The Covenant Theology of Zacharias Ursinus
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UHI Thesis - pdf download summary The Covenant Theology of Zacharias Ursinus Smedley, Todd Matthew DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (AWARDED BY OU/ABERDEEN) Award date: 2012 Awarding institution: The University of Edinburgh Link URL to thesis in UHI Research Database General rights and useage policy Copyright,IP and moral rights for the publications made accessible in the UHI Research Database are retained by the author, users must recognise and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights. This copy has been supplied on the understanding that it is copyright material and that no quotation from the thesis may be published without proper acknowledgement, or without prior permission from the author. 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Smedley 2011 Table of Contents Acknowledgments ..................................................................................................................... 2 Introduction ............................................................................................................................... 4 1. Zacharias Ursinus: His Life and Times .............................................................................. 16 2. Zacharias Ursinus: A Theological Biography .................................................................... 27 3. A Survey of Past Research ................................................................................................. 47 4. Ursinus’ Doctrine of God ................................................................................................... 73 5. Ursinus’ Doctrine of the Natural Knowledge of God ...................................................... 117 6. Ursinus’ Covenant of Grace ............................................................................................. 152 7. Ursinus’ Prelapsarian Covenant ....................................................................................... 189 8. Ursinus’ Doctrine of Justification .................................................................................... 222 Conclusion ............................................................................................................................. 265 Bibliography ......................................................................................................................... 273 1 Acknowledgments I wish to thank many to whom I owe a great debt of gratitude for their scholarly assistance and constant personal encouragement in helping me complete this project. As with all studies of this nature a researcher is cognizant of how much his own work stands on the shoulders of the scholarly community that has preceded him. Particular thanks go to my supervisors, Professor Andrew McGowan and Professor John Webster, for their wise guidance and editorial help. Our interactions, discussions and their constructive criticism were invaluable. Their patience and steadfastness in helping me see this project come to completion is commendable and much appreciated. Any weaknesses or errors in this thesis are, of course, my own. I cannot sufficiently convey the debt of gratitude owed to Dr. Robert Norris, my colleague and friend. Without him, this work would have never become a reality. His keen interest in the subject matter and his theological acumen sharpened my thinking and broadened my knowledge of the Post-Reformation period. I want to sincerely thank him for reading the entire manuscript several times and for his invaluable suggestions as to how to improve it. Most of all, I wish to thank him for his constant friendship and partnership in the gospel ministry. Thanks to the staff of Fourth Presbyterian Church, Bethesda Maryland for their support in this work. Specifically, I wish to thank my assistants Meghan Ferguson, Natalie Langford and Kathy Lofberg for their help with so many of the tedious details of this project. Furthermore, I would be remiss to not thank the members of Fourth Presbyterian Church, 2 many of whom showed great confidence in me and served as constant encouragers in balancing full time pastoral ministry and the writing of this dissertation. I will forever be grateful for the faithful support and unconditional love of my mom and dad. They have not only contributed so much to my spiritual life but also to my academic life through the years. Words do not express how much I appreciate them and value their presence in my life. Finally, my deepest thanks and affection goes to those who are most precious to me - my loving bride Jennifer and delightful children, Hannah, William and Peter. Words could never express my profound gratitude for my wife’s faithful support in life and ministry. Especially in these last several years I wish to thank her for her patience and gentle encouragement through this project as I spent many hours cloistered down in our basement. Finally I wish to thank my dear children who always cheerfully asked if I had my PhD yet and who do not remember a time when their dad was not working on ‘his book.’ 3 Introduction This study is an examination of the covenant theology of Zacharias Ursinus, which in many ways broke new ground for the development of Federal Theology in the sixteenth century with his introduction of the foedus naturale. For the first time in its development he describes the prelapsarian economy to be covenantal and thus opens the way for a bi- covenantal scheme to eventually become a distinctive feature of Reformed theology. Through a comprehensive analysis of Ursinus’ works this study seeks to show that his innovative doctrine of the covenant did not lead him to the legalism and speculative theology of which many scholars of the last several decades accuse him. The burden of this thesis is to prove that, at least as far as Ursinus is concerned, the twofold covenant of nature and grace is a theology of divine grace. Understood within the larger framework of his theological system Ursinus’ doctrine of the covenant does not evidence a move away from sovereign grace and towards legalism nor does it originate from some overly rationalistic scholastic speculation. Instead, it will be argued that Ursinus’ groundbreaking idea of the ‘covenant of nature’ naturally and organically emerged from his own theological system that was steeped in federalism, the law-gospel dichotomy, a thoroughgoing doctrine of double imputation and his understanding of the natural knowledge of God. Furthermore, we will argue that his bi- covenantal scheme, while certainly original, was not out of accord with the preceding generation of Reformed theologians but was in keeping with the character and content of the theological system he inherited. The perspective of this study takes a different path of interpretation than Ursinus’ critics and seeks to demonstrate that his provisional twofold 4 covenant illuminates rather than confuses the gracious nature of the Reformed gospel that was passed down to him from the first generation Reformers. Background to the Study Zacharias Ursinus has long been considered a key figure in the early development of the Reformed covenant theology and yet no sustained and focused analysis of his doctrine of the covenant has been attempted to date. Such an examination will naturally explore his explicit teaching on the doctrine of the covenant while understanding and appreciating it within the larger framework of his theological system and methodology. While scholars generally agree that Ursinus was the first to view the prelapsarian state of man covenantally, there is little agreement on whether or not this was a favorable addition to the development of Reformed theology. Many scholars do not perceive this move towards a bi-covenantal scheme to be in keeping with the gracious and humanistic teaching of the early Reformers, most notably, John Calvin. Curiously, much of the literature produced in the past several decades tended to look to Calvin as the primary, if not sole, standard by which to judge the subsequent Reformed Scholastics. The current study recognizes and appreciates the more recent scholarship which has sought to balance this prevailing assumption by arguing that Calvin was only one of any number of theologians who shaped the thinking of the second and third generations of Reformed Theologians. Nevertheless, this study is wrapped up in the larger debate which has become known as ‘Calvin versus the Calvinists.’ According to this ‘Calvin versus the Calvinists’ debate the later Reformed theologians of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries diverged from Calvin’s humanistic and gracious theology to a more rigid and rationalistic form of scholasticism which inevitably led to a legalistic understanding