The Half-Way Covenant: Church Membership in Puritan New England.

Abstract

The publication of this important work marks another significant step forward in the post-Millerite elaboration of the social history of Puritanism in New England. Robert G. Pope provides the first detailed analysis of the workings and implications of that oft-discussed and much-misunderstood practice which eighteenth-century opponents labelled derisively the halfway covenant. His perspective is less the general doctrinal and ideational meaning of the device than its institutional meaning within the fabric of Puritanism as it operated on the level of the local church. He emphasizes that the need for a revised membership practice was inherent in the New England attempt to maintain sectarian ideals of church membership (visible saintship) within the context of a comprehensive (and publicly supported) church. He understands that the recommendations of the synod of 1662 and the debate surrounding them do not constitute the entire story of the half-way covenant, for the synod's recommendations meant something only in the context of their implementation by individual churches. From his detailed study of the half-way covenant in specific churches, two general conclusions emerge. First, as Edmund S. Morgan has suggested on several occasions, half-way membership served less to attenuate the sectarian nature of church membership than to enhance it. Second, the ministerium was far more willing to accept the innovations inherent in the half-way covenant than was the laity, particularly on the local level. Despite the importance and general persuasiveness of this study-or perhaps, because of these factors-several points of reservation should be raised. Assuming that Pope does not mean by his title to suggest that only the seventeenth century in New England was Puritan, the title is misleading. Pope is concerned only with the half-way covenant in the seventeenth century. For a microcosmic analysis of surviving church records (and leaving aside the question of whether his claim of having examined them all is valid), the seventeenth century is the easy one, and in many ways, less important than the eighteenth. The whole problem of the expansion of the half-way covenant with the enormous growth of churches in New England in the first half of the eighteenth century is omitted, as is the thorny matter of the relationship of the practice to the Great Awakening. One of Pope's few assertions about the eighteenth century-that New-Light ministers rejected the half-way covenant-at best needs much qualification. Even within the seventeenth century, one can question Pope's assumption that virtually all enlargements of membership criteria within churches constituted adoption of the half-way covenant, particularly in view of the sketchy nature of many of the church records with which he deals.