Covenant Theology and/or Dispensationalism Reading Recommendations
There have been several posts lately asking questions about either covenant theology or dispensationalism. I've perused the wiki and found no specific reading recommendations for either covenant theology or dispensationalism. The posts themselves have been helpful to me in understanding very high-level differences between the two, but I'd like to dive deeper into both to get a better understanding.
What are your reading recommendations for covenant theology or dispensationalism?
Edit: Thanks everyone for the recommendations! Now to find time to actually read them. :)
Posted Jun 21, 2021, 8:17 PM UTC · edited
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Covenant Theology: Bibilical, Theological, and Historical Perspectives (eds. Waters, Reid, Muether) is less than a year old, but at 600-odd pages with contributions from what feels like the entire faculty of Reformed Theological Seminary, it’s probably the new ‘definitive’ volume.
It’s probably indicative of where I stand, myself, in relation to current Dispensational scholarship, but Ryrie’s Dispensationalism is, to my awareness, still the elephant on the other end of the interpretive hermeneutic.
Merkle’s Discontinuity to Continuity is going to be something like a high-level treatment of in-betweeners, and then A. Blake White’s What Is New Covenant Theology? is maybe the best introductory work on the largest group of those in the middle who would code as Reformed-adjacent; I’m not aware of any NCT folks who don’t hold to at least a Calvinistic soteriology, and John Piper, for instance, describes himself as “somewhere between” Covenant and New Covenant theology. There are also a wide variety of “progressive” dispensational conceptions; deep in the label game, even most self-identified, plain-old dispensationals circa 2021 are more progressive than Ryrie. It’s a broad spectrum with carve-outs for everyone!
Second on Covenant Theology. It’s a tome!
In terms of a short volume, Christ and the Covenants by O. Palmer Robertson is a good one that was required reading for Covenant Theology class. But there is definitely no other single volume that I would recommend over Covenant Theology for a thorough Reformed perspective.