How to Study the Bible: Dispensations, Covenants and God

Okay. I’m through reposting old material for a while. Now it’s time to put the ingredients together and hope the result is a cake.

I’m headed toward a new outline of the entirety of the Bible — but I have to caution you about one very important thing. This is not about “dispensations” — at least not in one sense of the word.

“Dispensations”

The idea that the Bible is a series of dispensations — Patriarchal, Mosaic, Christian — goes back to the old Scofield Study Bible from over 100 years ago. Its notes were put together by a dispensational theologian, and while not entirely wrong, it’s created a lot of problems for understanding the scriptures.

Dispensationalism. A hermeneutical approach to the Bible that became a movement within American evangelicalism after the 1870s. The term originates from oikonomeo and its derivatives, which appear about twenty times in the Greek New Testament and mean “to manage, regulate, administer and plan the affairs of a household” (see Lk 16:1–2; Eph 1:10; 3:2, 9; Col 1:25). When used of God, the word refers to his sovereign plan for the world.

At the heart of dispensationalism is the dividing of all time into distinguishable economies (or dispensations) which are seen as different stages in God’s progressive revelation. C. I. Scofield, a leading exponent of dispensationalism, defined a dispensation as “a period of time during which man is tested in respect of obedience to some specific revelation of the will of God.” Furthermore, “these periods are marked off in Scripture by some change in God’s method of dealing with mankind. … Each of the dispensations may be regarded as a new test of the natural man, and each ends in judgment—marking his utter failure in every dispensation.”

Daniel G. Reid, Robert Dean Linder, Bruce L. Shelley, and Harry S. Stout, Dictionary of Christianity in America, 1990.

The idea was picked up in the Jule Miller Filmstrips used to convert so many to the Churches of Christ, although dispensational theology is not really a centerpiece of any brand of Church of Christ theology. Nonetheless, dispensational thinking became deeply embedded in our church culture since so many of us were taught using those lessons.

I should mention that Scofield’s dispensationalism was premillennialist (the Rapture precedes the 1,000-year reign of Christ on earth), and the Churches of Christ largely rejected premillennialism under the influence of Foy Wallace, Jr. in the 1940s and 1950s.

The Scofield dispensational understanding is that God issued a new set of laws for each new dispensation and repealed the old laws from the old dispensation, so that each dispensation was independent of what came before or after. Scofield saw each dispensation as a “test” imposed by God on man — a test to be passed or failed. And it’s no surprise that this view of the dispensations often led to a legalistic understanding of God’s will. It certainly did in the Churches of Christ of the 20th Century.

But Scofield got it wrong. Each dispensation is a dispensation of grace, not testing. The Law of Moses did not repeal God’s covenant with Abraham — a covenant founded on faith and grace. In fact, God says that he made the Mosaic covenant to honor his covenant with Abraham —

(Lev 26:44-45 ESV)  44 “Yet for all that, when they are in the land of their enemies, I will not spurn them, neither will I abhor them so as to destroy them utterly and break my covenant with them, for I am the LORD their God.  45 But I will for their sake remember the covenant with their forefathers, whom I brought out of the land of Egypt in the sight of the nations, that I might be their God: I am the LORD.” 

God tells Moses that even if Israel violates the Law of Moses, God will remember his covenant with Abraham and then continue to be Israel’s God. God’s covenant with Abraham was not repealed in Moses — it was furthered.

Then in Galatians, Paul writes,

(Gal 3:17 ESV)  17 This is what I mean: the law, which came 430 years afterward, does not annul a covenant previously ratified by God, so as to make the promise void.

Plainly, the Law of Moses did not repeal Abraham’s covenant. Did Jesus?

(Rom 4:22-25 ESV)  22 That is why his faith was “counted to him as righteousness.”  23 But the words “it was counted to him” were not written for his sake alone,  24 but for ours also. It will be counted to us who believe in him who raised from the dead Jesus our Lord,  25 who was delivered up for our trespasses and raised for our justification.

We are saved by faith because God saved Abraham by faith under the Abrahamic covenant. Abraham’s covenant remains in effect today! And it was in effect during the Mosaic “dispensation.”

And there is a sense in which the Mosaic covenant remains in effect. It’s not “nailed to the cross” (one of the most well-known verses in Church of Christ theology). The KJV mistranslates,

(Col 2:13-14 KJV)  13 And you, being dead in your sins and the uncircumcision of your flesh, hath he quickened together with him, having forgiven you all trespasses;  14 Blotting out the handwriting of ordinances that was against us, which was contrary to us, and took it out of the way, nailing it to his cross;

Rather than —

(Col 2:13-14 ESV) 13 And you, who were dead in your trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made alive together with him, having forgiven us all our trespasses,  14 by canceling the record of debt that stood against us with its legal demands. This he set aside, nailing it to the cross. 

The KJV is a mistranslation. Bobby Valentine’s explanation of the text is beyond my ability to improve upon. The Law was not nailed the cross; the record of our sins was! (We’ve learned a lot more about koine Greek since 1611). In fact, Jesus says,

(Mat 5:17-19 ESV) “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them.  18 For truly, I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the Law until all is accomplished.  19 Therefore whoever relaxes one of the least of these commandments and teaches others to do the same will be called least in the kingdom of heaven, but whoever does them and teaches them will be called great in the kingdom of heaven.”

We can’t help but notice that Paul occasionally refers to the Law of Moses as authoritative for Christians!

(2Co 13:1 ESV) This is the third time I am coming to you. Every charge must be established by the evidence of two or three witnesses.

(Rom 13:8-10 ESV) Owe no one anything, except to love each other, for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law.  9 For the commandments, “You shall not commit adultery, You shall not murder, You shall not steal, You shall not covet,” and any other commandment, are summed up in this word: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”  10 Love does no wrong to a neighbor; therefore love is the fulfilling of the law. 

The Law of Moses is not so much repealed as reconceived and re-envisioned in light of the work of Jesus. The sacrificial system is mooted by the sacrifice of Jesus. Jesus himself becomes the Temple — and the church as his body becomes the Temple on earth. The practices that separate Jews from Gentile — circumcision, food laws, the festivals — are mooted by God’s inviting the Gentiles into Israel, as promised to Abraham.

All this forces us to to re-imagine the so-called dispensations. Rather than a new law replacing an old law, we shouldn’t even think in terms of law. The dispensations are about covenants — which may or may not be about law.

The covenants don’t replace each other. The old covenants aren’t repealed, but they are re-interpreted and re-applied to a new circumstance created by God’s making new, additional promises. Rather, like Russian dolls, each new covenant includes all the predecessor covenants (but transformed by the further covenant and God’s additional self-revelation).

Or maybe a better analogy is growing up. The 61-year old Jay includes the 12-year old Jay and the 3-year old Jay. All those memories are part of who I am today — but reinterpreted and transformed by what happened later. The old doesn’t go away, but neither does it remain unchanged. Erase from me my teenage years, and I won’t be the same person. I needed those earlier years to grow up. They aren’t repealed just because I grew older and a little bit wiser. They’re what was needed for me to become me.

Or maybe it’s better described as being like marriage. I mean, what’s the first covenant you make with a girl that you will one day marry? Probably to become “exclusive,” that is, to go steady (Yes, I really am that old). You promise to be faithful to each other.

Later on, you become engaged, that is, you promise to marry — to be faithful for life, to live together, most likely to have children. And you find out that this level of faithfulness involves a lot of new rules — even though you’re not yet married.

And then you make a third covenant — marriage — and it involves a far greater commitment and far more rules than you ever imagined. Except that all these “rules” are really just corollaries to “I will be faithful to you because I love you.” There’s just the one rule — with millions of implications.

And when you’re both 90 years old, you’re still going steady. The old covenant isn’t repealed, but it is transformed. But the core is still faith — being faithful, trusting each other, believing in each other. It doesn’t change. And we don’t marry to be tested (although marriage will unquestionably test you). We marry to love, to be faithful, to be loved, and to receive faithfulness. Those who marry to be tested, well, I’ve never met such person but he’d have be a little bit crazy.

Oh, by the way, it’s God himself you refers to his covenants as a marriage. It’s a pretty good analogy.

Now, there are other very good reasons to reject Scofield’s dispensational theology —

* It makes the Old Testament a dead letter, useful for Bible stories and Messianic proof texts, but not for understanding the New Testament or how to live today.

* It assumes that there must be a new body of New Testament law to replace the Law of Moses, causing us to the read the NT searching for express and implied laws as the path to salvation.

* It makes nonsense of large portions of the Gospels, Romans, and Galatians.

* It causes us to imagine that there might be yet further dispensations to come, such as a 1,000-year reign in which Christians win the victory through military might. As utterly contrary to the NT as this idea is, Scofield’s version of a new dispensation allows us to imagine an entirely new set of moral standards and new kind of Kingdom in a new dispensation.

* It assumes that God’s work before Jesus came was a failure.

* Rather than seeking a restoration of Eden — a renewed and better Eden! — in the new heavens and new earth, we find ourselves looking to leave the earth behind as disembodied souls in heaven — with the earth and our bodies being burned to a crisp as yet one more in a series of mistakes by God. We expect God to repeal the Creation!

Now, today, some of the best theologians still speak in terms of “dispensations,” but few intend to refer to the Scofield understanding (used both in the Scofield and Ryrie Study Bibles). Obviously, lots of things changed with each new covenant. It’s not error to call each phase marked by a new covenant a “dispensation” so long as we don’t read Scofield’s meaning into the phrase — which is why I rarely use the word. It’s not so much wrong as easily misunderstood in the Church of Christ context.

In fact, “dispensation” is the KJV translation of oikonomia, sometimes meaning plan or arrangement (it’s the root word for our “economy” — which is another story altogether). But the word is not used in the Bible to refer to a covenant-age. We’ll speak of “covenants.”