Israel, the Church, and the New Covenant — Part Two: Who the Covenant People Are and How You Enter

The question Part One raised but did not fully answer is the one that presses on every reader who has followed the argument: if the covenant people are defined by bearing fruit rather than by ancestry, then who are they? And more urgently — how does one become one of them?

St. Paul answers both questions with a directness that has made Western Christianity uncomfortable for five hundred years.

The Heart’s Circumcision

“For he is not a Jew who is one outwardly, nor is circumcision that which is outward in the flesh. But he is a Jew who is one inwardly; and circumcision is that of the heart, by the Spirit, not by the letter” (Romans 2:28–29).

This is programmatic. Paul is not hedging, and he is not making a minor concession to Gentile sensibilities. He is redefining the category. True membership in the covenant people is constituted by the Spirit’s work in the heart, not by genealogy or the physical sign.

This is not Paul’s innovation. The prophets said exactly this. Deuteronomy 10:16: “Circumcise therefore the foreskin of your heart.” Jeremiah 4:4: “Circumcise yourselves to the Lord; remove the foreskin of your hearts.” Paul is reading the Old Testament — not departing from it. What is new is that the Spirit who accomplishes this interior circumcision has now been poured out: at Pentecost, in Baptism, in Chrismation.

The Singular Seed

The next step in Paul’s argument is Galatians 3:15–29, and it is decisive for any theology that still treats ethnic lineage as a claim on God’s promises. Paul makes a grammatical observation that carries the full weight of the covenant: “Now the promises were spoken to Abraham and to his seed. He does not say, ‘And to seeds,’ as referring to many, but rather to one, ‘And to your seed,’ that is, Christ” (Galatians 3:16).

The singular seed is Christ. All the promises of the Abrahamic covenant — blessing, inheritance, the gift of the nations — are concentrated in Him. And therefore: “If you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s descendants, heirs according to promise” (Galatians 3:29). There is no secondary covenant track. The inheritance belongs to those who are in Christ, and one enters Christ through Baptism: “For all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ” (Galatians 3:27).

Paul adds a detail that seals the argument: the Mosaic covenant, with all its legal requirements, came 430 years after the Abrahamic covenant. It does not nullify the earlier covenant (Galatians 3:17). Faith came first. Faith remains the foundation. The law was a temporary paidagōgos — a guardian, a custodian charged with keeping the child until the appointed heir could take full possession (Galatians 3:24–25). That time has come.

The Two Jerusalems

Paul’s sharpest image comes in Galatians 4:21–31. He reads the two sons of Abraham — Ishmael, born of Hagar the slave, and Isaac, born of Sarah the free woman — as two covenants. Hagar corresponds to Mount Sinai and to “the Jerusalem that now is, which is in bondage with her children.” Sarah corresponds to “the Jerusalem above” — the free woman, the mother of all believers.

The earthly Jerusalem, the physical city, the geopolitical territory — Paul identifies these with the covenant of bondage. The heavenly Jerusalem, the Church, is the free woman. Her children are not constituted by descent from Abraham kata sarka — according to the flesh — but by promise, by Spirit, by the same divine act that made Isaac’s birth possible when nothing natural could have produced it.

This passage alone dismantles the theological foundation of Christian Zionism. The earthly city, for Paul, is Hagar. The Church is Sarah. To identify the fulfillment of the Abrahamic promises with a plot of land and a modern government is not to honor the Old Testament — it is to choose Ishmael over Isaac.

The Sacramental Moment

This is where Orthodoxy names something that Western Christianity often leaves abstract. The moment of grafting in — the moment of becoming Abraham’s heir, of entering the heavenly Jerusalem, of receiving the circumcision of the heart — is not a private spiritual transaction. It happens in the life of the Body, in specific, irreplaceable acts.

Fr. Alexander Schmemann, in For the Life of the World, describes the Eucharist as the Church’s ascent to the heavenly Jerusalem — the anabasis the liturgy enacts each Sunday. The Anaphora begins: “Let us lift up our hearts.” The Church rises to stand at the heavenly altar where the Lamb who was slain is perpetually offered and perpetually received. Baptism is the entry into that Body. Chrismation is the gift of the Spirit who circumcises the heart. The Eucharist is the continuous renewal of covenant union with the singular Seed.

The Orthodox Church makes a strong claim here: these sacraments are the actual mechanism of what Paul is describing. “For all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ.” The clothing is real. The grafting is real. The membership in the covenant family is not metaphorical.

Paul’s question is answered. The covenant people are those in whom the Spirit has circumcised the heart — those who belong to the singular Seed, those who inhabit the heavenly Jerusalem, the free woman’s children. And one enters by the same door the Lord Himself opened: through water and the Spirit, through the chrism of consecration, through the broken bread and the shared cup.

The question of how to enter has always had the same answer. The Church is simply the place where the door stands open.

Part Three — “What We Hold and What We Reject” — concludes this series.