Let me go to the ever reliable 1913 edition of Webster’s once-fine dictionary, listing just two definitions of `covenant’ which seem most relevant to my discussion:
- A mutual agreement of two or more persons or parties, or one of the stipulations in such an agreement. [Appropriate example:] Then Jonathan and David made a covenant. –1 Sam. xviiii. 3.
- (Theol.) The promises of God as revealed in the Scriptures, conditioned on certain terms on the part of man, as obedience, repentance, faith, etc.
In general, covenants, in the sense of solemn and sometimes legally binding agreements, are fundamental to human societies, but the concept of covenant has been woven into a wrongful understanding of human being and of all of Creation and also into a wrongful understanding of the relationships between human beings and God. We can do better. The concept of covenant is valid and seemingly necessary to our understanding of human being and of Creation, but that’s the rub; it’s part of human being, individual and communal, to make covenants and to try to live by them. Yet, covenants—including those in the Bible—have played a role in the idea that human beings were created in some sort of state where they were already capable of forming the Body of Christ. All of our inadequacies and actual rebellious or criminal acts are bundled up in the concept of sin (and “original sin”). In the newest and least plausible versions of this myth of human being, our apish ancestors—at some mysterious instant and in the persons of a man and a woman genetically traceable to periods as much as 100,000 years apart from each other—a true human race rose fully capable of being God-like, true brethren of Christ, if only we would obey laws which were revealed in various ways in history, yet were actually declarations of truths imposed by a God from outside of time and space, truths said to be reflective of the moral nature of human beings evolved and developed and living in a highly particular time and space.
Whew!
The sheer breathlessness of the last sentence of the previous paragraph should alert us to the botched nature of our understanding of human being. We have created a chimera which is part Adam as conceived by premodern Christians and Jews and part the vague creature of nature as envisioned by Darwin and his successors. In fact, as Augustine of Hippo considered and rejected, as many modern writers of various and sundry beliefs seem to expect or fear, human beings are both of those and neither of those. They are partly the creatures found in the writings of the truly wise commentators of Jewish and Christian history—images of God in the usual terminology, as well as partly found in the writings of wise pagans; they are partly human animals descended from apes; they are something else in total.
It’s the totality with which we have great problems, though tools are available in modern mathematics and modern physical scientists to make sense of totalities which are the sum of lesser entities which retain their individuality and which are also something else. The universe in which we live is the sum of its various components and also itself; it is container of much and also a universe with its own properties. (See A Universe is More than it Contains for an early discussion of the issue based upon the fact that a relativistic universe, which ours seems to be, violates the so-called Law of the Conservation of Energy, though that law—better: principle—holds at all local places and times.)
We moderns who, in one example, have done so much good work in analyzing parts of communal human being, such as the political and economic and social parts, have shattered Humpty Dumpty and yet we retain memories of what we thought him to have been before we began our studies of his being. So it is that we have great knowledge of the biochemistry of his shell and his albumen and his DNA but we Christians have chosen to think yet of his totality in terms of the ancient view of an egg as containing a tiny chick which just needs to grow without any of the fancy development which is, in fact, necessary for that shell-enclosed puddle of chemicals to become a Sunday roast. We can do better if we but have the courage and energy, the willingness to work hard and to experiment with new ideas, to engage with traditional and modern understandings, and to rethink matters, that we might produce total understandings which will be as powerful as useful.
We have various misunderstandings of human being and of Creation which can now be corrected because of our greater and more precise and more correct and more reliable knowledge of created being in this world of concrete, thing-like being and also better knowledge of some of the realms of abstract being which mathematicians in particular have explored in recent centuries.
We Christians, and some others, think of covenants in the context of a static Creation and of a static human being when such is not the case. Creation isn’t just this world created once and in more or less final form, whether 4,000 years ago or 14 billion years ago.
Think of it all as a house built on-site and still under construction and remodeling, set in a particular landscape of a grassy plain and nearby hills and a lake and so on; that house has human occupants. They make covenants with one another, as well as growing into existing covenants. Some of those occupants also make an explicit covenant with the Creator of it all, the maker of the landscape as well as of the house and its occupants.
All of those creatures, living and nonliving, are dynamic, always changing in their genetic family-lines (call this evolution, if you wish) and in their individual selves (call this development, if you wish). Human beings as a species have evolved a lot in just the past 10,000 years when human intelligence has risen dramatically and very much so for some groups of human beings. (See The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution by Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending.) This evolution was facilitated largely by changes in the structures of human communities responding to new opportunities; these changes were caused by and led to the need for higher social intelligence, though there was surely some effect as well from the sudden explosion in technology including metalworking as well as horse-breeding; warriors and kings and blacksmiths and horse-breeders gained large advantages in reproduction.
So it is that I claim that covenants in 2000BC (call it the Age of Abraham) and those in 1000BC (call it the Age of Moses) and 1750AD (call it the Age of Blackstone) were not the same. Covenants were once a supernatural relationship even when between two mortal men. Then they were probably more a matter of honor. Now they are probably more of a dry legal matter.
The definitions from the 1913 edition of Webster at the beginning of this essay give us a pretty good way of understanding certain relationships between men and between God and men. In this short essay, I’m mostly interested in covenants between God and men, whether `men’ is one human being or many or all of those who respond positively to God’s invitation of friendship or all human beings—with some necessary flexibility in definition.
In the far olden days, even those tending toward monotheism saw God and world in paganistic terms—God could impose His will upon the world but it existed somewhat in parallel and was maybe as `old’ as was the Almighty. To the later Hebrews and the early Jews and early Christians, it seemed clear—in some sense of the word `clear—that God was a Creator in an absolute sense; before He spoke the world into being, there was nothing but God. Over some centuries, Christian thinkers—beginning with the ancient Christian Fathers and going through St Augustine of Hippo and on through Aquinas—developed a sophisticated metaphysics under which God could be coherently described as the absolute Creator of this world as understood in the centuries of the so-called Middle Ages of Europe (about 500-1400AD). More recently, any understanding of God as a Creator has to take account of such modern knowledge and theories as the Big Bang—not an act of Creation but rather some sort of strange change in the phase of being. This phase change or change in state of being is so strange because it was and is a weird sort of abstract being on the `other’ side and concrete, thing-like being on our side. So to speak.
Abstract being which seems to truly be some sort of mathematical entity, that is—the quantum wavefunction which `collapses’ (bad but useful term) to form matter-energy, can be awfully dynamic indeed, though actually deterministic in its abstract form as well as dynamic. Matter is more particular than the abstract mathematical being from which it is shaped; therefore, matter doesn’t move so rapidly as does that mathematical being. And, yet, we know that quantum wavefunctions, the mathematical being from which matter is shaped, seems fully deterministic—raising a variety of questions as to where it comes from, but that is outside the scope of this essay.
More importantly for now, we have to realize that our own dynamic human being has passed through various states of being. As a species, we arose immediately from a line resulting from a split with chimpanzees. As individuals, we developed from the combination and recombination of egg and DNA with sperm and DNA.
When did the first individual human being arise who could enter a conscious relationship, a covenant, with God?
Given the rapid evolution of human intelligence over the past 10,000 years, we’d have to assume that the undoubtedly real, though shadowy, men who became immortalized as the patriarchs of the Israelites, were of lesser intelligence than modern men—unless they were so unusual as was the handful of modern geniuses such as Newton and Goethe who were so much smarter in some ways than other modern men.
A covenant between God and an early (neolithic) anatomically modern human being would have been pretty rudimentary compared to what is found in the theological and metaphysical and devotional writings of St Basil the Great or John Henry Newman, though most such covenants are made between God and entire communities. A neolithic tribe would have had rich but simple relationships. That tribe itself wouldn’t have been capable of forming a sophisticated covenant with God, nor with other tribes. A great leader from that tribe wouldn’t have been capable, even with the proper upbringing, to have filled the shoes of Moses and certainly not those of Solon or Charlemagne or William the Conqueror or George Washington.
We can see in the Bible in a distorted, but largely true, way the formation of early civilizations in Southwest Asia and northern Africa. It seems to have been true to human being, individual and communal, that the political structure of these civilizations were defined in self-serving ways by men talented in organizing human communities and individual projects—including large-scale acts of violence. Even as men during the lifetimes of Isaiah and Jeremiah were collecting and redacting ancient narratives, oral and written, we can speculate that the model for covenants between God and men were those enforced by warlords, princes and kings and sometimes leaders of nomadic tribes, yet, none organizing political or military communities so complex as those of the first Chinese emperor, Qin Shi Huang, not nearly so complex as those of later empires in various parts of Eurasia and, eventually, the Americas and Africa.
A covenant with God remains true to the definition found above and taken from Webster’s 1913:
The promises of God as revealed in the Scriptures, conditioned on certain terms on the part of man, as obedience, repentance, faith, etc.
But, it’s also more than a bit different. After all, God is no longer quite the God of the ancient Hebrews, seen necessarily in terms of concepts available to the Patriarchs and Moses, nor is He the somewhat better encapsulated God of Isaiah and Jeremiah and Ezra and Ezekiel on to the Apostles and premodern Christian Fathers. Rather than a monotheistic version of a pagan Sky-God or Divine King, God has revealed Himself—through modern empirical knowledge—as a God who operates primarily through His power to create and to continuously create in the way of shaping, in the way of forming and maintaining relationships.
God is not only a mathematician, not only a designer—if a designer at all, but He is the Creator who made the abstract being studied by mathematicians, the universe studied by various people including those who overestimate the “design” elements, the living creatures studied by the most atheistic of biologists, the human race studied by historians and anthropologists.
God is not primarily a King and is not at all a King who lives up in Heaven and rules over a Creation which is at His feet. He is a Creator and Shaper of what is not Him. His covenant is given to us at all times of men in a way that we can best and—necessarily—partially understand. As I pointed out above, even the revelation that He is the Creator has been more fully revealed over time as human being has evolved and matured—starting as a pagan Father God who is dominant over other gods and over a creation not quite a creation from nothingness, the Almighty is now best seen and understood by use of not only Scriptural revelation re-understood by modern Biblical scholars but also by use of modern physics and biology and history and mathematics. Even thinkers such as Augustine of Hippo, Moses Maimonides, and Thomas Aquinas had a far simpler understanding of `Creator’ and `Creation’ than is possible because of, than is demanded by, better understanding of created being.
It’s probably best to say that we can now understand our covenant with the God of Jesus Christ in terms not at odds with the ancient covenants of Noah and Abraham, of post-exile Jews and premodern Christians, but rather in those terms but enhanced with our modern knowledge of God in His freely chosen role as Creator. We owe all we are and all we have to our Maker but He chose to make us out of the stuff explored by modern physicists and by processes explored by modern biologists.