The Mystery of Christ, His Covenant, and His Kingdom

The Mystery of Christ, His Covenant, and His Kingdom

Sam Renihan's book 'The Mystery of Christ' tackles the very difficult topic of Covenant Theology from a Confessional Particular (Reformed) Baptist perspective (today known as '1689 Federalism'). I studied this book in full one chapter per week together with my church for our Lord's Day doctrine class.

Historically speaking, the topic of Covenant Theology has been locked away from the masses in proverbial Reformed Academe ivory towers, in part due to the inherent difficulty of the subject. Therein lies the first great strength of this title - it deals with the topic in, what I believe, is the simplest language possible without making oversimplifications and errors. However, it could also benefit from using and subsequently explaining technical terminology, especially when in English the words describing the technical term would carry different connotations; as an example, in chapter 2, when discussing and responding to high-level paedobaptist objections, Sam uses the words "analogy of faith" without either capitalising the words to let the reader know that this is a substitution for a technical term, nor does he explain what that means - the reader may be tempted to think of using their belief in God as some kind of interpretative analogy (and would be very vaguely right), but what Sam is referring to is the specific premodern interpretative principle called Analogia Fidei in Latin (using all of Scripture to interpret one particular passage of Scripture).

Second, while a number of people have criticised the book's structure and flow, I believe Sam shines a stroke of genius in beginning his book not with a definition of what a divine 'covenant' is (as is historically customary), but rather with a discussion of theological system presuppositions regarding the Systematic Theology and Biblical Theology categories that are utilised in the discussion of Covenant Theology. Not only does this set the tone for the whole book, resetting the modern discussion of Covenant Theology along Confessional Baptist lines, it also gives the well-versed attentive reader an outline and exactly what to expect, to the point that if someone has serious study in Covenant Theology they need only to read the first two chapters and they will know everything else Sam is about to say. Therein lies another issue, in that the first two chapters which lay out the presuppositions of the author that necessarily drive the subsequent discussion, are both much more useful and much more interesting than the rest of the book (with the exception of the chapter on the Covenant of Redemption, and one section in the chapter about the Abrahamic Covenant where Sam disagrees with Pascal Denault's 'The Distinctiveness of Baptist Covenant Theology'). This isn't to say that the rest of the book is useless, but that the other chapters have limited use in either instructing a person for the very first time regarding the historical divine covenants (which it does very well, after all this being the point of the book), or in answering very specific questions in debates. While critics have noted that due to this, the first two chapters are very information heavy and difficult to understand, this is necessarily so - ordering the book by chapter difficulty would not be very constructive, and placing them last would (ironically) open up charges of reading Baptist presuppositions into Biblical data; instead Sam is helpfully very upfront about them and justifies them from Biblical data and Historical Theology. The reason I am grading down the book is because it lacks what would be an indispensable feature, which is an alphabetical subject index. While the table of contents is structured very specifically and details the book passage by passage, navigating this regarding subjects would still require the reader to remember the specific subject's context. An alphabetical subject index could fix that, and is a standard feature in a vast majority of much lesser books today.

Third, the physical product itself is not very durable (mine has folds and wear after just six months of careful use by three people), and also slightly overpriced for the amount of content. For the current price from the cheapest Australian retailers, I would either expect to see 50-100 more pages of content or a hardcover (the preferable option, as all content one could wish for in this volume is well covered), in books of comparable subject difficulty. I understand that Founders as a ministry is not yet (Lord willing) an established publisher that can leverage printing economies of scale; nevertheless this is a genuine criticism. The cover illustration is fantastic, even if eerily similar to several earlier Crossway titles (but not the same artist), but the choice of the just-off-black-green to contrast with the gold looks good only on the spine, whereas the eye wants to see black by contrast on the front cover and gets irked instead.