On the Promises of the Old Covenant

CatechismTheology
Written By Chris Corbin
 

Q. What did God promise them?
A. God promised that they would be his people to bring all the nations of the world to him.

Q. What response did God require from the chosen people?
A. God required the chosen people to be faithful; to love justice, to do mercy, and to walk humbly with their God.

 

Given the multiple covenants found in the Old Covenant described in the last post, getting a single understanding of the Old Covenant requires a synthesis through a particular interpretive lens. The 1979 Catechism interprets the Old Covenant through what we may think of as a largely “prophetic lens,” meaning drawing from the literature and tradition of the books of the prophets, books tending toward a more ethical and expansive view of God’s covenants with Israel. Such a move makes sense given the prophetic backdrop for much of the life and teaching of Jesus, as well as the extensive reinterpretation of prophetic utterance by early Christians as applying to, and predicting the coming of, Jesus.

That God promised to make Israel his people immediately calls to mind Jeremiah 30:22 which has God saying, “And you shall be my people, and I will be your God.” Of course, the notion of God calling Israel out as a chosen people is hardly confined to Jeremiah and is found throughout the Old Testament, both in prophetic and non-prophetic texts, such as Exodus 19:5, Deuteronomy 7:6, Deuteronomy 14:2, Psalm 105, Psalm 135, and Isaiah 41:8. The notion of God using Israel as a means of drawing all the nations to God, however, is more strongly linked to the prophetic tradition. The most famous verse expressing such an idea is probably Isaiah 49:6, stating, “It is too light a thing that you should be my servant to raise up the tribes of Jacob and to restore the preserved of Israel; I will give you as a light to the nations, that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth.” This idea of Israel as God’s vehicle for revelation and reign over the whole world arises in other prophetic literature, such as Joel 3:2, in which God will “gather all the nations and bring them down to the valley of Jehoshaphat” and “enter into judgment with them there” on account of Israel. Still, while the notion of Israel being God’s chosen people, and especially of being God’s vehicle to reveal Godself to and to gather in and rule over all the nations of the world is emphasized in the prophetic literature, some form of this promise can be traced all the way back to God’s covenant with Abraham in Genesis when God promises to both make a great nation of Abraham and to bless a the nations of the world through Abraham’s offspring.

The interpretation of what is expected of Israel to fulfill the covenant, couched largely in ethical expectations rather than those of sacrifice and ritual purity/separation, draws on a few strands of prophetic thought. This second question directly draws upon Micah 6:8: “He has showed you, O man, what is good; and what does the LORD require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?” Given that it makes no reference to the vast body of law related to holiness thought of in terms of purity or distinction found throughout the Torah, it seems that Catechism also has in the background something like Amos 5:21-24:

I hate, I despise your feasts,
and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies.
Even though you offer me your burnt offerings and cereal offerings,
I will not accept them,
and the peace offerings of your fatted beasts
I will not look upon.
Take away from me the noise of your songs;
to the melody of your harps I will not listen.
But let justice roll down like waters,
and righteousness like an everflowing stream. 

The question for Christian use and understanding of the Old Covenant in these terms is why it should be that the vast amounts of purity regulation should no longer apply. It certainly makes sense given the shape of Jesus’ mission as seen in the synoptic Gospels, opening up toward the inclusion of Gentiles, and especially given Paul’s emphasis on Gentile missions, that the Church would begin to see the covenant with Israel as oriented toward God’s activity toward all the nations. One could also see the emphasis on the Old Covenant as about moral rectitude and faithfulness rather than observance of the purity laws as a simple matter of divine revelation. After all, Jesus in Mark 7 and Matthew 15 states that it is not what goes into a person (clean or unclean food) that defiles them, but what comes out (harmful speech). Similarly, Peter is given a vision declaring all animals clean to eat in Acts 10. However obvious such explanations are to us, though, accustomed as we are to 1900 years of largely Gentile Christianity without such purity regulations or outward marks of holiness-as-distinction, such was not nearly as obvious in early Christianity. After all, Acts recounts the early church still having uncertainty about inclusion of Gentiles even after Peter’s vision, and Paul’s ministry was marked in several instances by his opposition to rival Christian teachers expecting circumcision and adherence to the ritual law for Christians by Gentile converts.

It is important to realize that that this was not merely an instance of Christianity slowly breaking off from some monolithic Jewish mainstream. The first century was a time of contested understandings of what was required by the Law and even indeed of what was considered binding Scripture. Even here I will necessarily oversimplify the tumultuous and generative character of first century Judaisms. At the most conversative religiously were the Sadducees who focused on animal sacrifice at the temple and understood the purity laws as largely applicable to the priestly class affiliated with the temple. The Pharisees were the more liberal, both accepting more innovative doctrines like the resurrection of the dead, angels, and a much larger selection of sacred writings. Theirs was a Judaism less connected to the temple and more connected to synagogue teaching, prayer, and ritual purity for all adherents; this was the form of Judaism that could ultimately weather the destruction of the Jerusalem temple and laid the foundation for a Rabbinic form in which the sacrifice of prayer could stand in for the sacrifices at the temple. There were also Essenes, a group that took the command for holiness and purity to such an extreme that they entered into a monastic-like existence in the desert.

Following the work of New Testament scholar Luke Timothy Johnson, I am inclined to see the early church’s putting less emphasis on purity law as arising out of the crisis of the crucifixion—and here I don’t mean the crisis of Jesus’ death. Rather, for those believing in the resurrection of Jesus, there was cognitive dissonance between his manner of execution and his consequent glorification. As Paul alludes to in Galatians 3:13, Deuteronomy 21:23 was interpreted as saying that anyone hung upon a tree was cursed under the law. This called for a reinterpretation of the relationship between Jesus and the Law, making the Law subordinate to Christ (something Johnson sees as the main thrust of the Gospel of Matthew in which Jesus is presented as the Torah incarnate), a move itself that allowed the church to take seriously Jesus’ apparent rejection of purity laws around food or the Sabbath.

What is probably most important to take away from the Catechism’s particular reading of the scope and character of the Old Covenant is to avoid going to two extremes. It recognizes that Christianity and contemporary Judaism are sibling religions that follow diverging paths from the foment of first century Judaism. Christianity does not read the Old Testament the same way that contemporary Judaism reads the Tanakh (a word for the Jewish Scriptures), even if they are largely the same texts. At the same time, Christians cannot see God’s interaction with Israel or the special relationship to that covenant people as merely an interesting historical prologue to the Church. All of us Gentile Christians (the author included) are grafted in, are part of a body constituted by the opening up of God’s covenant to Israel not its termination.

You can find much more about Luke Timothy Johnson’s interpretation of early Christianity and the reorganization of the symbolic world of Torah in his Great Courses lectures on Jesus and the Gospels or in The New Testament: A Very Short Introduction by Oxford University Press.

 

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Chris Corbin

The Rev. Dr. Chris Corbin is editor-in-chief for Earth & Altar and is the Missioner for Transition and Leadership for the Episcopal Diocese of South Dakota. His interests include British Romanticism, Anglican theology, ministerial formation, and evangelism. Beyond this, Chris spends far too much time drawing cartoon versions of saints. He likes to think of himself as the Episcopal Church’s Ron Swanson, what with his woodworking and avoiding small talk. He/him. You can check out his book, The Evangelical Party and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Return to the Church of England, or follow him on Twitter @theodramatist.

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