The works of John Owen (1616–1683) belong near the top of any list of all-time great Christian writings.[1] J. I. Packer was right to say of the Puritan congregationalist, “In an age of giants, he overtopped them all.”[2] But perhaps some are already rolling their eyes at the mention of Owen’s name in a series on great Christian books. This is because his reputation as a brilliant theologian, prolific writer, and faithful churchman is matched only by his reputation for being exceedingly difficult to read. Carl Trueman laments, “Owen is hard to read. He wrote in long sentences and sometimes arcane and technical vocabulary. I suspect his theology is not so much rejected by the church today as simply not read. The effort is too great, whatever the actual reward might be.”[3] Few linger long enough to reap the benefits of his brilliant theological mind coupled with his deep devotional piety. As one who has taken the time to linger, I want to encourage would-be readers, press on! Owen’s style becomes easier to grasp with just a little practice, and the effort required truly pales in comparison to the reward gained.
1. Joel Beeke and Randall Pedersen remind readers that Owen has been variously called “the ‘prince of the English divines,’ ‘the leading figure among the Congregationalist divines,’ ‘a genius with learning second only to Calvin’s,’ and ‘indisputably the leading proponent of high Calvinism in England in the late seventeenth century’” (Meet the Puritans: With a Guide to Modern Reprints [Grand Rapids, MI: Reformation Heritage Books, 2006], 455). Roger Nicole is reported to have named Owen the greatest English-writing theologian of all time (see Matthew Barrett and Michael A. G. Haykin, Owen on the Christian Life: Living for the Glory of God in Christ [Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2015], 23).
2. J.I. Packer, A Quest for Godliness: The Puritan Vision of the Christian Life (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 1990), 191.
3. From the Foreword to Owen on the Christian Life, 14.
The purpose of this essay is to introduce readers to the treasury of Christian truth that is John Owen’s written body of work. His literary corpus is massive—more than eighty published works.[4] Here I’ll focus on one work in particular, the Everest of his theological writings, Pneumatologia: or, a Discourse Concerning the Holy Spirit.[5] In this work, all of Owen’s most notable traits as a Christian theologian are on full display. Three traits of Owen’s genius stand out in particular: his work is exemplary in its theological method, classical in its Trinitarian commitments, and christocentric in its biblical-theological structure.
Exemplary in its Theological Method
Owen states that his purpose in Pneumatologia is “to treat of the operations of the Holy Ghost, or those which are peculiar unto him” in all of Scripture.[6] In executing this purpose, he follows something of a canonical order throughout the volume, but he is always careful to articulate dogmatic principles along the way. These dogmatic principles govern his exegetical conclusions because the principles themselves are derived from a holistic and careful reading of the Scriptures. Though somewhat anachronistic, Owen masterfully blends the disciplines of dogmatics (or systematic theology) and biblical theology, allowing the fruits of both disciplines to aid one another mutually in the discovery of the truth revealed by God in his word. This way of approaching the task of Christian theology is in danger of being eclipsed in our age of bifurcating theological disciplines. The left hand of biblical studies is too often uninformed of what the right hand of systematic theology is doing (and vice-versa). Worse still, in some circles, the two hands are seen as working against one another. Owen models a better way.
4. The Works of John Owen were first compiled into a twenty-three volume set edited by William H. Goold and published by Johnstone and Hunter, 1850–1853. This edition was reprinted by Banner of Truth Trust in 1965. The Banner of Truth reprint is still widely available. Crossway is now publishing a new set of The Complete Works of John Owen, which will include the massive Hebrews Commentary and the Latin works left out of the Banner of Truth edition. Edited by Lee Gatiss and Shawn D. Wright, the new edition comes with thorough introductions by competent scholars in relevant fields for every volume (forty in all).
5.John Owen, Πνευματολογια [Pneumatologia, i.e., Pneumatology]: or, A Discourse Concerning the Holy Spirit was first published as a stand-alone work in 1674. The treatise occupies the entirety of vol. 3 of the Goold edition of The Works of John Owen. The work reviewed in this essay will appear as vol. 6 of the Crossway series, edited by Dustin Bruce and Michael A. G. Haykin (forthcoming). Citations herein will refer to the Goold edition and will take the form, Owen, Pneumatologia, page number.
6. Owen, Pneumatologia, 92 (emphasis in original).
Classical in its Dogmatic Commitments
In Pneumatologia, the classical doctrine of the Trinity—revealed in holy Scripture, and reflected upon by millennia of Christian thinkers—functions to provide certain dogmatic rules to guide Owen’s interpretation of the key biblical texts concerning the person and work of the Holy Spirit. Few thinkers from any Christian theological tradition have equaled Owen’s mastery of trinitarian theology, and nowhere is that mastery more evident than in Pneumatologia.
For Owen, as for all major proponents of Trinitarian theology throughout history, the works of the Trinity are undivided. More specifically, because there is only one God—a belief that entails one divine nature with one divine will and power—every work of God in the world is necessarily a singular work of all three persons. Owen says,
[T]he several persons are undivided in their operations, acting all by the same will, the same wisdom, the same power. Every person, therefore, is the author of every work of God, because each person is God, and the divine nature is the same undivided principle of all divine operations. And this ariseth from the unity of the persons in the same essence.[7]
7. Owen, Pneumatologia, 93.
This is the historic doctrine of the inseparable operations of the Trinity.[8]
8. For an in-depth consideration of this doctrine and Owen’s articulation of it, see Kyle D. Claunch, “What God Hath Done Together: Defending the Historic Doctrine of the Inseparable Operations of the Trinity,” JETS 56, no. 4 (2013): 781–800.
Given this principle, Owen feels obliged to justify his attempt to speak of the particular works of the Holy Spirit at all. He explains, “When any especial impression is made of the especial property of any person on any work; then is that work assigned peculiarly to that person.”[9] By “especial property of any person,” Owen is referring to the eternal relations of origin in the Trinity. The especial property of the Son is his filiation (or being begotten by the Father), and the especial property of the Holy Spirit is his spiration (being breathed forth by the Father and the Son). For Owen, the Spirit is third in the eternal order of the divine life and consequently is third in the revealed order of divine operations. Dogmatically, Owen is recognizing the biblical pattern of ascribing divine works (and sometimes attributes) to a particular person in a way that does not exclude the other two. Classical theologians refer to this as the doctrine of appropriation. The appropriation of a work or attribute to one particular person is fitting because of how it reveals that person’s eternal relation to the other two divine persons, but appropriation does not exclude the other persons from the divine operation in view.
9. Owen, Pneumatologia, 93.
In light of the trinitarian principles of inseparable operation and appropriation, Owen is able to offer one of his most profound insights: “Whereas the order of operation among the distinct persons depends on the order of their subsistence in the blessed Trinity, in every great work of God, the concluding, completing, perfecting acts are ascribed unto the Holy Ghost.”[10] Attentive as he is to the pattern of divine speech in holy Scripture, Owen recognizes that the Holy Spirit perfects the work of creation as he hovers over the primordial waters (Gen 1:2). He brings to completion the creation of the human nature of the Son as he hovers over the womb of the virgin (Luke 1:35). He concludes the work of salvation as he applies the redeeming efficacy of atonement to the people of God (John 16:7–11 and Eph 1:13–14).
10. Owen, Pneumatologia, 94. Similar statements to this are found throughout the volume.
Often, Owen will remind readers of a “rule” of Trinitarian theology he has previously expounded in order to aid their understanding of a passage of Scripture and to prevent faulty interpretation.[11] Owen’s Trinitarian orthodoxy is based on his conviction that this doctrine is revealed in Scripture when Scripture is read as unified whole with a single divine author (the Holy Spirit) who cannot contradict himself. The dogmatic claims of Trinitarian orthodoxy function, therefore, as both root and fruit of good exegesis.
11. For example, in his exposition of Genesis 1–2, Owen concludes the perfecting of the work of creation is “peculiarly assigned to the Spirit.” He immediately reminds readers that this ascription must be understood “by the rules before mentioned,” which rules are the doctrines of inseparable operations, eternal relations of origin, and appropriation (Owen, Pneumatologia, 97). Later, before expositing the key biblical texts that deal with the work of the Spirit in the life of Christ, Owen sets forth six “observations,” which he also calls “rules,” in which he lays out again the basic commitments of Trinitarian and Christological orthodoxy so that readers do not make the same mistakes as the Socinian heretics when reading these Scriptural passages (159-62).
Christocentric in its Biblical-Theological Structure
In all of his theological work, Owen shows a keen interest in properly relating the various covenantal epochs of redemptive history to one another. It is no surprise, then, to see him approach the doctrine of the Holy Spirit with a view to the unfolding storyline of Scripture. After three chapters dealing with “considerations of a general and preliminary nature,”[12] he gets to the meat of his treatise. He looks first at the work of the Holy Spirit in the “old creation.” Under the heading of “old creation,” Owen includes the creation of the non-rational world, including inanimate objects and animals, as well as the vocation of Adam in the Garden of Eden prior to the Fall.[13] Next, he takes up the “peculiar operations of the Holy Spirit in the Old Testament preparatory for the New.”[14] In this section, Owen has in view the entire period from the Fall until the coming of Christ. He refers to the OT as “preparatory for the New” because he recognizes that the New Covenant, which he refers to frequently as the “new creation,” is not established until Christ completes his atoning work and ascends on high. Owen turns his attention next to the work of the Spirit in the new creation itself. The first aspect of the work of the Spirit in the new creation taken up by Owen is the Spirit’s particular operations “toward the head of the new creation—the human nature of Christ.”[15] As will be demonstrated below, these two chapters are central to Owen’s entire project. Finally, Owen takes up the ministry of the Holy Spirit in the church, the mystical body of Christ as a whole, and in the individual members that make up that body. The remainder of the volume deals with various aspects of the work of the Holy Spirit toward the church of the New Covenant over which Christ is the head.
12. William J. Goold, “Prefatory Note,” The Works of John Owen, Vol. 3, 3.
13. See the title of Book I, Chapter IV, “Peculiar Works of the Holy Spirit in the First or Old Creation,” 92–104.
14. See the title of Book II, Chapter I, “Peculiar Operations of the Holy Spirit under the Old Testament Preparatory for the New,” 125–51.
15. See the title of Book II, Chapters III and IV, “Work of the Holy Spirit with Respect unto the Head of the New Creation—the Human Nature of Christ” and “Work of the Holy Spirit in and on the Human Nature of Christ,” 159–187.
This summary of the structure of Pneumatologia is important because it helps readers understand the central place of the Holy Spirit’s work in the life of Christ in Owen’s overall pneumatology. For Owen, the workings of God in the “old creation” (from creation to Fall) and under the Old Testament preparatory for the new (from Fall to Christ) are intended, in different ways, to function as types—foreshadows and previews—which point forward to Christ as the antitype, or the fulfillment of what is being pointed to. For Owen, a careful study of the person and work of the Holy Spirit across the storyline of Scripture provides a clarifying lens for the general typological relationship of Christ to all that came before him. For example, Owen likens the hovering of the Spirit over the primordial waters from which he brought forth all manner of life in the old creation to the hovering of the same Spirit over the womb of the virgin to form the human nature of the Son of God at the beginning of the new creation.[16] Owen says, of the rest of the Old Testament:
16. Owen, Pneumatologia, 164.
Whatever the Holy Spirit wrought in an eminent manner under the Old Testament, it had generally and for the most part, if not absolutely and always, a respect unto our Lord Jesus Christ and the gospel; and so was preparatory unto the completing of the great work of the new creation in and by Him.[17]
17. Owen, Pneumatologia, 126.
Not only does a properly ordered biblical pneumatology spotlight Christ as antitype of all that came before, it also highlights him as archetype—a pattern to follow—for the body of Christ, the church. Concerning the analogous relation between the Spirit’s work in Christ and his work in the church, Owen says, “And this belongs unto the establishment of our faith, that he who prepared, sanctified, and glorified the human nature, the natural body of Jesus Christ, the head of the church, hath undertaken to prepare, sanctify, and glorify his mystical body, or all the elect given unto him of the Father.”[18]
18. Owen, Pneumatologia, 189.
The Lord Jesus Christ is central to the storyline of Scripture. The whole canon—in its progressively unfolding clarity, breadth, and depth—cannot be properly understood without reference to him. For John Owen, this is demonstrated as clearly through a careful study of the doctrine of the Holy Spirit as anywhere else. A rightly ordered pneumatology will be a Christocentric pneumatology as Christ is seen to be the antitype of the types that came before his first advent and archetype of the church, which is the ectype—that which follows the pattern set by the archetype.
The Christocentric structure of the Pneumatologia is particularly refreshing to contemporary Christians who are inundated with works of pneumatology, which explicitly seek to de-centralize Christ, claiming that Western Christianity suffers from an excessive christocentrism, such that it has neglected the Holy Spirit. Contrary to this trend, Owen understood that the Holy Spirit’s mission will always have reference to Christ, whose Spirit he is. Jesus himself said of the Holy Spirit whom he would send into the world, “He will glorify me” (John 16:14).
Conclusion
Time does not permit me to relate the way that Owen applies the dogmatic principles of Trinitarian and Christological orthodoxy and the Christocentric nature of biblical pneumatology to the Son’s experience of the Spirit specifically, though I have treated the question at length elsewhere.[19] Nor does time permit a full exploration of Owen’s account of the work of the Spirit in the ongoing sanctification of the Spirit-indwelt believer by the infusion of a habit of grace in the soul and the mortification of sin. Owen’s extensive exegetical and dogmatic treatment of the spiritual gifts and his defense of a cessationist position with respect to the miraculous gifts are also well beyond the scope of this little review. I can only hope that this brief overview of the writings of John Owen, especially his Pneumatologia, will whet the appetite of many. For John Owen’s exemplary methodology, Christocentric biblical theology, and classical dogmatic commitments, I appeal to readers to heed the old Augustinian expression, tolle lege—take up, and read!
