Comment on our McCay Piece
Wilfred McCay wrote “But it was not enough for the constraints of this order to be applied externally, like so many fences and leashes. Control, which led to a kind of moral self-sufficiency, needed to be internalized, with the help of institutions like the family, the church, the neighborhood—and the polity. Indeed, in the literature of the era, the relationship between the self-governing soul and the self-governing polity appears as a recurring motif.”
This notion was not invented by 19th Century evangelicals; Gwynnie wants to remind you that it is a Biblical promise made by the Jewish prophet Jeremiah and realized through Jesus: (Jeremiah 31:31-34, NLT) "The day will come," says the Lord, "when I will make a new covenant with the people of Israel and Judah. This covenant will not be like the one I made with their ancestors when I took them by the hand and brought them out of the land of Egypt. They broke that covenant, though I loved them as a husband loves his wife," says the Lord. "But this is the new covenant I will make with the people of Israel on that day," says the Lord. "I will put my laws in their minds, and I will write them on their hearts. I will be their God, and they will be my people. 34And they will not need to teach their neighbors, nor will they need to teach their family, saying, `You should know the Lord.' For everyone, from the least to the greatest, will already know me," says the Lord. "And I will forgive their wickedness and will never again remember their sins."
Throughout our culture, we are being encouraged to break that new covenant as well as the old.
