In an essay on Romans 11:28-29 written for the Society of Biblical Literature Seminar Papers, Joseph Sievers notes that “Rom 11:29 was never cited in official Catholic pronouncements before Vatican II.” Since the Council, however, Romans 11:29 — “For the gifts and the call of God are irrevocable” — has been used repeatedly to affirm the enduring nature of the relationship of God with Israel through the Old Covenant.
After quoting this particular passage of Scripture, Pope John Paul II said of the Jewish people, “you continue to be the first-born people of the Covenant.” Similarly, John Paul II made reference to Romans 11:29 when he said “there is need for acknowledgment of the common roots linking Christianity and the Jewish people, who are called by God to a covenant which remains irrevocable.”
Perhaps the most well-known and explicit usage of this text since the Council is to be found in the address of John Paul II to the Hebrew community in Mainz, Germany:
The first dimension of this dialogue, that is, the meeting between the people of God of the Old Covenant, never revoked by God (cf. Rom. 11:29), and that of the New Covenant, is at the same time a dialogue within our Church, that is to say, between the first and the second part of her Bible.
Statements such as these should provoke certain questions in our minds. What is the “Old Covenant”, and in what way is it “never revoked by God”? Does this mean that the Jewish people continue today in a saving relationship with God through the Old Covenant, while Christians retain their own unique means of coming to God, through the New Covenant? In other words, are there two operative covenants today, one for the Jews and one for the rest of us?
How do such statements concerning the enduring validity of the Old Covenant fit with previous declarations of dogmatic truth? For example, the Council of Florence declared:
[The council] firmly believes, professes, and teaches that the matter pertaining to the law of the Old Testament, of the Mosaic law, which are divided into ceremonies, sacred rites, sacrifices, and sacraments, … although they were suited to the divine worship at that time, after our Lord’s coming … ceased, and the sacraments of the New Testament began; and that whoever, even after the passion, placed hope in these matters of the law and submitted himself to them as necessary for salvation, as if faith in Christ could not save without them, sinned mortally.
Covenants and Persons
The formulation of answers to such questions as these requires a good deal of contemplation. Perhaps the best place to begin is to consider for a moment what a “covenant” is. In the Old Testament Scriptures, a covenant is a sacred bond which forges a familial relationship; it usually involves the swearing of oaths and self-maledictions, the implicit or explicit invocation of the Divine Name or witness, the celebration of a ritual sacrifice, the erection of sacred monuments, the sharing of a ritual meal, or any combination of these things.
At its heart, the covenant deals with the question of relationship between persons. Our Holy Father once wrote along these lines:
I would only return, briefly, to the philosophical category we have already met, corresponding to the theme of the covenant, namely, relatio. For in asking about the covenant, we are asking whether there can be a relationship between God and man, and what kind of relationship it might be.
And likewise, Catholic scholar Scott Hahn has said:
Contracts usually exchange property, goods, and services. But covenants exchange persons … Covenants create a family bond … a covenant extends far beyond the limits of any contract. When people enter into a covenant, they say, ‘I am yours, and you are mine.’
This one central fact of the covenant must always be kept in mind. Too often, it seems, we tend to confuse law with relationship, conflating Covenant with Commandment. Not that the two are wholly separate — they are not, and in fact, they must always go together. Commandment gives shape to the Covenant relationship, and Law makes Liturgy possible. As Cardinal Ratzinger once wrote concerning Israel and the Mosaic Covenant:
[God] makes known his will to [Israel] in the Ten Commandments … and, through the mediation of Moses, makes a covenant with them … a covenant concretized in a minutely regulated form of worship….
[In] the final analysis, worship and law cannot be completely separated from each other. God has a right to a response to man, to man himself, and where that right of God totally disappears, the order of law among men is dissolved, because there is no cornerstone to keep the whole structure together.
The Rules are not the Relationship
And yet, a distinction must be maintained. While the Law gives order and regularity to the Covenant, the Law is not itself the Covenant; the rules are not in and of themselves the relationship. Why must we recognize this all-important fact? Because it helps to explain for us how John Paul II can say that the Old Covenant was “never revoked by God”, how the Council of Florence can say that “the law of the Old Testament”, that is, the “ceremonies, sacred rites, sacrifices, and sacraments … after our Lord’s coming … ceased”, and how they can both be right.
Before delving any deeper into the subject, however, it is also worth pointing out one more very important aspect of Covenant: its permanence. We saw a moment ago that covenants are different from contracts; a contract involves the exchange of property, but a covenant involves the exchange of persons; a contract can be sealed by the invocation of my name (usually signed to a piece of paper), but a covenant is ratified by the invocation of God’s name; a contract, finally, can be revoked, torn up, and thrown away, but a covenant can never be revoked. This is precisely the purpose for the self-malediction that is so often present in the swearing of covenant oaths — that is to say, in every covenant there is both an element of blessing and an element of curse. In his doctoral dissertation on covenants in the Old and New Testaments, Scott Hahn wrote:
While an oath cannot guarantee fidelity, it does serve to assure both parties of the necessary elements of divine assistance and judgment … the binding force of covenant oaths is a divine power which immutably abides … when a sworn duty remains unfulfilled, the oath ensures divine retribution, i.e., covenant curses. In sum, the violation or non-fulfillment of a sworn duty does not terminate a covenant; it simply triggers the curses of the original covenant-ratifying oath (emphasis added).
This brings us much closer to an understanding of how it is that the Old Covenant was “never revoked by God”; when we look at the nature of the covenant oath and its inherent permanence, we realize that John Paul II was hardly stating anything innovative when he spoke to the Hebrew community in Mainz about the Old Covenant. On the contrary, he was underscoring the reality of the nature of covenants. St. Paul made a very similar point in his epistle to the Galatians when he wrote about the relationship between the covenant with Abraham and the covenant under Moses: “To give a human example, brethren: no one annuls even a man’s covenant, or adds to it, once it has been ratified … the law, which came four hundred and thirty years afterward, does not annul a covenant previously ratified by God, so as to make the promise void.” (Gal. 3:15, 17)
We have not, however, exhausted our inquiry merely by reaching this realization. We can say that covenants are indeed irrevocable by their very nature, and thus, the Old Covenant has never been revoked, and yet at the same time we must grapple with the fact that something has changed: somewhere between Sinai and Calvary, something happened, otherwise we would not speak of a “New Covenant” in contrast to an “Old Covenant.”
Perhaps the first step in the right direction has already been suggested by the words of St. Paul to the Galatians, quoted above: “the law, which came four hundred and thirty years afterward, does not annul a covenant previously ratified by God, so as to make the promise void.” (Gal. 3:17) In this passage, St. Paul is speaking of the Law given through Moses and its inability to “annul” the “covenant previously ratified by God” with Abraham. We seem to be dealing here with two separate covenants — one made by God with Abraham in Genesis 22, and one made by God with Israel in Exodus 19-24 — and yet St. Paul says that the one does not annul the other. How then do these two covenants relate to each other, and further, how do they relate to the New Covenant which Jesus ratified with His own blood?
The answer lies in what we have already discovered about the nature of the covenant: it is ordered toward relationship. If the covenant is, as Cardinal Ratzinger said above, God’s way of entering into a relationship with mankind, then are we too far off the track to suggest that there is, after all, one over-arching covenant which God makes with Man in history? A statement by St. Clement of Alexandria indicates that we are not far off at all:
Therefore, in substance and idea, in origin, in eminence, we say that the ancient and Catholic Church is alone, gathering into the unity of the one faith — the faith that comes from the two Covenants, or rather the one Covenant in different times by the will of the one God, and through the one Lord — those already chosen, whom God predestined, knowing before the foundation of the world that they would be righteous (emphasis added).
One Perpetual Covenant
Cardinal Ratzinger said much the same thing when he commented on St. Paul’s treatment of the Abrahamic Covenant in relation to the Mosaic Covenant: “… Paul, with his distinction between the covenant with Abraham and the covenant with Moses, has rightly interpreted the biblical text. This distinction, however, also supersedes the strict opposites of the Old and the New Covenant and implies that all history is a unity in tension: the one Covenant is realized in the plurality of covenants.”
This may be a new way of thinking for us; we have undoubtedly become accustomed to placing the Old and New Covenants into two completely separate “compartments”, and imagining that there is a wide gulf between them. Following St. Clement and our Holy Father, however, we must understand that there is ultimately “one Covenant … realized in the plurality of covenants”, the “one Covenant in different times” — that is, one Covenant under different external forms.
Commenting on the phrase found in Eucharistic Prayer IV, “again and again you offered a covenant to man,” Pope John Paul II (when he was still Cardinal Wojtyla) wrote, “With the full revelation of the Divine Fatherhood comes full and far-reaching confirmation of the covenant made when man was created. That covenant, shattered once by original sin, is to be rebuilt by redemption, with foundations that go deeper still and dimensions even vaster.” In this meditation, Cardinal Wojtyla was speaking of the same thing that we saw in St. Clement and Cardinal Ratzinger: “the covenant made when man was created”, i.e., the original covenant with Adam, was “shattered once by original sin,” but was ultimately “rebuilt by redemption” when Our Lord ratified the New Covenant. This “New Covenant”, then, is not “new” in the sense that it appears out of nowhere as a completely unheard-of novelty; rather, it is the rebuilding, “with foundations that go deeper still”, of the one covenant that God extended to Adam at Creation.
If the covenant with Adam is connected in its essentials with the New Covenant, then all of the other covenants we find throughout Scripture can also be located in the context of this “one covenant.” Here we must return to something said earlier: Law and Covenant are integral, but not identical. The Law is what governs the relationship, but the two must not be confused with each other. What we see happening throughout Salvation History, then, is that God’s one relationship which He continually extended to mankind has undergone a series of external changes. That is to say, this “relationship” between God and Man has been governed by a changing set of rules.
Why should this be the case? For anyone who is familiar with Salvation History, the answer should be obvious. It is not so much a matter of God changing the rules as it is a matter of God making accommodations for His children who have been undergoing changes themselves. By way of illustration, I might point to the relationship I have with my own son. He is three years old at the moment, and our relationship is governed by a particular set of rules. I don’t let him drive the car; I don’t let him stay up until the wee hours of the morning; I don’t let him argue with me. Will those same rules be in place years from now, when he is fifteen, sixteen, seventeen? Obviously not. As he grows and matures, the rules which govern our relationship will undergo certain changes to accommodate that growth.
Something similar has taken place in Salvation History, particularly with regard to Israel. Every time they rebelled against God and turned to their idols, He appended new rules or laws to their relationship. A striking example of this — though it is only one of many — can be found in Exodus 32-34. After entering into a covenant relationship with God, the people of Israel promptly built a Golden Calf and worshiped it. As a result, God took away the priesthood from all of the first-born sons and gave it to the Levites, because they alone took the Lord’s side when Moses came down from the mountain. Thus we find statements in Scripture like, “Behold, I have taken the Levites from among the people of Israel instead of every first-born that opens the womb among the people of Israel” (Num. 3:12; see also Num. 3:41, 3:45, 8:18).
This change in the covenant relationship was never intended to be permanent, however; this was an accommodation made by a wise Father in response to the rebellion of His “first-born son” (cf. Ex. 4:22), and it was removed with the coming of Christ. In the New Covenant, the priesthood has been returned to the first-born sons, in the sense that all priests act in persona Christi, in the person of the First-Born Son of God.
What has changed between the Old and the New Covenants is that the temporal restrictions and rules have given way to greater freedom. To quote Ratzinger again, “once what was provisional in [the Sinai Covenant] has been swept away, we see what is truly definitive in it … the expectation of the New Covenant, which becomes clearer and clearer as the history of Israel unfolds, does not conflict with the Sinai covenant; rather, it fulfills the dynamic expectation found in that very covenant.” Thus, to take a few examples, the rite of circumcision has reached its fulfillment in the Sacrament of Baptism; the animal sacrifices and thank-offerings have reached their fulfillment in the Sacrifice of the Mass; the priesthood once restricted to the Levites has now been restored to all of those who are, like Christ, priests “in the order of Melchizedek.” (cf. Heb. 5:10, 6:20) These temporal provisions of the Old Covenant have not so much been thrown out as they have been elevated and brought to their climactic fulfillment. As Our Lord said, “Think not that I have come to abolish the law and the prophets; I have come not to abolish them but to fulfil them.” (Matt. 5:17)
In a very real sense, the Old and the New Covenants cannot be separated; they are, after all, two phases in the one covenant relationship which God extends to Man. What can be said, then, about Israel and the Old Covenant today? Are we at a place where we can say, after all these things have been considered, that the Jews have their own unique covenant with God, while Christians have an equally valid-but-separate covenant with God? On the contrary. The Holy See’s Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews stated in a 1985 document, “Jesus affirms ([John] 10:16) that ‘there shall be one flock and one shepherd’. [The] Church and Judaism cannot then be seen as two parallel ways of salvation, and the Church must witness to Christ as the Redeemer for all”. If it is an error to say that the Old Covenant has been revoked by God, it would be equally wrong-headed to say that there exist today two distinct covenants, one for Jews, and one for Gentiles. Both statements are wrong, and for the same reason: God swore a covenant oath to Abraham in Genesis 22, saying “in your seed shall all the nations of the earth bless themselves.” (Gen. 22:18) From that point forward, God was bound by His own covenant oath to bring salvation to the world through the seed of Abraham, the Jewish people. The promise to Abraham is that the nations will return to union with God, but that they will do so with Israel at the center, as the “first-born son” of God among the nations (cf. Ex. 4:22) that facilitates this familial reunion.
In other words, if God were to cast off His people Israel, He would not be keeping His promise to Abraham — and thus it is incorrect to say that the Old Covenant has been revoked (cf. Romans 11:1, 11, 25-29). By the same token, however, if God were to set up two separate pathways for union with Him, one for the Jews and one for everyone else, He would still not be keeping His promise to Abraham. The promise to Abraham was precisely that there would be a reunion of God’s human family, both Jews and Gentiles, in the one Divine covenant of salvation. Anything less than this would fail to fulfill the covenant oath sworn in Genesis 22.
The Fullness of Redemption
Ultimately, then, we can (and must) affirm with John Paul II that the Old Covenant was “never revoked by God.” As we have seen, the meaning of this statement is that God will not go back on His promises, either to Abraham or to Israel; He declared to Moses that Israel is His “first-born son” (Ex. 4:22), and this is a familial relationship which He will not sever. Even if the Jewish people are largely not yet in full communion with Him by means of the New Covenant (which, it must be stressed again, is the continuation and fulfillment of the Old Covenant), they remain, as St. Paul said, “beloved for the sake of their forefathers.” (Rom. 11:28) It is precisely this close relationship between the Old and New Covenants that leads the Church to pray on Good Friday “for the Jewish people, the first to hear the word of God, that they may continue to grow in the love of his name and in faithfulness to his covenant” (emphasis added). Far from praying that the Jewish people will remain in the Old Covenant, the Church prays that the Jewish people will grow in faithfulness to the Covenant — to their relationship with God — which means, ultimately, that they will (as the prayer says) “arrive at the fullness of redemption”, a redemption possible only in and through Jesus Christ.
In the end, Scripture and the tradition of the Church tell us that “all Israel will be saved” (Rom. 11:26). St. Paul saw that the remnant of faithful Israelites in his own day was already proof that God had not given up on His people. If the salvation of “all Israel” had already begun through the remnant in St. Paul’s day, however, Catholic tradition tells us that the “last days” will see this remnant blossom into a full flowering. St. Augustine said, “It is a familiar theme in the conversation and heart of the faithful, that in the last days before the judgment the Jews shall believe in the true Christ.” St. Thomas Aquinas is even more to the point: “[O]mnis Israel salvus fiet, non particulariter sicut modo, sed universaliter omnes.” [“All Israel will be saved, not individually as it is now, but all universally.”] While there is disagreement among the Fathers as to how large of a number of individual Israelites is meant by “all Israel” (Origen said, “Who the ‘all Israel’ are who will be saved … only God knows”), all are generally agreed that a conversion of an unusual and significant kind will happen in Israel in the last days, as a precursor to the Second Coming of Christ.
When this eschatological event takes place, we will understand better what St. Paul meant when he said that Israel is still loved by God “for the sake of their forefathers”, and that “the gifts and the call of God are irrevocable.” We can conclude in this same spirit of hope, then, by listening again to the words of Cardinal Ratzinger: “…Israel still has some way to go. As Christians, we believe that they will in the end be together with us in Christ. But they are not simply done with and left out of God’s plans; rather, they still stand within the faithful covenant of God … It is in God’s hands, of course, just in what way, when, and how the reuniting of Jews and Gentiles, the reunification of God’s people, will be achieved.”
(Editor’s note: A footnoted version of this article is available at www.lumengentleman.com.)
