Video Meliora, proboque; Deteriora sequor

Something New & Old in the "New Covenant"

Cardinal Ratzinger's Many Religions - One Covenant is a deep and satisfying read, particularly in the way he makes connections between the Old & New Testaments:

Paul is well aware that, prior to the Christian history of salvation, the word "covenant" had to be understood and spoken of in the plural; out of these various covenants he selects two particularly, sets them up in mutual opposition, and refers each one to the covenant in Christ: these are the covenant with Abraham and the covenant with Moses. He sees the covenant made with Abraham as the real, fundamental, and abiding covenant; according to Paul, the covenant made with Moses was interposed 430 years after the Abrahamic covenant; it could not abrogate the covenant with Abraham but constituted only an intermediary stage in God's providential plan...

God's pedagogy with mankind operates in such a way that its individual props are jettisoned when the goal of the educational process is reached. Particular paths are abandoned, but the meaning remains. The convenant with Moses is incorporated into the covenant with Abraham, and the Law becomes the mediator of promise. Thus Paul distinguishes very sharply between two kinds of covenant that we find in the Old Testament itself: the covenant that consists of legal prescriptions and the covenant that is essentially a promise, the gift of friendship, bestowed without conditions.

      'Law is Grace' is not a Contradiction

For the Law is not only a burden imposed on believers - as we are inclined to think, due to the one-sided emphasis of the Pauline antitheses. As seen by Old Testament believers, the Law itself is the concrete form of grace. For to know God's will is grace. And to know God's will is to know oneself, to understand the world, to know what our destination is. It means that we are liberated from the darkness of our endless questioning, that the light as come, that light without which we can neither see nor move. "You have not shown your will to any other nation": for Israel, at least for its best representatives, the Law is the visibility of the truth...