What is Purpose Theology?

Recently, I’ve done some research into covenant theology, which I think has some good insights. However, I felt that it didn’t describe the early Christian faith with full accuracy. So I did a bit of research to find out what their view is called, and I wasn’t able to find a name. In this article, I’ll describe what I think the correct view is, and I’ll call it “Purpose Theology.”

Covenant theology is the view that Scripture is best understood by reading it through the lens of the different covenants that God made with people. In this view, God’s covenants with Noah, Abraham, Moses, and David help us understand the Old Testament, and these covenants help us to understand the New Covenant that God made in the New Testament.

There’s a lot of truth to this. By understanding how God worked with Abraham and Moses, we can understand much about how he works with the church. However, my concern is that covenant theology tries too hard to make the New Covenant look like the Old Covenants. In fact, the New Covenant is only mentioned a few times in the New Testament, so it sounds like God isn’t necessarily defining his purpose in the same terms that he used in the past. Instead of being the way he works, it’s a helpful way of understanding the way he works. So that means that just because something was true of an old covenant doesn’t mean that the same thing is true of the New Covenant.

So here’s what I suggest instead: Purpose Theology, which is about the purposes for each covenant and how God fulfills each of the Old Covenants in the New Testament. I’ll list what I consider the main tenets of Purpose Theology:

1. God’s purpose for the Old Testament covenants was to prepare the way for Christ.
2. The covenants with Moses and Abraham weren’t intended as God’s perfect plan for the world. Instead, they were a way to set apart a nation for himself, through which he could work to bring salvation for everyone through Christ. He called this nation, “my people.” Much of the Old Testament is God conceding to people, patiently working with them to improve their morality and prepare them for the coming of the perfect Way, Truth, and Life.
3. The Old Testament covenants weren’t primarily about salvation, since people like Job and Melchizedek could be saved without them, and since not everyone within those covenants was really following God.
4. The New Covenant, inaugurated by Jesus, is a way for people who are estranged from God to be connected to him and saved from their sin both in this life and the next. It is specifically about salvation, called the new covenant in Christ’s blood.
5. The covenants with Moses and Abraham were made with an earthly nation and ethnicity (though not determined biologically). But in the New Testament, God has a heavenly nation that contains people from every ethnicity on earth, adopted into a spiritual family that transcends earthly structures of nation and family.
6. The church, rather than the earthly nation of Israel, is now God’s people. The church is the always-intended fulfillment of God’s covenant with Abraham, where he promised to bring blessing to all nations. It’s the fulfillment of God’s covenant with David, since it’s the Kingdom of Heaven over which Jesus reigns eternally in the Davidic line. It’s the fulfillment of the moral society that the Law of Moses was intended to point toward. The ethnicity of Israel has fulfilled its purpose by giving way to the Kingdom of God, which is the church. We can’t know for sure whether the unbelieving Jews will eventually believe (possibly suggested by Rom 11:26), but if they do believe, they will join as members in the one body to which we belong, one Kingdom without regard for ethnicity, which is the church.