Early New England: A Covenanted Society by David Weir (review)

EARLY NEW ENGLAND: A COVENANTED SOCIETY by David Weir. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005. Ecumenical consensus proposes full communion as the goal of the ecumenical dialogues. Within this ecclesiological vision, governance has three dimensions: personal, collegial, and communal oversight. The Catholic contribution to this vision is the ecclesiology of hierarchical communion, with its emphasis on the personal role of the bishops in communion with the bishop of Rome. This vision does not obscure the communal role of the whole People of God or the collegial structures whereby this personal service is exercised. The principal complementary gift to this hierarchical theology of communion is the covenant theology to emerge in the Reformed tradition . Under the sovereignty of God, the covenantal interdependence of the whole people of God is expressed in collegial structures to which any and all expressions of personal episcopé are held to be accountable. In the pilgrimage toward full communion, the gift of covenant collegiality and hierarchical mutuality will need to find avenues for dialogue and reconciliation. This volume is a summary of research on covenantal structures of governance , civil and ecclesiastical, in seventeenth century New England. During this period what have become the states of New England was part of old England. The pilgrim fathers set up colonies of separatist and nonseparatist Calvinist congregations in Massachusetts and other colonies of the east coast of North America, from Nova Scotia to South Carolina. Ironically, from 1642 until the 1660 restoration, the Puritan churches became the established Church of England. Those colonists who left England to separate from the established Church in order to establish a new covenantal, converted community in the new world became the state enforced religion in both old and new England during this period. The book, part of the Emory University Studies in Law and Religion, analyzes in detail the documents of this period—covenants, charters, contracts and confessions—their diversity and the covenantal theologies that lie behind them. In pursuing this study, the author has researched and synthesized a vast amount of unpublished material. He looks in detail at this rich array of documents, most of which are Reformed congregational in origin. But some are Baptist from the Rhode Island colony, or civil covenants, especially after the restoration of 1660, which allow for a certain range of Protestant religious diversity, following the acts of toleration in old England in the period of the restoration. The author is able to document the diversity of the approaches to the covenant relationbook reviews 537 538 the jurist ships, especially in the civil societies of the period, and to revise the received wisdom about the uniformity of the “Puritan Mind.” He is also able to document the evolution of contractual and constitutional thinking which developed out of the covenantal principles of the early Reformed colonists. This research is of interest not only to the scholars ofAmericanAngloSaxon Protestantism or of the wider Reformed tradition. Given the influence of British Protestantism on modern legal thinking, on the institutions of post revolutionary American society, and on the civil religion that under girds American public life, this study discloses important new insights on the commonAmerican heritage. Likewise, it demonstrates alternate modes of church order and governance to those of the traditional episcopal forms of the pre-Reformation and the Anglican heritages. Each community, intentionally and in light of their reading of the biblicalcovenant ,theexigenciesoftheirownrelationshipwithGod,withone another, and with the society they were building, developed its own formulationsofrightsandresponsibilities .Oncetherewasevenamodesttoleration in all of England, new and old; and charters for civil society were handed down by authorities, all of whom would have been authorized by the established Church of England in its restored episcopal form, the utopian, puritan experiment was inevitably due to unravel. Even more fundamental to the erosion of covenantal theology and the community of visible saints were the accommodations to the unconverted members of the community and to the children “born” into the covenant, but not themselves yet full communicants in the congregations. The book provides chapters on the European background of the puritan movement and covenant theology, and the early colonial charters of the century. There are chapters on the civil covenants, the church covenants for the Puritan congregations, and for those...