Covenant is not contract

Covenant is not contract. A contract is defined by its terms. The terms of a contract define the price of the transaction. The covenant, in contrast, is defined in terms of the relationship of the parties. The terms of the transaction are incidental to the covenant. The issue is the fidelity the parties promise to each other. The engine of covenant is gift exchange because the point of covenant is the establishment and the firming up and the maintaining of the relationship between the covenantal parties. In the case of covenant, the maintenance of the covenant is the point of the covenant. In the case of the contract, once the transaction has occurred the contract becomes dispensable. 

Covenants are, in the first place, constituted of gifts. Treaties ratify the mutual obligations the covenanted gift exchange entailed. The payoffs of covenants are not contained in the terms of the treaty but in the blessings or curses that come of honoring or violating the covenant altogether. The covenantal process bestows blessings far beyond the terms of the treaty; and the abrogating of the covenant brings down on the violator far more serious punishment than what the terms of the covenant spell out. 

Covenants define the establishment of a sustainable order. Abrogation of the covenant disestablishes the order and unleashes first a period of chaos and retribution (vengeance) and then a longer period of decline and collapse. The collapse produces a society that cannot sustain a covenant and could therefore operate only in terms of contracts. 

Free market economics presumes a society defined entirely contractually and not at all covenantally, which is to say, free market economics presumes a society already in a state of collapse. Free market economics is thereby extractive of the cultural fertile core on which the social order is founded.