Covenant Theology and God’s Chosen

Introduction

Within the alt-right community there is a continual call to advocate traditional, Northern European paganism. Inherent in both the published and online literature is the view that the fall of Europe can be traced to the abandonment of its roots in the Norse religion and that Christianity looted paganism of its intellectual treasures.[1] Though alt-right Christians like me can be found, there seems to be a rising consensus in the alt-right that is critical of Christianity. This is understandable since the New Testament is the prophetic fulfillment of Judaism, which has a history of plundering nations and, especially since the medieval era, has become a morally debased religion practiced by a generally evil people. In this brief article, I hope to reinvigorate interest in the Christian story among the alt-right by providing a theological consideration for why God chose the evillest race in history to be his people in the Old Testament. I’ll begin by proffering covenant theology as the historic alternative to dispensationalism (and its Zionism), as the interpretive lens through which we should understand the biblical meta-narrative. I’ll conclude by examining how the incarnation of Christ and God’s pattern of salvific election can better help us understand the character of God and his choice of the Jewish people in the Old Testament.

Abrahamic Blessing and Covenant Theology

The Jews have wreaked havoc on Western civilization. This is one of the first realizations one has when she starts to dive into alt-right literature. Their mode of operation has sometimes been described as parasitic, as they attach themselves to a host nation and destroy that nation from the inside. Yet, many Christians in America believe that the Jews are God’s special and chosen people. Guided by a theology called dispensationalism, they eagerly defend the Jewish people in all internal and foreign affairs: they defend their presence in any nation, they defend the state of Israel and their cause in any conflict, they defend U.S. foreign aid (both financial and military) to Israel, and they support any political policy that lifts up the Jewish people, even to the detriment of another people. Writes one Christian Zionist, “With the world rightly united against the use of nuclear weapons, let us empower Israel—and stand ready ourselves—so that Iran’s regime grasps a simple truth: We will not hesitate to defend ourselves or our allies. True peace hinges on strength, and we must exhibit both in earnest, today and always. And just as strength is not a precursor to war, neither does bombing Iran start a never-ending conflict; in fact, it stops the war that started the day the Islamic Republic was born.”[2]

What could drive a Christian to speak so casually about bombing another nation? It all starts with the covenant promise that God made to Israel. In Genesis 12, God says to Israel’s patriarch, Abraham, “I will make you into a great nation, and I will bless you; I will make your name great, and you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and whoever curses you I will curse; and all peoples on earth will be blessed through you” (2–3). Evangelicals receive this verse as a mandate to support God’s Abrahamic people in the form of modern Israel to whatever violent end and at whatever financial or human cost. However, if the reader of Scripture progresses, he’ll find that the nature of this covenant is framed in conditional terms. Leviticus 26:3-4 uses the if/then grammatical structure of a subjunctive conditional: “If you walk in my statutes and keep my commandments so as to carry them out, then I shall give you rains in their season, so that the land will yield its produce, and the trees of the field will bear their fruit.”

But Israel did not keep their end of the covenant, and God, in his loving patience, decided to give them chance after chance, renewing their covenant at various points in Scripture. In the book of Joshua, He reaffirms His covenant with Israel and reiterates His warning against disobedience. Joshua says on behalf of Yahweh, “If you abandon the Lord and worship foreign gods, He will turn against you, harm you, and completely destroy you, after He has been good to you” (24:20).

Within the Abrahamic covenant then, there is a two-fold promise: The unconditional promise that through Abraham all nations will be blessed. This is an allusion to the coming of the Messiah whose line will persist through the Jewish people no matter what. Yet there is the conditional promise of general blessings; the material blessings of rain for the harvest, protection from enemies, and God’s provision of Holy Spirit-led guidance and sense of fatherhood over the nation of Israel as his children.[3] In other words, God promised to keep his Messianic promise of blessing to the Jews and that promise was kept through Christ. When Christ the Messiah did finally come, he came through the Jewish people. The gospels of Matthew and Luke even provide a genealogy of Jesus with Matthew going back to Abraham and Luke going all the way back to Adam.

But the Jews have rejected the Messiah. Acts 4:11 says, “Jesus is ‘the stone you builders rejected, which has become the cornerstone.’” So, God sent his gospel to the Gentiles through the Apostle Paul and engrafted them into the salvific tree of Israel. The promises that were meant for Israel have now been transferred to the Church. Whoever trusts in Christ for salvation becomes a citizen in God’s chosen spiritual nation — the Church. Circumcision, which in the OT was the sign and seal of the covenant that God made with his people to make them his own has been replaced by baptism. It serves the same purpose as circumcision as it is understood as setting someone apart from the world and bringing them into the covenant family of God’s people which is now the Church, not Israel.

Theologians have long called this observation supersessionism, which is directly informed by covenant theology. Covenant theology is a helpful interpretive guide to the meta narrative of the Bible. The Bible’s story unfolds in “chapters” of covenants. God made a covenant with Noah not to destroy the natural world even though he knew sin would continue to spread among it. He gave Noah the sign of the covenant in the form of a rainbow. He made a covenant with Abraham to bless his offspring materially and spiritually if his people would not follow other gods. The sign and seal of this Abrahamic covenant is circumcision, which is seen as a ceremonial act of cleansing and purification; a way to set the Israelites apart from her neighboring nations. He made a covenant with David that his kingship would be eternal. The sign and seal of this covenant was the throne, on which Christ now sits at the right hand of God the Father. In the New Testament, God made a covenant to anyone through Jesus Christ to be their God, if they abandon their false gods and idols and trust in Him through Christ alone.

The sign and seal of this new covenant is baptism. This is why Christians baptize their babies — It replaces circumcision as the ceremonial rite of induction into God’s covenant community. In this way, covenant theology makes a common-sense observation of the chronology of biblical salvific history. Zionist disagree with this way of viewing the whole Bible, and instead insist the Bible’s narrative unfolds in ages called dispensations. They believe that there are several ages in the salvific story and that we are currently in the “church age.” According to dispensationalists, there is a final coming age of Zion, where Christ will rule from Jerusalem for a thousand years. This theology gives Israel a sort of sacred status as the future center of God’s kingdom. Zionists angrily denounce covenant theology and its subsequent supersessionsim as “replacement theology”[4], because it replaces the idea of the chosenness of Israel with the chosenness of the Church.

It is confusing that Christian Zionists, while believing along with covenant minded Christians that salvation is found only in Christ, could simultaneously believe that the people who have whole heartedly rejected Christ are his chosen people. If they believe on the one hand that people who reject Christ, including Jews, spend eternity in hell, how could they on the other hand believe that an entire race of people who have rejected the only means of salvific blessings could be God’s chosen? If anything, the very opposite is true. St Paul likens Israel to Pharaoh whose heart was hardened by God before the Exodus from Egypt. It’s quite possible that Israel is under a special spiritual curse, as they continue to reject their Messiah who came through their own faith.

A more comprehensive explication of covenant theology than provided here is needed to fully understand its interpretive implication. However, it should suffice to say for now that dispensationalism is rather new in the history of biblical interpretation. The historic tradition of the church is also an important epistemological factor in discerning the Word of God in Sacred Scripture. The doctrine of the Church is passed on from one generation to the next, preserving the sacra doctrina of the apostles. This is what the Church means in the Apostles Creed when we say, “I believe in the Holy Catholic Church.” As St Vincent of Lerins said, “All possible care must be taken, that we hold that faith which has always been believed, everywhere, always, by all.”[5] Dispensationalism is as new as the nineteenth century. It does not mean that we don’t see doctrinal developments based on already-evolving truths come in more recent times. But it does mean that the church cannot accept an entire paradigm shift in interpretation. Covenant theology is the historic (traditionally) and commonsense (biblically and logically) method for understanding the whole of God’s Word. So, who are God’s people? The Church. Those who commits themselves to Christ, whether Jew or Gentile, belong to God and are a part of his chosen covenant family called the church. There is no room in the biblical meta-narrative for viewing the modern state of Israel or any ethnic group of people for that matter as God’s chosen people. God made a new covenant in Christ. The old covenant has been fulfilled in him and comes with new terms and conditions. Simply being Jewish does not suffice. As St. Paul writes in Romans 9:8, “In other words, it is not the children by physical descent who are God’s children, but it is the children of the promise who are regarded as Abraham’s offspring.” That promise is fulfilled in Christ.

Why the Jews?

However, this still does not answer why God chose Israel from the many peoples of the world to covenant with in the Old Testament. Here is the answer: God’s loving character and desire to save all people, from the worst of all nations and peoples to the best. Would God be God if He only chose the best of humanity? If He chose for Himself a people whom He, in his divine foreknowledge, knew would be the most obedient of all peoples, what kind of hope would that give to the imprisoned, the poor, and all of us who have sinned egregiously against the Lord (and that’s everyone)? What hope would lesser races have, that they too may be forgiven and saved? God chose the Jews, the very worst of humanity, and became one of them through Jesus Christ, that all of humanity, from the worst of us to the best of us might be saved. By taking on Jewish flesh in the incarnation of Christ, he made possible the redemption of those races and peoples even in the very pits of humanity, reconciling anyone who trusts in him to the Father. Referring to the Jews, God tells Moses in Exodus 32:9, “I have seen this people, and behold, it is a stiff-necked people.” But in Christ, God became the lowest form of human, a Jew, so that any one of us may attain salvation in Him and through Him alone. God has made a habit of choosing the worst of us. It is why he chose Paul, a persecutor of Christians to carry the gospel to the gentiles. It is why God chose Peter who denied Christ when asked if he knew him. It is why God chose James though he doubted Christ even while seeing him arisen. God would not be God if only the best had a chance at salvation. He loves the worst of us. But he requires that we repent of our sins and trust in Christ alone.

Conclusion

            Covenant theology is, therefore, the appropriate hermeneutic with which we should approach the biblical narrative. Its merits are easily observed in Scripture. It is believed and practiced in Roman Catholicism, Classical Protestantism, and Eastern Orthodoxy, and has been the prevailing method of biblical interpretation for the history of the church. The American public peers into Christianity and observes the rather loud dispensational voices commenting on current events and therefore believes that the church catholic (the whole church) thinks this way. Christianity, therefore, to the alt-right might seem off putting, given its claims concerning Israel. But it’s important to know that most of the church affirms a more reasonable interpretive method, one that severs the destiny of Israel from the church. It is my hope that if the alt-right understands that dispensationalism/Zionism is actually a minority view in the grand scheme of church history, and isn’t a view taken seriously by most theologians, perhaps they’ll give Christianity another look.

Nick Craig has a B.Sc. Religion, Liberty University and an M.A. Theological Studies, Houston Christian University

Bibliography

Elwell, Walter A, ed. Evangelical Dictionary of Theology. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House, 1984.

Hedrick, Gary. “Replacement Theology: Its Origins, Teachings and Errors .” Shema, October 5, 2012. https://shema.com/replacement-theology-its-origins-147/.

Parker, Sandra Hagee. “Peace Through Strength When It Comes To Supporting Israel and Confronting Iran.” Jewish News Syndicate, February 5, 2025. https://www.jns.org/peace-through-strength-when-it-comes-to-supporting-israel-and-confronting-iran/.

Rea, Robert F. Why Church History Matters: An Invitation to Live and Learn From the Past. Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2014.

Svarte, Askr. Polemos: The Dawn of Pagan Traditionalism. Moscow, Russian Federation: Prav, 2020.

[1] Askr Svarte, Polemos: The Dawn of Pagan Traditionalism (Moscow, Russian Federation: Prav, 2020), Kindle location 221.

[2] Sandra Hagee Parker, “Peace Through Strength When It Comes To Supporting Israel and Confronting Iran,” Jewish News Syndicate, February 5, 2025, https://www.jns.org/peace-through-strength-when-it-comes-to-supporting-israel-and-confronting-iran/.

[3] Walter A Elwell, ed., Evangelical Dictionary of Theology (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House, 1984), 277.

[4] Gary Hedrick, “Replacement Theology: Its Origins, Teachings and Errors ,” Shema, October 5, 2012, https://shema.com/replacement-theology-its-origins-147/.

[5] Robert F Rea, Why Church History Matters: An Invitation to Live and Learn From the Past (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2014), 36.