‘This is God’s new covenant, a more trusting, more loving, way of living now.’
Reunited kingdom: Keith Archer has a ‘new covenant’ experience
‘If Jeremiah’s new covenant was our dream, we were already living it.’
This May, six friends and I met at the Château de Bossey, near Geneva, home of the Ecumenical Institute of the World Council of Churches. Fifty-five years ago (gosh!) we spent five months there as students. There were about sixty of us then, from all over the world, and from most of the world’s main churches – almost every tradition but Quakers! A few years ago, some of us decided to return for a reunion. Many of the original sixty lived far too far away to travel to Switzerland for just a few days. Some others couldn’t be traced, or weren’t interested. Some, sadly, had died. But ten of us agreed to meet in May 2020. Covid intervened, of course, and three people had to drop out through ill health, one at the very last moment. So, this May, just seven of us made it: one from Switzerland, three from Germany, and three (including me) from England. No longer the whole world, but a fair mixture, broadened in scope by the spirits of those distant, long-absent friends. To paraphrase George Fox’s famous words, we were walking cheerfully over the world. By ‘cheerfully’, Fox didn’t mean being carefree; his cheerfulness involved courage too. In view of all those years and the health issues they had brought us, to be there at all required his kind of cheerfulness!
Bossey had changed, of course. It still has students, but to stay afloat in a changing world it has also diversified into offering company conferences, and B&B. It’s now more upmarket than it was in the 1960s: nice, but the atmosphere was not as we remembered. That did stop us dwelling excessively on the past and what Bossey meant to us then, and made us think more about now, and about what pointers there might be for the future.
Some of what we did together was touristy, including a glorious cruise across Lac Léman to the picturesque French village of Yvoire. But more significant was our work together, led by Christoph from Heidelberg, who is a theologian and a psychoanalyst. He asked us to prepare for our meeting by reading carefully three Bible passages. One was the book of Jonah; another was the curiously-parallel parable of The Prodigal Son. But the passage that engaged me most was the prophet Jeremiah’s vision of God’s ‘new covenant’ with his people: ‘I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts… No longer shall they teach one another, or say to each other ‘Know the Lord’, for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, says the Lord’ (Jeremiah 31:33).For me this connects with the rest of that George Fox quote: ‘Walk cheerfully over the world, answering that of God in every one.’
Christoph led our discussions, but he never told us what to think. He simply told us what he thought, and invited us to do the same. We listened carefully when anyone spoke, and never interrupted. In part, perhaps, this was because we were working in a mixture of English and German, so we all had to concentrate. Perhaps too it was because the psychoanalyst in Christoph was more to the fore than the theologian. Or maybe it was simply because we were sharing as friends, not as teacher and taught. However it came about, I felt we were ‘answering that of God in every one’ of us. It was as if we didn’t need to be told to ‘Know the Lord’ because we knew him already. If Jeremiah’s new covenant was our dream, we were during those days together already living it.
My five months at Bossey were part of my training for ministry in the Church of England, and there I stayed until retirement. Since then, however, I have worshiped mainly with Friends – and to me those days of our reunion felt like truly ‘gathered’ worship. And when later we had a go at Quaker-style worship, we seemed to take to it like ducks to water, even though the others knew little or nothing about Quakers. Evidently, George Fox came much closer to that new covenant dream than the Church of England – not only of his day but maybe ours as well.
Mainstream churches are often established by law. The state within which a national church operates gives it powers and protection. This makes the church an instrument of state control. Consider Bloody Mary’s persecution of Protestants, followed by Elizabeth’s persecution of Catholics, and the continuing politico-religious turmoil in which Quakers eventually emerged. And English history is not unique. Consider too the Deutsche Christen (German Christians) of Germany’s Nazi period, or indeed the Moscow Patriarchate of the Russian Orthodox Church under Vladimir Mikhailovich Gundyayev today.
Returning to Jeremiah, churches so intimately involved with secular power look very much like God’s original, law-based covenant with Israel: ‘a covenant that they broke, says the Lord’ (Jeremiah 31:31f). But although the new covenant’s law, written on people’s hearts, can be ignored, it cannot be broken. It’s like the law of gravity: even if we try to levitate, our feet stay firmly on the ground. It’s a fact of life, and there’s a similar one in human relationships. The wisdom and prophecy of the Old Testament discern it, and Jesus lived and died by it. In Galatians 6:7, Paul articulates it thus: ‘Do not be deceived; God is not mocked, for you reap whatever you sow. If you sow to your own flesh, you will reap corruption from the flesh’.
If we harm someone, they will naturally want to harm us back. And if they do, we seek revenge by inflicting even more harm on them. And on and on the spiral goes, until it ends in the ‘corruption’ of the grave. That’s why wars last so long, even if there is sometimes a break in the fighting. For example: the armistice of 1918 paved the way to the third reich. That was defeated in 1945, but Germany’s postwar reconciliation with the west came from their common enmity with the Soviet Union, which continued. Events in Ukraine now demonstrate that the end of the cold war did not (as Francis Fukuyama predicted) achieve the ‘end of history’. One hundred and ten years’ war so far, and still counting.
‘But,’ concludes Paul, ‘if you sow to the Spirit, you will reap eternal life from the Spirit.’ This is not ‘pie in the sky when you die’. This is God’s new covenant, a more trusting, more loving, way of living now. It’s realistic, because it accepts the natural law that ‘you sow whatever you reap’ – though because trust is so often not returned, it’s hellishly risky. Think of what happened to Jesus!
Our reunion at Bossey felt like a new covenant experience, but what happened among seven old people from England, Germany and Switzerland will obviously not change the world. Yet when any number of any people of any age anywhere, whether they’ve heard of George Fox or not, ‘walk cheerfully over the world answering that of God in every one’ there is hope.
