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Citing various sources of federalism, Torrance demonstrates that its adherents confuse a covenant with a contract and thus move the focus away from what Christ has done for us to what we do for ourselves. He also traces elements of anxiety and Pelagianism in Reformed congregations to the Westminster Confession of Faith’s doctrines of limited atonement, and complains of its failure to comprehend the meaning of Christ’s headship over all humanity by its imposition of a “radical dichotomy between the sphere of Nature and the sphere of Grace, of natural law and the Gospel, so that the Mediatorial Work of Christ is limited to the covenant of grace and the Church, the sphere marked out by the covenant of grace.”109

Rejection of Covenant Theology from within the ranks of Presbyterianism such as Torrance’s is rare but not only recent. In Caruthers’s own era Scottish pastor and theologian, John McLeod Campbell, one of Torrance’s influences and subject of his research, rejected Covenant Theology.110 Campbell was deposed from his ministry in the Church of Scotland in 1831 on the charge of heresy and eventually published his views in his major work, The Nature of the Atonement in 1856, to explain his views and restore an emphasis upon the fatherhood of God and his universal and unconditional love.111

In its role for Presbyterians as an “architectonic principle” of federal theology, the covenant has prompted an interminable debate, charitably described by its proponents as “historical development.”112 The continuing variation and disagreement within the reformed ranks over Covenant Theology substantiates MacCullough’s observation that the Old Testament speaks a great deal about the covenant between God and Israel as an agreement to keep his law, but that it also develops the idea in various ways, and it talks about covenants in different contexts, and with different implications.113

Although Reformed Presbyterians and others committed to federalism have not developed a consensus among themselves with regard to the covenant’s soteriological role, the legitimacy of the covenant form is mostly agreed upon within broader biblical studies. The amount of scholarly energy expended on the study of the covenant is impressive with varying results. Studies have tended to seesaw between the early twentieth-century judgments that the covenant did not become a working idea in Israel’s literature until the later Deuteronomic traditions and the later twentieth-century views of George Mendenhall, Walther Eichrodt, as well as others who view the covenant as “an early and constitutive notion in Israel.”114 Recent work generally tips in favor of the latter. The covenant’s place of importance seems certain in the earliest period of Israel’s worship of Yaweh. As such, for Mendenhall, the covenant concept embodies and represents Israel’s underlying conviction that its social, religious, and even global aspirations, are important lawful expressions of the nation’s relationship to Yaweh.115

The lawful dimension of the covenant can be seen as especially prominent in Caruthers’s emphasis upon God’s rightful claim upon the Africans. Caruthers sees Exodus as an expression of the covenant that authorizes not only God’s relationship with Israel but with all the nations of the earth. In her study of the covenant concept in Qumran literature Bilhah Nitzan utilizes aspects of Eichrodt’s work that views the covenant as both an early and “revolutionary factor in the relationship between human beings and their deity.” In her opinion, Eichrodt correctly understood that Israel’s “covenant detached religious faith from the feelings of anxiety and insecurity that characterized pagan religions” and established the more secure “covenantal relationship,” capable of regulating human life “according to fixed laws of retribution given by a single divine authority thereby providing hope for peace and security to those who kept the laws of the covenant.”116

Similar legal and binding overtones of divine authority are sounded in Caruthers’s use of the covenant promise against slavery. When he writes that “it was promised to Abraham,” and reminds his reader citing Gen 22:18, that “in his seed all the nations of the earth should be blessed,” Caruthers is drawing upon the legality of God’s claim not only upon Israel but all nations.117 Thus Africa and all other “heathen nations . . . stand pretty much,” he writes, “in the same relation to Him in which the descendants of Abraham, so far as they were included in the promise, stood to Him before their deliverance from Egypt.”118 Caruthers sees the Exodus text as an expression of the covenant that authorizes not only God’s relationship with Israel but with all the nations of the earth. God’s covenantal claim upon the enslaved African in the nineteenth century is thus no less legitimate than his claim upon the enslaved Hebrews in the Exodus account.

In Caruthers’s thinking enslaved Africans are “My people” because the claim of the Exodus text applies to all nations.119 The covenant is singular without temporal boundaries, lawful over all of redemptive history, and Africa is among the nations included in the Abrahamic promise as reiterated in Psalm 2. For Caruthers “the whole world was under condemnation and led captive by the devil at his will” but since “all nations were included in the covenant of redemption” in which Christ ransomed his people, then “no man and no act of men have a right to claim the services of any portion of his purchased inheritance.”120 This includes Africans and Anglo Saxons because “both were given him in the covenant of redemption and he has redeemed both by the same price.”121

      Summary

For “the Christian reader,” Caruthers writes, “it is unnecessary to multiply quotations” from the Bible in proof of his point, but not before he has cited Psalm 72 and its prediction of “universal homage.” Caruthers sees the Hebrews’ redemption from slavery as the pattern for the redemption yet to come in the person of the Messiah, to whom “every knee shall bow . . . and every tongue confess,” and from whom “the church, in its ministry and membership, received a commission . . . to go and carry the light of the gospel to them that are sitting in darkness” and to “proclaim an immediate and eternal deliverance to all who were in bondage to sin and Satan.”122 Thus the claim—“My people”—is now doubled in its justification.

      First, as shown above, it is justified because it is based on God’s role in the creation and preservation of Israel and all other nations. The unity and equality of humanity from the dawn of creation was grounded in their common creator. God’s claim upon the Hebrew slaves of Exodus extended to the African slaves of the South. The enslavement of Africans, or any nation, is a violation of the Exodus text and in defiance of the creator’s claim. God was the creator and preserver of all humanity and, therefore, the only rightful superintendent of the black race.

      Secondly, it is based on the covenant of redemption. In the covenant, deliverance in Christ’s name is proclaimed to the Africans because their nation is also his inheritance. As a Presbyterian minister Caruthers was committed to the expression of Covenant Theology developed throughout the Reformation and its expression in the Westminster Confession of Faith. Although that expression has provoked critical dissent and substantial differences among adherents that will not be resolved any time soon, there is general agreement upon the biblical covenant as structurally circumambient, encompassing the relationship between humanity and God in an atmosphere of lawfulness, regulation, and security. For Caruthers, American slavery pollutes and clouds this atmosphere with its illegitimate claims. If the Africans belong to God through creation, and to their Messiah through redemption,

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