Halfway Covenant (1662)
A
major attempt by the American Puritans to preserve
a Christian commonwealth in the New World. The "Puritan way" in
Massachusetts had begun with close cooperation between church and society.
Voting was open to all church members, but to no others. To become a church
member an individual had to testify publicly that God had worked
"savingly" in the heart. In Massachusetts's early years the system
worked well. A steady stream of people came forward to testify of the "new
birth," and as church members, these converted people set the tone for the
whole society.
Soon,
however, difficulties arose. Children of the earliest settlers were not
experiencing God's grace and hence not becoming church members. The Puritan
leaders faced a serious problem. In the Puritans' Reformed theology the
converted had the privilege of offering their infant children for baptism as a
seal of God's covenanting grace. Now many of those who had been baptized as
infants, but who were not making public profession of their own faith, were
expressing the desire to have their children baptized. The Puritan leaders
wanted to preserve the church for the professed believers, but they also wanted
to keep as many people as possible under the influence of the church. Their
solution was to create a "halfway" covenant relating just to church
membership. Individuals from the second New England generation could bring
their third generation children for baptism and halfway membership. But no one
in the second or third generation could participate in the Lord's Supper or
exercise other privileges of church membership unless they testified that God
had done a gracious work in their heart.
Puritans
thought they had preserved both the integrity of the church and a broad
Christian influence in society. As it happened, the church in Massachusetts did
prolong its impact through the halfway system. It also diluted its spiritual
character. At least that is what Jonathan Edwards, an evangelical theologian,
thought in the next century. His active opposition to the practice helped bring
about its death in the second half of the eighteenth century.