Relocating To Elfland

Recent exploration of the “covenant of life” has got me thinking about how all of human thought (epistemology) and all of human life (ethics) are covenantally conditioned. Here is the proposed exegetical background, followed by a few ruminations:

Traditional Reformed theology has understood the covenant of life to arise in Genesis 2:16–17, “You may surely eat of every tree of the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.” I wonder, though, if the exegetical basis for the covenant should be broadened to include Genesis 2:15, “The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it.” If all this was part of the covenantal arrangement, then it looked something like this: Man was to act as Yahweh’s king-priest, working (cultivating) in His sanctuary and guarding it against defilement (v. 15). In this work, he was to be sustained from the fruit of his labor (v. 16); but his thinking and acting were at every point to be subject to Yahweh’s word. Verses 15–16 describe the covenantal task of man, and the blessedness of it. Verse 17 sets forth the qualification, i.e., absolute submission to Yahweh. Autonomous thought and life are comprehensively (and graciously) prohibited.

This means that from the very beginning man was either keeping covenant or breaking covenant, both in his epistemology (autonomous interpretation of any fact apart from Yahweh’s word was sin) and in his ethics (autonomous work, whether cultivating or guarding, was sin). And this, in turn, helps us see why unbelievers are properly regarded as ignorant and wicked even where they know a great deal and accomplish great good: not to know and do all things under the authority of (in creaturely submissiveness to) God’s revelation is simply not to know and do according to the covenant – meaning that great knowledge and great accomplishments may yet be great sin. Man was made to know and to cultivate. In a sense he cannot help these things – they are in his nature. Yet his knowledge and cultural activity are rebellious if he knows anything apart from its revealed relationship to the Creator, or builds culture without regard for the Creator’s mandate to do so. What makes the unbelieving geneticist’s research “wrong” or “bad” is not technical errors but his insistence that genomes have nothing to do with God. What makes the pagan musician’s compositions “wrong” or “bad” is not their technical deficiencies (they may, in fact, be brilliant) but his refusal to make music in joyful response to the invitation of his Maker. The geneticist is ignorant of what is most fundamental about genomes; the musician is robbing God of His glory with every note.

I think this notion of covenantal conditioning may enable us to appreciate rather than depreciate the insights and cultural accomplishments of unbelievers, without thereby “sanitizing” them of their moral evil and culpability.