Introduction

Doug Wilson’s American Milk and Honey is now available. There’s a great deal in the book worth commenting on, and I anticipate engaging with that material more broadly in the near future. In the lead up to its release, however, Moscow has not been silent concerning Israel, the Jews, and antisemitism. Not only has Wilson himself blogged extensively on these issues, but just the other week Toby Sumpter threw his hat in the ring with a blog post¹ largely affirming many of Wilson’s convictions. Then Canon Press published a video of Pastor Wilson and company discussing right wing Twitter’s response to all this with Andrew Isker.² While a number of Wilson’s arguments deserve further analysis, I’d like to dedicate this article to examining one of the more curious features of his account; the so-called “covenant with Hagar.”

Allow me to say at the outset that I am personally indebted to Pastor Wilson in terms of my own theological development. My first systematic introduction to covenant theology was To a Thousand Generations. I became a postmillennial preterist in large part because of Wilson’s writing and preaching. But this is one reason why I was surprised to find so much of what he has argued of late running contrary to covenantal and eschatological sensibilities I acquired through his influence.

It might be tempting to cast this disagreement entirely in terms of Wilson’s futurist understanding of biblical prophecy concerning the conversion of the Jews vs. the minority preterist reading of James Jordan et al. I trust my sympathies in that debate will show through here. As far as I’m aware, however, Wilson’s particular use of Hagar is unattested even among those exegetes who take the majority Reformed position, making it a true theological novum.

In 2022 Wilson published One New Man, his commentary on Galatians and Ephesians. Though clearly not intended as exhaustive, the commentary never mentions a “covenant with Hagar” for modern unbelieving Jews. Instead, Wilson takes something far closer to the standard Reformed reading. It’s hard to avoid the sense that his “covenant with Hagar” was developed in response to recent controversy, rather than being the product of impartial exegesis.

Given the centrality of the idea to much of Wilson’s content preceding the release of American Milk and Honey, I expected the book to dedicate far more space to “the covenant with Hagar,” including perhaps a defense of his seemingly idiosyncratic new reading of Galatians 4. In reality, the chapter “Children of Hagar” devotes a mere two and a half pages to the concept, and despite it doing quite a bit of heavy lifting, there is never any serious exegetical engagement with the text of Galatians, leaving the ambiguous and bizarre nature of his previous comments to stand.

The Covenant with Hagar

Wilson understands his project as defending what he terms a “soft supersessionism.” Soft supersessionism “holds that the Jews as a people are still part of God’s purpose and plan for the world,”³ and describes what he regards as the historic Reformed consensus. It quickly becomes apparent, however, that Wilson not only wants to secure a continuing place for the Jews in redemptive history, but that he wants to secure them that place as a covenanted people:

When the Jews are converted en masse, this will usher in the latter day glory, and the resurrection of the dead. In short, the status of the Jews with regard to faith and unbelief is relevant for the rest of the world. As some have probably guessed, the arguments presented in this book are coming from a soft supersessionist position. Now one of the questions that will naturally be asked is what covenantal category these severed Jewish branches could possibly have in the meantime.⁴

For Wilson, “[Jewish identity] has always been a matter of covenant, not blood.”⁵ Therefore, to maintain that the Jews as a people remain part of God’s plan is necessarily to conceive of modern Jews as a people in covenant. His frequent appeal to a “covenant with Hagar” has been one in a number of efforts to locate such an ongoing biblical-covenantal identity. Since being a Jew is a matter of covenant, “for Christians what [the question of Jewish identity] should amount to is whether a tribe of people could bind themselves by covenant to the line of Hagar (Gal. 4:25). And the answer is yes.”⁶ This is evidently a commitment shared by Toby Sumpter: “It’s simply not true that no covenant remains for unbelieving Jews. It’s a covenant of bondage and slavery, and it is most certainly not the covenant of promise and grace (from which they have been removed), but there is a covenant with unbelieving Jews that remains nonetheless — the covenant with Hagar.”⁷

Tell me, you who desire to be under the law, do you not listen to the law? For it is written that Abraham had two sons, one by a slave woman and one by a free woman. But the son of the slave was born according to the flesh, while the son of the free woman was born through promise. Now this may be interpreted allegorically: these women are two covenants. One is from Mount Sinai, bearing children for slavery; she is Hagar. Now Hagar is Mount Sinai in Arabia; she corresponds to the present Jerusalem, for she is in slavery with her children. But the Jerusalem above is free, and she is our mother. (Galatians 4:21-26)

Despite acknowledging Paul’s appeal to the Genesis narrative here as metaphorical⁸, in some places it actually sounds as though Wilson is arguing that unbelieving Jews are made participants in a historical covenant with Hagar and Ishmael. Language of being covenantally bound “to the line of Hagar” is suggestive of this, as is his insistence that “although the ethnic Jews are descended from Abraham physically, covenantally speaking, they are Ishmaelites.”⁹ In the recent Canon Press video he argues similarly: “[Ashkenazi Jews] are covenantally bound to, I would argue, the covenant of Hagar in Galatians. So, covenantally they are Ishmaelites, because they have identified with this line that goes all the way back.”¹⁰

Elsewhere in the same video Wilson treats the “covenant with Hagar” as though it had its inception in the first century. When Isker says that he would understand the covenant with Hagar to end in AD 70, Wilson responds: “But if Galatians is written in the 40’s, and Jerusalem falls in 70 AD, that’s less than 30 years to have this covenant…It seems odd to me, or just a quirk, that you have this category of a covenant with Hagar that is just so short lived.”¹¹

Regardless of when this covenantal arrangement begins, nothing is clearer than the fact that, for Wilson, the “covenant with Hagar” and its relevance for Jewish identity must carry forward past the first century and into our future:

The group we commonly call Jews are cultural and ethnic Jews, and they have overwhelmingly rejected Christ as their Messiah. They are consequently under the covenant of Hagar (Gal. 4:24-26). Paul describes it as a covenant of bondage, and there is no indication in the text that this covenant was going to evaporate over time. Chains can be struck off, by faith alone, but they don’t evaporate. The veil will remain (2 Cor. 3:15) until the promised time for their restoration arrives (Rom. 11:24).¹²

In his chapter “Children of Hagar,” Wilson attempts to synthesize Paul’s metaphorical olive tree (Rom. 11) with the argument of Galatians 4. Concerning the unbelieving branches he asks, “If they are just a tangled pile of debris next to the field where the olive tree is located, then how could they remain alive? More than that, how could they remain alive (thus providing graftable branches) for two millennia or more?”¹³ His solution, arguably generating more questions than answers, is to “envision them as being a tree of Ishmael, planted in the clearing in between the wild olive trees on the hillside, and the cultivated Abrahamic tree in the middle of the garden of the Master.”¹⁴

Many of the questions that naturally arise concern the precise nature of this new covenantal tree. In the glossary originally published to his blog and now serving as an appendix to American Milk and Honey, Wilson offers a definition of covenant comprehensive enough to include his “covenant with Hagar:”

A covenant is a solemn bond, sovereignly administered, with attendant blessings and curses. This is the structure of all covenants, including the covenants that bind people in their unbelief. The apostle Paul teaches that unbelieving Jews are in covenant with Hagar, not Sarah (Gal. 4:25), and that whenever Moses is read, a veil lies over their heart (2 Cor. 3:15).”¹⁵

The first sentence of the definition is taken from Reformed is Not Enough¹⁶, and agreeable insofar as it goes. The second, however, is sheer non-sequitur. Aside from begging the question and assuming Wilson’s “covenant with Hagar,” what biblical covenant fits this description? Even if we could conceive of such a covenant, what would it mean for a covenant that binds its members in unbelief to have attendant blessings? Blessings for what? What does covenant keeping look like in such a covenant?

Sumpter approaches something like a partial answer to these questions in his recent blog post: “Paul says that this [future conversion of the Jews] is based on covenant promises to take away their sins (Rom. 11:27)…As Douglas Wilson recently reminded me, in Galatians 4, Paul calls this the Covenant with Hagar…”¹⁷ Apparently, the forgiveness of sins promised by Isaiah (Isa. 27:9) and invoked by Paul is one of the blessings attending the “covenant with Hagar,” a covenant that Sumpter assures us “is most certainly not the covenant of promise and grace…”¹⁸

Defining the Covenant

To this point, it should be clear that the “covenant with Hagar” is key to Wilson’s brand of soft supersessionism. What’s equally clear, however, is that this particular covenantal arrangement evades precise definition, and what elements have been made plain at times appear entirely incompatible with a historic Reformed covenant theology.

A historical reading of the “covenant with Hagar” is, of course, impossible. Although God makes prophetic promises to both Abraham and Hagar concerning Ishmael’s future, “nothing is clearer [in Genesis 16-21] than the singularity of the covenant God made with Abraham and the passing down of that covenant through Isaac and not through Ishmael. There is, thus, no Hagar covenant.”¹⁹ Paul simply does not teach that “unbelieving Jews are in covenant with Hagar.” The phrase used by both Wilson and Sumpter, “the covenant with Hagar,” appears nowhere in the passage. Paul is clear that his appeal to Genesis is allegorical; the covenant, therefore, is not with Hagar, rather Hagar is the covenant (Gal. 4:24).

Put simply, Hagar is the Old Covenant considered apart from its fulfillment in Christ. This is the plain reading of the text. Hagar is the covenant made at Mount Sinai and governing the present, earthly Jerusalem (vv. 24-25). The conflict between the Old Covenant of law and the New Covenant of freedom wherein the promise to Abraham has been finally realized is central to Paul’s argument throughout Galatians. That argument culminates in the allegory of chapter 4, where, as summarized concisely by John Stott, “the two women, Hagar and Sarah, the mothers of Abraham’s two sons, stand for the two covenants, the old and the new, and the two Jerusalems, the earthly and the heavenly.”²⁰ Matthew Henry is particularly helpful here:

These two, Agar and Sarah, are the two covenants, or were intended to typify and prefigure the two different dispensations of the covenant. The former, Agar, represented that which was given from mount Sinai, and which gendereth to bondage, which, though it was a dispensation of grace, yet, in comparison of the gospel state, was a dispensation of bondage, and became more so to the Jews, through their mistake of the design of it, and expecting to be justified by the works of it. For this Agar is mount Sinai in Arabia…and is in bondage with her children; that is, it justly represents the present state²¹ of the Jews, who, continuing in their infidelity and adhering to that covenant, are still in bondage with their children. But the other, Sarah, was intended to prefigure Jerusalem which is above, or the state of Christians under the new and better dispensation of the covenant, which is free both from the curse of the moral and the bondage of the ceremonial law, and is the mother of us all – a state into which all, both Jews and Gentiles, are admitted, upon their believing in Christ.”²²

The Old Covenant bore children for slavery, but not in the first instance because of unbelief. Rather, as described by Henry, the Sinaitic covenant was a dispensation of bondage:

Now before faith came, we were held captive under the law, imprisoned until the coming faith would be revealed. So then, the law was our guardian until Christ came, in order that we might be justified by faith…I mean that the heir, as long as he is a child, is no different from a slave, though he is the owner of everything, but he is under guardians and managers until the date set by his father. In the same way we also, when we were children, were enslaved to the elementary principles of the world. (Gal. 3:23-24; 4:1-3)

Even Old Covenant saints who possessed the faith of Abraham were for a time under this bondage. According to Calvin, “Those holy fathers, though inwardly they were free in the sight of God, yet in outward appearance differed nothing from slaves, and thus resembled their mother’s condition.”²³ This is because “though they were children of God and heirs of the kingdom of heaven just like ourselves, [they] were under tutors and governors…Their ceremonies were like bridles or cords preventing those who observed them from enjoying the liberty that we have today through the Lord Jesus Christ.”²⁴ Turning to the state of the “present Jerusalem” he adds,

What, then, is the gendering to bondage, which forms the subject of the present dispute? It denotes those who make a wicked abuse of the law, by finding in it nothing but what tends to slavery. Not so the pious fathers, who lived under the Old Testament; for their slavish birth to the law did not hinder them from having Jerusalem for their mother in spirit. But those who adhere to the bare law, and do not acknowledge it to be ‘a schoolmaster to bring them to Christ,’ (Gal. iii. 24,) but rather make it a hindrance to prevent their coming to him, are the Ishmaelites born to slavery.²⁵

It was possible to be a spiritual son of Sarah under the covenant of law, “for the law contains many promises of salvation which were fulfilled in the Lord Jesus Christ.”²⁶ It was also possible to live under the bondage of Sinai while ignoring its telos, and so without the Jerusalem above for a mother. This means that the Hagar covenant did not begin in the 40’s AD; it was the experience of unbelieving Jews bound to the Sinai covenant throughout history, only now exposed as abject slavery. At the coming of Christ all the spiritual blessings promised by the law became the exclusive possession of the heavenly Jerusalem. The advent of the New Covenant emptied the Old of its substance, leaving “nothing but what tends to slavery” for those who remained. As Wilson explains, “The heir, when he is little, is bossed around just like a servant.”²⁷ The New Covenant, however, separates servants from sons. Jesus Himself anticipates this fact when He reminds faithless Jews who claim Abraham as their father that “the slave does not remain in the house forever; the son remains forever” (John 8:35).

Paul can speak of Hagar in the present tense precisely because he is writing circa AD 40, during a unique time in which both covenant administrations overlapped: “In speaking of a new covenant, he makes the first one obsolete. And what is becoming obsolete and growing old is ready to vanish away” (Heb. 8:13). This is a feature of the New Testament’s covenantal landscape that I first learned from Pastor Wilson:

We commonly assume that the formation of the Christian church in the first century was an abrupt lurch into a completely different order of things. In reality, the transition from the older administration to the new took almost half a century. Pentecost occurred around a.d. 30, and the formal judicial dissolution of the older Judaic worship occurred in a.d. 70 in the destruction of Jerusalem.²⁸

We can agree with Wilson that the Hagar covenant does not evaporate gradually over time. As a moniker for the Old Covenant, it was finally and climactically brought to a close in AD 70 along with the destruction of Jerusalem and the temple of the Jews. This is the significance of Paul’s appeal to Genesis 21: “But what does the Scripture say? ‘Cast out the slave woman and her son, for the son of the slave woman shall not inherit with the son of the free woman’” (Gal. 4:30). Wilson seemed to know this when he wrote in One New Man that “this transition from the old covenant to the new is the point where Sarah has borne her freeborn son, and the slave woman is divorced and put away.”²⁹ As J. B. Lightfoot observes, “It is scarcely possible to estimate the strength of conviction and depth of prophetic insight which this declaration implies. The apostle thus confidently sounds the death-knell of Judaism…”³⁰

Sumpter grants that “the Old Covenant vanished at 70 AD with the temple and sacrifices, meaning that the temple approach to God has entirely ceased,” but adds that “just as the Jews existed in exile during the Old Covenant without sacrifices or temple, they can continue to exist for centuries, and they have.”³¹ What guaranteed the continued existence of biblical Judaism during the exile, however, was the fact that despite lacking a temple and sacrifices the Jews in exile remained a people in covenant with God. The destruction of the temple in AD 70 did not in itself terminate the Old Covenant. If that were the case, we might be inclined to think the Old Covenant had resumed were certain Zionist factions to have their way and re-institute the temple sacrifices. The destruction of Jerusalem, rather, powerfully bore witness to the reality that the covenant had in fact vanished, just as Jesus’ and His Apostles said it would. One might argue (as Wilson does) that the dynamic of bondage to meritorious works remains for modern Jews; “until the world ends, there will always be those who live carnally in unbelief and those who live in faith, by faith, and unto faith.”³² What is simply indefensible, however, is the notion that the Old Covenant order typified by Hagar endures to the present.

If we’re going to insist on mixing biblical metaphors, it will be essential to compare like terms. Romans 11 speaks of the unbelieving Jews being cut off, Galatians 4 of their being cast out. On Wilson’s reading, the unbelieving branches broken off of Israel’s tree are then grafted into the tree of Ishmael and the covenant with Hagar. But this would be to divide what is analogous in each metaphor; cutting off and casting out signify the same reality. The bondage of Hagar is the state of the unbelieving natural branches prior to being pruned from Israel’s tree. Unbelieving Jews do not become sons of the slave woman upon being cut out of the covenant; they are cut out precisely because that is what they already are.

As Pastor Wilson has taught, “there are only two ways to come into a connection with the tree [of the covenant]—to grow on the tree as the vast majority of the Jews did, or be grafted on the tree as the first century Gentiles were.”³³ Branches that grow on the tree, whether first century Jews or tenth generation Scots Presbyterians, are natural branches. In attempting to expand the analogy of Romans 11 Wilson has run up against the force of the preterist reading. There is no mechanism offered for keeping the pruned natural branches alive, yet it is indeed the “natural branches” (branches that grew on Israel’s tree, and not some “tree of Ishmael”) that will be grafted back in (Rom. 11:24). The clear implication being that both the pruning and regrafting of these same natural branches must happen in fairly quick succession, and not after a period of two millennia or more.

Wilson’s “covenant with Hagar” leads him to believe that “when the unbelieving Jews were cut out of the olive tree, they were not thrown onto a gigantic burn pile,”³⁴ but instead survived God’s judgment on the Jerusalem below as a covenanted people. An imminent and fiery destruction, however, is precisely what the Scriptures themselves anticipate concerning the faithless Jews who persist in unrepentance:

You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come? Bear fruit in keeping with repentance. And do not presume to say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our father,’ for I tell you, God is able from these stones to raise up children for Abraham. Even now the axe is laid to the root of the trees. Every tree therefore that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. (Matt. 3:7-10)

Conclusion

In a September blog post responding to Stephen Wolfe, Wilson invited anyone who would debate the merits of his proposed memorials on antisemitism and “ethnic balance” to “come at it with an open Bible…[and] make an argument grounded in Scripture.”³⁵ I hope it’s clear that this is what I’ve attempted to do in responding to his reading of Galatians 4. While much remains to be said regarding American Milk and Honey, for now, suffice it to say that Wilson and company might garner more sympathy for his project if they ditched the “covenant with Hagar” angle in favor of an approach rooted in thorough exegesis and historic Reformed thought.

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Gabe is a ministerial student at Christ Covenant Church of Chicago (CREC). He and his wife Sarah live in the Chicagoland area with their daughter.

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NOTES

1. Sumpter, Toby. “Romans 11, Zionism, and the Future of the Jews.” Having Two Legs (blog). 11/07/2023. https://tobyjsumpter.com/romans-11-zionism-the-future-of-the-jews/ ↩︎
2. Canon Press, “Right Wing Twitter vs Doug Wilson (feat. Andrew Isker),” YouTube, November 9, 2023, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4sVp6eWVYrs. ↩︎
3. Douglas Wilson, American Milk and Honey: Antisemitism, the Promise of Deuteronomy, and the True Israel of God (Moscow: Canon Press, 2023), Kindle, 100. ↩︎
4. Wilson, American Milk and Honey, 100. Emphasis mine. ↩︎
5. Wilson, Douglas. “A Brief Introductory Glossary on the Relationship of Christians and Jews.” Blog and Mablog (blog). 12/07/2022. https://dougwils.com/books-and-culture/s7-engaging-the-culture/a-brief-introductory-glossary-on-the-relati onship-of-christians-and-jews.html ↩︎
6. Wilson, “A Brief Introductory Glossary on the Relationship of Christians and Jews.” ↩︎
7. Sumpter, “Romans 11, Zionism, and the Future of the Jews.” ↩︎
8. “Realizing that while we are not mixing metaphors, we are in fact juggling metaphors. We have the illustration from Abraham’s family, with the unbelieving Jews as children of the slave concubine. We also have a horticultural illustration, with the unbelieving Jews as pruned branches.” (Wilson, American Milk and Honey, 101.) ↩︎
9. Wilson, American Milk and Honey, 101. ↩︎
10. Canon Press, “Right Wing Twitter vs Doug Wilson (feat. Andrew Isker),” 24:30 to 24:48 ↩︎
11. Canon Press, “Right Wing Twitter vs Doug Wilson (feat. Andrew Isker),” 27:42 to 27:52, 30:12 to 30:22 ↩︎
12. Wilson, Douglas. “A Round-Up On Race, Ethnicity, and Antisemitism” Blog and Mablog (blog). 10/02/2023. https://dougwils.com/books-and-culture/s7-engaging-the-culture/a-grab-bag-of-observations-about-race-et hnicity-and-antisemitism.html ↩︎
13. Wilson, American Milk and Honey, 100. ↩︎
14. Wilson, American Milk and Honey, 101-102. ↩︎
15. Wilson, American Milk and Honey, 154. ↩︎
16. Douglas Wilson, Reformed Is Not Enough: Recovering the Objectivity of the Covenant (Moscow: Canon Press, 2002), Kindle, Location 737. ↩︎
17. Sumpter, “Romans 11, Zionism, and the Future of the Jews.” ↩︎
18. Sumpter, “Romans 11, Zionism, and the Future of the Jews.” ↩︎
19. J. Louis Martyn, Galatians: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary, Anchor Yale Bible Commentaries (New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 2008), 436. ↩︎
20. John R. W. Stott, The Message of Galatians (London: Inter-Varsity Press, 1968), 125. ↩︎
21. It’s clear that here Henry intends the present state of the Jews at the time of Paul’s writing. ↩︎
22. Matthew Henry, Acts to Revelation, Matthew Henry’s Commentary On the Whole Bible (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, Inc., 1991), 539. ↩︎
23. John Calvin, The Epistles of Paul the Apostle to the Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians and Colossians, Calvin’s Commentaries (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 1974), 138. ↩︎
24. John Calvin, Freedom from the Bondage of the Law, Thirty Six Various Sermons. https://www.monergism.com/thethreshold/sdg/calvin/calvin_36sermons.html ↩︎
25. John Calvin, The Epistles of Paul the Apostle to the Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians and Colossians, 138. ↩︎
26. Calvin, Freedom from the Bondage of the Law ↩︎
27. Douglas Wilson, To a Thousand Generations—Infant Baptism: Covenant Mercy for the People of God (Moscow: Canon Press, 1996), Kindle, Location 865. ↩︎
28. Douglas Wilson, One New Man: A Commentary on Galatians and Ephesians (Moscow: Canon Press, 2022), Kindle, 49. ↩︎
29. Wilson, One New Man: A Commentary on Galatians and Ephesians, 59. ↩︎
30. J. B. Lightfoot, St. Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians (Andover: W. F. Draper, 1870), 282. ↩︎
31. Sumpter, “Romans 11, Zionism, and the Future of the Jews.” ↩︎
32. Wilson, One New Man: A Commentary on Galatians and Ephesians, 59. ↩︎
33. Re-Considering Doug Wilson’s “Covenant with Hagar”
    Wilson, To a Thousand Generations—Infant Baptism: Covenant Mercy for the People of God, Location 1065.
    ↩︎
34. Re-Considering Doug Wilson’s “Covenant with Hagar”
    Wilson, American Milk and Honey, 101-102.
    ↩︎
35. Re-Considering Doug Wilson’s “Covenant with Hagar”
    Wilson, Douglas. “The Case of Owen and the Memorials.” Blog and Mablog (blog). 09/25/2023. https://dougwils.com/books-and-culture/s7-engaging-the-culture/the-case-of-owen-and-the-memorials.htm l ↩︎