“Thus while Calvin described Adam’s arrangement in paradise as gracious — Calvin maintained it was distinct from the one covenant of grace first promised to fallen Adam in Genesis 3:15 and successively to the OT and NT Church. Underscoring the unity of the covenant of grace from its first postlapsarian (fall) declaration until the present, Calvin writes;
‘The covenant made with all the patriarchs is so much like ours in substance and reality that the two are actually one and the same. Yet they differ in the mode of dispensation.'”
Jonathan Beeke
Duplex Regnum Christi — p. 90
1.) Per Beeke on Calvin the covenant of works was a gracious covenant though gracious to a different degree than the covenant of grace. We might note the difference as prelapsarian creational grace vs. postlapsarian redemptive grace.
2.) The covenant of grace is a unity. Therefore, we can say that any theory of the covenant (such as R2K’s theory) that insists that the Mosaic covenant was a return to a covenant of works “in some sense” is significant error. It is at the very least heterodox and even more likely heresy — at least as it lies in the hands of the R2K “theologians.”
3.) The New and Better covenant remains a unity with the covenant unfolding in the OT. It is the realization of all that was heretofore only promised. If the New and Better covenant brought in by Christ was completely divorced from the unfolding of the covenants (progress of covenantal redemption) then we would have to say that the saints in the OT were not saved by grace alone through faith alone in Christ alone.
