How the Puritans Reimagined Israel and Why Their Heirs Let That Vision Fade

Why is there such a disconnected between contemporary reformed understanding of Israel and the Puritans? This is what I seek to explain in this article.

To begin, it is important to understand that the Puritans crossed the Atlantic with their books, their discipline, and a towering confidence in the sovereignty of God. They also carried something less noticed and rarely remembered. They believed the Jewish people still had a future in God’s unfolding story. They also treated that belief with the kind of seriousness that J. I. Packer admired in them. In A Quest for Godliness, Packer called the Puritans the redwoods of the Reformed world, rooted deep and rising high. He believed they embodied the tradition at full strength, without dilution or compromise. That they also preserved a biblical expectation for Israel places them, unexpectedly but decisively, in a category of Christian readers who still heard the prophetic voice without filters.

For more than a millennium Christian theology had assumed that the church had replaced Israel. Augustine said it. Aquinas refined it. Early Protestantism absorbed it almost by reflex. In my opinion, John Calvin—second only to Jonathan Edwards in Reformed theology—often read Israel’s promises spiritually and applied them to the church, though he allowed that Israel might one day return in faith. The Puritans saw something stronger in the text than Calvin ever articulated, yet they did not break with him. They took the strand he left and wove it into a wider tapestry.

Some Puritans read the prophets with a literalness that unsettled their peers. Thomas Brightman, for instance, argued outright that the Jews would return to their land and to their Messiah—a claim bold enough to draw immediate criticism. John Owen went further, insisting that God would one day bring about a national turning among the Jewish people. And Thomas Goodwin took Romans eleven at face value, treating Paul’s language as a promise rather than a figure of speech. Not all Puritans followed them, of course, but the ones who did spoke plainly, without hedging. They pressed the church to reckon with a simple question: if God promises something, on what grounds do we assume He has taken it back? Their insistence made Israel’s future more than a curiosity. It made it a test case for the integrity of covenant itself.

Their covenant theology sharpened that question. God had made promises to Abraham that had not yet been exhausted. Some Puritans treated this cautiously, others with more confidence, but the line was unmistakable. Increase Mather wrote in The Mystery of Israel’s Salvation that Israel’s unbelief had not canceled its call. Owen and Goodwin echoed him in different forms. They believed the covenant still had chapters left to unfold.

Their commitment to Hebrew study only deepened the conviction. They read the prophets in the original language and discovered a concreteness modern allegory cannot camouflage. To many Puritans, the promises addressed to Israel sounded as if they were meant for real descendants at a real point in history. The very survival of the Jewish people across centuries of exile struck them as something more than chance—as if the storyline of Scripture were still unfolding in front of them. They saw providence at work. God, they believed, was preserving a people because He was not finished with them.

Their eschatology gave that conviction its shape. Cotton Mather, in Great Works of Christ in America, argued that a Jewish turning to Christ would spark a global awakening. Others echoed the idea in quieter tones, and a few preached it with unmistakable heat, but the expectation shows up again and again in their sermons and commentary. They weren’t treating Israel as a metaphor or stand-in for the church. They meant Israel—actual Israel. Their congregations heard sermons built not on speculation but on prophetic expectation, the kind grounded in Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel.

Jonathan Edwards received this legacy and expanded it. In A History of the Work of Redemption, he taught that the conversion of the Jewish people would be one of the pivotal events in human history before the return of Christ. Yet Edwards placed this within a sweeping global vision of gospel expansion that exceeded anything the seventeenth century Puritans had imagined. He believed Israel’s restoration would help trigger a worldwide awakening that would draw nations into the kingdom. His reading was both Puritan and more than Puritan. Israel remained central, but now as the opening movement in a global symphony.

The Reformed tradition did not hold onto this emphatic hope. Enlightenment thinkers encouraged suspicion of prophetic specificity. Early biblical critics favored typology over history. Later, the rise of dispensationalism changed the atmosphere in a different way. Many Reformed theologians became wary of sounding even remotely similar to the dispensational world with its charts and conferences. In that climate, the Puritan hope for Israel was often dismissed not because it lacked biblical support, but because it had become guilty by association. A truth that Puritans once proclaimed with boldness became something later theologians avoided out of cultural anxiety.

At this point, another reading of history deserves attention, one emphasized strongly by New Zionist theologians. In this view, the pushback against dispensationalism wasn’t just one influence among others—it was the engine that redirected Reformed thinking. You can hear it in the tone of Louis Berkhof and John Murray. Their caution often reads less like a fresh engagement with the biblical text and more like a response to a theological opponent just offstage. Page after page, they labor to mark off covenant theology from anything that sounds remotely dispensational, as if the boundaries themselves needed defending. Entire readings once taken for granted in Puritan exegesis were reinterpreted simply because they felt too literal. Theological boundaries hardened. A suspicion of Jewish restoration took hold. And a vision once rooted in Scripture became a casualty of identity politics within the church.

The academic world accelerated this retreat. Israel became a theological symbol rather than a living people in a living story. Prophetic texts were drained of historical expectation and poured into typological containers. National promises faded behind literary structures. A tradition once vibrant with hope began speaking only in abstractions. Most Reformed Christians today do not even know this change happened.

The irony is unavoidable. The Puritans and Jonathan Edwards, towering figures in the formation of Protestant identity, held a conviction about Israel that many of their heirs never consider. They saw the endurance of the Jewish people and expected their return. Mather said it would be the hinge of history. Edwards said it would shake the world. Their confidence was not sentimental. It came from Scripture itself.

Here the New Zionist perspective presses with particular force. If God can reverse His promises to Israel, then no church can rest secure in any promise at all. The Puritans and Jonathan Edwards—figures who helped shape the very instincts of Protestantism—held a conviction about Israel that many of their heirs rarely even notice. They looked at the stubborn endurance of the Jewish people and expected a return that would matter. Cotton Mather called it the hinge of history. Edwards said the world would feel the shock. Their confidence didn’t come from sentiment or speculation; it came from the way they read the prophets and Paul.

This is where the New Zionist perspective hits hardest. If God can quietly retract His promises to Israel, then what promise can any church hold with confidence? If Israel’s election can be rewritten, then covenant itself becomes a fragile thing. The Puritans sensed this long before the debate took recognizable shape. They didn’t always argue it in formal terms, but they lived and preached as if God keeps what He pledges. The prophets spoke clearly, and history has begun to speak with them.

Recovering the Puritan and Edwardsian view is not a call to nostalgia. It is a call to theological honesty. The Reformed tradition was wider than many imagine. It carried within it voices who read Scripture without shrinking its promises or dissolving its distinctions. In remembering them, we uncover a story the tradition once knew by heart. And we rediscover a people who, despite every attempt to silence them, refused to disappear.