Almost instinctively, shortly after arrival, one of the first things colonists did was establish a church. The way they did so was not to simply get a meeting together and come to an oral agreement. They wrote down what they were thinking. They wrote down a central plot that described their intentions. The spirit of those documents were derived from the covenantal agreements in the book that inspired their journey in the first place.
It’s important to understand what a covenant is and why it stands out historically. A covenant is an agreement. Marriage is a modern example of a common covenant and is referred to as a covenant in the Bible. Having an agreement assumes that at least two or more parties are involved and both agree. It assumes that they are all equally deserving of the individual right to agree and thus the responsibility to uphold the covenant. Historically this is not the norm.
For most of history people were politically contained in an unequal hierarchy and commanded what to do. They were subjugated to an earthly power contained within another human being. A covenant is different. The covenants written by the first American settlers established agreements that held all people equally free to agree and equally responsible to uphold. The only hierarchy was between man and God. All people were held equal under God.
Biblical covenants are similar. There are five major covenants in the Bible; the Noahic Covenant, the Abrahamic Covenant, the Mosaic Covenant, the Davidic Covenant, and the New Covenant.
Each covenant describes an agreement between God and his people. “Agreement” is a key concept here. They are not commands from God but agreements, which assumes that people have individual will and can choose to participate or not. There are blessings for obedience and curses for disobedience. Or, as we would say today, there are consequences for the behavior of the undersigned.
The whole structure of the Biblical corpus’ backbone relies on these covenants, and the people who left the shores of Great Britain with Bibles in their hands would have been very familiar with this concept. Colonies that had no contact with each other ended up producing strikingly similar covenants upon arrival.
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