Participation and Covenant

Download or read book Participation and Covenant written by Dick Moes and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2024-03-13 with total page 445 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Participation and Covenant: Contours of a Theodramatic Theology, Moes develops a theological framework that has participation in the life of God in Christ through the Spirit as its integrative center. In doing so, he enters into conversation with covenant or federal theology, particularly as it has been presented by Michael Horton, in which the integrative center is the concept of the covenant. He argues that God’s fundamental relationship with humanity does not entail a covenant ontology—a fundamentally legal and ethical relationship to God, as we find in Horton’s presentation—but rather an ontology of participating in God’s loving presence in Christ through the Holy Spirit. For this relationship we were created, and this participation is therefore natural to us. Accordingly, a theodramatic framework that incorporates a reframed understanding of divine-human covenants and that has participation in the life of God in Christ by the Spirit as its integrative center is better able to give direction for clearly communicating the gospel in our secular culture and for properly shaping our Christian identity and practice—in the face of the secularism that affects the church, too—than Horton’s framework of covenant theology.