The Constitution of the United States is the legacy of “a peculiar moment in history when all knowledge coincided, when classical antiquity, Christian theology, English empiricism, and European rationalism could all be linked.” And covenant was the linking concept. The religious idea of covenant was particularly and profoundly important in the evolution and inspiration of the American Constitution, for the political idea of, and the political concepts embodied in, the Constitution can be traced in “an unbroken line of descent” to the seventeenth-century covenant theology. In this essay, I will review the origins of the Constitution in covenant theology.
