Within Protestant, and especially Reformed and evangelical, theology, two rival systems have organised the covenants into a larger architecture, and the difference between them still shapes how English-language Bibles are read and taught.
Covenant theology, systematised by continental Reformed theologians and given classic expression in the Westminster Confession of Faith (1646), reduces the biblical covenants to two theological covenants beneath the historical ones: a covenant of works made with Adam before the fall, promising life for perfect obedience, and a covenant of grace made with fallen humanity through Christ, in which the specific covenants with Noah, Abraham, Moses and David are successive administrations of the same single promise. On this reading Israel and the church are one people under one covenant of grace, which is why covenant theology has historically supported infant baptism, treating it as continuous with the sign of circumcision given to Abraham's household.
Dispensationalism, developed by John Nelson Darby in nineteenth-century Britain and popularised through the Scofield Reference Bible (1909), instead divides history into distinct dispensations, in each of which God deals with humanity under different terms, and keeps God's promises to national Israel apart from God's dealings with the church rather than merging them. It yields distinctive eschatology, including a future restoration of Israel and a pretribulation rapture, positions covenant theology rejects.
The dispute decides whether Old Testament promises to Israel are read as fulfilled in the church, awaiting a future Israel, or both, and it remains a live line within American evangelicalism.