14 For annotated texts of the creeds and covenants of Salem Church (1629, 1636), Boston Church (1630), Windsor Church (1647), and the two Cambridge Platforms (1646, 1648) see Williston Walker, ed., The Creeds and Platforms of Congregationalism (1893, rpt. Boston, 1960).
15 The Synod of Dort (1618-19) of the Dutch Reformed Church, with German Calvinists and English Puritans sitting in, produced the “Five Points” of Calvinism which included: (1) total depravity, (2) limited atonement, (3) unconditional election, (4) irresistible grace and (5) the final perseverance of the saints (that is, no backsliding). These doctrines emerged in the process of declaring the teachings of Jacobus Arminius to be a Calvinist heresy. The Five Points were generally accepted by Congregationalists in New England; the texts appear with an English translation in Philip Schaff, The Creeds of Christendom (4th ed., New York, 1905), III, 540-97. See also A. W. Harrison, The Beginnings of Arminianism to the Synod of Dort (London, 1926).
16 A major statement was John Cotton, Covenant of God’s Free Grace (London, 1645). The importance of the idea of the covenant to the Puritans was developed by Champlin Burrage, The Church Covenant Idea (Philadelphia, 1904), and enlarged by Perry Miller in “The Marrow of Puritan Divinity,” Errand into the Wilderness (Cambridge, 1956), 48-98; and The New England Mind: the Seventeenth Century (1939, rpt. Cambridge, 1954).