The Christian Covenant in the Modern World

There is a famous children's game called telephone, the object of the game is that one person starts a message and it is whispered to the next person and so on. By the end of the entire sequence, the message is generally mixed up and often makes almost no sense at all. However, this children's game appears to have the same idea and outcome as globalization. As ideas, customs and cultures are moved from one nation to the next; they are often construed and appear to be different. Chris Waterman, Dean of the School of Arts and Architecture at UCLA, has done case studies on this idea. Specifically, Waterman showed how globalization affected a classic Zulu song, Mbube. Similarly, religions often go through processes where ideas are changed from country to country based on the angle modern culture takes on the subject. In depth, Christianity has had a constant changing of its idea of the covenant with God since its first introduction through Adam. Similar to the game of telephone, Chris Waterman and the covenant in the Hebrew Bible are both examples of how ideas are changed to fit in with modern culture, even though the same basic structure is still there.

The "new covenant" in Christianity has changed quite a bit since the first covenant God had promised to his people. The covenant began, in a way, with Adam; however, when Adam betrayed God and was expelled from the Garden of Eden, the covenant was broken. Nonetheless, the covenant of the New Testament became based off of the covenant God started with Noah. This covenant set the basic structure that would become the skeleton for all covenants to come. The basic structure of this covenant is that God promises benefits to one particular group of people, providing they do a specific tas...

... middle of paper ...

...still the same exact log (Waterman). That is the underlying issues within both of these topics. As cultures, customs and ideas are transferred from country to country and time period to time period, they are changed to fit the society of that time. However, no one can deny what works, so the same basic structure is always maintained. Society is doomed to play telephone for the rest of history. As the common saying goes, history always repeats itself.

Works Cited

"American Standard Bible." Bible Gateway. Ed. Nick Hengeveld. Gospel

Communications International. Retrieved 17 November, 2005

.

"Covenant." The New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, Houghton Mifflin (2002).

Retrieved 17 November, 2005, from xreferplus.

.

Waterman, Chris. "The Lion Sleeps Under Many Covers." University of Illinois

Global Studies Initiative. Urbana, IL. 5 October, 2005.