ABSTRACT
In 1954, when life had many more certainties for Americans than it does today, the noted American theologian H. Richard Niebuhr wrote:
One of the great common patterns that guided men in the period when American democracy was formed, that was present both in their understanding and in their action, and was used in psychology, sociology and metaphysics as in ethics, politics and religion, was the pattern of the covenant or of federal theology…
[O]ne may raise the question whether our common life could have been established, could have been maintained and whether it can endure without the presence of the conviction that we live in a world that has the moral structure of a covenant.
