Resistance, we have seen, was the practical corollary of early modern Protestant thinking on the nature of authority, law, and covenantal accountability. Around the turn of the seventeenth century, Reformed political thinkers and agents assumed the capacity for, and the legitimacy of, certain acts of resistance in response to the violation of covenantal fellowship. In fact, the consociated political body may even be divinely obligated to resist severe instances of unjust rule. For these Protestant figures, this was a modern addendum to the traditional maxim lex iniusta non est lex. The terms of the covenant entailed nothing less. In previous chapters, I focused on the sorts of acts or states of affairs that provide justification for lawful resistance, and the way that failure to render justice to fellow members of the covenant was also considered failure to render justice to God. As we saw in the writings of Johannes Althusius, these social obligations are ordered to various common goods of consociational life that have their origin in God’s covenantal love for his people.

The God of early modern Reformed theology has sometimes been described as a leviathan: all-powerful, unaccountable, and utterly free in his dealings with humanity. His chief end is the increase of his own glory. His covenants are made apart from any prior recognition of goodness or merit, depending solely on his sovereign whim. Theologians, political theorists, and historians of early modernity have all contributed to this construal of the tradition. In his classic work The Divine Right of Kings, John Neville Figgis analogized Thomas Hobbes’ political Leviathan with the “Deity of Calvinism,” since both possessed power that was “unchecked by law, justice or conscience.”1 Several decades later, Carl Schmitt seized on this historical parallel in one of his lesser known – but most revealing – works, marking it as a prime example of how our most important political ideas are, at root, secularized theological concepts.2 The source of God’s covenant with humanity cannot be traced to anything like the essential goodness or love of God, since, as Schmitt reads Hobbes, “God is above all a power, not wisdom or justice.”

Covenantal accounts of political life have provoked challenges not only from early modern detractors, but late modern ones as well. While the former often employed explicitly theological terms in their polemics, as we saw in the previous chapter, many late modern theorists have expressed puzzlement over the persistence of theological language in early modern covenantal thought. Early-modern political doctrines of consent, social contract, and popular sovereignty were supposed to silence the theologians. Late modern political historians have also continued to puzzle over the place of theological commitments in early modern politics. Was the silencing of the theologians (Gentili’s infamous silete theologi) actually effective? And if not, why not?

In early modernity, covenantal language could evoke biblical, theological, contractual, or political themes – often all at once. The boundaries between disciplines and realms of social life, as we will see, were far more porous for early modern theologians, lawyers, and political philosophers than late moderns usually assume. The task of this chapter is to show the distinctive theological shape of covenantal language, with an eye to the political application of covenant around the turn of the seventeenth century. In the sixteenth century, covenantal terms such as pactum, foedus, and testamentum could refer to several species of relationships. I concluded the previous chapter with an outline of what I call the consociational model of covenant. A covenant of this sort refers to a particular sort of fellowship or form of life-sharing in which members participate in some common good through the communication of rights and services.

Buried deep within what some scholars consider the first modern encyclopedia, Johann Heinrich Alsted included this maxim on the nature of the commonwealth: “A covenant ought to exist so that the republic might be the people of God.” As we have seen in previous chapters, covenantal language suffused Reformed theology at the end of the seventeenth century. What is relatively more novel is the application of this language to the political community.

Alsted’s maxim, and the theological commitments that underwrote it, is key to understanding the political context of the time. As one of the most influential encyclopedists of the early modern age, Alsted would not have taken himself to be introducing a novel theological claim about the political order; he was merely summarizing a commonplace of his ecclesial and scholastic circles. This chapter will, in effect, unpack the context for Alsted’s commonplace, revealing how theological ideas supported some of the most important developments of political thinking in the concluding centuries of the sixteenth century.

Away with those mousetraps of yours, unless they catch blind shrew-mice. Has anyone ever been so impious or impudent, if he held to any religion, who thought a people so bound and tied to kings that it is obligated to let kings carry it off to strange gods … ? There is no sane man that does not proclaim that the people can and ought to make good its promises and fulfill all the obligations of the covenant with God. But in this matter there is no need at all for the people to have power and jurisdiction over the prince; it was not comprehended in the covenant, nor does God exact it—that the people by force and arms lead back into the way a king who hunts after devious paths and insane errors.

With a linguistic history reaching back to ancient Hebrew writings, Roman law, and medieval jurisprudence, the concept of covenant has shaped Western notions of law and justice like few others. In its barest sense, it is a contract or agreement between parties. It establishes or recognizes the terms by which a relationship among persons is preserved or set right, and is often ratified by some ritual or sacrifice. It promises rewards for the fulfillment of obligations, and punitive consequences for the breach thereof. It involves the exchange of goods, rights, or services, according to some specified norm. In a fuller sense, a covenant is the founding or recognition of a common project, or fellowship, by which individuals pursue goods that they could not in isolation. Christian theologians, from Augustine of Hippo (354–430) to John Calvin (1509–1564) to Karl Barth (1886–1968), have made great use of this concept to describe the relations both between God and humanity, and among human persons.