Politics Reformed: The Anglo-American Covenant Theology
The Covenants from Abraham to David
We will consider here the merits and limitations of covenantal social thinking and ask whether such ideas have relevance today. While the usual cast of characters is revisited, this study is not just about John Calvin or the English Puritans. They play a supporting role in the pursuit of a larger theological and political tradition that remains both compelling and instructive.
We begin with the covenant with Abraham in Genesis. It is perhaps the most important biblical covenant. The covenants of God with Abraham promise both people and land, and they require both ceremony and sign (Genesis 15, 17). Genesis 17:5–8 records this promise made by God to Abraham. These Abrahamic covenants are foundational and eventually become the ones of greatest controversy–both theological and political. Particularly controversial is this promise to Abraham in Genesis 22:15–18:
“And the angel of the LORD called to Abraham a second time from heaven and said, ‘By myself I have sworn, declares the LORD, because you have done this and have not withheld your son, your only son, I will surely bless you, and I will surely multiply your offspring as the stars of heaven and as the sand that is on the seashore. And your offspring shall possess the gate of his enemies, and in your offspring shall all the nations of the earth be blessed, because you have obeyed my voice.'”
This not only echoes the dominion mandate found earlier in Genesis 1:26, 1:28, and 9:1, in which God tells mankind to be fruitful and multiply and subdue the earth; it also has further political implication. The covenant is made with Abraham and also with his descendants. It is used to establish a “people” and a homeland—two essential ingredients for any human polity.
The Politically Most Powerful Narrative: Mount Siani
The Exodus from Egypt is perhaps the most politically powerful narrative in the Scripture.1 Included in that narrative are both the . . . covenants made with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and the covenant made at Mount Sinai (Exodus 2:23–25). God returns to the unconditional covenant He made with Abraham and his descendants, telling Moses that deliverance from Egypt is part of the covenant made with the patriarchs (Exodus 6:2–5).
A clear example of the “covenant formula” is evident when Moses is instructed to tell the Israelites:
“You yourselves have seen what I did to the Egyptians, and how I bore you on eagles’ wings and brought you to myself. Now therefore, if you will indeed obey my voice and keep my covenant, you shall be my treasured possession among all peoples, for all the earth is mine; and you shall be to me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation” (Exodus 19:4–6).
This passage not only repeats the usual political details (being a people, kingdom, or nation) but also emphasizes God’s role in establishing and maintaining His part of the covenant. As for the Israelites, their terms are imposed; but they are no less bound to keep them.
From a Familial to National Covenant
The covenant at Sinai is a corporate covenant made with Israel and probably the second most important political covenant in the Hebrew Scripture. Moses serves as mediator, not so much in the sense that he negotiates as that he acts as a representative for both God and the people. The Sinai covenant confirms the movement from a familial covenant to a national covenant; it includes not only the Ten Commandments but also the case law and civil law that follow. This becomes the condition of blessing or cursing (Deuteronomy 27, 28; Leviticus 26). The Sinai covenant provides the basis for the new Israelite polity. It also assigns the division of power, separating prophetic, priestly, and civil functions.2 What was once familial, social, and political becomes more explicitly and institutionally political.
Joshua’s Covenant as Mediator
In Joshua 24, we see the first explicit tripartite covenant of human design. Joshua harks back to the patriarchal covenant and reminds the people of God’s covenantal faithfulness. They, in turn, pledge their faithfulness. But Joshua himself also makes a covenant with the people, which not only expands on the role of mediator played by Moses but also includes a covenant between the mediator and the people. This has important civil implications because Joshua (like Moses) has a civil role to play. This is a clear example of a mutual and conditional covenant.
The tripartite covenant is rich with civil implications. It further establishes what Joel Kaminsky defines as “corporate responsibility.”3 This means that persons are also judged as nations for their collective faithfulness or unfaithfulness. It appears to grant clergy a right to take the role of prophet, admonishing civil authorities or the people, or both. God appears to give special responsibility to the civil magistrate as evidenced by the record of both Saul and David (I Samuel 16:14; II Samuel 7:16, 22).4 The leader of Israel was seen to function on God’s behalf (Joshua 11:12, 15; Judges 6:25–26).
Finally, while God appears to make a covenant with every individual Israelite, these individual covenants serve to complement rather than replace the corporate covenant. The main application of this last covenant, between God and individual persons, is to emphasize that the people owe their primary allegiance to God rather than to the ruler should these obligations come into conflict. God is King.5 This emphasis on conscience (reappearing in later Protestant manifestations) enabled the right of disobedience and resistance.
The Davidic Tripartite Covenant
The Davidic covenant is perhaps the last major covenant of significance in the Hebrew Scripture; it both parallels the Abrahamic covenant and asserts the covenant to be perpetual (Ezekiel 37:21–28) . . . Not only are the covenant people to take possession of a homeland, but also they ultimately cannot be defeated. The civil implications of the Davidic covenant extend beyond the idea of a perpetual spiritual covenant made with a chosen people. Legal civil authority was also established by covenants, making them an early form of constitution.
Although David was anointed by Samuel under God’s direction (I Samuel 16), his legal civil authority was recognized through a series of internal covenants (II Samuel 5). These covenants were made not with the people “at large” but with the people via their tribal leadership. This is another example of the tripartite covenant established by Joshua. The ruler covenants with God and also with the people. The covenant of the Israelite monarchy was both vertical and horizontal.
King David’s covenant with tribal leaders also demonstrates the principle of federalism wherein a network of covenanted polities and jurisdictions forms a nation rather than one central authority governing a people and forming a nation. All of these historical episodes tied together the kinds of reform that would determine the attributes and goals of covenantal politics. Covenantal politics therefore includes moral and religious reform, which renewed piety before a holy God. It also includes political reform, which held rulers and people accountable to one another. Successful reform was preconditional to the success of the community before God.
The Reformers Return to the Hebrew Scriptures
Christians not only acknowledge the aforementioned “Old Testament” covenants, they declare themselves inheritors of them through Christ. This move into a new covenant becomes, for Christian theologians, a new Exodus. The author of the letter to the Hebrews, for example, asserts to his readers, “We received the good news just as they did,” and draws a direct parallel with the Hebrew covenant (Hebrews 4:2, 10, 12).
Reformed theologians were emphatic on the need to return to the Hebrew Scriptures. This is emphasized by Heinrich Bullinger, for example, who wrote, “Let none of us therefore hereafter say, ‘What need I to care what is written to the Jews in the old Testament . . . . I am a Christian.’” Bullinger’s response is both to cite the use of the Old Testament by Christ and Saint Paul and to address what is kept and lost in the Old Testament ordinances (Decades I.2, 58–59).6 The narrative of Israel is adopted both literally and metaphorically as the narrative of the Christian Church, particularly in light of judgment and redemption promised by the prophet Isaiah. Christians assert that Christ is the heir of the Davidic kingship . . . Jesus is given the throne “of his father David” in order to “rule the house of Jacob forever.” Thus, Jesus inherits the role of covenantal ruler.
The Three Points of Emphasis in Reformed Theology
The study of Reformed political theology must begin with its Hebraic roots. While Reformed theologians pursued reforms of Roman Catholicism on points common to all Protestant traditions, the Reformed variant of Protestantism is marked by three important emphases.
The first was an emphasis on biblical languages, consistent with the humanist training of the founders of Reformed Protestantism. Reemphasizing Hebrew, sometimes even rabbinic sources, encouraged a new and independently minded study of the Hebrew Scriptures (the “Old Testament”).7 This then led to a second innovation, biblical covenants as a leitmotif of theology and biblical interpretation. The third innovation was the construction of a theological garment that attempted to seamlessly integrate Hebrew Scriptures and the Christian Scriptures—the “Old” and “New” Testaments. This return to the Old Testament together with the articulation of “covenant theology” changed early modern politics.
Bullinger’s View of Resistance and Conscience
Henirich Bullinger had two conflicting views of the magistrate. On the one hand, there was his fond desire to see the polity as a Christian community headed by a godly magistrate. On the other hand, how could Bullinger sidestep the fact that Roman Catholic magistrates (in France, Spain, or England, for example) threatened the Reformation?
Bullinger never seems to quite resolve this problem. When consulted by John Knox in 1555 on the question of tyrannicide, Bullinger gave a mixed reply. Concerning “Bloody Mary’s” succession to the throne, Bullinger would only tell Knox that these questions were particular to the laws of the realm and not abrogated by Scripture. Concerning Mary’s proposed marriage to Phillip II of Spain (a Catholic monarch) and the potential transfer of power, Bullinger deferred to the laws and customs of the realm.
But he does add, “If the reigning sovereign be not a Deborah, but an ungodly and tyrannous ruler of the kingdom, godly persons have an example and consolation in the case of Athaliah. The Lord will in his own time destroy unjust governments by his own people, to whom he will supply proper qualifications for this purpose, as he formerly did to Jerubbaal and the Maccabees and Jehoiada.”8
This all seems like pretty strong stuff, but the explicit conclusion was actually quite conservative. Bullinger would conclude that only “mandated idolatry” should be disobeyed in every instance, citing biblical examples of armed resistance and tyrannicide only in that context. When pressed by Knox as to which side the faithful should take if “religious nobles” took action, Bullinger only repeated his warning and deferred the decision to those fully apprised of all relevant facts.
John Calvin’s View of Resistance
Calvin’s famous prescription to use magistrates rather than private persons is implicitly more covenantal because it works within the standing framework of authority and includes the consent of the people. By the early 1560s, Calvin is explicitly referencing the covenant as the basis of resistance. Preaching on I Samuel 8, Calvin argues:
“Since kings and princes are bound by covenant to the people, to administer the law in truest equality, sincerity, and integrity; if they break faith and usurp tyrannical power . . . is it not possible for the people to consider together taking measures in order to remedy the evil?”
A covenantal theory of resistance can also be discerned in Calvin’s discussion of conscience. It is notable that these discussions are not in the chapter of Calvin’s Institutes devoted to the civil magistrates (IV.xx) . . . . Calvin lays out a relationship between law and conscience arguably more seminal for politics than anything found elsewhere in his Institutes. . . Calvin concludes many things about the authority of the Roman Catholic hierarchy, the importance of a chaste mind, and not offending one’s Christian brother.
But what he also says about conscience goes beyond bishops and brethren. Most important is Calvin’s reference to a passage from Saint Paul’s famous chapter on civil government, wherein Saint Paul requires obedience to the magistrate, “not only to avoid God’s wrath, but also for the sake of conscience” (Romans 13:5, emphasis added). This verse, following on the heels of Saint Paul’s admonition “Let every person be subject to the governing authorities,” provides Calvin with a backdoor approach to reexamine whether resistance is allowed by Romans 13:1.
The External Forum and the Forum of Conscience
Calvin begins each discussion of conscience with a dualistic anthropology, dividing the “spiritual” and the “civil” (III.xix.15, 140, 141) or the “external forum and the forum of conscience” (IV.x.3, 415). The dichotomous approach to human affairs here is striking. “When the one is considered, we should call off our minds, and not allow them to think of the other. For there exists in man a kind of two worlds, over which different kings and different laws can preside” (III.xix.15, 140–41, emphasis added). From this Calvin reaches a conclusion already drawn in his chapter on civil government: spiritual liberty does not lead to civil license. But this is only a qualified conclusion.
Citing other passages from Scripture, Calvin defines the conscience as that by which men know something of divine justice and have their sins revealed before God (III.xix.15, 141; IV.x.4, 416). The function of law therefore is to bind us to God alone. “Hence a law is said to bind the conscience, because it simply binds the individual, without looking at men, or taking any account of them” (III.xix.16, 142; an almost identical passage is found at IV.x.4, 416).
Calvin twice entertains the possibility that Saint Paul is asserting (Romans 13:5) that all civil law should bind the conscience, but he rejects that conclusion because of what has already been said about “spiritual government” (III.xix.15, 140–41; IV.x.3, 415). It may be that Calvin here has posited a simple distinction between obligations to God and obligations to Caesar. He would then be repeating Saint Peter’s oft-cited claim, “We must obey God rather than men” (Acts 5:29) or Christ’s statement, “Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s” (Matthew 22:21).
But Calvin already includes Peter’s admonition in his chapter devoted to civil government. In revisiting Saint Paul’s famous statement in Romans 13:1, Calvin wrote that we are bound by “the general command of God” as the genus of our obligation. Our obligation to the civil magistrate is but a species of this obligation. Therefore, it is not the civil laws that reach to our conscience but the command of God to obey the civil laws. Hence, civil obedience is conditional on divine obedience. (The species could not subvert the genus.) It will not suffice merely to rephrase this as obedience to God necessitating obedience to the civil magistrate.
In fact, Calvin is quite explicit about this interpretation and rejects it. Saint Paul does not at all teach that the laws enacted by them reach to the internal government of the soul, since he everywhere proclaims that the worship of God, and the spiritual rule of living righteously, are superior to all the decrees of men (IV.x.5, 417).
Looking to Scripture for Political Guidance
Calvin and Bullinger’s embrace of explicit or implicit covenanting served as a catalyst to a new movement within political theory. What was prescribed by Reformed Protestants in the sixteenth century should not be cast as entirely original, of course, for they were steeped in humanist and legal training, and the influence of medieval and classical political theory can never be discounted. But although the reformers were indeed steeped in the humanist legal tradition, they also looked to Scripture for political advice—to texts that predated Solon, Gaius, or Justinian I.
Even when the reformers are not entirely original, they make an important contribution by articulating political theory in the language of the new theology. Hostility toward medieval scholarship (or at least recognizably Catholic authors and persons) made it necessary for political theories to be reformulated and made palpable to new audiences. In the stream of the Western (and Anglo-American) legal conversation, “old” ideas became “new” when associated with Protestants and Reformation. This enabled the passing of political theory to a Protestant posterity.
Pursuit of the Salus Populi
In its most passive and subtle form, covenantal political theory largely echoes the traditional “commonwealth” approach of Roman law. This means that the biblical covenant becomes a “new” symbol to justify standing ideas and institutions. And this is not surprising, given the humanistic training of the reformers. In this more passive form of covenantalism, the nation is also viewed as a common pursuit of salus populi.
In the seventeenth century, for example, Samuel Rutherford explicitly centered civil government on the great principle of Cicero: salus populi, suprema lex.9 This common good was pursued with two important biblical caveats. First, all government is derived from God’s supreme authority. Magistrates are accountable to the limits of authority interpreted from Scripture. Second, the will of the people, though not necessarily represented by direct elections, is a means by which the authority of God is legitimately transferred to civil magistrates.
Again, although neither of these ideas is new within political thought, the argument from Scripture is part of the Protestant re-formation of politics. These two ideas also demonstrate the two dimensions of the covenant relationship: vertical and horizontal. Commonwealth thinking by Reformed Protestants was largely a passive adoption of the covenant as a political model.
At the other end of the spectrum from commonwealth thinking and passive covenantalism is active or aggressive covenantalism, which displays a more explicit scriptural argumentation. Aggressive covenantalism does not reject the essential goals of passive covenantalism: salus populi. It agrees with the need for appropriate civil order, but it makes resistance and limits on civil authority a religious duty rather than a right.
For example, Quentin Skinner characterizes Christopher Goodman, John Ponet, and John Knox as arguing that those who fail to resist tyrants would be damned.10 And while all covenantal political theologians argued, for example, that the magistrate has some responsibility for the maintenance of true religion, the more aggressive form of covenantalism emphasizes this as a means of obtaining divine corporate blessing or avoiding covenantal sanction.
The Covenantal Understanding of Tyranny
With the additional force and warrant of the covenant, tyranny is cast not simply as the abuse of reason or freedom, it becomes the violation of both divine delegation and popular trust. This opens the door for an aggressive doctrine of resistance or revolution. Inheritors of this tradition over two centuries could assert, “Resistance to tyrants is obedience to God.”11 This included John Bradshaw, prosecutor of Charles I, and Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, who wanted the phrase as the motto of the United States.
This assertion is a far more powerful claim than “Resistance to tyrants is the assertion of our natural rights” or “Resistance to tyrants is the restoration of nomos,” where nature or nomos simply means some superintending impersonal mechanism. The notion of an argument only from nature does not create the same kind of moral imperative as one that is tied to personal revelation and divine judgment. This existential approach makes the covenanted commonwealth approach much more wary of the abuse of power and of conscience and more prepared to act in the face of tyranny. It makes covenantal political theory a political theology par excellence.
Bullinger and Calvin were both prepared to apply the covenant to politics, to assert the idea of corporate responsibility, but it was their contemporaries elsewhere who put it into radical practice. John Knox first explicitly and radically applied the covenant to politics, though reluctantly at first.12 Knox was selective in his application of the civil covenant, predicated largely on religious circumstances. His first assertion that a covenant had been violated was during the accession of Mary Tudor.
In 1554 he argued that to participate in the Mass was to violate “the league and covenant of God” that forbade idolatry.13 This was consistent with both the Protestant critique of Roman Catholic ritual and its condemnation of the doctrine of transubstantiation. The covenant Knox was referring to was technically not a civil covenant. Knox was referring to the covenant between God and His elect, but an important precedent was set by casting civil disobedience as necessary to avoid damnation.
By 1558, in The Appellation to the Nobility and Estates, Knox is prepared to articulate a doctrine of resistance that hinges on a more robust theory of covenanting. Knox seems most clearly to have used the Appellation as a call to the inferior or lesser magistrates of England to rebel against the monarchy. At no point did Knox call on the Scottish nobility to rebel. Whereas England was a covenanted nation, having officially subscribed to Protestantism, Scotland was not.14 After Scotland subscribed to Protestantism, however, Knox issued the same covenantal warning and admonition. In a sermon to the General Assembly in 1564, Knox applied the same arguments to the Scottish nobility.15
Covenant, Revolution, War, and Eschatology
Covenant theology also became the basis for a proto-constitutionalist view of government, inspiring two national covenants in Scotland during the sixteenth century (National Covenant in 1638 and Solemn League and Covenant in 1643). These literal expressions of a national corporate covenant, protests against the ecclesiastical dictates of Charles I and his bishops, were prominent and explicit expressions of Reformed political theology.Scotsmen Alexander Henderson and Archibald Johnston drew up the National Covenant in 1638. It was based on the Confession of Faith of 1581 (signed by King James VI of Scotland [later King James I of England]) and reflected both the Reformed theology of covenant and the tradition of religious “banding” that had been popular in Scotland since the late sixteenth century.16
The National Covenant and the succeeding document, the Solemn League and Covenant (1643), became literal and legal expressions of Reformed political theology coupled with historical and cultural circumstance. The National Covenant cited numerous Acts of Parliament to show that the Reformed faith had been duly established in Scotland. It bound its signatories to maintain freedom of church and to defend Presbyterianism. It provided legal warrant for deposing and excommunicating bishops, and it condemned the Book of Canons (a 1635 set of clerical rules issued by Charles I), the new Liturgy, and the Perth Articles.
Giving rise to the Covenanter movement, the National Covenant was first signed by noblemen, gentry, clergy, and burgesses. It was later distributed for a formal canvass and loyalty oath. The National Covenant not only asserted Presbyterianism as true church polity, it also asserted Scottish nationalism, civic loyalty to the Crown, and the supremacy of parliamentary statute. Most significant, the National Covenant was characteristic of earlier covenantal thought because it emphasized the conditional nature of authority and of allegiance before God, and stressed corporate accountability before God.17 Its subscribers argued that the king had driven them to articulate their revolutionary principles.18
The Solemn League and Covenant of 1643
The English Civil War began in 1642. The Scots, who had originally made peace with Charles in 1641, were troubled to hear that Irish Catholics threatened to join the Royalists. Most important in the Scots’ alliance with the English was the role of the political covenant. The Scottish Presbyterians allied with English Puritans only after the English agreed to the Solemn League and Covenant in 1643.
The Scottish Presbyterians hoped that this common allegiance to the Solemn League and Covenant would lead to Presbyterian reform of church polity in England. Beset by numerous setbacks and by the efficiency of Cromwell’s New Model Army, Charles I surrendered to the Scottish Presbyterians in 1646 and shortly thereafter was ransomed to the English. The legacy of Geneva’s theology of resistance was reputedly in the pocket of every soldier under Cromwell’s command: a pocket edition of quotations from the Geneva Bible.19
Samuel Rutherford cast the conflict in covenantal terms. In his 1644 Lex, Rex or The Law and the Prince, Rutherford used Old Testament examples to argue the existence of a covenant between the king and the people.20 God works through the people in this covenant.21 There are three parties to this covenant, though the interests of God and the people are the same. There also exists a covenant between the king and God.22 This obligates the king to maintain religion and civil piety. Rutherford wrote:
“The covenant is so mutual, that if the people break the covenant, God is loosed from his part of the covenant [Zechariah. xi.10]. The covenant giveth to the believer a sort of action of law, and jus quoddam, to plead with God in respect of his fidelity to stand to that covenant that bindeth him by reason of his fidelity.”23
Rutherford’s argument drew on multiple sources, appealing to Scripture, natural law, and acts of Parliament.24
Lex, Rex further develops the political theology of the sixteenth century that resistance to tyrants is obedience to God. Like Bullinger, Rutherford argues that tyranny was the work of Satan.25 God worked through the people to remove the ruler.26 Resisting was the duty of the common people as well as of the lower magistrates.27 The people and the lower magistrates were not to engage in passive resistance only, but were to actively resist the king by removing him from power.28
Drawing on the theology of resistance of the past hundred years, Rutherford wrote, “We teach that any private man may kill a tyrant, void of all title. And if he have not the consent of the people, he is an usurper, for we know no external lawful calling that kings have now, or their family, to the crown, but only the call of the people.”29
A Covenanted Nation: The Parliamentary Sermons
Besides the obvious case of the national covenanting, another prominent application of covenant theology is apparent in sermons preached during the Long Parliament (1640–1648). Beginning in November 1640, the Long Parliament instituted the practice of regular sermons from Reformed clergy. These sermons were preached to the English Parliament until 1652 and serve as a window into the covenantalism common to both Independents and Presbyterians.
The language of the sermons was nationalist, often taking ancient Israel as a model. Britain’s history and contemporary situation were reconstructed in light of a narrative wherein people could enjoy security and purity through a close relationship between church and state.30 It is evident from the sermons that clergy did not see themselves having any constitutional authority over Parliament. Rather, clergy mimicked the Hebrew prophets. They had prophetic authority to remind magistrates of both the individual covenant of salvation and the corporate covenant of collective responsibility. This was consistent with the precedent of Zurich and Geneva.
As a covenanted nation, rulers were “appointed” by God though not with any sense of autonomous divine right. Appointment justified accountability, and the vehicle for accountability was found in constitutional politics and godly preaching. The people and the commonwealth were committed to serving their governors, but all were charged with reform of the church. Cornelius Burges told the Parliament in 1640, “My business is, merely to persuade you into a Religious Covenant with God, as himself hath prescribed and commanded; and his people, in the best times of Reformation, have readily admitted: namely, every man to stir up himself and to lift up his Soul to take hold of God, to be glued and united to him, in all faithfulness, sincerity, care, and diligence, to be only his for ever.”31
Covenantal political theology argued that righteous and religious leaders are a blessing. Government was a divine office, but one that still required the tutoring of the preachers. By 1645 the clergy were becoming increasingly explicit in attributing troubled times to the failure of the people and nation to uphold covenant obligations. Stephen Marshall and Edmund Calamy, for example, blamed the troubled times on divisions and faction. Others blamed heresy. With transgressions came both covenantal chastisement and deliverance. Though a covenanted nation could provoke God, He would not reject them if they repented.32
National repentance included nationwide prayer and resembled individual repentance.33 But it was not just repentance that concerned the clergy during the Commonwealth era. An eschatological framework also pervades these sermons. Consistent with a covenantal cosmology, piety was given historical meaning in this eschatological framework.34 And with eschatological thinking came a new set of challenges for Reformed Protestants and their political theology.
Regicide, Millenarianism, and The Covenant
Both Presbyterians and Independents, inheritors of the eschatology developed in the sixteenth century, saw history in providential and prophetic terms. Even James I himself was a student of biblical prophecy. But whereas Presbyterians took a prophetic approach to eschatology, Independents had an apocalyptic eschatology underlying both their political theology and their ecclesiastical polity.35
G. P. Gooch goes so far as to say, “At the basis of the creed of every religious body of the time, except the Presbyterians, lay the Millenarian idea.”36 The apocalyptic eschatology was championed early in the sermons of Independent clergy Richard Sibbes and Thomas Goodwin.37 It is found in the sermons of John Owen, Cromwell’s chaplain.38 It is found in the writings of John Milton, who was a prominent critic of the Presbyterians.
Millenarianism was not confined to England, either.39 Across the ocean in New England, American Puritan John Cotton was a millenarian, an influential correspondent of Cromwell, and a supporter of the execution [of King Charles].40 Thomas Hooker argued that clear fulfillment of prophecy trumped any other interpretive method of Scripture.41
In 1645, Hugh Peters preached before Parliament that the New Model Army was the instrument for the downfall of the Antichrist and the millennial kingdom of Christ.42 John Cooke, solicitor general and chief prosecutor of Charles I, was not alone in anticipating the arrival of the millennium (Christ’s earthly reign) in the wake of the king’s execution.43 (Cooke continued to look for it even as he was condemned to die after the Restoration.)44
Thomas Goodwin, who would be appointed to a state chaplaincy under Cromwell, predicted that the millennium would begin by 1695.45 When such radical eschatology trickled down from the educated clergy to the army, Fifth Monarchists, and Levellers, the radical effect on the English political climate multiplied.46
Presbyterians Oppose Chiliasim
Presbyterians leveled criticism against what they deemed chiliastic and antinomian eschatology and ecclesiology among the Independents. Apocalyptic millenarianism was condemned by Richard Baxter, who also opposed the execution of Charles I and refused the oath of allegiance under Cromwell.47
Presbyterian Robert Baillie, representative of other Westminster divines, rejected the biblical literalism of Cotton and other Independents–calling the Independents “Chiliasts.”48 Rutherford, though very much a providentialist in his outlook on history, likewise took a position against what he saw as a kind of utopian eschatology on the part of the Independents.49
Independents behind the king’s trial were cast by Presbyterians as having abandoned the Bible, the written Word, and the law of nature. Prynne declared the whole trial and execution of Charles Stuart to be illegal according to the standing civil law.50 By contrast, Independents took a dim view of both reason and the common law emphasis on precedent. In contrast to the openness to regime type that characterized Calvin, Bullinger, or even many seventeenth-century Reformed Protestants, the Independents increasingly associated monarchy with the biblical Antichrist.
Millenarianism is not necessarily inherent in or essential to covenantal politics, as is demonstrated in the Presbyterian opposition to eschatological excesses. Nevertheless, such excesses proved tempting to Reformed Protestants, revealing fissures in their political theology. But likewise were some of the covenant’s virtues more pronounced during this episode. The covenant had proved itself a voice for liberty against the excesses of Charles I. The question remained as to whether this could be a balanced and reasonable voice, and that question would be tested again in the case of America.
Reaching Limits: The Covenant in America
A series of covenants joined together church, town, and commonwealth in New England. Many of the immigrants who followed afterward, particularly Presbyterians and Baptists who settled in the Middle Colonies, were already familiar with covenanting before they arrived in the New World.51No person or segment of society was left out of the series of covenants. Even immigrants without families were required to submit to the authority of a household covenant. Children were trained to assume covenantal responsibilities.52 Believing that God had called them to continue the work of reforming religion, these early Americans gave the covenant its fullest and most extensive application.
But in doing so, they also had to contend with Reformed theology’s political challenges. America was cast in the Puritan mind as the land where God’s people could finally live in covenanted faithfulness. All the elements of seventeenth-century English Reformed theology migrated with the colonists:
They brought the Reformed soteriology, now including its federal modifications to some degree.
They brought the budding apocalyptic theology that had flowered during the English Civil War.53
They brought with them a providential view of history that was bound up with covenantal expectation of blessing and chastisement.54
They brought the jeremiad tradition.55
They brought the long-standing but imprecise theology of corporate faithfulness, including the relationship between unconditional (gracious) covenants and conditional (legal) covenants.56
Instead of a political Eden, America became a place where the covenant was pushed to its limits, faded, and eventually blended with other approaches to politics.
Many explanations have been offered, then and now, for its demise. Clergy in the eighteenth century blamed general worldliness and sin. Modern scholars credit philosophical or sociological factors such as secularism, class struggle, financial prosperity, or immigration. But it is just as reasonable to assert that the covenant, when fully applied to political realities, collapsed under the weight of its transcendent demands.
New England Covenants, Compacts, and Charters
At the civil and ecclesiastical level, New Englanders were bound to one another by covenants. Ecclesiastical covenants were used for the founding of churches. Charters were the bedrock of civil authority in the colonies, and provided foundations for the civil covenants.57 Some charters established new colonies; others consolidated existing ones or revised the terms of authority.58
Given the distance from England, the colonists were often left to establish their own local governments by combination, compact, charter, patent, or legislative action. Civil covenants, founded on the charters, transferred or awarded the power of governance and law enforcement to a local town, plantation, or colony. The Fundamental Orders of Connecticut provide an example of a civil covenant. Though much is made of the Mayflower Compact, it was never presumed by its authors to grant political authority. This had already been established by the 1606 Charter of Virginia. Instead, the Mayflower Compact was a civil covenant conceived for survival of the local government.59
Roger Williams
Roger Williams dealt the first substantial blow to the covenant in New England. Though he was warmly greeted by John Winthrop upon his arrival in 1631, Williams soon proved to be too radical in his understanding of the public covenant. Though some in early twentieth-century scholarship cast Williams as a democrat or proto-liberal, Alan Simpson offers the right corrective in labeling him “a religious enthusiast.”60
Using “typology” theology, wherein Old Testament passages become figures (or types) rather than literal lessons for New Testament believers, Williams argued that the physical punishment for heretics in the Old Testament was only a figure for spiritual punishment experienced under the New Testament.61 The civil sword of the Old Testament became the spiritual sword of the church, Williams argued.
State patronage, the civil sword, would lull the church to sleep. The church advanced through persecution, not protection.62 In short, Williams was prepared to spiritualize everything, including the corporate covenants found in the Old Testament. What makes Williams important, however, is not just his dissent on matters of religious orthodoxy and civil enforcement. Other English Independents more or less agreed with him concerning the pitfalls of religious intolerance.
His most significant contribution was to push the civil consequence of soteriology to the point where it challenged the parallel theology of the civil-religious covenant. In the face of arguments that heresy would threaten the spiritual health of believers, Williams retorted that the sovereignty of God’s grace would preserve them from error.63 (Conversely, Williams may also have believed in double predestination and reprobation.64 God’s Spirit, Williams argued, did not require the help of the civil magistrate.65)
He charged those who tried to use the civil sword to encourage belief or discourage heresy with practicing Arminianism.66 Furthermore, Williams argued, mandatory church attendance encouraged hypocrisy and divine condemnation in addition to changing the character of preaching and worship.67 Unregenerate persons might even have their fate sealed by church attendance, giving them a false sense of security.68 All of this Williams argued on the basis of divine sovereignty and election. This was the first time that someone within the Reformed tradition had so thoroughly used its own soteriology to undermine its civil theology.
The Providence Plantation Charter
Williams’s legacy was the Providence Plantation charter (the Patent for Providence Plantations, 1643), later folded into the Rhode Island Charter given to John Clarke in 1663. Providence Plantation’s charter marked a change in religious tone from the royal charters in New England. While the charter acknowledged the religious motivations of its members and the conversion of the Native Americans, it reflected dissent in both Old and New England.
It explicitly separated the civil magistrate from religious matters and an established state church. In Rhode Island, civil religion was to be sustained by private religious commitments only. This, the charter assured the Crown, would lead to greater public morality and patriotic commitment.69 Hence, Williams succeeded in divorcing the civil from the ecclesiastical in a way heretofore not known in England or in America. More important, he did it using the logic of covenant theology.
Pluralism
In addition to fighting dissent from within, New England clergy struggled with rising secularism and religious pluralism. The revocation of the Massachusetts Bay Colony charter in 1684 and the Restoration put politics on a different legal footing. Immigration continued. Religious dissent, not originally accommodated by the old covenantal vision, was becoming an unavoidable reality in the late seventeenth century. And the challenge was substantial.
Though the New England Puritans were proud of their English heritage, they had come to America with the expressed intent to be ruled by Scripture and those whom God called to lead. This vision was above and beyond the English constitution. If they were to be governed by standing law alone, what would define them as a peculiar and covenanted people? How would they navigate the new freedom given to dissenters?70
Wedding the Covenant Vision to the English Constitution
The solution articulated by the Mathers [Increase Mather, 1639-1723 (father); and Cotton Mather, 1663-1738 (son)] to the challenge of secularism and pluralism diluting the covenant vision was to reestablish the vision on the bedrock of English constitutional law. This pushed things in a more secular direction but did not jettison spiritual goals. In Cotton Mather’s 1692 election sermon, he avoided the typological identification with Israel and praised royal governors concerned with secular interests. That praise included an expectation that the ruler should uphold every person’s “Right unto his Life, his Estate, his Liberty, and his Family.”
While the new government was not commissioned by God to promote Congregationalism, it did protect life, liberty, property, self-government in the popular assembly, and the privilege of electing the Governor’s Council. Christians should rejoice that there was no taxation without consent and that their worship was unmolested. This sermon echoed a sentiment stated previously by his father, Increase Mather, wherein he praised the Royal Charter as securing “all Christian Liberties, and all English Liberties.”
Such a commonwealth approach did not entirely abandon the traditional covenantal vision. Mather argued that it was in the context of political liberty that New England was able to pursue its covenantal vision. The people must still lean upon God; it was God’s covenantal faithfulness that enabled economic prosperity and political liberty. A fusion of English law and covenant logic became a theme of election sermons for the next seventy-five years. This was not the covenantal vision of the founders, but neither was it a wholesale abandonment.71
The Challenge of Revivalism
But while covenant-minded clergy thus found a way to deal with political secularism and religious pluralism, they had much greater difficulty with revivalism, which posed a more subtle and serious threat. Revivalism made policing the borders of the covenant network difficult and created rifts and dissent that threatened to tear the covenanted community apart. Not only did revivalism undermine ecclesiastical hierarchy, it threatened religious orthodoxy. Hence, it was not so much secularism as religious enthusiasm that imperiled the reformers’ covenanted approach to life in the world.72
As broad interest in revival and “awakening” grew, clergy lost control of its use. “The Great Awakening” caused serious splits within churches with a professional clergy and an organized governing structure.73 This was especially true in Anglican areas. Occasional revivals or renewals gave way to revivalism, which posed important threats to the standing political order:
First, revivalism brought about a change in many churches and regions from clerical religion to lay religion, which meant that there were no longer designated guardians of the covenant vision.74
Second, it moved American Christianity from an emphasis on doctrine to an emphasis on piety.
Third, it resolved a long-standing tension within Congregational New England.
The definition of a church went from its dual role in the national covenant (as a guardian of civil piety and gatekeeper of full civil membership through baptism) to an insulated role as a covenanted community of the converted.75
The War for Independence: Reviving the Covenant
During the War for Independence, the covenant enjoyed a resurgence.76 Colonial Americans largely remained a devout people who saw things in providential terms. Of twenty-nine sermons published by Massachusetts clergy from 1777 to 1783, twenty-two reminded the listeners of the covenant and called them to virtue and piety.77
Clergy in the Middle Colonies were also conversant in the use of covenantal political theology.78 The rhetoric of the War for Independence became a repeat of the politico-theological rhetoric of the Puritan Revolution. At the time of America’s war with England, Horace Walpole (fourth Earl of Oxford) is alleged to have said, “Cousin America has run off with a Presbyterian parson, and that is the end of it.”79
This covenant revival during the War for Independence was not exactly a return to the thinking of the New England forefathers, but there was certainly a thread of continuity. In the 1770s, at least 50 percent of American colonial churches subscribed to key aspects of Reformed theology regardless of denomination.80 The Book of Deuteronomy, the most politically prescriptive book of the Bible and a narrative of Israelite nationality, is the most cited source in American political writings between 1765 and 1805.81
Clergy used political sermons and jeremiads to provide leadership and encouragement by framing crises in biblical terms. There is much in the Revolutionary and Founding sermons that one can recognize as covenantal in theme and symbol: moral declension, providential interpretation of history, corporate responsibility, and providential history, if not outright millennialism.82
Political sermons such as Henry Cumings’s have the flavor of a jeremiad.83 Samuel Cooper’s A Sermon on the Day of the Commencement of the Constitution, for example, casts the covenant of the “Hebrew nation” as evidence that it was a “free republic” (much like America).84 Joseph Sewall’s Nineveh’s Repentance and Deliverance, Samuel Dunbar’s The Presence of God With His People, and Jacob Cushing’s Divine Judgments Upon Tyrants repeatedly cast divine and human faithfulness in terms of covenants.85
Samuel Sherwood’s The Church’s Flight Into the Wilderness is a sermon of outstanding millenarian expression. Presbyterian Abraham Keteltas’s God Arising and Pleading His People’s Cause is entirely dependent on themes that were central to Reformed theology, such as election and chosenness, providential history, predestination, and the federal emphasis on virtue.
Defensive Arms Vindicated, attributed to “A Moderate Whig” (but actually taken from a 1687 sermon by Scottish Presbyterian covenanter Alexander Shields titled A Hind Let Loose), was used to defend the duty of American citizens to put up resistance.86
The Fight for Liberty
Many Patriots were driven by the desire not just for political liberty but also for religious liberty. This group included Baptists and other Separates in New England and denominations seeking disestablishment in Anglican strongholds.87 It also included those who dreaded the export of Anglican bishops from England to places such a New England where Anglicanism was equated with Romanism. American fear of Roman Catholicism was yet another vestige of America’s Reformed heritage.
While most Protestants at this time still distrusted Rome, Americans inherited the English eschatological context for Rome described in Chapter 7 in which the pope was the Antichrist and the Roman church the Whore of Babylon. This eschatological context was combined with the fact that Americans had fought a Catholic power in the French and Indian War (1754–1763) and the Church of England still reminded New England Congregationalists of Rome.88
Being used in the cause of American liberty, with all of its religious overtones, was indeed a glorious and fitting way for the covenant to see its last full engagement on the political stage. This American episode exemplified what Reformed Protestants arguably did best: provide existential teeth and theological grit to arguments for liberty. The covenant proved itself to have a flexible genius in the eighteenth century.
Voegelin on the Covenant
Eric Voegelin presents the biblical covenant (berith) with Israel as being one of the symbols in history that relieve the anxiety of being which is common to all persons.89 The biblical covenant resembles the existential tension of man himself, who finds himself in the Metaxy, a term Voegelin uses to describe existence between the divine (God) and the mundane. Within Voegelin’s framework, the struggle of Israel is representative of the struggle of all who are tempted to seek the Promised Land in time and this present world.90
Israel was, as Voegelin put it, “a people that moved on the historical scene while living toward a goal beyond history.”91 The idea of being a “chosen people” asserts a qualitative leap and conversion in resolving the tension inherent in the Metaxy and is one particular response to the revelation of divine being.
But Voegelin argues that only Jeremiah and to some degree Amos fully articulate the true meaning of the theophany, or conversion, effected by the covenant. Yahweh is the universal God of history. He is not, Voegelin argues, a God to be negotiated with or to be appropriated for Israel’s pragmatic purposes.92
Voegelin describes two focal points in the Israelite theopolity: the creation of community through the covenant (obedience to divine instructions) and political organization necessary for pragmatic existence (existence in history).93 When Christians later confronted these necessities in their own theological symbolism, they eventually divided them into church and state, which remained largely separated even through the crisis of the Reformation. Through the efforts of Christ in the Sermon on the Mount, of Saint Paul, and of Saint Augustine, the church rarely confused the social order with the Kingdom of God.94
At the time of the Hebrew theopolity, the challenge of this covenant symbol was not yet tested or refined. It was, Voegelin says, “ambiguous and fraught with dangers of derailment.”95 In some ways, this political and spiritual tension enabled an important lesson in the history of order. Voegelin says of Israel, “For the first time men experienced the clash between divinely willed and humanly realized order of history in its stark brutality, and the souls of the Prophets were the battlefield in this war of the spirit.”96 Only later would profane existence be better translated into the civitas Dei of Saint Augustine.97
As to the Role of the Prophets In Israel’s case, Voegelin argues, the problem is centered on the establishment of the monarchy. The failures of the monarchy enabled the rise of the prophets. And with the prophets arose what Voegelin calls “Yahwism.”98 That is, if it had not been appropriated for political gain or had not fallen prey to “externalization” (pragmatic concerns) by the monarchy, the covenant would not have necessitated prophetic clarification.
Like most political symbols within the Metaxy of human existence, the covenant required spiritual openness. Pragmatic appropriation of the symbol doomed the monarchy but also inspired the jeremiad-driven symbolization of the prophets. The legacy of the Hebrew theopolity is the message of the Prophets, universalized and rescued by Christianity, as “life of the spirit and the life in the world.”99
As the Hebrew monarchy wound to a close, the prophets asked who would carry their historical order into the future. Beginning with the eternal covenant alluded to by the Davidic monarchy, this becomes the “Messianic problem”–the central question of Christianity.100 The prophetic symbols remain loaded with the problems of balancing the transcendent with the pragmatic.101 . . . Interpreting the Sinaitic covenant as an externalization of divine order replaces communal life with ritual observance.102
To paraphrase the prophetic message, God desires mercy or loyalty, and not sacrifice. What the covenant revealed–and the terms it specified–were not a contract that men could define for themselves; nor was it an agreement between equals.103 Instead, the covenant is best understood as something to be absorbed into the souls of “those who listen to the call.”104 This life of the spirit is existence in community, but it cannot become a pragmatic formula for political community. The pragmatic formula encourages the very thing that the Decalogue forbids–human self-assertion.
Daniel Elazar: Pragmatic Relevance
Whereas Voegelin’s critique rejected any particular relevance for political covenants beyond vague existential symbolism, Daniel Elazar has advanced their contemporary importance by putting them at the root of federalism, constitutionalism, republicanism, and political culture.105 In Elazar’s schema, covenants exhibit important and distinctive components. All of these elements are important because they emphasize covenantal politics as relational. He notes:
“[All] covenantal political understanding revolves around similar questions of obligation and consent, free will, self-government, and political order–in other words, how are the relationships of humans one to another and to this universe and its transcendent power established and maintained so as to preserve both order and freedom, equality and opportunity, neighborliness and distinctiveness, liberty and law?”106
Elazar describes political covenanting as serving three important functions which distinguish it from hierarchical or organic political orientations: as a form of political conceptualization and mode of political expression; as a source of political ideology; and as a factor shaping political culture, institutions, and behavior.
Political covenanting is unsurpassed in its reconciliation of power and justice, a reconciliation enabled by unique political and social traditions.107 A covenant is therefore more than an institutional or legal formulation; it becomes, in short, a political and social worldview.108 Without this worldview, Elazar argues, certain institutional dimensions of constitutionalism cannot succeed. These dimensions of constitutionalism include the separation of powers, limited government, a jury system, and true federalism.109
Covenant, Compact, or Contract
Elazar tries to discern the precise impact of political covenanting on modern constitutionalism by creating categories drawn from the language used in the early history of Anglo-American constitutionalism: covenant, compact, and contract. Each term represents a different kind of political agreement. Covenants and compacts are asserted to be historically more prevalent than contracts and also more constitutional or public in character. As reciprocal instruments, covenants and compacts bind their parties “beyond the letter of the law.” Contracts tend to be private devices and not the public documents that political theorists allude to when they generalize the foundations of constitutionalism as “social contract theory.”
Covenants, even more so than compacts, introduce a morally binding dimension above the legal dimension.110 Covenants are also distinguished from compacts and contracts by the belief that God is a guarantor of, or a direct party to, the relationship between parties in the covenant. Compacts do not explicitly include a divinely transcendent dimension and instead rely on mutual pledges and a secular legal grounding. Modern constitutions are no longer made with God but instead “under God.”111 In this respect they are more like compacts than covenants. Contracts are distinguished primarily by their private and strictly legal nature.112 Contracts also do not emphasize morality for their members beyond legal and minimally moral reciprocity.
Covenants, compacts, and contracts all seek liberty for their members, but each articulates its own relationship between liberty and morality. At the one extreme, covenantal liberty has a strong and binding communal nature, particularly under divine law. At the other extreme, contracts tend to emphasize positive law and individualistic notions of liberty.113 Elazar argues that these two features of contracts–secularism and individualistic freedom–make it difficult for contracts to command moral unity or coherence.114 Covenants, more so than compacts or contracts, articulate the moral adherence necessary for representative government. This was particularly the case in America.115
The Decline of the Covenant?
Elazar argues, “As constitutionalism has spread, covenantalism seems to have retreated.”116 The change is most evident in the loss of explicitly religious language in modern constitutionalism. This can be called the “secularization” of the covenant. At first, God was seen as a party to the political covenant. Then, God was seen as the overseer of the covenant, though not a direct party. Even though the covenantal commonwealth is largely forgotten in the new liberal democracies, Elazar’s argument offers hope: “The covenantal foundations remain and manifest themselves in those polities even in unexpected ways in every generation.”117
Part of this manifestation is evidenced in the new language of political theory: foedus, pactum or pactio, confederatio, contractus, and consocentio. Part of it is found in the theme of “deliverance” that can be seen in both covenantal theology and social contract theory.118 Part of it is to be found in the understanding of rights only as liberties integral with justice and moral duties.119 Part of it is found in the moderate egalitarianism that is characteristic of modernity’s rejection of organic and hierarchal arrangements.120
However much these themes may or may not reflect a covenantal past, their new articulators no longer explicitly recognize that ancestry.121 And what is more, there are seemingly new formulations of civil society that contest or reject altogether the covenantal traditions. In the end, it seems as though a covenant without transcendent divine or moral elements ceases to be a covenant at all. When this theopolitical foundation is completely gone, Elazar argues, then political liberty will go with it.122 He believes that the acknowledgment of divine authority and a vision of a moral political community are the catalysts rather than the enemies of liberty.123 The quest for politics is, for Elazar, fundamentally a quest for meaning, and this meaning is possible only under God’s direction.
David Novak: Noah vs. Sinai
David Novak provides a two-tiered application of the biblical covenants to politics. He argues that only two biblical cases are pure covenants (ha-berit): the Noahide covenant and the Sinaitic covenant. The Noahide covenant is made with mankind. It is the assurance of justice to all persons.124 The Sinaitic covenant is made with biblical Israel. Both are everlasting.125 Any further covenants, whether made with or between Jews or not, require one of these two covenants as a deliberate foundation.126
The Noahide covenant, although a valuable legal and moral tool, is quite different from the covenant at Sinai. Whereas the Sinai covenant established a covenanted community by direct revelation, the Noahide covenant is an indirect revelation that merely serves as a common guarantee of human justice. It is akin to what philosophers have called natural law. But however valuable the Noahide law, it is not sufficient to establish either a community or a relationship with God.
One cannot force one’s way into a Sinai-type covenant without divine election. Novak is quick to remind the reader that the Sinai covenant was made with one particular people in “local experience and practice.” It is ultimately meant for all mankind, as indicated by the promise to Abraham in Genesis 12:3. But the inclusion of all peoples will come only by God’s doing in the messianic age.127 Any attempt at universal language or community apart from direct revelation or election becomes idolatry–a “self-divinization of the people” like the one at Babel.128 Any attempt at a human “monoculture” of redemption will lead to enslavement or extermination.129
Novak also closes off any possibility for speaking of covenants as evolving into more inclusive social contracts (as Elazar suggested). Novak associates covenants only with the biblical narrative, whereas social contracts are the phenomena of democratic polities.130 Novak argues that covenants and social contracts can coexist, but must be considered in proper priority as political formulations.144 Contracts, the broader and more inclusive tool, are to work in the service of covenants.131
Novak argues that this is because the regime under which one lives is not one’s ultimate destination.132 Religious association and community take ontological and historical priority over one’s citizenship.133 One is a member of a particular community before one is a citizen. Novak’s insistence that covenants take priority over social contracts emphasizes ontological priority and Novak’s own convictions as a Jew. But it also enables him to also make a substantive demand that any functioning social contract respect its members.
Novak argues that in any social contract, not just one in which Jews are participating, it is important to see that only “full” persons are capable of agreeing to a social contract. These are persons who first “reside” (in the fullest sense) in communities, primarily religious communities. There must be respect for preexisting historical and ontological identities in any political arrangement.134
Conclusion: The Coventnal Ethos
Why preserve the covenant at all in political life?
While it has served as a powerful symbol for moral reformation and liberty in the face of moral decline and the abuse of political power, any justification of it must extend further. The covenant represents more than a “Thou shalt not” to tyrants and moral depravity. The ultimate contribution of the covenant is to enable the kind of community that fulfills the highest aspirations of politics and human nature while we remain in the Metaxy.
The end of human community ought not to be simply the love of wisdom but also the wisdom of love, as Emmanuel Levinas has eloquently argued.135 Rightly understood, community is defined by the ethics of responsibility. This is the heart of the covenant. It is no coincidence that the biblical tradition is marked by its emphasis on both love and covenanting and on the relationship between the two.
Love is not simply the foundation of the covenant. It is the basis of the sweetest human relationships and therefore of all things political. The prophet Hosea asserts that God desires mercy and not sacrifice.136 Christ repeats this, adding that love (agape) is the sum of the law and that love distinguishes his disciples.137 Saint Paul argues that the greatest of the virtues is love.138
The federal liberty of the covenant requires us to transcend the love of self. The model of love is divine love, and covenant love begins with the love of God rather than the love of self.139 God is chesed in the biblical tradition, what some English Bibles translated as “loving-kindness.” The ultimate end of this loving-kindness is shalom, meaning peace and wholeness. Shalom is the great contribution of the covenant tradition and holds out hope that in this life some may enjoy a humane political order.
Notes
1. Michael Walzer, Exodus and Revolution (New York: Basic Books, 1985).
2. Elazar, Covenant and Polity in Biblical Israel: Biblical Foundations and Jewish Expressions, in The Covenant Tradition in Politics, vol. 1 (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 1998), 213.
3. Joel S. Kaminsky, Corporate Responsibility in the Hebrew Bible (Sheffield, UK: Sheffield Academic Press, 1995).
4. See Freeman, Heavenly Kingdom: Aspects of Political Thought in the Talmud and Midrash (New York: University Press of America, Inc., 1986), 50.
5. Ibid., 43, 48.
6. Heinrich Bullinger, The Decades of Henry Bullinger, ed. Thomas Harding, 2 vols. (rpt, Grand Rapids, Mich.: Reformation Heritage Books, 2004).
7. David L. Puckett, John Calvin’s Exegesis of the Old Testament (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1995), 53, 57; Jerome Friedman, The Most Ancient Testimony: Sixteenth Century Christian-Hebraica in the Age of the Renaissance Nostalgia (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1983).
8. Letter CCCLII, Robinson, ed., Original Letters, 2:745-47.
9. Samuel Rutherford, Lex, Rex or The Law and the Prince (1644; rpt. Harrisonburg: Sprinkle Publications, 1982), 119.
10. Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, Volume Two: The Age of Reformation (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 234-37.
11. This phrase, together with an allusion to biblical warfare (“An Appeal to Heaven”) was put on some battle standards during the American War for Independence. Patricia Bonomi, Under the Cope of Heaven: Religion, Society, and Politics in Early America (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1986), 215. Ellis Sandoz provides background to the phrase “Resistance to tyrants” in The Politics of Truth and Other Untimely Essays (Columbia, University of Missouri Press, 1999), 204n6.
12. W. Stanford Reid, “John Knox’s Theology of Political Government,” Sixteenth Century Journal 19, no. 4 (Winter 1988), 529-40.
13. Roger A. Mason, “Introduction,” in John Knox on Rebellion, ed. Roger A. Mason (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1994), xi.
14. John Knox, The Appellation of John Knox, in John Knox on Rebellion, 103-5; Mason, “Introduction,” xix-xxi.
15. John Knox, The Debate at the General Assembly, June 1564, in John Knox on Rebellion, 192-97; Mason, “Introduction,” xxiii-xxiv.
16. Steele, “The ‘Politick Christian’: The Theological Background to the National Covenant,” in John Morrill, ed., The Scottish National Covenant in Its British Context 1638-1651 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1990), 45-46.
17. Ibid., 54.
18. Ibid., 44.
19. George Milligan, The English Bible: A Sketch of Its History (London, 1895), 86.
20. Rutherford, Lex, Rex, 54-62.
21. Ibid., 1, 3, 6, 25.
22. Ibid., 54.
23. Ibid., 54.
24. Ibid., 59.
25. Ibid., 72-77.
26. Ibid., 26.
27. Ibid., 136-43.
28. Ibid., 152-59.
29. Ibid., 33.
30. John F. Wilson, Pulpit in Parliament: Puritanism during the English Civil Wars 1640-1648 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1969), 174-75.
31. Cornelius Burges, The First Sermon Preached to the Honourable House of Commons now assembled in Parliament at their Publique Fast (London, 1641), 57, quoted in Wilson, Pulpit in Parliament, 201.
32. Herbert Palmer, The Glasse of Gods Providence; John Strickland, Mercy rejoycing against Judgment (London, 1644).
33. Wilson, Pulpit in Parliament, 183-89.
34. Ibid., 195.
35. Wilson, Pulpit in Parliament, 223-30; Geoffrey F. Nuttall, Visible Saints: The Congregational Way, 1640-1660 (Oxford, UK: Basil Blackwell, 1957); Leo F. Solt, Saints in Arms: Puritanism and Democracy in Cromwell’s Army (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1959); Tai Liu, Discord in Zion: The Puritan Divines and the Puritan Revolution, 1640-1660 (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973).
36. G. P. Gooch, The History of English Democratic Ideas in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1898), 127.
37. Richard Sibbes, Works of Richard Sibbes, vol. 7, ed. Alexander B. Grosart, 1862-1864 (rpt., Edinburgh: Banner of Truth Trust, 1977); Thomas Goodwin, Zerubbabel’s Encouragement, in vol. 12 of Thomas Goodwin, Works (1863; rpt., Edinburgh: Banner of Truth Trust, 1985), 61-80.
38. John Owen, Ebenezer: A Memorial of the Deliverance of Essex County, And Committee. In Two Sermons, 73-177, in The Works of John Owen, ed. William H. Goold (Johnstone and Hunter, 1850-1853; rpt., Edinburgh: Banner of Truth Trust, 1965).
39. Theodore Dwight Bozeman, To LiveAncient Lives: The Primitivist Dimension in Puritanism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), 217-36.
40. John Cotton, The Powring sic. Out of the Seven Vials or an Exposition, of the 16 Chapter of the Revelation, with an Application of it to our Times and An Exposition Upon the Thirteenth Chapter of Revelation (London, 1642).
41. Thomas Hooker, A Survey of the Summe of Church Discipline (1648).
42. Hugh Peters, God’s Doings and Man’s Duty (London, 1646); Hugh Peters, A Word for the Army and Two Words to the Kingdom (London, 1647).
43. William Dell, The City Ministers Unmasked (London, 1649); Peter Sterry, The Comings Forth of Christ (London, 1650); John Owen, The Shaking and Translating of Heaven and Earth, in Works, vol. 8, 245-81.
44. Mayfield, Puritans and Regicide: Presbyterian-Independent differences over the Trial and Execution of Charles (I) (New York: University Press of America, 1988), 112.
45. Goodwin, A Glimpse of Zion’s Glory (London, 1641), in Works, vol. 12, 79.
46. Wilson, Pulpit in Parliament, 231-32.
47. Mayfield, Puritans and Regicide, 82; Lamont, “Introduction,” in William Lamont, ed., A Holy Commonwealth: Richard Baxter (Cambridge, UK Cambridge University Press, 1994), x.
48. Robert Baillie, Letters and Journals of Robert Baille, 3 vols. (Edinburgh, 1841), 2:313; Wilson, Pulpit in Parliament, 228; Lamont, Godly Rule: Politics and Religion, 1603-1660 (New York: Macmillan St. Martin’s Press, 1969), 112.
49. Samuel Rutherford, A Survey of the Summe of Church Discipline (London, 1648).
50. William Prynne, The Substance of a Speech to the House of Commons (London, 1648).
51. Alan Simpson, Puritanism in Old and New England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955), 19-38; Harry S. Stout, The New England Soul: Preaching and Religious Culture in Colonial New England (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 29. These settlers were mainly in New England, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey. Backcountry settlements in the Middle Colonies consisted of Scots-Irish and Germans who reconstituted their churches. Frank Lambert, Inventing the “Great Awakening” (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 36. Neither Anglicans nor Quakers had church covenants. David A. Weir, Early New England: A Covenanted Society (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2005), 176, 180; regarding Baptists, see 182-83, 186-87.
52. Edmund S. Morgan, The Puritan Family: Religion & Domestic Relations in Seventeenth-Century New England (1944; rpt., New York: Harper and Row, Publishers, 1966), 3-12, 90-92, 180-82; Stout, New England Soul, 22; Daniel Elazar, Covenant and Constitutionalism: The Great Frontier and the Matrix of Federal Democracy, in The Covenant Tradition in Politics, vol. 3 (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 1996), 33-41.
53. Reiner Smolinski, ed., The Threefold Paradise of Cotton Mather: An Edition of “Triparadisus” (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995); Cotton, An Exposition Upon the Thirteenth Chapter of Revelation (London, 1655) and The Churches Resurrection, or the Opening of the Fifth and Sixth Verses of the 20th Chap. of the Revelation (London, 1642); William K. B. Stover, Faire and Easie Way to Heaven: Covenant Theology and Antinomianism in Early Massachusetts (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1978), 23; Miller, The New England Mind: From Colony to Province (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1953), 185-90; Robert Middlekauff, The Mathers: Three Generations of Puritan Intellectuals 1596-1728 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), 179-87, 320-49; Thomas S. Kidd, The Protestant Interest: New England after Puritanism (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2007), 136-66; Zakai, Exile and Kingdom: History and Apocalypse in the Puritan Migration to America (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1992).
54. Miller, The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1939), 463-92; Miller, From Colony to Province, 3-15, 184-85, 345-66.
55. Sacvan Bercovitch, The American Jeremiad (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978); Miller, From Colony to Province, 19-39, 184-85, 345-66; Andrew Murphy, Prodigal Nation: Moral Decline and Divine Punishment from New England to 9/11 (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2008), 17-43.
56. Miller, From Colony to Province, 21-24, 53-67, 98-99; Edmund S. Morgan, Visible Saints: The History of a Puritan Idea (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1963).
57. Weir, Early New England, 30-31.
58. Ibid., 9, 134.
59. Ibid., 85.
60. Samuel Hugh Brockunier, The Irrepressible Democrat: Roger Williams (New York: Ronald Press, 1940); James E. Ernst, The Political Thought of Roger Williams (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1929); Alan Simpson, “How Democratic Was Roger Williams?” William & Mary Quarterly 3rd series, vol. 13, no. 1 (January 1956), 54
61. Roger Williams, The Complete Writings of Roger Williams, ed. James Hammond Trumbull et al (New York: Russell and Russell, 1963), 3:123-24.
62. Williams, Complete Writings, 3:244-45, 367-68.
63. Ibid., 3:111.
64. Ibid., 127.
65. Ibid., 126-27.
66. Ibid., 258, 259.
67. Ibid., 138, 203, 302.
68. Ibid., 225.
69. Weir, Early New England, 51-54.
70. Stout, New England Soul, 119; Miller, From Colony to Province, 119-29, 165-72.
71. Stout, New England Soul, 120-21; Cotton Mather, Optanda, Good Men Described and Good Things Propounded (Boston, 1692), cited in ibid.; Increase Mather from Miller, From Colony to Province, 169.
72. Noll, America’s God, 37.
73. Bonomi, Under the Cope of Heaven, 133-60.
74. Lambert, Inventing the Great Awakening, 139, 195.
75. Noll, America’s God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2002), 44.
76. Ruth H. Bloch, “Religion and Ideological Change in the American Revolution,” in Mark A. Noll, ed., Religion and American Politics From the Colonial Period to the 1980s (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1990), 52-54.
77. Dale S. Kuehne, Massachusetts Congregational Political Thought, 1760-1790: The Design of Heaven (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1996), 137.
78. Keith L. Griffin, Revolution and Religion: American Revolutionary War and the Reformed Clergy (New York: Paragon House, 1994), 71-81, 85-86.
79. Garry Wills, Inventing America, cited in Elazar, Covenant and Constitutionalism, 78. For a longer (and very enthusiastic) treatment of the Presbyterian role, see W. P. Breed, Presbyterians and the Revolution (1876; rpt, Decatur, Miss.: Issacharian Press, 1993).
80. Elazar, Covenant and Constitutionalism, 68.
81. Donald S. Lutz, A Preface to American Political Theory (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1992) 136.
82. On millenarianism, see Stephen A. Marini, “Uncertain Dawn: Millennialism and Political Theology in Revolutionary America,” in Richard Connors and Andrew Colin Gow, eds., Anglo-American Millennialism, from Milton to the Millerites (Leiden: Koninklijke Brill NV, 2004); and Ruth H. Bloch, Visionary Republic: Millennial Themes in American Thought, 1756-1800 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 3-94. Millennialism in America was not confined to the Reformed tradition. Lutheran revivalists, only decades before the Revolution, also included millennialists. Kidd, The Great Awakening: The Roots of Evangelical Christianity in Colonial America (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2007), 26.
83. Henry Cumings, A Sermon Preached at Lexington on the 19th of April (Boston, 1781), contained in Ellis Sandoz, ed., Political Sermons of the American Founding Era: 1730-1805 (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1991), 661-81.
84. Samuel Cooper, A Sermon on the Day of the Commencement of the Constitution (Boston, 1780), in Sandoz, Political Sermons, 634-35.
85. Joseph Sewall, Nineveh’s Repentance and Deliverance (Boston, 1740), 38, 42; Samuel Dunbar, The Presence of God With His People (Boston, 1760), 220, 221, 229; and Jacob Cushing, Divine Judgments Upon Tyrants (Boston, 1778), 612, 613, 618, 625-26. All in Sandoz, Political Sermons.
86. Samuel Sherwood, The Church’s Flight Into the Wilderness: An Address on the Times (New York, 1776); Abraham Keteltas, God Arising and Pleading His People’s Cause; (Newbury-Port, 1777); Defensive Arms Vindicated and the Lawfulness of the American War Made Manifest. All in Sandoz, Political Sermons.
87. Isaac Backus, An Appeal to the Public for Religious Liberty (1773), in Sandoz, Political Sermons.
88. George Whitefield, Britain’s Mercies, and Britain’s Duties (1776) and Charles Chauncy, Civil Magistrates Must be Just, Ruling in the Fear of God (Boston, 1747), in Sandoz, Political Sermons.
89. Eric Voegelin, Israel and Revelation, in Order and History, vol. 1 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1956), 10-11.
90. Ibid., 114.
91. Ibid., 113.
92. Ibid., 470.
93. Ibid., 415.
94. Ibid., 183, 247-48.
95. Ibid., 113.
96. Ibid., 461.
97. Ibid., 10.
98. Ibid., 180.
99. Ibid., 183.
100. Ibid., 472-72.
101. Ibid., 186.
102. Ibid., 429-30.
103. Ibid., 460.
104. Ibid., 426.
105. Glenn A. Moots, The Covenant Tradition in Federalism: The Pioneering Studies of Daniel J. Elazar,” in Ann Ward and Lee Ward, eds., The Ashgate Research Companion to Federalism (Burlington: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2009).
106. Daniel J. Elazar, Covenant and Civil Society: The Constitutional Matrix of Modern Democracy, in The Covenant Tradition in Politics, vol. 4, 343.
107. Elazar, Covenant and Commonwealth: From Christian Separation through the Protestant Reformation, in The Covenant Tradition in Politics, vol. 2, 6-7.
108. Elazar, Covenant and Polity in Biblical Israel, 20.
109. Ibid., 21.
110. Elazar, Covenant and Constitutionalism, 249.
111. Ibid., 5.
112. Elazar, Covenant and Polity in Biblical Israel, 30-32.
113. Elazar, Covenant and Constitutionalism, 43.
114. Elazar, Covenant and Commonwealth, 61.
115. Elazar, Covenant and Constitutionalism, 8.
116. Elazar, Covenant and Civil Society, 265.
117. Elazar, Covenant and Constitutionalism, 6-7.
118. Elazar, Covenant and Civil Society, 19.
119. Ibid., 242-48.
120. Ibid., 242.
121. Ibid., 247-49.
122. Ibid., 266.
123. This is what also makes covenanting anti-utopian. Ibid., 360.
124. Novak, Jewish Social Contract, 40.
125. Ibid., 34.
126. Ibid., 33-34.
127. Ibid., 48-49.
128. Ibid., 49-50. David Hume serves as a representative of the Enlightenment cosmology. He defines a miracle by its “supernatural” quality, which (as he casts it) violates the “laws” of nature. David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Chapter 10.
129. Novak, Jewish Social Contract, 45.
130. Ibid., 42.
131. Genesis 14:21-24,18:20,19:4-5.
132. Novak, Jewish Social Contract, 44.
133. Ibid., 47.
134. Novak, Covenantal Rights, 85; Novak, Jewish Social Contract, 52-53.
135. Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise Than Being, or Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1991), 161-62, 188.
136. Hosea 6:6.
137. Deuteronomy 6:5; Matthew 9:13, 12:7, 22:36-40; John 13:34-35.
138. I Corinthians 13:13.
139. John von Heyking, Augustine and Politics as Longing in the World (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2001), 172-221.
This excerpt is from Politics Reformed: The Anglo-American Legacy of Covenant Theology (University of Missouri Press, 2010). Our review of the book is available here.
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