Sacramental Scaffolding: Calvin on the Continuity of the Old and New Covenants

Everyone is moving to Florida. Everywhere I look there are new roads, new subdivisions, new buildings piercing the sky. New everything. Several years ago, my oldest son and I sat and marveled as we watched construction workers scaling up and down a building using several stories of scaffolding, like ants winding their way through a labyrinthian ant farm. The scaffolding would be there only for a season, but for that time it would provide real and necessary support to the workers until they completed their task. And then it dawned on me—the scaffolding encircling the building was to those construction workers what the sacraments of the old covenant were to old covenant saints.

But perhaps I should back up first. Why did I see a sacramental analogy in scaffolding? Because of something John Calvin writes in his Institutes.

Continuity vs. Discontinuity

In book 4 chapter 14 of the Institutes of the Christian Religion, Calvin aims to convince his readers that the sacraments of the Old Testament served the same purpose as the sacraments of the New Testament—to lead believers to Christ, their substance. Sacraments, regardless of where they fall on the timeline of redemptive history, are God’s appointed means of confirming his promises of salvation and communing with his people.

For those discipled in Christian traditions that stress the discontinuity between the old and new covenant, such symmetry feels foreign. It sounds like a flattening of redemptive history, a denial of the differences between the old covenant and new. But to those in the Reformed and Presbyterian tradition, this continuity is foundational for our soteriology (cf. Gen. 15:6; Rom. 4:3) and our sacramentology, especially with regard to baptism (Gen. 17:7–8; Acts 2:38–39; Col. 2:11–12). While we fully acknowledge that there is considerable change in terms of the outward form and number of sacraments (WCF 7:6), and that “Christ has obtained a ministry that is as much more excellent than the old as the covenant he mediates is better, since it is enacted on better promises” (Heb. 8:6), we nevertheless maintain that the “sacraments of the old testament, in regard of the spiritual things thereby signified and exhibited, were, for substance, the same with those of the new” (WCF 27:5). The gospel is one, from Genesis to Revelation, and so every sign, every ceremony, every drop of blood and water ushers us on to him who is the sum and substance of the gospel.

Shadows Only?

These two portions of the Confession were instrumental in helping me resolve a question that had racked my brain for years—what did old covenant saints get in the blood of bulls and goats? Was it all shadow, no substance? Was Christ only signified and foreshadowed in the blood of bulls and goats or was there a real participation in the grace of Christ even before his coming in the incarnation?

Before becoming reformed, I assumed the former view. After all, Hebrews 10:1 speaks of the law as having, “but a shadow of the good things to come instead of the true form of these realities.” A shadow is not, properly speaking, a part of the form it outlines. If traced to its origin, a shadow will lead you to the object that casts that shadow, but it would be wrong for me to point to the ground and say, “That shadow is a part of me.” And so, if the law (i.e. old covenant era) is a shadow as the writer of Hebrews says, then that must mean that Christ himself wasn’t present in the Old Testament sacrificial rites but only foresignified by them. It’s not a stretch to see why many, like me, understand Old Testament sacraments this way.

But now, together with Calvin, I maintain that the sacraments of the Old Testament weren’t merely shadows, but shadows with substance to them, and that substance was Christ. They were a real and true means of communing with the person of the Son and the benefits of his redemption.

Calvin confronts this “shadow only” understanding of Old Testament sacraments in several places. He writes, “The Scholastic dogma (to glance at it in passing), by which the difference between the sacraments of the old and new dispensation is made so great that the former did nothing but shadow forth the grace of God, while the latter actually confer that, must be altogether exploded” (4.14.23).

Calvin is adamant that the sacraments of the old covenant not only displayed the grace of God that would come in the incarnation, but that they actually conferred the grace of Christ to those who partook in faith. When believers killed, ate, and spread the blood of a year-old lamb upon the posts and lintels of their home, they were sacramentally partaking of the “Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world” (John 1:29). When they drank water flowing from the rock in the wilderness, they were participating in Christ (“That rock was Christ,” cf 1 Cor. 10:4).

Calvin continues:

I repeat what I have already hinted, that Paul does not represent the ceremonies as shadowy because they had nothing solid in them, but because their completion was in a manner suspended until the manifestation of Christ. Again, I hold that the words are to be understood not of their efficacy, but rather of the mode of significancy. For until Christ was manifested in the flesh, all signs shadowed him as absent, however he might inwardly exert the presence of his power, and consequently of his person on believers (4.14.25, emphasis mine).

Solid shadows. According to Calvin, Scripture refers to the time of the law as a shadow to signal that the old covenant was not the end, but the means to the end of Christ and the new covenant. Shadows, by their very nature, communicate that there is something more that lies ahead. In the same way that it would be strange to see a shadow on the floor, stop, and never look up to address the one who is casting the shadow, Paul is stressing that it was “impossible for the blood of bulls and goats to take away sins” (Heb. 10:4). Those ceremonies were not meant to be looked to as though they had power to forgive sins. They were meant to draw the eyes of the offerer onto something beyond themselves in the same way that a shadow draws our eyes not to itself but to the shadow caster. The sacraments of the Old Testament and the New Testament are both 100 percent efficacious (effective) in terms of “inwardly exert[ing] the presence of [Christ’s] power.” But, they do differ in this—the old covenant sacraments signal that the fullness of redemption was still forthcoming and new testament sacraments confirm that the fullness has come.

Finally, Calvin reiterates that the language of shadow is not meant to deny the efficacy of old testament sacraments but to highlight the superiority of new testament sacraments, in the same way that the form casting a shadow is superior to the shadow it casts.

In this sense we are to understand the words of Paul, that the Law was a “shadow of good things to come, but the body is of Christ” (Col 2:17). His purpose is not to declare the inefficacy of those manifestations of grace in which God was pleased to prove his truth to the patriarchs, just as he proves it to us in the present day in Baptism and the Lord’s Supper, but to contrast the two, and show the great value of what is given to us, that no one may think it strange that by the advent of Christ the ceremonies of the law have been abolished (4.14.22, emphasis mine).

Remember the issue that prompted the book of Hebrews. Jewish Christians were being pressured to return to the sacrifices of the old covenant. And one can understand why it was so tempting. If, as they’d been told their entire lives, the sacraments of the Old Testament were God’s divinely appointed means of grace, then it would take something hugely significant, something superior to the old covenant sacraments, to justify their abolishment. This then is why the writer of Hebrews describes the old covenant sacraments as shadows, to stress that the new covenant sacraments were superior. And why so? Because fulfillment is superior to non-fulfillment (or that which is yet to be fulfilled).

Think of it this way—which is better, to be engaged or to be married? Married, hands down. Why? Because an engagement is not the full realization of the hopes and desires of the couple. Engagement is unto marriage. It’s a good thing, but not the ultimate thing. And so it is with the relationship between the old and new covenants and their respective sacraments. Christ has come, redemption has been accomplished and that is better than waiting for its accomplishment, which was the case with the types and shadows of the Old Testament. Quoting Augustine, Calvin writes, “Those [the sacraments of the Mosaic law] were promises of things to be fulfilled, these indications of fulfillment” (4.14.26).

Sacramental Scaffolding

So, taking into account all that Calvin says in these excerpts, here is how I see scaffolding as a fitting illustration for the function and importance of old covenant sacraments in relation to the new.

• The sacraments of the old covenant, like scaffolding, were an efficacious means of supporting the faith of old covenant believers. Believers were able to make their way “up and down,” to commune with God, in the same way that we commune with God in the sacraments of baptism and the Lord’s Supper. As Calvin wrote, “Whatever, therefore, is exhibited to us in the sacraments, the Jews formerly received in theirs—i.e., Christ, with his spiritual riches. The same efficacy which ours possess they experienced in theirs—i.e., that they were seals of the divine favor toward them in regard to the hope of salvation.”
• Nevertheless, just as scaffolding is disassembled once a building is completed with its internal staircases and elevators, so too were Old Testament sacraments abrogated with the coming of Christ and the sacraments of the new covenant (i.e. the completed building). A thing can be useful for a time, but inappropriate if used outside of that window of time.
• Though it is true that elevators and staircases are much to be preferred over the scaffolding that preceded them, their superiority does mean that the scaffolding was ineffective in supporting the workers who scaled up and down it.

Conclusion

In extolling the superiority of the new covenant and its innumerable benefits, we need not disparage the old. That the old covenant is described as a shadow does not hollow it out of any and all substance or significance. Though the means of grace certainly looked different in that era of redemptive history, they were means of grace still, and that of the same grace in Christ Jesus. We should give praise to God for not only foreshadowing but feeding and nourishing the faith of our forefathers, just as he does ours. We are one people, in one Christ, who pours out his grace upon all, whether they looked forward to or back to his sacrifice upon the cross.