Christianity as Covenant: Jewish Perspective(s)

In honor of Passover and Easter, San Diego law prof Maimon Schwarzschild comments on a recent book by Orthodox Jewish theologian Irving Greenberg suggesting that Jews should consider Christianity an authentic covenant.  He also links to an interesting review of the book by an intellectual journal of mainstream Orthodoxy.  An excerpt from the review:

The thrust of this book is . . . the existence of multiple (or at least two) covenants between God and humanity. At the very time when God called upon the Jewish people to undertake enhanced responsibility for the destiny of the world, He broadened the constituency of His covenantal love by sending a signal, or a group of signals, that launched Christianity. Greenberg’s argument for this position is multifaceted: God’s love is not limited to a single group; all human beings are created in His image; Maimonides pointed to a divinely guided eschatological purpose in the establishment of Christianity as a religion grounded in the Jewish scriptures; the inevitable moral, intellectual, and religious distortions that result from restricting election to a single group can be corrected by other groups with different emphases.

The first three of these points are fully valid, and there is considerable truth in the fourth as well. Since Maimonides regarded the establishment of any new religion as illegitimate and saw Christianity in particular as avoda zara, his assertion that it is part of a divine plan for spreading knowledge of Torah raises evident difficulties. But he did say this, so that there exists a precedent for maintaining that God wanted Christianity to develop (though probably not in the precise form that it has taken), and I see no principled objection to speculation that would broaden the range of divine motives beyond the one that Maimonides proposed. To apply the language of covenant, however, is not consonant with biblical teaching or Jewish tradition.