The Church and the Jews, 2: The Double-Edged Covenant

By Thomas V. Mirus ( bio - articles - email ) | Aug 28, 2025

This is the second installment of a four-part essay responding to an article by the Catholic public intellectual Robert George, published in the Jewish journal Sapir. (Read Part 1)

---

I call heaven and earth to witness against you this day, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse. Now choose life, so that you and your children may live.—Deuteronomy 30:19

Robert George claims that Vatican II’s Lumen Gentium taught that “God’s covenant with the Jews continues to remain in effect— it is unbroken and indeed unbreakable.” However, Lumen Gentium 16 merely reiterated St. Paul’s teaching that “God does not repent of the gifts He makes nor of the calls He issues.”

Rather, Pope Benedict says in his 2018 essay on the topic, “the thesis that ‘the covenant that God made with his people Israel perdures and is never invalidated’…was pronounced for the first time by John Paul II on November 17, 1980 [in a speech to representatives of the Jewish community] in Mainz. It has since been included in the Catechism of the Catholic Church (no. 121) and thus belongs in a certain sense to the current teaching of the Catholic Church.” (“In a certain sense,” Benedict qualifies, because as he had explained decades earlier, “The individual doctrine which the Catechism presents receive no other weight than that which they already possess”—and no primary magisterial document has taught this thesis about the covenant.)

Benedict goes on to accept this thesis as true in a sense, but ultimately inadequate for two reasons. First, because “the covenant” is not a static reality. There are at least four different covenants in the Old Testament (Noahic, Abrahamic, Mosaic, Davidic), which are ultimately fulfilled in the New Covenant. Second, because it takes two to keep a covenant. While God is permanently faithful to these covenants, we cannot say they are unbreakable on the part of the human recipients:

…we must say critically in terms of content that this formula does not bring to the fore the real drama of the story between God and man. Yes, God’s love is indestructible. But the covenant history between God and man also includes human failure, the breaking of the covenant and its internal consequences: the destruction of temple, the scattering of Israel, and the call to repentance, which restores man’s capacity for the covenant. The love of God cannot simply ignore man’s no. It wounds God himself and thus necessarily man too.

So, the Jews in fact did break their covenants with God at various times throughout the Old Testament, and were accordingly denounced by the prophets. The culmination of this repeated breaking of the covenant was their rejection of Christ, as Our Lord Himself prophesied in the parable of the vineyard owner’s son being killed by the tenants.

To Benedict’s two reasons I would add a third, or a corollary to the second. The covenant, particularly the Mosaic covenant, is a double-edged sword. In Deuteronomy 28-30, Moses tells his people that if they are faithful to God, He will bless them, while if they disobey Him, He will curse them.

If God’s covenant with the Jews is truly irrevocable, then so is His threat of a curse on those Jews who are unfaithful to the covenant. You cannot assert one side of the covenant without the other. Just as a Catholic who breaks his baptismal vows sins more gravely and incurs worse punishment than a non-Christian, so the covenant with the Jews raised the stakes of their sin and disobedience (not to mention the Mosaic Law itself functioning as a punishment, according to St. Paul).

Some might argue that non-Christian Jews who practice the traditional form of their religion to the best of their ability are being faithful to their covenant. The status of post-Christian Jewish practice will be discussed in the third part of this essay, but for now it is enough to say that such a statement is equivalent to the dual covenant heresy. To say that the old covenant is fulfilled in the new does not mean that Jews are no longer under a covenant with God, but it does mean they cannot be faithful to the old without entering into the new: “When he speaks of a ‘new’ covenant, he declares the first one obsolete. And what has become obsolete and has grown old is close to disappearing” (Hebrews 8:13).

Thus, as Benedict wrote, Jews cannot be faithful to their covenant without accepting Christ. Therefore, regardless of possible lack of culpability on the part of individuals, those Jews who do not believe in Christ are not faithful to their own covenant, opening themselves to all the consequences that Moses forewarned.

A curse and a blessing

Any mention of a curse on Jews who do not accept Christ will raise the question of whether this contradicts the Church’s statement in Nostra Aetate that “the Jews should not be presented as rejected or accursed by God” based on some kind of collective blood guilt for the death of Christ. However, Deuteronomy clearly states the threat of a curse, and the only way to evade this would be to say that the covenant has indeed ceased. So we must find a way to reconcile Nostra Aetate with Scripture, which I propose to do as follows.

Nostra Aetate denies that the Jewish people is cursed specifically for being collectively guilty for the death of the Lord. In its affirmation with St. Paul that God’s gifts and calling are irrevocable, it also denies a curse in the categorical and permanent sense of total exclusion from the covenant, such that the Jews are no longer in any sense God’s chosen people.

In contrast with the view rejected by Nostra aetate, which holds the Jews to be accursed because they are “Christ-killers” simply for being ethnically Jewish, an orthodox understanding strongly affirms the Jewish people’s continuing relationship with the covenant, even as that covenant is a double-edged sword. The Jews are not under a blood curse because some of their ancestors killed Christ; rather, Israel of the flesh is estranged from the fulfillment of the ongoing promise because of its ongoing failure to recognize the promise’s fulfillment in Christ (excepting, of course, those who have come to believe).

This is no matter of theological speculation. Israel of the flesh has, for the past two thousand years, suffered precisely the wandering, exile under foreign rule, and intermittent persecution with which Moses warned that the Lord would curse her (Deu 28:36-37).

Jewish convert Gideon Lazar, whose work I strongly recommend to all interested in these questions, observes that the elements of the curse God put upon Cain were included in the curse Moses described to the Hebrews. This is no surprise, as Cain has traditionally been seen as a foreshadowing type of the unbelieving Jews.

However, it is essential to remember that alongside the curse, God placed upon the outcast Cain a mark of protection, a warning to men that that “whoever slays Cain, vengeance shall be taken on him sevenfold” (Gen 4:15). Not only that, but Moses assured the Hebrews that when they repent and return to God, “the Lord your God will put all these curses upon your foes and enemies who persecuted you” (Deu 30:7).

When we see the curse threatened in Deuteronomy in light of the curse of Cain, we understand both why the unbelieving Jews have been so often exiled and persecuted, and why this curse in no way justifies that persecution—any more than the foreign nations God used to punish His people in the Old Testament were justified in their actions. (There is a reason the Church’s traditional policy, long before Vatican II, was that Jews should be tolerated and even protected, not killed.) It reminds us to wonder at the fact that God, while punishing His chosen people, has also miraculously preserved them in their identity as a people even as they have been scattered across the whole world.

One cannot be accused of ongoing infidelity to a covenant one is no longer under. If God promised a curse to Israel for infidelity, then, this presupposes Israel’s persisting connection to the covenant. Yet it is also because of this ongoing connection that the Jewish people will, in the end, be grafted back on to Abraham’s stock. Thus the traditional view affirms God’s promise of a curse for infidelity, while also upholding a kind of collective predestination for Israel in the end (though not for every Jew, just as Christ coming to redeem the nations means that some, not all, from every nation will be saved).

Thus Benedict concludes his essay:

The formula of the “never-revoked covenant” may have been helpful in a first phase of the new dialogue between Jews and Christians. But it is not suited in the long run to express in an adequate way the magnitude of reality. If brief formulas are considered necessary, I would refer above all to two words of Holy Scripture in which the essentials find valid expression. With regard to the Jews, Paul says: “the gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable” (Rom 11:29). To all, Scripture says, “if we endure, we shall also reign with him; if we deny him, he also will deny us. If we are faithless, he remains faithful—for he cannot deny himself” (2 Tm 2:12f).

Those who repeat the phrase “irrevocable covenant” over and over, without considering its “negative” side, are not taking their own claim seriously. Nor are they taking the Jewish Scriptures seriously, despite their claim to love the Jewish tradition. That is because they place this sole emphasis on the covenant’s irrevocability not so much for the sake of its truth, but for its instrumental use in complimenting the Jews and producing friendly relations with them.

But that is not the love of Christ. To love as He loves, our love must be ruled by the full, unvarnished truth, rather than selecting or emphasizing only those parts of the truth which we deem useful to accomplish our compromised human notions of love.

We Catholics are indeed bound to love the Jewish people. The way their own prophets loved them, by calling them to convert. The way Joseph loved his brothers, by revealing to them that the very one they had formerly persecuted is now inviting them to share in his kingdom.