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Equality and Covenant Theology

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 February 2016

Robin W. Lovin
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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

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References

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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.

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