Note: This is the 6th installment of a series of posts making an encore presentation after their previous happy home, Sibboleth, was unceremoniously executed this past fall.
The Structure of the Universe (Part 6: Why Israel?)
“There is the first Adam and the Second Adam, and there is none in between.” Those frightening words, uttered in the context of a course on Christology in a Reformed seminary setting, starkly raise the question: why Israel?
In Westminster Calvinism, the Law is the structuring principle for the universe–at least as pertains to the relationship between God and humanity. When people, through Adam’s sin, became incapable of attaining to the Law, God created a co-context of a covenant of grace which would be good for us so long as God brought Jesus into the equation to keep the Law for us so that we could be saved on the basis of the covenant of works.
All of this supposedly happens in Genesis 1-3.
But once the Reformed Tradition has taken the notion of Law and teleported it back from Sinai to the Garden; and once it has taken the notion of world-blessing covenant and teleported it back from Abraham to the gates east of Eden, there is no reason why Israel has to exist except as a contingent container for receiving the truth of God as God saw fit to reveal it from time to time.
Once again I invite you to study the footnotes of the Westminster Confession. Every place where the Confession footnotes scripture to support its idea of a “covenant of works,” what scripture is talking about is the Law God gave at Sinai. And every place where the Confession footnotes scripture in support of its idea of a “covenant of grace,” what scripture is talking about is an actual covenant made in time with Abraham and/or his descendants. For this moment in the scholastic Reformed Tradition, what is “real” is not what happens in history, but the transhistorical entities that hover beyond space and time–abstract concepts of works and grace.
In such a world, there is no inherent value in the story of Israel. It is simply a place-holder until the non-Israel-bound covenant of works can be fulfilled so that the non-Israel-bound covenant of grace might be consummated so that the non-Israel-tied Law by which all are judged alike might have its fulfillment imputed to some and its condemnation wrought in others.
Tellingly, when the Reformed Tradition began to dabble in Biblical Theology with the work of Geerhardus Vos, it fancied itself studying “the history of special revelation.” See what that’s saying: the story of Israel is merely a container for what’s really important: the increasing revelation of the knowledge of transhistorical truths about God (that would find their consummation when Jesus comes to do the Law and thereby show us who God really is: the righteous law-keeping One).
Even for Vos, the story isn’t the thing, the revelation of the propositional truths about who God is, that’s the thing.
So once again we step back to ask what difference it makes whether or not one sees the cosmos structured on a system of law.
It makes a difference for how we see the place of Israel within God’s story. Why did it take 2,000 years for Christians in the West to see that Paul really means Rom 9-11? Our idea of the gospel was too far removed from the narrative of Israel.
Why does the New Perspective, with its insistence on seeing the story of Israel at the middle of everything, garner such harsh opposition? Because to say that Israel is at the middle of everything means that God’s relationship with the cosmos and humans in particular is tied to deeply contingent and historical factors: actual covenants in space and time, eras of history within which God acts differently toward different people, an identity for God that is tied to events and people within history rather than abstract, absolute categories.
Once you have said that Israel matters–that the actual covenants with Abraham and Moses and David matter–then you have cut away the exegetical moorings by which Reformed theology has created its Works versus Grace antithesis, cut away the scriptural “proof” for the Reformed version of the covenantal structure of the cosmos, and thereby undermined the way in which the early Reformed Tradition opposed Roman Catholicism and articulated its doctrine of justification.
This does not mean that Humpty Dumpty can’t be put back together again; and it doesn’t mean that in the framework of the 16th century debates that the Roman Catholics were right about everything after all. But it does mean that the recognition that Israel really matters, like the recognition that Jesus’ humanity is richly textured in its importance, like the recognition that “atonement” is about more (not less!) than the law court, like the recognition that Christ is the goal of the Law and not vice versa–this recognition sends us back to the beginning to ask afresh: What is the world and God’s intention for it? What’s wrong with the world? Is God’s purpose to rescue from or redeem the world with these sets of problems? And what, if the latter, must God do to affect that redemption?
I too have wondered, why Israel? Do you have an answer? If the Israel Project of being a light to the world succeeded, would we need Jesus or was Israel designed to fail? Which then would cause me to ask, was Adam created to fall? … just thinking out loud.
A few things comes to mind that my interpretation would change if there was no Israel. 1. The Kingdom of God. 2. The Temple. 3.Our relation to the cosmos.
Daniel,
I’d like to see you answer Sam’s question. I’m in complete agreement with your post and the deficiencies in the Reformed tradition, but what if Israel would have succeeded? Is the coming of Jesus necessary? Was the incarnation just a contingency that was not a part of Yahweh’s ideal?
Perhaps it is fruitless to ask such questions since our identity is tied to the narrative, and the narrative shows that Israel failed and any “but what if” is purely speculative and hypothetical. I’d at least like some type of acknowledgment though, at least for curiosity’s sake!
I’m not sure that scripture ever speaks to “absolute necessity” in such terms, Luke. We’re given a story of what did happen, and then told also that it was God’s plan all along, and also are encouraged to think of it all not as some sham but as the true work of God throughout history. So: Adam could have succeeded and didn’t; ditto Noah, Abraham, Israel, David, post-exilic Israel, perhaps a post-exilic suffering servant figure. Jesus was necessary because it had to be a human within this space that God marked out.
Theologically, we can take our understanding of the Trinity and put it back at the beginning of the story and see Adam as a representative of the heavenly Son (the latter having priority rather than vice-versa). This might lead to a thought that any of these other representatives is to a greater or lesser extent faithfully imaging The Son, and that eventually the arrival of the Son himself is required to set things straight.