On Covenants

Q. What is meant by a covenant with God?
A. A covenant is a relationship initiated by God, to which a body of people responds in faith. 

Q. What is the Old Covenant?
A. The Old Covenant is the one given by God to the Hebrew people.

We come now to a new section in our discussion of the Catechism. This section deals with the Old Covenant, which is found in the portion of the Bible called the Old Testament, but it offers us first insight into what a covenant itself is. As the Oxford Companion to the Bible points out, the idea of covenant is “one of the fundamental theological motifs of the Hebrew and Christian scriptures” (Metzger and Coogan, eds., 138).

Importantly, “covenant” is not nearly the static concept that one may be led to believe by the curtness of our catechetical description. Within the Bible there are of course the covenants that God makes with humanity, but there are also covenants made between human parties, either between relative social equals or between a superior and a subordinate, such as the case of suzerainty treaties between a great king and lesser kings or vassals. One will often hear pastors and other Christian teachers contrast covenants with modern treaties or contracts, but this attempt at distinction risks overly simplifying and romanticizing the notion of covenant. While there were, as I will speak about in a moment, unconditional covenants such that even if one side failed to live up to the covenant’s expectations, the other party remained bound by theirs, there were also conditional covenants. These conditional covenants would state consequences or punishments for failing to maintain covenant stipulations and in the extreme failure to meet stipulations could lead to the covenant being annulled. In the New Testament, the concept of the new covenant was associated with the idea of inheritance, with the Greek word used to translate covenant being diatheke meaning something like “will” in the sense of “last will and testament.” The Latin translation of this Greek word is testamentum which is where we get “testament,” and so it is important to note that when we speak of the Old and New Testaments, this language is synonymous with Old and New Covenants, since these collections of books are the records of these covenants. It is therefore best to think about covenants in general in the bible as roughly equivalent to agreements based on commitment between two or more parties.

In the Old Testament we find record of covenants between human individuals, such as between Abraham and Abimelech, Ahab and Ben-hadad, or David and the elders of Israel. We also find not one but several covenants in the form more often looked at theologically, of covenants between God and the people. The first of these is a covenant between God and all of creation given to Noah in which God pledges faithful protection to humans, non-human creatures, and indeed the whole cosmos. Then comes the covenant with Abraham in which God promises the land as an everlasting possession, many descendants, and a special relationship with those descendants. The covenant between God and Moses likewise makes Israel God’s people and God Israel’s God. The covenant with David promises an unbroken succession of kings on David’s throne. Finally, there is reference in the Old Testament to a coming new or renewed covenant in Exodus, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel. Jeremiah 31:31-34 in particular emphasizes a new covenant with a new order yet to be established. This promise of a new or renewed covenant held sway over different Jewish movements in the first century including not only Christianity, seeing this new covenant in the death and resurrection of Jesus, but also the Qumran community, which saw itself as fulfilling the promises of the new covenant.

The covenants with Noah, Abraham, and David were unconditional or promissory from God, with the understanding either that there were no stipulations for human behavior for them to be in force or that human failure to maintain the stipulations still could not nullify God’s promise. For instance, for Abraham circumcision acted as a sign of the covenant, but not a stipulation that was required to ensure God’s faithfulness. Similarly, while God would chastise unfaithful kings, the covenant with David would not be broken by their unfaithfulness. However, the covenant with Moses, with the human stipulation of faithfulness through upholding the law, especially the Ten Commandments, was conditional. There would be punishments for failing to keep the Law and Hosea 1:9 may even indicate the possibility of the covenant being annulled through human unfaithfulness. Regardless of whether the covenants were unconditional or conditional, though, by the time of the prophets and then the final editing and compilation of the writings of the Old Testament there was a strong sense that all the covenants between God and Israel were initiated by God. There is also a way in which one can think of the four fulfilled covenants in the Old Testament, and especially those with Abraham, Moses, and David, as part of a larger covenantal act by God to create a people who would be set apart to be the conduit for God’s blessing and witness to the whole world (see Genesis 22:18 and Isaiah 49:6).

In light of the horrendous treatment of Jewish people by Christians for most of the Church’s history, culminating tragically in the Holocaust or Shoah, Christians must carefully interrogate the ways they use Old and New Testament or Covenant language. Much of this violence was rationalized through the idea that Judaism had been superseded by Christianity; that the Jewish people represented a particular kind of obstinate refusal to accept the messiahship of Christ that had to be corrected, violently if need be. There is no doubt that contemporary Christianity and contemporary Judaism, while having a common origin in the various forms of first-century Judaism and sharing a large body of sacred scripture, differ on a number of significant theological points about who and what Jesus is. At the same time, for Christians to simply say that all previous covenants have been superseded or made irrelevant because of Christ is to undo the words of Jesus as the fulfiller (not eliminator) of the Law, Paul’s understanding of God’s continued faithfulness to the Jews, and indeed of the very idea of God as trustworthy. Thus, it is vitally important to understand “old” only in the sense of “earlier in time” rather than “no longer relevant” when talking about God’s covenants with humanity.

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