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From monarch to bishop: Covenant, Torah, and community formation in the Old Testament and the Anglican Communion
Anglican Theological Review, Winter 2003 by Newman, Judith H
My assignment for this Episcopal Church Foundation Fellows Forum was to provide some conceptual groundwork and scriptural tools with which to consider "Covenant, Contract, and Commonweal: The Ordering of Community in a Litigious Age." Given the breadth of the conference topic, which embraces the role of law and polity in church and state and their tangled interrelationships, I will shed light on a rather small fraction of our concerns, although I will comment that the Old Testament provides diverse perspectives on all of the above. There is no single model for plotting these interrelationships. "Law" or Torah in the Old Testament, and particularly how Torah is conceived in the post-exilic period of Second Temple Judaism, is quite complex and variegated, more so than one would imagine from reading the Pauline epistles. As I make some observations about covenant and community, I issue a reminder that the Old Testament, unlike the New, was written over a period of perhaps some eight centuries, from the earliest poetry to the latest apocalypse.1 If we include the deutero-canonical literature, that time extends to a millennium. It reflects the influence of Egyptian, Babylonian, Assyrian, Canaanite, Persian, and Hellenistic cultures. To think in synchronic terms of "the" Old Testament perspective on any issue is thus problematic. The church as a whole affirms the unity of Scripture but not the uniformity of Scripture, and so it is necessary to consider its literature in terms of variegated tradition streams that developed over a long period of time. Certain theological emphases remained constant, but were formulated in new ways given different cultural contexts and historical circumstances.
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This paper offers a general overview of the nature of covenant in ancient Israel with a brief description of some of the covenants contained in the Old Testament, with a particular focus on two of them: the Sinai covenant and the divine covenant with King David. It then presents two portrayals of how law-Torah-is understood in relation to leadership and community formation, from two different historical contexts. It offers a comparison between two depictions of the discovery of the scroll of the Torah, the book of the law, during the reign of King Josiah. The first narrative in 2 Kings 22-23 is pre-exilic. The second, in 2 Chronicles 34-35, dates to the post-exilic period, sometime in the fourth century B.C.E. These examples reveal that both the theological trajectory in which the literature stands and the historical circumstances of Israelites or Jews(2) at the time in which each was written, influence the way in which community was conceived. My observations will serve ultimately to shed light on the modern role of bishop in relationship to tradition and community formation and relates to the topics of schism in the Anglican Communion as well as ecumenical relations.
Diversity of Covenants
Let me begin, then, in keeping with the first "c" in our alliterative conference title, with a discussion of covenant. The traditional Christian term for the collection of books in the Hebrew Bible would seem to suggest that there is one and only one covenant contained therein. The term "Old Testament" derives from the perspective of those who consider themselves under a single new covenant, that group of Christians who constituted themselves as a community, or more correctly, numerous communities, linked by an understanding of Jesus as mediator of a new covenant with God. But there are many other covenants in the Hebrew Bible-covenants between humans, covenants between God and humans. A covenant, most simply put, is a formal agreement between two parties in which the parties are bound by mutual obligations or, minimally, mutual expectations.
An essential distinction to make among types of covenants is between the conditional covenant, whose validity is conditioned on obedience to the covenant stipulations, and the unconditional covenant, sometimes called a covenant of grant or a promissory covenant, in which the stronger party to the covenant grants something to the lesser party, but which cannot be annulled, although there may be a punishment for failure to show loyalty to the covenant partner. Both kinds of covenants are reflected in political treaties that have been recovered from throughout the ancient Near East.
Biblical covenants were meant to ensure any variety of matters for the parties to the covenant, depending in part on the theological tradition in which they originated. The Priestly source, for example, includes a series of three divine-human covenants. They are all unconditional, and each is designated a berit 'olam, an eternal covenant. The first is the covenant God makes with Noah and his descendants in Genesis 9, after the flood. Sealed with the ritual sign of the rainbow, it is a covenant of promise in which God forswears destruction of all flesh ever again by water. The second is the covenant with Abraham in Genesis 17, sealed by the mark of circumcision, and promising land, descendants, and blessing to his descendants. The third of the priestly series makes up part of the Sinai covenant traditions. In Exodus 31:31, God grants sanctity to the people, making them a holy people, set apart, and the Sabbath is a perpetual sign of that covenant. In both the second and third of the Priestly covenants, failure to observe either circumcision or the Sabbath on the part of any given individual does not result in the cancellation of the covenant, but does result in that individual's being cut off from the people. The sanctity and wholeness of peoplehood is a premium in the Priestly covenant theology, which is thought to have originated during the Babylonian exile when the people were outside the land, and the maintenance of their community was very important.3
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