Covenant Theology, Baptism, and Biblical Imagery - Episode 131

Carey Griffel: Welcome to Genesis Marks the Spot where we raid the ivory tower of a biblical theology without ransacking our faith. My name is Carey Griffel, and I admit it. I almost continued the theme of alcohol this week. I had thought it would be really interesting to kind of trace how different traditions and church history have used the theme of alcohol, especially in relation to the Eucharist or communion or the Lord's table, and maybe we will do a little bit of that later on.

[00:00:39] But really, I'm going to be doing a bridge episode today so we're not entirely leaving the cup behind. And today might be a little bit of a different episode, might be a little bit meandering. We are going to be going beyond biblical theology, which is our usual landscape here, because what we were just talking about with alcohol and the cup plays directly into that Christian tradition of the communion at the table. And the next thing we're talking about is baptism. And so most church traditions will take both the Lord's supper as well as baptism, and they give it some added meaning by calling them sacraments.

[00:01:21] So today I wanna talk a little bit about that because our views will play into the types of things we're gonna be looking at as we trace the theme of baptism, purification, and covenant. Those are all related. We ought to be understanding how they all relate from a biblical mindset.

[00:01:42] But that's the hard thing about it, because most of us are going to be coming at this colored by church tradition. I'm not saying it's terrible that you have a tradition and that this is the way you're thinking about things, but what we're doing here in biblical theology is we're trying to understand the context of the text itself and the writers who wrote that text.

[00:02:05] Those are things that ought to inform our theology, but sometimes our theology is very disconnected from that. And instead of drawing our theology from the text and its context, we are drawing our theology from interpretive history. There is a stream of history that goes from the text into the church and historical interpretation. So there could be ways to connect that and ways to proceed forward from the original context into some additional philosophy and theology. And to some degree, we ought to be doing that because if we don't, we're not making the text relevant to our era and our way of thinking.

[00:02:50] However, when that theology is being done in a period of time where we have less information, which by the way is always because we're always gaining more information, then that means that when we gain information and we have more knowledge to work with, if there are things we ought to change about our theology, then we shouldn't balk at that.

[00:03:15] People don't like change and they really don't like to change fundamental ideas that are core to them. So I get that that's difficult, and I get that that's probably not gonna happen for most people. That doesn't mean that that's not something that can happen.

[00:03:31] But at any rate, we're going to talk a little bit about systematic theology. And we're also going to be doing the work of combining the ideas of the cup and water motifs. These are both thematic devices in biblical theology that really have a lot to do with one another . For now, I just want to bring out these connections and we will be exploring them in more depth later.

[00:03:57] We've talked about the cup in relation to wrath. In Psalm 75, verse eight, it says, "For there is a cup in the hand of Yahweh with wine that foams, fully mixed, and he pours out from this. Surely all the wicked of the land will quaff it down to its dregs." End quote.

[00:04:19] That's a verse we've talked about before, along with just a few other passages, right? As I mentioned previously, we're gonna be getting into the flood narrative. Most people think of the flood narrative as a divine judgment, and indeed it is, which means that it does have something to do with this idea of wrath. And it's very interesting that wine is a liquid, water is a liquid, and both wine and water are connected quite intimately in many passages in the Bible.

[00:04:51] Now the flood narrative is not only a divine judgment, it is also divine salvation. And that is what we see in the cup imagery as well, a deep combination of judgment and salvation. Now, I know that my coverage so far of the flood story has been a little bit all over the place, but I never did promise to cover things consecutively.

[00:05:17] We kind of jumped to the end of the flood narrative because of the themes that we were tracing, but now we're gonna go back to the beginning. For those interested, my first episode on the flood was way back in episode 78, and in that episode I introduced and described my note taking system. So I highly recommend checking that out and giving the system a try.

[00:05:41] I've also done the overview of the flood in its c structure, which is a literary structure that highlights a point in the middle of the design, kind of like the top of a mountain. And that was in episode number 80. The chiasm showed that the main point was that God remembered Noah. That "remembering" is salvation language. We've also talked about Mesopotamian flood stories. We did that back in episode 81.

[00:06:13] Now obviously, the destruction of the wicked is a major point of the flood and the reason that the flood comes. But the salvation is actually the main storyline. That's where we get a whole lot of detail, like the making of the ark. And if the point was meant to be the destruction, we just have so very little detail other than the imagery of waters and oh yeah, by the way, everything dies.

[00:06:39] I'm not gonna take the time to read the flood narrative just yet, but if you look at it, it kind of starts out at the end of Genesis five, doesn't it? When Lamech has hope in Noah. Noah is the one who's going to relieve us from the work, and yet what happens is the flood.

[00:06:58] Now, in between what Lamech says and the beginning of the flood, we have the whole narrative with the Sons of God and the daughters of men, the Nephilim, all of that. We've talked about that quite a bit, and no doubt we will continue to talk about that quite a bit. Humans are evil and every inclination of the thoughts of his heart are always evil. God decides to destroy humankind, and not only humankind, but also animals. The earth was corrupt. God saw that it was corrupt. God is going to destroy the earth.

[00:07:34] So okay, we have plenty of destruction here, but it's not described in very much detail. Then Noah builds the ark. There's some very particular details with that. Then when the waters come, the text tells us that the flood came over the earth. The great deep was split open. The windows of heaven were opened. The rain came upon the earth.

[00:07:57] Like if we're just reading this in English and we're not paying too much attention, it just seems like a big rainstorm, right?

[00:08:04] The real description of the flood comes in chapter seven verses 17 through 24, and here's the words that it uses. The flood came. The waters increased. The waters prevailed and greatly increased. The waters prevailed overwhelmingly. They covered the mountains. The waters swelled over the mountains. Finally, we get every living thing that perishes. Every living thing that dies. And he blotted out everything from the earth.

[00:08:37] That's the destruction of the flood. I mean, that doesn't sound very dramatic, right? We have a whole lot of repetition of waters prevailing and increasing, and oh, by the way, everything dies.

[00:08:51] Now, if you've ever been in an area that has experienced a major flood event, you do know how destructive those waters can be. A few years before I was born in my own local area, we had a situation where there was a dam. The dam broke and flooded a massive area. And even though I didn't experience that myself, I grew up with the story. I grew up seeing the pictures. I grew up picturing what that would look like to have that much water come to cover the area that I was in. Like I could picture it because there was a good description of where the water was, and so I could look at the land and I could imagine how much water was covering everything. And there were plenty of stories of what people had to do in order to save buildings and structures, and a lot of buildings and structures were not saved. Of course, there's a whole museum that is dedicated to this flood. Like it didn't decimate everything for years, but it certainly had a massive economic impact and it had a massive impact on the cultural understanding of who we were.

[00:10:03] Now, if you can imagine a situation where you are a smaller population than what we tend to have today, and your lives are dependent on the crops. Unexpected major flood events are a really big deal in a culture like that. You don't have enough food to feed your people and your people aren't going to survive.

[00:10:25] And like I said, I saw pictures of the destruction and just the layers of mud that were on everything, in buildings. Talk about a massive cleanup job and a lot of things were just torn down because of the water damage. So, at least for me, I have this mental picture of waters increasing and how much that will do to an area.

[00:10:48] But even so, if you think of the flood as being the event that killed everything aside from one family, this description is still really, really tame.

[00:11:00] The end of the flood is similar to what we have at the beginning of the flood. The beginning of chapter eight, we have the waters subside. The heavens are closed, the heavens are restrained. The waters recede, the waters abate. The ar The waters continue to recede.

[00:11:20] Now, of course this is going to depend on your translation, but what we see in some translations is that the Hebrew repeats a lot. And for a Hebrew reader, this repetition would be emphasizing points. This isn't described in the same way that we would watch like a disaster movie, for instance.

[00:11:41] Anyway, my point is that we do have this connection of the cup and wrath and flood and those themes flow into the theme of baptism and even the river of life. We're continually seeing judgment and joy mingled together, and we're going to see wine and water combined in many passages, which in and of itself is really interesting because you have different Christian traditions that do the Lord's Supper differently, right? Many of them are using alcoholic wine. Some of them will use juice instead of wine. And juice is a fairly close replacement for wine if you're just looking at the substance of it. And you do have some places where water is used instead of wine, and those people tend to be looked down upon by the people who are using wine or even the people who are using juice like, aha, you're not doing it right because Jesus didn't drink water at the last Supper.

[00:12:45] But I think what we can see as we trace both wine and water, that we might see that the gap between water and wine isn't as big as you might think.

[00:12:55] Then you have Jesus turning water into wine. We have some other stories that might be related to that. Plus the fact that there is no wine in the original Passover. So I'll just leave a little bit of that for you to think about for now.

[00:13:11] It strikes me that in this podcast we've never even talked about the rivers that flow out of Eden. That probably deserves a whole episode in and of itself. And if you're familiar with Eden and Temple imagery, you have that same imagery that comes along with the temple.

[00:13:30] And I would be remiss if I didn't mention Mark 10, verse 38 . Mark 10 is this passage where James and John, the sons of Zebedee, come and want Jesus to grant that they will sit at his right hand and at his left.

[00:13:46] Mark 10 38 says, quote, " But Jesus said to them, you do not know what you are asking. Are you able to drink the cup that I drink or to be baptized with the baptism that I am baptized with? End quote.

[00:14:02] And Jesus tells them that they will drink the cup that he drinks and they will be baptized with the baptism that he is baptized with. Now, there's a whole lot of opinion here on what baptism Jesus is talking about. We will eventually get to that in our series here, but just for now, we are noting the connection with the cup, with wrath, with baptism.

[00:14:25] Okay, so we're talking about wine, we're talking about water, we're talking about judgment and wrath and salvation. but I said I was gonna bring covenant into this mix as well.

[00:14:37] I want to suggest to you that both water and wine in Scripture function as covenantal transformers. They're bringing judgment. They're bringing cleansing. And they're bringing life.

[00:14:53] You need all of these elements involved in the picture. And a final question for you to consider for the future, what does water and spirit have to do with one another? See, we tend to really want to boil things down into simple concepts and have either or statements. Unfortunately, biblical theology and these kind of metaphors that we're tracing really dismantles the ability to do that very well.

[00:15:21] But people will nonetheless try.

[00:15:24] So let's talk a little bit about some systematic formulations of theology. I know that I have a wide listenership. Some of you will be very familiar with systematic theology. Some of you won't be, even if you're in a tradition that has a very strong systematic theology, that doesn't mean you understand it or even that you've heard about it before.

[00:15:48] The thing about systematic theology is that it just kind of gets embedded into the church history and tradition. And it informs the preaching and the teaching. And people aren't always sure where these ideas come from. They presume that they are biblical ideas. They're not presented as ideas that arose through time, even if that is, in fact, the case.

[00:16:12] So a lot of people have no idea what these ideas are, what they look like. But I also know there's other people who are listening who know way more about it than I do because they're in that system and they've studied it deeply. And you may or may not think that it is the biblical framework. And that's fine. I'm not trying to dismantle systematic theology, but I am going to point out some distinctions and differences.

[00:16:40] At any rate, let's go ahead and dive a little bit into covenant theology because we need to ask what covenant is and how people see that and why they argue about it in the way that they do in modern times. If we don't understand that, then we can't understand very well what the deal is with sacrament. These things are all tied together, even though they seem like separate ideas.

[00:17:08] So covenant theology is kind of a traditional reformed view we might say. We will be talking primarily about traditions shaped by the Westminster Confession. And here covenant theology is a way to understand the Bible's story of salvation as a unified unfolding plan.

[00:17:29] This is kind of the spine that holds the whole biblical narrative together. And it's interesting because I am not reformed. I don't take a reformed view, but I will still talk a lot about covenant. So I do think it's important to kind of lay out this traditional reformed view of covenant theology, because this is not what I'm talking about when I'm talking about covenant in theology.

[00:17:55] So here's the basic structure. There's three different types of covenants that they're kind of tracking on. First, we have a covenant of works. This was between God and Adam in the garden. The idea here is that obedience leads to life. So God makes this covenant with Adam in the garden. If Adam obeys, he gets life. If he disobeys, it gets death. Adam's failure introduced sin and death here.

[00:18:27] Now, when I bring up J Harvey Walton's ideas and his idea of the covenant at creation, he is not talking about this. He's talking about something very different. He's talking about covenant being an organizing principle, and he's not distinguishing these covenants like we have in reformed theology.

[00:18:48] Now, of course, I think I've mentioned before that the word covenant does not show up in the early chapters of Genesis. We do have hints of it because we have the writer who uses God's covenantal name in Genesis two. In Genesis one, God is called Elohim. In Genesis two, he is called Yahweh Elohim. The use of this name does not by itself indicate that there is a covenant. There is no description of a covenant, but we'll get more into that when we talk about J Harvey Walton's dissertation.

[00:19:25] But for now, we're just presuming that there's a covenant here. Then we have the covenant of grace. This covenant was initiated after the fall and it's fulfilled in Christ. So again, here after the fall, God initiates a new covenant that is based on grace instead of works. And throughout the Old Testament, this covenant is progressively revealed through Noah, Abraham, Moses, and David, and it's fulfilled in Jesus.

[00:19:57] Then the third idea we have here is the covenant of redemption. This is a behind the scenes covenant within the Trinity itself, the Father, son, and the Holy Spirit who agree before creation that the Son would redeem fallen humanity. This is the idea that Christ was to come before the foundations of the world.

[00:20:21] So basically what we have here is a way to unify scripture into a coherent theological system that emphasizes salvation history as a continuous covenantal work. It explains why there's sacraments. And here there are two sacraments, baptism, and the Lord's Supper, and those are seals of grace. There's a continuity of the church from the old to the new covenant. And infant baptism is rooted in circumcision. This is an approach that emphasizes continuity. God has one people, one plan, one promise from Genesis to Revelation. In fact, it goes from before Genesis to Revelation.

[00:21:05] Now, just to help kind of clarify what covenant theology is, we might contrast that with the idea of dispensationalism. I won't go too deeply into that because we're not really talking about dispensationalism, but dispensationalism is a different interpretive framework to understand the biblical covenants and God's redemptive plan.

[00:21:29] There is some common ground between covenantal theology and dispensationalism because both systems seek to explain scripture's unity, and they affirm salvation through Christ, and they recognize covenants as central to God's plan. Both of them agree that the Abrahamic, the Mosaic, and the Davidic covenants all find their ultimate fulfillment in Jesus. Both of these theologies reject works based salvation. They emphasize faith, but there's some major differences.

[00:22:03] In covenantal theology, as I said, there's an emphasis on continuity between the Old Testament to the New Testament. Dispensationalism will stress a discontinuity between these covenants. So in covenantal theology, the church is the true Israel, and it inherits the promises. In dispensationalism, Israel is an ethnic entity and the church is distinct from it. There's a difference in eschatology. In covenant theology, the kingdom is a present spiritual reality, even if it's not fully here yet. And in dispensationalism, there is a stronger emphasis on a future earthly kingdom that Israel is going to participate in. Remember Israel being ethnic Israel. In covenant theology, the New Testament reinterprets, Old Testament promises in Christological fashion. In dispensationalism, they prioritize literal Old Testament promises to Israel and say that those are primarily and maybe only to ethnic Israel.

[00:23:13] I've seen plenty of people who combine these systems, even though they might not be seeming to combine them.

[00:23:20] But there is this very distinct difference in seeing the continuity or seeing a division between the Old Testament and the New Testament. And these are really important things to understand if you're trying to engage in a wider Christian context with other Christian believers who might come at things in a different way. If you understand that they have a different formulation of this theology and how to look at covenants, then that might help you to kind of bridge some gaps or at least understand where other people are coming from.

[00:23:53] People who are into covenantal theology often practice infant baptism with this continuity with circumcision. Dispensationalists will typically advocate believers baptism because they emphasize the new covenant's regenerate community. Of course, there's a whole lot of difference in end times philosophy where dispensationalism anticipates a pre-millennial earthly reign of Christ that is centered on Israel, and covenantal theology often adopts a more, a millennial or post-millennial view, which focuses on Christ's current reign.

[00:24:32] Of course, there's all kinds of spectrum here and all kinds of combination of ideas, but here's some basics that I hope will help some people kind of sort things out a little bit.

[00:24:43] Now, just for fun, I want to go through a little bit of an article that I found on Desiring God, which is of course a very reformed website. And this article is talking about dispensationalism versus covenantalism.

[00:24:59] And I really wanna give some credit here because the author of this article is trying to walk something of a middle ground. This article is written by Steven Wellum, and it's called Dispensational or Covenantal, the Promise and Progress of Salvation in Christ.

[00:25:18] I'll go ahead and read the abstract of the article. It says, quote, " Dispensationalism or covenant theology? From the beginning of the church, Christians have wrestled over how best to relate the covenants. In recent generations, two broad traditions have governed the church's covenantal thinking. In seeking to put the covenants together in Christian theology, we need to do justice to the plurality of God's covenants, each of which reaches its fulfillment in Christ. We need to posit an implicit creation covenant as foundational to future covenants, and we need to seriously account for the newness of God's new covenant people. From creation to the cross, God accomplishes his redemptive plan, covenant by covenant, progressively revealing the greater new covenant now ratified in Christ." End quote.

[00:26:15] Now there's a lot here that I can agree with. There's a lot here that shows an emphasis on this traditional covenantal framework of thinking, though. We need to ask, is the Bible presenting covenants in a way that we think of them, or do we need to shift our thinking in how we're processing this information that we see in the Bible about covenants?

[00:26:39] Again, systematic theology has a very strong tendency to look at the whole narrative of Scripture and try to pull out that one thing that the Scripture is talking about. And to some extent, we have to do that because the Bible is a narrative. It is cohesive. It has a storyline of God interacting with humans, humans interacting with God. And we ought to understand it as this whole. However, as I've said, with biblical theology, we also need to understand individual authors and individual books for their settings and what they're trying to say.

[00:27:17] And by understanding things like covenant in its ancient context, then I think that we will begin to see how very different we are thinking compared to the ancient world. And because of that different thinking, it's very difficult to bring all of that ancient thinking into modern philosophy. Which is what modern theology is. It is a type of philosophy. And we're all doing it, and we all have to do it because we have to make this text applicable to us.

[00:27:50] So these are understandable stepping stones and understandable thoughts, but it is very, very hard for us to separate out what we are thinking and importing into the text versus what the text itself is saying. That is a hard thing to do. At any rate, this is a long article. I'm going to read just a few things and comment on them.

[00:28:13] Wellum says, quote, " Dispensationalism began in 19th century England and has undergone various revisions. However, what is unique to all its forms is the Israel Church distinction, dependent on a particular understanding of the covenants. For dispensationalists, Israel refers to an ethnic national people, and the church is never the transformed eschatological Israel in God's plan. Gentile salvation is not part of the fulfillment of promises made to national Israel and now realized in the church. Instead, God has promised national Israel, first in the Abrahamic covenant and then reaffirmed by the prophets, the possession of the promised land under Christ's rule, which still awaits its fulfillment in the pre-millennial reign of Christ and the eternal state.

[00:29:08] " The church, then, is distinctively new in God's plan and ontologically different from Israel. Although the church is presently comprised of believing Jews and Gentiles, she is receiving only the spiritual blessings that were promised to Israel. In the future, Christ will rule over redeemed nations, not the church in her present form. The church will not receive all of God's promises equally, fully and forever in Christ. Instead, believing Jews and Gentiles who now constitute the church will join the redeemed of the nation of Israel along with Gentile nations to live under Christ's rule, according to their respective national identities and the specific promises given to each. Dispensationalism also teaches that the church is constituted as a regenerate community, which entails that the sign of baptism is to be applied only to those who profess faith in Christ." End quote. Okay, so this is again, Stephen Wellem's description of dispensationalism and what it looks like and what it believes. And again, there is a spectrum. So maybe if you are a dispensationalist, you will affirm some of this and reject some of it because it's not like there's some monolithic union that you have to join in order to be a dispensationalist.

[00:30:33] Now, what would my response to some of this be? Well, I find it very strange that it's making such a hard line between the Old Testament and the New Testament because what we see in the language and in the similarity between the Old Testament and the New Testament and Jesus fulfilling things and not doing away with them, plus, there's the very distinct and obvious metaphor of people being grafted in. That just doesn't track with dispensationalist thought.

[00:31:05] But okay, let's continue on reading. Wellem says, quote, " Covenant theology formally began in the Reformation and post Reformation era, and it is best described by the Westminster Confession of Faith and other reformed confessions. It organizes God's plan in history by God's covenantal dealings with humans.

[00:31:29] " Although covenant theology is not monolithic, those who hold to it typically argue for three covenants, the intra Triniarian covenant of redemption. The temporal covenant of works made with Adam on humanity's behalf, which tragically he broke, resulting in sin and death. And the covenant of grace made in Christ for the salvation of God's people, which has unfolded over time through different covenant administrations." End quote.

[00:32:00] Okay. So I like that he is admitting that covenant theology began in the reformation. That is definitely the case. And as you can see, we have the three covenants that I mentioned before. And while you can see how they're rooting these covenants in Scripture, there's really no place in Scripture that we can go to that says, look, this is the first covenant and the second covenant and the third covenant. And you might wonder why and how we have what we seem to have with the old covenant versus what Christ is instituting with the new covenant.

[00:32:38] All right, so here's the thing about systems. Like Dr. Heiser said, they all cheat, and that's not just about eschatological systems, either.

[00:32:48] When we look at actual Scripture and what it describes, we can come and see the violence inherent in the system. We have a necessary disconnect between the text and the systematic formulation of it. They're drawing out things in ways that seem fairly logical and philosophical. And a lot of people will make a distinction between what the Bible says and what theology says, as if that makes any kind of sense at all.

[00:33:17] At any rate, let me continue to read. Wellum says, quote, " Although covenant theology recognizes the plurality of the covenants, it subsumes all post-fall covenants under the overarching category of the covenant of grace. As a result, the Israel Church relationship is viewed in terms of continuity. That is, the two by nature are essentially the same, yet administered differently.

[00:33:47] " For this reason, Israel and the church are constituted as a mixed people, full of elect and non elect, and their representative covenant signs, which is circumcision and baptism, signify the same spiritual reality. Hence why baptism may be applied to infants in the church." End quote.

[00:34:11] Okay, so here we are getting into some little bit more complications, we might say. If you are familiar with what Dr. Heiser said about baptism, for instance, and he brought out a wide range of information on this, but he did come down on the idea that whatever you say about baptism has to be also said about circumcision. And so we might say, he's talking about covenant theology here, even though he's not getting into the distinctive ideas of the three different covenants.

[00:34:43] However, what I would like to strongly suggest to you is that just because a theologian or a biblical scholar seems to fall in line with this system or that system, it doesn't mean they actually fit into that system. I see this a lot when people say, well, Dr. Heiser was obviously a, a millenniast, or whatever they wanna say.

[00:35:08] I mean, again, there's a system and there's ideas within the system, and if you align yourself with something in that system, then it might make you seem like you're in that system. You know what else Dr. Heiser said? He also said that he thought that there was a place for ethnic Israel in the end times.

[00:35:30] What does that sound like? That sounds like dispensationalism. So which one is he? It's a false equation. Stop asking questions like that. Like unless somebody self identifies as falling in line with some form of systematic theology, you shouldn't presume that that's what they're talking about. It's a dangerous set of ground because I've had conversations with people lately about J Harvey Walton's dissertation and his bringing out covenant in that kind of functional creation of order. And when I say certain things, people will assume that, oh, he's talking about covenant theology, but I really don't think he is.

[00:36:14] He's making a distinctive difference between how we can see covenant, and just because it can be seen in creation in some form doesn't mean it's a formalized application of it. Because notice, what we have in covenant theology is this talk of a covenant of works. Walton's work is actually dismantling that idea and he's suggesting that there's a very different picture.

[00:36:41] He also seems to be dismantling the entire idea of covenant in creation itself, and he's suggesting that the flow of creation in the order of creation leads up to covenant. Doesn't necessarily mean it's there at the beginning. I think he's going too far with that idea because again, we do have God's covenantal name used, and as we explore the covenant or not in early Genesis, I hope to show you that there are elements that are there, just like there are elements of sacred space, there are elements of priesthood, there are elements of kingship. But when we're talking about the beginning of time, we don't have to presume that those ideas are fully fledged and fully there.

[00:37:29] So they are both there and not there at the same time.

[00:37:34] We have Schrodinger's creation or something. I don't know, but my point is we really have to look at this in a more nuanced way.

[00:37:42] And look, there's a reason that these systematic theologies have been developed. It's because they are trying to take them from the text and use the text in a faithful way. So it makes sense that when we get into biblical theology and we start really diving deeply into these things, then what we're gonna see is a whole lot of stuff that may on the surface seem like systematic theology, because hopefully there are good things in your systematic theology and they are stemming from the text.

[00:38:18] When we gain new information about the context of the Bible and how the biblical authors themselves were thinking about things, we ought to be free to adjust the way that we are talking about it in our theology. That's a hard thing to do.

[00:38:33] But a lot of times, it's like you can take the dispensationalist view, you can take the covenantal view, you can shift it slightly and then have it fit into biblical theology. But you're gonna have to give up a few ideas when you do that too. That's why these are contrasting ideas and not the same idea.

[00:38:54] I don't think I'm gonna get into all of the passages I was hoping to get into today, but I do hope that all of this is going to be helpfully laying the groundwork of the conversation moving forward.

[00:39:05] So Wellum continues by saying, quote, " As covenant theology claims, the covenants are the central way God has unfolded his redemptive plan. But instead of dividing history into two historical covenants, the covenant of works, which is a conditional law covenant, and the covenant of grace, which is an unconditional gospel covenant, and then subsuming all of the post fall covenants, the Noahic, Abrahamic, Mosaic, Davidic, and new, under the larger category of the covenant of grace, Scripture depicts God's plan and promises as progressively revealed and accomplished through a plurality of covenants, Ephesians two 20, each of which reaches its fulfillment in Christ and the new covenant. This formulation better accounts for how each biblical covenant contributes to God's unified plan without subsuming all the covenants under one covenant.

[00:40:07] "It also explains better how all of God's promises are fulfilled in Christ, Hebrews one, one through three, Ephesians one, nine through 10, and applied to the church along with emphasizing the greater newness of the new covenant. This formulation is better because it explains the covenant's first and biblical rather than theological categories consistent with Scripture's presentation of the covenants.

[00:40:36] " After all, there is no specific textual warrant for the covenant of grace. It is more of a theological category. Theological categories are fine, but they must be true to Scripture. By contrast, there is much biblical warrant for God's plan unveiled through plural covenants. See, for example, Ephesians two 12, Romans nine, four.

[00:41:02] " No doubt, covenant theologies by covenantal structure grounds the theological categories of law and gospel, and it highlights well the two covenant heads of humanity, Adam and Christ. However, this is not the only way to ground these theological truths and covenant theology's primary weakness is that it grounds these truths by a covenantal construction foreign to Scripture." End quote.

[00:41:31] Okay, I just wanna say that that is amazing that he is acknowledging that. It makes me very happy. The question is, how far do we go to reshift our views and ground our views in Scripture rather than theological categories that are primarily philosophical, logical extensions from Scripture.

[00:41:53] Again, we all have to do those kinds of things. We all have to use logic. We all have to use philosophy of some form in order to do hermeneutics, to understand scripture well.

[00:42:06] Wellum goes on to say something that is nice here, he says, quote, " Furthermore, there is little warrant for the ratification of two distinct covenants in Genesis one through three. First in Genesis two 15 through 17, and then in Genesis three 15, as covenant theology contends. Instead, it's better to view Genesis three 15 as God's gracious post fall promise that despite Adam's sin and rebellion, God's purpose for humans will stand, and that from humanity, God will graciously provide a redeemer to undo what Adam did. Thus, from Genesis three 15 on and through the covenants, we see the unfolding revelation of the new covenant." End quote.

[00:42:55] Okay, so good that he's not seeing two distinct covenants in Genesis one through three. The question is, are we seeing one at all? And if we do, what does that covenant look like?

[00:43:08] As we'll see later on in the conversation about Walton, it's not that we can't see it at all, it's that we really need to see it very, very differently than we tend to do because he's still looking at things like this covenant of works.

[00:43:25] Wellum goes on to say, quote, " Furthermore, careful readers of Scripture will want to avoid categorizing the covenants as either conditional bilateral, law, or unconditional unilateral, gospel, as covenant theology tends to do. Instead, Scripture teaches that each covenant contains both elements, but with a clear distinction between the covenant in creation before and after the fall.

[00:43:55] " Thus, what was demanded of Adam before the fall is not confused with God's promise of redemption after the fall. And the Christological promise of Genesis three 15 gets unpacked across the covenants revealing that redemption is always and only in Christ alone. In fact, it's because of this blend of both elements that we can account for the deliberate tension that is created in the Bible's covenantal story, a tension that heightens as God's plan unfolds and is resolved only in Christ's perfect obedient life and death for us." End quote.

[00:44:31] It's good that he is trying to dismantle this and see it in a broader, more biblical way. There is that tendency of categorizing covenants as either being conditional or unconditional.

[00:44:43] But here's a phrase that he used. He said, Scripture teaches that each covenant contains both elements. And my question is, does Scripture really teach that? Like how do we know about what a covenant is? Scripture isn't describing what a covenant is. The people of the Bible already knew what a covenant was.

[00:45:09] They already used covenants in their daily lives. They already had the context of covenant. So Scripture isn't teaching anything about what a covenant is and what a covenant does, at least not generally. I do think that there is an element that Scripture might be correcting some views about covenant and showing the best way to do a covenant and showing what a covenant should look like and showing that when a covenant is actually fulfilled the way it should be, then this is what it looks like versus a human covenant, which is never fully the same as what we have here, right? Because we don't fulfill promises perfectly.

[00:45:54] So even though Wellem is saying that we need to avoid categorizing covenants as either law or gospel, he still goes on to say that there is a distinctive difference between the covenant before and after the fall, and that what was demanded of Adam before the fall shouldn't be confused with the promise of redemption.

[00:46:14] And my question is here, how do you then make any connection? Like how is Adam our head if the covenant that he was given is faulty and not the same and doesn't lead to redemption? Like that doesn't make any sense.

[00:46:35] It's like, well, we want to have continuity, but we're still gonna create these dividing lines here, here and here. Because that's where I wanna see them. My suggestion is that the work of Walton and other people who are looking at this in the context of the ancient Near East, what a covenant actually did, they're going to help us see this in proper light and as this law or works versus gospel and grace distinction that he's still putting in, even though he says he wants to avoid it.

[00:47:09] Now, I will agree, as he goes on to say that the tension grows between God's faithfulness to his promises and our disobedience. Okay, fair enough. That still doesn't tell us that there's this distinctive difference between a covenant of works and a covenant of not works.

[00:47:28] All right. I'm not gonna keep reading every bit of this article. It's a very long article and you can go read it yourself. But Wellem asks how Scripture presents the covenants, and he says it's not in this two covenant structure, but rather there's multiple covenants that progressively reveal the greater new covenant.

[00:47:48] And I don't necessarily have anything wrong with that way of describing it, but we still have to understand what a covenant is, first of all. And what we have today in our minds is like this contract idea. And it's really questionable as to how much that maps onto an ancient covenant, but we'll get to that in future episodes. Okay. Hitting on a few more points from this article.

[00:48:13] Willem says, quote, "Although dispensationalism acknowledges the significance of Genesis one through 11 for the Bible story, the idea of a creation covenant has no role. But this is the problem. There is abundant evidence for such a covenant. And its significance for putting together the covenants is twofold. First, the creation covenant is foundational for all future covenants since all subsequent covenants unpack Adam's role in the world as our representative head. Romans five 12 through 21. Hebrews two 15 through 18, Adam and all humanity is created as God's image- son to rule over creation. Genesis 1 26 through 28, Psalm eight. Adam is created to know God as he mediates God's rule to the world. God demands perfect obedience from his covenant partner, which sadly he fails to fulfill. Genesis two 16 through 17. Genesis three, one through six. But God graciously promises that a woman's seed will come. Genesis three 15, a greater Adam who will reverse the effects of sin and death. All subsequent covenant heads, Noah, Abraham, Israel, David function as subsets of Adam, but they are not the greater Adam. Instead, they only point forward to him. Without a creation covenant as the foundation, the remaining covenants hang in midair." End quote.

[00:49:51] Okay, so this is really, really why we need to understand the covenants in the ancient setting rather than importing our idea of what covenant is on the past.

[00:50:05] Wellum says that there is abundant evidence for a creation covenant. And I will agree with him in the same way that there is abundant evidence for Eden being a sacred space and Adam being a priestly king. Even though the creation account says nothing explicit about a covenant or a temple or Adam being a priest and a king, it's describing it in very figurative, very metaphorical, very allegorical ways, and there is a lot there to land your plane on here.

[00:50:42] So I will agree that there is abundant evidence, but that doesn't mean that what we're going to learn about covenant later should be applied to here at the beginning, wholesale. Like I will say that as well about sacred space, Adam as priest and Adam as king. You don't need to import all of the ideas into the beginning here because it is the beginning.

[00:51:10] So is the creation covenant foundational for all future covenants as Wellem claims here?

[00:51:17] Well, future covenants are going to expand upon the creation covenant. The creation covenant does not have to contain all of the elements, like I said. And even if it does, which maybe it does, there's some argument there. We have to ask, is God demanding perfect obedience and this is what covenant is and that's why Adam was kicked out? Most people will kind of go along with that line of thinking. But we're gonna challenge a little bit of that here in future episodes.

[00:51:53] We're gonna challenge the idea that there was this concept that God expected humanity to be perfect. They didn't turn out to be perfect, so he kicked them out. I believe that there is a better way of looking at it than that, which then doesn't mean that we're gonna go the opposite direction entirely. Again, it's all about nuance and looking at it in covenant.

[00:52:19] I really think it's weird too, that there's this distinctive idea that this covenant of works and Adam as being the head means that everything is dependent on Adam suddenly, whereas nothing else in Scripture is. Everything else we see is dependent on God and God actually fulfilling the promises. So that's something to bring into this conversation and ask, what the heck? Why is Adam the head of the covenant here? Whereas, yes, you know, in the future we have Noah, Abraham, Israel, and David, who are all heads of the covenant because they're all part of the covenant, but they're not expected to do it perfectly.

[00:53:05] But there's gotta be some understanding that God knows that they're not going to be the perfect ones to fulfill things.

[00:53:12] There's an idea here that we could, I don't know, maybe learn from the progression of these covenants.

[00:53:19] Wellem says that, quote, "The creation covenant is foundational for establishing crucial typological patterns that reach their fulfillment in Christ and the new covenant. As these typological patterns are unveiled through the covenants, they eventually terminate in Christ and his church." End quote.

[00:53:40] So he's presuming that there is a covenant here and that what's going on can be described as a formal covenant. And he seems to be suggesting that if there's no formal covenant here, then that somehow dismantles all of the typological patterns. And I, I don't get that because this is the beginning, right? Like the typological patterns have a start here. But that's the point. They're establishing things. And history is going to change things and progress into the future because that's what happens. People do things and things kind of change. Like this is the flow of history.

[00:54:24] We can certainly establish crucial typological patterns of sacred space, kingship, priesthood, covenant. All of these things can start here without presuming that everything that we have later is going to be imported into this. I mean, we don't do that with any of the other ideas, do we?

[00:54:46] We don't import all of the ideas of Abraham, Israel and David into what's going on with Noah. We don't import everything from Israel and David into what's going on with Abraham. You know? So there can be this distinction of, yeah, the ideas are there as seeds. Noah is kind of a king because he's the head of the new humanity. He's the patriarch. That doesn't mean that he's going to be doing everything that David did, because that's a different context. Abraham is like Israel, but he's also not doing everything that Israel did. In fact, Abraham had a wider family than just the nation of Israel.

[00:55:31] You have Israel and David, and there's maybe a closer connection between those two than what the others, but Israel was also a set of tribes, and David came from just one tribe. So what can be said about David cannot be said about all of Israel. What can be said about Israel cannot be said about everything that Abraham did.

[00:55:55] What can be said about Abraham cannot be said about everything that Noah did. What can be said about Noah cannot be said about everything that Adam did. There's an expansion as we go, and sometimes there's a focusing as well.

[00:56:12] Honestly, this is what makes these things typological patterns. If Noah, Abraham, Israel, and David all did the exact same thing, there wouldn't really be anything distinctive about what they can teach us.

[00:56:28] Now, Wellem here is really focused on the covenants and this being the purpose of the narrative, and in a sense I can really agree with that. But we have a danger of when we go to systematize things and when we go to look at the narrative as a story, we really want to bring it all into one thing. That's just our tendency. I think covenant is an amazing and very expansive way to see the story of Scripture. I think covenant is probably one of the best ways to see that, to be honest with you.

[00:57:04] But there's a lot of elements in Scripture that are only kind of incidental to the idea of covenant. You can have a covenant without a king. You can have a covenant without a priest. You can have a covenant without a prophet.

[00:57:19] And yet, Jesus came to be our perfect king, to be our perfect priest, to be our perfect prophet. So you cannot just boil things down into one thing.

[00:57:30] But on the other hand, there's some really good points here to consider about the importance of covenant and how it tracks through Scripture and how we can kind of nuance things. And how each of these systems might have something to say to us about how we can nuance that, even if they don't quite formulate it exactly the way the biblical authors did.

[00:57:53] I very much like Wellem's idea that what we should be focused on is this new and greater covenant. This is not an undoing of the old, it's not the opposite of the old.

[00:58:05] And maybe we can say, just as Wellum says here, quote, " The church is not directly the new Israel or her replacement. Rather, in Christ, the church is God's new covenant people because Jesus is the anti typical fulfillment of Adam and Israel, the true seed of Abraham who inherits the promises by his work." End quote.

[00:58:30] Does that necessitate that there is no room for ethnic Israel and the land? Like Dr. Heiser says, I don't think that has to be the case, but maybe it is. Maybe it has a new role that we don't understand yet.

[00:58:46] We are kind of hampered a bit by not knowing the future and having what we do know, being couched in all of this metaphorical and allegorical ideas that quite honestly, we don't understand all that well today, especially.

[00:59:02] Okay, so in our biblical theology approach to covenant and sacrament and baptism and judgment and all of these ideas, there might be some weaknesses to our approach here, but nonetheless, we are taking a narrative priority to things which looks at the unfolding storyline of Scripture over time and respects authors, settings, genre, theological development. And while that does read forward and not backward, it doesn't take away a backward view because of the fact that Jesus is God here on earth, incarnate for us.

[00:59:44] So what he is doing is not something that God wasn't doing in the Old Testament. Where systematic theology seeks logical and doctrinal coherence, what we're gonna do in biblical theology is try to discover coherence through the arc of history in this narrative and contextual flow. We're gonna pay attention to the movement, tension, surprise, reconfiguration of ideas. That's not something we really kind of like, but it's what we see in Scripture.

[01:00:17] Biblical covenants aren't philosophical categories of a modern sort. We'll be talking about this deep context here. Progressive revelation doesn't mean that you can just keep progressing forever. It just means that God doesn't reveal everything at once. What Noah or Abraham knew of God's covenant is not the same as what David or Paul knew about it. That doesn't mean they're different. They're just in different contexts, and there's different purposes and different things we can learn here.

[01:00:51] It's very important to understand that genre matters as well. We'll be talking about that and sacrament and storytelling and embodied reenactments of all kinds of things here in this series.

[01:01:06] Baptism and communion are both very key to things and we can describe them in different ways. We can describe them as signs or seals. They can be narrative rituals and formations of identity where we relive covenant history in ourselves.

[01:01:24] We're going to see a wide range of baptism and water symbolism, and that is going to track onto so many other concepts that it might at times be a little bit hard to keep track, but we're gonna do our best. As we've talked about alcohol and relationship and communion together, it is an element of participation. And this is one of those pictures that we see where God so desires to participate with us that he gives us these images and these ideas.

[01:01:56] Alright, I'm gonna go ahead and wrap up here. There was so much more I was gonna say in this episode, and instead of continuing everything I'm talking about here, I will probably go ahead and write up some blog posts in the future. So if you wanna keep track of my blog posts, you can do that either by joining my Facebook group or perhaps better by signing up to my newsletter because in my weekly newsletter, which I have been very proud of myself to get it done weekly lately, I will send out links to all of my blog posts.

[01:02:30] So if you wanna sign up to my newsletter, you just go to my website at genesis marks the spot.com, and on the front page you'll see a box that says, join the email list. You put your name and your email there, hit subscribe and you will be in my system so that I can send you my newsletters. You will get links to my episodes. You will get all of the links to my current blog posts. And whatever else I want to send out that week.

[01:03:02] Thank you guys for listening. Thank you guys for your support. If you have questions in this series about baptism, I'm still working on building up my flow. You should see my stack of notes is a very tall stack of notes, so there's a lot to get to here.

[01:03:19] So if you do have questions, you can go to my website, find the tab up at the top that says Contact. You can email me that way. Or you can find me on Facebook. At any rate, thank you guys for your support. Thanks especially to my Patreon and PayPal supporters. You guys rock, and I hope you will all look forward to what we are going to be unpacking in this series.

[01:03:47] I wish you all a blessed week and we will see you later.