WT767 (2005): 301-21 THEOLOGICALLY UNITED AND DIVIDED: THE POLITICAL COVENANTALISM OF SAMUEL RUTHERFORD AND JOHN MILTON ANDRIES RAATH and SHAUN DE FkEiTAS I. Introduction Puritanism in England and America (and Pietism, its counterpart on the Euro- pean continent), was the last great movement within the insdtudonal church to influence the development of Western law (and polidcs) in any fundamental sense.' Also, English Puritanism was the third great intellectujJ-social movement of the Reformadon federalists, after Huldreich Zwingli and Heinrich Bullinger in Zmich, and John Calvin in Geneva.^ Despite its ultimate failure as a move- ment, Puritanism had a profound and lasting impact on the consdtudonal tradi- don in England, on the "new polidcal science" of the polidcal compact, and on the consdtudonal development of the United States. In certain respects it was the greatest of the three, pardcularly with regard to the polidcal thought and the polidcal ideas and movements to which it gave birth, of which the covenant was a central teaching. ^ The sixteenth-century Zurich and Geneva Reformadons each provided a different emphasis regarding the covenant and the Chrisdan community It was especially the theologico-polidcal covenantalism emanating from the Zurich Reformadon that received attendon in sixteenth- and seven- teenth-centxny Puritanism.* Samuel Rutherford and John Milton represent the Andries Raath is Senior Professor in the Department of Constitutional Law and Philosophy of Law, Faculty of Law, University of the Free State, Bkemfontein, South AJrica. Shaun de Freitas is Senior Lecturer in the same Department. Harold J. Berman, Law and Revolution: The Formation of the Western Legal Tradition (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983), 31. The term Puritan is clouded by many different definitions and interpretations. A summary of some of the main views on the term is given in Joel R. Beeke, Tlu Qlfestfor Full Assurance (Carlisle, Pa.: Banner of Truth, 1998), 82. The term is used here in the sense of Perry Miller's description of the "marrow of Puritan divinity" as a theology based on the idea of the covenant (Errandinto the Wilderness [Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1956], 82-83). Samuel Rutherford represented the Presbyterian line of Puritan thought which, "in a political sense . . . denote [s] that section of opinion which had supported the parliamentary cause in the civil war but which wjis alienated by, or which steered clear of politics after. Pride's Purge [December 1648] and the execu- tion of the king" (Blair Warden, The Rump Parliament, 1648-1653 [Cambridge: Cambridge Univer- sity Press, 1977], 10). ^ Daniel J. Elazar, The Covenant Tradition in Politics: Vol. 2, Covenant and Commonwealth (New Bruns- wick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 1996), 231. ' Ibid. * See Andries Raath and Shaun de Freitas, "Heinrich Bullinger and the Marian Exiles: The PoliticzJ Foundations of Puritanism," Studia Historiae Ecclesiasticae 28 (2001): 1-34; and Andries 301