Covenant, Interdependence, and the Common Good

LOVE MADE SOCIAL — COLUMN 6 OF 16

Modern societies often imagine the person as an independent individual who enters social relationships by choice. The individual owns a body, talents, time, property, and preferences, while obligations to others appear as limits placed upon personal freedom. The biblical vision begins elsewhere, because human beings do not create themselves and cannot sustain themselves alone. People are born dependent upon families, communities, languages, histories, institutions, ecosystems, and forms of knowledge they did not invent. They inherit benefits and burdens before they are capable of consenting to either, and even their most personal achievements rely upon public order, education, infrastructure, law, and the labor of others. Covenant names the moral obligations that arise from this interdependence without dissolving personal dignity into the collective. No person becomes human alone. Children survive because others care for them, language is received from a community, knowledge accumulates across generations, and workers depend upon transportation, customers, legal protections, and institutions. Economic success may involve discipline, creativity, and risk, but it is never purely individual because property and contract themselves exist within a social order that recognizes and enforces claims.1

Covenantal thinking does not deny responsibility or achievement; it places them within a network of relationships. The person is an agent but also a recipient, an owner but also a steward, and an individual but also a neighbor. Freedom therefore cannot mean merely the absence of restraint, because mature freedom includes the capacity to participate responsibly in shared life. Radical individualism treats social obligation as a suspicious intrusion upon autonomy. Taxes are understood only as money taken from individuals, public health is reduced to private choice, poverty is interpreted mainly as personal failure, and property is imagined as though owners created the legal and social order that makes ownership possible. The biblical covenant challenges this isolation by assigning obligations that do not depend upon proving that the beneficiary’s need was personally caused by the person required to respond.

Israel’s law does not ask whether a landowner created the vulnerability of widows, strangers, or poor people before requiring gleaning and honest treatment. The stranger must be treated justly because Israel remembers what it was to be a stranger, debts are limited because the survival of the community matters more than permanent creditor power, and laborers receive rest because economic authority has moral limits.2 Covenant does not eliminate personal responsibility, but it refuses to make personal responsibility the only moral category. Covenant also rejects the opposite error of oppressive collectivism. Persons must not be absorbed into the state, party, race, class, nation, corporation, or religious institution, because communities can invoke unity while silencing dissent and leaders can claim the common good while denying rights. The biblical covenant binds communities to God’s justice; it does not grant communities unlimited authority over persons.

Naboth’s vineyard cannot be seized merely because a king desires it, prophets may confront national leaders, and conscience cannot be surrendered to the majority.3 The person remains accountable before God and retains a dignity that no institution creates. Covenant therefore holds personal worth and mutual obligation together: the individual is not isolated, while the community is not absolute. This balance clarifies the meaning of the common good. The common good is more than the sum of private interests and more than whatever benefits the majority, because a majority may enjoy inexpensive goods produced through exploited labor, regional economic growth may depend upon one neighborhood bearing concentrated pollution, and a congregation may prosper while underpaying employees. Such arrangements may benefit many people without constituting a genuinely common good.

The common good consists of the social conditions that enable persons and communities to flourish together. It includes public order, truthful institutions, education, health, meaningful work, environmental integrity, protection of rights, participation, and peace. It does not require identical outcomes, but it does require that shared life not depend upon the degradation, invisibility, or permanent exclusion of some members.4 Christian freedom must consequently be understood as socially sustained. A person may be legally free to seek employment while lacking transportation, education, health, child care, or protection from discrimination, and a worker may freely accept dangerous employment because the alternative is hunger. Formal choice matters, but it does not always establish substantive freedom when people possess no realistic alternative. This insight does not imply that government must provide every good or eliminate every risk. It means that Christian moral judgment must ask whether people possess the capacities and conditions required to act responsibly. The freedom to learn depends upon schools, the freedom to work depends upon health and fair opportunity, and the freedom to participate depends upon access to information and protection from domination.

Covenantal obligation also extends across generations. Present communities inherit institutions they did not create, benefit from earlier sacrifices or injustices, and pass conditions to people not yet born. Environmental damage, depleted infrastructure, racialized wealth, and institutional distrust do not disappear when the original decision-makers die, which means that responsibility cannot be restricted to personal guilt for originating an injustice. Intergenerational responsibility must be framed carefully. Descendants are not personally guilty for every act of their ancestors, but present persons and institutions are responsible for what they now possess, maintain, and transmit. A person may inherit property without having stolen it; if that property was acquired unjustly, however, inheritance does not automatically settle the moral question, because covenant asks what faithfulness requires now.5

The church should embody an alternative to both isolation and domination. Its members belong to one another without owning one another, share burdens without erasing difference, submit to mutual accountability without surrendering conscience, and use gifts for the good of the body. This requires more than friendliness because covenantal life has economic and institutional consequences for employment, money, leadership, conflict, property, and the congregation’s responsibilities toward its neighborhood.6 A church that preaches community while operating as an audience gathered around a personality has not yet become covenantal, while a church that demands loyalty without accountability has converted covenant into control. Christian community becomes credible when belonging enlarges responsibility and participation rather than insulating leaders or dissolving persons into the institution. Covenant offers a richer account of social life than either self-sufficient individualism or coercive collectivism. Human beings are persons of sacred dignity whose lives are bound to others through gift, dependence, responsibility, and hope. We belong to one another, but only God may possess us absolutely; this is why the common good must be judged especially from the position of those whose ability to participate is weakest.

Endnotes

1. 1 Corinthians 4:7; Acts 17:24–28; Jonathan Sacks, *The Politics of Hope* (London: Jonathan Cape, 1997).
2. Exodus 20:8–11; 22:21–27; Deuteronomy 10:17–19; 15:1–11; 24:10–22.
3. 1 Kings 21:1–29; Daniel 3:1–30; Acts 5:27–32.
4. Second Vatican Council, *Gaudium et Spes* (1965), nos. 26–32; Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, *Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church* (Washington, DC: United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, 2005), nos. 164–70.
5. Ezekiel 18:1–32; Nehemiah 9:1–37; Iris Marion Young, *Responsibility for Justice* (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).
6. Acts 2:42–47; 4:32–35; 1 Corinthians 12:12–27; Ephesians 4:1–16.