We Should See Other Blogs

We had a good sermon Sunday morning. One of those sermons that have been a long time coming and seem somehow overdue, you know? It began with talk about how Christians are supposed to become more like God over time, which seems entirely right and correct to me. I mean, if you’ve ever hung out with a bunch of people that think a certain way, it’s hard to keep from buying into that. It’s sort of like osmosis, if you think about it; it makes sense that if you’re in community with God you’d become more like him.

I’m not going to say anything ground-breaking here. I know loads of people have said it, and a good percentage of them have said it much better. I just have to get it off my chest.

Here’s the thing, though: if you’re supposed to start looking more like God as time goes by, what does the way you look say about your God? Or what does the way your community looks say about its God? You have to figure that a bunch of people in community growing together to look like something, well, eventually they’re going to come to resemble (as a group) that thing that they’re growing towards.

That is to say, if your religious community resembles elaborate kabuki, what does that say about your god? If it looks like an exclusive monastery for masochists, what does that say about your god?

It’s a good question, I think. Ask yourself. Are you growing up to look like your father, God, or are you growing God up to look like you? Or to put it in the language of scripture, are you being conformed to the image of God, or is God being conformed into the image of you?

I imagine that we often think of this in terms of it being someone else’s problem. For instance, it’s the problem of modernist, consumer-oriented mega-churches held rapt by the glittering American materialist dream. Or it’s the problem of a bunch of German post-Enlightenment scholars who decided one day that their empirical measurement of scripture was more important that scripture’s measurement of itself. Or it’s the problem of a few woo-woo postmodern shaman types who dance in the aisles and light candles and stuff during what one could loosely describe as “services”.

But of course it’s not just their problem. It’s your problem, too. Because it’s not just as easy as picking up the Bible and seeing what God looks like. I guess we have this history of “interpreting” scripture for exactly this reason: Jesus doesn’t just leap up out of the book and give you a list of bullet points. It’s quite complicated, really.

I just realised this post could go on forever, if I wanted it to. I could talk about the Holy Ghost moving in people, and how people chose these books to be scripture while rejecting others, or how people split up into camps about what God looks like, or how everybody thinks everybody else is wrong.

At the end of the day (and at the end of this paragraph), though, there’s nothing left to do but take a good long look at yourself. Maybe stop glancing around to see what other folks look like, and just get out a mirror or something. What does what you see say about your God?

I was driving just a few minutes ago, dropping off a computer to be fixed so I can turn it into a router/firewall, and I turned the radio off. Maybe the season of Lent is burrowing into my psyche or something, but I turned it off and my mind began to wander.

Oddly, I started thinking about faith.

Or, rather, I started thinking about the way I write about faith. How do I represent it? I mean, I’m no theologian or anything like that. I write about theology sometimes, but generally I’m just echoing what a bunch of other people have said to me; I’m just talking about stuff that other people are talking about, stuff that resonates somehow with me.

But I’ve come to a conclusion. Though maybe not a conclusion so much as a place where I don’t really have a conclusion: either way.

Faith is this ridiculously mysterious thing. It doesn’t really make sense; is there any other concept that you can talk about in terms of having been given something and also in terms of having given?

I’m a Calvinist, part of that branch of the Christian faith that defines faith in terms of a gift. It’s something you’re given. And from God’s perspective, that makes a lot of sense, since if God doesn’t control everything, he controls nothing, right?

But on the other hand, in my head, I chose to write this post, and I am responsible for where the letters go and what it means and who reads it and gets all screwed up because I wasn’t half as lucid as I’d like.

Maybe you can wrap your head around that, but I sure can’t.

Then again, it’s so often like that with God, isn’t it? Take scripture. It’s inspired by God, but people got together and said, “It seems good to us and to the Holy Spirit,” and chose a certain number of books and letters while rejecting some others. Take the Trinity, as another example. It’s there in scripture, revealed as a concept but never actually stated as such; three persons in one being, co-existing in eternal harmony. Does that make sense? Yes. But no. You could look–and by all means do–and find ten or twenty more if you wanted.

I really don’t know where to go from here. I guess I don’t really have a way to end this post, except to say the reality of faith is that it lives, no matter how you look at it. But even that’s just another dry statement. It’s boring when you write it down on paper, which is probably why real people tend to be better at showing faith to their neighbors than, say, books and tracts and whatnot. Those things have their place, and have done great things, but real faith isn’t a matter of mere words, is it?

And I guess that means I should stop talking.

Here I was, all set to watch Mad About You, and settle down for a nice evening of not really thinking about anything. And of course the internet has to come along and spoil it for me.

Having read several books that place the focus of Jesus’ message on redemption not only of souls, but also of creation, I found a review of one of these books that called the author’s formulation of scripture’s message as a “sad substitute for the gospel”.

But is it?

It keeps prompting the question in me that if Jesus came to save souls, great: but what comes after that? What does that look like?

Or, why does salvation have to be this either/or thing between a liberal social gospel (which, I agree, standing alone doesn’t make much sense at all) and the liberation of souls from the devil’s grasp?

Why does it always seem to come down to that?

Scripture says that Jesus came to reconcile all things to himself. All things. Not just human souls, but his creation as well, unless I’m reading that verse completely wrong. Putting it another way, the creator of the world, the Word, comes back in the flesh to re-create things and make them good again, the way they were before the fall.

But what does that look like? I admit, if you’re looking for the end of the world in a decade, if you’re thinking that Jesus is going to–excuse the hyperbole–come down from on high in his spaceship and beam up all the saved people, if you’re expecting everything to just end, if you’re expecting that heaven is the final destination, yeah that makes sense. It makes sense in an individualist sort of framework, where you have a personal relationship with Jesus, who has come to save your soul, so you can eventually end up in heaven, where you will be happy and you and you and you and on and on and on.

If scripture talks that way, I must have missed it, and I’ve been doing my fair share of reading lately. I’ve poked these ideas with a sharp stick, and they bleed true, I think.

For instance, the kingdom has come. It has. Jesus said the end of the world would be in his generation, and the children of Israel saw it come, but they also saw the replacement for their small corner of the earth. They saw the children of Jesus strewn across Asia, and then across the world.

Yet the kingdom hasn’t come, not really, not the full thing, has it? Jesus isn’t reigning on earth yet. Things aren’t good here. We don’t have our new heaven and new earth. We still have entropy, and microevolution, and death, and suffering, and war.

So what do we do in the meantime? Is the kingdom this sort of inward-focused blessing machine for the people behind the walls, or is it maybe a blessing to all nations? Do we have a responsibility just to ourselves, or to the whole world?

Does this include helping the poor? Yes. Does this include saving the environment? I think so. Does this involve saving souls? Absolutely.

See, I can’t separate the two things in my head. Saved people do good things. It’s true. Sometimes they do bad things–I do bad things, for crying out loud, all the time–but in general Christians, real Christians, are a blessing to those around them. If you’re saved, doesn’t that mean the default position is feeding hungry people? If you’ve been redeemed, doesn’t that lead to a life of compassion?

Maybe the whole point is not just getting to some place where we all have a personal transformation and that’s it. Maybe the point is God’s glory, Jesus’ glory. And maybe, just maybe, he’s more glorified when we seek to redeem not only the souls of people, but everything, or anything at all.

Have you ever wondered why Christians are so concerned with morality? What is it about Christians that makes them care so much about doing things a certain way?

By this point you might be expecting me to go off on some sort of liberal screed; instead I’d like to surprise you by saying that it’s obvious why we’re concerned with morality, and even more than that, it’s a good thing we’re concerned with morality.

But I think morality isn’t quite the right word for it; or if it is the right word, it feels much colder than it should. It’s problematic that there aren’t many other good words to describe morality, isn’t it? When I hear the word, I think of a certain moral code, a certain way of doing things, a certain subset of things defined as right, and a certain narrowness of opinion.

Morality doesn’t speak to motivation, though, does it? It’s like describing a piece of music without understanding the intentions of its author or talking about an Olympic event without considering why the competition’s happening in the first place.

We should invent a new word for that or seek to redeem the word or something, because Christian morality, it seems to me, isn’t something that takes place in a vacuum; it’s something that is part of a larger picture or something that needs to be viewed within a certain context.

Imagine God ripped out of the world: imagine being an atheist. If there’s no point to the universe, if there’s no context in which the universe takes place, it’s a pretty mean place. Animals dying and killing and being broken down by even smaller animals until their atoms are part of something entirely different, maybe a plant or an airplane or your baby brother, until the animal is forgotten and all trace of it removed from the earth; then you find out the animal is in fact you, and this is what’s going to happen to you, and you don’t much like it at all so you build a giant statue in what will one day become a desert, and one day Percy Bysse Shelley comes along and writes a poem about you, only it turns out that he’s just telling you how you’ve been forgotten despite your statue (which is also gradually being destroyed by erosion), not to mention that he’s gotten your name entirely wrong and you’re completely and utterly dead. That’s a pretty mean world, wouldn’t you say? Mean, pointless, and spirit-crushing. That’s what the world becomes if you divorce it from eternity, and from God, and from redemption, and from re-creation, and from Jesus.

Morality, as it turns out, seems the same way. It can be divorced from the context in which it was created, but it becomes this method of keeping people in check, like a straight-jacket or a jail cell. Imagine someone coming along a reading Psalm 119 and hearing David be all like, “I love this law, and I read it all the time, and I’ve started memorizing this passage here”, and on and on and on; David is clearly off his nut, as laws aren’t thing you delight in, or that you memorize (can you imagine memorizing Ontario’s traffic code?). They’re things you try to circumvent and try to push as far as you can, because you’re looking at it outside of its framework.

Imagine morality inside your friendships for a minute. Do you steal from your friends? No, unless you’re like the worst friend ever. Do you routinely beat them up? One would hope not. But by don’t you do those things? Not because you subscribe to a set of rules that you’ve agreed on and signed, but because you love your friends. You don’t do certain things to your neighbors because you love your neighbor.

All of that–and I can’t see an exception, really–is in the context of loving God. Jesus came, he did something wonderful, and your response is not only faith, but the things that naturally flow out of faith, those things scripture calls good works.

Sure, you can divorce these concepts from Jesus, and in some place at the back of most people’s minds there’s this place that defined a certain moral code, but why would you want to? Maybe it’ll restrain some evil in the world or something, but at what cost?

I personally feel that a lot of our Christan brothers have got things backwards. Sure, a country that doesn’t marry gays is in a better place than one that does, but what does that mean to the unchurched and nonchristians? Nothing. Why should it? Try forcing that view on them, and outside of the context of Jesus, you have a mean system of morality that denigrates people and calls all sorts of things “bad” without providing the very redemption from those things that Jesus offers.

Maybe I’m just talking to myself here–after all, I don’t enough fingers to count the times I’ve stolen from Jesus, or beat him up, or whatever–and maybe I’m not making much sense. But it looks like it works, doesn’t it? Can you imagine a world blanketed in Christians? Can you imagine an America as a nation of Christians instead of a so-called Christian nation? Can you imagine a Canada that says, “We do this because we love Jesus.”?

I am unabashedly for sola scriptura.

That is, scripture is my only plumbline, my only yardstick. Not to say I’m good at it. Not to say I ever will be. But when push comes to shove, that’s where I’ll stand. When Jesus says, for instance, that the kingdom of God is at hand, meaning that it’s here, it’s now, it’s on this earth, I take that at face value. When Paul says that the kingdom of God is after the resurrection, I take that at face value, too.

But I am not ashamed to say people are imperfect. The “but” beginning that sentence may not make sense now; let me explain. Scripture only goes as far as it goes. It lays down hard and fast rules sometimes, but most often it lays down principles to follow, or guidelines to observe.

Our depravity as people enters here, that we are asked by holy scripture to figure it out for ourselves. (Incidentally, this is why the way of Jesus is so transferable, from culture to culture; there’s no one way to dress, for instance. There’s just decency and modesty.) The writers of the canonical books didn’t have a clue about optical information transfer and the hive mind of the internet, or internal combustion engines. They probably didn’t even understand the vast immensity of the universe that the Hubble telescope has unfurled for us in such vivid photography. Yet they had the seeds of it all there. Why is the free transfer of information good? Why is unlocking the secrets of the universe good? How should we do it? What should be our aim? And even when our goals and methods aren’t very good at all, what should be our response?

That God gave us brains to do this stuff is amazing. It draws glory to him above all. The fact that I can talk to some guy in Indonesia, the fact that I can send money to Come Over and Help to feed and clothe the young people of Eastern Europe, the fact that I can understand how I can’t grasp the vastness of the universe – these things all glorify God in their own way.

Yet, our brains, our beings, these things are all incredibly tainted. The vestiges of perfection are there, yes, but think of the ways humanity, created in God’s image, has mis-applied the gift. War. Weapons. Cruelty. Racism. Poverty. Sexism. Materialism.

These are things that even Christians have perpetuated on other Christians. Let’s not even mention what non-Christians have done to eachother in this and the last century alone! Even with our continuing personal reformation there is still a big chunk of absolute shit in each of our hearts. Think of what you, if you’re a Christian, have done to your brother or sister. To your fellow kingdom member. To your family. To your neighbor. I know: I’ve done my fair share and a bit more.

But focus merely on the application of scripture. Imagine the Roman Empire with its abundant slavery, and imagine Paul giving slaves the same dignity in Christ as their masters. Imagine how this will, eventually, snuff out slavery altogether. Now imagine Africans being sold by their fellow Africans to slavers, then sold again to the nominally Christian American southerners. How does that fit with the message of the Bible that slave, free, man, woman, black man, and white man are all equal under Christ? It doesn’t. Slavery is evil. Period. And those that promoted slavery while claiming to be Christians were committing a heinous crime against the ethos of scripture, and of Jesus’ and Paul’s message.

Imagine the battalions of Roman soldiers stationed over the known world, the emperors of which empire exercised every manner of cruelty against their enemies. Imagine Jesus’ message that the kingdom of God is not perpetuated with a sword, or with a spear, or Isaiah’s message of weapons being melted down and made into plowshares. Now imagine a nominally Christian president of a nominally Christian nation waging an unjust war against an equally unjust dictator, all while under a flag of a nation that mentions God in every pledge of allegiance. Imagine the thunderous trampling feet of nominally Christian armies lifting sword and shield to free a holy land. Imagine heretics being burned alive. War is evil. Unjust war is even more evil. And those that promote war in the face of scripture’s repudiation of it, and who promoted “redemptive violence” in the name of the Prince of Peace are committing and have committed a heinous crime in and against the name of Jesus.

All this to say, “We’re not perfect.” The sins of Christianity in the 2,000 years after Christ are many and complex. They are more numerous and more complicated that the sins of the Jews in the 2,000 years after Moses. I’ve mentioned some overt sins. But there are more, and they are personal. They are in the hearts of Christians who embrace a Hellenistic version of Christianity, or a rationalistic version of Christianity, or a Judaic version of Christianity, or a post-modern version of Christianity, or a materialistic version of Christianity, or a Pharisaical version of Christianity, and on, and on, and on.

We’re not perfect. This is the reason we stand on scripture as final authority. It is perfect. You can laugh at that from your modernist standpoint if you wish. I am convinced of it, like Paul was convinced.

But I am not convinced we Christians always get its spirit right. I am not certain I do, either. This is why I am unable to simply accept human tradition as an augment to the word. Isn’t that what the reformers fought against? This is why I am unwilling to simply submit to a certain cultural interpretation of scripture. This is why I am unable to say that things lacking clarity in scripture must go only one way. This is why I am suspicious of people who say that such and such is a necessary result of following scripture.

This is why I feel compelled to re-examine practice in the light of scripture over and over again, and to ask questions, and be convinced in my imperfection by that which is in itself perfect in every way. Have you done these things? I think they’re necessary. Essential, even. Simply because my evil runs deeper than even I know (and some of you will of course point out with a wink and a nudge a few places I haven’t noticed yet), and because, like the church, I am my own greatest enemy, and like the church, need Jesus, and only Jesus.

Thanks to Sarah (via direct conversation) and Laura (via her being her and me being me) I’ve been thinking about baptism. And of course, when you think of baptism, what springs to mind?

The essential issue in paedobaptism vs credobaptism is, I think, your view on what covenant means, and what being spiritual children of Abraham means, both of which are very much tangled up with eachother.

For instance, it’s clear that we are now in a new and better covenant than the old one. The old one being the Mosaic covenant, whose symbols and rituals have been set aside in the face of the Real Thing, Jesus Christ. I think we can all agree on that, as the language is straight out of Hebrews. The thing is we tend to fight about is the continuity of those two covenants; what parts of what have been carried over and what have not? And which have been changed, and which not?

I prefer to go back a bit further and look at the covenant God made with Abraham, the one that promised that in him, all the nations of the world would be blessed. A covenant that is expressly spoken of in Genesis as “everlasting”. This covenant has clearly not been abrogated, since the modern church is called the spiritual children of Abraham. Yet this covenant, if not abbrogated, has certainly been changed: we’re no longer required to circumcise our children, and the rest we are promised has already come and is yet to come. Yet the promise remains to us and to them – reading that portion of scripture without any disingenuous semantic manipulation – or, they are also spiritual children of Abraham.

The fact that our identification with Abraham is spiritual, and our covenant with Christ is spiritual doesn’t change this fact. It also doesn’t change the fact that though we are a spiritual people, we are also very much a physical people (pinch yourself and find out). The new covenant is rooted in something very physical: Christ’s body and blood. We celebrate this every time we observe the Eucharist. We baptise people, children or adult, with a physical sign of a spiritual reality: water.

What I’m trying to say is we’re not either a physical people (like the Jews) or a spiritual people (like, you know, ghosts), but that we’re both at the same time. By faith included as children of Abraham, and like his children and descendants, ours also.

I’ve been reading some fiction, but more than that a couple nonfic theological books I checked out of the church library (which is a really funny library, by the way). They are: What Is Reformed Theology, and a book explaining the theology of a Christian Sabbath. I don’t remember the name of the latter.

In any case, I really appreciate WiRT, as I do most books by RC Sproul; especially when he explains the difference between the study of religion and the study of theology, not to mention the distinctive Reformed theological trait he develops, that Reformed theology is primarily concerned with the God. Every other point flows from that viewpoint, and as a staunchly Reformed young man myself, I cannot but agree.

The second book isn’t as well-written; it still puzzles me how so many books about the Christian Sabbath can start off as a polemic, when they really should start as a celebration. One of the best things going for Sabbath theology as exposited today, a rather recent innovation in Reformed and Presbyterian circles from what I can ascertain, is its focus on and celebration of a coming and extant kingdom represented in a future and present day of rest. But as you move past the “greedy people who want to turn Sabbath into every other day” bits, it’s a really rewarding book. Even if you don’t agree with the idea of a Christian Sabbath or a day of rest as a creation ordinance (Luther certainly didn’t, and Calvin did or didn’t depending on whether you read his exposition of Exodus or his Institutes), it’s a good introduction to why people make such a big deal out of things like the “Lord of the Sabbath” quote.

I just lost the longest theologically-related post ever, and I want to shoot myself in the head. Let me summarise:

1. Why does the church, described by scripture as nomadic, put so much stock in buildings and the like?
2. Why do we do church the way we do? We don’t kneel, for instance, or lift our hands in prayer.
3. How do we do church in such a way as to reach this current generation? If not worship services, what then?
4. What philosophical bent does your worship service portray?
5. People who want to be in a church are the most happy, the best members. If they want to come, let them in; if they want to leave, let them go.

Gah. These question brought to you by The Bridge, where I was this morning to see Laura and play the djembe. It was good. New theatre to meet in. But seriously, I’m PISSED that I lost that post.

In the vein of blogging till my fingers fall off, and having had time to let Sunday morning’s sermon on the Lord’s Supper percolate, I present for your consideration some questions I had during said sermon. Please note that I am not stating a view of my own here: I don’t deny the LS as it’s set forth in any of the doctrinal standards my church holds to. These are merely questions that I think bear answering. With that in mind, I continue.

First, before I start asking any questions, I want to note the historical context of our doctrinal standards: the classic Reformed struggle again Catholicism. This colours almost every paragraph in the standards, with the exception of a very few that deal with Arminianism and other damnable heresies (not my words). Because of that, and because these standards haven’t been updated to include any of the prominant modern damnable heresies, I sometimes wonder if they wouldn’t bear some additions. For instance, dealing with a more modern corruption of the doctrines relating to the Holy Spirit.

That said, I have to ask if our understanding of Roman Catholic practices – and I tread carefully, I’m not saying that we need to accept any of their stances – might be improved with some dialogue with actual RCCers. Most of our preaching that deals with those practices seems to be more polemic in nature than those practices may deserve. I merely ask this question. For instance, the idea that the bread and wine in the eucharist are reverenced derives from the idea that they are the actual body and blood of Christ. Therefore, it makes sense to treat them like a holy thing. I say this because if – and I mean this if in an argumentative sense – that practice is wrong, it’s because of something: practices and symbols and whatnot derive their meaning from the underlying philosophy that drives them to be enacted in the first place. Or more to the point, it doesn’t follow that we should go oh, my, what a silly practice you wacky Catholics! Instead, the weighing and balancing of the why in all that. Get at the root. At the same time tempering this teaching with a certain humility in that we are not in ourselves superior in any way to people who believe these things, at least not in ourselves. I guess what I mean is not look down long doctrinal noses.

My first real question is about the idea of closed or close communion. If you submit that the eucharist is something that each person must judge for themselves in their hearts, then why the guards at the gates? If a person really wants to partake in unworthy manner, that person is likely already a hypocrite and doesn’t really care about what you’re saying. If anything, does a close communion not merely discourage people from coming to the table? And if you believe that the eucharist is a particular or special means of grace, is that not a bad thing?

Secondly, I understand the warnings to those who would partake in said unworthy manner. I think they are necessary. But again, a hypocrite doesn’t want to look unworthy. A hypocrite says in his heart for whatever reason that it’s better to look good and eat than look bad and not. Perhaps, then, could the emphasis not be on the table as an opportunity for the hypocrite to begin real heart change then and there?

Thirdly – and this is my main question – the mention of the Lord’s Supper as a means of special grace, and as a covenant meal brings several subquestions to mind.

If – and this is a big if, as the Reformation has not been particularly united on this front to my understanding – the eucharist is a means of special grace, above and beyond the normal means of grace that God provides in our everyday life; and if it is a covenant meal – remembering that the covenant is to us and to our children – how then do we deny children who have made a profession of faith this means of grace?

I am merely asking this as a hypothetical talking point. But follow the logic, as I believe many paedocommunionists would put it forth. We do not expect our children to understand baptism when they are baptised. This is a fairly common point. But we do it anyways, because baptism is a covenant sign and the covenant doesn’t extend merely to those who have stood up and said so. Major source of disagreement between Reformers and Baptists of various varieties. We do this despite there being no specific, clear command to do so, but mostly as a result of our covental reading of scripture, and as a result of baptism being a clear outgrowth of the practice of circumcision (as scripture itself says).

One might say, however, that the eucharist is an outgrowth of another Jewish practice, the Passover feast. It was also a covenant meal. But – and this point challenged two points – if it is an outgrowth of the Passover feast like baptism is an outgrowth of circumcision, and if it is a covenant meal in the same way the Passover was a covenant meal, then not only is it not a means of special grace but instead a meal of rememberance, but also should be partaken in a more covenantal sense: the whole family.

Now, let’s say one disagrees with this. Let’s say that one thinks the Lord’s Supper is a meal that does confer grace. Or in simple terms, it does something, and that something is a special something. Why then would you deny a child who has made any sort of profession, however young they might be, from a means of growth in his fledgling faith? That’s tantamount to saying that a person should grow up without the means to grow until one has grown old enough to have the means of growth. It seems backwards, do you see? One might even go so far – and again, I am not myself saying this – as to say that our tradition of a public profession of faith ushering a member into full communion is a barrier to the growth of the very people who need the strength most to make that profession. It’s an interesting line of logic.

On the other hand, if one believes that the eucharist is merely a rememberance, then why would you stop a child from remembering with you the death of Jesus Christ? Again, an interesting line of logic.

Anyhow, now you all have something to think about. Or, you have something to skim over and dismiss before breakfast. Or a late night snack.

If there’s one thing I brought back from the message at MaryBeth’s wedding this weekend, it’s that we Reformers sure like to talk about the Covenant. In fact, if you’ve ever seen the catechism material our churches like to use – at least the few I’ve been to – you’ll understand. As a friend pointed out to me, every single lesson is about covenant.

The interesting thing in watching messages or listening to messages from outside my circles is how they seem to focus on Jesus, almost never mentioning any Covenant of any kind. Not because they necessarily aren’t covenantal in their theology, but more because it’s not something that’s in the forefront of their minds or tacked on as the foreword to every concept.

I’ll be the first person to tell you that covenant is essential. For Israel, their covenant with Yahweh was the jewel (or the centrepiece) of their entire faith as it was expressed in the nation itself. They were in a much more tangible sense than we are in direct, visible covenant with God. But at the same time, the covenant itself isn’t the endgame: there’s more to it. In fact, the whole thing points in the end to the person who made it with the people who joined into it by choice or otherwise. For the Jews of the Old Testament, that person was God as he revealed himself to them. Covenantally, to be sure. But in the end, the Jews came to focus on that covenant instead of what it pointed to, I think. That is to say, their nationhood and its personality in relation to this earth became more important – think of the uprising during Roman times – than what it actually meant.

More to the point, they concentrated on the relationship more than they concentrated on the author of the relationship. In that, they became static: the OT covenant was very much about the Mosaic Law, and the Mosaic Law became something of an idol to the religious leaders, regardless of their particular racing stripes. They guarded it with their verbal law, basically hedging the Law around with “safeguards”, or garnishing the ground around their statue. Whatever you prefer to call it. Eventually it got so bad that the garnish obscured the object of their effections, and I think that’s when it all went bad. Not only had they removed the Covenant from the context of relationship with Yahweh, they also removed the Law from its context of that relationship until there was such a divide between what the Law and Covenant really meant and what it was supposed to represent that they couldn’t see the forest for the trees.

Not, of course, to say “screw the covenant and concentrate on the relationship”, but instead put your Law back in the context it deserves and let it show you the things it’s meant to show you. I think this is part of what Jesus came to show to the people of Israel: your Covenant with Yahweh is not about your nationhood. Your nationhood is, instead, about God. But of course, once your nation is the penultimate theological drive in your life, it’s difficult not to crucify the things getting in the way.

Not only that, Jesus came to tell them the same thing that Hebrews tells us. Both Covenants, however you arrange and separate them, are about the Christ. The law is imperfect in that it cannot save. The old covenant is imperfect in that it centres around that Law. Christ, however, is perfect in that he can and does save from sin, and the new covenant in his blood is therefore perfect. This is, I think, extremely orthodox.

But the same thing applies today: our faith is not about the new covenant. The new covenant is, instead, about Christ’s death and resurrection. And when I say a generous orthodoxy in the title of this post, what I mean to say is that we – focusing perhaps too tightly on covenants – and those such as the Emergent Church – focusing perhaps too tightly on Christ – are pretty much saying the same thing.

This is how I would say it: the covenant is not the centrepiece of our Christian faith. No, Jesus Christ is, and our relationship to him as individuals, churches, and the church. We are in a covenantal relationship with him, yes, but let’s not get all hung up on what type of relationship that is all the time, because while it may be academically helpful and scripturally fruitful, it’s just a means to an end. The means: covenant. The end: relationship with Jesus.

I heard a pastor friend of mine once comment that a sermon isn’t quite complete without Jesus. All of scripture points to him. The finger it uses is these different covenants, and though we may not agree on all the garnish, we do have a point of ecumenical agreement with other churches in that fact, whether we talk about the relationship or the object of it.

Which is just my way of saying that we aren’t so different after all.