Covenant  🔗 **Source:** [Covenant]() ## Highlights - This God is not marked by power but by faithfulness and vulnerability. This God resolves to be with and stay with and depend upon the resources, judgments, and capacities of God’s new covenant partner. Covenant means to locate the power for life, not in self, but in the commitment, giving, and caring of the other ones. . . . ([Location 255](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B084Z6K95B&location=255)) - our covenant-making God is all about relationship, faithfulness and self-yielding. But that same God holds us accountable and, perhaps weeping like Rachel, permits the consequences of human unfaithfulness to unfold — but always with a promise of never abandoning us. This is truly an amazing God. ([Location 280](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B084Z6K95B&location=280)) - Randi Walker tells us that “the Congregational, Reformed, Christian, and Evangelical traditions all had within their understandings of the nature and purpose of the church some idea of a covenantal relationship both of the church with God and the church and its people with one another” (133). ([Location 306](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B084Z6K95B&location=306)) - Tags: aqua - In covenant making, Christians give themselves first to God and then to one another (paraphrase of 2 Cor. 8:5). A way of thinking about this relationship is that if we are each in a relationship of covenantal grace with God, then God stands at the center of us all and we, like spokes on a wheel, find ourselves inextricably linked to one another in relationships that need endless development in further covenant making. ([Location 314](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B084Z6K95B&location=314)) - Tags: aqua - Every expression of the wider United Church of Christ beyond the local church is governed by none other than local church folks. Conferences are made up of nothing more and nothing less than the local churches and authorized ministers within those Conferences — there is no one else, no “them.” The national setting of our church is governed by representatives from those very Conferences — lay folk and clergy from local churches making decisions for the wider expressions of the church through the General Synod and the Covenanted Ministry boards. So we are our own covenant partners. ([Location 399](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B084Z6K95B&location=399)) - Tags: aqua - Covenant is all about freedom — but freedom, in fact, to be in relationship. Covenant is first of all about God’s freedom. ([Location 419](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B084Z6K95B&location=419)) - Tags: aqua - the neat and conventional antithesis between law and grace is a distortion of faith, because “there are no unconditional or conditional relationships in the gospel, but only relationships of fidelity that prize both freedom and accountability, the two always intertwined and to be negotiated” (The Covenanted Self, 44). ([Location 429](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B084Z6K95B&location=429)) - Tags: aqua - That statement articulates well who we are as the United Church of Christ, a covenantal network of autonomous bodies who “prize both freedom and accountability, the two always intertwined and to be negotiated.” ([Location 431](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B084Z6K95B&location=431)) - Tags: aqua - “covenanting requires maturity to be ‘knit together in love’ ([Location 437](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B084Z6K95B&location=437)) - Tags: aqua - “But speaking the truth in love, we must grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ. . . .” ([Location 439](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B084Z6K95B&location=439)) - Tags: aqua - A second reality required in living out autonomy within covenant is freely making and then freely living with the choice of being in covenant. That choice means yielding some of one’s own power to the “other,” the covenant partners. ([Location 442](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B084Z6K95B&location=442)) - Tags: aqua - In covenanting with humans, God in effect limits Himself and withdraws somewhat from interfering with them to give them space to be independently human. He grants humans a degree of freedom under the terms of the covenant retaining only the authority to reward or punish the consequences of that freedom at some future date. By the same token, the humans who bind themselves through the covenant limit their powers as well. (68) ([Location 446](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B084Z6K95B&location=446)) - Tags: aqua - “I understand covenant in our own time and place to be a radical alternative to consumer autonomy, which is the governing ideology of our society and which invades the life of the church in debilitating ways.” ([Location 452](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B084Z6K95B&location=452)) - Tags: aqua - in our efforts for covenantal faithfulness, we have an opportunity to show the world a “better way” of differing than disengagement and separation. Such covenantal living among autonomous entities can make a powerful witness — or fail to do so — in a world of walled borders and violent power struggles. ([Location 465](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B084Z6K95B&location=465)) - Tags: aqua - Worship is central in covenant making in scripture but also in covenant renewal. ([Location 533](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B084Z6K95B&location=533)) - Tags: aqua - We covenant with the Lord and one with another; and doe bynd ourselves in the presence of God, to walke together in all his waies, according as he is pleased to reveale himself unto us in his Blessed word of truth. (as it appears in Barton, 60) ([Location 538](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B084Z6K95B&location=538)) - Tags: aqua - I fear our United Church of Christ commitment to freedom has lately become a commitment to avoiding covenantal clarity. ([Location 552](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B084Z6K95B&location=552)) - Tags: aqua - Covenant making can do constructive work by clarifying the unique identities and differences among us as well as clarifying how we are related to one another. ([Location 584](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B084Z6K95B&location=584)) - Tags: aqua