Featured Christocentric Theology (New Covenant Theology): The Big Nothing Burger

Over the past few years, the Faith Pulpit has alerted its readers to some aberrant theological movements and positions, e.g., the Emerging Church, the New Perspective on Paul, and the Redemptive-Movement Hermeneutic. These views may seem obscure at first, but they eventually make their way into the life and practice of a church. Several elements of the Emerging Church movement are already showing up in churches outside that movement. This issue of the Faith Pulpit examines another doctrinal issue that pastors and church leaders should be aware of. Tim Little, adjunct professor at Faith Baptist Theological Seminary, describes and evaluates New Covenant Theology to help us understand another movement that is poised to impact churches in the near future.

New Covenant Theology (NCT) is a rather new theological movement.1 Its proponents come from the local church rather than academia, and the majority of its adherents are found within the local church. Its proponents include Tom Wells, Fred Zaspel, John Reisinger, and Steve Lehrer.

Some people within the movement have reacted against Dispensationalism or Covenant Theology, and sometimes both. John Reisinger writes, “As New Covenant Theologians, we believe that historic Dispensationalism, as a system, is not biblical. . . . We are also convinced that Covenant Theology, as a system, is just as unscriptural.”2

Several of its proponents come out of a Reformed Baptist position, abandoning the tripartite division of the law (moral, civil, and ceremonial), infant baptism, and the historic covenants of works and grace. While they abandon these aspects of Reformed theology, most also reject dispensational distinctives, such as the distinction between Israel and the church and dispensational hermeneutics.

One of the bulwarks of NCT is its hermeneutics. NCT has admonished theologians to look beyond their presuppositions, analyze the text exegetically, and craft their theology around their exegesis.3

What distinguishes New Covenant Theology from these other movements? A key component is its primary hermeneutical principle, which they call the “logical priority of the New Testament over the Old Testament.”4 If we understand this aspect of New Covenant Theology, we will have a good grasp of the movement and how it approaches the Bible (their hermeneutics).

What Is New Covenant Theology? - Faith Baptist Bible College

 

The New Covenant
While NCT proponents state that the NT does not contradict the OT, that is exactly what transpires. In Jeremiah 31:31 God states explicitly that the New Covenant is “with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah.” Steve Lehrer comments, “If you read the verses that surround this text . . . , it is crystal clear that this New Covenant, in its Old Testament context, is promised to the geo-political nation of Israel at some point in the future.”16

Later Lehrer writes, “The Israelites would have read Jeremiah 31 and thought that the New Covenant restoration was exclusively for them. But when God interprets His own word He tells us that this is simply not the case.”17 Lehrer understands Jeremiah 31 in light of the New Testament, and he understands the New Testament to teach that the church is the recipient of the New Covenant. How is one to understand Jeremiah? NCT proponents say the answer is figuratively, symbolically, or in Lehrer’s words, typologically. He “understands Israel to be an unbelieving type or picture of the true people of God, the church. . . . Israel never was a believing people as a whole. Israel always had a tiny remnant of true believers in her midst. Israel was not the church in the Old Testament, but they did function as a type or picture of the church-the true people of God.”18

According to Lehrer, the reference to “the house of Israel and the house of Judah” in Jeremiah 31 then refers to the church typologically. He abandons the grammatical and historical hermeneutic. Such an approach is not true progressive revelation. It is simply the extension of NCT’s presupposition of the logical priority of the New Testament.

NCT proponents criticize Dispensationalism and Covenant Theology “because [their] basic presuppositions are either assumed or wrongly deduced from their theological system.”20 Yet as we have seen, New Covenant Theology is guilty of the very same premise because it approaches the text, particularly the Old Testament, with the faulty presupposition of the logical priority of the New Testament.

What Is New Covenant Theology? - Faith Baptist Bible College