Skip to content
Licensed Unlicensed Requires Authentication Published by De Gruyter October 14, 2021

Reverse-Engineering the Covenant: Moses, Massachusetts Bay and the Construction of a City on a Hill

  • Matthew Rowley ORCID logo EMAIL logo

Abstract

This article examines the famous “city on a hill” sermon delivered by John Winthrop at the start of colonial Massachusetts Bay. It focuses on belief-formation, looking at how Winthrop reverse-engineered the covenant in two senses. First, he found a blueprint for a godly society in the Pentateuch. Moreover, scholars have missed Winthrop’s reversal of the covenant-formation process. In the Pentateuch, God approached Israel with a covenant offer—setting the terms of the agreement and setting the supernatural verification that the covenant was ratified. However, when Massachusetts Bay entered the covenant, Winthrop reversed the order: he approached God, he set the terms of the covenant and the standard of verification that God ratified the covenant. America’s “founding covenant,” though taken by many as a parallel with biblical Israel, is actually its opposite. In reverse-engineering the covenant based on the Pentateuch, Winthrop also altered the role of God and his people. One of the benefits flowing from covenant obedience, Winthrop argued, would be victory in battle against Native Americans.


Corresponding author: Dr. Matthew Rowley, Honorary Visiting Fellow, Department of History, Politics and International Relations, University of Leicester, Leicester, LE1 7RH, UK, E-mail:
I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers whose critiques strengthened the article.

References

Primary Sources

Bush Jr, S. 2001. The Correspondence of John Cotton. London: University of North Carolina Press.Search in Google Scholar

Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society. 1838. series 3, vol. 7. Boston: Charles C. Little and James Brown.Search in Google Scholar

Cotton, J. 1630. Gods Promise to His Plantation. London: William Jones.Search in Google Scholar

Duffield, G. E. 1964. The Works of William Tyndale. Appleford: Sutton Courtenay.10.1177/0040571X6406753307Search in Google Scholar

Heimert, A., and A. Delbanco. 1985. The Puritans in America: A Narrative Anthology. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, .10.4159/9780674038493Search in Google Scholar

LaFantasie, G. W. 1988. The Correspondence of Roger Williams, 2 vols. London: Brown University Press.Search in Google Scholar

Spitz, B. 2018. Reagan: An American Journey. New York: Penguin.Search in Google Scholar

Winthrop, J. 1645. A declaration of former passages and proceedings betwixt the English and the Narrowgansets, with their confederates. Boston.Search in Google Scholar

Young, A. 1846. Chronicles of the First Planters of the Colony of Massachusetts Bay, From 1623–1636. Boston: Freeman and Bolles.Search in Google Scholar

Secondary Sources

Barry, J. M. 2012. The Creation of the American Soul: Roger Williams, Church and State, and the Birth of Liberty. London: Duckworth Overlook.Search in Google Scholar

Bremer, F. J. 1997. “The heritage of John Winthrop: religion along the Stour Valley, 1548–1630.” The New England Quarterly 70:515–47.10.2307/366644Search in Google Scholar

Bremer, F. J. 2003. John Winthrop: America’s Forgotten Founding Father. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Search in Google Scholar

Bremer, F. J. 2012. First Founders: American Puritans and Puritanism in an Atlantic World. Durham: University of New Hampshire Press.Search in Google Scholar

Bross, K. 2004. Dry Bones and Indian Sermons: Praying Indians in Colonial America. London: Cornell University Press.Search in Google Scholar

Charles, M., and S.-C. Rah. 2019. Unsettling Truths: The Ongoing, Dehumanizing Legacy of the Doctrine of Discovery. Downers Grove: InterVarsity.Search in Google Scholar

Coffey, J. 2013. Exodus and Liberation: Deliverance Politics from John Calvin to Martin Luther King Jr. Oxford: Oxford University Press.10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199334223.001.0001Search in Google Scholar

Cogley, R. W. 1999. John Eliot’s Mission to the Indians before King Philip’s War. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.10.4159/9780674029637Search in Google Scholar

Fea, J. 2018. Believe Me: The Evangelical Road to Donald Trump. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans.Search in Google Scholar

Gorman, A. 2021. The Hill We Climb: An Inaugural Poem for the Country. New York: Viking.Search in Google Scholar

Guinness, O. S. 2018. Last Call for Liberty: How America’s Genius for Freedom has become its Greatest Threat. Downers Grove: InterVarsity.Search in Google Scholar

Hall, D. D. 2011. A Reforming People: Puritanism and the Transformation of Public Life in New England. New York: Knopf.10.5149/9780807837115_hallSearch in Google Scholar

MacCulloch, D. 2003. Reformation: Europe’s House Divided, 1490–1700. London: Penguin.Search in Google Scholar

McGann, J. 2019. “Christian charity, A sacred American text: Fact, Truth, method.” Textual Cultures 12: 27–52.10.14434/textual.v12i1.27151Search in Google Scholar

Moots, G. A. 2010. Politics Reformed: The Anglo-American Legacy of Covenant Theology. London: University of Missouri Press.Search in Google Scholar

Noll, M. 2002. America’s God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln. Oxford: Oxford University Press.10.1093/0195151119.001.0001Search in Google Scholar

Reagan, R. 1989. Speaking My Mind: Selected Speeches. New York: Simon & Schuster.Search in Google Scholar

Rodgers, D. T. 2018. As a City on a Hill: The Story of America’s Most Famous Lay Sermon. Princeton: Princeton University Press.10.2307/j.ctvc778b0Search in Google Scholar

Rosendahl, S. F. 2018. Not Your White Jesus: Following a Radical, Refugee Messiah. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press.Search in Google Scholar

Rowley, M. 2018. “Godly violence: Military providentialism in the Puritan Atlantic world, 1636–1676.” PhD diss., Leicester, UK: University of Leicester.Search in Google Scholar

Rowley, M. 2020a. Trump and the Protestant Reaction to Make America Great Again. London: Routledge.10.4324/9781003132356Search in Google Scholar

Rowley, M. 2020b. “A new Approach to just and holy warfare: the complicated case of Puritan violence,” in Religion and Conflict in Medieval and Early Modern Worlds: Identities, Communities and Authorities, eds. N. Hodgson, J. McCallum, N. Morton, and A. Fuller, pp. 275–93. London: Routledge.10.4324/9780429451201-21Search in Google Scholar

Silverman, D. J. 2019. This Land is Their Land: The Wampanoag Indians, Plymouth Colony, and the Troubled History of Thanksgiving. New York: Bloomsbury.Search in Google Scholar

Spitz, B. 2018. Reagan: An American Journey. New York: Penguin.Search in Google Scholar

Stout, H. S. 1986. New England Soul: Preaching and Religious Culture in Colonial New England. (Repr. 2012); Oxford: Oxford University Press.Search in Google Scholar

Stuart, L. A. M. 2016. Rethinking the Scottish Revolution: Covenanted Scotland, 1637–1651. Oxford: Oxford University Press.10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198718444.001.0001Search in Google Scholar

Van Engen, A. C. 2020. City on a Hill: A History of American Exceptionalism. New Haven: Yale University Press.10.2307/j.ctvwcjf0tSearch in Google Scholar

Walsham, A.. Providence in Early Modern England. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.Search in Google Scholar

Weir, D. A., Early New England: A Covenanted Society. Cambridge: Eerdmans, 2005.Search in Google Scholar


Supplementary Material

The online version of this article offers supplementary material (https://doi.org/10.1515/JBR-2021-0012).


Published Online: 2021-10-14
Published in Print: 2021-10-26

© 2021 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

Downloaded on 28.3.2024 from https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/jbr-2021-0012/html
Scroll to top button