William J. Dumbrell (1926–2016)

In “Covenant and Creation”, W.J. Dumbrell undertook an ambitious feat to weave the Noachian, Abrahamic, Sinai, Davidic covenants, and the New Covenant pointed to by the pre-exilic prophets into one cohesive covenant theology of the Old Testament. Although there is no separate chapter on the covenantal relationship between God and Adam (a relationship which Reformed theologians typically called ‘Covenant of Works’), Dumbrell offered an excursus on the topic. In that he ascribed the show more covenantal relationship to God’s very act of creation itself, thereby critiquing the traditional Reformed treatment as unsatisfactory.

There might be no lack of insightful vignettes in this short work; the achievement was severely hampered by Dumbrell’s penchant for convoluted sentence structure and profusion of relative pronouns. The readability of the book fell victim to opaque meanings in imprecise language.

As a case in point, on page 117, this sentence appears:

“In such a favoured relationship Israel might have been expected to have enjoyed the blessings which would have surely been associated with the notion of the divine presence in what has been defined in Exodus terms as a sanctuary.”

Or, on page 145:

“The immediate military antecedent which had posed a final threat to David’s complete occupancy of Palestine had been the Philistines who had been defeated in a campaign which had been divinely controlled …”

For an accomplished educator, such proclivity for complex sentences is astonishing.

The length of the book does not do justice to the weighty subject Dumbrell tried to expound. However, his treatments on pre-exilic prophets, particularly his corporate understanding of the Isaianic servant songs, are less than cogent. show less

In his New Covenant Commentary, Williams likewise stayed the standard framework: "south Galatia," middle date. He did well at bringing in the appropriate points of connection with the greater Greco-Roman and Second Temple Jewish worlds of Paul and the Galatians. He spent considerable time with some passages but only briefly covers many others.

Williams especially found himself in quite the predicament in attempting to uphold the traditional Catholic/Orthodox/Anglican/Protestant desire to show more consider many aspects of the Old Testament as providing authority for modern Christian faith and practice in light of how Paul was adamantly resisting such a position. His aside on the issue did not exactly persuade or convince.

Overall, however, a good and robust exploration of Galatians. show less

The last word on Covenant Theology in Genesis Brilliant.

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