The paper below was prepared for the Jubilee Centre taskforce on the role of the state in the post COVID-19 world. Its intention is to provide a brief overview of classic social contract theory and then identify some ways in which the social contract paradigm relates to Christian theology. Enjoy!
Christianity and the social contract
“Contemporary Western society is in the grip of contractual thinking”[1]
“The response to the pandemic, and to the widespread discontent that preceded it, must be based on a New Social Contract”[2]
The U.N. Secretary General is doing it.[3] The World Bank[4] and Joe Biden are doing it, [5] as are Black Lives Matter activists,[6] Naomi Klein,[7] Australian Liberal politicians[8] and Extinction Rebellion:[9] they are all using social contract language to frame the most important and immediate public issues of our day.
Our security and prosperity rely on a set of implicit assumptions and agreements that shape how individuals, governments and corporations relate to each other. One influential political theory calls these assumptions and agreements the “social contract”, and the trust, civility and sense of mutual benefit at the heart of the social contract are crucial to maintaining a peaceful and prosperous society. In the social contract we citizens give up some of our natural freedoms in exchange for a society that works for the good of everyone. Or at least that’s how it works in theory.
Today, our social contract is facing acute and immediate challenges. From Black Lives Matter to the COVID-19 lockdowns, every day we see both the necessity and fragility of our social contract played out on news bulletins. Beyond the headlines of the day, social contract language is used to frame discussions in sustainability (do we all have a duty to give up air travel and SUVs for the good of the planet?), extremism (is it acceptable for my freedom of speech be curtailed in the name of the war on terror?) and technology (what is the responsibility of big tech companies to their users’ data?).
Where do Christians fit in this picture? Should Christians simply embrace the language of the social contract and join the conversation on those terms? Or should they critique and resist the idea of the social contract as a concept that frames our society’s present and guides its future? It is important that Christians understand where social contract language came from, its possibilities and potential dangers, and how it relates to a biblical worldview. Although social contract theory and a biblical view of society are in important ways antithetical, there are significant areas of overlapping concern that allow for a constructive and invigorating conversation about the health and future of our society.
Origins of social contract theory
“The social contract” has a casual, everyday sense, and a more specific, philosophical meaning. In everyday language it means something like “the unwritten rules of how we all expect to treat each other and be treated in society”. If police beat or even murder a man they are supposed to protect, then they are breaking the social contract. If I sneak out of my house when I am supposed to be self-isolating because of COVID-19, then I am breaking the social contract.
The more technical, philosophical sense of the term is multiple. There isn’t just one theory of the social contract, but a whole range.[10] The social contract has important antecedents in Plato’s Crito and Republic, as well as in medieval thought, but as we commonly understand it today it is a thoroughly modern idea. We usually identify four key classical social contract theorists: Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), John Locke (1632-1704), Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) and Immanuel Kant (1724-1804). I will focus on Hobbes and Rousseau, because they present what can be considered the two extremes of social contract thought.
Hobbes is the Eeyore of social contract theory. He thinks that individuals without the contract are self-interested, violent and in a “war of all against all”. Life is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short”, and we live in perpetual fear of suffering a violent death. To avoid this state of constant threat and anxiety, individuals decided to hand over the sole power of life and death to a central, despotic sovereign, a “Leviathan” in the title of Hobbes’s famous political treatise. In exchange for forfeiting all their natural rights to do whatever they want, the sovereign Leviathan offers them security. Once the contract has been entered into, there is no check on this Leviathan’s power, no higher authority to which it must answer.
Rousseau is the Tigger to Hobbes’s Eeyore. If Hobbes’s “war of all against all” is like a nightmarish Hieronymus Bosch painting, Rousseau’s pre-contract “state of nature” resembles one of Thomas Kinkade’s idyllic landscapes. “Man is born free”, Rousseau proclaims in the opening line of The Social Contract, “and everywhere he is in chains”. These are the chains of modern industrial life, where wealth and property are concentrated in the hands of the few and people are alienated from their natural liberty.
If individuals are pushed into Hobbes’s contract because they are so afraid of the violent alternative, they are pulled into Rousseau’s because of a positive vision for their common life and perfectibility. Whereas Hobbes’s Leviathan offers the thin gruel of security, Rousseau’s social contract is supposed to lay the table for a banquet of freedom. Everyone can be free because, Rousseau contentiously argues, every community has a “general will” that reflects its true wishes. In following the general will, Rousseau claims that individuals retain their autonomy while simultaneously being under a collective authority. And what if some individuals refuse to conform to the general will? Well, in Rousseau’s words, they should be “forced to be free”.
So there we have the two bookends of social contract theory. Is the pre-contract state of nature vicious (Hobbes) or idyllic (Rousseau)? Does the contract bring about a tyrannical sovereign (Hobbes) or the supposed consensus of a general will (Rousseau)? Does it provide security (Hobbes), or freedom (Rousseau)? One thing is clear: “social contract theory” is no more a single, homogeneous idea than are “postmodernism” or “Christianity”.[11]
What sort of thing is the social contract?
You will often hear the complaint that “I never signed the social contract”. You will hear it ridiculed on the basis that no-one ever sat down one fine day and put pen to paper to form a society. These critiques misunderstand the work that the contract metaphor is doing in social contract theory.
Neither Hobbes nor Rousseau maintains that, on a given calendar day in history, a group of individuals sat down and signed a written contract. To think so would be as absurd as taking Adam Smith to be arguing that there is a literal five-fingered “invisible hand” at work in the economy. So if the social contract isn’t a historical legal agreement, what is it? There are at least three answers to that question.
First, the social contract can be considered as a piece of what philosophers call transcendental reasoning, or in plain language a way of making sense of what we see around us every day. How is it that we don’t all go round killing each other? How is it that most people obey most laws most of the time? How can we explain the society we see around us? There must be something that stops us ripping each other’s heads off, some implicit understanding we have of how society works, a missing piece of the jigsaw puzzle of our common life. The idea social contract is an attempt to provide that missing piece.
Secondly, there is the view that the social contract doesn’t describe something that happened a long time ago but rather makes something happen right here and now. In philosophical language, contract language is performative, not descriptive. Its value is in shaping our social attitudes and expectations today, not in telling us what happened back in the mists of time.
Thirdly, the social contract can be seen as a vision for the future, like Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech. It projects an inspiring and mobilising picture of how society should and perhaps could be. It is like a sporting playbook: not an accurate account of how things actually turn out during the game, but a blueprint of how they are supposed to look if all goes according to plan. On this reading, the appropriate question to ask of the social contract idea is not “is it true?” but “what can it inspire?” or “how can it change things for the better?”
What are the benefits and opportunities for Christians of using social contract language?
Before considering the tensions and pitfalls of social contract language, let us think about its benefits. When Christians are thinking about how to engage with any social or political idea, they need to begin with a clarity about what they are trying to achieve. Is the aim to contribute constructively and distinctively to ongoing public debate? To critique secular ideas from a rigorously biblical point of view? To talk to Christians, to wider society, or (most difficult of all) to both at the same time?
If the aim is to contribute to wider social debates and be heard in the public square, then one important consideration is that social contract language simply is the frame in which current discussions are taking place. Like Britain’s rail service, social contract language may be far from perfect and may include unwelcome detours and frustrating delays, but it is almost certainly quicker than refusing all help and trying to walk. In this respect, the social contract is like human rights: we may critique the concept’s foundations, we may be uneasy with some of its implications, but unless we want to cut a lonely figure on the platform while train after train speeds by, we need to engage with it one way or another.
The benefits of social contract language are many. Here are a few quick points that bear careful consideration. First, the contract metaphor can push against some of the damaging assumptions of modern individualism in showing that no man is an island and that we are part of a larger society with obligations to each other, whether we like it or not.
Secondly, the social contract has the distinct advantage over some historical and contemporary ideas of government that it attempts, in one way or another, to honour the security and dignity of all human beings, not just for an elite. In theory at least, each individual has a stake in the sovereign power that governs society, whether by consenting to it (Hobbes) or participating in it (Rousseau).
Thirdly, the social contract makes visible that the foundation of our common life is deeper than laws and regulations. Society is not just built on legislation but on relationships of trust and mutual benefit, without which laws and the social contract itself would crumble, and society disintegrate.
Fourthly, as we shall see below, the social contract borrows much from a biblical worldview, although it adapts and transforms its theological basis sometimes beyond recognition.
What are the limits and dangers of the social contract idea?
Contractarianism has undergone sustained and necessary critique from many quarters in the last half century. While specific expressions of the social contract have been critiqued in their details, here are the most important general arguments that have been marshalled against social contract theory as such.
Anthropologically narrow. The social contract idea has been accused of peddling a particular model of the person, often labelled the “liberal Individual”. “Individual” indicates that the contract idea represents “a failure to consider the essentially social nature of human being”,[12] as if atomised individuals required a contract to form associations that do not arise naturally. “Liberal” indicates that the model privileges the faculties of will and rationality, the act of choosing, and the status and leisure to have a voice in the public arena.
Relationally reductive. The contract metaphor forces all human relations into an economic and legal mould. It sees every relationship as a contract bent on the maximisation of benefit, treats every person as a stranger, every encounter as a calculation, and strips away trust and generosity, reducing all of life to the logic of the business deal. The social contract is part of paradigm of calculated exchange and promotes a vision of “economic man”.[13] Individuals are considered to be primarily owners of themselves in an anthropology that is based on property.
Exclusionary. It has been argued that the social contract’s liberal individual is a thinly veiled white bourgeois male. This particular human is then used as the yardstick of all humanity. The social contract reveals itself as a “sexual contract” that excludes and oppresses women,[14] and a “racial contract” that excludes and oppresses people of colour.[15]
Anthropocentric. The contract also focuses exclusively on human-human relationships, artificially excluding our necessary reliance on, and interaction with, the non-human world.[16]
Non-binding. The consensual nature of the social contract falls short of providing rationally compelling or motivating reasons to act in one way rather than another. Contract theories cannot adequately account for the ethical basis of the society they bring into being in a way that would compel dissenters to fall into line. A variation on this theme is that a contract struck in one generation cannot bind the descendants of the contractors into perpetuity.[17]
Circular. It has been argued that the idea of the social contract bootstraps itself into existence. It requires rational, civic-minded individuals who will choose the general will over their own narrow interests, but it claims that these virtues are only cultivated within the contracted society.[18]
Destructive of civil society. The social contract tends to overlook all social entities apart from atomised individuals and the state. In some cases this refusal to acknowledge civil society groups such as private associations, families, ethnicities, interest groups and churches is a deliberate policy. Rousseau, for example, expressly stipulates that there should be no “particular associations”[19] to rival the citizens’ loyalty undivided loyalty to the state.
Falsely procedural. Michael Sandel[20] and others argue that contractualists (especially Rawls) are mistaken when they say that social contract theory has no inherent vision of the good life but merely describes a neutral process for arriving at social cohesion. The very exclusion of specific ideas of the good, Sandel argues, is itself a particular conception of the good.
Theological perspectives on the social contract
In addition to these general critiques, and echoing many of them, Christians have engaged in distinctive ways with social contract theory.
A secularised Christian idea
One of the most important theological engagements is to argue that social contract theory is, in fact, a Christian heresy.
At the dawn of the modern age, the social contract idea was an attempt to provide an account of political authority and obligation that has no need of God. Nevertheless, this attempt to secularise politics retains many theological concepts and religious structures, merely re-baptising them—so to speak—as secular.
First, instead of the God who obligates the community through his commandments in a way that provides a basis for the social order that is greater and more binding than any individual’s own understanding or feelings, Rousseau’s general will and Hobbes’s Leviathan seek to create the same, trans-personal, binding obligation without appeal to God.
Secondly, Rousseau seeks to strengthen the social bond through what he calls “civil religion”. This ersatz religiosity recognises the role of religion in providing the fundamental assumptions and predispositions that make the social contact possible in the first place, such as basic civility, trust that other people will do what they say, or the conviction that we will be held to account for our actions. However, it seeks to detach these assumptions and predispositions from religion, framing them “not exactly as religious dogmas, but as social sentiments without which a man cannot be a good citizen or a faithful subject”.[21]
Rousseau’s wager on civil religion relies on social sentiments being able to do the work of religious dogma. Civil religion allows citizens to be banished and indeed put to death, “not for impiety, but as an anti-social being, incapable of truly loving the laws and justice, and of sacrificing, at need, his life to his duty”. The principles of this civil religion have a distinctly Deist flavour:
The existence of a mighty, intelligent and beneficent Divinity, possessed of foresight and providence, the life to come, the happiness of the just, the punishment of the wicked, the sanctity of the social contract and the laws: these are its positive dogmas. Its negative dogmas I confine to one, intolerance, which is a part of the cults we have rejected.[22]
Thirdly, the very possibility of the contract is seen to rely on distinctively theological virtues. In The Jewish Social Contract, David Novak argues that modern social contracts are living off the borrowed capital of Judaeo-Christian ideas of trust, promise-keeping, moral accountability and a power beyond the state, without which they cannot survive.[23] Harold J. Berman similarly argues that modern contract law comes from medieval canon law, and relies on concepts of sin, equity, and the idea that making a promise incurs an obligation to God.[24]
Fourthly, the story of the social contract moving from a state of oppression (Hobbes’ state of nature or Rousseau’s alienated industrial society) through an act of deliverance (contracting) to a state of security or freedom is derived from a distinctively Judeo-Christian salvation narrative. In his Exodus and Revolution, political theorist Michael Walzer argues that “This isn’t a story told everywhere; it isn’t a universal pattern; it belongs to the West, more particularly to Jews and Christians in the West; and its source, its original version, is the Exodus of Israel from Egypt.”[25]
Social contract narratives follow the rhythm of creation-fall-redemption. The “war of all against all” (Hobbes), “state of nature” (Rousseau) or “original position” (Rawls) is the creation myth of social contract theory. It can be beatific or hellish. Some social contract theories, notably Hobbes’s, fold the creation and fall narratives together, making the original state one of terrifying brutality. Other theorists, such as Rousseau, separate creation and fall, introducing an actor into history (society, in Rousseau’s case) that corrupts the original purity of human life. The contract itself is a means of either partial or total redemption, rescuing the contracting parties from the worst of themselves (Hobbes) or from corrupt and destructive social circumstances (Rousseau).
Fifthly, the very idea of secularising the biblical salvation narrative is not a stripping away of religious content but the replacement of one means of salvation with another, a “state soteriology”[26] that mimics its theological model. One version of this salvation story is offered by Isaiah Berlin in his seminal lecture ‘Two concepts of liberty’. Considering Rousseau’s social contract as a “secularised Protestant individualism”, Berlin argues that:
the place of God is taken by the conception of the rational life, and the place of the individual soul which strains towards union with Him is replaced by the conception of the individual endowed with reason, straining to be governed by reason and reason alone, and to depend upon nothing that might deflect or delude him by engaging his irrational nature.[27]
In this respect, is it profitable for Christians to engage with social contract theory as an exercise in comparative religion.
Rousseau’s social contract is more pointedly related to its theological model than Berlin acknowledges. William Cavanaugh has argued that the social contract is a mechanism through which the modern state sets itself up as a rival agent of salvation, saving us precisely from the dangerous theological disagreements that—so the argument goes—have led to devastating wars of religion.[28]
Sixthly, the social contract seeks to replace the social glue provided by religious practices and rituals with the blunt instruments of political legislation and regulation. Oliver O’Donovan laments that
Instead of imagining our membership of one another in terms of what we communicate in — our neighborhoods, our businesses, our wisdom, our songs, and stories, we are taught to think of ourselves as united wholly by a political vocation which, precisely because it is not rooted in ordinary life, requires constant reinforcement by indoctrination.[29]
This attempted co-option by the state of the worldview formation of its citizens results in a situation in which “political functions bear too heavy a burden of identity-conferral”.[30]
Lex, rex
A further way of bringing social contract theory and biblical Christianity into conversation is around the work of Reformation thinkers considered to be precursors of the social contract, especially the version of contract theory present in the writing on John Locke. First among these Reformation antecedents is Samuel Rutherford’s (1600-1661) Lex, Rex (usually translated Law and the Prince, 1644).
Rutherford provides a fascinating alternative to the secularising contract theories of Hobbes and Locke. He uses the example of Moses to argue against monarchy and for a mode of Republican government in which the monarch is appointed both by the people in a “covenant” and also by God. In contrast to Hobbes, he also allows for the people to take back power from a tyrannical monarch: “If the people, as God’s instruments, bestow the benefit of a crown on their king, upon condition that he will rule them according to God’s word, then the king is made by the people conditionally.”[31] Unlike both the Hobbesian Leviathan and Rousseauian general will, Rutherford’s sovereign is subject to a higher power, that of the God who appointed him and to whose commands he is accountable. The king is a “life-renter, not a proprietor,” and “lex, rex” means that “law has a supremacy of constitution above the king”, rather than “rex, lex”, where the monarch makes whatever laws he or she pleases.
As well as showing (in the eyes of some commentators) the Reformation roots of social contract theory, Rutherford’s Lex, Rex also demonstrates that social contract theory need not necessarily be secularising and antagonistic to theological ideas and religious interests. Christians who reject the secular assumptions of the modern social contract need not reject the contract metaphor out of hand. Lex, Rex also does a better job than modern social contract theories is articulating the complex biblical view of authorities as both flawed and necessary, as both appointed by God (Romans 13:1) and chosen by people (1 Samuel 8:5).
Relations Trinitarian and contractarian
Social contract theory labours under a fundamental tension that each theorist must address, to greater or lesser degrees of satisfaction, but none has resolved. It is the tension between individual freedom and state authority. Hobbes squares the circle by denying individual freedom altogether and settling for the consolation prize of security. Rousseau argues that only in coming under the authority of the general will can the individual be truly free, whether or not she realises it.
Christian theology, however, possesses the resources to address this problem from a distinctive starting point. The doctrine of the Trinity leads the Christian to reject the basic premise of the difficulty, namely that the entities to be reconciled are the individual and the universal, the one and the many. This dichotomy of the one and the many is a modern way of conceiving society, but it is not a biblical one.
As Colin Gunton explains, “God appears to be conceived neither as a collectivity nor as an individual, but as a communion, a unity of persons in relation”.[32] Whereas social contract theory can only understand relationships as symmetrical (no individual is qualitatively different to any other in the contract) and reciprocal, intra-Trinitarian giving and receiving is asymmetrical and mutual. The Christian Trinity therefore “diagonalizes”[33] the false dichotomy of individual and state, showing how the bedrock of all relationality, both in the universe and in society, cannot be reduced to a square-off between the many and the one. This Trinitarian relationality also pushes back against the tendency of contract theories to under-emphasise or even seek to eliminate civil society: the complexes of local associations smaller than the state but larger than the individual.
Christian theology here offers a more multicoloured account of relations than the black and white contractarian individual/state dichotomy. Relationships of care, dependency, love and mutuality which we all readily recognise in daily life find their home in the Christian account but risk becoming invisible in the contractarian.
Contract and covenant
While the Bible has precious little to say about contracts as such, it is replete from start to finish with a concept that has much in common with contractarian ideas, and indeed from which they are in significant part derived. That concept is berith (Hebrew) or diatheke (Greek): covenant. Covenant is a thicker, more multifaceted concept than the legal notion of contract, and it offers a productive and important counterpoint to contemporary discussions of contractarianism.
Theologians commonly identify five covenants in the Bible: with Noah, with Abraham, with Moses on Sinai, with David, and the new covenant announced by Jesus Christ. Each of them repays careful study in the context of contemporary social contract theory; here are some of the salient points.
The Noahic covenant
The Noahic covenant, unlike social contracts, includes non-human life:
“I now establish my covenant with you and with your descendants after you and with every living creature that was with you—the birds, the livestock and all the wild animals, all those that came out of the ark with you—every living creature on earth.” (Genesis 9:9-10)
To be sure, Noah the human being is the mediator of the covenant, but all living things are parties to (and not just objects of) God’s covenant promise. In the light of contemporary ecological concerns, this provides a mandate and a pattern for social settlements that do not ignore non-human relationships of dependency and nurture.
The Abrahamic covenant
God’s covenant with Abraham in Genesis 15 subverts the paradigm of reciprocal commitments and responsibility enshrined in the “liberal subject” and his (always his) assumed capability. Having called Abram from his home in Ur, the LORD commands him to bring animals which he cuts in two, arranging the halves opposite each other, in preparation for what looks like an ancient near eastern covenant ceremony. The parties to the covenant (or just the junior party, the vassal) would normally pass between the animal pieces, performing a vow that they too are to be cut like the animals should they break their covenant vow.[34] What happens next most certainly does not follow the pattern of ancient near eastern covenant ceremonies:
12 As the sun was setting, Abram fell into a deep sleep, and a thick and dreadful darkness came over him. 13 Then the Lord said to him, “Know for certain that for four hundred years your descendants will be strangers in a country not their own and that they will be enslaved and mistreated there. 14 But I will punish the nation they serve as slaves, and afterward they will come out with great possessions. 15 You, however, will go to your ancestors in peace and be buried at a good old age. 16 In the fourth generation your descendants will come back here, for the sin of the Amorites has not yet reached its full measure.”
17 When the sun had set and darkness had fallen, a smoking firepot with a blazing torch appeared and passed between the pieces. (Genesis 15: 12-17)
Far from being an active participant in the covenant, Abram is out cold. Far from standing aloof, the LORD himself walks between the animals in the shape of the smoke and fire that will later lead the Israelites through the wilderness. This radical asymmetry between Abram and the LORD ruptures the requirement of participation and reciprocity that governs the social contract. Abram makes no promises of his own in this passage. Instead, “Abram believed the Lord, and he credited it to him as righteousness” (15:6; see also Romans 4:1-3).
When we say that the social contract is “broken” we often mean that it is unbalanced, that the parties are not each carrying their fair share of the burden. If Genesis 15 were a social contract it would be broken before it begins, such is the imbalance of commitment and responsibility.
Another word to describe the distinctive nature of biblical covenants, vividly illustrated in this passage and echoed throughout the Bible, is “grace”. A contract is governed by calculation and mutual benefit, and can be broken if the conditions are adverse or if another party reneges on his or her commitment. This is what we see in the copycat breaking of COVID-19 quarantine rules, or in the impassioned civil disobedience of black people incensed that the institutions supposed to protect them have violated their part of the contract. A biblical covenant, by contrast, is irrevocably binding and does not play out on a balance sheet of credit and debt. It hangs on the character of a God who does not exploit his position of power but moves towards his covenant partners in grace, even laying down his life to serve them.
The Mosaic covenant
Perhaps the closest that the Bible gets to an explicit social contract is the giving of the law at Sinai, and Joshua’s subsequent injunction to the nation in Joshua 24:14-15 to choose whom they will serve.[35] Tellingly, this solemn agreement between God and his people does not bring about the society it regulates, but acknowledges the gracious act of election and rescue that Yahweh has already performed. This is nowhere clearer than in the first words of Exodus 20, the chapter containing the Ten Commandments:
And God spoke all these words:
“I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery. You shall have no other gods before me. (Exodus 20:1-3)
It is God’s rescue of his people from Egypt that founds the new society: an act of grace and not a contract. The Sinai law solemnises and develops a relationship between God and his people that pre-dates it. The law helps the rescued Israel to adopt ways of living and relating that reflect the character of the God who has rescued them. This covenant is not performative; it is descriptive of the reality of rescue-for-relationship in which the nation now finds itself, as Moses proclaims to Pharaoh: “‘The Lord, the God of the Hebrews, has sent me to say to you: Let my people go, so that they may worship me in the wilderness” (Exodus 7:16).
This order (calling before covenant, liberation before law) is illuminating not only for the temporal primacy it gives to the LORD’s grace over agreements between him and his people, but also of the way it can inform contemporary conversations about privilege, race and disadvantage. A covenant of the Sinai sort cannot be struck with an oppressed people, unless at the very least their liberation is part of the terms of the covenant. A people must be free to abide by the covenant, to “worship me in the wilderness”. A new law given to Israel while the nation was still enslaved in Egypt would ring hollow. So also today, talk of rewiring the social contract in a way that does not address the systemic and institutional oppression of black or indigenous people is little more than an exercise in public relations of the most cynical kind. Exodus comes before Sinai, “let my people go!” before “thou shalt not…”
One further crucial and often overlooked aspect of the Sinai covenant is the rituals and liturgies[36] that undergird and surround it. The LORD did not covenant with Moses and Israel as a one-time event, the agreement then fading into the background of history like some ceremonial contract-signing ceremony. He gives Israel a suite of institutional, monarchical, familial and personal habits and ceremonies with the intention of predisposing his people to remember and keep the covenant. Among the many liturgies the LORD ordains are: the injunction remember the Passover and teach its significance to children, not as an afterthought but as a command on the very night of Passover itself (Exodus 12:24-7); the injunction to each new king to read through the Torah and make himself a personal copy (Deuteronomy 17:18); the inscription of exodus memory into the cultural and agricultural rhythms of the nation (Leviticus 25:38); the celebration and remembrance of God’s salvific act and of the giving of the law in song (see esp. Exodus 15, Deuteronomy 31-2, Psalms, esp. 77, 78, 105, 107, 119). All in all, these manifold cultural and ritual practices engage the senses, emotions and intellect in remembering and reinforcing the covenant at every level of society from the individual through the household to the nation.
Further undergirding the covenant but distinct from these memorial liturgies are the aspects of the law that actively reinforce the pro-social dispositions that are necessary for covenant-respecting and covenant-keeping. The value and expectation of trustworthiness, civility and obedience to divine promises are all hard-baked into Israel’s corporate life, and it is no accident that these are among the qualities necessary for a strong and sustainable covenant community.
These infra-legal cultural practices undergird the meaning and prominence of the covenant, weaving it into both the highpoints and the daily and yearly lived experience of the people both individually and corporately. By comparison, the vague and sporadic measures taken by contemporary governments to shore up the social contract with well-meaning but half-hearted attempts at “civic education” have little effect, while advertising billions and a destructive paradigm of competition in all areas of society condition individual consumers to be little predisposed to the civic duties a strong social contract requires. No rewriting of the social contract can be complete without giving serious attention to its cultural and liturgical infrastructure.
The new covenant
Of all that could be said about the new covenant inaugurated by Jesus, one thing will suffice here: it is new. The articulation between the old and the new covenants is as complex as it is crucial. Christ does not “come to abolish the Law or the Prophets” but “to fulfil them” (Matthew 5:17); the former covenants “are a shadow of the things that were to come; the reality, however, is found in Christ” (Colossians 2:17); whereas “the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ” (John 1:17); “the ministry Jesus has received is as superior to theirs [the High Priests’] as the covenant of which he is mediator is superior to the old one, since the new covenant is established on better promises” (Hebrews 8:6).
With due hermeneutical sensitivity, there is much to ponder here for those who would seek to rewrite or renew the social contract in our own day. The new covenant stands neither in a simple continuity with the old, nor as its complete negation; it fulfils the old covenant in a way that the old covenant itself never could. The dynamic of the new covenant displeases everyone: the conservatives are unhappy to see that there is no going back to how things were; the utopians are frustrated to see that there is no clean break with the ways of the past. Once more, the Bible diagonalizes dichotomised modern expectations.
The contractual logic of equivalence and the covenantal logic of superabundance
The philosopher Paul Ricœur has two terms that neatly sum up one major difference between social contracts and biblical covenants.[37] Contracts obey a “logic of equivalence”, a regime of strict justice in which unerring calculation determines the “just measure” of the distribution of goods and benefits. It is the logic of the transaction and of capitalism more broadly, a reciprocal paradigm in which debts must be paid in full. In ethics it is the logic of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. It is a human logic.
Biblical covenants, by contrast, operate according to a “logic of superabundance”, a lavish, gracious, loving paradigm of excess that does not deny calculative justice but completes it: God walks through the cut animals alone; the exodus rescue precedes the Sinai law; Christ lays down his life in the new covenant in his blood. This is the logic of the “how much more” of the Pauline epistles, of going beyond what is expected, walking the extra mile, turning the other cheek, exceeding what is demanded by a ledger of credit and debt. The logic of superabundance replaces the fear and submission of Leviathan or the tyranny of the general will administered by imperfect mediators with the love and sacrifice of a sacrificial sovereign. It is the logic of grace and the gift. It is a divine logic.
A toolbox for Christian engagement with the social contract
So how might a Christian position herself in relation to social contract language? She has at her disposal a toolbox stocked with different ways of expressing the relationship between contractualism and the Bible, each of which is appropriate for different tasks at different times. The context must determine the approach: are we lecturing on the philosophy of the social contract, contributing to public debate in the pages of a newspaper, convincing people of the Christian origins and basis of modern social theory, or chatting to a mate down the pub? Each of these scenarios will require a very different way of staging an encounter between the Bible and social contract theory. Here is a list of the main tools a Christian has at her disposal:
- Seize the day. Rousseau’s social contract theory lay more or less dormant until the flashpoint of the French Revolution provided an opportunity for its principles to be used (many would say abused) in practice. The social and economic effects of the COVID-19 pandemic will in all likelihood provide a similar moment of flux during which time society can be reformed in ways that would be well-nigh impossible under normal conditions. Now is the time to speak.
- Get on the train. Social contract language, loosely understood, simply happens to be a prominent metaphor, and a metaphor with traction, in social debates today. Christians can engage in those debates, adopting the language of the social contract as a way of entering the ongoing conversation. Social contract language can be a lens through which to focus ideas and values that are important in the Bible.
- Reveal the present. As has frequently been pointed out in recent months, breakdowns in the social contract, such as the violations of COVID lockdown or the black lives matter protests, have an apocalyptic function. They make visible attitudes towards, and aspects of, society that would otherwise remain obscure. These apocalyptic moments are useful to Christians—and to everyone else—in showing us who we really are, in all our glory and all our wretchedness.
- Go deeper than policy. The language of the social contract is a reminder that there are values and concepts in our society that run deeper than policy and legislation, values without which society cannot function. Trust and accountability are necessary for the rule of law and a cohesive society, yet they often fly under the radar of social analysis. Making these fundamental values visible and showing how they can be cultivated through liturgies embedded in the very civil society that contract theories discount is important for a Christian account of society, not only because these are values of which the Bible has much to say but also because they are values without which our social contract crumbles. Our society’s understanding of them is drawn substantially from a biblical frame of reference, and in this respect social contract thinking is a praeparatio evangelica.
- Use the Egyptian gold. In a related move, Christians can point to the covert theological assumptions and borrowings in the social contract and reclaim it, in its redeemed form, as a Christian idea. In this they are following Augustine’s injunction:
if those who are called philosophers, and especially the Platonists, have said aught that is true and in harmony with our faith, we are not only not to shrink from it, but to claim it for our own use from those who have unlawful possession of it. For, as the Egyptians had not only the idols and heavy burdens which the people of Israel hated and fled from, but also vessels and ornaments of gold and silver, and garments, which the same people when going out of Egypt appropriated to themselves, designing them for a better use…[38]
- Point to Christ’s fulfilment. A biblical ethic is the fulfilment of the social contract. Let us be clear here: the claim is not that Christians themselves are perfect citizens, but that Christ embodies a paradigmatic example of its proper functioning. Christians can relate to the social contract in the same way that Paul relates to the values of Hebrews and Greeks in 1 Corinthians 1. Paul’s argument has four steps: 1) Proponents of the social contract desire a society of mutual trust, respect and flourishing. 2) But they cannot have the fullness of these things in the way they are searching for them. 3) These things are to be found in Christ, and in union with him. 4) So if society is serious about pursuing the ideal of the social contract, it should be serious about engaging with the Christ who can bring the fullness of what that contract requires.
- Show the beauty of grace. Christians can point out the logic of equivalence that governs the social contract, and set forth the attractiveness of the logic of superabundance that characterises biblical covenants. The richer, stronger, gentler logic of superabundance presents a beguiling alternative to the calculating logic of equivalence. It is also a reconciliatory logic, as Miroslav Volf powerfully articulates.[39] Just as Jesus absorbed violence on the cross rather than retaliating, thereby bringing the victory over death that generations of retaliation failed to secure, so also the logic of superabundance subverts the polarised, entrenched stand-off of rival filter bubbles to bring reconciliation where the ethic of power indicative of the logic of equivalence only drives division ever deeper.
The social contract in itself is neither inimical nor necessary to Christian social thought. While Christians would be unwise to eschew it on grounds of its imperfection they would also be foolish not to recognise its inner tensions and shortcomings, not least because the theological voice can offer a distinctively penetrating set of critiques and a particularly rich and coherent proposal for its renewal and strengthening in our day.
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[1] Virginia Held, Feminist Morality: Transforming Culture, Society, and Politics (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1993).
[2] U.N. Secretary General António Guterres, “Tackling the Inequality Pandemic: A New Social Contract for a New Era”, New York, 18 July 2020.
[3] António Guterres, “Tackling the Inequality Pandemic: A New Social Contract for a New Era”, 20 July 2020. Retrieved from https://www.un.org/sg/en/content/sg/statement/2020-07-18/secretary-generals-nelson-mandela-lecture-%E2%80%9Ctackling-the-inequality-pandemic-new-social-contract-for-new-era%E2%80%9D-delivered
[4] Bussolo, M., Dávalos, M. E., Peragine, V., & Sundaram, R., 2018. “Toward a New Social Contract: Taking On Distributional Tensions in Europe and Central Asia”. Retrieved from https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/
[5] “Biden-Sanders Unity Task Force Recommendations”, 2020. Retrieved from https://joebiden.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/UNITY-TASK-FORCE-RECOMMENDATIONS.pdf
[6] See Kimberley Jones’ powerful and viral video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=llci8MVh8J4
[7] in 2019 Naomi Klein embarked on a ‘New Social Contract Tour’ round the USA, arguing for the urgent renewal of our common social agreement.
[8] Tim Wilson, The New Social Contract: Renewing the Liberal Vision for Australia (Brisbane: Connor Court Publishing, 2020).
[9] Extinction Rebellion, “Declaration of Rebellion”, 2019. Retrieved from https://rebellion.earth/declaration/
[10] For a good overview of most of the main social contract theories, see David Boucher and Paul Joseph Kelly (eds.), The Social Contract Theory from Hobbes to Rawls (London: Routledge, 1997). The story is brought up to date in Albert Weale, Modern Social Contract Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020).
[11] After lying relatively dormant for two centuries, the social contract model has undergone a renaissance in recent decades, notably in John Rawls’ A Theory Of Justice (1972), and David Gauthier’s Morals by Agreement (1986). Rawls attempts to put social contract theory on a strictly formal level, making it independent of the particular vision of the good, and Gauthier renews the contractarian account of cooperation by drawing on contemporary decision theory to explain why individuals see it as in their best interest to enter a social contract.
[12] Colin Gunton, The One, The Three and the Many: God, Creation and the Culture of Modernity, The Bampton Lectures 1992 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993) 220.
[13] See Virginia Held, Feminist Morality.
[14] See Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988).
[15] See Charles Mills, The Racial Contract (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997).
[16] See Michel Serres, Le Contrat naturel (Paris: François Bourin, 1990).
[17] This argument is made by David Hume in “Of the original contract”, in David Hume: Political Writings, ed. Stuart D. Warner and Donald W. Livingston (Cambridge: Hackett, 1994) 164-181.
[18] This argument is made, among others, by Jean-Luc Nancy in Etre singulier pluriel (Paris: Galilée, 1996) 54.
[19] Jean-Jacques Rousseau, ‘The Social Contract and Other Later Political Writings, ed. Victor Gourevitch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997) 60.
[20] Michael Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982).
[21] Rousseau, ‘The Social Contract and Other Later Political Writings 150.
[22] Rousseau, ‘The Social Contract and Other Later Political Writings 150-1.
[23] David Novak, The Jewish Social Contract: An Essay in Political Theology (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009).
[24] Harold J Berman, “The Christian Sources of General Contract Law”, in Christianity and Law: An Introduction, ed. John Witte Jr. and Frank S. Alexander (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008) 132.
[25] Michael Walzer, Exodus and Revolution (New York: Basic Books, 1985) 12.
[26] William Cavanaugh, “The city Beyond Secular Parodies”, in Radical Orthodoxy: A New theology, ed John Milbank, Catherine Pickstock and Graham Ward (London: Routledge, 1999) 193.
[27] Isaiah Berlin, “Two Concepts of Liberty”, in Four Essays on Liberty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), 138.
[28] See Cavanaugh, “The city Beyond Secular Parodies”.
[29] Oliver O’Donovan, The Ways of Judgment, The Bampton Lectures, 2003 (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2005) 156.
[30] O’Donovan, The Ways of Judgment 156.
[31] Samuel Rutherford, Lex, Rex: The Law and the Prince. Available at https://quod.lib.umich.edu/e/eebo/A57975.0001.001?page=viewtextnote;rgn=full+text. Last accessed Saturday, 8 August 2020.
[32] Gunton, The One, The Three and the Many 225.
[33] see Thinking Through Creation: Genesis 1 and 2 as Tools of Cultural Critique (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Press, 2017).
[34] See, for example, Michael Horton, Introducing Covenant Theology (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 2019) 40-41.
[35] “Now therefore fear the Lord and serve him in sincerity and in faithfulness. Put away the gods that your fathers served beyond the River and in Egypt, and serve the Lord. And if it is evil in your eyes to serve the Lord, choose this day whom you will serve, whether the gods your fathers served in the region beyond the River, or the gods of the Amorites in whose land you dwell. But as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.”
[36] I am using the term “liturgies” here in the sense developed by James K. A. Smith in his Cultural Liturgies trilogy: pre-theoretical practices that inculcate and incubate certain ways of living in, experiencing and understanding the world and ourselves. Overlapping terms include “habit” and “paideia”.
[37] André LaCocque and Paul Ricœur, Thinking Biblically: Exegetical and Hermeneutical Studies, trans. David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003) 107. I have elsewhere discussed the difference between equivalence and excess in terms of a “n-shaped dynamic” and “u-shaped dynamic” respectively; see Thinking Through Creation: Genesis 1 and 2 as Tools of Cultural Critique (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Press, 2017).
[38] Augustine, On Christian Doctrine II.40. Available at https://www.ccel.org/ccel/augustine/doctrine.xli.html. Last accessed Saturday, 8 August 2020.
[39] See Miroslav Volf, Exclusion and Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness and Reconciliation (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1996).