The Puritan Cosmopolis: A Covenantal View

It is from Mistakes about the Covenant, that Men are carried away with deluding Opinions to the unspeakable Prejudice of their Children as well as of themselves.

Increase Mather, “To the Reader”

Taking Increase Mather’s warning about covenant-related mistakes as a starting point, this essay uncovers an alternative provenance and meaning for late-seventeenth-century Puritanism and for the Puritan covenant in particular by returning it, as the Puritans did at the time, to its place in an early modern context of outward-looking, cosmopolitan thought.¹ Anxious about making mistakes about the covenant—as Mather ardently hoped they would be—members of New England’s Puritan communities debated its various meanings and iterations at almost every turn during their nearly hundred-year long existence in New England, from the covenant of Abraham or Adam (which was never explicitly called a covenant but was taken to be one by many Christians, including the Puritans), to the covenants of Noah and Christ. As has been widely recognized, it is within the framework of covenantal concern that we can best make sense of the two biggest crises that the Puritans endured in their first thirty years or more of settlement in New England—namely, the Antinomian crisis of 1636–38 and the Halfway Covenant crisis of 1662—both of which were covenant-induced. Far less familiar to scholars of the period, however, is the crisis of covenant under examination here when in the last two decades or so of the seventeenth century, the Puritans turned to rereading the covenant with a particular concern for its corporate implications rather than for the personal or family-oriented implications at issue in the earlier crises.²

The implications of this third covenant crisis, I ague, have been overlooked because the nature of the covenant’s corporatism has been incompletely understood. Tracing it from its origins at Sinai to its repurposing in the Christian Gospel to the Protestant Reformation’s covenantally inspired church, scholars have traditionally seen the Puritans’ appropriation of the corporate covenant as providing for the constitutional form of government that came to fruition with the founding of the American nation. Covenantal corporatism on this account paved the way for a federalism—from foedus, Latin for covenant or association—that would ultimately provide rights to its constituent members and work to unite their otherwise diffuse identities into an autonomous and comprehensive whole.

At the center of this interpretation is a covenant linked through declension politics and the rhetoric of the jeremiad to a series of unfortunate events that befell the New England colonies in the last thirty years of the seventeenth century.³ From King Philip’s War to the revocation of their charter in 1684, to the installation of a royal governor under the terms of a new charter in 1691, to the Salem witchcraft crisis one year later, these events, it has been suggested, turned the Puritans into a fearful people whose primary goal was to protect their religious way of life. Accordingly, traditional histories, literary and otherwise, have focused on the defensive ecclesiastical and governmental maneuvers that served this end. These included fast days and collective lamentations organized by the churches, the “full inquiry” authorized after the death of Governor Leverett in 1679 by the Massachusetts General Court into the “Causes and State of Gods Controversy with us,” and the practice of covenant renewal, a collaboration between church and state ostensibly aimed at insulating and consolidating the Colony’s identity and power (qtd. in Foster, 228). Written in response to crises within the community and, like most jeremiads, used to excoriate people for their sins and encourage them to improve their behavior, many covenant renewals sermons did just this. As late as 1677, for example, Increase Mather emphasized the connection between covenant renewal and personal or social reformation by reminding his parishioners, and extended reading audience, that a people have a duty to renew their covenant “in the case of eminent danger and distress” or “in case of Apostacy from God” (“Renewal of Covenant” 8, 9).

The vast majority of covenant renewal sermons, however, including Mather’s...