God made a second “covenant of grace” to deliver perishing sinners through a Redeemer, Jesus Christ, by free grace and according to unconditional election (WCF 7.4, WSC, Q&A 20). Still, while there existed grace in the covenant of works, the covenant that followed manifested “grace” to fallen sinners through the strict merit accomplished by Christ as the Redeemer.

Moving on from God’s historical execution (past and present) of his eternal decrees (timeless), we consider the “special act of providence” that God the creator exercised toward man when he was created (WSC, Q&A 12). In other words, God stooped down to freely enter into a relationship with man who was created in his image. This stems from what the Puritans would have regarded as a fitting summary for the entire Bible, God is determined to have a people for himself, a people in a living relationship with him by way of a covenant. Let’s consider in general (with all of its diversity!) a Puritan theology of the covenants.

First, the Puritans manifested a mature covenant theology with connections to the development of such from the sixteenth century. Connections existed with such Reformers as Johannes Oecolampadius, Heinrich Bullinger, Wolfgang Musculus, John Calvin, Peter Martyr Vermigli, Zacharias Ursinus, Caspar Olevianus, Robert Rollock and William Tyndale. Rather than erecting something new, the English Reformed built upon groundwork already laid and without some supposed softening of the doctrine of predestination and in connection with such developments a two-covenant theology of works and grace associated with a two-Adam federal representation, an emerging emphasis on a pre-temporal covenant between the Father and the Son, the revelation in history of the covenant of grace immediately after the fall, election as the foundation for the covenant of grace and the unconditional yet bilateral nature of the covenant of grace. Prominent background figures for the emergence of a Puritan covenant theology include Robert Rollock (1555–1599), William Perkins (1558–1602), and William Ames (1576–1633). This seventeenth-century settlement of covenant thought can be seen in the Westminster Confession of Faith (1648) but also in related contemporary works such as Edward Fisher’s Marrow of Modern Divinity (1645), and John Ball’s Treatise on the Covenant of Grace (1645), both published as the Westminster Assembly sat. The Westminster Confession of Faith, exhibiting continuity with the Irish Articles (1615), in general sets forth the standard two-covenant approach in which God condescended to Adam in the covenant of works, which when broken made the covenant of grace in Jesus Christ necessary.

Second, God entered into a “covenant of life” with man at the time of creation through Adam as a federal head (WSC, Q&A 12). In the Scriptures, covenants were established by God and between him and man as relational agreements. In a covenantal relationship, he promised and determined to be the God of his people and promised that they would be (and should be determined to be) his people. This covenant of life, also known as a covenant of “works” (WCF 7.2) was founded “upon the condition of perfect obedience,” and was made with Adam as a federal or “common head and representative for all mankind” after him (Thomas Vincent, An Explicatory Catechism, 1678). For the Puritans in general, God condescended in grace (unmerited favor not redemptive grace as shown to sinners) to Adam in the covenant of works by offering him something for his perfect obedience that he could never truly merit. So John Ball, in his Treatise speaks of God covenanting in “free grace and love” and offering a reward for his obedience “in strict justice,” but not according to merit. God could give less to Adam without doing any sort of “injustice” to him.

Third, Adam sinned and broke this covenant of life, bringing man under the wrath of God and subject to death and eternal punishment. So, when Adam fell into sin (defined as a lack “of conformity unto, or transgression of, the law of God,” WSC, Q&A 14), all mankind “sinned in him and fell with him” (WSC, Q&A 16). The Puritans spoke of “original sin” in its historical orthodox understanding, which involved the “imputation” of Adam’s sin, as his “disobedience” has “become ours” through his representative headship (Ames, The Marrow of Sacred Divinity, 1627). In summary, the relationship established by the covenant of life (works) was broken with man having “lost communion with God” and coming under his wrath to be subject “to all miseries in this life, to death itself, and to the pains of hell forever” (Q19).

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