The Covenant Crucified: Quakers and the Rise of Capitalism

The book compares "covenant", uniting people under the care of a transcendent God, and "contract", uniting them through secular visions of self-interest. It is part of a trilogy on early Quaker history, contributing to understanding early Friends and how the movement changed in the first decades. The author outlines the highly distinctive nature of the Quaker covenant of light and how that was transformed within a generation into a more worldly contractual understanding. It is also a call to Quakers today to recover a sense of covenant for the journey ahead."

THE CONVENANT CRUCIFIED forms part of Douglas Gwyn’s trilogy on early Quaker history. By combining the scholarly with the prophetic it is, says Gwyn,both a History of Theology and a Theology of History. He explains the subtleties between “covenant”--meaning to unite people under the care of a transcendent God, and “contract”---meaning to unite them primarily through secular visions of self-interest.

The early chapters of the book provide an historical context of these two words, with chapters on the Early Christian Church, the English Civil War and subsequent Puritan revolution; the first stirrings of the Quaker Movement, and the persecutions they suffered under Charles 2nd.

Gwyn's insights are critical to our understanding of show more early Friends and how the movement changed in its first decades. He describes the highly distinctive nature of the Quaker ‘Covenant of Light’ and explains the reasons why it was transformed within a generation into a more worldly contractual understanding. show less