IV. 40.Objection 5.34

“If the death of Jesus really inaugurated the new covenant spoken of by Jeremiah the prophet, then why hasn’t it been fulfilled?”

Brown summarizes his response with the following words: “In short, the new covenant was established two thousand years ago in incipient form and it continues to advance to its ultimate fulfillment.”

Brown bases his reasoning on the fact that a simple reading of Jeremiah (as well as some of the other prophecies in the Jewish Bible) would seem to indicate that the return from the Babylonian exile would usher in the ultimate Messianic era. Since this did not happen, Brown contends that there was a partial fulfillment with the return from Babylon while the full fulfillment is yet to come.

To quote Brown again: “Jeremiah (much like Ezekiel) expected that the return of the exiles from Babylon would be so glorious that it would…