New Covenant Theology Interview with Doug Goodin

New Covenant Theology and the Old Testament in Light of Christ

Welcome back to Conversations with a Calvinist. My name is Keith Foskey, and I am a Calvinist. We have a wonderful show for you today, and I'm very excited to welcome my guest. His name is Doug Gooden.

He is the president of Cross to Crown Ministries and the New Covenant School of Theology. He is a husband and a father to three children, and I'm grateful to have him on the show today. Doug, welcome to Conversations with a Calvinist.

Thanks, brother. It's good to be here. Yes, sir, and I wanted to mention how we met. A few years ago, I did a debate on the subject of the Sabbath, and in my preparation for the debate, I found myself being in the camp of what would typically be referred to as New Covenant Theology, and so as I was searching out New Covenant Theology, and I was coming across names like John Reisinger and Fred Zaspel and things like that, I came across your name, and I came across your school, and I reached out to you, and you were so gracious that you said, give me a call, and you said, I'm going to go on a trip with my family.

I'm going to have hours in the car, and we spoke for over an hour with your family in the background, poor children having to listen to us talk about Sabbatarian Theology.

Over your car's speakerphone. Well, they're used to it, and that was a good way to pass hours in.

The car. Okay, and that was a wonderful conversation. It was very helpful, and again, it sort of helped me to understand that I'm not the only guy in the world who's seeing things the way that I am, and I knew that when it came to the subject of the Sabbath, I was on the outside of the typical circles that I run in because I run in Reformed Baptist circles, and so most of the gentlemen or pastors that I deal with are Sabbatarian, and so when they hear that I'm not and that my position differs from theirs, I sometimes feel a disconnect there, and it turns out that there's a bigger subject here than just the Sabbath.

It really is, and that's what I want to jump into today. I want to jump into the subject of what is New Covenant Theology. I'm going to let you answer this question, but let me preface it by saying this.

When we say New Covenant Theology, we are distinguishing that from other frameworks of theology which deal with the continuity and discontinuity between the Old Covenant and the New Covenant, and typically the two camps are known as Classic Covenant Theology, which would be found in something like Presbyterianism, and Dispensational Theology, which was made popular in the last 200 years, of course, is not an ancient view, at least not in my perspective, and so we have these two sort of competing views, but they're not the only kids on the block.

They're just the only two that people tend to listen and hear from, so New Covenant Theology is distinguishable from both. Can you.

Help us to understand what that means? Well, I can try, and I get this question all the time, and I find that one of the charges they like to bring against us, or at least maybe that's too strong, but one of the things that they like to say to us is, you're new, you're new, this is a new thing.

Well, that's exactly what the Roman Catholic faith charged the Reformers with when they started out, so our concern has to be what does the scripture say, not labels that uses. So to begin the definition, I want to just pull my friend Blake White's book, What is New Covenant Theology?

An Introduction, and for anybody who's looking to really understand this, I would say this is the place to start. It's a thin book, as you can see, it's not very thick, but he lays out basically seven broad tenets that we hold to in New Covenant Theology, and then let me just go through just the table of contents to lay those out, and then I'll share some alternative descriptions.

But basically, the first point is, there's one plan of God centered in Christ. So when we read the scripture, though we don't go with the Presbyterians and say there's one covenant of grace unfolded in the way they do, nor do we go with dispensationalists to say that basically it's complete discontinuity between the old and the new.

We say, no, there is one theme, there is one plan in the scripture, and it centers on Christ, not covenant, not any of these other things, but it centers on Christ. So that's the heart of it. Number two is the Old Testament should be interpreted in light of the New Testament.

We do not believe with John MacArthur, who says this, that the Old Testament stands on its own. We would say that is not true. You can't fully understand the meaning of the Old Testament texts without Christ and the New Testament, because it all speaks of him.

It is the divinely inspired interpretive grid for the Old Testament is Christ and the New Testament. So we give priority of interpretation to the New Testament. That is not a rejection of the inspiration of the Old Testament in any way, but what does the Old Testament mean?

Well, it means what Jesus tells us it means,.

Because it all pointed to him. And let me just stop you just for a second, because I want to give a hearty amen to that. I have a very dear friend who has actually been to my church and taught a few times, but he is a graduate of the Master's Seminary, and he holds a very, very strong view of what you just said, that the Old Testament stands on its own, to the point that anytime I would reference Christ in the Old Testament, even in passages such as that, which are so clear, such as Isaiah 53 or something like that, he would say, no, that's that you're reading it.

And I said, of course, I'm reading into it. I'm reading into it what the New Testament tells me to read into it. So just had to comment on that. That's absolutely true.

So is it your understanding that that is what Master's Seminary is teaching?

I can't say that. All I can say is that he graduated many years ago, so I'm not sure what they're doing now, but he came out of that. He was actually a missionary. And so he has been somewhat disconnected from the seminary for a while because of where he is as a missionary.

So I really can't speak to that. I just know that that was his position. And he would send me papers. He would send, because he would want to argue with me, and he would send me papers that were from professors that he had that were arguing for different things.

And then when MacArthur wrote his book on Isaiah 53, which was saying it was about Christ, I sort of ribbed him a little. I said, hey, look, here's this. Your main man agrees with me.

Well, that's my impression of MacArthur. I've read and listened to him a lot over the years, and he's dispensational in the sense that he holds to a premill view, and he does see a future something for Israel, but he doesn't go where the traditional dispensationalist goes in that.

And so that surprises me that Master's Seminary would be teaching that, although I know there's some pretty hardcore dispensationalists there. I tell people all the time, if you and a Jew come to the same conclusion about a text in the Old Testament, you don't understand it as a Christian.

We must not come to the same understanding of an Old Testament text as a Jew does, because that is completely bypassing and ignoring the Christ-centered hermeneutic that Jesus himself taught. Everything's been transformed.

Everything in the Old Testament has now been transformed with the substance here, the shadow. It was all there. The shadow was there. But now, I just used this analogy this morning. I'm doing a series on our live show on the Sabbath, and when Paul calls the Sabbath a shadow, he said it's like there's a light here shining down on this form, and in the Old Testament, they could look and see the outline.

They could see the shadow, and they gained some understanding of what the thing that was reflecting that shadow was. They understood something, and what they understood was real. But now, the light is surrounding it, and we can see it in all of its fullness, and the shadow, we're not supposed to look at the shadow anymore.

We're supposed to look at the substance, which is Christ. And now, we go back and look, if you will, at the shadow. We see, oh, that thing that we weren't quite sure was, that's the nose. It's a very crass illustration, right?

But it's the idea that now we have the full interpretive grid through which to understand what the Old Testament was pointing toward, and it's Christ. And to read the Old Testament and not see it all about Jesus is to just ignore what Jesus himself taught.

Moses wrote about me, he said. Remember, he had harsh words for those disciples on the road to Emmaus. Oh, slow of heart to believe all that the Old Testament taught when it taught about me, and I had to die, Isaiah 53.

I had to rise again before I could reign and rule. It's all there, Jesus said. So that's the second tenet. The third tenet of New Covenant theology is that the Old Covenant was temporary by design, and this starts heading into those waters that get a little murky with us and our Reformed Baptist brothers, because they would agree that the Old Covenant was temporary, but where they won't come with us is that the heart of that Old Covenant, the Decalogue, was also necessarily temporary because it was the very heart of that covenant.

And I'm sure we can come back and talk about that, but we would look at everything from Exodus through Malachi, which is largely the Old Covenant scriptures, the instructions, the form of that Old Covenant.

It was temporary, and it had a place, it had a purpose, and it points to Christ, but we're not under that covenant any longer. Number four, closely related, is that the law is a unit. This threefold division that our Reformed brothers love to divide the law into the moral, civil, ceremonial, and I don't know if you want me to spell that out anymore for your listeners, but in short order, they take the sacrificial laws and the shellfish and some of those things that you and I were talking about offline, they would put that all in one category and say, yes, those laws were all fulfilled in Christ.

We're not supposed to sacrifice lambs anymore because we have the ultimate lamb, who is Jesus. And then the... Yeah, the ceremonies themselves are fulfilled in Christ. Yeah, correct. Right, which obviously is true.

It's what Jesus said. When John the Baptist introduced Jesus as the lamb of God, I always say to people, why didn't anybody start laughing? He just called this guy a lamb. What if he had said the duck-billed platypus of God?

Everybody would have started chuckling. What in the world? But they all knew they had a context. Oh, this is the one who's going to be the sacrifice on our behalf because they had seen millions of lambs sacrificed over their lifetime as a substitute for them.

And now they could put that together. Oh, he's the ultimate lamb. He's the fulfillment of that. So the reformed guys would put some of the laws in that category and say, yes, they're fulfilled in Christ.

Then they would take others that were in their mind distinct for the nation of Israel as a nation and say, those are civil laws. And since the church is not a nation any longer, we are from all nations, then we don't have civil laws for the church.

So that leaves what they call the moral law, which they reduce to the 10 commandments and say, but those are the heart of God's standard of righteousness for all men everywhere for all time. And so they pull those out of the whole old Testament law and say, these are binding universally.

And new covenant theology says the scripture teaches that nowhere. There is no trifle division. You can't pick and choose some laws, the laws to be taken as a unit and whatever the new Testament says about the law, it means all of the commandments of the old covenant.

So again, we can come back and talk about any of these. I just kind of wanted to run through the differences. Number five is that Christians are not under the law of Moses, but under the law of Christ, which you can see just naturally flows from what I just said.

We don't look to the old Testament for our marching orders. We certainly see the old Testament as inspired. And Paul even says the old Testament is profitable for training in righteousness, but we have to ask the question in what way, what are our marching orders?

It's the commands of Christ and the new Testament is full of them. You know, again, I'm sure I'm anticipating some of where we'll go. We get charged with antinomianism in new covenant theology. Like we think it's a free for all.

Are you kidding me? The new Testament is full of the commands of Christ that are not suggestions. They're not recommendations. They're not life, you know, life hacks. They are, I'm the King and Lord of the universe.

And I'm commanding you obey this. That's right. We have to obey them, but we don't go back.

To Moses to find those laws. To call us antinomian. And for those who don't know what that means, it means opposed to the law or against the law, to be lawless in another way. It's so unfair. And there's a little book that I found when I was doing my Sabbath debate called, Is John Riesinger an antinomian?

That was the whole book was just trying to define whether or not Riesinger, who is well known for, at least for those of us who are in new covenant theology, would know him. And to say he was antinomian is, even the book itself says that's such an unfair.

Ascription. Yeah. Well, most reformed guys, when they define antinomianism included in that definition is anybody who rejects the 10 commandments, that's right, is antinomian by definition. And I've told people, well, if that's your definition, then yeah, I'm antinomian.

But if you mean, am I saying there are no commandments for Christians? Of course there are. Again, that Jesus is King and he tells his subjects, this is what I want from you. When King Jesus says to me, love your wife, like I love the church, that's a command.

And I am to pursue that obedience because he's my King. Number six is all members of the new covenant community are fully forgiven and have the Holy Spirit. Now I would quibble with my friend Blake here on the word community, because that's actually a reformed word where they talk about everyone in the old covenant community.

And they do this to bring infant baptism over into the new covenant. And that may be beyond the scope of this conversation, but I would just simply say all members of the new covenant are forgiven and have the Holy Spirit.

Because depending on how you look at community, we certainly all have people in our churches, the kind of people that Jesus called tares that are in the community. But if they're not true believers, then they aren't forgiven and they don't have the spirit.

But everyone who is truly in the new covenant is forgiven of their sin and has the Holy Spirit. And in distinction from in the old covenant, every Jew who was circumcised was in the covenant, but most of them died in unforgiveness because they didn't have faith.

The writer of Hebrew says that they, they, God was sworn his wrath. They will not enter his rest. He drove them into the wilderness and killed that whole generation because they didn't have faith. They weren't forgiven, but they were in the covenant because they were Jews.

And that's not true. The new covenant, we, you get into the covenant by faith. And if you're, if you have faith, then you are forgiven and you have the Holy spirit. And then finally, uh, that the church is the eschatological Israel, that everything that Israel pictured and portrayed again, Israel was a shadow as well.

And now that the light is shining on the substance, that's Christ and all who are in Christ. We are the, the ultimate fulfillment of everything that was promised to Israel. And that was pictured in Israel and all of that.

So as I discuss this with people, um, in contradistinction to those other groups, covenant and dispensational, uh, I think you hit it well earlier. It really comes down to an understanding of the major theme of scripture and how do we relate the old Testament and the new Testament?

It's so much a discussion of where there's continuity and where there's discontinuity and, and everybody, you know, comes with that a little differently, but the three systems you're describing are really three different ways of answering that question.

And so the way that I like to illustrate it is, and this is a little simplistic, so I hope my covenant and dispensational brothers will forgive me, but it just an analogy covenant theology. They love the illustration of acorn to oak tree.

They use it all the time that the covenant of grace, as they call it, uh, began in the garden of Eden as an acorn that, uh, when, when God promised the seat of the woman would crush the head of the serpent in Genesis three, that that is the, uh, did I say Galatians a minute ago, uh, Genesis three, um, that, uh, that that is the first statement of this covenant of grace that is going to be unpacked through the entire scripture and that all of the other covenants like Noahic and Davidic and Abrahamic, all of them, including the Mosaic covenant, that they are not really distinct covenants as much as they are different administrations and outworkings of this one covenant of grace, which reaches full flower.

It becomes the oak tree in the new covenant, but it's, it's a very, uh, progressive, uh, unified covenant, this covenant of grace. And as John Riesinger says, they flatten out the relationship between the old and the new.

So the people of God, there's one people of God in this view. And so the Israel and the church are the same, and there are a few external differences, but essentially and fundamentally, they're the same.

The covenant's the same. The law is the same. Again, that's, that's the 10 commandments, uh, carries over from the old into the new because they see it as this one continuous flow, uh, acorn to oak tree, uh, baptism take is the new covenant administration of which circumcision was the old covenant sign.

And so they, they gave circumcision to babies in the old covenant. Therefore we should baptize babies in the new covenant, because again, it's just part of this unfolding one covenant of grace idea. Uh, and it's a lot of, a lot of continuity, the real stress and continuity, uh, dispensationalists in my view are more like looking at the old and the new as apples and oranges.

Uh, there's just almost no, no relationship at all. Now, now that's old school dispensationalism. I want to be fair to progressive dispensationalists. They see much more continuity than the original folks did, but they still see a pretty sharp distinction between the old covenant and new covenant, you know, Israel and the church.

They're not the same. They're, they're distinct, uh, the law that's old covenant. We have a new covenant law, all those things. Some, some of which, uh, we would agree with the illustration that I like to use for new covenant theology is caterpillar to butterfly.

Uh, and the idea is when you look at a caterpillar and you look at the butterfly, what you see is great discontinuity. You know, you would never look at the butterfly and think, oh, I bet that used to be a caterpillar, but the DNA, the heart of it, what, what the caterpillar was always designed to be was to have this metamorphosis to be transformed into this, this thing that can fly.

And so there's, there is a, a, a connection, but when you look at the caterpillar, you see the promise that someday that thing is going to be transformed into something that can fly. And then the change happens and it does become this, what appears to be a new creature, but it's not entirely new.

So as we look back at the old Testament now and everything in the old Testament, we see there, it was all foreshadowing, picturing, pointing to the metamorphosis to fly in the new covenant. If you can go with me in the analogy.

So.

Not in a nutshell is how I would distinguish the groups. Great. Wonderful. Now, were you always, uh, a new covenant person where you brought up in this, or did you learn this in seminary? Or is this, is this a conclusion you came to like me, like in seminary, I went to a dispensational seminary.

I went to Jacksonville Baptist theological seminary, which, which I was told in eschatology class, if you don't believe in the rapture, I hope you get left behind. So you'll see that we're right. I mean, it was that, and I, and I, and I know it was said in jest, but it was very, they, they held to one very specific view of eschatology and it was the dispensational pre-millennial view.

So on your side, how did you come to this? Um, yeah, so I'm a hodgepodge. Um, I grew up in the, the non-instrumental church of Christ. My dad was an elder and, uh, and I don't know how much you.

Know about the church of Christ. Uh, it, well, our church, our church used to be part of the disciples of Christ movement, which is the liberal wing of the, of the restoration movement. So I'm a little bit more familiar than most with the, uh, with the, uh, restoration movement, the Barton stone Campbell.

Uh, yeah, yeah. All those guys. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So you.

Heretics had, uh, had, uh, music, right? Yeah. You guys wouldn't play any instruments and we would play anything. You could roll in and plug up. That's right. And the old church of Christ joke is when the last trumpet sounds, no church of Christ people respond because certainly God never used it.

Yeah. So I grew up in that, but my dad was not a very good church of Christ elder because though we didn't have instruments in the church, uh, he did not see it as a tool of the devil. And I was a music major, ironically, uh, no problem there.

And my, my family was all very musical. So, uh, but we just didn't have instruments in the church, which, okay, that's fine. As far as a preference goes, if that's what you choose, then that's all fine.

But believe me, we had some hardcore folks that, uh, uh, thought, uh, I probably was close to jumping off the ship of Christianity because I play the guitar and stuff. Um, so I grew up in that. And the one thing my dad taught me all my whole life is, um, never, ever take the word of man for anything.

What is the word of God say? Amen. Um, and that was, that was great. I appreciate that. Now he was not a, uh, he, he was, he was a very simple man. Uh, he, I came along late in life. My dad was a world war two vet.

Uh, he was born in 1922. Um, in fact that, uh, that weekend that I was driving home when I, uh, helped you prepare for your Sabbath debate, we were driving home from his funeral. And, uh, so in addition to passing the time, it was also good for me to get my mind off of something else.

Cause we just had the heaviness of the funeral and I love my dad. He was a good man. Um, and, uh, but he was not, he was never, he was never an educated man. He was very simple, uh, grew up in the hills of Missouri.

Uh, you know, I've got Hillbilly in my, uh, my background kind of thing. And, uh, so he was a diligent student of the word, but not educated. So he didn't understand. He didn't, he never knew terms. He didn't learn Calvinism, Arminianism.

He didn't learn any, any of those things. He just, what does the Bible say now? He did come to, uh, what I would say was some pretty significant errors in his view of interpreting the scripture, uh, very strongly Arminian, even though he didn't know what that term means.

Um, and, and Arminian to the degree of, of semi-Pelagian, if not worse in some ways. Now I believe, cause he, as I grew in my understanding, I challenged him pretty hard on some things because I could begin to be concerned for his soul.

Not because you have to be a Calvinist. I know, I know I'm talking to a Calvinist here. Uh, and I am as well, depending on how you define Calvinism. But my concern was not to convert him to a Calvinist, but to make sure that he believed the gospel, because as you know, very well, then the churches of Christ, disciples of Christ, Christian churches can be baptismal regenerationists.

They can be very legalistic. And I began to realize, Oh, you know, it's my dad trusting in his good works to get, you know, to be saved. And so we had some great conversations and I was convinced, uh, long before he died that no, he believed the true gospel.

He's just, wasn't a theologically astute man. So anyway, so I grew up in that and in college for about five minutes, uh, I was a dispensationalist. I had some friends that were kind of caught up in dispensationalism and at first it sounded great and exciting.

You know, they're reading the paper and they're reading, uh, the scripture and putting these prophecies together. And I'm thinking, Oh, the end is upon us. The rapture is happening any day. This makes sense.

I never heard this before, but it didn't take too long for me to realize, ah, this just doesn't make sense. And I graduated high school in 1988. Well, that was when how Lindsay had predicted the end of the world, right?

Yeah. 48 reasons, 88 reasons. The world went into 1988. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. So I'm ready for.

It. Well, it didn't happen. And then he wrote his, his reprisal the next like, Oh, I was off by a year because of this. Like, yeah, it didn't happen then either. So it didn't take me too long to realize I can't go here.

This is just not where I'm at. Well, about that time, I really, uh, I became acquainted with guys like R .C. Sproul and some of the best of the best of reformed thinkers and teachers, and I'm a very logically consistent minded guy.

So that attracted me big time. So I was all over it. And I, uh, when the Lord called me to ministry, I immediately enrolled in covenant theological seminary in St. Louis, my hometown. And, uh, my first class I signed up for was covenant theology.

I told my wife, I said, I, you know, we got to have babies so we can baptize them. I am sure we're Presbyterian. You just need to be told why we're Presbyterian. But I was, I was fully convinced because I loved what I was hearing from these folks.

And, uh, and so about halfway through that, that course on covenant theology, they kept talking about this covenant of grace, which it all made perfect, rational sense to me like this. Yes, I, this, this makes sense.

And like I said, I'm going to baptize my babies when we have them, but halfway through the semester, I raised my hand, said prof where this covenant of grace, you keep talking about, where is it in the Bible?

And I was not asking as a skeptic, I was already convinced. I just somehow I'd missed it. And, uh, I was the most willing convert they'd ever had. And there was this long pause to my question. And he said, well, I just, my heart sunk like what this thing that drives everything you've been talking about.

You don't have a verse for me. It's, you know, my dad's words ringing in my head. Don't ever take the word of man. What does the word of God say? And so I went home that day and told my wife, well, we can't be Presbyterians can't be baptized because the covenant of grace isn't in the scripture.

Um, so as I began to work backward from that, I thought, okay, everything they've been telling me so far in seminary hinges on this covenant of grace. If that's not a biblical truth, then what else are they teaching?

That is not there. And he, and that's when I began to question what they were saying about the trifold, uh, tried tripartite division of the law and all that. So I'm wrestling through all that and rejecting much of it, but I liked a lot of it too.

And the reformed theology, uh, in other ways became very, uh, very, uh, meaningful to me. I learned Greek at that time and reading Romans in the Greek is what made me a very unwilling convert to God's sovereign election.

Cause again, I'd been taught the opposite all my life, but I'm reading this in the original. I thought, uh, there is no way now that I see it. And I don't have my English background. I don't have what I was taught this means in English, but I'm having to wrestle with what the Greek says.

And this says I was predestined before the foundation of the world. Oh, and I didn't like it at all, but I had to submit to the word there. And, you know, eventually I began to see the glory of it and the beauty of it, but at first I didn't like it.

So anyway, fast forward, I'm, I'm called to a church in Colorado to, to be on staff and the pastoral staff there. And, uh, I had rejected most of, uh, traditional reformed covenant theology at that point in terms of the ecclesiology and the, the law and that kind of stuff.

And then the, the senior pastor of that church, they had had John Riesinger out for a conference a couple of years prior to my getting there. And he handed me a couple of recent years books. And I just read it and said, this is what my dad believed.

This is where I'm at. And so there was just like, I'm home and let's, let's go.

Nice. Nice. Okay. So, so Riesinger was helpful to you as well then. Very much. Very much. Good deal. Recently I read a book by a friend of mine. Well, he was a contributor, Richard Lucas. Are you familiar with him?

Oh, somewhat. Yeah. Yeah. A great guy. He's here in town. He and I were able to, we spoke together at a, there's this, uh, a mutual friend of ours has a skeptics night at his church where skeptics can come answer questions.

And, uh, I'm one of the ones that he allows to come and answer questions. And Richard was there too. And we had a wonderful conversation and he was very gracious and gave me a copy of the book, progressive covenantalism, because when I started telling him that I, I found myself more in the new covenant camp, he said, well, I want you to read this book.

Um, and he said, because he feels like in his opinion, and I really want to hear your thoughts on this. And I hope he, I hope he listens to this because I do respect him a lot. And, uh, like I said, we're friends.

And, uh, so I hope he'll take a chance to listen to this, to this podcast. But, uh, he said he felt like new covenant theology was really not viable long-term and that progressive covenantalism was going to, or has already sort of taken its place.

Uh, and, and his, his argument was that the new covenant theology, and I hope I'm, I hope I'm saying this correctly. So, so Richard, if you hear this, if I, if I'm not being fair, you can, uh, you can tell me later, but I, the way that he said was it, there wasn't enough foundational and scholarly material about NCT to drive it as a system.

And, and, and you've got Wellam and Gentry with their kingdom through covenant, which does mention at least in the first edition that they saw themselves as a stream of new covenant theology, but now they've sort of, they've, they've sort of abandoned that, uh, that term and they're using the term progressive covenantalism.

So, so do you see any distinctions between the two? And if so, are they, are they.

Meaningful? Yeah, that's a, that's a great question. And those of us, uh, uh, who talk about these things a lot, we, we have to, we're, we're entertaining that question. Uh, I'm, I was on a panel last year that we were trying to get Dr. Wellam and Dr. Gentry to join us.

And we were very close actually is more than that. And COVID kind of messed that up, but we were hoping to have this, this round table discussion about these things to answer that very question. Um, because it does matter.

You know, I tell guys, we are such a small pond in the theological world that if PC and NCT can stay together, we have much greater potential to have an impact in the broader church than if we split up, because we take one little puddle in the, in the whole stream of a theology.

And now we divide into two little drops. We just, it's, it's hard to see how that's going to have an impact. Um, one of the questions that has to be answered to answer your question is, is there really a, uh, a devastating difference between PC and NCT?

And I personally don't think that there is, but some of those guys do. And as I've probed around and tried to figure out why, why does Dr. Wellam feel the need to, uh, to go down a different path in terms of label and that kind of thing.

Uh, you know, he was personally discipled by John Riesinger. I mean, they were close friends and he was a close disciple and you're right. He used the label NCT in that first edition and he still uses it in public pretty regularly.

I was talking to someone this morning who, uh, who knows Dr. Wellam well, and he said, yeah, it just, he uses NCT almost more than he uses the term peace, uh, progressive covenantalism when he's out talking.

So, uh, here's where it could, in my opinion, could get to a place where we must divide. Uh, you know, they, Wellam and Gentry make a big deal that the, the backbone of scripture is covenant. Uh, I disagree.

Uh, the backbone of scripture is Christ. Okay. And, and yes, covenant is important, but they do sound a little bit like covenant theologians in that they, they start from this premise of covenant is the backbone of scripture.

And then they see a progression of God's revelation through the covenants. Now in, in one sense I do too, because the Bible does, there's clearly, uh, a distinct, uh, a emphasis in Galatians three, for instance, that Christ is the fulfillment of the promises to Abraham.

He spells that out explicitly. Uh, we know that Jesus is the fulfillment of the Davidic covenant and the promises that David's going to reign. Well, that's Jesus. He's, he is David. Um, it gets a little harder for me when you look at the Noahic covenant, I see how the Noahic covenant preserved the seed.

If God had destroyed every human being, then there's no way to fulfill his plan for the universe, for the world. So he, he couldn't destroy the whole world. So in that sense, the covenant with Noah prepares for Christ, but the new Testament doesn't draw further implications than that.

Uh, and then, and then the mosaic covenant, we are told very clearly it was temporary. It was, it was, uh, uh, it was a guardian, a pedagogue to keep Israel in check, to reveal the need of a savior and all that.