We're one, but we're not the same

You say: "love is a temple, love a higher law Love is a temple, love the higher law." You ask me to enter, but then you make me crawl And I can't be holding on to what you got, when all you got is hurt. From the song "One." I've often thought about these lyrics, especially whenever I'm contemplating the inbreaking of the new covenant, in anticipation of the return of the crucified God, the risen Messiah. Betraying more of my idiosyncracies than is probably wise, I fancy this excerpt to speak against much of the church at large. "Love," they say, "in this new covenant, is a temple, a higher law. Come. Enter your rest." (All this is true, of course.) Yet it turns out to be anything but rest. Burdened with guilt and talmudic blue laws (fill in...

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Covenant Life

{This originally appeared in Tabletalk 27.3, (March 2003): 34} The word covenant gets tossed around a lot—in Tabletalk and elsewhere. The difficulty lies in the fact that covenant remains a hard concept to comprehend, yet many theologians teach it to be a central interpretive principle of Scripture and Israel's history. Simply put, God's covenant with man is gracious and everlasting, resting on his oath that should it fail, he will be torn in two (Gen. 15; cf. Jer. 34:18). However, this simple early covenant grows more complex as the biblical narrative continues. By the time we reach 1 Samuel 12, we see provisos upon which the fulfillment of the covenant seems to rest. How are we to understand God's conditions? We ignore them only at our peril. At the very least,...

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