Covenant Idea

I recently came across the work of Daniel Judah Elazar, a political scientist at Temple University who has devoted much of his working life to tracing the impact of biblical ideas of covenant on the development of Western politics. This comes out most fully in a four-volume work on the covenant idea in politics, which begins with a solid survey of the biblical teaching on covenant, especially in regard to political life, and then traces the covenant political theology of the Christian Middle Ages, the Reformation, and the secularization of the covenant idea in modern constitutional thought. He gives a lot of air time to the Swiss Reformation, even comparatively obscure writers like Althusius. All in all, his many works look like a great resource for Christian, and especially Reformed, political thought.