Eternal Covenant: The Trinitarian Shape of an Historic Baptist Doctrine

Abstract

This dissertation argues that the eternal covenant is the prism through which God manifests his triune glory in the missions of the Son and the Spirit. Negatively, this argument is made against the background of historical neglect of the doctrine since no Baptist has provided a substantial treatment of the pactum salutis in over two hundred years, and current Baptist systematic theologies have introduced deficient models for understanding the doctrine of the Trinity and the Scripture’s testimony to the Son’s submission. Positively, the background for this dissertation is the recent recovery by Baptists of both covenantal biblical theology and classical theism. If Baptists are to recover the doctrine, however, they will need to respond to the clear critique leveraged against it by Robert Letham, namely, that it undermines historic Christian orthodoxy and is insufficiently grounded in Scripture. Thus, by correcting a deficiency in some theological developments and embracing the advances in others, this dissertation demonstrates that biblical doctrine of the pactum salutis is worthy of recovery and fruitful for still further work.