Covenant Theology

Christ, the Lamb of God, Offering Up Himself for the Life of the World

By Bp. Joseph Boyd (Ancient Church of the West)

The "Original Covenant Theology" was the sacramental theology of joining our lives to God’s life through the blood of Christ’s sacrifice on the Cross, and present within the life of the Church through Baptism and the Eucharist (and all other Sacramental acts). It is not just a promise, it is a bond, a blood connection, which ties families together, and, through the application and reception of sacrifice, those who were originally not family into a covenant all community that shares the same “blood” and the same “spirit.”

Much of the reason the West has lost an understanding of the blood covenant is because we replaced the “life to life” understanding with the “Wirgilt” understanding of Germanic law, and made sacrifice about “death for death” instead of “life for life.” This, along with the replacement of the original Hebrew paradigms and their philosophical outworking in the Greek Old Testament Septuagint, led to an increasingly "legalistic" and "declarative" focus, due to the the translation problems of St. Jerome's Vulgate. The legal focus turned God's Covenant from a creative, life-giving process of restoring all Creation back to God through the sacramental life of the Church, into a legal paradigm of declarative authority to forcefully proclaim one righteous, rather than grow Christians into the likeness of Christ through the shared life of the Holy Trinity.

The metaphysical understand of sacrifice in the Greek Old Testament is not about punishment. It is about restoring God’s life to those who are in death because of is disobedience and sin through the application of an intermediary, a blood link, that connected the dwelling place of God, the Mercy Seat upon the Ark of the Covenant, to man, once that link had been lost because of man’s unfaithfulness and not “walking in the commandments of the Lord.”

The blood of lambs and goats functioned as an imperfect connection to God’s life. But, the connection is key to understanding it, because the blood of the sacrifice was applied to the sinful party, after it had been offered to the Lord on the altar or the Mercy Seat. It was not about merely offering it to God, but receiving what God had to give them through the offering.

Reformed or “Covenantal Theology” that focuses on penal substitution and on the commandments of God as His “covenant” in a legal sense, are not really grasping what the whole process was about. They are teaching a theology of law and not of life. Covenantal theology in the original sense was all about man losing God’s life through sin, death being the product of sin, and then having something or someone take on death so that its/his blood could link those in spiritual death back to the source of spiritual life, and restoring the relationship with God as life-giver. It wasn’t about punishment for sin, but a cure for death.

Christ's Sacrifice is Present in Every Sacrifice that the Church Makes, by the Power of the Holy Spirit

The one who undertook the death in order to link sinful man with the Origin of Life and Holiness, God, experienced the full effects of sin, so that others could have life. This is why Christ’s Resurrection is so powerful, because it not only breaks the cycle, but provides a limitless, eternal, heavenly sacrifice, offered up by Christ Himself, that is always available for us, so that we can always connect with God and His Life. In this way, He is the Second Adam, because with this “permanent repair,” we can be eternally restored to God and our original status as His sons and daughters.

Just as we are connected to sin and death through the blood we share with Adam, so now we can share in God’s eternal life, through the blood we share with Christ. This is why, as you can see, the Christian Church must be Eucharistic. Because we believe that our offerings of self, each other, bread and wine, participate in this eternal and all-sufficient sacrifice, and ever make present God’s covenant within His New People, the Kingdom to Come, the New Jerusalem.

We are a restored creation and a New Covenant in Christ’s Blood that promises eternal life through our connection to God through Him!

In the Ghent Altarpiece, the Cosmos is Restored through the Blood of the Lamb upon the Altar