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The Puritan Notion of the Covenant in Jonathan Edwards' Doctrine of Faith

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2009

C. Conrad Cherry
C. Conrad Cherry
Affiliation:
Assistant Professor of Religious Studies, Pennsylvania State University
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Extract

The immense importance of the idea of the covenant for the Puritans of England and New England has been thrown into sharp relief by recent Puritan studies. Many problems regarding the origin and function of the Puritan covenant-idea still await the careful attention of the student of Puritanism, but this much is clear: the notion of the covenant was decidedly a pervasive idea in Puritan theology, and the idea was developed in a rather elaborate scheme by a host of Puritan theologians. As Leonard J. Trinterud has discerned, the idea of the covenant so permeated the thinking of the Puritans that in “the first decades of the seventeenth century … scarcely a single important figure was not a covenant theologian” among “the Presbyterian and Independent Puritans.”1

Type
Research Article
Information
Church History , Volume 34 , Issue 3 , September 1965 , pp. 328 - 341
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1965

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References

1. Trinterud, Leonard J., “The Origins Puritanism,” Church History, XX (03, 1951), p. 50.Google Scholar

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4. See for example Trinterud, Leonard J., The Forming of an American Tradition (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1949), pp. 171 ff.Google Scholar; Wright, Conrad, “Edwards and the Arminians on the Freedom of the Will,” Harvard Theological Review, XXXV (10, 1942), p. 242Google Scholar; De Jong, Peter Y., The Covenant Idea in New England Theology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1945), pp. 197–198.Google Scholar

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33. Ibid., p. 68.

34. Ibid., p. 67.

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36. Preston, op. cit., p. 43.

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39. “A History of the Work of Redemption,” WD, III, p. 198.

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48. This distinction between covenants was not novel to Edwards but had a long history in the Reformed fold. Witsius and Wyttenbach, for example, taught that the covenant of grace is the execution, through the conditions of faith and holiness, of the eternal pact between Father and Son. See Heppe, Heinrich, Reformed Dogmatics, ed. Bizer, B., trans. Thomson, G. T. (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1950), pp. 374–375.Google Scholar

49. Smyth (ed.), op. cit., p. 67.

50. Ibid., p. 66.

51. Ibid., pp. 66–67.

52. Ames, op. cit.

53. Smith (ed.), op. cit., p. 66.

54. Observations Concerning Faith,” WW, II, p. 614.