Imagine — counterfactually: on the night he was betrayed, the Lord Jesus held up an empty hand and said, ‘This is the blood of the covenant poured out for you. Drink of it.’ But there was no cup, no wine, nothing. If there’s no sign of the covenant, is there any covenant? Quite apart from the still raging debate whether what Jesus held up was a mere memorial of His sacrifice or contains, in some sense, his “real presence,” what does the fact that Jesus held up something, rather than nothing, say about covenants? Covenants come with signs. Noah’s covenant has the rainbow, Abraham’s circumcision, David’s throne, the New the Lord’s Supper. Does a covenant without signs make sense?
In our culture, cohabitors commonly argue that it does. They say that their relationship doesn’t need the fuss and bureaucracy of a marriage certificate. ‘Our love is a covenant that doesn’t need a sign,’ they would say if they were familiar with covenantal language. Amorphous, emotive relationships of convenience claiming the prerogatives of a covenant are now so much a part of our culture that their spirit is in the air.
Today, even IX Marks, an organization that majors on polity and church reform, rarely mentions covenanting and claims that covenants don’t bind their makers. For example, Jonathan Leeman claimed that church covenants are good but they can be set aside even for “foolish reasons.”1 That is, if Gary wants to leave the church he covenanted to, because he wants to hear stories about a pre-tribulation rapture (even though he was told explicitly in the new members class that that is not a doctrine of the church), we should bid Gary, “best wishes and blessings for [his] journey” of covenant breaking. After all, “the church has no choice but to accept [Gary’s] resignation.”2
“No choice” means the covenant is a mirage, nice words on paper that express no blessed tie that binds; merely sentiments only valuable for as long as the sentiment lasts. It might look like a covenant. But it’s a phantom. It’s a docetic covenant.
In earlier generations, breaking the church covenant itself was seen as possible grounds for church discipline. Benjamin Keach (1640-1704), a key early Baptist, insisted that “all Congregational Divines” agreed “that no person hath power to dismember himself: i.e. He cannot without great Sin, translate himself from one Church to another.”3 Now, though, we’re told to enable covenant-breaking by blessing it and that we have “no choice” but to do so.
God, however, calls us to be faithful and covenant-keeping like He is (Dt. 7:8-9). “If a man vows a vow to the Lord, or swears an oath to bind himself by a pledge, he shall not break his word. He shall do according to all that proceeds out of his mouth” (Numbers 30:2 also Dt. 23:21-23, Ps. 56:12, 76:11.) The one who dwells in God’s presence “keeps his oath even when it hurts” (Psalm 15:1a, 2, 4), even when the conditions change. Love “bears all things” (1 Cor. 13:6). If Gary had love for the body to which he covenanted, he would have borne with the lack of Left Behind movies there.
Jesus’ command to let our “yes” be yes, is not a prohibition of taking vows (Matthew 5:33-37), much less an endorsement of covenantlessness. He was correcting traditions which had allowed loop-holes that excused promise-breaking. If you just promised by the altar or the temple you could break your vow, so the tradition said. Jesus rejects the loopholes and re-affirms that vows must be kept, even if one didn’t swear by anything, just said “yes.” Will you be a member of this church? “Yes.” Will you keep her till death do you part? “I will.” Such pledges are as binding as the most holy oath. Hence, a church cannot have a covenant and then casually tell members cutting those ties “fare thee well.” Life is complicated and there may, indeed, be reasons when the bonds that tied us together may be loosed. But we can’t turn the covenant into a mirage.
What should we do about Gary? I don’t believe we should try to bind him to a church he wants to leave, even if we could. But, as he’s going out the door, we owe it to him to tell him our covenant isn’t an illusion; that his foolish breaking of it just in order to have his pre-tribulation rapture beliefs flattered is sinful; that if he wants God’s blessings, he should repent, not expect our benediction. In our church, first, our constitution frees members from the covenant every decade. So, if members do not want to commit to the body for another decade, they are free without guilt. (Most reaffirm.) Still we’ve had to deal with covenant breakers, no matter how plain we’ve made our expectations of covenant keeping. The unfaithful feel no reason to wait until their commitment has expired to leave. Even with little more than a year until their covenant expired, two young couples left, treating their covenant as if it were empty. Their “yes” – and their signed commitment – wasn’t yes. Our practice has been, if covenant-breakers at least have enough respect for the church to resign their membership, we rebuke them (so far, privately) but let them go with no further action. If he (or she) can’t be bothered to notify us on the way out, we have to excommunicate, because in a congregational church, only the congregation has the right to remove a member from the membership. But when members leave for legitimate reasons (like moving away), we developed the tradition of asking the departing members to come forward to the platform, give a few words to the church, and have us pray for them, blessings on their road ahead. I’ve been surprised that every departing member has wanted to do this, some becoming emotional. The fourth verse of “Blest Be the Tie,” describes it perfectly: “When we asunder part, It gives us inward pain; But we shall still be joined in heart, And hope to meet again.” One (now departed) member even rearranged and wrote an addition to that hymn: “We Are a Family.” Docetic covenants – empty shells of a non-existent tie, unenforced commitments broken with plastic smiles and a cheap “blessing” – cannot create the sweet sorrow we share with departing members. Gary will never know it.
Docetic covenantalism is the idea that a covenant can be unincarnated. It’s a phantom of a covenant that Gary can walk away from. Like hypocrisy, which is the tribute vice pays to virtue, docetic covenants pay tribute to “the tie that binds.” But its ties don’t bind. Thus, the uncovenanted, then, drift from church to church, often effusing about their “church family,” but are akin to C. S. Lewis’ “men without chests.” They lack the organ that attaches them to the body. We expect of Gary the virtue he committed to in his covenant but then are told not to be shocked, indeed to bid him “best wishes,” when he breaks it for his foolish reason. We’ve castrated covenants and then bidden the gelding-covenants be fruitful. But they’re not. Docetic covenants are sterile. Rather, the Bible holds up, after the Lord Himself, Ruth who on the Moab Road pledged hesed – covenant love – and kept it. Ruth is the story of faithful covenant-keeping. God brought His new covenant through it.
We can’t turn the disloyal into covenant-keepers by legalistic demands that Gary keep his commitments. We can’t earn the loyalty of the disloyal. But we can let Gary know that he’s a covenant-breaker; that he’s not showing the signs of those who dwell with God. And we can see, perhaps one day, some Garys turn into Ruths.
John B. Carpenter, Ph.D., is pastor of Covenant Reformed Baptist Church, in Danville, VA. and the author of Seven Pillars of a Biblical Church (Wipf and Stock, 2022) and the Covenant Caswell substack.
Notes:
- Jonathan Leeman, The Church and the Surprising Offense of God’s Love: Reintroducing the Doctrines of Church Membership and Discipline (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2010), 318.
↩︎ - Leeman, 318. ↩︎
- Keach, “The Glory of a True Church,” Polity: Biblical Arguments on How to Conduct Church Life (Washington, DC: Center for Church Reform, 2001), 79.
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