The American Jeremiad

2. The Blessings of Time and Eternity

2 The Blessings of Time and Eternity Considered in Plinlimmon's perspective, the term jeremiad is an apt one. Jeremiah is at once a historian of horologicals and a chronometer of the future; he both laments an apostasy and heralds a restoration . In Hebrew tradition this dual function is something of a paradox. The chosen people had sinned and continued in sin, had been punished with exile and were being threatened with more severe punishments unless they reformed; but they remained chosen nonetheless, still the keepers of the ancient promise to Abraham. And Jeremiah asserts the fulfillment of the promise as the very telos of history. The exile, he announces unequivocally, will end; eventually , Israel will return to a second paradise, a Canaan abounding in blessings beyond anything they had had or imagined. But he never clarifies the relation between means and ends. As he envisions it, the restoration is sometimes a reward for performance, sometimes a gift. Israel's redemption, it would seem, will come by miracle, though its deeds are to justify the miracle. Although restoration depends on service, it is already a foregone conclusion in God's mind and will. It may be, as modern commentators have argued, that Jeremiah 's emphasis on miracle provided him with a way out of despair - that his reliance on "the unique divine initiative at the end of history" 1 grew in proportion to what seemed to him the nation's irreversible moral deterioration. Whatever the case, his testimony is 31 32 THE AMERICAN JEREMIAD problematic. No prophet stressed repentance as much as Jeremiah did, and none so fervently foretold the gratuitous spiritual transformation in store for the house of Israel. The Christian solution was as simple as it was sweeping. Jeremiah , according to the Church Fathers, was addressing two different peoples. One was the literal Israel, whose story of disobedience and decline was a commonplace of secular history. To them Jeremiah spoke "like unto a Sonne of Thunder." The Israelites had entered into a "national covenant," agreeing to keep the law and obey God's commandments - "which my covenant they brake," Jeremiah thunders, speaking for God, "althogh I was an housband unto them" (31:32); and John Cotton, speaking for Jeremiah, explains the consequence: "the Lord cast them off," to "laugh at their Calamities until He has consumed them utterly, so that there shall be no Remnant, nor escaping." Yet there was to be a remnant. In the verses (31:31, 33) immediately preceding and following this prophecy of doom, Jeremiah changes his tone entirely. Speaking now with "the still, and soft voice of a . . . Sonne of consolation, (for their sakes whom the Lord had appointed to bee heires of salvation)," he announces a new covenant, absolute and immutable. Here, the Christian commentators observed, Jeremiah was addressing a different audience - not the Israelites before him, but the spiritual Israel, the entire community of the elect, past, present, and to come - and what he said concerned not temporal affairs, but the promise of "Christ the Messiah ... and their eternal deliverance ... Typicall from Babylon." 2 In these consoling verses, Babylon represented the world, and Jerusalem the kingdom of God. By the types and figures of heaven's chronometer, Jeremiah was specifying the sole, sufficient condition of sacred history: the covenant of grace, unchanged from the protevangelium in Eden through the Incarnation, pledging that Christ's church would triumph over Satan.*Whatever their horological blemishes, the saints would in the end rejoice in Zion. *This developmental view of the covenant of grace - "from Adam to Noah, from Noah to Abraham, from Abraham to Moses, from Moses to David, from David to CHRIST, from CHRIST to the end of the world" (Peter Bulkeley, The Gospel-Covenant [London, 1651], p. 113) - is a commonplace of the literature. The passages from Jeremiah to which I refer read as follows: Beholde the daies come, saith ye Lord, that I wil mak a newe covenant with the house of Israel, and with the house of Judah, THE BLESSINGS OF TIME AND ETERNITY 33 In Christian terms, then, Jeremiah was a Janus-like prophet, facing secular and sacred history alike. On the one hand, he laid the foundation of the European jeremiad: the conditional pact between God and a civic community for certain temporal ends. On the other hand, he outlined the terms of unmerited redemption for the elect. So understood, the two covenants stand as sharply...