Why I Am Covenantal

I am Covenantal by quite the accident. My journey from Dispensational to Covenantal theology is a testimony to the positive effects of Post-Conservativism at its’ finest! Becoming a covenantal theologian has proved to be the greatest, most fruitful, and insightful change from one doctrinal (traditional) position to another which I have ever experienced.

I say that I became a covenantal theologian by accident because I did not seek out to become covenantal, I did not read books by covenantists, I didn’t even know covenantal theology existed; all I did – being the post-conservative that I am – is ask question and read my bible. I understand that things are not quite that simple, nonetheless this is how it all began; and the results have had a positive domino effect!

I was raised in dispensational theology. To me (and I suspect to most dispensationalists in the pews) dispensationalism was simply what the bible taught and what all Christians everywhere and always believed. Dispensationalism is, at risk of oversimplification, “Left Behind” theology. I’ll use these terms interchangeably because like myself, many people probably have never heard the word “dispensationalism”, so if I say Left Behind theology it’ll keep everyone on the same playing field. When I say Left Behind theology I mean books by guys like Tim Lahaye, Hal Lindsay, Mark Hichock, David Jeremiah, Grant Jeffrey, John Walvoord, and Joel Rosenburg just to name a few. In other words, Dispensational Theology, Left Behind Theology, is rooted in a particular understanding of “End Times”.

Here is the key which this post hangs: in order for Left Behind guys to come up with this understanding of the End Times they had to invent a new way to read the bible. This new way they invented around the year 1830 is called Dispensationalism. The key which dispensationalist hinges on is the persistent and stubborn insistence to maintain a clear and sharp distinction between Israel and the Church. There are TWO peoples of God and Two plans of God. This interpretive lens gets even sharper: When the Messiah first came he attempted to establish the Kingdom of Heaven by sitting on the Jewish throne as David’s heir as the Jews expected. The Messiah was going to destroy the enemies of Israel and establish peace on earth. However, Israel rejected the Messiah as their King and instead crucified him. As a result, God postponed his plans with Israel and turned his attention to the Gentiles, i.e. the Church. But this “dispensation” called the “church age” (an inconvenient side effect of Israel’s rejection of the Messiah) will end with God taking his church out of the way by means of a Secret rapture and will then turn his attention back to Israel.

In other words, redemptive history for the dispensationalist looks something like this: God elected Abraham and his descendents to be his special people. He gave them the law which included the sacrificial system to atone for sins. The children of Israel rebelled and ended up in Exile, but God delivered them from exile, sent them the Messiah to be their King (… Church age… oops) to defeat the nations of the world and to rule on David’s through forever. This is the part of Left Behind theology that has avoided the popular eye. The church which in parenthesis (…) is the dispensational understanding of the New Testament, Christ’s work on the cross, the Resurrection, and you and I; all of this is the great “oops” of God’s redemptive history.

So I read and I reread and I wrestled and I studied and I asked questions and then I read again and again and again and finally in frustration I asked the question: where the heck is all of this stuff! Where is the great divide between Jews and Gentiles? Paul said God is no respecter of persons and that there is neither Jew nor Gentile for all are one in Christ! I am compelled to ask the question: what if the Jews had not rejected Christ as their King? The cross – God’s answer to the problem of the fall – would have never occurred, neither would the resurrection and humanity would be lost in their trespasses and sins without hope, how could the cross be the “oops” if it was the plan all along? How were the Jews “saved” by the law with its sacrificial system if the scriptures are very explicit that animal sacrifices could never take away sins? How were the Old Testament saints saved? Why would God arbitrarily choose Israel for salvation leaving the rest for damnation? What relevance does the Old Testament have to the Church today aside of moral teachings and the such?

These were huge questions for me. This entire approach to the scriptures leaves them wholly disfigured. Nothing makes any sense. This invention of the dispensationalists to make up this new way to interpret the bible (which was not new to me at all) in an effort to support a particular End Times theory leaves the bible on the cutting room floor, loose leaves all over the place. Everything is arbitrary, inconsistent, and full of discontinuity.

I began to blame myself. I suspect that a part of the reason why I am writing this blog is because there are those out there (probably lots of you) who are in a similar situation, and also blaming themselves. If the bible doesn’t make any sense it is because we are too stupid to grasp it. We must hang on to a hand full of “key” passages as a hope that we are on the right track; these hand full of passages having been given us by the “professionals”, i.e. the great grandparents passed them down the line until you one day heard them in Sunday School. We love to read the Rosenberg’s, the Laheys, the Lindsay’s, and we know they can’t be wrong because just look at current events. Just look at how this event or that event matches up with this or that verse in the bible. How could they be wrong? So if the rest of the bible doesn’t make sense, if we are too stupid to grasp it then that’s okay. Just leave it to the professionals, hang on to your handful of favorite passages and shut up and sit down.

But have you ever considered that you are not as stupid as this doctrinal approach to the bible makes you feel! Give yourself some credit, give the Holy Spirit some credit, and the give the bible some credit for heaven’s sake! To be sure there are very many difficult things in the bible, and for these we rely on the professionals to help us return to the Bible times. But there is also a "natural reading" of the bible which testifies against the Dispensational approach. That is why whenever someone comes in to buy their first bible I always recommend that they first get a plain text bible without study notes, and I encourage them to read it through from front to back first before they allow someone to stick ideas in their head. What I am convinced will happen is that later when someone tries to fill their head with a dispensational worldview bells and whistles will go off because the dispensational approach goes against (not with) the flow of the scripture and redemptive history.

As I read the bible, my "Left Behind" theology seemed to make God arbitrary. Yet I refused to believe that God is arbitrary so the pad answers to my questions never satisfied and I knew there had to be another way – the post-conservative that I am. While taking a Pentateuch class in Bible College I made the mistake of mentioning the “Old Testament Saints” and referred to them as the “ekklesia” – i.e. the Old Testament church. I got chastised by my teacher, was sternly told that they were “under the law” and at the top of the page on our final exam was written in big bold type: You are in no way to relate Israel to the Church or use words like “Grace” (or something like this). Later that year a fellow student approached me in a different class and she asked me a question that I had spent many a year’s asking; she asked, “Derek, how were the Old Testament people saved?” (This was before class started and only we and the teacher were in the room), I tried to whisper so as not to cause contention with the teacher, “Well, this school teaches that they were saved through the law and sacrificial system. I believe that they were saved by grace through faith”. Despite my silence, the teacher, Mrs. Holmes, over heard. She came and said in a sweet old tone: “By law? Balderdash! No one gonna tell me there was no grace in the Old Testament!” I wanted to grab this saint, give her a bear hug and swinger her through the air in delight; it was the most encouraging thing I heard all year. When she passed away that summer, to my still pain, the school lost one of its most keen and fair minded teachers.

I was primed and ready to understand the bible differently, but how? Was there another way? As a matter of fact there was and all that would be required was for someone to point the way. There is where O Palmer Roberstson's book, Christ of the Covenants comes in, and later (and more enlightening) was N.T. Wrights book, “Climax of the Covenant”!

When God called Abraham he did so with the intention of redeeming all peoples – indeed all of creation. God’s call to Abraham was to set into motion a plan that would undo the effects of the fall. God’s covenant with Abraham was both unconditional (Gen. 15: God placed his own life on the line) and conditional (Gen. 17). The situation was not that all ethnic Israelites would be saved no matter what; rather only those circumcised (which we later discover was supposed to be an outward expression of a circumcised heart as Exodus tells us) were a part of God’s covenant with Abraham, and this included “strangers and aliens”, i.e. those who are not descended from Abraham physically could still partake. “Israel” was more of a concept, a changed name, than a physical entity. The nation was to embody the concept, it is not a mistake that Israel means “Prince with God”; if you remember, Adam was created as a co-regent with God, a ruler of this world under God. Israel’s call was to embody Adam’s original call: those who were circumcised in the heart were a part of God’s covenant with Abraham and therefore the answer to the problem of the fall. It was no mistake then that God gave Israel a “promised land" which was a land bridge between the three major continents of the world at that time: Egypt, Asia, and Mesopotamia. Israel was to be a light to the world and the “concept of Israel” was to spread to all nations. Of course this did not happen because of one crucial set back: Israel was still “in Adam”, that is, they could not be the answer to the problem because they themselves were still a part of the problem. They were wholly disobedient to God and as a result found themselves in Exile; this mirrored Adam’s disobedience to God and his own Exile from the Garden of Eden, an Exile which humanity has forever since been in. Israel’s Exile only proved that they were a part of the problem.

But what about Genesis 15 and God’s unconditional promise to Abraham in which God staked his own life on the line? He would need a “true Israelite”, a representative of Israel someone who would succeed in perfect obedience to the point even of death, the death of a cross (Phil. 2). And through this perfect Israelite, obviously Christ, a new creation would be born – an undoing of the effects of the fall. This was the first Resurrection; Christ’s own resurrection. Now if we are “in Christ” (that is, in Israel) by the faith of Abraham than we are in the Covenant of God and a part of the family of God. And this is why Paul could write that we the church are the “Israel of God” (Gal. 5).

The scriptures for the first time make the greatest of sense. God is not longer arbitrary, he is a purpose driven God. The scriptures are no longer disjointed, they are holistic. And that is why I am a Covenantal Theologian today.

Derek

(P.S. I have developed different aspects of this blog elsewhere: click here)