Journal: Westminster Theological Journal
Volume: WTJ 83:2 (Fall 2021)
Article: Puritan New England As The New Israel: The Case For And The Overwhelming Case Against
Author: Richard W. Cogley

WTJ 83:2 (Fall 2021) p. 299

Puritan New England As The New Israel: The Case For And The Overwhelming Case Against

Richard W. Cogley

Richard W. Cogley is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Southern Methodist University.

Revisionist scholars such as Reiner Smolinski, Theodore Dwight Bozeman, and Jan Stievermann have challenged the still-vibrant academic claim, best associated with the work of the late Sacvan Bercovitch, that seventeenth-century American Puritans identified themselves as “uniquely,” “literally and historically,” and “geographically” the successors to the original chosen people, the twelve tribes of Israel who once inhabited the promised land of Canaan. These revisionists argued that the Puritans, like other early modern Protestants, viewed proper Christians of all times and places as the present-day new Israelites. The principal issue at stake in this debate is the American Puritans’ use of a Christian exegetical technique known as typology. Bercovitch contended that the Puritans employed this technique to style themselves, and only themselves, as the new chosen people and to see New England, and only New England, as the new promised land. Bercovitch’s critics reached the correct conclusion; however, they provided little guidance about how Americanists should interpret the considerable textual evidence which he cited in support of his position. After all, New England Puritan sources abound with expressions like “our American Jerusalem,” “the New-English Israel,” the “American Zion,” and “our Israel.” This article presents Bercovitch’s textual evidence for the New England as the new Israel thesis and then recontextualizes it, the task which his critics left unperformed. This recontextualization is important because many scholars who are not specialists in American Puritanism use Bercovitch to frame their long-range interpretations of American politics, history, and religion. His argument about typology appeals to these generalists because there is so much textual evidence which seems to support it, and because it enables them to claim that Americans from the Puritans through the present day have viewed America as God’s new Israel.

The late Sacvan Bercovitch argued in The Puritan Origins of the American Self, The American Jeremiad, and numerous articles that the New England Puritans identified themselves as the new Israelites, the divinely

WTJ 83:2 (Fall 2021) p. 300

designated successors to the original chosen people, the twelve tribes of Israel.1 His argument rested on the Puritans’ use of a form of biblical exegesis known as typology or else as figuralism, an alternative term he took from Erich Auerbach and s...