Covenant is an immensely rich concept, both historically and constructively. Ancient Near Eastern rulers entered into covenants to organize and regulate their political life. The Hebrew scriptures, through a complex appropriation and modification of the covenant forms of their ancient Near Eastern neighbors, describe several covenants that God entered with human partners as well as a number of intrahuman covenants. The New Testament interprets this Old Testament teaching and presents the new covenant in Christ as its culmination. This biblical material has in turn prompted many Jewish and Christian thinkers to develop theologies of covenant in their elaboration of religious doctrine. The idea of covenant has also played important roles in the Western legal and political traditions.
It should be no surprise that covenant has been an important theme in the scholarship of John Witte, Jr. Even his origins may have disposed him to this topic from an early age: Witte was raised in the Dutch Reformed tradition, and Reformed Christianity, more than any other Christian tradition, has emphasized the biblical covenants as an organizing topic of theology. Witte would became a scholar of law and religion, and few concepts play a more promising role in the intersection and integration of law and religion than covenant. Moreover, given the appearance of covenant in a number of different religious and legal traditions, it has prospect for the sort of fruitful engagement across confessional divides that Witte has sought to cultivate for decades at Emory University’s Center for the Study of Law and Religion.
It is truly an honor to contribute to his Festschrift. I have long regarded him as a model scholar. He not only is a prolific and accomplished writer but also is dedicated to excellence in teaching and is a master collaborator and encourager. It’s the last of these qualities that I appreciate most of all. Despite the fact that Witte moves in the highest echelons of the academic world and I teach at a small and relatively obscure theological seminary, he has encouraged me, offered me otherwise inaccessible opportunities, and promoted my work for nearly two decades now. I am profoundly grateful for these things and offer this chapter as a small token of thanks.
I first survey what Witte has contributed to recent scholarship on covenant. Then I offer some of my own reflections on covenant related to Witte’s work
1 John Witte’s Scholarship on Covenant
Witte’s work on covenant has addressed the topic in two primary contexts: marriage and political association. The former focus seems to appear more frequently in his writings, and so I discuss this first.
Witte has often written about the biblical, and particularly Old Testament, roots of considering marriage as a covenantal relationship. He notes that earlier parts of the Old Testament canon don’t treat marriage as a covenant in any direct way. But as we reach the prophetical literature, this idea takes on great theological and practical importance. As Witte explains, several prophets—particularly Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Hosea, and Malachi—analogize the marriage relationship to God’s covenant relationship with Israel. Israel’s unfaithfulness to Yahweh was like marital infidelity that threatened to dissolve their bond. This conception of marriage as a covenant became most explicit in Malachi, which refers to a woman being the companion and wife of her husband “by covenant” (2:14).1
Witte is not an Old Testament scholar by specialty, of course, and his writing on these matters makes generous use of other scholars’ work. But Witte has added his own constructive reflections on what this covenantal dimension contributes to an understanding of marriage. For one, it confirms several things evident elsewhere in scripture. It confirms the presentation of marriage as a monogamous union of one man and one woman in Genesis 2. It also confirms God’s participation in each marriage as well as the procreative function of marriage. Further, it confirms God’s laws for marriage formation already present in the natural and Mosaic laws. But the covenant metaphor, according to Witte, also added new dimensions to Mosaic regulations about marriage and exemplified the spirit of those regulations. It drew individual marriages
Witte has devoted great attention to the development of the law and theology of marriage in the West, an area in which he has made many of his most important contributions to scholarly learning. One of his favorite areas of interest is how the Protestant Reformation transformed Western marriage policy and law. According to Witte, Martin Luther and the Lutheran Reformation added new dimensions to the theology and practice of marriage, many of them related to their two-kingdoms doctrine. For Lutherans, marriage was an institution of the earthly kingdom. In his early work, John Calvin largely followed Luther. But although he never rejected this Lutheran precedent, “Calvin’s mature theology of marriage was grounded in the biblical doctrine of covenant.”3 In a number of works, Witte has outlined this rich covenantal conception of marriage developed by Calvin and continued in later Reformed writers.4
Although primarily a historian of the law and theology of marriage, Witte also keeps a keen eye on contemporary debates and contributes wise interventions on the future course of marriage and family law. Among the developments that piqued his interest a couple of decades ago was the fledgling movement to recognize “covenant marriage” in several American states. The idea was to give prospective couples two legal options, either to pursue a merely contractual marriage that is easy to enter and easy to leave or to choose a covenantal marriage that requires premarital counseling and sets a high bar for divorce.5 In more recent work, however, Witte has acknowledged that despite this movement’s promising start, it failed to get far off the ground.6
Witte has also directed his legal-historical attention to the importance of covenant for political association. Here again he has found the most evidence for this within the Reformed tradition. In several works, especially The Reformation of Rights, Witte has examined numerous early Reformed texts—many
As Witte has shown that early Reformed theologians drew their covenantal perspective on marriage from scripture, so he also demonstrates the biblical inspiration for their covenantal perspective on politics and law. They believed that political covenants of their own day were parallel to intrahuman Old Testament covenants, in which Israelite kings pledged their submission to God’s law and to the people’s liberties.8 Witte is aware of how such convictions problematize the idea of religious liberty. He has argued, however, that the New England Puritans’ idea “of a liberty of covenant, while initially exclusivist, eventually became the basis for a robust theory of confessional pluralism.”9
John Witte has amassed a treasure of historical scholarship on the importance of covenant in biblical literature and especially in the Western legal and political tradition. While immensely valuable in its own right, this scholarship raises pressing questions about its relevance for contemporary law, politics, and marriage—and this may be putting it lightly, given the religious fragmentation and increasing secularity of our own day. In the rest of this chapter, I seek to extend and engage some of these important conversations that Witte has instigated. I do so as a Reformed theologian, for whose own work on ethics and political theology the covenant idea has been crucial.
2 Intrahuman Covenantal Relationships: Initial Reflections
There are many kinds of human relationships. What makes covenantal relationships different from others? One characteristic of covenantal relationships is that they are designed to be long-term. There would be no point in establishing
Some human relationships can be short-term and meet only immediate needs. But we also need long-term relationships. One common and useful form of longer-term relationship is contract. In contracts, the parties agree to discharge certain obligations in the future, ordinarily with the understanding that enforcement mechanisms stand behind them. The difference between contractual and covenantal relationships doesn’t necessarily concern the substance of the obligations or the reality of enforcement. The essential difference is that covenants involve swearing an oath to God. Covenants invoke God to witness the agreement and even to enforce it. Covenants therefore have a solemnity and weightiness that contracts don’t, even though violating the latter may entail painful temporal consequences.
Contracts and covenants, then, are different kinds of long-term relationships. This raises the question of why a covenantal relationship would ever be
Establishing covenantal relationships in a limited number of areas of life may seem theoretically attractive, but it raises further questions, which are necessarily theological in nature. Perhaps most serious: On what grounds are human beings justified in invoking God to witness and enforce relationships of their own making? Why isn’t this presumptuous? Why isn’t it a form of blasphemy, a misuse of God’s name in violation of the Decalogue? What gives us authority to put God under obligation? Even if there’s a satisfactory response to this problem, at least one other big question remains: Can people of different religious convictions enter covenants with each other? Such people don’t share the same ideas about the “God” they invoke,12 and presumably mutual agreement on the terms of a covenant is essential to its validity. The potential contemporary usefulness of covenant surely depends greatly on the answer to this question.
The Old Testament uses covenantal language and imagery when describing some political and marital relationships. This practice indicates, for those of us who acknowledge the Old Testament’s authority, that there is theological justification for entering political and marital covenants in certain circumstances. It’s worth exploring why this is the case, which in turn may provide insight
3 Political Covenants
I return to the first of the big questions raised above: On what grounds are human beings justified in invoking God to witness and enforce relationships of their own making? The basic answer I propose is that human parties are justified in establishing political covenants when such covenants emerge between people who are already together in covenant with God and when such covenants serve to advance that covenant with God.13 Before proceeding further, I should note that covenants may take different forms. In the Old Testament there are divine-human covenants and intrahuman covenants, and these are necessarily different in some respects. But there are also different kinds of divine-human covenants and different kinds of intrahuman covenants, reflected in the relative strength of the covenanting parties or the kinds of obligations each party has. I need not provide further details here, but the discussion below presumes such differences.14 Now back to the point above: intrahuman political covenants are justified when grounded in and advancing a covenant that God has already made with both parties.
The first two intrahuman political covenants in the Old Testament are those between Abraham and Abimelech, king of Gerar, in Genesis 21 and between Isaac and Abimelech (II?) in Genesis 26. Both covenants involved oaths (21:23–24, 31–32; 26:28–31). As we read these accounts in the context of Genesis, we find that despite Abraham’s and Isaac’s many differences with Abimelech, they had one very important thing in common: they were all human partners of the covenant God made in Genesis 8:21–9:17, what I will call the Noahic covenant. God made this covenant with Noah as the father of a renewed humanity after the great flood, and with his offspring after him (9:8–9). The text also states that God made it with all living creatures of the earth for all future generations (9:10, 12, 15–16). It’s a truly universal covenant, extending even to the earth itself and the broader natural order (8:21–22; 9:13, 17). The implications are clear: all
There are compelling reasons to interpret their covenants in Genesis 21 and 26 in light of this preexisting covenantal bond. To begin, scholars have noted that the covenants of Genesis 21 and 26 are parity covenants. That is, Abraham and Isaac covenanted with Abimelech as equals.16 Their mutual participation in the Noahic covenant is part of the explanation for this. For one thing, the Noahic covenant put all human beings in their place, for in it God, the superior, covenanted with humans, the inferior.17 This implied a fundamental equality of humility among all humans. But the Noahic covenant also acknowledged the equal dignity of all human beings. They’re all divine image-bearers, and their blood is of equivalent value (9:6).
This organic connection between the Noahic covenant and the intrahuman covenants of Genesis 21 and 26 provides some reason to think that the legitimacy of the latter rests in the former. But surely intrahuman covenanting can’t be justified merely on the ground of mutual participation in the Noahic covenant. The additional element necessary is that intrahuman covenants must advance the Noahic covenant’s purposes. Humans can have confidence invoking God’s name to witness and enforce their own covenants if such covenants promote covenantal responsibilities that God has already given them.
What are the Noahic covenantal responsibilities? The account of the Noahic covenant doesn’t mention many, but one of them comes in poetic form: “Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed, for God made man in his own image” (9:6).18 To put it simply, the human community ought to enforce justice against wrongdoers and restore peace where there’s conflict. And this was indeed a central purpose of the covenants in Genesis 21 and 26. Abraham and Abimelech had had a serious dispute in Genesis 20, which
Before reflecting further on political covenants grounded in the Noahic covenant, I pause for an interlude. The Old Testament describes other intrahuman political covenants that are crucially different from those of Abraham and Isaac with Abimelech. I think especially of covenants that the people of Israel established with some of their kings—David (1 Samuel 5:3; 1 Chronicles 11:3), Asa (2 Chronicles 15:12–14), and Joash (1 Kings 11:17; 2 Chronicles 23:3, 16)—in which they made various commitments to each other and to the Lord. These intra-Israelite covenants weren’t grounded in the Noahic covenant as the covenants of Abraham and Isaac with Abimelech were. The former pledged, for example, that Israel would be the Lord’s people (1 Kings 11:17; 2 Chronicles 23:16) and that any Israelites who failed to seek the God of Israel would be put to death (2 Chronicles 15:13). The Israelite people had no inherent right to make themselves God’s special people, nor did any Israelite have an inherent right to execute a person for failure to worship properly. Nor did the Noahic covenant give Israelites or anyone else such authority.
But another covenant functioned to ground these intra-Israelite political covenants in a way analogous to how the Noahic covenant grounded the intrahuman covenants in Genesis 21 and 26, namely, the Mosaic covenant established at Sinai and later renewed in Deuteronomy. In this covenant, God declared that Israel would be his “treasured possession among all peoples” (Exodus 19:5). This covenant also commanded that idolaters should be executed (for example, Exodus 22:20). Hence, when later Israelite kings and people made the covenants they did, they committed themselves to be the
This interlude isn’t a digression, since it raises important constructive questions and also prompts some engagement with issues raised by John Witte’s scholarship. As mentioned above, Witte has noted how many early Reformed political writers viewed political association through the lens of covenant. In doing so, they analogized their contemporary political covenants with the political covenants between Israelite kings and people. Witte’s historical work is certainly accurate, but did these early Reformed thinkers have good grounds for this analogy? If my preceding analysis of Old Testament covenanting is on solid footing, the answer seems to be negative. The Israelite kings and people covenanted with each other in response to the prior covenant God had made with Israel. But early modern European kings and people couldn’t look back to any covenant God had made with them. God never established France, for instance, as his special people, as he established Israel at Sinai. The intra-Israelite political covenants were thus a problematic precedent for sixteenth- and seventeenth-century political covenants.
As Christians, of course, early Reformed writers could look back to the New Testament and claim to be covenanted with God through the new covenant. Should these Reformed thinkers have appealed to the new covenant as precedent for their political covenants, then? This too would have been problematic. In the New Testament, the new-covenant community wasn’t a political nation but a church. Christ gave his church apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors, and teachers (Ephesians 4:11), but no magistrates. He gave his church the keys of the kingdom of heaven (Matthew 16:18–19), but no sword of justice that magistrates possessed (Romans 13:4). The covenants of Abraham and Isaac with Abimelech enacted the requirements of the Noahic covenant in which all three participated, and the covenants of Israelite kings and people enacted the requirements of the Mosaic covenant in which they all participated. But entering a political covenant does not and cannot enact the requirements of the new covenant.
This isn’t to say that early Reformed writers were wrong in their desire to view political association of their own day through a covenantal lens. In my judgment, however, they should have considered the Noahic covenant the foundation for their own political covenanting. In turn, this implies that they should have regarded the political covenants of Genesis 21 and 26, rather than those between Israelite kings and people, as proper biblical precedent. God put the Noahic covenant into place until the end of the world as we know it
These concerns aren’t simply theoretical. One major practical difference between viewing the Noahic covenant as foundational and viewing the Mosaic covenant as foundational is whether those entering a political covenant constitute a special people holy to the Lord. Covenanting under the auspices of the Mosaic covenant, the Israelites properly considered themselves such a people. The Mosaic law promulgated detailed regulations for right worship and their coercive enforcement. This provided justification for what we today would call rejection of religious liberty in their political covenants (as observed above, for example, in 2 Chronicles 15:13). But the Noahic covenant established no particular people as a special people holy to the Lord, nor did it give instructions for right worship and its enforcement. It thus provides no justification for seeking uniformity of religious belief and practice in political covenants established under its auspices.
Religious liberty is another prominent topic in John Witte’s scholarship, as explored elsewhere in this volume. I suggest that regarding the Noahic covenant as foundational for political covenants provides excellent theological rationale for supporting a broad measure of religious freedom.22 Or from another angle: those already convinced of the good of religious liberty should find it attractive to view the Noahic covenant as politically foundational.
Of course, this was not the mindset of early Reformed writers. Like most of their contemporaries in other Christian traditions as well, they considered their political communities Christian nations, or at least as communities that ought to be Christian nations. They sought toleration for their own worship when under hostile governments but didn’t think of broad religious liberty as a political ideal.
As a self-identifying confessional Presbyterian, I acknowledge the Scottish Presbyterians as among my spiritual forebears. Yet I must regard their conception of political covenant as inconsistent with a biblical covenant theology, and thus inconsistent with their own deepest convictions. The Reformed tradition would do well to dissent from this part of its legacy, in my judgment.
4 The Prospects for Contemporary Political Covenants
The previous section leaves open the question whether viewing political association through a covenantal lens is helpful for Christians and others in our present day. Since religious liberty is now quite widely affirmed (though hardly uncontroversial), my preceding comments may suggest initial grounds for an affirmative answer. Nevertheless, those preceding comments also raise a puzzling question: how can people who aren’t united by a common religious confession enter valid covenants with each other? If they don’t share the same conception of the “God” whom their covenant oath invokes, how can the different parties have confidence in each other’s understanding of the terms and commitment to observe them? This was the second of the big questions I raised in my initial reflections on intrahuman covenants.
This question takes us back to the political covenants Abraham and Isaac made with Abimelech. These biblical stories indicate that political covenants can indeed be valid between parties of different religions and also indicate the
Did Abraham and Abimelech share a common religion? The most plausible evidence for an affirmative answer is probably in the opening verses of Genesis 20. Abraham was on the move, as he often was, and he sojourned in Gerar, where Abimelech was king. Afraid for his safety, Abraham presented his wife Sarah as his sister, and Abimelech promptly took her into his harem. At this point “God came to Abimelech in a dream by night” (20:3). In context, it’s clear that this is the same God as the one described throughout Genesis. God informed Abimelech that Sarah was Abraham’s wife, Abimelech protested his innocence since Abraham had told him otherwise, and God acknowledged his ignorance but instructed Abimelech to return Sarah to Abraham, upon pain of death (20:3–7). Abimelech, it seems, had a relationship with the same God whom Abraham worshiped.
But on further reflection, it’s doubtful that Abraham and Abimelech truly shared a common religion. Earlier narratives in Genesis describe an intimate relationship that God established with Abraham by covenant oath, through which he promised to make his offspring numerous and a blessing to all nations of the earth, to which promises Abraham clung by faith (Genesis 15: 17). Genesis communicates that no other individual or people enjoyed such a privilege. Polytheistic idolatry was presumably the default religious orientation of the day. Even Abraham had been an idolater (see Joshua 24:2). Genesis 20 gives no indication that Abimelech had any intimate fellowship with Abraham’s God or even that their nocturnal encounter concerning Sarah had any precedent. It’s unlikely that Abimelech thought of Abraham’s God as anyone other than one deity among others. Abraham and Abimelech didn’t share a common faith.
Yet they entered a covenant in Genesis 21, in which they both swore oaths. This demands explanation, and it seems to lie in an important detail in Genesis 20: the “fear of God” existed in Gerar under Abimelech’s reign. Following the revelation that Sarah was actually Abraham’s wife, Abimelech confronted Abraham and accused him of doing “things that ought not to be done” (20:9). Abraham offered a rather half-hearted defense, explaining that he thought, “There is no fear of God at all in this place, and they will kill me because of my wife” (20:11). The context makes evident that Abraham was wrong in this suspicion. Gerar was not the sort of place that kills husbands to steal their wives. There was fear of God in this place.
What is fear of God, in this context? As in several other Old Testament texts, it seems to represent respect for a divine power higher than oneself, under whose judgment one stands. As such, this fear of God restrained those who had it from certain egregious acts of injustice, and the lack of it explained the
It would be interesting to know what names for God each of their oaths used. The text tells us that after Abimelech departed, Abraham “called there on the name of the LORD [YHWH], the Everlasting God” (21:33). This was God’s special covenant name, which Abimelech never uttered and presumably didn’t know. But even if they called God by different names, reflecting their different religions, they were able to swear oaths to promote mutual peace and justice. Abraham and Abimelech weren’t spiritual kin, but neither were they moral strangers. As Novak has put it, they occupied “a common moral universe.”25 Covenants such as theirs didn’t aim to bring utopia but to promote relatively and provisionally livable societies. And that seems to be precisely the goal the Noahic covenant suggests is appropriate.26
So what about our own day? It isn’t immediately obvious what contemporary occasions might call for covenants in political communities that already have a settled and functioning constitutional order. The situation of Abraham sojourning with his large household of servants in the city-state of Gerar seems exceedingly distant from the politics of my own country, the United States, and of many other countries. But we can leave it open for now as to whether there may be occasions in which associations within the contemporary American constitutional order might enter political covenants. Of course, the United States continues to negotiate and enter treaties with other countries. This is pertinent to note since “treaty” and “covenant” are arguably synonyms. Some English translations of scripture use “treaty” to translate the common Hebrew word for “covenant” when it describes what I’ve called a political covenant. So I pose this question: Is the contemporary United States the kind of place qualified to enter covenants, either among its own people or with other countries? The fitting way to ask the question, in terms of preceding discussion, is whether the contemporary United States is a place that fears God.
I have my doubts. Many people do regard the United States as a religious country, although such claims seem true only on a relative basis, in comparison to more secularized places, such as Western Europe. But even if the
Yet I don’t mean to communicate despair about the United States. To judge a place as lacking in the fear of God is simply to say that it’s no Gerar.27 It doesn’t mean that it’s Sodom either, or Amalek, which swept behind Israel when they came out of Egypt and cut off the weaker people lagging behind because Amalek “did not fear God” (Deuteronomy 25:17–18). Viewing American political association through a contractual lens—somewhere between a trustful covenantal lens and a deeply suspicious transactional lens—may be the best we can do. But it’s better than the worst we could do.
5 Marital Covenants
If there is a strongly viable place for covenants as a means for social organization in today’s world, marital covenants are likely the better candidate. Perhaps this is why John Witte has spent more time writing about them than about political covenants. In this final section of the chapter, I offer a few brief reflections on the subject.
Although it may be disagreeable to some readers, I believe it’s proper to consider marital covenants, like political covenants, under the auspices of the Noahic covenant. It’s true, as Witte has discussed, that the Old Testament prophets frequently analogized God’s relationship to Israel to marriage, and
Marital covenants can thus be justified on similar grounds to political covenants. What right do a man and woman have to invoke the name of God when entering into a marriage relationship by their own choice? The answer is that God has established marriage as a good and necessary human relationship, and he has confirmed its ongoing importance by way of covenant. Thus, when couples swear by God’s name to enter into a marital covenant, they advance God’s own covenantal purposes. The man and woman already share a preexisting covenant relationship with God, and on that basis can covenant with each other to promote its requirements.
Marital covenants have no greater theoretical legitimacy than political covenants, but there are practical reasons to think that the former have greater prospects than the latter for meeting the criteria of validity. One reason is simply that marital covenants involve a much smaller number of parties, at least in our own day, when heads of state don’t speak personally on behalf of a community as ancient potentates did. That is, a head of state who genuinely fears God can’t enter an international treaty or covenant on the basis of the integrity of her personal oath. Many political communities today may be simply too big or too democratically conceived to make covenants between them viable. But not so with marriage. A second reason is that shared religious conviction is one of the most common things that bring marriage partners together, and some religions require their adherents to marry only within the faith. To put it another way, individuals who fear God, and who fear God in the same way, tend to find each other and marry. Many couples, of course, lack the sort of religious beliefs that would make legitimate covenanting possible. But for many others their shared conviction will make their oaths mutually comprehensible and thus their obligations mutually clear.
In the face of easy divorce and broader breakdown of the family in much of the world, the potential usefulness of viewing marriage as covenantal is rather obvious. The fledgling covenant-marriage movement in the United States may have fizzled in a strictly legal sense, but there’s nothing stopping families and other nonpolitical bodies from promoting and recognizing marital covenants. The state may view marriage as only a legal contract, but couples and their supporting communities can treat it much more profoundly, for what it truly is.
I write this chapter with great appreciation for John Witte, Jr. and his contribution to contemporary thinking about covenant. It’s with some regret that I can’t offer a more enthusiastic assessment of the prospects for covenant in our present cultural moment, but as I believe Witte would agree, covenant by itself cannot heal an ill society. Making covenants, in fact, presumes a certain moral health already present in those who make them. If and when Western societies begin to heal from their focus on individual self-fulfillment, and begin to gain (or regain) a sense of the fear of God, perhaps political and marital covenanting can be both a beneficial result of that healing and an instrument for its continuation and sustenance.
See, for example, John Witte, Jr., From Sacrament to Contract: Marriage, Religion, and Law in the Western Tradition, 2nd ed. (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2012), 39–43; John Witte, Jr., God’s Joust, God’s Justice: Law and Religion in the Western Tradition (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2006), 377; John Witte, Jr. and Joel A. Nichols, introduction to Covenant Marriage in Comparative Perspective, ed. John Witte, Jr. and Eliza Ellison (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005), 16–18; and John Witte, Jr., Church, State, and Family: Reconciling Traditional Teachings and Modern Liberties (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 228–30.
See, for example, From Sacrament to Contract, 43–45; and Church, State, and Family, 230–32.
From Sacrament to Contract, 185; see also John Witte, Jr. and Robert M. Kingdon, Sex, Marriage, and Family in John Calvin’s Geneva, vol. 1, Courtship, Engagement, and Marriage (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005), 490.
See, for example, From Sacrament to Contract, 184–212; God’s Joust, 378–80; Witte and Kingdon, Sex, Marriage, and Family, 482–90; John Witte, Jr., The Western Case for Monogamy Over Polygamy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 245–53; and Church, State, and Family, 85–105.
See, for example, God’s Joust, 364–68; and Witte and Nichols, introduction to Covenant Marriage, 1–5.
See Church, State, and Family, 312–14.
See, especially, John Witte, Jr., The Reformation of Rights: Law, Religion, and Human Rights in Early Modern Calvinism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 122 (Goodman), 122–41 (Beza), 187–203 (Althusius), 223 (Milton), and 287–314 (the New England Puritans). For related discussions, see, for example, God’s Joust, 143–60, 350–51; and John Witte, Jr., The Blessings of Liberty: Human Rights and Religious Freedom in the Western Legal Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022), 60, 102, 115–16.
See, for example, The Reformation of Rights, 122, 125, 188–91; and The Blessings of Liberty, 20.
The Reformation of Rights, 288.
David Novak calls this a “commercial transaction.” See The Jewish Social Contract: An Essay in Political Theology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 44. Novak’s work on intrahuman covenants as rooted in divine-human covenants has been very helpful and stimulative for my own work over the years. Many of my conclusions are similar, although not identical, to his. Acknowledging Novak’s contribution here seems especially fitting since I have heard John Witte express his appreciation for Novak’s work as well, and Novak has contributed to several of Witte’s projects. See, for example, David Novak, “Religious Human Rights in Judaic Texts,” in Religious Human Rights in Global Perspective: Religious Perspectives, ed. John Witte, Jr. and Johan D. van der Vyver (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1996), 175–202; David Novak, “Law and Religion in Judaism,” in Christianity and Law: An Introduction, ed. John Witte, Jr. and Frank S. Alexander (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 33–52; and David Novak, “The Judaic Foundation of Rights,” in Christianity and Human Rights: An Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 47–63.
See Novak, The Jewish Social Contract, 211.
Ibid., 34–35.
Novak offers a similar answer. See, especially, his distinction between “master” covenants and “derivative” covenants in The Jewish Social Contract, 33–34.
For a useful summary of the different kinds of covenants in scripture and in the ancient Near East, see Scott W. Hahn, Kinship by Covenant: A Canonical Approach to the Fulfillment of God’s Saving Promises (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 29.
For detailed discussion of this Noahic covenant, including a defense of distinguishing the covenant with Noah here after the great flood from the covenant with Noah before the flood (Genesis 6:18), see David VanDrunen, Divine Covenant and Moral Order: A Biblical Theology of Natural Law (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2014), chap.2. That volume is part of the Emory University Studies in Law and Religion, under the general editorship of John Witte, Jr.
See, for example, Hahn, Kinship by Covenant, 43.
As Novak puts it, “The most either of them can ever be is a covenanted, junior partner of God. Only then can they become equal partners with each other.” See The Jewish Social Contract, 46.
Scripture quotations are from The ESV Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good New Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
See Daniel I. Block, Covenant: The Framework of God’s Grand Plan of Redemption (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2021), 109.
Novak, The Jewish Social Contract, 45–46.
One important early modern Protestant figure who used the Noahic covenant as a foundation for legal, political, and social life was English jurist John Selden. See discussion of his views in John Witte, Jr., Faith, Freedom, and Family: New Essays in Law and Religion, ed. Norman Doe and Gary S. Hauk (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2021), chap. 9 (“The Integrative Christian Jurisprudence of John Selden”).
For detailed defense of this claim, see David VanDrunen, Politics after Christendom: Political Theology in a Fractured World (Grand Rapids: Zondervan Academic, 2020), chap.7.
On the National Covenant generally, see, for example, Dictionary of Scottish Church History & Theology, ed. Nigel M. de S. Cameron et al (Downers Grove, IL: InterVaristy, 1993), 620. A different but relevant example may be the Afrikaners, who emerged from and developed their own version of Dutch Reformed Christianity. Their self-understanding as a covenanted people seems to have contributed to the inseparability of their commitments to their religion and to their national identity, with many complicated and tragic implications for the history of South Africa. For related discussion, see Jonathan Neil Gerstner, The Ten Thousand Generation Covenant: Dutch Reformed Covenant Theology and Group Identity in Colonial South Africa, 1652–1814 (Leiden: Brill, 1991), especially chap. 11. See also, generally, Hermann Giliomee, The Afrikaners: Biography of a People, expanded ed. (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2009).
See VanDrunen, Divine Covenants, 157–61.
Novak, The Jewish Social Contract, 42–43.
Ibid., 47.
Gerar itself was far from ideal. Abimelech, thinking Sarah was unmarried, “took” her (Genesis 20:2). Abimelech wouldn’t have killed Abraham if she were his wife, which was good, but what he did still sounds like violence against women.