The Unitarian theologian James Luther Adams, whose 20th century theological work shaped our tradition significantly, defined covenant as having five “major ingredients.”
The first ingredient is promise. First, Adams says, “Human beings, individually and collectively, become human by making commitment, by making promises. The human being..., as Martin Buber says, is the promise-making, promise-keeping, promise-breaking, promise-renewing creature.”
The second ingredient is that our covenant is with something greater. Our covenant is “with the creative, sustaining, commanding, judging transforming powers which may be interpreted theistically, nontheistically, or humanistically. In a religious covenant the orientation is to something we cannot control but something upon which we depend.”
Third, covenants go beyond the individual. “Covenant is for the individual as well as the collective… The individual is brought out of separateness into covenant. We are responsible not only for individual behavior but also for the character of the society.”
Fourth, covenants are necessarily focused towards areas of injustice. Adams’s observation is that “the covenant responsibility is especially directed toward the deprived”—what, today, we might call the marginalized: “people suffering from neglect and injustice or those who are caught in the system that suppresses them.”
And finally, the last ingredient is still what we hold at the center of our values: Love. Adams says that covenant “depends upon faithfulness, and faithfulness is nerved by loyalty, by love. Violation of the covenant is a violation of trust. What holds the world together… is trustworthiness, eros, love. Ultimately the ground of faithfulness is the divine or human love that will not let us go.”
The Rev. Dr. Cynthia Landrum summarizes Adams’s five components this way:
By saying we’re a covenantal faith, Unitarian Universalists define ourselves not by a set of beliefs in the ultimate, but by the commitments we make to travel a path together—a path held together by love, which is a covenant with whatever we hold to be the divine, the creative life force, the ultimate of the universe.
Covenant is an agreement between us as individuals and as a collective—and in religious community, there’s an inherent responsibility to orient toward justice; to combat oppression in particular.
Covenant is a promise made between individual and group, oriented towards something greater, bound by love, to travel together in the path of justice.