Doug Van Dorn- The Oath Before the Garden

All right, so the point of today is that I want to dive into kind of the big picture of the Bible through the lens of covenant, covenant theology.

So right away when I talk about covenant theology, there are some bad things that people immediately start to think of when they're not in this kind of system, this world of thinking about the Bible.

Just name three of them, all right? Spiritualizing and allegorizing.

That's what you people do in covenant theology.

That's why you never take the Bible literally.

Well, no, that's not true at all.

So we might address a little bit of that.

Anti-Semitism.

Covenant theology... created anti-Semitism where people hate the Jews.

And we've seen a lot of this kind of stuff actually kind of creeping up, and some of it has been with the Reformed world.

But that is not the fault of Reformed theology.

Jesus himself was, of course, a Jew.

All of the disciples were Jews.

The gospel goes to the Jews first, then to the Gentiles.

Covenant theology is not responsible for anti-Semitism.

Probably the worst of all of these is the boogeyman called replacement theology.

I can't tell you how many times I hear people talk about replacement theology instead of calling it covenant theology.

As if what we're teaching is that the church replaces Israel, which of course then feeds into the anti-Semitism movement.

and the allegorization thing that I just brought up a moment ago.

So all of those things are brought up in the way that people who don't think about covenant theology or know much about it or really don't like it or even hate it, they kind of get those ways of thinking about it.

And I just kind of want to lay off the table and say, that's just not the way that you should be thinking about covenant theology.

So the book that you will see on your screen here grew out of a series of Sunday school lessons that I taught at our church on Sunday night way back, I think it was in 2014.

So my book is a take on Reformed Baptist covenant theology.

You know, find some Presbyterians that'll say, well, that's a contradiction, an oxymoron, you can't have that.

Reformed and Baptist in the same word, if by that they mean Reformed is covenant.