Christian Ethics: A New Covenant Model

By Hak Joon Lee

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: democratic politics, 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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Release date: Nov 9, 2021
• ISBN: 9781467462624

Hak Joon Lee

Hak Joon Lee (PhD, Princeton Theological Seminary) is the Lewis B. Smedes professor of Christian ethics at Fuller Theological Seminary where he teaches in both master and doctoral levels and serves as chair of the department. He is copresident ofG2G-KODIA Christian Education Center, a research institute on Asian American Christianity and culture. He has written several books in English and Korean including The Great World House: Martin Luther King, Jr. (in English) and A Paradigm Shift in Korean Protestant Churches: A Road Map for Change and Renewal (in Korean), which was selected one of the most outstanding books of the year 2011 by the ministry of culture, sports, and tourism of South Korea.

Book preview

Introduction

For theological reflection on social matters, much more significant than the original covenant on which the federalist tradition builds is the new covenant, which remains almost completely neglected as a resource for political thought.

—Miroslav Volf, Exclusion and Embrace

Friends is a classic American sitcom that remains popular among many young people despite the passage of more than two decades since it first appeared in 1994. Based in Manhattan, it is the story of six friends (Rachel Green, Ross Geller, Monica Geller, Joey Tribbiani, Chandler Bing, and Phoebe Buffay) who are all quirky in one way or another—spoiled, compulsive, weird, immature, desperate, and wimpy—reflecting their early childhood family trauma or personal complexes. They struggle to achieve professional success and romantic happiness, but their lives are never straightforward. Over the course of eight years, these friends go through family crises, numerous personal mistakes, failures, conflicts, laughter, tears, and surprises. The message of the sitcom is that these six young people learn what it really means to be friends as they experience various challenges. They are discouraged and frustrated by past hurts and wounds, but they also find a resting and healing place in friendship. They stick together, accepting and caring for each other, finding grace among each other.

There are several reasons for the tremendous popularity of Friends. The show superbly describes a widespread moral ethos among young people—nonjudgmental, tolerant of different lifestyles, expressive, feeling imperfect and vulnerable, but also longing for acceptance, trust, and belongingness.¹ In hilarious ways, the sitcom asks a very serious question: What is friendship? This question is pressing and poignant for young people who live in a society where traditional communities are disappearing and social life is increasingly stressful and lonely. They look for an alternative community where they can find acceptance and support.

Friends raises several important questions for Christians: Does the church offer good company like those six friends? How would the church accept persons of wildly different personalities like the six characters? Would the church provide a space (like Central Perk, where they frequently gather) where Christians can find acceptance, forgiveness, empowerment, and the joy of sharing life? What resources does Christianity have for meeting the growing needs of young people that Friends seems to portray? These are not easy questions to answer, and we know that churches today are often more religious institutions than places that provide friendship and grace where lives are shared together.

This book is about Christian ethics based on covenant. In this post-Christian era, many people do not fully comprehend what covenant is; they typically conflate it or confuse it with contract—a legal agreement between different parties—and are unaware of its deep biblical meaning. However, covenant, as we will see shortly, is central to the Bible. More importantly, covenant, in a nutshell, is about God’s friendship with humanity. Indeed, God called Abraham my friend, just as Jesus called his disciples friends (John 15:15). The Bible is the drama of friendship: from creation of humanity as God’s partner, to the unexpected betrayal of humanity that leads to alienation, to God’s constant efforts to restore friendship, which climax in God’s incarnation in Jesus and dwelling in us as the Spirit. Surprisingly, however, the biblical idea of covenant celebrates core values that Friends depicts: trust, acceptance, commitment, honesty, affection, and self-sacrifice for other friends. The message of the Bible is that God never gives up on friendship with humanity. Just as Joey becomes a member of the new family that Chandler and Monica form at the end of the show, we are invited to become permanent members of God’s family.

ETHICS

Then what is ethics, and why do we need ethics? How is ethics related to covenant, and how is ethics based on covenant different from other forms of ethics? While having a forceful (even if often distracted) passion for justice and individual rights, many young people in the postmodern era have negative or sullen reactions to the word ethics. It conjures up images of dry rules, courts, intolerant religious groups, or rigid parents or teachers. Whatever the postmodern bias or disenchantment about ethics may be, it is an indispensable aspect of human life. Friendship and genuine romantic love—emotional qualities that our popular culture promotes and young people highly value—are moral in nature. Maintaining them well requires certain moral norms and virtues such as trust, honesty, loyalty, and sacrifice.

Ethics is part of our very nature as human beings. The questions of fairness, right, and good always loom large, whether spoken or not, when we interact with others and make our decisions regarding marriage, school, work, voting, shopping, etc. We always rely on certain normative standards to assess and evaluate our decisions and actions.

If ethics is indispensable to human life, then what is it and what is its role? Broadly speaking, ethics has to do with the quality of life: how to live a good, happy, or excellent life. Indeed, ethics is a unique human endeavor to live life well, in a fulfilling way. Specifically, we rely on ethics to secure predictability and stability in our life;² that is, ethics helps to protect us and society from chaos (survival) and to find reliable guidance toward flourishing (thriving). Because of its necessity for common human survival and thriving, some form of ethics is found in every society, even a global society, although the question of how to best achieve thriving has never been settled in human history.

This book defines ethics as a normative endeavor to organize human life toward goodness, happiness, and thriving, while avoiding or mitigating confusion and chaos. We organize and order our personal and social life using certain ideals, norms/values, and rules, which are typically based on reason, experiences, cultural tradition, or religion.³ These ideals, rules, and values provide a road map for a good, excellent, and thriving life.

This normative organizing effort is critical and reflective, not impulsive or arbitrary. It is not confined to one area of life or one moment in time but encompasses the entire human life. Personally, ethics has to do with the ordering of one’s life toward excellence while keeping integrity; socially, it concerns organizing and arranging institutional and social life in a just and orderly way, so that people may live with a sense of security, predictability, and trust. The individual and social dimensions are never separate because a society constitutes the context of an individual life, and the quality of a social relationship affects individuals. In summary, one may say that ethics is the art of organizing human life that aims at life’s stability (minimally) and flourishing (maximally).

Like other world religions, Christianity takes ethics very seriously. It claims that God is a moral, righteous God. One can find lists of rules, norms, virtues, and moral teachings in both Testaments of the Bible. Christianity also promises flourishing, well-lived lives (excellence) and a right and peaceful community for humanity in God. However, a Christian view of morality goes beyond rules and commandments. In fact, rules and commandments are only secondary to God and God’s relationship with humanity. Christianity teaches that a good relationship with God and with others is the ultimate source of happiness and goodness. Rules are subjected to and guided by the cosmic vision of just, peaceful, and harmonious relationships, called shalom. Christianity claims that only such relationships offer the condition for genuine human flourishing and happiness.

COVENANT AS A KEY METAPHOR OF CHRISTIAN ETHICS

This book introduces the biblical idea of covenant as a divinely designed framework for the flourishing of humanity and the planet and as a key metaphor of Christian ethics.⁴ That is, covenant renders a compelling account of the Christian moral life that is designed to lead to the common thriving. Let me first explain what a key metaphor is and why it is important for Christian ethics, and then how covenant is a key metaphor of Christian ethics.

According to Richard Hays and Sallie McFague, human knowledge is metaphoric. Humans understand and organize the world around them relying on various metaphors. Among them, key metaphors play central roles in guiding a person’s perception and interpretation of reality by providing focus, clarity, and coherence.⁵ According to David Kelsey, the choice of a key metaphor in reading Scripture represents a single synoptic, imaginative judgment⁶ as it encapsulates the core vision and conviction of Scripture.

Christian ethics also relies on certain key metaphors in explaining the distinctive nature and dynamics of the Christian moral life and obligations. The choice of a key metaphor inevitably reflects one’s worldview—one’s view of God, humanity, and the world, and their interrelationships. A particular model or paradigm of Christian ethics (often called a school or a tradition) is built through a coherent and systematic conceptualization of a key metaphor in order to explain God’s moral character, demand, and human moral responsibility. Relying on a key metaphor, Christian ethics attempts to render both a compelling account of why things are the way they are and a portrait of how they ought to be.⁷ In short, a key metaphor directly and indirectly informs our ethical vision, values, and practices, namely, the shape and contours of Christian ethics.

Various Christian ethical traditions (e.g., liberationists, Reformed, evangelicals, communitarians, Anabaptists, Catholics) have developed their ethics on the basis of key metaphors that are related to their unique understandings of God’s character, will, and relationship with the world. For example, liberationists take God’s liberation of the oppressed (in terms of race, gender, and class) as a key metaphor, while Catholics take God’s natural order of creation (given in natural law) as a key symbol. Reformed Christians embrace divine commands (available through creation and Scripture, most notably the Ten Commandments) as a focal metaphor, while for Anabaptists, the God who revealed Godself on the cross is a central symbol. The choice of key symbols typically leads to the selection of or emphasis on particular teachings or literature in the Bible as the central texts of Christian ethics. Some prominent examples of such authoritative texts are the exodus story (liberationist), the Ten Commandments (Reformed), the Sermon on the Mount (Anabaptists, Mennonites), the passion narrative, and epistolary passages on the cross of Jesus.

Scripture presents such a variety of metaphors and symbols for Christian ethics that one may rightly ask, By what criteria do we determine which symbols are key root metaphors? For Christians, I suggest, the criteria for a key metaphor include faithfulness, comprehensiveness, relevance, and practical efficacy (motivation). That is, a key ethical metaphor is faithful to Scripture and its theological convictions and encompasses the diverse texts of Scripture; it is capacious enough to address complex social issues with coherence and relevance; and, finally, it is capable of motivating moral actions.⁸

This book presents covenant as the key biblical metaphor that meets the criteria above. That is, covenant is faithful to Scripture in properly describing God’s moral character, demands, and relationship with humanity and nature; it is comprehensive with its wide representation in the diverse texts and literary genres of the Bible (see chap. 1), capacious in dealing with a variety of social issues with coherence, and efficacious in motivating Christians for moral actions. In short, covenant captures the rich moral vision and thick ethos of the Bible more accurately than other metaphors.

Here are several more reasons why covenant is central to the biblical worldview and a key metaphor of Christian ethics: Covenant constitutes the basic story line, a narrative plot, and a central drama of Scripture holding together the unity between the Testaments. Christian redemptive history is framed in terms of covenant. The stories of Israel, Jesus, and the church would not make sense outside the covenantal plot. Major biblical events and stories can be interpreted as covenant itself or covenant related, and accordingly, covenant is found in every critical moment of God’s dispensation and in major turning points in biblical history.

Scripture offers numerous references to covenant. The word covenant appears 287 times in the OT (berît in Hebrew) and 33 times in the NT (diathēkē in Greek). However, the significance of covenant in Scripture transcends sheer arithmetic. The motif of covenant reverberates throughout Scripture; it is presupposed in many passages. Walther Eichrodt notes, Even where the covenant is not explicitly mentioned the spiritual premises of a covenant relationship with God are manifestly present.⁹

According to Kevin Vanhoozer, the Bible is an unfolding theo-drama—a script of God’s actions in and for the world.¹⁰ He claims that covenant is not simply one biblical or theological theme among others. The God/world distinction and relation alike is ultimately a matter of covenantal drama.¹¹ From the beginning, creation and the human life in it are covenantally designed by God. Covenant is a metaphor that best portrays the free, intimate, and reciprocal relationality that characterizes the divine-human interaction and the interdependence and solidarity among all creatures. The biblical drama of covenant is not fictional but realistic;¹² it offers an apt device to account for various events, incidents, and data in the Bible. It does not gloss over the struggles and failures of people in history. It deals with the sinful but beloved people of God and their real-life stories, which include moral flaws, betrayals, power struggles, and temptations as well as their moral aspirations and endeavors.

Covenant is the modus operandi that God takes in interacting with humanity and the world, and God fulfills God’s purpose for humanity and creation through covenant. In the Bible, covenant is central to God’s reign, which is by nature ethical and manifested in the calling and formation of God’s community.¹³ To be covenanted means to be God’s people; it is to enter into and stay under God’s reign of love, righteousness, peace, and joy.

Covenant holds the key to the question of the distinctiveness of Israel and the church.¹⁴ The term covenant itself was consistently applied by the Israelites to their relationship with God from the earliest times.¹⁵ Standing in a deep covenantal tradition of Israel, Jesus’s identity and ministry were deeply covenantal. The early Christian community considered itself the new Israel, a universal community of covenant comprising the entire humanity of Jews and gentiles, male and female, slaves and slave masters.¹⁶ There is a broad consensus that Paul’s understanding of the Christ event and Paul’s ethical teachings—Jewish apocalyptic understanding of God, election, and community—are informed by covenant. Hence, covenant provides the window through which we gain a deeper and more accurate knowledge of God and God’s interactions with humans.

As ethics has to do with the normative organizing of human life, covenant is the art or method of God’s organizing a community toward shalom.¹⁷ God uses covenant to organize God’s community, including creation. In the Bible, the coming of God’s reign is intimately connected with the covenantal organizing of people. Gerhard Lohfink notes: The rule of God presupposes a people of God, in whom it can become established and from whom it can shine forth.¹⁸ God’s covenantal organizing, which is the manifestation of God’s reign, is ethical in nature. The organizing happens through a covenanting process that morally binds different parties into a new moral community, and it entails the redefinition and reworking of social relationships, that is, the transformation of unjust social arrangements and structures.

Covenantal organizing is intimately related to the three key motifs of ethics: rules, goal, and virtue. A new community is formed on the basis of the agreed-upon rules between the parties (covenantal stipulations); it aims toward a shared goal (telos); the parties should be reliable and trustworthy beyond external regulations (specified by covenantal stipulations) in order to sustain a covenantal relationship, hence the formation of virtues and character is a necessary concern here.

The central quest of Christian ethics—how we ought to live as God’s children—cannot be separated from God’s moral purpose (shalom), God’s normative demands, and God’s character. In the Bible, it is in a covenant relationship that humans find God’s purpose, learn God’s will, and freely commit to and bind themselves with God to be God’s partner and imitate God’s character. Karl Barth aptly notes: How can it be Christian ethics if it does not know and take into account the fact that the divine covenant of grace with man is the beginning of all God’s ways and works, and that the human situation grounded in this covenant is, therefore, the situation of every single man?¹⁹

Covenant explains the distinctive and dialectical nature of the Christian moral life better than other biblical metaphors (such as love, liberation, law, or the cross). For example, it effectively captures the dialectic relationship of the indicative and the imperative in Christian ethics. As we see in the exodus story and in Jesus’s redemptive ministry, human moral obligation takes form as a response to God’s initiating salvific actions (liberation or deliverance). It is indicative because humans participate in God’s ongoing organizing actions in history. However, humans are not just passive observers of God’s action but God’s coworkers. Covenant precisely accounts for this dialectic relationship in which the imperative flows from the indicative.

The brief observations above show that although covenant does not exhaust all the moral ideas and motifs of Scripture, it is a central drama and key moral metaphor of the Bible. Its centrality for Christian ethics is unparalleled. Christian moral life and obligations are primarily structured and informed by covenant. As we will elaborate further in the book, the inherent theological potency and ethical capaciousness of covenant set it apart from other biblical metaphors or concepts. Without accounting for covenant and its distinctive theological-ethical dynamics, any study of Christian ethics would be unable to fully and accurately account for the Christian moral life that is covenantally designed by God.

THESIS AND RATIONALE

Claiming that Christian ethics derives its distinctive content, shape, and characteristics from covenant in general, and the new covenant of Jesus in particular, this book constructs a coherent and plausible form of Christian ethics (its method, practices, and social ethics) centered on the new covenant of Jesus: new covenant ethics.

Theological interest in covenant is nothing new. Noticing its centrality in the Bible, Reformed theologians have upheld covenant as a comprehensive biblical paradigm of human life that applies to every type of relationship (with God, fellow human beings, and other creatures) and every level (personal, institutional, and societal) of human relationships. Numerous books and articles on covenant have been published over the centuries, and scholarly research continues today among Jewish and Christian theologians, ethicists, historians, and biblical scholars.

Despite these efforts, however, no one has developed a coherent and compelling form of a Christian ethic based on the new covenant of Jesus. The studies of covenant in Christian ethics have focused on general patterns, key theological motifs, and ethical norms of covenant (e.g., divine-human relationality, reciprocity, law, divine commandment, rule making, nature of Christian obligation, structure and pattern of human life, and constitutive principle of society), with the Sinai covenant (in a close association with the creation covenant) as its primary model. Christian ethicists have examined covenant as the constitutive and organizing principle of a society, the better understanding of various modern institutions—their structures and patterns—and social issues associated with them (e.g., family, business, politics, congregation, medicine, law, education, and international relationships).²⁰ On the other hand, historians and social scientists have studied the influence of covenant theology on the development of modern constitutional democracy, human rights, and other enduring political and social legacies.²¹

This book is different from traditional covenantal ethics in that it takes the new covenant of Jesus as its starting point and foundation. Jesus and his new covenant are the center of Christians’ spiritual and moral life. Worship, ethical decisions, and spiritual practices take place in the knowledge of their covenant relationship with God in Jesus. Jesus is the content of their doxology, spiritual growth, and moral endeavors. However, traditional covenantal ethics does not explicitly and sufficiently take Jesus and his new covenant as the starting point and center of Christian ethics, usually attributing more centrality to the Sinai covenant, with the law or divine commandments as its key metaphors!

The claim that covenant is the center of biblical drama and the heart of a biblical paradigm of the moral life is incomplete without fully grasping and explicating the significance of the new covenant of Jesus. This failure to take the covenant of Jesus as the center and crux of the entire covenant drama has created moral confusion, inconsistency, and the abuse/misuse of covenant.

On the other hand, Anabaptists and Mennonites have historically upheld Jesus (and the Sermon on the Mount) as the starting point and center of their ethics, but without taking covenant (the new covenant) as the narrative framework, historical background, and theological contour of Jesus’s ministry and teachings. As many scholars argue today, the Jewish background of Jesus and the NT is critical in understanding the worldview of the NT and the early church and in overcoming white racism.²² Jesus and his moral teachings cannot be properly understood apart from the covenantal history of God’s interactions with humanity and Israel.

Consequently, both traditional covenant ethics and Anabaptist/Mennonite ethics are limited in establishing the proper narrative and theological continuity between the OT and the NT, and the OT covenants and the new covenant of Jesus—the former forgetting the centrality of Jesus for the Christian moral life, and the latter ignoring the covenantal matrix of Jesus and the Sermon on the Mount. This book interprets Jesus’s ethics in a covenantal framework and the fulfillment of covenant in Jesus. Matthew 5:17–18 offers a key interpretive clue in dialectically connecting the OT covenants and the new covenant.

New covenant ethics is a paradigm of Christian ethics based on Jesus and his new covenant, which is the climax of the covenantal drama of the Bible. While it shares common moral features and characteristics of the biblical idea of covenant in general, the new covenant intensifies, expands, and eschatologizes them in a cosmic scope fulfilling the promises of the OT covenants. The new covenant is a covenant ad infinitum.

With the goal of organizing God’s shalom community, new covenant ethics is Trinitarian in its theology; eschatological in its scope; and nonviolent, ecological, and just peacemaking in its nature, compared to the other covenants.

METHOD

In constructing new covenant ethics, typology plays an important role. Typology is a hermeneutical technique employed in the study of literature, history, archaeology, and the social sciences to secure reliable epistemological reference points and to expand the explanatory power of social phenomena, historical events, and textual meanings. In biblical hermeneutics, a typology helps see the continuity in God’s redemptive history and acts across a long span of history. Typology is the meaning of theo-dramatic unity, the principle that accounts for the continuity in God’s words and acts, the connecting link between the history of Israel and the history of the church, the glue that unifies the Old and New Testaments.²³

For example, in the Bible, Adam is a type for Noah, Abraham, Israel, and Jesus, while Eden is a type for the ark, Canaan, and new creation. As the divine drama unfolds through the tumults of history, typology helps to discern God’s actions without losing narrative coherence and theological continuity. It is essential to see how the past is connected with the present and the future. Biblical writers relied on typology to interpret various events, and they attempted to understand what God was doing in their times in light of the past types (patterns) of God’s work. Types are constant but not fixed; they adapt to new contexts through analogical imagination and reasoning.

Typology is useful in understanding the biblical covenants and in constructing new covenant ethics; covenant describes a particular type of God’s organizing of humanity and nature. A typological reading of covenant helps to clearly see how God interacts with God’s creatures and how God achieves God’s purpose through covenants from the beginning (prototype) to the end (antitype). Its typology permeates the Bible. It is a repeated pattern of God’s interaction with humanity and other creatures in the Bible. Covenant serves as a theological constant in the divine drama across history despite the ongoing moral failures of God’s people. Covenant is a divinely designed type (the prototype of God’s creation) that anticipates the fulfillment in the antitype (the new covenant). The biblical drama gains the unity through covenantal typology that integrates prototype and antitype.

A figural reading, typology, is inextricably tied with analogical thinking—similarity in difference. Analogy describes an intellectual process on which we rely when we attempt to explain a certain complex or ineffable reality by comparing it to some familiar or already well-known entity or phenomenon. In describing rich, complex experiences or in explaining mystery, we constantly borrow symbols, metaphors, and figurative language because no single image can define reality.²⁴

Analogy presupposes and relies on a typological thinking, and vice versa. This affinity between analogy and typology helps us see how biblical covenants are similar with each other in their differences. The coherence between protype and antitype (consequently the canonical unity as well) is achieved through typological-analogical interpretation of biblical covenants. In the Bible, typology is the study of analogical correspondence among revealed truths about persons, events, institutions, and other things within the historical framework of God’s special revelation, which, from a retrospective view, are of a prophetic nature and are escalated in their meaning.²⁵

Typology (and analogy) operates through the memory-hope (promise-fulfillment) pattern of the Bible, which is also one of the constitutive dimensions of covenant. Diverse biblical covenants are typologically and analogically related in their continuity and discontinuity to previous covenants, with the new covenant as their fulfillment. If we neglect typology, we risk missing some truth that the divinely inspired author intended. Anticipatory symbols are introduced into the biblical narratives with divine intention in order to set up the pedagogical relationship of type and antitype, promise and fulfillment.²⁶

In other words, covenant is a typological paradigm in the Bible. Typology renders not only internal dramatic coherence but also external adaptability (analogical imagination). Because of these qualities (coherence and adaptability), covenant serves as a wonderful paradigm for Christian ethics. It keeps faithfulness, capaciousness, and a broad relevance and applicability in diverse historical and cultural contexts, as we see not only in ancient Israel and the early churches but also in the rise of modern democracy and constitutionalism in Europe and the organizing of the international order in the post–World War II era.

This book claims that covenant and its patterns (types) are at the heart of the biblical paradigm of ethics. Through a careful exegesis of divine covenants in the Bible, it identifies several key patterns (types) of the covenant: externally, the covenantal drama of liberation-restoration; internally, the threefold operational patterns.

1. God’s covenantal organizing is framed by an overarching pattern of liberation (judgment against oppression, sin, death) and restoration (re-creation of a new, just community [shalom]). Constituting the rubric of God’s covenantal drama, this pattern appears in major biblical covenants: God delivered the universe from chaos to cosmos (the creation covenant), Israel from the Egyptian oppression to the promised land as a priestly kingdom (the Sinai covenant), and humanity from sin and death to a new creation (the new covenant of Jesus).

2. In moving toward shalom, God’s covenant operates by a threefold dialectical pattern: unilateral-bilateral, communal-communicative, and memory-hope (chap. 3). Together, the three dialectics exhibit the distinctive nature and operating pattern of divine covenant: what covenant is (its unique nature and moral characteristics), how covenant is established and sustained, and how it unfolds in history.

Displaying God’s intention and method in building a moral community, the covenantal drama of liberation-restoration and the threefold dialectics are crucial for understanding the distinctive nature, grammar, and characteristics of the biblical covenants in general and the new covenant of Jesus in particular. They help elucidate the logic, pattern, and purpose of covenant as God’s organizing method, and consequently the Christian moral life.

The methodological importance of these patterns and dialectics cannot be overemphasized; they demonstrate the capaciousness, performative power, and problem-solving capability of new covenant ethics in resolving the tensions in several key binary ethical categories, such as divine-human agency, norm-context, worship-ethics, and unity-diversity (chap. 5), in reorganizing various discrete ethical motifs, notably goal, law, virtue (chap. 7), and norms/values in a coherent way (chap. 8), let alone accurately elaborating the reigning biblical ethos and the performative nature of the Christian morality and accountability.

Grounded in Jesus and his new covenant, the Christian moral life is liberative, restorative, indicative, communicative, contextual, and eschatological.

THE ORDER OF THE BOOK

This book has two parts: method and social ethics. Part 1 is more theoretical in constructing the method of the new covenant ethics, while part 2 is practical in testing the relevance of new covenant ethics in critical engagements with various social issues of our time. Part 1 has three subparts.

Chapters 1–2 offer a brief overview of the major divine covenants in the OT: covenants with creation/Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses, and David. The objective is to show how the biblical narrative and redemptive history run through a covenantal plot and story line, forming a distinctive and coherent worldview, how these covenants are interrelated (across the Old Testament and New Testament) with their final climax in the covenant of Jesus Christ, and how the latter is distinct from the others.

Chapters 3–6 study the distinctive patterns, characteristics, and strengths of covenant. Chapter 3 studies the pattern of the covenantal drama and the threefold dialectics of covenant: unilateral-bilateral, communal-communicative, and memory-hope (promise-fulfillment), while chapter 4 examines the distinctive nature, characteristics, and practices of new covenant ethics (communicative engagement, just peacemaking, community organizing, and nonviolent direct action) derived from the new covenant of Jesus and the three dialectics. Chapter 5 studies how new covenant ethics creatively harmonizes the tensions between divine and human agency, norm and context, the being and becoming of Christian identity, worship and ethics, and unity and diversity. Chapter 6 briefly compares new covenant ethics with other major forms of Christian ethics (traditional Reformed ethics; the ethics of Reinhold Niebuhr, John Howard Yoder, and Stanley Hauerwas; and liberation ethics), to highlight its strengths and distinctiveness.

Chapters 7–10 examine the moral values, sources, and method of new covenant ethics. Chapter 7 studies several core moral values and norms of the new covenant and their interrelationships structured under the threefold dialectics: gratitude, trust, hospitality, truth and truth telling, love, justice, freedom, solidarity, rights, and hope. Chapters 8–9 analyze the three classical motifs of ethics (goal, rule, and virtue) and the four moral sources of Christian ethics (Scripture, tradition, experience, and reason) from a covenantal perspective. Chapter 10 develops a methodology of covenant ethics that is communal, communicative, and analogical.

Part 2 begins with a covenantal approach to Christian social ethics (chap. 11) and discusses a covenantal theory of distributive justice: equality, need, merit, and capability (chap. 12).

Chapters 13–20 explore various social issues in our globalizing, digitizing, and neoliberal society in a critical conversation with secular liberal ethics and conservative evangelical ethics: politics (chap. 13), economics (chap. 14), creation care (chap. 15), criminal justice (chap. 16), race (chap. 17), sex and marriage (chap. 18), human life at its beginning and end (chap. 19), and war and peace (chap. 20).

The book concludes with a brief summary of what new covenant ethics is and what its distinctive contributions are today for Christian discipleship and public discourse in an era of globalization.

DEFINITION

Christians generally define the divine covenant as the agreement made through the exchange of pledges between God and humans, whose fulfillment leads to blessings but whose breach leads to retribution. The agreement is typically (but not always) concluded by a covenantal ritual (e.g., cutting animals, sharing meals), which emphasizes the solemn nature of the pledges. This understanding is based on the Sinai covenant, which most scholars claim resembles ancient Near Eastern suzerain-vassal treaties.

This book defines covenant as God’s organizing mechanism of a community, which is established when humans accept God’s invitation to enduring fellowship, typically following God’s deliverance or promise of future blessings (royal grant). It consists of the three moral components: love, justice, and power, and is instituted and operated by communicative interaction between the participants. In short, covenant is a communicative mechanism that justly organizes the powers and commitments of people into a loving fellowship, with shalom as the ultimate goal.

SCOPE

Scripture discloses different forms of covenants (divine-human, human-human, divine–other creatures) with different foci and emphases. Among these covenants, the divine-human covenant is logically prior to and more authoritative than the human-human covenant. The latter is guided and stipulated by the former. My primary (but not exclusive) focus in this book is the divine-human covenant in the Bible, found particularly in major biblical covenants that are theologically connected to the new covenant of Jesus both directly and indirectly. My strategy is to study the nature, meaning, and logic of the divine covenant and explore their implications for the Christian moral life, because the Christian moral life is a response to God’s grace—the outworking of our covenantal relationship with God in every realm of a social life.

Like other major metaphors in the Bible, covenant is multifaceted and fertile, with many layered meanings. There is no single covenant tradition or single meaning of the covenant.²⁷ My discussion of covenant is not exhaustive in the sense of including the contributions of various kinds of biblical criticisms, nor does it examine every covenant mentioned in the Bible.

CONTRIBUTION

Grounded in the covenant of Jesus and his teachings, new covenant ethics presents a faithful, capacious, and coherent form of Christian ethics for the global era. It is biblical in its foundation, communicative in its method, and liberative in its praxis. Despite centuries-long, extensive discussions of covenant, no one has developed a coherent Christian ethic that is explicitly centered in Jesus and his new covenant. The failure to identify Jesus and his new covenant as the center and starting point of the Christian moral life has resulted in the confusion, misunderstanding, and misuse/abuse of covenant. In a clear distinction from traditional covenant ethics and other paradigms of Christian ethics (e.g., Christian realist, Anabaptist/Mennonite, liberationist), new covenant ethics offers a faithful and plausible approach to Christian ethics with wide applicability today in addressing various moral challenges in our society. It offers a form of Christian ethics that enables a complex moral thinking (instead of a reductionistic, partisan ethic) and that instills a passion for justice and hope for the renewal of a society (instead of despair and hopelessness). Equipped with this holistic ethical framework, Christians may confidently engage with popular culture and the public realm, both of which are increasingly fragmented and polarized under the impact of globalization, digitization, and neoliberal economy.

1. Unfortunately, this ethos is in stark contrast with the public perception of Christians as mostly judgmental, hypocritical, narrow-minded, and proselytizing. See Kinnaman and Lyons, UnChristian.

2. The correlation of ethics and stability is found in the Greek etymology of ethics (ta ēthika). The noun ēthos means dwelling or stall, a place that houses animals and protects them from wild animals. The verb form eiōtha means to act according to custom. Ancient Greeks believed that social custom provided security for society in the same way a stall provides security for animals. Based on the etymology of ethics, one may say that ethics as an academic discipline studies what brings stability to human life and what holds human life together. Lehmann, Ethics in a Christian Context, 25.

3. The question of what is the authoritative ground of these goals, norms, and virtues is increasingly controversial in a pluralistic society. Some find the ground in a specific religion, some in a cultural tradition, while others find it in reason.

4. Key here does not mean exclusive or exhaustive but rather connotes primary or central.

5. McFague, Metaphorical Theology.

6. Kelsey, Use of Scripture, 159, quoted in Hays, Moral Vision, 194.

7. Stackhouse, Ethics and the Urban Ethos, 80.

8. Similarly, in his study of NT ethics, Richard Hays offers three criteria in evaluating the appropriateness of focal metaphors: inclusivity (a textual basis with wide representation in Scripture), coherence (securing unity among diverse documents without serious tension), and faithfulness (central and substantial ethical concerns of the Scripture). Hays, Moral Vision, 195.

9. Eichrodt, Theology of the Old Testament, 36–37. Most biblical scholars are aware that major important biblical notions such as covenant, reign, and righteousness are implied or presupposed even when specific references to those terms are not made in Scripture. Covenant is one of them.

10. Vanhoozer, Faith Speaking Understanding, 20.

11. Vanhoozer, Remythologizing Theology, 68.

12. The idea of drama offers a more accurate interpretation of biblical stories and parables than narrative or story. Drama looks similar to narrative (which connotes a fictional quality) but is different from the latter because of its participatory and performative nature. For Christians, biblical stories and parables make realistic, not fictional, moral claims; they not only describe or explain the events but also call for appropriate performative responses on the part of the audience. That is to say, Christians not only read and share the biblical stories but also are required to perform them as participants in the ongoing salvific drama of God. One would not actually perform the drama if one did not truly believe it was real. The performative nature of the biblical drama comes from its covenantal plot and structure. See Stassen, A Thicker Jesus, 12.

13. Kingdom and covenants go hand in hand because covenants were the means by which God ruled over his kingdom. They were God’s kingdom administrations, leading the kingdom of God toward its destiny of expanding to the ends of the earth. Birmingham Theological Seminary, Kingdom, Covenants and Canon of the Old Testament.

14. Nicholson, God and His People, 191.

15. Freedman, Divine Commitment and Human Obligation, 419.

16. The significance of covenant is found in the enduring interest on it in NT studies, especially in the ongoing debates around the so-called new perspective on Paul, sparked by the monumental study of E. P. Sanders on covenantal nomism. The debates have offered new insights on Pauline theology, especially the continuity between the OT and the NT, Judaism and Christianity, while provoking heated debates on the doctrine of justification. However, the insights of these discussions have not been adequately translated into Christian ethics.

17. For a detailed discussion, see Lee, God and Community Organizing, chap. 1.

18. Gerhard Lohfink, Jesus and Community, 27.

19. Barth, Church Dogmatics II/2, 643.

20. May, The Physician’s Covenant; May, Testing the National Covenant; Mount, Covenant, Community, and the Common Good; Stackhouse, Covenant and Commitments; Allen, Love and Conflict.

21. Walzer, The Revolution of the Saints; Moot, Politics Reformed; Bradley, Religion, Revolution, and English Radicalism; Wolfe, Leveller Manifestoes; Weir, Early New England.

22. J. Kameron Carter, Race; N. T. Wright, Paul and the Faithfulness of God.

23. Vanhoozer, The Drama of Doctrine, 223.

24. Spohn, Go and Do Likewise, 57. It is more so with Christian faith that deals with the divine reality and its mystery. Christian theology relies on the use of analogy because its subject matter is the God who is transcendental, mysterious, and ineffable beyond human description.

25. Beale, Handbook on the New Testament Use of the Old Testament, 14, cited in Estelle, Echoes of Exodus, 52.

26. Estelle, Echoes of Exodus, 42.

27. Allen, Love and Conflict, 19.

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 ease the fear and anxiety of Noah, God gave a rainbow as a sign of God’s fidelity. Through the covenant with Noah, creation and humanity received another chance, and the goodness of creation and God’s firm commitment to its well-being were reaffirmed.

In terms of its moral intention and nature, Noah’s covenant is often called the covenant of preservation. It preserved the earth and humanity from the raging torrents of the flood and the surging sea; it protected humanity from self-destruction due to violence and corruption; and it preserved animals from human aggression. Herman Bavinck is helpful in elaborating the ethos of preservation in Noah’s covenant: It limits the curse on the earth; it checks nature and curbs its destructive power; the awesome violence of water is reined in; a regular alternation of season is introduced. The whole of the irrational world of nature is subjected to ordinances that are anchored in God’s covenant.¹⁶

Noah’s covenant lays out more clearly circumscribed moral parameters for humans in relating to others and animals, with a new focus on violence. Noah’s covenant also reveals God’s adjustment to a changed human condition (violent passion and temperament) following the Fall (Gen. 8:21, the inclination of the human heart is evil from youth). Humans had become a serious threat both to fellow humans and to animals (Gen. 9:2). One example of a moral adjustment is God permitting human consumption of animal flesh, but with a clear restriction on the consumption of blood (9:3–4). God reemphasizes the sanctity of human life by warning of retribution against anyone who violates it (9:5–6). However, the message of Noah’s covenant should not be interpreted as anthropocentric. The event of the ark (hosting all living creatures there) and God’s reiteration of a covenantal relationship with animals had the effect of reminding Noah and his offspring (who have now become a threat to other species) of the sanctity of all living creatures and the earth by saying that they too live in a covenantal relationship with God. Noah’s covenant delicately balances the reality of sin with God’s original intention for creation. It adjusts God’s laws to a new situation of human rebellion and sinfulness. The basic sanctity of both creation (including nonhuman creatures) and human life (the imago Dei) was assured again, despite the changed condition of life after the Fall and God’s judgment.

Although it often receives less attention than other covenants in Scripture, Noah’s covenant is extremely important for Christian social ethics. It offers a theological ground for common grace, which God makes available to all human beings despite sin. God’s common grace operates to preserve the basic natural order of creation (e.g., seasonal rhythms and stability, seedtime and harvest), the basic rights of humanity, and the life of animals from further deterioration, violence, and abuse. Until the final consummation of creation in the eschaton, Noah’s covenant is the pivot around which God’s preserving work of justice revolves.¹⁷ As an eternal covenant, it still has a binding moral power over all of humanity, including Christians. As we will discuss later, technically speaking, Christians live simultaneously under the binding authorities of the Noachian covenant and the new covenant of Jesus, and this doubling-binding nature is crucial to properly understand the scope and parameters of Christian social ethics (chap. 11).

COVENANT WITH ABRAHAM

God made covenants with Abraham twice, in Genesis 15:18 and in 17:2.¹⁸ If Noah’s covenant is a kind of a safety-net covenant that intended to preserve creation from further deterioration, then Abraham’s covenant indicates God’s initiative of redemption that counters human depravity and sin in order to restore the brokenness of creation. God’s response to the global plight of sin at the tower of Babel was the global blessing of Abraham for all of humanity:¹⁹ Abraham’s covenant is multidimensional in its meaning and quite comprehensive in its scope. It encompasses a nation (Israel), ecology (the land), and the global community (blessing to the nations).

Abraham’s story also has some resonance with the creation story. Just as chaos, darkness, confusion, corruption, and violence were in the background of the creation covenant, the chaos and confusion following the collapse of the tower of Babel (Gen. 11) serve as the context for Abraham’s election and calling. Instead of punishing humanity in a catastrophic way as he did in Noah’s time, God calls Abraham, another Adamic figure (type), to do something new. God’s blessings and promises to Abraham included flourishing (both descendants and fame), the gift of the land (as opposed to the expulsion from Eden), and the restoration of all peoples (as opposed to their scattering after Babel).

Creation mandates are repeated in this covenant. As Adam was given the garden to tend, Abraham was promised a new garden (Canaan) where he would fulfill God’s initial blessings for humanity: land, seed, a blessing to be fruitful and multiply, and a blessing to the nations by undoing the curses of Adam in Genesis 3—toil of labor, pain of childbirth, and physical death. As Adam had been created in the barren soil and placed into the garden of Eden (Gen. 2:4–15), so too was Abraham sent from his native land to Canaan. Now Canaan is God’s new Eden, just as Abraham is God’s new Adam. Overall, Abraham remained faithful to God’s covenant, despite his occasional mistakes and weaknesses. Accordingly, Abraham was later presented as a universal example of faith and obedience for future believers. God’s redemptive plan for humanity and God’s covenant continue across generations, from Abraham to Isaac, to Jacob, and later to Israel through Moses.

COVENANT WITH ISRAEL: THE SINAI COVENANT

Among all the biblical covenants, the Sinai covenant occupies a special place. It provides the most detailed ritualistic and ethical instructions and directives. It is at the heart of the Torah (the first five books of the Bible), a collection of stories leading to the Sinai covenant, and its expositions and commentaries. Compared to other biblical covenants, the Sinai covenant offers the most systematic explication of covenant and its requirements through clearly delineated stipulations (the Ten Commandments and covenantal codes, statutes, and ordinances) and elaborate rituals binding Israel as God’s covenantal partner in every realm of its life. In this covenant, God promises to make Israel his special possession among the peoples—a kingdom of priests and a holy nation to the world.

This covenant indicates a partial fulfillment of God’s covenant with Abraham (a great nation) and continues Abraham’s calling (to be a blessing to the nations) through Israel on a far more extensive and broader scale, namely, as a covenanted people and nation. Like Abraham, Israel represents a restored humanity. Israel was called to be a paradigmatic model of a new community for other nations that embodies God’s compassion, righteousness, and justice in the entirety of its social life.²⁰ They were expected to display what a redeemed people would look like as a light to the nations that shines forth God’s glory and as a priestly kingdom to which all other nations come and learn God’s ways. It was required to become a model for other nations not only in its piety, religious practices, or moral life but also in its entire social system and institutions (family, law, economy, politics, etc.). The moral quality of Israel’s personal and social life mattered to God because Israel, as a community (a collective entity), was to be the vessel of God’s revelation and blessing to all the nations.

The Sinai covenant first appears in Exodus 19 through 24, chapters that detail the covenantal ceremony at Mount Sinai. If we examine the narrative structure of the Sinai covenant, we see the covenanting event taking place against the immediate historical background of God’s deliverance of the people of Israel from Egypt. The covenant making begins with a historical prologue—the narration of God’s past deliverance: "I am the LORD, your God,