Covenant

Berit, covenant, is the organising category of the Hebrew Bible's account of God's relation to Israel: a binding agreement, sworn and ratified, carrying stipulations and consequences. The narrative supplies several. With Noah and all flesh, guaranteed by the rainbow and made with the whole earth and its creatures (Genesis 9). With Abraham, promising land and descendants, marked in the flesh by circumcision (Genesis 15 and 17). At Sinai with Israel, mediated by Moses, with the law as its terms and blessings and curses attached (Exodus 19-24, Deuteronomy 28). With David, promising an enduring dynasty (2 Samuel 7). And the new covenant of Jeremiah 31:31-34, written on the heart rather than on tablets.

Comparative scholarship since George Mendenhall's work in the 1950s observed that the Sinai material follows the form of ancient Near Eastern suzerainty treaties, preamble, historical prologue, stipulations, deposition of the text, witnesses, blessings and curses, and concluded that the biblical writers described the relation to God using a known political instrument. The observation is now standard in the field, though the dating of the parallels and which treaty tradition is closest remain debated.

The theological dispute concerns continuity. Christianity read Jeremiah's new covenant as fulfilled in Jesus, and from Paul and the Letter to the Hebrews onward worked at the relation between the covenants. The doctrine that the church replaces Israel as the covenant people, supersessionism, became widespread and had severe historical consequences. It has been substantially repudiated over the last sixty years: the Second Vatican Council's Nostra Aetate (1965) rejected the charge of collective Jewish guilt and affirmed the enduring election of the Jewish people, later Catholic documents state that God's covenant with them has never been revoked, and most mainline Protestant bodies have adopted comparable statements. Jewish thought has consistently maintained the covenant's continuing validity, and modern Jewish theologians have written on what covenant can mean after the Holocaust, Irving Greenberg proposing a "voluntary covenant" freely reaffirmed rather than imposed, a formulation that has itself been much debated.

Islam works with a related structure. The primordial covenant of Qur'an 7:172, in which God draws forth the descendants of Adam and takes their acknowledgement that he is their Lord, makes covenant a universal human condition rather than the property of one people, and the Qur'an also speaks of covenants taken from particular prophets and from the Children of Israel. Within Christianity, covenant theology, systematised in seventeenth-century Reformed thought, which distinguished a covenant of works with Adam from a covenant of grace in Christ, organises the whole of scripture around the category, and dispensationalism disputes it precisely by keeping God's dealings with Israel and with the church distinct rather than unifying them.

Within Protestant, and especially Reformed and evangelical, theology, two rival systems have organised the covenants into a larger architecture, and the difference between them still shapes how English-language Bibles are read and taught.

Covenant theology, systematised by continental Reformed theologians and given classic expression in the Westminster Confession of Faith (1646), reduces the biblical covenants to two theological covenants beneath the historical ones: a covenant of works made with Adam before the fall, promising life for perfect obedience, and a covenant of grace made with fallen humanity through Christ, in which the specific covenants with Noah, Abraham, Moses and David are successive administrations of the same single promise. On this reading Israel and the church are one people under one covenant of grace, which is why covenant theology has historically supported infant baptism, treating it as continuous with the sign of circumcision given to Abraham's household.

Dispensationalism, developed by John Nelson Darby in nineteenth-century Britain and popularised through the Scofield Reference Bible (1909), instead divides history into distinct dispensations, in each of which God deals with humanity under different terms, and keeps God's promises to national Israel apart from God's dealings with the church rather than merging them. It yields distinctive eschatology, including a future restoration of Israel and a pretribulation rapture, positions covenant theology rejects.

The dispute decides whether Old Testament promises to Israel are read as fulfilled in the church, awaiting a future Israel, or both, and it remains a live line within American evangelicalism.