Two Unusual Covenants

Two Unusual Covenants
2 Kings 11:1-21

The idea of covenant has been very important in the history of the United States and in the development of American democracy as a way of understanding relationships in the human community. Etymologically, the word covenant includes the idea of people “coming together” to agree on something; a covenant is an agreement, but the agreement concerns not merely some facts but the way the people live together. When settlers at New Plymouth formulated the Mayflower Compact in 1620, they entered into a covenant with one another for their community’s “better ordering and preservation” under God. Ideally, living in a covenant relationship implies that the nation is a group of people who accept responsibility to and for one another under God. Not long after the Mayflower Compact, Thomas Hobbes and John Locke were also developing in Europe a secular form of covenant-based political thinking that also came to influence American thinking. So there came into being constitutions that were covenantal without being religious...