A note for my readers: With this post, I draw to a conclusion a brief series of blog posts on what it means to be Reformed. These posts collectively are an attempt to retrieve some of what remains valuable in the Reformed tradition. There is much more to be done. Traditions must periodically be retrieved, often not so much from their critics as from their friends. Lately, this seems true for the Reformed tradition. Those who most adamantly claim the tradition are often those who seem to understand it least. 

I will be traveling next week, returning home after a year-long stay in the Bay area of California. I have a number of things in mind for the blog once I settle back into Bellingham: a look at the agenda for Synod 2024 (Christian Reformed), some remote coverage for the synod itself, a review of a book on Genesis by Marilynne Robinson, a review of an older book by Denys Turner on Julian of Norwich, movies, and more. 

Finally, for those with enough patience to wade through two hours of talk, I recently appeared together with my nephew Kent Hendricks on Paul Vander Klay’s popular YouTube channel. You can find an abbreviated version of  the program here. 

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Christians are often better than their theology. Their theology may be narrow and rigid, but they are loving and open to others. Their theology may be entirely otherworldly. They may sing, “This world is not my home; I’m just a ‘passing through,” but they in fact care about and celebrate human life in all its dimensions. Their theology may tell them that same-sex marriage is an abomination, but when a queer couple move in next door, they bring cookies or share a meal. 

And sometimes even our theology is better than it has any right to be. We find in our theology a motif that seems at odds with the rest of what we think and profess to believe, but in spite of that dissonance we hold to that motif because it seems to us to articulate something basic and right about the faith. In Reformed theology, covenant occupies such a space. What covenant means in (much of) Reformed theology and what it has come to mean in our churches are different. It’s hard to stretch the idea of covenant that fills theology books over the instinctive theology of the covenant operative in churches, but this is not because the theology books are right and the theological instincts of our members are wrong but quite the opposite. In this post I hope to retrieve or, at least, begin to retrieve covenant not only from the dominant evangelical emphasis on decision but also from the mistaken articulations of covenant in the Reformed tradition.

For those who have not been following these posts on what it means to be Reformed, let me catch you up. After two introductory posts (here and here), I commented on two important, one could say, defining, emphases in the Reformed tradition: the distinctive Reformed way of construing salvation (the bracketing off of salvation as God’s business that comes under the heading of election; here) and the less distinctive but nevertheless important Reformed way of reading scripture (thematic reading of the Bible; here). I’ll resist the urge to review and modify what I have already said about those two Reformed emphases (I’m always tempted to do so, thinking that given another chance, I could say it better), except perhaps for a couple of places where those themes may intersect my topic in this post, the Reformed idea of covenant.

Of the three Reformed ideas, it’s the idea of covenant, judging from my own experience, that is at the heart of the lived experience of Reformed congregations. And, perhaps, the one that is most in peril. Covenant in the congregations of which I have been a part has to do with family in all the senses of the word. It names the family of faith, the meaning of church membership, the idea of denomination, and—this is crucial—the status of our kids. It’s for kids more than for anything else that we Reformed tend to speak “covenant”: covenant kids, covenant schools, and covenant baptism. In this usage “covenant” means roughly us. It names our life together.

It does so in a way that is quite distinctive in the religious and cultural atmosphere of our time. What it says is that faith—not just belief but the practice of the Christian life—is communal and generational. We do not believe alone. We believe and practice the faith in communities and in families. In the ethos of evangelicalism the notion that before my faith became my faith it was the faith of my parents and grandparents is thought to be somehow defective. Evangelicalism preaches for decisions, decisions made apart from anyone else. If we don’t believe on our own, so goes the common assumption, we don’t believe at all. Covenant denies that this is the case. Believing in community is as much faith as believing alone, perhaps more so.

Covenant says that our relationship to God is communal. We believe together. Or, better, we are faithful together, faith being larger than belief. And not only this, but being faithful together is the heart of our mission. Covenant community is sacramental. In Hebrew terms, it is tikkun ‘olam, the beginning of the healing of the world. Our community stands in relationship to God as a sacrament for the relationship between God and all the earth. In our covenant, all the world is covenanted.

Covenant is often subverted in practice in our churches by substituting some other kind of unity for covenant unity. Ethnicity, say. Or race. Or even theological identity. This also happened in biblical times. It’s idolatry. But for all the ways we subvert it in practice, covenant remains our best instinct. If we are to be Reformed for the future, we need to recover centrally covenant.

We need to recover covenant in particular from a theology that also has long Reformed roots. It’s sometimes called covenant theology, but to keep it straight for my purposes here I will call it by its proper name: federal theology. In using the word “covenant,” federal theology purports to be biblical. But it’s not. It uses “covenant” in a way foreign to the Bible. The central idea of federal theology is the notion of representation. In this way of thinking, humans are federated under a single head, the covenant representative. There are two such: Adam and Christ. Adam is the federal head for the old humanity; Christ is the federal head for the new humanity.

In federal theology, this idea is used to explain the reach of both sin and salvation. Or how these come to affect us. The sin of Adam becomes our sin, yours and mine, because Adam acted as the official representative of the human race. (What this does to Eve’s sin has always been one of those theological aporias that tantalizes seminary students.) In the same way, the obedience of Christ becomes our obedience because Christ represents us. At least, Christ does so (in this theology) for the elect. In this way, federal theology provides a legal framework for the doctrines of original sin and atonement.

These ideas are thoroughly 16^th century and European. They represent (sorry for the pun) a theological innovation. This does not mean that they don’t have value, but they are not what they are often claimed to be: the direct teaching of the Bible. When the Bible uses the word “covenant,” it can mean several things, but not this. The Bible knows nothing of the idea of covenant representation.

In the Bible, the central idea of covenant is an agreement, a contract. This idea of covenant is complicated in the Bible by two other ideas which make their appearance. One is promise, where the promise binds the person promising in a contractual way. When God, for example, promises Abraham that he will be the father of a great people, God binds Godself to that promise in a covenantal or contractual way (see Genesis 15). While promises of this sort and contractual agreements between parties are related, they are not the same thing.

When covenant is taken up in the New Testament, it adds an additional complexity. The Greek word used most to translate “covenant” in the Greek translation of the Old Testament, the Septuagint, was diathēkē, which means a “will” or a “testament,” introducing yet another idea into the mix. When Paul, for example, uses “covenant” (diathēkē) in Galatians 3:15, he doesn’t use it in the Old Testament sense. Instead, he plays on the idea of a last will or a testament. 

Had I the space in this post to do justice to covenant in the Bible, at this point I would pivot into what has been a lively scholarly conversation about covenant in the Bible over the past 75 years. The conversation began in earnest with the publication of a 1954 article by my dissertation advisor, George E. Mendenhall. Mendenhall noticed the way that covenant materials in the Bible aligned with Late Bronze Age Hittite treaty documents. They follow the same literary form. To Mendenhall, this suggested that some of the biblical materials, especially those associated with the covenant at Sinai, were ancient. Later treaties in the ancient Middle East did not follow the same pattern. Covenant, Mendenhall thought, goes back to Moses.

Whether this is true or not—recent scholarship tends to be dubious about claims for the antiquity of the Pentateuch—it leads, at least theologically if not historically, to a rather startling conclusion: the story of the covenant at the mountain in Exodus (repeated in Deuteronomy) is the story of the constituting of Israel. Covenant was not just a concept but an enacted reality. At the mountain, Israel came into existence. Israel was not a pre-existing ethnic group but people—enslaved people—gathered together in covenant with Yhwh, their God. Like the enactment of the US constitution, the people at the mountain entered into a new arrangement and became a new people.

It’s this idea of covenant—covenant as an enacted reality—that Jesus appears to have had in mind when he instituted the sacramental meal at the center of Christian community, saying, “This cup is a new covenant in my blood” (Luke 22:20, I Corinthians 11:25; see also Matthew 26:28, Mark 14:24). At that meal, memorialized at every eucharistic celebration, Jesus enacted and enacts the new community of which we are a part.

And community in this covenantal sense runs deep. It embraces the whole of faith as a communal experience. Faith, or better, faithfulness not as something we hold alone but as something we hold together. In biblical thought, covenant defines faith. Faith is what you do in covenant: faithfulness to God, faithfulness to each other. And this in turn grounds our theology of baptism. Or should. In baptism we enter covenant, whether as children or as adults, whether it is us owning covenant or covenant owning us. 

As I said at the beginning, this idea of covenant grounds Reformed community. To retrieve it is to push back on the individualism of our age. It’s to push back on faith as decision instead of faith as covenant faithfulness. The resources for this retrieval lie not in what passes for covenant in 16^th century federal theology with its cumbersome theological constructions, covenants of redemption (find that in the Bible), of works, and of grace, but in the Bible itself.

It’s amusing in this regard to read Louis Berkhof on covenant in his Systematic Theology. After laying the basics of federal theology, as he approaches baptism and the status of covenant children, his exposition grows murkier and murkier, as he tries to mash together election with the covenant of grace and ultimately fails. But he persists. Borrowing from Gerhardus Vos, he makes a distinction between covenant as a legal arrangement (in federal theology terms) and covenant as lived experience, and he chooses to honor not just the former but the latter (ST, 236-7). Which is just right. Sometimes we know with our hearts that for which we cannot fully given account in our minds. 

What does it mean to be Reformed? Among other things, it means covenant, an altogether countercultural way of life. Let’s embrace it anew.

Clay Libolt