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

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