Covenant & Commonwealth: From Christian Separation through the Protestant Reformation
The Covenant Tradition in Politics, Volume 2, Introduction
Daniel J. Elazar
I
No one seriously immersed in the Jewish and Christian traditions has escaped the theological impact of the covenant idea. Covenant was once the subject of so many theological treatises that at times it seems as if there is little new to be said about it. On the other hand, covenant is less a theological concept than a theo-political one. The word itself is used so frequently in the English language that it has become a mere commonplace term, if not quite like freedom and democracy, then certainly like republic and constitution. Even so, far too little has been written about covenant as a factor in political affairs.
Politically, a covenant involves a coming together (con-gregation) of basically equal humans who consent with one other through a morally binding pact supported by a transcendent power, establishing with the partners a new framework or setting them on the road to a new task, that can only be dissolved by mutual agreement of all the parties to it.
Covenant, Compact, and Contract
Covenant is tied in an ambiguous relationship to two related terms, compact and contract. On one hand, both compacts and contracts are related to, and even may be derived from, covenant, and sometimes the terms are even used interchangeably. On the other hand, there are very real differences between the three which need clarification.
Both covenants and compacts differ from contracts in that the first two are constitutional or public and the last private in character. As such, covenantal or compactual obligation is broadly reciprocal. Those bound by one or the other are obligated to respond to each other beyond the letter of the law rather than to limit their obligations to the narrowest contractual requirements. Hence, covenants and compacts are inherently designed to be flexible in certain respects as well as firm in others. As expressions of private law, contracts tend to be interpreted as narrowly as possible so as to limit the obligation of the contracting parties to what is explicitly mandated by the contract itself. Contracts normally contain provisions for unilateral abrogation by one party or another under certain conditions (and with penalties where appropriate); compacts and covenants generally require mutual consent to be abrogated, designed as they are to be perpetual or of unlimited duration.
A covenant differs from a compact in that its morally binding dimension takes precedence over its legal dimension. In its heart of hearts, a covenant is an agreement in which a higher moral force, traditionally God, is either a direct party to, or guarantor of the particular relationship. Whereas, when the term compact is used, moral force is only indirectly involved. A compact, based as it is on mutual pledges rather than guarantees by or before a higher authority, rests more heavily on a legal though still ethical grounding for its politics. In other words, compact is a secular phenomenon.
This is historically verifiable by examining the shift in terminology that took place in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, reaching a climax in the American and French revolutions and their respective aftermaths. In the United States, the terms "covenant" and "compact" were used almost interchangeably until after 1791. In the British North American colonies the accepted term in the seventeenth century was covenant. Compact was introduced in the mid-eighteenth century as part of the spread of Enlightenment secular thought during the Revolutionary era. Those who saw the hand of God in political affairs in the United States continued to use the term covenant, while those who sought a secular grounding for politics turned to the term compact. While the distinction is not always used with strict clarity, it does appear consistently.1
The issue was further complicated by Rousseau and his followers who talk about the social contract, a highly secularized concept, which, even when applied for public purposes, never develops the same level of moral obligation as either covenant or compact. The Rousseaunian formulation had limited popularity in the United States but became the dominant terminology in revolutionary France, although it did share the field with the other two terms, particularly compact, especially in the early years of the Revolution. With the triumph of Jacobin ideas, which themselves are an outgrowth of Rousseaunian thought, the term contrat social swept the field.2
Covenant, then, is the oldest of several terms that deal with the formation of the political order through consent as manifested in a pact or an appropriate level of mutual binding. In the following chapter we will examine this idea of pact and consent in light of the other theories of political order.
The covenants of the Bible are the founding covenants of Western civilization. Perforce, they have to do with God. They have their beginnings in the need to establish clear and binding relationships between God and humans and among humans, relationships which must be understood as being political far more than theological in character, designed to establish lines of authority, distributions of power, bodies politic, and systems of law. It is indeed the genius of the idea and its biblical source that it seeks to both legitimize political life and to direct it into the right paths; to use theo-political relationships to build a bridge between heaven and earth -- and there is nothing more earthly than politics even in its highest form -- without letting either swallow up the other.
The covenant idea has within it the seeds of modern constitutionalism in that it emphasizes the mutually accepted limitations on the power of all parties to it, a limitation not inherent in nature but involving willed concessions. This idea of limiting power is, as the Puritans discussed in this book well understood, of first importance in the biblical worldview and for humanity as a whole since it helps explain why an omnipotent God does not exercise His omnipotence in the affairs of humans. In covenanting with humans, God at least partially withdraws from controlling their lives. He offers humans freedom under the terms of the covenant, retaining the covenantal authority to reward or punish the consequences of that freedom at some future date. By the same token, the humans who bind themselves through the covenant accept its limits in Puritan terms, abandoning natural for federal liberty -- to live up to the terms of their covenants. Beyond that, the leaders of the people are limited in their governmental powers to serving the people under the terms of the covenant. Thus the idea of constitutional or limited government is derived from the idea of covenant.
Covenant as a theo-political concept is characterized by a very strong measure of realism. This recognition of the need to limit the exercise of power is one example of this. It also recognizes the distinction between those who are bound by the covenant and those who are not. At the same time it makes provisions for appropriate linkages between those so bound and others, granted of a different order, but designed to keep the peace in the world in the face of the realities of conflicting human interests, needs and demands. In this book we are concerned with the political use of the idea of covenant, the tradition that has adhered to that idea, and the political arrangements that flow from it.
In more secular terms, the task of politics is not simply to construct civil societies compatible with human nature, but to help people make the most of their potential by creating conditions and opportunities for leading the best possible lives. As Aristotle observed: people form political associations, not only to maintain life, but to achieve the good life.
II
Politics has two faces. One is the face of power; the other is the face of justice. Politics, as the pursuit and organization of power, is concerned (in the words of Harold Lasswell) with "who gets what, when and how." However, politics is equally a matter of justice, or the determination of who should get what, when and how -- and why. Power is the means by which people organize themselves and shape their environment in order to live. Justice offers the guidelines for using power in order to live well.
Politics cannot be understood without reference to both faces. Without understanding a polity's conception of justice, or who should have power, one cannot understand clearly why certain people or groups get certain rewards, at certain times, in certain ways. On the other hand, one cannot focus properly on the pursuit of justice without also understanding the realities of the distribution of power. Both elements are present in all political questions, mutually influencing each other.
The need to pursue justice through a politics set on the right path is as real in a secular age as in a religious one. The true essence of realpolitik is the understanding that just as politics cannot avoid the realities of human relationships and power, it cannot be detached from the pursuit of justice and the paths of morality either. Machiavellian methods are effective only in the short run simply because in the long run, everyone involved in political affairs comes to understand the use of those methods. Those who cannot use them, leave the political arena, turning it over to those who can, who then proceed to transform that arena into a jungle, in which every man's hand is raised against every other man's as each tries to use the political methods which the master suggested to his prince -- returning to what seventeenth and eighteenth century political theorists referred to as the state of nature with the chaos and insecurity that entails. Realistically, Machiavellian methods work best in situations where they are unexpected, that is to say, where there already exists a connection between politics and a sense of morally obligatory limitations on political behavior, which, of course, those methods then subvert.
The collapse of a shared moral understanding inevitably leads to a collapse of the rules of the game. We are witness to just such a collapse in many polities in our time, for precisely that reason, a collapse which has brought in its train the present crisis of humankind. It is the discovery of a proper moral base or foundation, and its pursuit in such a way that recognizes the realities of power that is essential for a good politics. That is what the conceptual system rooted in covenant is all about. The rules of the game for some may have emerged originally through an evolutionary process to be accepted by those bound by them as a matter of course. Once disrupted, however, they can only be restored by consent, that is to say, through covenanting.
Through covenant, the two faces of politics, power and justice, are linked to become effective both morally and operationally. In the course of this book, I will suggest that covenant is by far the best source for developing a proper moral understanding and proper moral path in politics, that it is, indeed, the way to achieve a general public commitment to the political institutions required for the good life and to emerge from the Machiavellian jungle as free, morally responsible people. Perhaps such covenants may be civil rather than theo-political in character; that is still a question facing humanity. The idea of a civil covenant is one of the most important contributions of the last previous great revival of the covenant idea, the period from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries, the crucible that led to the emergence of modern democracy. The range of its possibilities was tested in the modern epoch and, by itself, found very useful but wanting. So, too, with the theo-political covenants of the past.
The genius of the covenant idea does not rest upon its philosophic explication although such explication has much to contribute for a finer understanding of it. While ideas have their own subtle influence on people, their influence grows exponentially if they are embodied in a tradition -- in the case of the covenant idea, a political tradition which continues from generation to generation. Such a tradition has both visible and invisible, conscious and subconscious manifestations. Its visible ones are easily traced, but the greatest part of its impact is in its invisible ones, those that are part of the substructure of the society, that constitute its culture, in this case political culture. To the extent that the covenant idea is mediated through certain political traditions, to become part of the political culture, it has become second nature to those peoples influenced by it.
III
What are the components of a political tradition? First of all, it is a mode of thinking and body of thoughts shared by members of a particular body politic, especially those in any way involved in politics. In order to think about political things, they must have a political vocabulary -- a set of terms which individually and in relation to one another offer ways to delineate and express political meaning. Such terms constitute a political vocabulary which represents the "program" through which people consider political things. The key words in any political vocabulary are what Kadushin has referred to as value concepts, that is to say, terms whose precise definition may be difficult or well nigh impossible, but which are understood to have a common core meaning within a particular culture.3
A political tradition begins with the founding of the body politic and revolves around certain fundamental principles and the relations -- including the tensions -- between them which already are part of the founding. Every body politic is founded on its own principles of organization, power and authority relationships, and fundamental tensions, explicit or implicit. The latter are those which are "present at the creation" of the body politic and which have to be bridged in order for the body politic to come into existence. Because they are only bridged but not resolved, they are built into the very fabric of the body politic which must reconcile them anew in every generation as long as the body politic exists in the same form. It is a task of the political tradition to keep those principles, relationships, and tensions alive and operational as the body politic confronts changing situations and circumstances.
The political tradition is kept alive by the chain of political leaders and thinkers who utilize that vocabulary to undertake or explain the political acts that shape and direct the body politic. In the course of time, a tradition becomes embodied in certain basic texts that reflect the political ideas of a particular body politic, its political vocabulary, and celebrate the figures, events, and concepts that most embody the tradition. In that sense, the visible dimensions of a tradition sooner or later come to involve the interaction of texts and behavior in dealing with the internal and external influences on the body politic.
In sum, a tradition is a major integrative force within the body politic. Some polities rely on tradition more than others for integration. Covenanted polities are particularly in need of an appropriate political tradition for their integration. In every case they are covenanted polities because their political tradition rests upon the covenant idea and a covenantal political culture.
This book is an exploration of the covenant tradition as it was manifested and explicated in medieval and Reformation Europe, examining the ways in which that idea and its derivatives penetrated and permeated, shaped or gave rise to particular political systems, institutions, and behavior. These indeed are the elements of politics that count, through which ideas are made meaningful and real. Thus it is simultaneously the statement of a thesis, its documentation through case studies and something of a guide for those who would learn how to conduct political life according to the covenant tradition.
More than anything else, cultures, systems, and humans informed by the covenantal perspective are committed to a way of thinking and conduct which enable them to live free while being bound together in appropriate relationships, to preserve their own integrities while sharing in a common whole, and to pursue both the necessities of human existence and the desiderata of moral response in some reasonable balance. There is a dialectic tension between each of these dualities which adds the requisite dynamic dimension to covenant-based societies, one which makes such societies covenant-informed as well as covenant-based. This dialectic tension is an integral element in covenantal systems, one which provides such systems with the necessary self-corrective mechanisms to keep them in reasonable balance over the long haul, at least so long as covenantal principles continue to inform and shape the polities concerned.
This is not to suggest that all of human life is informed by covenant. As discussed in Covenant and Polity in Biblical Israel and below, there are hierarchical and organic ideas and systems that compete with covenantal ones and which have shaped very substantial segments of the human race. Presumably, they, too, can be penetrated to achieve better understanding of human behavior.
At the same time, the extent to which covenantal relationships are spread among humans is an open question. It is possible to understand covenantal relationships as the property of a rather exclusive segment of the human race, those who have achieved that level of equality and social cooperation through some measure of conscious understanding and semi or subconscious behavior. It is also possible to see covenantal behavior as a human psychological necessity and, hence, extremely widespread, even within otherwise hierarchical and organic systems, at least in certain respects. Of course there are positions between these two extremes.
We must approach the subject aware of two realities: one, that partisans of each worldview, such as the Bible in the matter of covenant or Greek philosophy in the matter of organic development, will claim that theirs is the most natural and that where it does not exist, it is being artificially prevented from being. On the other hand, reality suggests that there are hierarchical, organic, and covenantal socio-political arrangements in the world, and combinations of the three. This writer takes a moderate position, holding that there is a somewhat exclusive club of those peoples and polities consisting of that segment of the human race that is truly immersed in the covenantal way of life, that in some ways all human beings have some psychological propensity for contractual relationships, that is to say, transactional ones based upon mutual agreement, which can include a covenantal dimension, and that there are gradations of covenantalism to be found in between.
IV
Since covenants are grounded in moral commitment, they also provide a basis and a means for placing all of us under judgment. That is to say, a proper covenant not only offers humans the right path or way but provides means for the self-same humans to judge and be judged as to how well they stay on that path or maintain that way. Given human propensities to stray from the right path, no human system and especially no political system can afford not to be under judgment. As we will see, this was a central theme in the arguments of the Reformed federal theologians.
We shall see that in its biblical origins, covenant (brit in Hebrew) is related to the way or path, that is to say to the bio-cultural basis of behavior, both concretizing and modifying it. The Bible emphasizes their interaction and that it is the task of both to bound, channel and modify derekh. Modern secularism has come to emphasize path over covenant. It has gone even further to abandon path for nature (as understood by moderns), implying that what is biological is all, and that what is cultural -- not to speak of covenantal -- while "real" is usually an interference with natural processes unless it is constantly reformed to be brought into harmony with nature as humans understand it at any particular time.
Even in considering nature, contemporary thought has rejected higher nature on behalf of lower. The result, as any one who understands the teachings of covenant in relation to human experience would have forecast, opens the door to the return of the human race to the Hobbesian state of nature, different only in that it is not simply the war of all against all but the exploitation of all by all -- Buber's jungle alongside that of Hobbes. Even as the world community of states moves toward some kind of order, the social fabric of those states is being rent by an unrestrained self-centeredness that is the antithesis of the covenantal way. Restoration of the covenant tradition in an appropriately contemporary way may help serve as a means of rescuing humankind from what is rapidly becoming its most desperate predicament, namely the inability to escape the egoism of the Hobbesian jungle.
V
Brit, the Hebrew word for covenant, is apparently derived from the Akkadian biritum, which means separation and binding.4 As such, it reflects the dialectic character of the idea. For covenant involves both -- the separation of things and their reunification through binding in such a way that they will preserve their respective integrities within the new bond. In Hebrew, covenants are a cut as reflected in circumcision which is the cutting off of the foreskin of the male organ, and the results are bound together -- in some Jewish traditions at circumcision through a binding cloth. For all Jews, after bar mitzvah through tefillin (phylacteries) Jewish men bind themselves daily in remembrance of the covenant bond with God. The Bible describes cutting covenants by sacrificing an animal, cutting it in two, and passing through the two halves as a means of binding them together again, a binding which is completed through the ritual feast, in which the animal is jointly consumed by the parties to the covenant.5
Thus the covenant dialectic has room for separation as well as unification -- indeed almost demands it, avoiding a monolithic orientation, and the search for the seamless harmonious whole. This is reflected in the history of the covenant tradition in the Western world, which has, in the course of two thousand years, undergone three separations, each of which has established a stream of covenant tradition of its own, even as its predecessors persist as living streams, with the several streams reconnecting from time to time at crucial moments in human history. They are: (1) the separation between Judaism and Christianity; (2) the separation between Christianity and its Reformed wing; (3) the separation between Jewish and Christian covenantalists and believers in a secular compact.
For Jews, the biblical canon was closed during the historical epoch during which the Romans became dominant in the Eastern Mediterranean. That epoch was initiated in the Jewish polity by the first post-biblical Jewish constitutional covenant, that between Simon the Hasmonean, the Nasi of the newly independent Jewish and the people, in 145 B.C.E. (Maccabees). Simon's covenant initiated three generations of independent Jewish statehood which were put to an end by Roman intervention when Pompey imposed a Roman protectorate on Judea in 63 B.C.E.
A century later, as the epoch reached its climax in Jewish history, Christianity was born. It emerged as a separate religion in the wake of the series of the disastrous Jewish revolts against Rome. In the process, the covenant tradition underwent the first of three separations, into Jewish Christian expressions, which developed along, parallel but increasingly separate lines for the next four historical epochs, or over 1200 years.6
In the fifth epoch after the rise of Christianity, there was a reconvergence of elements of the Jewish and Christian traditions which led to the separation of Reformed Christianity from the rest of Christendom to develop the covenantal tradition associated with the federal theology and expressed through the Reformed churches. The renewed interest in the Bible and in the post Biblical Jewish classics manifested by Christians and humanists in that epoch generated what came to be known as Christian Hebraism which was most pronounced amongst those who founded and developed the Reformed wing of Protestantism.7
A century later, at the beginning of the modern epoch, a third separation took place in which the covenant traditions of Judaism and Reformed Protestantism were seized upon by philosophers like Spinoza, Hobbes, and Locke, and secularized as compact theory to provide a new basis for a new secular political order. That movement was to reach its apotheosis in the American Revolution, a century and more later, at the climax of the modern epoch.8 It was to continue for three generations beyond and then give way to reborn organic and hierarchical theories of the state which became dominant in the last generation of the nineteenth and first generation of the twentieth centuries to bring the modern epoch to a tragic conclusion. Consequently, the covenant idea has reemerged in the first generation of the postmodern epoch and may yet be recovered by a weakened West, plagued by faintheartedness, self-doubt, and a new paganism.9
Each of these separations added its own dimension to covenantal thought and brought with it a special kind of impact, adding to the richness of the covenantal influence on Western Civilization. Partisans associated with each stream view the others as dead-ends, or deviations, and often relate to them through confrontation, claiming their stream as the authoritative continuation of the thrust of the concept and rejecting the claims of the other streams. There is something to be said in favor of that kind of assessment since covenant as a powerful operational tool becomes an even more powerful operational tool when right and wrong uses of it can be distinguished. On the other hand, from an analytic perspective, it is also possible to see how each of these streams represents an extension of significant aspects of the central idea in both abstract and concrete ways, and how each is related to the other. Indeed, at times, the interaction between them has been extraordinarily fruitful, perhaps more fruitful than the sheer persistence of one stream or another.
Perhaps the most intense conflicts have been between Judaism and Christianity, the latter demonstrating the antagonism of a claimant to a precious heritage who would like to eliminate the original heir for all time, so that no challenge can be made to his claim, even as he remains ambivalent about the burden the heritage imposes upon him. Nevertheless, there have been moments -- great moments -- when the conflict has given way to sharing and even cooperation.10 Invariably these moments have been related to the renewed sense of the covenantal dimension of their shared heritage which forms the basis for the sharing. The Reformation represented one such period as does the mid-twentieth century and the transition from the modern to the most post modern epoch.11
The interaction between Reformed Protestants and other Christians is somewhat more problematic. While the initial breakaway of the former led to creative conflict, more recently the interactions between the two have been based upon efforts to downplay the differences between them, even to the point of denial, thereby weakening the covenantal thrust of the Reformed stream.12 As the possibilities of simple-minded ecumenism have played themselves out, however, there has been at least a modest revival of covenantal thinking as various Christian denominations discover that they do have something unique to preserve even as they want to share their common Christianity with one another.13 Covenant offers the best possibility for reconciling these two seemingly contradictory expectations.
Potentially, the conflict between secular compact theorists and religious covenantalists should have been hardly less than that between Christianity and Judaism. In fact, despite the potential for conflict on the theoretical plane, the two came together so well in the practical political application as to paper over real conflicts until the die was cast one way or another, usually in the secular way. The theorists themselves sought to paper over the conflict, perhaps, as Leo Strauss suggests, for self-protection.14
Beyond that, the convergence of events created the possibility of synthesis between them in specific cases so that ordinary people did not have to choose between covenant and compact. The founding of the United States of America is perhaps the best example of this synthesis. In the American case, both themes could be intertwined, as they are explicitly in the Massachusetts Constitution of 1780.15 Subsequent generations of analysts can demonstrate, perhaps even successfully, that the Virginians of the Revolution were products of the Enlightenment and rejected religious covenantalism, while the sons of Massachusetts sought to create an uneasy synthesis, and the ministers of rural New England stood fast with the old traditions. Be that is it may. The interaction between the two streams produced the American Revolution, the Declaration of Independence, the Federal Constitution, and the United States of America with all its subsequent impact on world affairs. So, too, in the twentieth century, did the interaction produce the most successful efforts to date at world organization. If the League of Nations could not be sustained, the United Nations could combine a general charter with specific covenants to become, at the very least, a useful device in the post-World War II world, and perhaps even an essential one.16
Thus, in order to understand the influence of covenant in the Western political tradition, it is necessary to understand the three separations, the four streams of covenantal tradition and their interaction. We have already examined the Jewish covenantal tradition. In Chapter 1, we will explore and outline the overall Christian, Reformed Christian, and secular compact traditions in general terms so that in subsequent chapters, we may look at them in the specific contexts of the polities they inform, singly, or more frequently, in tandem.
Notes
1. Cf. Donald Lutz, "From Covenant to Constitution."
2. Simon Schama, Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution (New York: Knopf, 1989); Alexis de Tocqueville, Ancien Regime et la Revolution, translated by Stuart Gilbert (New York: Doubleday, 1955). See also Jean Jacques Rousseau, The Contrat Social.
3. Max Kadushin, Organic Thinking (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary, 1938) and The Rabbinic Mind (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary, 1952).
4. Cf., inter alia, Moshe Weinfeld, "Covenant Terminology in the Ancient Near East and its Influence on the West," Journal of the American Oriental Society, LVol. 93 (1973), pp. 190-199.
5. On covenant as a binding, see Delbert Hillers, Covenant: The History of the Biblical Idea (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1969); George F. Mendenhall, Law and Covenant in Israel and the Ancient Near East (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh, 1955); and Moshe Weinfeld, "Covenant" in Encyclopedia Judaica (Jerusalem: Keter Books, 1973), Vol. 5, pp. 1012-1022.
6. A. Cohen, The Parting of the Ways: Judaism and the Rise of Christianity (London: Lincolns-Praeger, 1954); Leo Baeck, Judaism and Christianity: Essays, Translated with an introduction by Walter Kaufmann (New York: Atheneum, 1970); Hans Joachim Schoeps, The Jewish-Christian Argument: A History of Theologies in Conflict, Translated by David E. Green (London: Faber and Faber, 1963); Solomon Grayzel, The Church and the Jews in the XIIIth Century: A Study of Their Relations During the Years 1198-1254, Based on the Papal Letters and the Conciliar Decrees of the Period (Philadelphia: The Dropsie College, 1933); Herbert Danberg, The Jew and Christianity: Phases, Ancient and Modern, of the Jewish Attitude Towards Christianity (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1941); Frederick Clifton Grant, Ancient Judaism and the New Testament (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1978); Marcel Simon, Recherches D'Histoire Judeo-Chretienne (Paris: Mouton, 1962); James William Parks, Judaism and Christianity (London: V. Gollancz, 1948); Samuel Sandmel, Judaism and Christian Beginnings (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978); Adolf Hilgenfeld, Judenthum und Judenchristenthum (Leipzig: Fues, 1886); Albrecht Oepke, Das Neue Weltgestaltung (Guetersloh: C. Bertelsmann, 1950). David Plusser, Yahadut U'Mekorot HaNazrut; E. P. Sanders, ed., Jewish and Christian Self-Definition (London: SCM Press, 1981); William David Davies, Christian Origins and Judaism (New York: A. Press, 1973); S. H. Hooke, Robert Loewe, E. O. James and W. O. E. Oesterley, Judaism and Christianity (London: Sheldon Press, 1937); Judaism and the Beginnings of Christianity, A Series of Lectures Delivered in 1923 at Jews' College, London, under the auspices of the Union of Jewish Literary Societies (London: G. Routledge, 1923).
7. Emile G. Leonard, A History of Protestantism, ed. by H. H. Rowley (London: Nelson, 1965); Paul Tillich, The Protestant Era, trans. by James Luther Adams (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957); Thomas Sanders, Protestant Concepts of Church and State (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1964); John Dillenberger and Claude Welch, Protestant Christianity, Interpreted Through Its Development (New York: C. Scribner's Sons, 1964); Lewis William Spitz, The Protestant Reformation, 1517-1559 (New York: Harper and Row, 1985); Hans Joachim Hillerbrand, ed., The Protestant Reformation (New York: Harper and Row, 1968); Henry Daniel-Rops, The Protestant Reformation (London: J. M. Dent, 1961); D. J. Callahan, H. A. Oberman and D. J. O'Hanlon, eds., Christianity Divided: Protestant and Roman Catholic Theological Issues (London: Sheed and Ward, 1962); John Sheldon Whale, The Protestant Tradition: An Essay in Interpretation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1955); Henri Hauser, La Naissance Protestantisme, second edition (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1962); J. Wayne Baker, Heinrich J. Bullinger and the Covenant (Athens, Ohio: University of Ohio Press, 1981).
8. Leo Strauss and Joseph Cropsey, eds., History of Political Philosophy (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1963); Jacob Ben-Amittay, The History of Political Thought From Ancient to Present Times (New York: Philosophical Library, 1972); William R. Hutchinson, The Modernist Impulse in American Protestantism (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1976); Otto Gierke, The Development of Political Theory (New York: Norton, 1939); Bernard Bailyn, Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1967); Morton Frisch and Richard Stevens, The Political Thought of American Statesmen (Itasca, Illinois: F. E. Peacock, 1973); Ralph Henry Gabriel, The Course of American Democratic Thought, second edition (New York: Ronald Press, 1956).
9. Robert Bellah, The Broken Covenant: American Civil Religion in Time of Trial (New York: Seabury Press, 1975); Charles McCoy, Covenant and Community in the Thought of Heinrich Bullinger (Philadelphia: Center for the Study of Federalism, 1980); William Johnson Everett, God's Federal Republic (New York/ Mahwah: Paulist Press, 1988); (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1969); Daniel J. Elazar and John Kincaid, Covenant, Polity and Constitutionalism, eds. (Lanham, Maryland: University Press of America, 1983).
10. On Judeo-Christian corporative relations, see James William Parkes, Judaism and Christianity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948); Prelude to Dialogue: Jewish Christian Relationships (London: Vallentine, Mitchell, 1969); Jews, Christians and the World of Tomorrow (Southhampton: Parkes Library, 1969); Richard Rousseau, ed., Christianity and Judaism: The Deepening Dialogue (Montrose, Pa: Ridge Row Press, 1983); and Norman Soloman, The Jewish-Christian Dialogue and Peace (Oxford: Oxford Project for Peace Studies, 1988).
11. Will Herberg, Protestant-Catholic-Jew (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1960); other ecumenical works include the following by Franklin H. Littell: From State Church to Pluralism (Chicago: Aldine Pub. Co., 1962); The Crucifixion of the Jews (New York: Harper and Row, 1975).
12. On postwar intra-Christian ecumenicism, see Robert M. Brown, An American Dialogue: A Protestant Looks at Catholicism and a Catholic Looks at Protestantism (Garden City: Doubleday, 1960); S.M. Cavert, Church Cooperation and Unity in America, 1900-1970 (New York: Association Press, 1970); J. O'Hanlon, ed., Christianity Divided: Protestant and Roman Catholic Theological Issues (London: Sheed and Ward, 1962); and Willem Hendrik van de Pol, The Christian Dilemma (London: J.M. Dent, 1952).
13. Cf. op. cit. Brown and op. cit. Cavert.
14. Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953); Otto Gierke, Natural Law and the Theory of Society, translated by Ernest Barker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1934); Robert Horowitz, The Moral Foundations of the American Republic (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1979).
15. Andrew C. McLaughlin, The Foundations of American Constitutionalism, introduction by Henry Steele Commager (Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1972); Bernard Bailyn, Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1967); Bernard Bailyn, The Origins of American Politics (New York: Knopf, 1968); Gordon Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1969); Henry Adams, ed., Documents Relating to New England Federalism, 1800-1815 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1905); Ralph Henry Gabriel, The Course of American Democratic Thought, 2nd edition (New York: Ronald Press, 1956); Andrew C. McLaughlin, The Confederation and the Constitution, 1783-1789 (New York: Collier Books, 1962); Andrew C. McLaughlin, A Constitutional History of the United States (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1963); Donald S. Lutz, Popular Consent and Popular Control: Whig Political Theory in the Early State Constitutions (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1980); Donald S. Lutz, "The Purposes of American State Constitutions," Publius, Vol. 12, No. 1 (1982), pp. 27-44.
16. On the League of Nations and United Nations, see Philip E. Jacob, The Dynamics of International Organization (Homewood, Ill.: Dorsey Press, 1972).
