Francis Roberts

[VirginiaHuguenot]

Francis Roberts, English Puritan (1609 - 1675) was a Presbyterian minister who conformed at the Restoration. He published a metrical version of the Psalms (1644) and is most famous for his "1750-page magnum opus on the covenants (The Mystery and Marrow of the Bible: viz. God’s Covenants with Man, 1657)," a copy of which exists at PTRS's Puritan Resource Center. For a recent study of his theology, see Won Taek Lim, The Covenant Theology of Francis Roberts (2007).

 

[VirginiaHuguenot]

The Covenant Theology of Francis Roberts is very good.

 

[VirginiaHuguenot]

Won Taek Lim, The Covenant Theology of Francis Roberts, p. 281:

Roberts' achievement, moreover, was massive. In detail of argument, in grasp of the preceding tradition, and in development of the historical dimension of covenant theology, his work stands as comparable to the great continental covenant treatises of Cocceius and Witsius. Like them, Roberts presents the covenantal model as fundamental to the Reformed understanding of the whole of theology, and more like Cocceius than Witsius, he focuses on the salvation-historical march of the covenant through its various dispensations. He clearly sums up the English covenant tradition in what is certainly its most doctrinally and exegetically developed essay. He is clearly a thinker whose work merits greater recognition.

 

[VirginiaHuguenot]

I got to examine Francis Roberts' The Mystery and Marrow of the Bible: viz. God’s Covenants with Man, 1657, at the PRTS Resource Center this week. What a blessing!

Thanks especially to Jeff Grant-Wyman for giving me a tour of PRTS, RHB and the Meeter Center at Calvin College, and to all the folks at PRTS and RHB for their kindness and warm welcome!