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155 For Voegelin, the covenant is a symbol that both reveals the tension inherent in human existence and transcends political or moral appropriation. For Elazar, the covenant is a peerless and flexible device underlying modern constitutionalism , federalism, and social contracts. For Novak, the covenant appears as both symbol and device only for communities sharing a revelatory tradition and not for civil society. If we accept Voegelin’s proscription against its appropriation , the covenant remains a revealing but inaccessible symbol in the history of political order. If we accept the optimistic reasoning of Elazar and decide that covenantalism may be alive and well in secular constitutions, we risk losing the distinct contribution of a divine partner and accompanying transcending moral obligations. If we accept Novak’s critique of the Noahide covenant and rely only on the Sinai covenant, we risk losing the possibility of applying the covenant to any communities beyond biblical communities. And we lose the value of the covenantal ethos for civil society as a whole. What should we say to these three presentations of covenanted politics? REDEEMING THE COVENANT The covenant reveals what Voegelin calls the Metaxy of human existence: the fact that humankind is suspended between divinity and the mundane. Because the covenant addresses the challenges of humankind’s special status as the Imago Dei, it is what I called in Chapter 2 a political theology par excellence . The covenant summons with a moral call that transcends selfishness and cynicism. Its exacting treatment of authority warns us of the tyranny of political expediency. The covenant exalts the highest fulfillments of community and Lessons for Religion and Politics Today 12 156 POLITICS REFORMED morality. It calls us not merely to conform to what is right but also to establish relationships and communities around what is just and good. Establishing these relationships and communities summons the qualities of our nature that are divine, those rightly emphasized by the jeremiads of the biblical prophets. We must not trade those transcending principles of justice and goodness for cynical and utilitarian goals of realpolitik or the deceptive visions of political demagogues and messiahs. In criticizing the Hebrew use of the covenant,Voegelin argues that the greatest misuse of the covenant symbol was to make Yahweh a God for the pragmatic purposes of Israel, rather than a universal God of history. Voegelin’s argument must be read as a warning against appropriating any symbol in such a way as to allow a nation to see itself as the culmination of history. This is precisely what went wrong when Reformed Protestants went from a prophetic to an apocalyptic eschatology during Cromwell’s Commonwealth. In the case of the Britain, the result of apocalyptic exceptionalism was theological suicide for the covenant tradition there. The American use of the covenant was not so tragic. By the time of their War for Independence, Americans had succeeded in building levees against the theological spillover of millenarianism and chiliasm that had doomed the covenant in Britain. The American Founders called upon another aspect of Reformed theology, the limitations of the postlapsarian condition, to curb the excesses of Gnosticism lest the chosen people think themselves called to something other than the mansions of heaven. As Ellis Sandoz casts it, this was a republic for sinners rather than for saints.1 Realistic acknowledgment of postlapsarian (fallen and imperfect) human nature carried on into the Constitution and its distrust of centralized power. As the so-called “father of the Constitution,” James Madison, argued, self-interested human nature would not and could not be miraculously cured. Rather, it was to be used in the service of limiting power. Men were not angels. They were ambitious and factious, and that fact must be acknowledged and then harnessed in the service of liberty.2 Voegelin’s admonishment serves as a warning against the appropriation of salvation to politics. The call of the covenant is more clearly discerned during the spiritual openness caused by crises of liberty. This is demonstrated in covenanting episodes both ancient and modern and in the endless replaying of the Exodus narrative throughout history. When the covenant is recalled in politics, it must be used only to restore the liberty that has been lost. Anything more ambitious than the restoration of liberty leads to messianic ideology and tempts peoples to political excesses that come from believing themselves “chosen.” Beyond the restoration of political liberty, the covenant points only to a spiritual end, the Civitas Dei, the City of God. This...

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