Growing Beyond Covenant
The fourth biblical image of God we will consider is that of God as Steadfast Lover.
At first, any image depicting God as a source of love - or as one who loves, runs the risk of being understood as merely rising out of our own sentimental desire to be loved. Also, our conceptions of love can often become somewhat negatively colored by the ways our experience and exercise of love get continually conditioned by our experience. As such, it is not all that easy for us to embrace or be embraced by such a thing as “unconditioned” or unconditional love. Because of this, we have become somewhat conditioned to think of relationships - even those of love - as somewhat contractual in nature. All is hunky dory provided both parties hold up their end of the agreement. However, if the understood terms of the agreed relationship are broken, all bets are off in regards to the continuing legitimacy of that relationship. Now, all of this may seem and feel somewhat familiar to how most of us have been taught or brought up to believe about how God relates to us. The rules are laid out for us and should we break them, there’s gonna be all kinds of you-know-what-to-pay at the hands of a disappointed and punitive god. While such an understanding of God can be found in patches of scripture, there is a stronger and much more consistent counter narrative threading its way through the great length of the biblical witness which, arguably, completely negates these conditionally moralistic understandings of God.
It has become customary to translate both the biblically Hebraic and Greek words for our mutually agreed relationship to God with the term “covenant.” The word has an interesting and evolving history which is worth a study in in its own right, but, for now, let us briefly consider some of that history.
First, it was not until sometime in the early 3rd century (ca 200’s CE) that a few scattered Christian theologians began to speak of Jewish and Christian understandings of our relationship to God (but not exactly the books of the Bible) in terms of the former being an “old testament” and the latter a “new testament.” Testament is simply the Latin translation for the Hebraic and Greek words that are expressed as “covenant” in English. It would be another two hundred years after that, when the books now accepted as the canon of Christian scripture was first formally established, that we started making reference to those as the “New Testament”. This was also the time, unsurprisingly so, when Christians fell into the habit of making reference to the Jewish scriptures as the “Old Testament”. However, such designations contributed mightily to understanding covenantal relationship as somehow central in our foundational understanding of the contents of the entirety of the Bible. This, I believe, can be fatally misleading to both our understanding of scripture and our understanding of God.
Covenants, of which there are many different ones in the Bible, were - and remain - prevalent in all aspects of human society. Generally speaking they are contractual agreements or pacts establishing the terms by which predominantly equal partners exchange promises to one another and the consequences that will be enacted if those promises get broken. Covenants regulate just about everything we engage in. It is what is in the fine print of nearly everything to which we sign our name. And, yes, frequently, biblical people again and again tried to gauge their relationship with God in terms of covenantal agreements. However, the witness of scripture also bears clear evidence that such an understanding posed some very immense issues for biblical peoples as they struggled to adequately understand their relationship to and with God - and with one another.
Biblical covenants between God and people (setting aside the all-too-obvious issue that this is not exactly an agreement established between two predominantly equal parties) were, generally speaking, framed in language which suggested “if” we fulfill our end of the bargain, then God promises to deliver the goods. If, however, we don’t do what’s expected of us, we will suffer for it. Soon enough, such understandings lent credence to notions that people who lived good lives were blessed with health, wealth , and happiness. Meanwhile, those who suffered misfortune must have done something to deserve such and so they were duly being punished by god for their evil ways. However, there sometimes seemed no end to the terrible things and tremendous misfortune which afflicted those who truly were good, faithful, and loyal lovers of God. This prompted some to begin to question if God was in deed upholding the divine end of the bargain. Others began to question the very institution of a covenantal understanding of our relationship with God. While certain “official” religious authorities, adding further insult to injury, continued to insist that as god is not one to break promises made, then the people themselves must be the ones at fault. Hardly endearing to the folk who suffered and bearing little cognizance of the realities of life, such theologies were seen as little more than a cheap shot. Eventually, it was this struggle which fired the literary imagination of someone who put forward the bad-things-happen-to-good-people story of Job. Job offers a stunning retort to any and all such overly simple and callously uncompassionate understandings of God which remain so oddly and sadly prevalent throughout the Christian Church. It was, however, some three hundred years before Job was written, that the prophet Hosea seems to have struck the first decisive blow against covenantal theology in favor of a deeper understanding of God.
The span of Hosea’s life occupied the great majority of Israel’s history during the tumultuous and ultimately cataclysmic 8th century (700’s BCE). Before its close, the now iconic “Lost Tribes of Israel” were exiled into perpetuity. Blame was swiftly heaped upon the people themselves for what was claimed to God’s wrath directed against their unfaithfulness. Hosea, however, offered up, through a personal parable of sorts, a very different image of God during such a calamitous time. God, Hosea claimed, is a steadfast lover.
The image of God as a steadfast lover, indeed as The Steadfast Lover, Hosea was largely calling into question any notion that God’s love was something earned or a reward for good behavior. Hosea also began to upend the notion that bad behavior somehow negated God’s love for us. Covenants, broken or not, had no bearing on the givenness of the continuously steadfast love God has for all that has been created. To illustrate this, Hosea compared God’s love to that of a spouse who, having an extremely unfaithful marital partner, continues in steadfast love for the disloyal spouse. Love rules the relationship. As such, it is God’s love for us - regardless of the extent of our love for God, which makes for our relationship with God.
The theology of Hosea can have a profound impact upon our understanding of God in our lives, in the world, and particularly in our relationship with others. Eventually, it not only question challenged many of the basic and popular assumptions we find expressed in the Bible about a “jealous” and “vindictive” god, it would later move another prophet, Jeremiah, towards talk of a “New Covenant” - a covenant which is, arguably, no covenant at all.
Some 250 years after Hosea, in an equally upsetting time, Jeremiah declared that God would forge a new covenant with the people which would not at all be like the old ones. It would be inscribed inwardly within all as an all-encompassing cognizance of a God who forgives with the givenness of an unconditional love. It is this Jewish witness to a covenant which is no covenant at all that would, more than 500 years hence, strongly influence Jesus’ own - and subsequent Christian - claims about a “new covenant” focusing solely on what God is doing and accomplishing and willing into being through God’s steadfast love for all that has been, all that is, and all that shall ever be. This is the good news that runs like a defining thread through all of scripture. It declares that there is nothing that will or can thwart God’s willed desire to continuously love the world in its entirety, down to every last one of us.
