Hi Rich,
Some might find interesting that, at the recent AAR meetings (American Academy of Religion) in San Diego, Mike asked a renowned semitics scholar if he though that the Royal Grant/Suzerain Treaty approach "works" to explain the two sorts of covenants in Scripture and he said "Yes, absolutely."
It means that right there in the culture in which Scripture was being given were good illustrations of the two great principles of Scripture: law and gospel. Even in our theological language we use daily metaphors: imputation (accounting), acquittal (court room) and so forth. Why is it okay for us to do it but it's not possible for Scripture to do it? Of course Scripture does it all the time.
I hasten to remind everyone not to set up a scheme whereby John 1:1-3 cannot happen. Of course it did happen. What happened? The Apostle John borrowed from ancient PAGAN Greek philosophy by calling Jesus the Logos. That was a bold move and one that, I gather, some would say that he either could not or should not have done. But he did it. It was liable to misinterpretation -- it was misinterpreted rather badly by some early fathers, namely Justin Martyr who developed a "Logos Christology" -- but that didn't prevent the Spirit from inspiring John to appropriate a widely known and used term for Christian usage.
If that could happen, why couldn't the Spirit inspire Moses to use widely known and used terms from the Ancient Near East? Of course, the Spirit is free to do what he wills. Modern semitics has learned a lot about the ANE that wasn't known when our covenant theology was being developed in the 16th and 17th centuries. Had they access to the information to which we have access now, I think they would have done the same thing. They certainly did similar things. They played off of feudal imagery (similar to the Suzerain treaty forms) and made use of what they knew about the ANE. Why can't we do the same?
This is what "historical-grammatical" means. It means reading the Scripture in its original context. The beautiful thing here is that the original context helps us understand Scripture in a way that resonates with what we confess, that God made two historical covenants: works and grace.
Part of the criticism of this approach to contemporary covenant theology is fueled by an antipathy to distinguishing the two types of covenants and this gets us back to the basic breakthrough of the Protestant Reformation: the distinction between law and gospel. The Reformed did nothing more than to express their hermeneutical breakthrough, their repudiation of the medieval and Roman Catholic "old law-new law" hermeneutic (which Rome and the FV still confess) in covenantal terms. Against the "old law-new law" hermeneutic, we confessed that Scripture contains within it two kinds of words: law ("do this and live") and gospel ("For God so loved the world"). We expressed those two different kinds of words, in redemptive-historical categories, by speaking of two different kinds of covenants: works and grace.
rsc
Dr. Clark,
I don't want to bog down the other thread with this discussion. My intent here is not to be pugilistic but to try to interact on this. I do appreciate your extended explanation but want to press this a bit more. I don't want this thread to turn into a thread that trashes the Klinean approach but I would like to understand/challenge a few things you wrote.
First, my concern with the terms is not antipathy to the differentiation between the two Covenants. My concern is that, perhaps, some lessons are drawn from a Hittite treaty that are not properly grammatico-historical and I'm trying to figure out how the Klinean knows where to stop drawing the lines of connection.
You said:
On the surface this appeared to be a good analogy but then I reflected upon it a bit more.I hasten to remind everyone not to set up a scheme whereby John 1:1-3 cannot happen. Of course it did happen. What happened? The Apostle John borrowed from ancient PAGAN Greek philosophy by calling Jesus the Logos. That was a bold move and one that, I gather, some would say that he either could not or should not have done.
First of all, John certainly borrowed a term but then he poured a completely different meaning into the Greek understanding of the way the Logos was understood in pagan philosophy. Thus there are several issues of discontinuity that make your analogy fall down:
1. He was doing so under inspiration, Moses doesn't use the Royal Grant/Suzerain Treaty "lingo". Klineans do.
2. Is it clear to you that Moses borrowed from the Hittites or is it the other way around? If the former then the analogy would only work if we saw him using the language but then "cleaned up" the understanding of the terms the way that John does to the term Logos.
3. If the latter, what if the Hittites dorked up the treaty form that they copied? How do we know they did a good job of representing their treaty in the same way they imitated the way God cut His treaties with Abraham and others?
4. Finally, for the analogy to really "work" we would have to go back into Logos philsophy and import pagan notions about what the Logos represented into John so that we could have a fuller understanding of what he's talking about. In other words, the Klinean approach is not simply saying that the terms are the same but that we need to look at how the pagans understood the thing and bring them over into Scripture so we can understand how God intended us to understand them.
In fact, I think that last point really highlights my concern. Why would we not import the pagan Logos notions into the Johannine presentation of the Logos? After all, if the pagan understanding of the covenant for the Hittites is useful to understand the nature of the Covenants then why isn't the pagan understanding of the Logos useful for understanding the nature of Christ?
Blessings!
Rich