proposed the idea of what would later develop into the covenant of redemption.  He spoke of the ability to perform covenant conditions as being a gift of the Holy Spirit.  Looking at law and grace, he described faith as a faith which works by love.

Bullinger, writing toward the end of 1525, used Gen 17 as a pivotal passage to look forward to Christ and back to Adam.  Having written in Vom einigen Gott (October) of the unity of the covenant, in Von dem Touff (November-December), he developed the idea of the covenantal nature of the protoevangelium which Zwingli had mentioned earlier but not explored. 

In 1525, three men, who shared the same Erasmian humanist academic background, the same exegetical drive, and the same questions of the same day, presented a doctrine of covenantal unity from Adam to Christ.  Covenant theology was born.

[1] Pierrick Hildebrand, The Zurich Origins of Reformed Covenant Theology, OUP 2024.

[2] Andrew A. Woolsey, Unity and Continuity in Covenant Thought, RHB 2012.