NTS on Paul, redemption, creation, and the ‘cosmic covenant’
Romans 8.19–22 and Isaiah’s Cosmic Covenant
By Jonathan Moo
New Testament Studies (2008), 54: 74-89 Cambridge University Press
doi:10.1017/S0028688508000052Paul claims that creation’s final release from this bondage will not be attained until the full revelation of the children of God, an event that Paul equates with a future ‘redemption of our bodies’. Yet there is ambiguity in the status of the ‘children of God’ in Romans 8, who both are and are not yet God’s children, and this ambiguity likely reflects the tension in Paul’s view of the resurrection life and the new creation, which belong at once both to the unseen future and to the believers’ present life in Christ. When this tension within Paul’s eschatology is situated within the dynamic context of a cosmic covenant provided by Isaiah, there may even be created an opening for those who desire to interpret Romans 8 ecologically. For Paul, God’s children and the created order are inevitably co-sharers in both suffering and glory; but, more than that, as through the Spirit the children of God are enabled ‘to become what they are’, there is perhaps hope even in ‘the present evil age’ that individuals and communities orient themselves toward God and creation in such a way that the [ktisis] itself gains glimpses of its longed-for hope of freedom.
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