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Camden M. Bucey
In Righteous by Design: Covenantal Merit and Adam’s Original Integrity, Harrison Perkins addresses long-standing Reformed debates over Adam’s original state and the covenant of works with scholarly rigor and pastoral warmth. At its core, this book defends the classic Reformed position that Adam was created with original righteousness, fully capable of obeying God and attaining eternal life under the covenant of works without needing any superadded gift of grace.
Perkins emphatically rejects the medieval Catholic notion of the donum superadditum (a “superadded gift”) as unnecessary and unbiblical. Instead, he argues that Adam’s nature was inherently oriented toward communion with God and eternal life. God “designed us for that end in our nature” (281), so no supernatural elevation was required. This stands in stark contrast to the Roman Catholic idea that man’s natural state needed a supernatural gift to reach its supernatural end.
Because Adam was created upright, his obedience would have had real value before God—not through strict condign merit (as if creatures could earn divine rewards by intrinsic worth), but through covenantal merit (meritum ex pacto). By God’s voluntary promise, Adam’s perfect obedience—flowing from his righteous nature—would have justly received the blessing of eternal life.
Following key Reformed theologians such as Turretin, Witsius, and Vos, Perkins shows that God made Adam for eschatological glory from the beginning. The Westminster Shorter Catechism’s statement that “Man’s chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy him forever” (Q/A 1) embodies this understanding that our supernatural destiny was built into our created nature. Creation was never meant to be an end in itself but was always aimed at greater communion with God.
Perkins commendably integrates the ontological dimension of Adam’s righteousness with the covenantal structure of God’s relationship to him. Some discussions of the covenant of works become dryly contractual, but Perkins grounds the covenant deeply in the doctrine of the image of God. He insists that Adam’s ability to obey and please God was rooted in his nature as an image-bearer reflecting God’s holiness. As Perkins puts it, “the image of God and original righteousness are bound together” (325)—being in God’s image means being oriented to love, obey, and enjoy God.
A significant portion of Righteous by Design explores the classic nature-grace debate: What kind of help did human nature require to reach its supernatural end? Perkins’s answer is clear: Before the fall, nature required no infused grace—not because humans could reach God on their own, but because God had built that supernatural end into nature from the start. The “help” God gave was not an infused habitus (habit of grace) but rather the generous act of establishing a covenant as a special act of providence with Adam.
Perkins emphasizes God’s “voluntary condescension” in making the covenant of works. God freely stooped to enter into a relationship where Adam’s obedience would be rewarded—a sheer act of divine kindness. This is how Reformed theology can say the covenant of works was in a sense gracious (God was not obliged to promise anything to Adam), while still avoiding the confusion of calling it “grace” in the technical sense. In fact, Perkins argues (and this reviewer agrees) it is better not to use the word “grace” for the pre-fall situation at all, since Scripture and Reformed confessions typically reserve “grace” for God’s de-merited favor toward sinners. That is, what the elect receive (eternal life) is precisely the opposite of what they deserve (eternal death; Rom. 6:23).
His treatment of covenantal merit provides helpful clarity on issues similar to those examined in the OPC’s 2016 Study Committee Report on Republication. Readers familiar with those debates will appreciate Perkins’s careful distinctions regarding the nature of merit, divine condescension, and the relationship between the prelapsarian covenant and later administrations.
Perkins challenges the assumption that medieval theology was monolithic. He shows that Reformed theology sometimes has more in common with Thomas Aquinas than with post-Tridentine Catholicism on original righteousness, particularly in rejecting the idea that Adam was created in a purely natural state before the fall. According to him, both Aquinas and the Reformed taught that original righteousness was integral to man’s original nature, rather than an externally imposed addition.
However, while Aquinas classified original righteousness as a supernatural gift that perfected human nature, the Reformed in contrast saw it as inherent to the image of God itself. While there is a narrow alignment between Aquinas and the Reformed against pure nature formulations, their differences on the nature of original righteousness remain significant. Therefore, post-Tridentine Catholic theology increasingly emphasized pure nature with grace as a necessary add-on—a shift that moved away from both Aquinas’s original position and the Reformed tradition, though in different ways. Unlike Aquinas’s system, which contained elements that later Catholic theologians developed into a more robust expression of nature-grace dualism, Calvin’s explicit rejection of that dualism left no room for reinterpretation in the development of Reformed covenant theology.
The heart of this book is warm and doxological—Perkins wants this recovery of covenant theology to edify the church, not just advance academic arguments. But at the end of the day, this is a scholarly work that addresses several complex theological and historical issues. As such, it is not intended for every reader of New Horizons, even though Perkins’s work addresses foundational issues that impact all believers. By examining how Adam related to God as created, Perkins illuminates our understanding of humanity’s relationship with God and our ultimate purpose. His clear articulation of a properly formulated covenant of works helps us better appreciate the work of Christ, the second Adam, who succeeds where the first failed. In these fundamental matters of creation, covenant, and redemption, Perkins provides important conceptual clarity that strengthens our grasp of Reformed theology at its most basic level.
The author is an OP minister and historian of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church.
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