Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-8ctnn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-24T22:00:37.219Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Equality and Covenant Theology

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 February 2016

Robin W. Lovin
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

American culture bears a lasting imprint from its Puritan founders. Their ideal of a social and political community based on a religious covenant has provided a sense of mutual obligation and commitment to public purposes in American life that cannot be fully explained by the contractarian notion of “mutually disinterested” persons who join forces to further their individual aims more effectively. Covenant theology, at the beginnings of modern liberal individualism, sustained an older notion of the self fulfilled in community. At the same time, however, the covenantal emphasis on consent, the voluntary creation of new communities of identity, introduced new elements of historicity, initiative, and equality into old political theories. The distinctive covenantal form of some basic democratic norms thus continues to exert an influence on public choice and political ideals, even in a public philosophy which is today dominated by contractarian and utilitarian theories.

Type
Special Section—Religion and American Public Life
Information
Journal of Law and Religion , Volume 2 , Issue 2 , 1984 , pp. 241 - 262
Copyright
Copyright © Center for the Study of Law and Religion at Emory University 1984

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1. Rawls, J., A Theory of Justice 13 (1971)Google Scholar.

2. Niebuhr, H., The Idea of Covenant and American Democracy, 23 Church History 126–35 (1954)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3. Several noted historians insist, however, that we must give equal attention to the American Enlightenment. See Commacer, H., The Empire of Reason (1977)Google Scholar. One recent article offers the suggestion that the political ideals we often attribute to the New England founders were in fact best represented, and certainly regularly reinforced, by the European peasant cultures that provided many American immigrants in the 19th century. See Berthoff, , Peasants and Artisans, Puritans and Republicans, 69 J. Amer. Hist. 579–98 (1982)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4. Mead, S., The Lively Experiment 16–37 (1976)Google Scholar.

5. Bellah, R., The Broken Covenant 27–35 (1975)Google Scholar.

6. Miller, P., From Covenant to the Revival in The Shaping of American Religion (Smith, J.W. ed. 1961)Google Scholar.

7. Covenant theology is, generally speaking, the work of the Reformed branch of the Protestant Christianity, which owes its origins to the Reformation led by John Calvin (150-964) in Geneva. Not only the English Puritans, but also Protestant theologians in the Rhine-land and the Netherlands, and the Scottish Presbyterians formulated covenant theologies in the 17th century. All of these groups are appropriately called “Reformed,” and may be called “Calvinist” in the sense that they trace their tradition back to Calvin's theology.

8. Miller, P., The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century 413 (1939)Google Scholar.

9. Bellah, supra note 5, at 139-44.

10. Sturm, , Corporations, Constitutions and Covenants: On Forms of Human Relation and the Problem of Legitimacy, 41 J. Amer. Acad. Rel. 331–54 (1973)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Others, of course, have also used the covenant ideal normatively. Daniel Eleazar's “Workshop on Covenant and Politics” at Temple University has sponsored studies of the normative role of covenant in a variety of Jewish and Christian traditions. My concern in this essay is limited, however, to the Puritan covenant tradition and its impact on American public life. We must for the present forego the interesting question of how Puritanism is related to other traditions of covenant thought and, more generally, whether there are structural elements that link the various efforts to talk about society in covenantal terms.

11. Tuck, R., Natural Rights Theories 80 (1979)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

12. Studies of contract and covenant, often make a point of the multiplicity of fundamental agreements and the different relationships they establish between persons. For instance, a contract of government, which establishes one person or group as sovereign over others, differs from a social contract, which establishes relationships between members of a society. See Gough, J., The Social Contract 1–4 (1957)Google Scholar. The covenant of grace, which relates God to the redeemed, is different from the church covenant, which relates the redeemed to one another, and from the political covenant, which unites persons in general, redeemed or not. See McWilliams, W., The Idea of Fraternity in America 112–32 (1973)Google Scholar. These distinctions are valid, though the original authors often do not make them as explicitly as the commentators do. The terms of the different covenants or contracts vary, but the motivations and obligations that characterize each of these types of relationship, covenantal and contractual, remain much the same across the variety of specific agreements. For that reason, I will largely ignore the technical distinctions between contract of government and social contract, church covenant and political covenant, etc.

13. Kern, F., Kingship and Law in the Middle Ages 75–79 (1970)Google Scholar. See also Gough, supra note 12, at 22-35.

14. Hobbes, T., Leviathan 160 (Macpherson, ed. 1968)Google Scholar.

15. Tuck, supra note 11, at 90.

16. Hobbes, supra note 14, at 161.

17. Macpherson, C., The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism 40–45 (1962)Google Scholar.

18. Walzer, M., The Revolution of the Saints 30–38 (1973)Google Scholar.

19. Winthrop, J., The History of New England from 1630-1649 281 (Savage, J. ed. 1853)Google Scholar.

20. Fiering, N., The Moral Thought of Jonathan Edwards in its British Context 320 (1981)Google Scholar.

21. Baxter, R., How to do Good to Many, or the Public Good is the Christian's Life, in 17 The Practical Works of the Rev. Richard Baxter 294 (London 1682)Google Scholar.

22. Preston, J., The New Covenant or the Saint's Portion 376 (London 1624)Google Scholar. Spelling and punctuation have been modernized.

23. Edwards, J., The Nature of True Virtue 3 (Univ. of Mich. Press 1960) (1765)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

24. Miller, supra note 6, at 111-53.

25. Id. at 410-411.

26. Baxter, supra note 21, at 294.

27. Edwards, supra note 23, at 8.

28. On the pre-modern hierarchical ordering of society see Dumont, L., Homo Hierarchies 19–20 (1970)Google Scholar.

29. Locke, J., Two Treatises of Government 336–37 (New York 1965) (1689)Google Scholar.

30. Hobbes, supra note 14, at 189-90. It seems to me that the contract theorists' emphasis on natural human equality when the evidence could equally be presented, as Aristotle and Plato do, as evidence of natural human inequality, serves as a kind of intuitive equivalent to Rawls' famous “veil of ignorance.” If I know my own particular strengths and weaknesses, but do not know which characteristics will win the day in the struggles in which I will find myself, I would be prudent to put some limits on everyone's success, just as a Rawlsian contractor who does not know what strengths he/she will have would prudently limit the distresses of the worst off position.

31. Hobbes, , Human Nature, in The British Moralists: 1650-1800 5 (Raphael, D. ed. 1969)Google Scholar.

32. Hobbes, supra note 14, at 111.

33. Id.

34. Wolin, S., Politics and Vision 266 (1960)Google Scholar.

35. Preston, supra note 22, at 331. Spelling and punctuation modernized.

36. Hill, C., Puritanism and Revolution 259 (1958)Google Scholar.

37. Walzer, supra note 18, at 166-67.

38. See the study of Mather's work in Berkovitch, S., The Puritan Origins of the American Self 1–34 (1975)Google Scholar.

39. Constantin, , The Puritan Ethic and the Dignity of Labor: Hierarchy vs. Equality, 40 J. Hist, of Ideas547 (1979)Google Scholar.

40. Id.

41. Baxter, supra note 21, at 259.

42. Willard, S., The Character of a Good Ruler, in I The Puritans: A Sourcebook of Their Writings 252 (Miller, P. and Johnson, T. eds. 1963)Google Scholar.

43. Id. at 256.

44. Preston, supra note 22, at 375. Spelling and punctuation modernized.

45. Winthrop, supra note 19, at 280.

46. Lakoff, S., Equality in Political Philsophy 38–48 (1968)Google Scholar.

47. Winthrop, supra note 19, at 282.

48. Baxter supra note 21, at 303.

49. Locke, supra note 29, at 329.

50. Hobbes, supra note 14, at 201.

51. Hume, D., A Treatise of Human Nature (1739)Google Scholar; Smith, A., An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (Oxford 1976) (1776)Google Scholar.

52. See, inter alia the influential text on moral philosophy by Wayland, F., Elements of Moral Science 382 (New York 1835)CrossRefGoogle Scholar and the justification of depriving blacks of political rights in Dred Scott v. Sanford, 19 Howard 393 (1857).

53. Hartz, L., The Liberal Tradition in America 62 (1955)Google Scholar.

54. Hutcheson, F., An Inquiry Concerning Moral Good and Evil, in I The British Moralists: 1650-1800 263 (Raphael, D. ed. 1969)Google Scholar. The best survey of these developments, in my opinion, is still Raphael, D., The Moral Sense (1947)Google Scholar.

55. On the American reception of moral sense theory, see White, M., The Philosophy of the American Revolution 99–141 (1978)Google Scholar.

56. I The Record of the Federal Convention of 1787 68 (Farrand, M. ed. 1911)Google Scholar.

57. Wilson, J., Lectures on Law, in The Works of James Wilson 405 (McCloskey, R. ed. 1967)Google Scholar.

58. Sullivan, W., Reconstructing Public Philosophy (1982)Google Scholar.

59. Lovin, , Covenantal Relationships and Political Legitimacy, 60 J. of Religion 1–16 (1980)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

60. Attention to the relational and community-creating aspects of contractual relationships is one way of acknowledging this tension. Ian Macneil has recently suggested a concept of contract that incorporates many of the important themes which, I am suggesting, have their origin in a covenantal view of political community. Such a revised contract theory, of course, substantially modifies the narrowly empiricist assumptions about human nature and individuality that prevailed among the 18th century contract theorists. See Macneil, , Values in Contract: Internal and External, 78 Nw. U.L. Rev. 340–418 (1983)Google Scholar.

61. Greenstone offered this suggestion at a faculty seminar of the University of Chicago's Project on Religion and American Public Life.

62. Baxter, supra note 21, at 303.