The art of biblical interpretation: A covenant book

What is the best overall description of the Bible? I’ve heard it called a guidebook, a love letter, a story, a history, and a national constitution. Although each of those gets something right, can we find a description that captures the whole character of the Bible better?

Images and descriptions have a big influence on how we approach anything. Calling a journey ‘a forced march’ or an ‘adventure’ invokes very different experiences. A ‘playground’ garden won’t feel like one which is a ‘jungle’. Images give us an orientation, and set expectations. They guide what we look for and how we interpret things. So it is worth finding a good summary image for the Bible—a ‘master metaphor’, that helps to explain and co-ordinate other descriptions. 

The one that I think has the most to commend it is one that has been used by a few Reformed evangelicals—the Bible as a covenant book.¹ In the ancient world, a covenant established a relationship of solidarity and loyalty. It was based on solemn promises, sealed with signs, and often regulated by a covenant document (the book of Deuteronomy is the fullest example in the Bible). The covenant document came from the lord of the covenant, stating who he was and how the relationship with his people had been established, and giving the conditions of the relationship.

The parallels with the Bible are striking since it, too:

• comes from the Lord
• tells about the history of how he redeemed his people
• establishes his identity as covenant Lord—even while it describes our relationship with him
• gives us his promises and warnings
• directs our life with him.

The Bible is not, literally, a covenant document. It was not written by the Lord at the commencement of the relationship with his people, and it has more than you would expect a covenant book to have. It does, however, cover all that would be expected in a covenant document, and every part of it can be related to God’s covenant. So the first reason this is a useful image is because of how comprehensive it is. Unlike most other images, it is one that summarizes many of the features of the Bible.

A second reason this is a powerful image is that the Bible itself is built around covenants. God makes a covenant with: humanity in creation (Gen 1-3); with Noah (Gen 9:1-17); with Abraham (Gen 12:2-3, 15:7-21, 17:1-14); with Israel (Exod 19-24; Deut 5-8); and with David (2 Sam 7). These climax in the new covenant (Jer 31:31-34; Luke 22:20; 2 Cor 3:6; Heb 8:8-12). Because of this, ‘covenant’ is often used as a summary term for God’s relationship with his people. Reformed theology has described redemption in Christ as the ‘covenant of grace’. Calling the Bible the covenant book underlines just how important it is for our relationship with God.

A third strength of the image, and the one which I think has been the reason why it’s been used recently, is that it focuses on what God ‘does’ with his Word. He doesn’t simply give us information; he presents himself, tells us about his work, makes his promises, and evokes our response. While the truthfulness of Scripture is very important, some debates about inerrancy have focused on only that one dimension of God’s work in Scripture. Evangelical theologians who want to stress the range of things God does in the Bible have found this a useful image, since a covenant book does far more than present propositions: it promises, commands, warns and invites as well.

When we are clear that we are reading a covenant book, then we have clearer expectations of the Bible. We are aware that the covenant Lord addresses us; we expect to get to know him and understand our relationship with him. We look for information that applies to us, his people; we expect history that will frame our story. 

My next few posts will look in depth about what it means to read the Bible as a covenant book.

For further study, see Michael Horton’s The Christian Faith (Zondervan, Grand Rapids, 2012, pp. 151-157).

1. As far as I can tell, this image was first used by Meredith Kline in The Structure of Biblical Authority, Wipf & Stock, Oregon, 1997, pp. 87-88: “Viewed as treaty documents, the Old and New Testaments have the specific purpose of serving as a building plan for the community structure of God’s covenant people. The function of each Testament as a legal, administrative document is primarily to define the covenant community as an authority structure of system of government by which the lordship of Yahweh-Christ is actualized among his servant people.” Since then it has been used by: M Horton, Covenant and Eschatology: The Divine Drama (Westminster John Knox Press, Louisville, 2002); P Jensen, The Revelation of God (IVP, Leicester, 2002); KJ Vanhoozer, The Drama of Doctrine (Westminster John Knox Press, Louisville, 2005) and T Ward, Words of Life (IVP, Nottingham, 2009).

Photo credit: Ken and Nyetta