Liberty and Discipline in Covenant Theology*

Abstract

Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century formulations of liberty by the people or their inferior magistrates to oppose kings became intimately related to the theology and politics of Christian liberty and church discipline. In Old and New England, as on the continent, the ancient notion of covenant (from foedus, federal) was generally enlisted to justify civil and ecclesiastical polities based on disciplined reciprocity between members, on conditions to be fulfilled rather than fixed prerogatives, on freedom within specified limits to make those conditions (which, once made, were binding), and on due process.1 Covenant theology contributed different particular ideological implications depending on political circumstances: in France the Huguenot minority supplemented covenant between God and people with legal and nationalistic arguments, as well as with natural rights of a non-majoritarian kind, in order to attract alienated Catholic nobles in the fight against Catherine de' Medici. The resulting monarchomach defense of revolution was that when compact between king and people had been violated, inferior magistrates (not the people per se) were ordained and duty-bound to seek Vindiciae contra Tyrannos.2 In England, Puritans had waged a popular campaign in 1572 with a best-selling Admonition to Parliament. They appealed to the people again after their campaign of the 1580s had failed to purify the church from the top down by act of Parliament or Queen. But Puritans were not democrats, felt suspicious of the unregenerate mass, and needed as much to discipline the people as to sanctify their rights. Covenant became an important instrument for expressing and resolving Puritan ambivalence about the people, delimiting their sovereignty as much as it did patriarchal authority, and expressing the Puritan cause as both popular and a dictatorship of the saints.