Promises’ Limits, Covenant’s Promise

Abstract The Bible sometimes presents divine covenants as involving a promise. This gives us reasons to study promises as a way of generating a clearer understanding of these sorts of divine covenants. This paper argues for a set of features an ideal promise must have and argues that only something like a divine covenant could have all such features. Understanding some divine covenants as involving a promise helps explain how the human partners in the divine covenant can be entitled to demand and expect God to be faithful to his covenants. It also rules out certain models for divine covenants. This paper’s method suggests avenues for analyzing different types of divine speech as idealized versions of ordinary social practices.