3 - Breaking Covenant

Summary

Buried deep within what some scholars consider the first modern encyclopedia, Johann Heinrich Alsted included this maxim on the nature of the commonwealth: “A covenant ought to exist so that the republic might be the people of God.” As we have seen in previous chapters, covenantal language suffused Reformed theology at the end of the seventeenth century. What is relatively more novel is the application of this language to the political community.

Alsted’s maxim, and the theological commitments that underwrote it, is key to understanding the political context of the time. As one of the most influential encyclopedists of the early modern age, Alsted would not have taken himself to be introducing a novel theological claim about the political order; he was merely summarizing a commonplace of his ecclesial and scholastic circles. This chapter will, in effect, unpack the context for Alsted’s commonplace, revealing how theological ideas supported some of the most important developments of political thinking in the concluding centuries of the sixteenth century.