Once again, I’m going to ask you to think about the Bible as a whole as we look at some problems we face in getting our message across.
I’ve said this before: the biblical concept of covenant is not the same as contract. While you will find many church folks nodding their heads with this, their entire frame of reference still reduces covenant to contract. For them, it is not personal. When they read the Scriptures about terms like sin and redemption, their whole orientation is on contract structures and objective truth.
Two basic concepts will help to demonstrate the challenge we face.
First, there is “sin”. In western thinking this refers to something like culpable negligence or malice, in which there is a distinct guilt before the court. This is nothing like the biblical view. In Scripture, sin is contamination or defilement. The OT “Sin Offering” was not about specific offenses; the blood of sacrifice was not splattered on the one making an offering. Rather, your very presence in sacred space was defiling, so that blood was splattered on the sacred space to decontaminate it from your presence. The space was protected from your fallen nature; it made it possible for you to come before God.
Sin was not something you did so much as who you were as a mortal. Flesh is intractably filthy; it must die for you to live. It confines and defiles, entraps you in its foul will. You are in a tough situation needing to seize control, to tamp down its rebellious nature and bring it under discipline. But the only way to do that was to appeal to the God who made you and wants to rescue you from this slavery.
The solution was to render yourself — an eternal spirit trapped in flesh — decontaminated enough to briefly enter sacred space and present yourself as a supplicant, someone desiring to offer feudal submission and allegiance. This was not coming before the bar of law but coming to a specific individual who held all the cards, whose personal whim is your obligation. It has always been a matter of personal loyalty and feudal submission.
This brings us to the second item — “covenant” means treaty. Thus, redemption was not a matter of meeting some objective criteria but making a personal appeal. There is no formula. You must sign a treaty with your Lord. While the particulars will include a body of common elements shared with others, there will always be some elements unique to you. It’s personal.
When church folks hear the word “covenant”, they think of theology, of intellectual conceptions about faith. They associate the word “faith” with what’s in your head and your commitment to that. You must learn faith as a body of objective truth.
The Early Church Fathers (up through about 500 AD) seldom used the term “covenant”. They were too busy nailing down their intellectual traditions of Christology, Soteriology, etc. Lacking even a hint of Hebraic background, they never grasped the personal nature of faith (AKA, feudal submission to Christ). They lost all contact with ANE thinking, so fundamental to the Hebrew background of Scripture.
During the Middle Ages (500-1500 AD) they still didn’t use the term “covenant”, but it became synonymous with “law” in the western (Roman-Germanic) sense. Western feudalism was conceived as rather like a binding law of the universe that didn’t require God’s personal involvement. It all became a matter of status before the bar of law. It was wholly impersonal.
Thus, once the Reformation rolled around, the meaning of “covenant” was so badly contaminated that it became a reference to getting the right theology. You must obey the Covenant of Christ, and that requires a lot of formal education to get the proper theological frame of reference. In their minds, grace and law were hostile parties in a conflict. They had no place in their minds for how God giving the law was an act of grace. To them, law was legislation based on objective principle, standing separate from God.
Today, you can scarcely find an English translation of the New Testament that is not deeply influenced by Medieval or Reformation theology. The sense of all this theology is read back into Scripture in the very act of translation. The translators are helping you by narrowing down the definition of terms in how things are rendered, so that it’s not possible to go back and check what writers like Paul actually had to say.
When we use the term “covenant” with folks unfamiliar with the Hebraic outlook, it will be locked up in the prison of Reformed theology. Sometimes it’s better to use terms like “treaty” and “feudal submission” to Christ as Lord. This will help steer the conversation in the right direction.
