Covenant, Contract, and English Politics

The Covenanters vs. Hobbes & Locke

Introduction
17th century England was a topsy-turvy political scene. From the “Divine Right of Kings” theory of James I, culminating in the English Civil War and the execution of Charles I to Oliver Cromwell’s protectorate unraveling into the restoration of the monarchy, lurching back toward Roman Catholicism, with a final gasp of Protestantism in the Glorious Revolution. Behind all of that were political theologies and philosophies — competing notions of covenant and contract — playing significant roles in the conflict and turmoil. Today we trace two and half visions of society at work in England during the 17^th century while war and unrest racked the nation — pieces of which would ultimately find themselves at work in the American project.

The Covenant Concept
One of the most significant doctrines recovered during the Reformation was the idea of “covenant.” On the one hand, this helped to correct the superstitions of the Roman Catholic Church, which had functionally turned sacraments into pseudo-magical moments – instead, the Reformers taught that baptism and the Lord’s Supper were signs and seals of the covenant between God and man through Jesus. A covenant is a formal, binding oath between two or more persons with attendant blessings and curses. Reaching back to Adam, God had made a covenant of life with him and all of his descendants, and when Adam disobeyed, the curses of sin and death came upon them. But God made a new covenant, promising that the seed of the woman would one day crush the seed of the serpent and bring blessing back to Adam’s race. Later, God made covenant with Noah, promising not to destroy the world again with a flood and renewed the dominion mandate and established principles of justice for all men (Gen. 9). Then God made a covenant with Abraham, passing through the cut animals, giving him the sign of circumcision, promising to give Abraham many descendants and land and that in his seed all the nations of the earth would be blessed (Gen. 15, 17). God renewed covenant with Israel at Mt. Sinai, remembering his promises to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob (Ex. 19:5, 24:7-8), and as the Protestant Reformers struggled to articulate a political theology, they noticed that God made covenant with Israel as a nation and that this covenant was for the blessing of all the nations. While it was clear that this was a unique covenant with Israel, it suggested that other nations might be established as “covenanted under God” as well.

They also noted that other kinds of covenants existed in Scripture between Abraham and Abimelech (Gen. 21), Abimelech and Isaac (Gen. 26), Laban and Jacob (Gen. 31), as well as the covenant of marriage (Mal. 2:14). And even kings sometimes made covenant in establishing a nation in justice and truth (2 Kgs. 23). The idea of covenant was not merely for religious or directly redemptive purposes. It was a way for men to establish formal bonds and agreements with stipulations and sanctions under God.

In Scotland, John Knox and other Reformers came to be known as “covenanters” for their promotion of the idea that the nation of Scotland ought to be established as a covenanted nation to God as well as between leaders and the people. The French Huguenots also argued for this civil covenant polity in Vindiciae Contra Tyrannos. And this meant that just as a marriage covenant can be broken and dissolved by certain breaches of fidelity, they taught that certain breaches of duty to God or the people would make it biblically legitimate to dissolve a civil government. There are of course echoes here of the old feudal relationships, which probably developed from some of these Christian instincts to begin with.

English Civil War
Against the covenanter notions, King James I taught the “divine right of kings,” which essentially claimed that monarchs had their authority directly from God which was affectively absolute. While King James asserted this, he was smart enough not to push it too hard. But his son Charles I asserted it more forcefully, trying to get funding for his wars on the Continent – which included him levying taxes without Parliament’s permission, forced loans, martial law, imprisoning without warrant, and quartering troops. In 1628, Charles faced a sort of “Magna Charta moment” when he was forced to agree to the “Petition of Right” from Parliament, reasserting the rights of Englishmen to have substantive representation in Parliament and the King’s custom of working with Parliament.

As the Reformation continued in England, sharper divides appeared between Episcopalians, Presbyterians, and Independents/Separatists. “Puritans” were members of both the Episcopalian and Presbyterian parties, committed to purifying the Church according to Scripture, but differing over church government. During this period, Parliament usually consisted of a majority of Presbyterians. When Charles marched on the Scottish Presbyterians in 1639, not only did the military campaign fail, but Parliament retaliated by condemning the Earl of Strafford and Archbishop Laud and beheading them both. When Charles failed to quell further violence, he fled to Nottingham, and the English Civil War had begun.

The Royalists supported the King and the Roundheads were led by Oliver Cromwell. The presbyterians were initially largely aligned with the Roundheads, but as the war progressed, the more revolutionary anabaptists and anarchists began to have more influence over the Independents, and many presbyterians swung back to the side of the King. By 1644, the Royalists had been beaten, and in 1649, Charles was beheaded. Oliver Cromwell tried to get Parliament to establish some kind of Constitutional Republic, but nothing materialized and with the threat of anarchists and revolutionaries (e.g. the “Levellers” and the “Diggers/True Levellers”), he became the Lord Protector, a sort of benevolent military dictator in 1653. When Cromwell died in 1660, Charles II was brought back to England and the monarchy and episcopacy was restored, but never with the same authority as before.

Thomas Hobbes
Born in 1588, Thomas Hobbes lived a prodigious 92 years through the cacophony of these events, serving as the tutor of two Earls of Devonshire, and the exiled Prince of Wales, later Charles II. Hobbes’ great political treatise is Leviathan (1651), in which he argued that because of the nature of man, only a centralized, absolute, impersonal state can keep men from constant violence and war. Hobbes rejected Christianity as “the kingdom of fairies” and what he considered romantic and sentimental hopes in personal loyalties and relationships. He said that humans exist in a “state of nature” where life is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” Nature is a “war of all against all” (bellum omnium contra omnes).

In many ways, Hobbes was the polar opposite of feudalism and covenantalism. In place of a covenanted society, he posited that society was just a collection of selfish individuals that are kept from destroying one another by the power of an absolute ruler. Hobbes was an arch-individualist, arguing that all men fundamentally serve their own interests as individuals, like so many grains of sand. And men unite in society through a “social contract” only because they fear one another and the absolute ruler. Hobbes said that once this absolute “social contract” is established it can never be broken since that will result in chaos and anarchy. Hobbes translated the old Christian version of natural law into mere convention and convenience. And while his theories have never been popular in their raw form, his iconoclasm and cynical articulation made him a formidable opponent, and in hindsight, many scholars consider him the father of the modern state.

John Locke
In the aftermath of the English Civil War, John Locke offered another “via media” of sorts, this time in politics and political theory. Over against what many saw as religious extremism and enthusiasm, Locke offered a theory of the state without partisan religious language or doctrine, but what he proposed was a notion of freedom and social contract without a solid foundation.

In February 1689, John Locke (1632-1704) returned to England from Holland after six years in exile. After Charles II died, his brother James II came to the throne of England, but as a convert to Roman Catholicism, he had been very aggressively promoting Catholicism, and Parliament and many leading nobles invited his son in law, William of Orange from the Netherlands, to come to England to depose James. William agreed, James fled to Ireland, where he raised an army, but he was defeated. This is known by history as the “Glorious Revolution” and once again established England as a Protestant nation, albeit not so “Puritan” or presbyterian as many had wished.

John Locke became and still is one of the most influential thinkers in political philosophy down to the present day. His name is often invoked as emblematic of toleration, virtue, and representative government. Some scholars argue that what actually emerged in American civics is most closely a reflection of Locke’s vision, but more on that in a moment.

Locke’s two Treatises of Civil Government and his Essay Concerning Human Understanding are his most important works that still influence many discussions of civics and political theory. Locke argued against Hobbes for a different understanding of “social contract:” that nations are formed by the free agreement of the people. That free consent is represented in the Parliament, and executive power (e.g. monarch, president) is delegated by the legislature. Therefore, the people can withdraw their support for government when the trust is violated or the government devolves into tyranny. Locke argued for what he called the “natural rights” of men, principally life, liberty, and property — which Thomas Jefferson was clearly riffing off of in the American Declaration of Independence. While Locke was a professing Christian, he functionally denied the doctrine of Original Sin, believing that people are born with a “blank slate” (tabula rasa). Locke was highly optimistic that through experience people would generally come to respect one another’s rights and therefore argued that government could be relatively small and limited. John Locke is known today as the “Father of Liberalism.”

Locke’s influence seems to be owed primarily to his ability to synthesize and popularize two significant strains of thought in England at the time: drawing from the Puritans and covenanters, Locke emphasized the consent of the people as fundamental to lawful government and their right to throw off tyrannical government when necessary. Locke drew in particular from the ideas of Samuel Rutherford, the Scottish Presbyterian’s work in Lex Rex. But the other strain was a watering-down of the explicit biblical and theological basis for these principles, stumbling toward the false Enlightenment offer of secular neutrality. Locke used more religiously neutral terminology than the Scots and Puritans. He appealed to the “law of nature” and “nature’s God” and “heaven” fairly generically. While this synthesis created a larger tent in the short term, by abandoning the explicit biblical foundation for his political theory, it was actually weakened in the long term.

Conclusions
While Locke intended to dismantle Hobbes, there was actually a subtle but deadly assumption that both shared: individualism. Rather than grounding individual rights and dignity explicitly in the image of God, creation, and Scripture, Locke emphasized a vague notion of freedom and rights arising out of a hazy primitive state of nature. Locke assumed a basic, original goodness in man, with the ability to reason and tolerate others naturally. Christian doctrine holds Hobbes and Locke in something of a balance with its biblical notions of the image of God, the Fall, and the gospel. Fallen man can be very brutish as Hobbes insisted, but the image of God is not entirely obliterated. Common grace restrains some of the worst impulses of sinful nature, but the gospel truly begins to transform human nature. These realities have profound ramifications for political theory.

The biblical notion of the image of God also emphasizes the necessity and inescapability of community, multiple communities and jurisdictions and covenants that balance and check and disciple human nature (marriage, family, church, business, cities, counties, nation).

Without a vision of multiple covenants and multiple communities of loyalty and trust and accountability, the only (or most) unifying “contract” will be the civil government. And while Locke intended to give the people the ability to check its power, he actually left them relatively defenseless as mere individuals. Rousseau would come later during the French Revolution arguing from Locke’s writings for a “social contract” based on the “General Will” of the people, a vague notion that either amounts to pure democracy or else a raw might-makes-right majoritarianism. And Karl Marx didn’t mind using Locke’s individualism tied to labor and property to develop his theories either. And while many modern states claim to Lockean virtues of limited government and inalienable natural rights, their sheer size and bloat defies Locke’s romantic view of human nature and trends heavily to Hobbes’ Leviathan.

In my estimation, the American project is a blend of the Scottish covenanter model with Locke’s watered down contract synthesis. Arguably, the separation of powers in the federal government, checked by the Bill of Rights, the states, counties, and the original strength of the American churches and family all leaned more heavily in the covenanter direction. While Locke’s influence can be clearly seen, the first, ninth, and tenth amendments specifically guard the powers of the church, the people (families), and the states. And these covenanted governments bind people together and check the power of the central government, and all under God.