Note: From The Ballot and the Bible (Baker 2023). Reprinted by permission of the publisher. Citations have been omitted.
In “A Model of Christian Charity,” John Winthrop appropriates the language Jesus used to describe the new covenant. He never explicitly claims “chosen” status for his people, but over the course of the short speech, he claims the promises of biblical passages as if that were true. As he weaves passages from both Testaments into one depiction of the nascent community in America, he sometimes subtly alters references to the Mosaic law into commands for the church. Winthrop describes the colonists as entering a covenant with God, gaining a special commission and being subject to blessing and judgment on the basis of their obedience.
Covenants and Political Theology
Winthrop’s approach is in keeping with a larger theological position common at the time, an approach that treated all earthly governments (especially one’s own) as party to a covenant with God. America was far from alone in this: during the period of the Revolution, many European communities were also looking to the Old Testament as they created new political structures. The Puritans were following precedent from their previous communities in viewing all of society – their churches and civil governments – as covenanted with God….
There are some unique challenges when it comes to thinking about covenants in political theology. We need to be careful about how we read God’s covenants in relation to our own time and God’s providence, where we place ourselves in God’s story and how we apply God’s Word in our different contexts.
What Time Is It?
The Puritans didn’t emphasize the nation’s virtuous strength (as in Reagan’s “shining city”) but rather its coming judgment. It’s an emphasis that has waxed and waned in American political rhetoric, and we owe some of that to the Puritans.
It did not take long for Puritans in the Massachusetts Bay Colony (and for other colonists in their own contexts) to bemoan the moral state of their communities. By the time Winthrop died in 1649, his community looked little like his grand vision of brotherly love, care for the poor and faithful worship.
Across New England, Puritans disagreed about a range of issues, and their communities had lost much of their religious zeal. The Puritans had conceived of a society where the church and civic community were synonymous, but twenty years later, more than half of the adults in Boston did not belong to a church. This led to a rise in a form of preaching called the jeremiad, a sermon in the style of biblical laments and prophecies that would exercise great influence over American religion and politics. The Puritans were already familiar with this sermonic form: many of them left England for fear of the judgments coming to the morally declining church. Jeremiads describe moral decline, warn of coming judgment and exhort listeners to urgent action.
Winthrop’s speech is not quite a jeremiad, but it illustrates the theological context that made jeremiads so popular. If the community was party to a special covenant with God, then the members could expect their obedience to be rewarded and their disobedience punished in ways similar to those found in biblical accounts. Winthrop (and generations of politicians and pastors after him) appropriates the terms of Old Testament covenants, warning listeners that material blessings or judgments will follow their actions. These accounts also often favor decline narratives (assurances of blessings do not pack the same punch), placing a community in a certain spot in history and narrating the past and the future with astonishing certainty.
There are two problems here. First, we tend to take promises of blessing and judgment from different covenants and apply them to our own communities. And second, we read Scripture as if we know with certainty where we stand in it. While we may know better than to take promises given to Israel and apply them to a specific nation today, our reading of Scripture often comes with an assumption about what “time” it is.
We operate out of either a decline or progress narrative in which history’s trajectory is intelligible to us. To say that things are always moving in one direction (constantly improving or continually degenerating) is to say that history follows a certain course that we can accurately chart. We make political judgments as if we are standing high above history, knowing what has come before and what will come after us, and can judge the “direction” we are headed in. Christians can sometimes have theological reasons – for example, our beliefs about the end times – for holding to progression or declension narratives. But we are also often swayed by the general mood of our culture or context. When are the “good times” – in our wistfully remembered past or just around the bend of our next great improvement? Where do we find ourselves in the grand scheme of time? These will shape how we read Scripture, where we see ourselves in stories or instructions and when and how we think certain verses are applicable.
The Missing Noachian Covenant
There’s another pitfall when we misapply biblical covenants to our own nations: we miss the covenant for all nations that is actually in the Bible. We tend to think of Noah as a children’s story about a cute little ark with its cute little animals and a cheery rainbow at the end. We miss the crucially important covenant described in that (much darker than advertised) story. In Genesis 9, after Noah and his family come out of the ark, God establishes a covenant with Noah, his family and all living creatures. This covenant is important for thinking about what God demands of modern nations, because unlike the Mosaic covenant that Puritan writers referenced or the new covenant Jesus described, this covenant was made with all people. “I now establish my covenant with you and with your descendants after you and with every living creature that was with you – the birds, the livestock and all the wild animals, all those that came out of the ark with you – every living creature on earth” (Genesis 9:9-10).
God made a covenant with every living creature, and the rest of the Old Testament shows how nations are judged on the basis of that covenant. God was grieved with the ways of the world before the flood: the endless ways people can mistreat each other are well documented in just the first few chapters of Genesis. After the flood he makes clear both the obligation for all humans to treat each other well and the reason for this (they are made in his image).
There is a long tradition of Israel’s prophets condemning the nations for their mistreatment of humans made in the image of God. These noncovenantal nations are not judged for disobeying the stipulations of the Mosaic covenant; rather, they are judged for the way they treat other humans. They are condemned for violence (Joel 3:2-3, 5-6; Amos 1:11-12; 2:1-3; Habakkuk 2:12-13; Jeremiah 49:16; 51:35; 51:49; Ezekiel 25:15), oppressing the poor (Malachi 3:4; Isaiah 10:20; 19:20), gloating in others’ destruction (Ezekiel 25:3), taking advantage of others (Ezekiel 26:2) and slavery (Ezekiel 29:7). This does not give us a comprehensive list of the policies any nation should adopt, but it does give us some general guidance about how God judges all nations. The United States of America as a nation is not party to a special covenant, but it is party to the Noachian covenant, and it will be judged, like all nations, by those standards.
We miss this covenant when we appropriate covenants with Israel for our own countries – to our own peril. The demands of the Noachian covenant provide a foundational political ethic for Christians, whether political leaders or citizens participating in the larger political process. The image of God is not a doctrinal obscurity, something we read in Genesis and affirm as theologically correct with no other effects in our personal and political lives. Our appropriate discomfort with applying promises to Israel to our own nation does not leave us without biblical resources for political work. The Noachian covenant and the prophecies against the nations should shape the demands we as citizens make on our governments.
In addition, in Scripture, covenants are initiated by God: God begins the conversation, sets the terms and graciously invites humans into special relationship with him (for some examples, see Genesis 12; 15; 17; Exodus 19-24; II Samuel 7; Jeremiah 31). By contrast, in Winthrop’s “A Model of Christian Charity,” the humans decide that they are in a covenant with God. This is akin to reverse engineering the covenant process, putting humans in God’s role.
Winthrop describes the collective action and posture of his people in just that way. They approach God (“We have hereupon besought him”), determine the terms of the covenant (“draw our own articles”) and describe how they will know if they have kept it. He even writes as if God has responded: “then hath he ratified this covenant.” Winthrop ends the document with a quotation from Deuteronomy: “For I command you today to love the Lord your God, to walk in obedience to him, and to keep his commands, decrees and laws; then you will live and increase, and the Lord your God will bless you in the land you are entering to possess” (30:16). Now the land that the colony is crossing an ocean to “possess” is a divine gift.
When we set the terms of our own covenants, we will claim promises that are not ours to claim, such as a divine right to a land God never gave.
Applying Biblical Standards Faithfully
It is easy, with hindsight, to see the problems in misapplying biblical promises. But we also know that making faithful political decisions in our world requires us to turn to Scripture, and we don’t want to ignore huge chunks of it because it was delivered to the people of Israel or directed specifically to the church. No one really does this either: we are all in the business of picking and choosing which passages apply to our own contexts. Some Christians will find passages about Israel’s sexual misconduct and subsequent judgment and apply them to their own nation; others will apply passages about caring for the poor and foreigners to their own nation’s immigration or welfare policies. We are not without resources for judging between these different applications, but we need to be honest about whether we are picking and choosing – and, if we are, why we are doing so.
Winthrop wanted to apply biblical standards to his earthly community, and most Christians want to do the same. While there are examples of these Puritan communities that highlight the danger of this (making church membership a requirement for civil participation, excommunicating people from the church and the city), we can also see commendable examples. When merchant Robert Keayne took advantage of the scarcity of imported goods in the fledgling community, Boston courts fined him for price gouging – for not making “others’ conditions our own” as Winthrop had described. [Jon Butler, “Religion in Colonial America,” p. 54] That sounds like Christian theology informing policy in a positive way. Winthrop was right to think that Christian commitments should inform how we approach the shape, purpose and rules of civil government.
He was also right to think that ideas, stories and concepts from God’s dealings with Israel have relevance for us today. Christians see the Old Testament as prefiguring events in the New, and we agree with Winthrop that God’s revelation informs our understanding of human nature, the purpose and structure of human communities and the character and work of God in human history.
We want to share at least one thing with Winthrop – “thinking in biblical time.” [Daniel Rodgers, As a City on a Hill, p. 48]….We need to be wary of pulling passages out of their context. But we also need to be wary of any approach to Scripture that does not place both the text and our own work in the larger context of God’s redemptive story. We can find prophetic passages, stories of the rise and fall of rulers and divine instructions in Scripture that are relevant and instructive for our time, but that does not mean that all biblical language is free-floating, ready to be affixed to any project or idea. First and foremost, the biblical text’s rightful place is within the “economy of God’s communicative grace.” [John Webster, Holy Scripture, p. 6]
Content taken from The Ballot and the Bible by Kaitlyn Schiess, ©2023. Used by permission of Brazos Press.
Kaitlyn Schiess, doctoral student, Duke Divinity School
