II

 

The Covenant as a Concept and a Tool:

The Ideal of the Special Commission,

or God's Plan for New England

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The Puritans who founded the New England colonies had been very strongly influenced by a group of theologians called the Federalist School, or the School of the Covenant. In his "Marrow of the Puritan Divinity", Perry Miller[1] has given a very thorough account of these thinkers and their theories, the most central of which was that theology revolved around a series of agreements, of contracts, between God and Man. A more familiar name given to these contracts was "covenant".

            Our approach will be different from Miller's in so far as we shall examine the concept of covenant in its Biblical environment, since surprisingly enough, I have come across no study of Puritan New England in which the Biblical covenants and the New England covenants were studied together. However, we shall not study covenants for their own sake but rather present them as vehicles meant to express such a fundamental belief as the Special Commission we have already mentioned in the previous chapter. 

            The covenants may be compared to social contracts since they were used to found human communities - churches and towns. Since the signatories were enjoined to follow the Laws of God, we may say that the Special Commission was at the origin of, was the very root of New English society. Accordingly, we must examine John Winthrop's Modell of Christian Charity as the most seminal expression of the theory of the Special Commission. We shall also base our study on a sample of covenants written in the first decade of emigration to New England. Only the Mayflower Compact (1620) antedates this sample. Despite its difference from the other New England covenants, it deserves close attention. These New England covenants were that of Salem (1629, revised in 1636), that of Boston's First Church (1630), those of Watertown (1630) and Dedham (1636), all of them in Massachusetts, and finally that of Exeter, New Hampshire (1639).

 

1.    The Covenants in the Bible[2]

 

The Biblical covenants were agreements, contracts, "deals" between God and His people, and the word "covenant" itself occurs more than two hundred times in the Old Testament but not more than ten times in the New Testament. Besides being the story of the people of Israel, the Bible can be seen as the story of the successive covenants made between God and Israel. There were two main families of covenants, which corresponded to the Old and to the New Testament: the Old Testament was the former Alliance, the one before Jesus Christ lived or was announced, which consisted in doing what God had ordered. It was Jeremiah (31:31) who was the first to talk about the New Covenant between God and men, a Covenant based upon faith and not works, which explains why the New Testament, and more precisely the four Gospels insist more on faith in Christ and in the resurrection of the Body as the way to achieve salvation, than following literally to the regulations of the Old Testament.[3] Of course people under the New Covenant of faith had to keep the Commandments, but the emphasis on the Mosaic Code was less strong, less systematic.

In Genesis are presented the several Covenants made between God and the most famous Patriarchs. The first man with whom God covenanted was the first man of all, since it was with Adam (Gen. 2:16-17); but Adam broke the covenant since he sinned and ate the forbidden fruit from the Tree of Knowledge. As a consequence, Adam and Eve were expelled from Paradise, women were to suffer when giving birth, and men were to sweat to reap the fruit of their toil. Not discouraged with His last creation, God covenanted with Noah before the Flood, the origin of which was men's wickedness and sinfulness (Gen. 6:1-4), and only a few would be saved from utter destruction: Noah and his family. We can already establish a link with Winthrop's rhetoric of the "shelter and hiding place" of the new Jerusalem.[4] Then God established a Covenant with Abraham, promising him the land of Canaan and to make him "the father of many nations" (Gen. 17:04). That covenant was to be furthered with Abraham's son Isaac and his grand-son Jacob. The Covenant required them to "walk before God" - behave according to his principles - and to have male babies circumcised.

Then in the other books of the Pentateuch - the first five books of the Bible - to which we could add the Book of Joshua (the sixth), the Covenant is developed upon through a few recurring themes: the people of Israel were promised a heavenly reward if they kept the Covenant but God also warned them that they should not break it. Furthermore, God revealed the articles of the Covenant to His people, so that they could know by what rules to abide.

The articles the Israelis were to follow are contained in the Ten Commandments, also called "the Word of the Covenant" (Ex. 34:27), including more specifically the respect of the Sabbath (Ex. 21:8-11; 31:16; Lev. 24:8), and a strong emphasis on uniformity, a key concept at all times of history, and especially in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century. The people of Israel were to worship only one God because he admitted to be a jealous god (for example in Ex. 21:5). This stress on uniformity, which can be found again as being an explicit part of the Covenant in 2Kings 17:14-16 and 17:35;38, may be related to the Puritans' concern with the notion of true religion, even though it must be widened since every religion is the only true and acceptable one in the eyes of its adepts.

As for how the people would deal with the Covenant, there were only two possibilities: either they would keep it and gain their reward, namely the Promised Land of Canaan, or they would fail and would be damned and punished by God. If they obeyed, God promised to make them "a treasure unto me above all people" and "a kingdom of priests and a holy nation" (Ex. 19:05), He would make them fruitful and multiply them (Lev. 26:09, echoing Ge. 1:28). Finally the Book of Deuteronomy contains a poetic passage which might have appealed a great deal to men like John Winthrop: 

Wherefore it shall come to pass, if ye hearken to these judgments, and keep, and do them, that the Lord thy God shall keep unto thee the covenant and the mercy which he sware unto thy fathers / And he will love thee, and bless thee, and multiply thee: he will also bless the fruit of thy womb, and the fruit of thy land, thy corn, and thy wine, and thine oil, and thy kine, and the flocks of thy sheep, in the land which he sware unto thy fathers to give thee. / Thou shalt be blessed above all people: there shall not be male or female barren among you, or among your cattle. / And the Lord will take away from thee all sickness, and will put none of the evils of Egypt, which thou knowest, upon thee: but will lay them upon them that hate you. (Deut. 7:12-15)

 

Taken out of a Biblical context, this might have applied to the plantations in New England, and it would be very appealing to the Puritans in the wilderness: in a series of metaphors, Egypt could be replaced by early Stuart England, Canaan - the Promised Land - by New England, and the Red Sea by the Atlantic Ocean. Dozens of other comparisons between the two exoduses can be found in almost every text written in the early days of New England, the three aforementioned examples being just the most obvious ones.

            But that would occur only if they - the people of Israel - managed to keep the Covenant. Any breach would be mercilessly punished. The God of the Old Testament was very different from the God of the New Testament. He was angry, jealous, thundering threats at His people to warn them against breaking their promises, because on His part, God would keep His, whatever happened. As we have seen already, the first covenant-breaker was Adam and he paid very dear for having sinned. Then, to prevent His people from doing the same, God warned them against what would happen to them if they did break the Covenant. Perhaps the most eloquent threat can be found in Leviticus 26:15-25. God therein threatened to "appoint over you [the Israelis] terror, consumption and the burning ague, that shall consume the eyes, and cause sorrow to the heart: and you shall sow your seed in vain, for your enemies shall eat it". Something the Puritan planters could more easily relate to was that their "strength shall be spent in vain: for your land shall not yield her increase, neither shall the trees of the land yield their fruit"; God would "bring a sword upon you, that shall avenge the quarrel of my covenant" and send "a pestilence among you; and you shall be delivered into the hands of the enemy." Indeed it was a major source of concern for religious dissenters who were more or less persecuted in their own country and thought they were waging some sort of holy war against what they held as a most corrupt Church, even though most of them - probably for the sake of diplomacy - kept on claiming their adherence and their love for the Church of England.[5]

            We must keep in mind that the Puritans considered the Bible to be the unquestionable revelation of the Word of God. It was, as can be read in the Watertown Covenant (1630), the "All-Sufficient Canon", the source of all light. Therefore if God warned "His" people against breaking the Covenant, then His threats must be taken seriously. Even more cruel than warnings, Deuteronomy 17:02-05 contains a passage urging some sort of merciless inquisition and suppression of any covenant-breaker:

If there be found among you, within any of thy gates which the LORD thy God giveth thee, man or woman, that hath wrought wickedness in the sight of the LORD thy God, in transgressing his covenant, And hath gone and served other gods, and worshipped them, either the sun, or moon, or any of the host of heaven, which I have not commanded; And it be told thee, and thou hast heard of it, and enquired diligently, and, behold, it be true, and the thing certain, that such abomination is wrought in Israel: Then shalt thou bring forth that man or that woman, which have committed that wicked thing, unto thy gates, even that man or that woman, and shalt stone them with stones, till they die.

 

Again this passage must have been very appealing to the New Englanders, urging self-righteousness and denunciation, because a so-called godly man knowing about a sinner and not making the thing known was himself a sinner, and sinners were damned and could not achieve salvation.[6]

            Finally, John Winthrop's words in the final passage of his Modell of Christian Charity, saying that if the New Englanders should "deal falsely with our God", then He would withdraw his helping providential hand, and that they would "be made a story and a byword through the world", strangely echo 2Chronicles 7:20, since God, talking about the House of Israel if it should break the Covenant, said it would be made "a proverb and a byword among all nations."