Christian Ethics

A New Covenant Model

Hak Joon Lee

• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781467462624
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

In this capacious and accessible introduction to Christian ethics, Hak Joon Lee advances a renewed vision of Christian life that is liberative, grace-centered, and justice- and peace-oriented in nature. Responding to key ethical questions of today, Lee applies the moral meaning and implications of the New Covenant in Jesus Christ to twenty-first-century life, characterized by fluidity, fragmentation, division, and violence.

Christian Ethics begins by introducing covenant as the central drama and storyline of Scripture that culminates in the New Covenant of Jesus. It presents shalom (the wholeness and flourishing of creation) as God's ultimate purpose and God's covenant as "God's organizing mechanism of community" that mediates God's work of liberation and restoration. Lee proposes a creative model of Christian ethics based on the New Covenant of Jesus and its organizing patterns, reconstructing the key categories of ethics (agency, norms, authority of Scripture, ethical discernment, etc.) and drawing out four practices—communicative engagement, just peacemaking, grassroots organizing, and nonviolence.The result is a new model of Christian ethics that is inclusive, egalitarian, ecological, and justice- and peace-oriented, which overcomes the limitations of traditional covenantal ethics.

In the second part of the book, Lee systematically applies New Covenant ethics to the most urgent and controversial social issues of our time: democraticpolitics, economic ethics, creation care, criminal justice, race, sex and marriage, medicine, and war and peace. Through his deep, pastoral, and irenic inquiries into these difficult topics, Lee demonstrates a pattern of covenantal moral reasoning that undercuts the dominant neoliberal ethos of individualism and transactional relationship that more and more influences Christian moral decisions. His conclusion is that as covenant has been at the heart of modern democracy, human rights, civil society, and civic formation, a renewed understanding of covenant centered in Jesus can help to heal our broken society and imperiled planet, and to reorganize the fragmented human life in the era of globalization and digitization.

1

New Covenant Ethics

Biblical Foundation, Features, and Method

CHAPTER 1

A Brief Survey of the Old Testament Covenants

The covenant is the goal of creation and creation is the way to the covenant.

—Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics III/1

If creation was the external basis of the covenant, [the covenant] is the internal basis of [creation].

—Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics III/1

This chapter and the next establish covenant as the root metaphor and the divine drama of Scripture. Through a brief survey of the major covenants in the OT (with creation/Adam, Noah, Abraham, Israel, and David), this chapter shows how the biblical story line moves through various covenants, anticipating its climax in Jesus Christ. This survey of the OT covenants is important to understand the full meaning and implication of the new covenant of Jesus Christ because it is the consummation of the preceding covenants. Furthermore, the patterns and types of the OT covenants are crucial to understand the moral nature of God and God’s interactions with humanity and other creatures.

The survey of the biblical covenants in this chapter is far from exhaustive; it is only representative. Even the study of each covenant focuses only on its basic moral contours and characteristics. Special attention will be given to the patterns and types of God’s work in covenant—how God continuously uses covenant to organize God’s community and what patterns and types are discernible in the process. Let us now examine the major covenants in the Bible, starting with the covenant with creation.

COVENANT WITH CREATION

The Westminster Confession, a major theological document in the Reformed tradition, reads: “The first covenant made with man was a covenant of works, wherein life was promised to Adam, and in him to his posterity, upon condition of perfect and personal obedience.”¹ Despite Reformed theology’s creative application of the idea of covenant to Adam, called the covenant of works, there is still considerable dispute among scholars on whether God’s relationship with creation and Adam could be defined as covenantal. One major reservation centers on the fact that the term “covenant” does not appear in the creation story (Gen. 1–3).

Despite the absence of the term in Genesis 1–3, I claim that the overall ethos—the theological and ethical premises of the creation story—is covenantal in nature.² A covenantal interpretation offers more plausibility and explanatory power for the text than other interpretations. Any reasonable reader of Scripture recognizes that certain key motifs and ideas, such as covenant or God’s reign, are assumed in many places of the text without explicit reference. This happens because biblical writers communicate to a faith community that already shares certain core theological and moral assumptions. This practice applies to covenant: there are several plausible reasons to consider God’s relationship with creation and the first humans in covenantal terms.

William J. Dumbrell offers a sensible explanation for why God’s relationship with creation should be understood as a covenant. According to him, the term “covenant” first appears in the OT in Genesis 6:18. Interestingly, in describing God’s covenant with Noah, the author of Genesis chose the verb heqim (“to establish a covenant”) rather than the verb krt (“to cut a covenant”), which is typically employed to portray the initiation of a covenant (cf. Gen. 15:18; 21:27, 32; Exod. 23:32; etc.). He claims this verb choice is not incidental; it implies that God’s covenant with Noah (Gen. 6:18) is not a newly initiated covenant³ but a reestablishment of the old covenant, which had already existed, namely, God’s covenant with creation.⁴ His claim is substantiated in the other uses of heqim in Genesis 17:7, 21; Exodus 6:4; Deuteronomy 8:18; etc.

Several passages in Scripture directly refer to creation as a covenantal event. For example, Job 5:19–22 directly refers to the covenant with creation. Additionally, the prophet Hosea mentions God’s covenant when he says, “I will make for you a covenant on that day with the wild animals, the birds of the air, and the creeping things of the ground” (Hos. 2:18),⁵ reminiscing about the creation story and Noah’s covenant. Likewise, Psalms 3:9–22 and 89:19–37 compare the firmness of God’s covenant with David and Levitical priests to God’s “covenant with the day and night.” Similarly, Jeremiah 31:35–36 states that the sincerity of God’s promise to Israel is as firm as his sustenance of the natural order of creation.⁶ All these references show that creation is God’s covenantal work and that God maintains its order through God’s covenantal fidelity.

The ordering of the universe in Genesis 1 signifies a covenantal underpinning of creation. The creation story reveals the patterns and motifs that typically characterize the covenant: ordering or righting of things through separating and binding. The first three days of God’s creation consist in the repeated ordering acts of God that set up the boundaries among different entities, forces, and structures, while the last three days fill it with all kinds of creatures. An orderly and harmonious creation emerges step-by-step as God rules over chaotic and disorderly forces. Through differentiation and binding, God is ordering by putting all things right. God assigns and fills each realm with living creatures and distributes dominion (including rights and responsibilities). The assignment and distribution of spaces become the precondition for the survival and flourishing of all creatures. God’s orderly work has the effect of turning a disordered chaos into a harmonious cosmos. Establishing the order through differentiating and fettering is a typical covenantal motif.⁷

Despite the mystery and virility, Genesis 1 is really about order. Chaos is untangled into light and darkness, inchoate ground is divided into water and land, and a firmament is erected to hold the rainstorms above at safe distance from the ground water below. Most of the language is about separating and dividing, like the task of one doing laundry…. It takes three days to create earth’s spaces and three days to fill them with correlating animate and inanimate creatures…. Every day fits the scheme. And poetic repetition of phrases like, “It was good” infuse Genesis 1’s spatial proportion with a moral aesthetic.⁸

The rhythm, constancy, and regularity of the natural order are the result of God’s covenant with creation. Likewise, in correlation with the physical order, Genesis 1 implies that a certain moral order is embedded in God’s creation, testifying to the integrity and moral coherence of God’s creation. Mary Douglas comments, “Being moral would mean being in alignment with the universe, working with the laws of creation, which manifest the mind of God.”⁹ This motif of the covenantal ordering of creation appears in wisdom literature and in the prophets as well. This order serves as the stabilizing force and the moral reference point of human activities.

As the opening story of the Bible, the creation covenant has a profound ethical meaning and profound implications. It is more than cosmogony (the birth of the world), as it touches nature, humans, family, and economy in their intersections. Importantly, the creation covenant has profound ecological implications for our global society and the planet today, which faces looming threats from global warming, pollution, and water shortage—all human-made ecological disasters based on a myopic anthropocentric worldview of the West. It counters this worldview by presenting creation as the default, antecedent community for all creatures and all human communities. As Isaiah’s eschatological vision of shalom portrays (Isa. 11:6–9), creation constitutes a single moral community under God in which every living creature is a member with certain rights.

The covenantal character of creation becomes even clearer with God’s covenant with Adam.¹⁰ Covenantal patterns and motifs are pervasive in Genesis 1–2, which discloses the typical covenantal pattern (differentiating and fettering), premises (unity in diversity), and motifs (sonship, moral obligations, and rest).¹¹ Genesis 2 depicts Adam as the archetypal representative of humanity, namely, God’s covenantal partner. Made in the image of God (which indicates sonship), Adam is endowed both with the power to represent God to the rest of creation and the responsibility to care for creation. Although God is the ruler of creation, God yields and grants space for humanity as partners in God’s ongoing organizing of creation. In a pattern similar to the differentiation of the spaces and dominions of the cosmos in the first three days, God sets the moral boundary for human freedom/power and responsibility by placing a stricture on human behavior. The tree of knowledge symbolizes the boundary of human power in relation to God (the specific term of relationship between God and humanity), while the tree of life (eternal life) points toward the future promise of blessings and reward for Adam’s covenantal faithfulness. Violation of the stipulation leads to death, while obedience leads to eternal life and Sabbath—peace and harmony in creation (Gen. 1:26). Even more importantly, Hosea 6:7 offers a direct reference to Adam’s covenant (“Like Adam they transgressed the covenant; / there they dealt faithlessly with me”), which compares the apostasy of Israel to Adam’s disobedience in Eden and speaks of both incidents in terms of a breach of covenant.

Furthermore, Genesis portrays the relationship between Adam and Eve in a typically covenantal framework. God created them as differentiated persons (male and female) in unity, whose relationship was characterized by freedom, equality, reciprocity, and union (Gen. 2:23)—unity in diversity and diversity in unity, reflecting the triune life of God.

God’s covenant with Adam becomes further evident in light of the close typological continuity and parallel pattern between the creation story and Noah’s story. The creation mandate reappears in Noah’s covenant (Gen. 9:6–7);¹² typical covenantal motifs (such as kingship, rest, and obligations) are found in the creation story (Gen. 2:16–17) and then repeated in Noah’s story.

Genesis 1–3 serves as a classic, covenantally oriented typology of salvation history. As much as the positive metaphors of covenant, such as sonship and blessings, are present, the negative metaphors of the covenant—temptation, disobedience, broken relationship, and, finally, expulsion from the garden—are also found there. These are repeated throughout the OT in the apostasy, disobedience, disloyalty, and exile of Israel. All these observations show that the idea of God’s covenant with creation/Adam is not far-fetched at all; it is consistent with the other covenants in the Bible in pattern, logic, and moral characteristics.¹³ As we will discuss in chapter 3, the patterns of gift-task, reciprocity, and remembrance-hope are notable here.

The covenant with creation/Adam is foundational and normative for the subsequent covenants, as it sets the plot and the typological pattern and gives impetus for the rest of salvation history. The subsequent biblical covenants, in the final analysis, take the creation covenant as their reference point. They point toward the restoration of the covenant of creation/Adam. In other words, the subsequent covenants are God’s rescue operations to fix the negative consequences caused by human disobedience.

The linking of covenant and creation runs deep throughout the entirety of Scripture, rendering a universalistic scope and impetus as well as a transcendental moral ground to its narratives and moral teachings.¹⁴ This cosmic covenant is the default mode of human existence. Every human social arrangement and structure in history is circumscribed by this cosmic (universal) covenant of creation. Human society cannot override or contravene this covenant. There is no redemption without the redemption of creation; for redemption is creation restored.

COVENANT WITH NOAH

Genesis 6 describes the human moral condition after the Fall. Corruption and violence reached their peaks as humans constantly threatened God’s order to the extent that the integrity of creation was compromised (Gen. 6:5, 11–12). The flood was God’s intervention to save humanity from self-destruction as well as God’s judgment against sin. God ordered Noah to build the ark, and he responded in obedience.

After the flood receded, God established a covenant with Noah, his family, other creatures, and the earth itself. Noah’s covenant is closely tied with the creation covenant. Like the creation covenant, Noah’s covenant is a universal covenant of God that concerns all creatures and creation; it is explicitly ecological in nature, thus checking the anthropocentrism and ethnocentrism often associated with other covenants in the OT.

Several crucial creational motifs are reiterated in Noah’s story: Noah represents the head of humanity, as Adam did; he was given the same creation mandate (Gen. 8:17); and God commanded Noah to steward all species, which is reminiscent of Adam’s task in the garden (Gen. 9:1–7). As Noah was the symbol of humanity, the ark was a microcosmic symbol of Eden—a carrier of God’s promise and blessings and hope for the creation. God’s covenant with Noah was intended to restore the basic order of creation (threatened by human sin).

What is notable and ecologically important is that God specified nonhuman creatures and the earth as God’s covenant partners, reiterating this reality four times (Gen. 9:15–17).¹⁵ God promised to protect Noah and his dependents (i.e., future humanity), other creatures, and the earth from the instability of the natural order. To ...