Favorite Quotes from Wider Scholarship

Illustrating Covenant Creation Conclusions

“It [Genesis 1] is as truly a sevenfold revelation of a beginning as the Apocalypse of St. John is a mystic revelation of an end.”(emphasis mine)

Milton S. Terry, Biblical Apocalyptics, p. 44.

"Let us be clear about this: The destruction of the temple and of Jerusalem was not merely the end of the Hebrew-Israelite-Jewish period of history that began with Abraham. It was the end of the entire Old Creation from Adam forward. The Church is the replacement not merely of Israel, but also the older and larger Gentile world that began with Adam and continued through the Noahic covenant. The Kingdom of Jesus is a wholly New Creation and nothing less."

James B. Jordan, Matthew 23-25: A Literary, Historical, and Theological Commentary.
Chapter titled, "The Judgment of the Old Creation"

"Because of the call of Abram, the nations were organized around Israel. Israel formed "the land" at the center of the world, like the land that emerged from the watery chaos during the creation week (Gen. 1:2). All other nations were part of the turbulent sea that threatened to overwhelm the land and turn the world back to confusion. The new creation that took place in Abram divided sea and land, but simultaneously established a necessary connection between the two. Israel alone was the land, but the nations became "the ends of the land" (Deut 33:17; 1 Sam 2:10; Pss 2:10; 22:27; 59:13; 67:7; Isa 45:22; 52:10; Jer 16:19; Mic 5:4; Zech 9:10) and "the islands" (Isa 40:15; 41:5; 42:4). Gentiles formed the boundary of Israel's land, and as such they were incorporated as the frontier of Yahweh's empire that had Zion as its capital. The Gentile sea thus belonged to the land of the children of Abraham, and this implied that the Gentile would eventually share in their redemption as light and life spread from Zion to the frontier, from Jew to Greek."

-- Peter Leithart, Between Babel and Beast: America and Empires in Biblical Perspective, p. 11.

"First and foremost is the undeniable fact that Paul, when considering the resurrection from the death of Adam, posited that resurrection as the fulfillment of God's promises to Old Covenant Israel. He directly cites Isaiah 25 and Hosea 13, not to mention the fact that he indirectly alludes to Daniel 9, Daniel 12, the Psalms and other O.T. prophecies (1 Corinthians 15:54-56). This means that the promise of resurrection made in the Garden is incorporated into YHVH's promises to Old Covenant Israel. So, the story of the Garden becomes the story of Israel."

--Don K. Preston, We Shall Meet Him in the Air: The Wedding of The King of Kings, p. 4.

Notice now that in Rev. 21, the heavens and earth pass away at the end of the millennium . . . . [T]he great Day of the Lord was to occur at the time of the destruction of creation, at the judgment of Babylon, and since creation was to be destroyed at the end of the millennium, then the vindication of the martyrs, in the judgment on Babylon, was to occur at the end of the millennium.

-- Don K. Preston, Who is this Babylon, pp. 268-269.

In the creation God finished His works in six days, and rested on the seventh. The history of the world contains six periods marked by the dealings of God with men. The first period is from Adam to Noah; the second, from Noah to Abraham; the third, from Abraham to David; the fourth, from David to the captivity in Babylon; the fifth, from the captivity to the advent of lowliness of our Lord Jesus Christ; the sixth is now in progress, and will end in the coming of the exalted Saviour to judgment. What answers to the seventh day is the rest of the saints — not in this life, but in another, where the rich man saw Lazarus at rest while he was tormented in hell; where there is no evening, because there is no decay. On the sixth day, in Genesis, man is formed after the image of God; in the sixth period of the world there is the clear discovery of our transformation in the renewing of our mind, according to the image of Him who created us, as the apostle says. Colossians 3:10 As a wife was made for Adamfrom his side while he slept, the Church becomes the property of her dying Saviour, by the sacrament of the blood which flowed from His side after His death. The woman made out of her husband's side is called Eve, or Life, and the mother of living beings; and the Lord says in the Gospel: "Except a man eat my flesh and drink my blood, he has no life in him." John 6:53 The whole narrative of Genesis, in the most minute details, is a prophecy of Christ and of the Church with reference either to the good Christians or to the bad. There is a significance in the words of the apostle when he calls Adam "the figure of Him that was to come;" Romans 5:14 and when he says, "A man shall leave his father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife, and they two shall be one flesh. This is a great mystery; but I speak concerning Christ and the Church." 

Augustine, Contra Faustum, Book XII Section 12

"The cross and the parousia of Christ are in biblical eschatology what alpha and omega are in the Greek alphabet -- the beginning and the end. Our primary aim in this volume, as indicated by the title, is to show that Christ's cross and parousia (i.e., His presence or arrival commonly called the second coming) are the two foci of one complete, indivisible eschaton (end time) that pertain to the fulfillment of all redemptive history and prophecy within the closing period ("last days") of the Old Testament aeon (age).

The cross has been recognized generally as an eschatological event that forms the turning point between two covenantal aeons -- the Old and New Testaments or the Jewish and Christian ages." 

-- Max R. King, The Cross and the Parousia of Christ: The Two Dimensions of one Age-Changing Eschaton, p. ix.

[Editor's note: this citation is the opening of the Preface, the first 3 sentences of the book - T.M.] 

“The reason that Jesus reflects both the Old Testament figures of Adam and Israel is because, as we have seen earlier, Israel and her patriarchs were given the same commission as was Adam in Genesis 1:26-28. Consequently, it is not an overstatement to understand Israel as a corporate Adam who had failed in their ‘Garden of Eden’ [c.f. Gen. 13:10; Isaiah 51:3; Ezekiel 36:35; Joel 2:3] in much the same way as their primal father had failed in the first garden. For these reasons, it is understandable that Jesus is called ‘Son of God’ partly because that was a name for the first Adam (Luke 3:38; cf. Gen. 5:1-3) and for Israel (Exodus 4:22; Hos. 11:1). Likewise, the expression ‘son of man’ from Daniel 7:13 refers to end-time Israel and her representative king as the son of Adam who is sovereign over beasts (recall that the ‘son of man’ takes over the kingdoms of former evil empires portrayed as beasts). Understandably, against this background, it is natural that ‘Son of Man’ [Adam] became one of Jesus’ favorite ways of referring to himself.”(emphasis mine)

--G.K. Beale, The Temple and the Church’s Mission, pp. 174-175.

“He found him in a desert land
And in the wasteland..

As an eagle stirs up its nest,
Hovers over its young…”
Deuteronomy 32:10-11 NKJ

“Moses uses two key words in this passage: waste and hover. Both of these words occur only one other time in the entire Pentateuch, and again they occur together, in Genesis 1:2. Waste is used to describe the uninhabitable condition of the earth at its creation ("without form"); and hover is Moses' term for the Spirit's activity of "moving" in creative power over the face of the deep. God is not careless with language.. . . The Covenant on Sinai was a re-creation, a reorganization of the world. Similarly, St. John borrows terminology from the same passage in Moses to present that message to the Church: God has brought to fulfillment the provisional re-creations of the old order. The coming of Christ has brought about the definitive re-creation, the New Covenant.” (emphasis mine)

--David Chilton, The Days of Vengeance, p. 320.

"The reason that Genesis 1 has been understood as material for so long is because our world has been so entrenched in a material ontology that it cannot think that there is even another possibility."

-- Dr. John H Walton, "The Goal and Purpose of Genesis One"

“Second, and as far as I am concerned absolutely central for Paul, there is the apostle’s understanding of the story of Israel, and of the whole world, as a single continuous narrative… Paul’s references to Adam and Abraham, to Moses and the prophets, to Deuteronomy and Isaiah and even the Psalms, mean what they mean because he has in his head and heart, as a great many second-temple Jews did, a grand story of creation and covenant, of God and his world and his people, which had been moving forward in a single narrative and which was continuing to do so.” (emphasis mine)

--N.T. Wright, Justification, p. 34.

“It is especially interesting to find that the description of God’s placing the man in the Garden also bears a strong resemblance to the later establishment of the priesthood for the tabernacle and temple.”

--John Sailhamer, The Pentateuch as Narrative, p. 100.

“Theologians sometimes use ‘Old Covenant’ to refer to the Mosaic covenant. There is truth to this in that the Mosaic covenant published most fully the distinctive character of the Adamic covenant under curse. Yet, ultimately, the Old Covenant is the covenant of the original garden of Eden. Ultimately, there are two covenants, Old and New. There are two Adams, Adam and Jesus. There are two heavens and earth, the first in Adam and the second in Christ.” (emphasis mine)

--James B. Jordan, Through New Eyes (1988), p. 311.

It is no accident that God "hallowed" the seventh day (Gen 2:2). The Hebrew word for the number seven, sheva, evokes a wealth of intended meaning. Sheva is the root word of saba, which means "fullness and completion"....

But the word sheva has a still-closer kinship with another word: shava. Shava is the verb for swearing a covenant oath. It's literal meaning is to "seven oneself." The verb for swearing a covenant is built upon the number seven....

By blessing the seventh day, God swore a covenant to His world. He is not just proprietor of creation. He is not just master to a race of slaves. He is Father to a family. If God had stopped on the sixth day, we would be his creatures, slaves, and private property. But he went on and blessed the seventh day, and took a rest, and invited humankind into that rest. That action represents the covenant relationship that he established with his creation. And what is a covenant? A family bond, a sacred family bond.

--Scott Hahn, Swear to God

“[T]here is a close parallel between the biblical vocation of Adam in Genesis and the biblical vocation of Israel, and when we explore this we may find fresh ways through to the heart of contemporary puzzles....

Vocations of Adam and Israel. This is where I sense a strong parallel with the calling and vocation of the ancient people of Israel, and this is where we might glimpse some fresh light on Adam and the question of origins. Genesis itself makes a clear parallel between Adam and Abraham: "be fruitful and increase in number" (Gen 1:28) becomes "I will make you very fruitful; I will make nations of you" (Gen 17:6). Instead of the original paradise, with God present with his people, Israel is promised a land, and eventually given the temple as the place of God's presence. But the point is this: Israel, a small, strange nomadic people in an obscure part of the world, is chosen to be the promise-bearer: "through your offspring all nations on earth will be blessed" (Gen 22:18). Israel is to be a royal priesthood (Ex. 19). Israel is to be the light of the nations (Is 42; 49). Israel is chosen out of the rest of the world in order to be God's strange means of rescuing the human race and so getting the creational project back on track. And God chooses Israel while knowing full well, in Paul's language, that Israel is in Adam: the people who bear the solution are themselves part of the problem. That, in fact, is the clue to the hardest bits of Paul's theology, for instance the problem of the law. That's for another time. But watch closely. Israel is chosen to fulfill this divine purpose; Israel is placed in the holy land, the garden of God's delight; and Israel is warned that if they don't keep Torah they will be expelled, sent off into exile. It will look as if the whole project has been aborted. That is the horrible problem faced not only in the exile but in the so-called postexilic period....

What might that tell us about the vocation of Adam, then? I do not know when Genesis reached its final form. Some still want to associate it with Moses; others insist it was at least edited during the exile. But whatever view you take about that, certainly the Jews of the Second Temple period would have no difficulty in decoding the story of Adam as an earlier version of their own story: placed in the garden; given a commission to look after it; being the place where God wanted to be at rest, to exercise his sovereign rule; warned about keeping the commandment; warned in particular that breaking it would mean death; breaking it and being exiled. It all sounds very, very familiar. And it leads me to my proposal: that just as God chose Israel from the rest of humankind for a special, strange, demanding vocation, so perhaps what Genesis is telling us is that God chose one pair from the rest of early hominids for a special, strange, demanding vocation. This pair (call them Adam and Eve if you like) were to be the representatives of the whole human race, the ones in whom God's purposes to make the whole world a place of delight and joy and order, eventually colonizing the whole creation. God the creator put into their hands the fragile taskof being his image-bearers. If they failed, they would bring the whole purpose for the wider creation, including all those nonchosen hominids, down with them. They were supposed to be the life-bringers, and if they failed in their task, the death that was already endemic in the world as it was would engulf them as well. This, perhaps, is the way of reading the warning in Genesis 2: in the day you eat of it you, too, will die. Not that death, the decay and disolution of plants, animals and hominids, wasn't a reality already; but you, Adam and Eve, are chosen to be the people through whom God's life-giving reflections will be imaged into the world, and if you choose to worship and serve the creation rather than the Creator, you will merely reflect death back to death, and will share in that death yourself. I do not know whether this is exactly what Genesis meant, or what Paul meant. But the close and (to a Jewish reader) rather obvious parallel between the vocation of Israel and the vocation of Adam leads me in that direction..."

--NT Wright, "An Excursus on Paul's Use of Adam" published in The Lost World of Adam and Eve: Genesis 2-3 and the Origins Debate by John H. Walton, pp. 173, 175-77.

Circa Year 2000

"So then, the heavens and earth are a figure for the kingdoms of heaven and earth. The new heavens and the new earth are a figure for the glorious and ever-increasing reign of our Lord Jesus Christ." 

-- Douglas Wilson "Biblical Pictures of the New Cosmos" in And It Came to Pass, p. 29.

"That all kinds of animals are inclosed in the ark; as the Church contains all nations, which was also set forth in the vessel shown to Peter. That clean and unclean animals are in the ark; as good and bad take part in the sacraments of the Church."

Augustine, Contra Faustum, Book XII Section 15

"Jeremiah's vision is of the whole creation returning to it's primaeval chaos; in the first line he uses he uses the phrase tohu wahohu which is used elsewhere only of the empty turbulence out of which God created heaven and earth."

-- G.B. Caird, The Language and Imagery of the Bible, p. 114.

"It is important to remember that Judaism is not Old Testament religion at all; rather, it is a rejection of the Biblical faith altogether in favor of the Pharisaical, Talmudic heresy. Like Mormons, Jehovah's Witnesses, the Unification Church, and other cults, it claims to be based on the Bible; but its actual authority comes from the traditions of men. Jesus was quite clear: Judaism denies Christ precisely because it denies Moses (John 5:45-47). Orthodox Christianity alone is the true continuation and fulfillment of Old Testament religion (see Matt. 5:17-20; 15:1-9; Mark 7:1-13; Luke 16:29-31; John 8:42-47)."

--David Chilton The Days of Vengeance