In many sectors of Christianity penal substitutionary atonement (PSA) has come under hard times. It's definitely taken a beating on this blog.
You know the basic idea: Because of your sin you stand under God's judgment and wrath. You stand under a death sentence. However, Jesus stands in your place, taking that judgment and wrath--that death sentence--onto himself. Jesus substitutes himself and dies for you and I.
The main criticism of PSA is the view of God that sits behind it. God's baseline stance is wrath, a default position that has to be changed. Consequently, the leading edge of the gospel proclamation is The Big Angry Guy in the Sky. Salvation is being rescued from That Guy.
That criticism is well known. But here's the deal, there is a substitutionary logic in the New Testament regarding the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. And many of us, because of the ghost of PSA, feel queasy about those passages.
So there is this ambivalence. There is a substitutionary logic in the NT but the dominant hermeneutic of those passages is PSA. Thus we have with those texts an approach/avoidance conflict.
But those passages don't have to be read through PSA. I think the work of scholars like N.T. Wright have helped us see that. That is, we can accept the subitutionary logic of the NT without adopting PSA.
Because at root love often involves suffering for each other and for the sake of each other. Love often accepts suffering and pain intended for others. Love often involves protecting and shielding others, even when those others might be "getting what they deserve." If something bad were going to happen to my children I'd rush to substitute myself. That's what love does. So it's not surprising that God does the same thing.
The sticking point has to do with where the suffering is coming from. That's where PSA gets weird. The "bad thing" coming down on us is God's wrath. So in PSA God ends up saving us from God. That's the paradox introduced by the penal, crime-and-punishment metaphor.
But as scholars like Wright have taught us, the better frame isn't penal but covenantal. YHWH and Israel form a covenant with God's plan being to bless the world through Israel. But Israel cannot keep her end of the deal, bringing upon herself all the punishments that befall those who break covenants in the ancient Semitic mind. Israel broke her promise with the result, per the covenantal agreement, being exile. And at that point God's plan to bless the world through Israel gets stuck.
So God enters history in Jesus to be Israel's representative, Israel's Messiah. And as a faithful or the faithful Israelite Jesus takes up the covenantal burden--both in fulfilling the Torah and in bearing Israel's punishment in breaking the covenant. In Jesus God does what Israel could not do, stepping in to help Israel fulfill her side of the covenant, which, per ancient Semitic covenantal logic, does include punishments for breaking promises. In all this Jesus substitutes himself for Israel. Jesus protects Israel from herself, carries a burden she cannot carry, takes on her exile so that she can be set free.
The point in all this is that we can read the substitutionary logic of the NT through a covenantal rather than penal frame. In short, we should speak of covenantal substitutionary atonement rather than a penal substitutionary atonement.
(BTW, a quick Google search suggests that I just coined the phrase "covenantal substitutionary atonement." Feel free to use the term liberally.)
Of course this raises a host of other questions. Why did God form a covenant with Israel knowing Israel couldn't keep up her end of the deal? Why is an omnipotent God bound by the moral logic of ancient Semitic covenants? And so on. These are interesting and important questions. But they are very different sorts of questions than those thrown up by PSA. And, perhaps most importantly, they are questions that step around the most problematic aspects of PSA in the eyes of many modern Christians.
Email Subscription on Substack
Richard Beck
Welcome to the blog of Richard Beck, author and professor of psychology at Abilene Christian University (beckr@acu.edu).
The Theology of Faƫrie
The Little Way of St. ThĆ©rĆØse of Lisieux
The William Stringfellow Project (Ongoing)
Autobiographical Posts
- On Discoveries in Used Bookstores
- Two Brothers and Texas Rangers
- Visiting and Evolving in Monkey Town
- Roller Derby Girls
- A Life With Bibles
- Wearing a Crucifix
- Morning Prayer at San Buenaventura Mission
- The Halo of Overalls
- Less
- The Farmer's Market
- Subversion and Shame: I Like the Color Pink
- The Bureaucrat
- Uncle Richard, Vampire Hunter
- Palm Sunday with the Orthodox
- On Maps and Marital Spats
- Get on a Bike...and Go Slow
- Buying a Bible
- Memento Mori
- We Weren't as Good as the Muppets
- Uncle Richard and the Shark
- Growing Up Catholic
- Ghostbusting (Part 1)
- Ghostbusting (Part 2)
- My Eschatological Dog
- Tex Mex and Depression Era Cuisine
- Aliens at Roswell
On the Principalities and Powers
- Christ and the Powers
- Why I Talk about the Devil So Much
- The Preferential Option for the Poor
- The Political Theology of Les MisƩrables
- Good Enough
- On Anarchism and A**holes
- Christian Anarchism
- A Restless Patriotism
- Wink on Exorcism
- Images of God Against Empire
- A Boredom Revolution
- The Medal of St. Benedict
- Exorcisms are about Economics
- "Scooby-Doo, Where Are You?"
- "A Home for Demons...and the Merchants Weep"
- Tales of the Demonic
- The Ethic of Death: The Policies and Procedures Manual
- "All That Are Here Are Humans"
- Ears of Stone
- The War Prayer
- Letter from a Birmingham Jail
Experimental Theology
- Eucharistic Identity
- Tzimtzum, Cruciformity and Theodicy
- Holiness Among Depraved Christians: Paul's New Form of Moral Flourishing
- Empathic Open Theism
- The Victim Needs No Conversion
- The Hormonal God
- Covenantal Substitutionary Atonement
- The Satanic Church
- Mousetrap
- Easter Shouldn't Be Good News
- The Gospel According to Lady Gaga
- Your God is Too Big
From the Prison Bible Study
- The Philosopher
- God's Unconditional Love
- There is a Balm in Gilead
- In Prison With Ann Voskamp
- To Make the Love of God Credible
- Piss Christ in Prison
- Advent: A Prison Story
- Faithful in Little Things
- The Prayer of Jabez
- The Prayer of Willy Brown
- Those Old Time Gospel Songs
- I'll Fly Away
- Singing and Resistence
- Where the Gospel Matters
- Monday Night Bible Study (A Poem)
- Living in Babylon: Reading Revelation in Prison
- Reading the Beatitudes in Prision
- John 13: A Story from the Prision Study
- The Word
Series/Essays Based on my Research
The Theology of Calvin and Hobbes
The Theology of Peanuts
The Snake Handling Churches of Appalachia
Eccentric Christianity
- Part 1: A Peculiar People
- Part 2: The Eccentric God, Transcendence and the Prophetic Imagination
- Part 3: Welcoming God in the Stranger
- Part 4: Enchantment, the Porous Self and the Spirit
- Part 5: Doubt, Gratitude and an Eccentric Faith
- Part 6: The Eccentric Economy of Love
- Part 7: The Eccentric Kingdom
The Fuller Integration Lectures
Blogging about the Bible
- Unicorns in the Bible
- "Let My People Go!": On Worship, Work and Laziness
- The True Troubler
- Stumbling At Just One Point
- The Faith of Demons
- The Lord Saw That She Was Not Loved
- The Subversion of the Creator God
- Hell On Earth: The Church as the Baptism of Fire and the Holy Spirit
- The Things That Make for Peace
- The Lord of the Flies
- On Preterism, the Second Coming and Hell
- Commitment and Violence: A Reading of the Akedah
- Gain Versus Gift in Ecclesiastes
- Redemption and the Goel
- The Psalms as Liberation Theology
- Control Your Vessel
- Circumcised Ears
- Forgive Us Our Trespasses
- Doing Beautiful Things
- The Most Remarkable Sequence in the Bible
- Targeting the Dove Sellers
- Christus Victor in Galatians
- Devoted to Destruction: Reading Cherem Non-Violently
- The Triumph of the Cross
- The Threshing Floor of Araunah
- Hold Others Above Yourself
- Blessed are the Tricksters
- Adam's First Wife
- I Am a Worm
- Christus Victor in the Lord's Prayer
- Let Them Both Grow Together
- Repent
- Here I Am
- Becoming the Jubilee
- Sermon on the Mount: Study Guide
- Treat Them as a Pagan or Tax Collector
- Going Outside the Camp
- Welcoming Children
- The Song of Lamech and the Song of the Lamb
- The Nephilim
- Shaming Jesus
- Pseudepigrapha and the Christian Witness
- The Exclusion and Inclusion of Eunuchs
- The Second Moses
- The New Manna
- Salvation in the First Sermons of the Church
- "A Bloody Husband"
- Song of the Vineyard
Bonhoeffer's Letters from Prision
Civil Rights History and Race Relations
- The Gospel According to Ta-Nehisi Coates (Six Part Series)
- Bus Ride to Justice: Toward Racial Reconciliation in the Churches of Christ
- Black Heroism and White Sympathy: A Reflection on the Charleston Shooting
- Selma 50th Anniversary
- More Than Three Minutes
- The Passion of White America
- Remembering James Chaney, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman
- Will Campbell
- Sitting in the Pews of Ebeneser Baptist Church
- MLK Bedtime Prayer
- Freedom Rider
- Mountiantop
- Freedom Summer
- Civil Rights Family Trip 1: Memphis
- Civil Rights Family Trip 2: Atlanta
- Civil Rights Family Trip 3: Birmingham
- Civil Rights Family Trip 4: Selma
- Civil Rights Family Trip 5: Montgomery
Hip Christianity
The Charism of the Charismatics
Would Jesus Break a Window?: The Hermeneutics of the Temple Action
Being Church
- Instead of a Coffee Shop How About a Laundromat?
- A Million Boring Little Things
- A Prayer for ISIS
- "The People At Our Church Die A Lot"
- The Angel of Freedom
- Washing Dishes at Freedom Fellowship
- Where David Plays the Tambourine
- On Interruptibility
- Mattering
- This Ritual of Hallowing
- Faith as Honoring
- The Beautiful
- The Sensory Boundary
- The Missional and Apostolic Nature of Holiness
- Open Commuion: Warning!
- The Impurity of Love
- A Community Called Forgiveness
- Love is the Allocation of Our Dying
- Freedom Fellowship
- Wednesday Night Church
- The Hands of Christ
- Barbara, Stanley and Andrea: Thoughts on Love, Training and Social Psychology
- Gerald's Gift
- Wiping the Blood Away
- This Morning Jesus Put On Dark Sunglasses
- The Only Way I Know How to Save the World
- Renunciation
- The Reason We Gather
- Anointing With Oil
- Incarnations of God's Mercy
Exploring Preterism
Scripture and Discernment
- Owning Your Protestantism: We Follow Our Conscience, Not the Bible
- Emotional Intelligence and Sola Scriptura
- Songbooks vs. the Psalms
- Biblical as Sociological Stress Test
- Cookie Cutting the Bible: A Case Study
- Pawn to King 4
- Allowing God to Rage
- Poetry of a Murderer
- On Christian Communion: Killing vs. Sexuality
- Heretics and Disagreement
- Atonement: A Primer
- "The Bible says..."
- The "Yes, but..." Church
- Human Experience and the Bible
- Discernment, Part 1
- Discernment, Part 2
- Rabbinic Hedges
- Fuzzy Logic
Interacting with Good Books
- Christian Political Witness
- The Road
- Powers and Submissions
- City of God
- Playing God
- Torture and Eucharist
- How Much is Enough?
- From Willow Creek to Sacred Heart
- The Catonsville Nine
- Daring Greatly
- On Job (GutiƩrrez)
- The Selfless Way of Christ
- World Upside Down
- Are Christians Hate-Filled Hypocrites?
- Christ and Horrors
- The King Jesus Gospel
- Insurrection
- The Bible Made Impossible
- The Deliverance of God
- To Change the World
- Sexuality and the Christian Body
- I Told Me So
- The Teaching of the Twelve
- Evolving in Monkey Town
- Saved from Sacrifice: A Series
- Darwin's Sacred Cause
- Outliers
- A Secular Age
- The God Who Risks
Moral Psychology
- The Dark Spell the Devil Casts: Refugees and Our Slavery to the Fear of Death
- Philia Over Phobia
- Elizabeth Smart and the Psychology of the Christian Purity Culture
- On Love and the Yuck Factor
- Ethnocentrism and Politics
- Flies, Attention and Morality
- The Banality of Evil
- The Ovens at Buchenwald
- Violence and Traffic Lights
- Defending Individualism
- Guilt and Atonement
- The Varieties of Love and Hate
- The Wicked
- Moral Foundations
- Primum non nocere
- The Moral Emotions
- The Moral Circle, Part 1
- The Moral Circle, Part 2
- Taboo Psychology
- The Morality of Mentality
- Moral Conviction
- Infrahumanization
- Holiness and Moral Grammars
The Purity Psychology of Progressive Christianity
The Theology of Everyday Life
- Self-Esteem Through Shaming
- Let Us Be the Heart Of the Church Rather Than the Amygdala
- Online Debates and Stages of Change
- The Devil on a Wiffle Ball Field
- Incarnational Theology and Mental Illness
- Social Media as Sacrament
- The Impossibility of Calvinistic Psychotherapy
- Hating Pixels
- Dress, Divinity and Dumbfounding
- The Kingdom of God Will Not Be Tweeted
- Tattoos
- The Ethics of :-)
- On Snobbery
- Jokes
- Hypocrisy
- Everything I learned about life I learned coaching tee-ball
- Gossip, Part 1: The Food of the Brain
- Gossip, Part 2: Evolutionary Stable Strategies
- Gossip, Part 3: The Pay it Forward World
- Human Nature
- Welcome
- On Humility
Jesus, You're Making Me Tired: Scarcity and Spiritual Formation
A Progressive Vision of the Benedict Option
George MacDonald
Jesus & the Jolly Roger: The Kingdom of God is Like a Pirate
Alone, Suburban & Sorted
The Theology of Monsters
The Theology of Ugly
Orthodox Iconography
Musings On Faith, Belief, and Doubt
- The Meanings Only Faith Can Reveal
- Pragmatism and Progressive Christianity
- Doubt and Cognitive Rumination
- A/theism and the Transcendent
- Kingdom A/theism
- The Ontological Argument
- Cheap Praise and Costly Praise
- god
- Wired to Suffer
- A New Apologetics
- Orthodox Alexithymia
- High and Low: The Psalms and Suffering
- The Buddhist Phase
- Skilled Christianity
- The Two Families of God
- The Bait and Switch of Contemporary Christianity
- Theodicy and No Country for Old Men
- Doubt: A Diagnosis
- Faith and Modernity
- Faith after "The Cognitive Turn"
- Salvation
- The Gifts of Doubt
- A Beautiful Life
- Is Santa Claus Real?
- The Feeling of Knowing
- Practicing Christianity
- In Praise of Doubt
- Skepticism and Conviction
- Pragmatic Belief
- N-Order Complaint and Need for Cognition
Holiday Musings
- Everything I Learned about Christmas I Learned from TV
- Advent: Learning to Wait
- A Christmas Carol as Resistance Literature: Part 1
- A Christmas Carol as Resistance Literature: Part 2
- It's Still Christmas
- Easter Shouldn't Be Good News
- The Deeper Magic: A Good Friday Meditation
- Palm Sunday with the Orthodox
- Growing Up Catholic: A Lenten Meditation
- The Liturgical Year for Dummies
- "Watching Their Flocks at Night": An Advent Meditation
- Pentecost and Babel
- Epiphany
- Ambivalence about Lent
- On Easter and Astronomy
- Sex Sandals and Advent
- Freud and Valentine's Day
- Existentialism and Halloween
- Halloween Redux: Talking with the Dead
The Offbeat
- Batman and the Joker
- The Theology of Ugly Dolls
- Jesus Would Be a Hufflepuff
- The Moral Example of Captain Jack Sparrow
- Weddings Real, Imagined and Yet to Come
- Michelangelo and Neuroanatomy
- Believing in Bigfoot
- The Kingdom of God as Improv and Flash Mob
- 2012 and the End of the World
- The Polar Express and the Uncanny Valley
- Why the Anti-Christ Is an Idiot
- On Harry Potter and Vampire Movies
The "thing" that Jesus did on the cross was not so God could love us but so that we could love Him. Are you familiar with The Sanctuary Downtown and Peter Hiett? I love the way he covers the atonement.
For those of us new to this idea, can you tell us where we can read more? Thanks.
I'd start with N.T. Wright's book "Justification" for how the covenantal frame differs from the penal frame. Then I'd read his "Simply Jesus" for his take on how Jesus came to see his messianic vocation as that of taking upon himself the covenantal burden of Israel.
Hey Richard,
I do appreciate your writing in this topic.
Bad esn
Brilliant. And perhaps most brilliant of all, you've shown that "bearing punishments" is indeed part of what covenant substitutionary atonement accomplishments. In my view, some form of PSA is simply part of the Christian witness, and can't be fully avoided. But it can be re-framed--radically reframed--and this is a simple, effective way to reframe it. Thanks a lot; I'll probably use this, as I've used some of your other posts, in my teaching.
Thanks, Dr. Beck. I always enjoy your thoughts.
So in light of our modern world, the understanding I had (or that I was taught...) was that Israel becomes an allegory for God's people, now being, essentially, everyone. No Jew or Gentile, etc. But with a covenental view of Substitution, would this make that NT language more period specific (being to the people of Israel, of that generation and that specific history) ? Or is there an allegory, a crossover, if you will, from God's covenant with us?
Or peraps it is more of a representation of the fact that, as Jesus wrote the final chapter on Israel's story of rebellion and reconciliation, by intervening and doing the work of reconciliation on their behalf, he does this for us as well...
Doesn't this just shift the focus from "God saving us from God" to "God saving Israel from God"? I (think) I understand the difference between penal substitution and covenental substitution, but this doesn't really seem to solve the problem of where the "bad thing" is coming from.
The biggest source of "backing logic" for PSA is the overwhelming evidence of a "broken world." Big Angry God syndrome is manifested through the symptoms of violence, racism, war, poverty, genocide, etc... For many Christians, PSA become a "scare tactic" that actually has some realism in any societal environment. The covenant side of "CSA" is what people miss...Jesus kingdom is working in the here and now to concur sin, and restore God's creation, despite the fact that sin still occurs. The NT calls us to follow Jesus in this work, not just to watch, wait, believe, and receive. Wonderful post, Dr. Beck.
Professor Beck --
Would you say this fits hand/glove with the more Orthodox understanding of atonement that you offer in 'Slavery of Death'?
Thank you sir. These sorts of posts are always risky for me, talking about things I don't know much about. So it's always nice to get some affirmation from scholars who, well, actually know what they are talking about. :-)
The idea, as I understand it, is that God's plan was to bless the world through Israel (this was the promise to Abraham). But Israel, being rebellious, can't fulfill her part of the covenant. So things are stopped up and blocked, at an impasse. So Jesus steps in to lift the burden and end Israel's exile so as to bring the blessings of the covenant to reality. And having done that the blessings God always intended for the world are now universally available "in Christ."
Does that help?
Yes, but not quite. Israel freely enters into the covenant with YHWH and pledges to hold up her end of the agreement. And in taking the pledge she agree to submit to the consequences, "the bad things" if she fails to hold up the agreement. True, YHWH enforces those consequences, but the blame is a bit more shared if not fully on Israel's shoulders. More, the focus is corporate, a judgment of Israel as a people. That's very different from the individualistic focus of PSA, where YOU have a death-sentence hanging over YOUR head. And finally, the punishment of covenant unfaithfulness isn't eternal torment in hell but national exile. So as I say at the end of the post, you're right that there are still issues and questions and problems, but the focus has shifted and, I think, has become less theologically toxic (i.e, God wants to kill you or torment you forver because your personal moral failings).
Thanks. Yes, the covenantal aspect allows us to bring in the big narrative themes of creation, kingdom, and the restoration of all things.
Israel was not the problem to be solved by the cross; Adam was. God's plan was established well before He could take advantage of the 'Semitic mind.' And, I most humbly suggest that you not give much weight to anybody who says that "the leading edge of the gospel proclamation is the Big Angry Guy in the Skyl Salvation is being rescued from that Guy."
They can fit together really well. In fact one of the things you'll notice in N.T. Wright's expositions on this subject is how he brings in Christus Victor themes. That is, Jesus comes to see himself as ending Israel's exile but Jesus's vision of what this exile looked like was a bit different from what his contemporaries imagined. Their focus was on their national/political exile. Dealing with the Romans and the puppet king Herod. Jesus's vision was dealing with a deeper exile, bondage to sin, death, and the devil. My Slavery to Death series makes contact right there.
It does....the physical manifestation of the reconciliation of man to God, with Israel's history being a "microcosm" of sorts of the larger metanarrative...I personally find it hard to capture such elusive, but real, truths with our limited human vocabulary.
I think that idea also fits the language used about the Maccabbaean martyrs in 4 Maccabbees 17:22.
Most definitely. The martyrological logic in Maccabbees is that the blood of the martyrs is able to purify Israel and function as a heroic ransom/payment to end her exile. The key here is noting that this "ransom" isn't paid to a wrathful God, what you see in PSA. The ransom is for the covenantal "debt" that Israel is struggling to pay off. The righteousness of the martyrs, due to their heroic sacrifices, help pay off the debt. Their faithfulness makes up for Israel's general unfaithfulness. And I think that logic is very much what is going on in the NT with Jesus.
"the focus has shifted and, I think, has become less theologically toxic
(i.e, God wants to kill you or torment you forever because your personal
moral failings)."
Well that I can get on board with!
I view substitutionary atonement through the lens of empathy-identification. Christ suffered as his followers surely would ... but was not the end for him. He suffered, died, and yet triumphed ... hope is not lost! Sacrificing animals to absolve sin is a relic of Jesus' age, but identification with the sufferer (especially the wholly innocent one) is timeless. And, unlike hard-core Protestants who begin and end with substitutionary atonement (as if all the rest is just detail), I am more concerned with the person of Christ in his fullness, which includes his life story and his immense wisdom.
Not that the covenental view is invalid, but this is the personal view of it that's stuck with me for a long time.
In my family im the big angry guy who wants to inflict judgement on my children when they mess up...My wife is their savior from utter destruction...I have no problem with PSA!
I think what strikes me most in the prophets is the way the divine "wrath" (and, of course, there is a lot of divine wrath language in both Testaments) is connected to the divine pathos within relationship. This gets us around the "moral logic of ancient Semitic covenants" argument. Arguably, the OT conception of covenant does not really use the standard "moral logic" of their day, focused purely on the outraged honor of the overlord (see Anselm). Rather, it views covenant in terms of community life in relationship.
Anybody who has ever valued community life in relationship understands the anger that is aroused toward the attitudes and behaviors that are so toxic to that community life in relationship. It's the husband cheating on the wife; it's the kid who slaps his grandma in the face; it's the crushing abuse of the stumbling daughter; it's the indifferent shrug as you pass by your brother bleeding on the road. Within the context of community life, such attitudes and behaviors require wrath, and expiation--for the sake of love and life.
The way I understand what you're suggesting is that the story of Israel is the story for each and every one of us though in the scale of a society rather than an individual. That is, Israel, being wholly comprised of fallible humans, is completely incapable of actually sealing the deal of pleasing God, and thus, God needs to use Himself to bring us all to Him. Is this correct? It's a fairly intriguing interpretation, and I have to say, it fits very well with what I've come to learn these last few years as a new Christian. God bless! :)
How about “Credit default swap substitutionary atonement?” I reckon we’re not ever going to make this language unproblematic (though Dr. Beck and NT offer some needed insights by bringing in a covenantal trope). Perhaps a problem is not with our allegories and metaphors but that we resist engaging them as such? Like the coins Nietzsche (metaphorically) references in *On truth and lie in an extra-moral sense* “What then is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphism -- in short, a sum of human relations, which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that is what they are; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins.” Perhaps the currency value of PSA is declining, but the psychological/spiritual consequences remain though the image on the coin has changed. Obliged.
Yes! My first thought in reading RB's post was "Anselm".
T
It's my observation that every culture, and sometimes different generations within a given culture, view the atonement and try to describe what happened on the cross from within their cultural context.
Christus Victor--Pax Romana
Satisfaction--Anselm and the Medieval system
PSA--Late Medievalist within a Western European culture of Law and Penal Retribution.
etc....
Ah, I'm glad you said this.
I was having trouble wrapping my head around that end of things. But what you've said here actually makes some sense as to why this was not only fulfilling Israel's end of the old covenant, but in so doing God was actually creating a new covenant, in which the "terms" changed significantly. This is where PSA fails so badly; it's trying to cast what God was doing for national Israel as what he's done for us. They've entirely missed the New Covenant (which is entirely unilateral now) in so doing.
This makes sense to me. Israel was a microcosm of what God would do for the world - a "sign to the nations" (Isaiah 66:19) which culminated in Christ. Adam served as an example of sin and separation, culminating in a great baptism from which humanity was resurrected by faith - exemplified by Abraham, Isaac and Jacob - and it was from this tradition and against this backdrop that Jesus life, death and resurrection would make sense, first to Israel, and then to the gentile world. Jesus was the beginning of a new creation and a new covenant, but it would not have made sense without the context of the old.
Great post, Richard - I ran with it a bit here.
Thinking about why God made a covenant with Israel which Israel would not keep can be helped by realising that God is not controlled by time. We see time lines, I doubt God's acts are time line dependant. ekardlyn@hotmail.com Rose
I'm not so sure that Israel freely entered into the covenant with YHWH.
'Israel did not accept the Torah of their own free will. When Israel approached Sinai, God lifted up the mountain and held it over their heads, saying: ‘Either you accept the Torah or be crushed beneath the mountain.' ( Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel)
"For it is not those who hear the law who are righteous in god's sight, but it is those who obey the law who will be declared righteous." Rom. 2:13