3. Covenant Maturation
Let us now turn to the application of this One Eternal Covenant into history. We have been looking at Covenant Theology. Covenant Theology has to do with the persons of God and their relationships, with God’s relationships with humanity, and with our maturation toward being junior partners in the Divine community. Thus, the large focus in Covenant Theology is on persons, and we can link this with the Father-aspect of reality. Literary Theology studies how the Word is organized, and thus engages the Son-aspect of reality. When we move to Typology and Ritual, we are moving into the area of artistic imagery and of time sequences, the Spirit-aspect of reality.
These are the three large zones of Biblical Theology. Obviously, since God is One and “all of God does all that God does,” these three aspects of Biblical Theology cannot be separated fully from one another. What we begin to do in this essay is consider how the Spirit applies the one Covenant in history. We shall see that He does so by carrying humanity through ever-widening and ever-deepening spirals of maturation. These spirals or cycles correspond to one another, and thus are typologically related to one another. Thus, in this essay and those that follow, we are beginning to put Covenant and Typological Theology together.
We begin with the fact that God is eternally mature, while the creation was made formless, empty, and dark, and destined to become mature. The creation develops toward full maturity. This is also true of human beings, because human beings are made of the dust of creation.
Now, there is nothing in the creation that is not some kind of reflection of something in God. It cannot be otherwise. God cannot create something that is outside of His own infinite imagination and “experience.” Hence, this process of maturation is a copy of something in God.
We have to be very careful how we think about this. God does not exist in matter, space, and time as we know it, for He exists outside of created matter, space, and time. All the same, created matter, space, and time are copies of three aspects of God. God the Father, the Source of identity and particularly, is the ultimate root of specific things in the universe, of matter. God the Son, the Source of structure, is the ultimate root of space and of how specific things are placed in relation to one another in the universe. God the Spirit is the Source of bonding and also of motion, as He moves between Father and Son eternally. The Spirit, then, is the ultimate root of created time.
Continuing to be careful, we ask how it is possible to think about God’s maturing or growing. God is eternally mature, but also eternally becoming mature. We cannot imagine how this can be, but we must confess it is true, or else we have no Divine foundation for maturation in created time.
We can think about this in two ways. The first is that each person of God delights to humble himself for the glory of the other two. The Father hides himself and reveals himself only in the Son, and tells us to hear the Son. The Son, however, tells us to pray to the Father. Then the Son leaves the world, and tells us that the Spirit will come at Pentecost to guide us into all truth, so that we should be excited about the Spirit. But the Spirit is ungraspable, like water, air, oil, and fire. We cannot approach Him directly. In His humility, the Spirit causes us to cry “Abba, Father,” and He continually causes us to look to the Son.
In eternity, each person delights to give himself to the other two. The Father gives his property of personality to the Son and Spirit. The Son gives his property of language to the Father and Spirit. The Spirit gives his property of life and action to the Father and Son. And as each person gives himself to the other two, he receives back double, for he receives back from each of the other two. In this way, each person of God moves “from glory to glory.” God is all glorious, yet mysteriously God is also always becoming more glorious. This eternal movement in God is from initial glory, through delightful humility, to exaltation and greater glory. And yet, in some profound way, God does not change, because all of these movements in God are eternal.
This is how God lives eternally within himself, and so it is how the covenant works. When God extends the covenant by creating the universe, that universe is destined to move through the same maturing process: from initial glory, through humility, to greater glory.
[Note: Notice how after his humiliation, Job received double what he had possessed in the beginning. Consider also the parable of the talents in Matthew 25.]
We see this right away in Genesis 1, where the glory of each day is followed by an evening, and then a more glorious new day. Each new day is a transformed version of the preceding day. Each new day is a new covenant established in historical time, signaled by the phrases “it was established,” and “God saw that it was good.” But these new covenants are not completely new and different. Rather, they build upon and transform the preceding covenantal arrangement. There is one covenant, which is being transformed through times of humility (evenings) and then of new glory toward its goal of complete maturity.
The second way we can think about God’s eternal maturation is to consider that the second person of God is a Son. In the creation, a son grows up to be mature, like his father. If we want to, we can consider that the Father is eternally mature, while the Son is eternally becoming mature and has eternally become mature. The Father sends the Spirit to the Son to enable Him to become mature like the Father, and the Son is thus also eternally mature. Philosophers speak of Being and Becoming; the Father is the foundation of Being, the Son of Becoming.
The Spirit is the agent or cause of maturation, and the Son is the recipient of the Spirit’s work. The Son eternally becomes mature. The Spirit eternally causes the Son to mature.
Now this activity is duplicated in the creation, as the Father sends the Spirit to his daughter (the creation) to enable her to grow in maturity so that she can be a fit bride for his Son. The Son is eternally mature because he has become eternally mature. The daughter is growing toward maturity. It is the Spirit who brings about that maturity.
We can now begin to talk about the covenant as it applies to human life. The covenant matures in three phases: childhood, adulthood, and full maturity. The Bible associates these three phases with priesthood, kingship, and eldership or prophethood. A priest is like a child in that he lives strictly under the Law and is to do exactly and only what God commands. The king is more mature: Having grown up under the law, he now applies the covenant in new and difficult ways by wisdom. In Biblical history, the Sinaitic and Kingdom periods correspond to these two phases, and in a larger way, the Old Creation before Jesus and the New Creation after Pentecost correspond with them.
There is a final phase. Jesus said that the Spirit would lead us into all truth, so that in the New Creation we are still maturing toward our final goal. That final goal will be reached in heaven and in the resurrection, when we shall be fully mature. A kind of foretaste of that final maturity is seen in the last part of our earthly lives, when we are elders, and in the last part of Israel’s history, the age of prophecy. A prophet is a member of God’s divine council who tears down an old world and speaks a new world into existence by his words alone. Look at all the prophetic books, from Isaiah to Malachi, and you will see this. (We shall take it up more fully later on.)
Thus, the one covenant matures in three phases. First there is a covenant of childhood, in the Old Creation, from Adam to Jesus (Galatians 4:1-7). In Jesus humanity becomes an adult, but notice that Jesus leaves when he is only about 33 years old. He sends the Spirit to bring us to full maturity. This full maturity is also “in Christ,” because Jesus becomes fully mature in heaven, where he is pictured glorified with white hair (Revelation 1:14). In the New Creation, we are maturing toward that goal. There will be some kind of Final Creation, and thus a final form of the covenant for us, in the world to come.
[…] Biblical Theology Basics 3 (via Biblical Horizons) August 29, 2011 tags: Biblical theology, james-jordan, theology-proper, trinity by MadDawg Scientist 3. Covenant Maturation Let us now turn to the application of this One Eternal Covenant into history. We have been looking at Covenant Theology. Covenant Theology has to do with the persons of God and their relationships, with God's relationships with humanity, and with our maturation toward being junior partners in the Divine community. Thus, the large focus in Covenant Theology is on persons, and we can link this with the Father-aspect of realit … Read More […]
As always, Jim, your insights are profound. I know you say here that God is both fully mature and is maturing, but how do we distinguish this idea of an “eternally maturing” God from Whitehead’s Process theology? Are we saying that God the son, in His humanity, is eternally maturing, but in His Godhood, He is fully mature?
There are plenty of apparent paradoxes in God. One being His sovereignty and our freedom. To me, though, even this apparent paradox makes sense when I think of God as residing outside of time. His predestinating sovereignty, then, trumps my apparent freedom. The paradox disappears behind this truth. So are we saying that God’s full maturity trumps His eternal maturation? God cannot mature beyond what He already is, so that His maturation is not ultimate. Just as our freedom is not ultimate.
Jim,
I posted a brief reply to your post, in comment #51 of the “Doug Wilson Weighs in on the Eternal Fate of Faithful Catholics” thread.
In the peace of Christ,
– Bryan
I’m not so sure we can dissolve the paradox of God’s predestinating sovereignty and our freedom simply by thinking of God outside of time, especially since our conceptions of “timelessness” are time-bound.
Instead of injecting the word “apparent” to describe this paradox (as well as the paradox of God’s eternal maturation), why not just describe it as a paradox? Or, if that doesn’t suffice, as a “real” paradox? Just as Jesus’ humanity is just as real as His divinity, and those two natures subsist as One Person, our freedom is just as real as God’s sovereignty, even if we can’t quite determine how that can be.
And why should we, the finite creation of God, think that we should be able to comprehend the workings of God, the Creator, which He has not revealed to us? It seems more appropriate to seek maturity within the tension, allowing the depth, and width, and breadth of Father, Son and Holy Spirit to pull us ever further up and in as He unveils more and more of Himself to us. Pursuing maturity according to the limited but real freedom that the Sovereign has granted at this time is our task. Leave the things that He has chosen to conceal for now to Him. Deut. 29:29.
Rev. Jordan, I’m hanging on every word. Please keep it coming!
Come to think of it, perhaps the tension created by the paradox is necessary for maturity. It provides solid ground on which to stand while it prods us onward.
Tim,
Whitehead is a pantheist.
As for the Son, no, I’m not groping toward saying the humanity is maturing while the deity of Jesus is mature. Rather, I’m really just saying that the Son is a Son while the Father is a Father. Sons grow up.
As regards the Triune God, we cannot imagine how this is so. We can say it, but we cannot visualize it.
Bryan Cross writes:
“First, Jordan is not recognizing the doctrine of analogy by which what is present in creatures need not be present in the Creator in the mode in which it is present in the creature.”
Actually, I do just that, or certainly intended to! Whatever “time” and “maturation” might mean in the Creator, it is not the same “mode” as in the creation, and is unimaginable by us.
“Second, Jordan is not recognizing that becoming does not depend fundamentally on becoming, but on being; to deny that, is ipso facto to embrace process theology, because such a denial makes becoming fundamental. Becoming is a limited participation in being, but that doesn’t mean that being must be becoming, or that God must be limited.”
Here again, the Son is the Son of the Father. He is “eternally begotten from the Father.” All I’m doing is exploring that fact. Mr. Cross might just as well insist that for the Son to be begotten is heretical. Certainly, we as creatures cannot imagine or visualize “eternally begotten-ness.” And by the same token we cannot imagine or visualize how the Son may be eternally maturing and also fully mature.
“Any being who is becoming “more mature” is gaining a perfection that he doesn’t already have (in that nature). And since Jordan’s claim is that God (in His divine nature) is becoming more mature, this entails that He is acquiring this perfection from another being who does have this perfection, since no perfection can come from nothing. In other words, this being who is becoming more mature, must therefore be a created being, dependent on another being as the source of its perfections. And to call a creature God, or to worship a creature, are grave errors.”
Mr. Cross is not thinking along the lines of the Athanasius Creed. The three persons of God as they glorify one another are not deriving glory from outside themselves but from one another. As Christians we have to be careful when talking about “God this” and “God that,” because we must never forget that God is triune. It is never simply a matter of “God.” We must never slip into deistic thinking.
How can God, who is all-glorious, be glorified by His creation? We don’t know, but we know that it is so. This, by the way, is called the “full bucket difficulty.” How can a bucket that is already full be filled? If someone thinks that this denies the “law of non-contradiction,” he may do so, but he is out of step with the historic Christian religion.
The Church has always lived with the seeming contradictions of “eternal begetting” and the glorification of God. There’s nothing in my essay that goes beyond these two thing; or at least I do not intend to. I only intend to explore what they mean for the nature of created history.
Does 1 Corinthians 15:250-28 allude to the eternal maturation of the Son, or perhaps at least provide an analogy for it?
Jim,
Thanks for the clarification. Bryan Cross had raised some objections I ‘felt’ initially from reading your post. You answered wisely. I see now how easy it is for our minds to fall into Hellenistic objections in regards to the Trinity. To say that the Son is eternally maturing in regards to the Father, is no less offensive to the natural mind than to say the Son is eternally begotten from the Father. Process theology would have all three persons (if they were trying to be Trinitarian) eternally maturing.
Dan, the fact that, as you have put it, “our conceptions of ‘timelessness’ are time-bound”, is why the paradox of God’s sovereignty dissolves. It does not answer the question about freedom of choice and God’s sovereignty, it simply makes the question absurd. Or as Paul has so succinctly put it, “But indeed, O man, who are you to reply against God?”
Well, it’s the human Jesus Christ, also God of course, who reigns until the end, as Final Adam. But then the “son himself” is subjected to the Father, though there again “son of God” is a messianic title as well as a Trinitarian descriptor.
So, I would say no to your question. When it comes to describing God in Himself, we are always working by analogy, eminence, and negation: God is like the creation; He is the fullness of all thing; and there are things we cannot say about God.
My argument, and at some point I’ll revisit this and fill it out after these conversations, is that the reason the 2nd Person is the right Person to be begotten into the creation, to mature from baby to adult to elder, is that this property of being begotten and maturing is the unique property of the 2nd Person in some sense, in a way that it is not the property of the 1st and 3rd Persons. Now, if there is a better way to say this than “maturing” I’m open to a discussion.
So I suppose that the fact that the man Christ Jesus is gradually developing His kingdom in the world is a fact that can rise to being evidence for the specific property of the 2nd Person.
So, through His work in history He displays who He is as Son?
Tim,
You wrote “apparent freedom,” which led me to believe that you were attempting to resolve the paradox. If I’m understanding you correctly now, you’re saying that the paradox actually stands because we aren’t capable of resolving it, time-bound creations that we are?
Jim,
Thanks for your reply. I think that what you said in reply doesn’t help your position avoid the problems I mentioned in my first comment. I explain why in comment #53 of that same thread.
In the peace of Christ,
– Bryan
Bryan,
I appreciate the challenge, if not your rhetoric. The Son is fully mature, and also maturing. I have to leave it at that. At no point does he lack the perfections of God and/or of the Father. Maturation is not addition. A five year old child is a perfect human being in the image of God, for a five year old. When he is ten he is more mature, but not more perfect. If this does not register with you, well, I imagine my rhetoric can be improved.
Your criticisms also seem to imply that I am confusing time and eternity. I am not. Maturation and glorification are processes in created time; in eternity they are conditions. These eternal conditions are the uncreated root of the temporal processes in which we shall always live.
Hope that helps.
Great discussion.
Jim, I thought, based on what you wrote in Biblical Theology basics under the heading “Chiasms and Life” that this process of maturation has its origin in the responses of the Father to the Son, at least at the initial level.
I thought perhaps there is also a case for the Son’s humility in Creation beginning at Creation rather than the incarnation. This means the Son was not fully in on the Father’s plans until His ascension and glorification. I know it sounds like heresy, but when I mentioned this idea on the BH list, the gracious objections could only muster texts about the Son that were written after His ascension and glorification and referred to His current state of glory. It highlights the humility of the Son right from the beginning. Perhaps even He didn’t fully understand what He was in for when He created all things.
I doubt anything could be proven either way, but it is certainly an interesting idea, and it puts a slightly different spin on the Son’s work throughout the Old Covenant.
Mike Bull
Sorry – “…responses of the Son to the Father…”
Can’t go there, Mike. Outside of created time and in eternity, the Father, Son, and Spirit are interpenetratingly one (“perichoresis”). The Son is maturing, yes, but also fully mature. The creation of time, space, and substance is the creation of all events from beginning to infinity. That’s what is meant by “predestination.” The Son knew all that would ever happen in history “when” He and the Father and Spirit created the creation.
Interesting. Thanks. I’ll keep chewing!
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