22 July 2024

John Owen and Relating to God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit

This article began life as a talk given at the John Owen Barn in Owen’s old parish of Fordham in Essex (UK), at the launch of Lee Gatiss (ed.), John Owen Daily Readings (Fearn, Ross-Shire: Christian Focus, 2022).

Abstract

This article presents the foundational importance of the Trinity for the Christian life. Considering the teaching of John Owen, and his context in the seventeenth century, helps us see that the great blessing of the Christian life is that we have fellowship with the one true and living God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. And, in particular, that we have distinct communion with him as Father, as Son, and as Holy Spirit.

I. Is Your Faith Trinitarian?

Does the fact that the Christian God is a Trinity make any difference to you as a Christian? Is there a discernible Trinitarian shape to the Christian life? Or is it the case that the ordinary piety and devotion and lifestyle of a Christian is no different in theory and practice to the spirituality of a Muslim or a Jew or a follower of any other monotheistic religion? We may all claim to follow and believe in one God. We may have historical and cultural practices that differ somewhat depending on times and places. But does it matter that our God is supposedly one God in three persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit?

Let’s begin with Scripture, and in particular the apostle Paul’s letter to the Ephesians. Chapter 1 begins like this:

Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God,
To the saints who are in Ephesus, and are faithful in Christ Jesus:
Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places, even as he chose us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him. In love he predestined us for adoption to himself as sons through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of his will, to the praise of his glorious grace, with which he has blessed us in the Beloved. In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of his grace, which he lavished upon us, in all wisdom and insight making known to us the mystery of his will, according to his purpose, which he set forth in Christ as a plan for the fullness of time, to unite all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth.

In him we have obtained an inheritance, having been predestined according to the purpose of him who works all things according to the counsel of his will, so that we who were the first to hope in Christ might be to the praise of his glory. In him you also, when you heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation, and believed in him, were sealed with the promised Holy Spirit, who is the guarantee of our inheritance until we acquire possession of it, to the praise of his glory. (Eph 1:1-14 ESV)

I think we can see here that Paul has a Trinitarian emphasis in his understanding of the Christian life. He begins by blessing his readers with grace and peace “from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.” The first two persons of the Trinity are distinguishable, but equally the source of grace and peace to us. He then speaks of blessing God, or ascribing praise to God, as “the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ”. The God to whom we owe everything is the God of Jesus, the Father of Christ the Son. He is not simply a generic, undistinguished, undifferentiated “God”, but the Father whose Son is Jesus. This is where it all starts, with the Father who is the fountain of everything.

In eternity, this Father chose us, in Christ, to be his holy people. In love, he predestined us for adoption as his children. This was accomplished despite our sinful rebellion in thought and word and deed, through the blood of Jesus on the cross, which redeems those who are united to him. In the Son we have forgiveness of our sins, according to the riches of his grace — his lavish kindness and mercy towards undeserving sinners. This God, Father and Son, work out everything in conformity with their plan. And when we hear the good news of what the loving Father has done for us in Christ our Saviour, and believe in it, we are sealed with “the promised Holy Spirit.” He is the downpayment within us of the glory to come in future, marking us out as belonging to God. Those who are chosen by God the Father are redeemed by God the Son and sealed by God the Spirit.

So, Paul presents the salvation of Christian believers and our status in God’s universe in an explicitly and gloriously Trinitarian way, centred on Christ in whom we have every spiritual blessing in the heavenly realms. And in the rest of this letter, Paul shows us how the Trinity is at the root of our distinctive doctrine as Christians, but also of our distinctively Christian lives. So, we are not to “grieve the Holy Spirit of God, by whom you were sealed for the day of redemption” (Eph 4:30), and hence we are to let go of bitterness, anger, slander, and malice. Our lives are meant to be patterned after Christ’s, as we “walk in love, just as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us” (Eph 5:2). And we “give thanks always and for everything to God the Father in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ” (Eph 5:20). Christian lives are Trinitarian lives, which take up “the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God, praying at all times in the Spirit” (Eph 6:18-19). And so, we will enjoy peace and love “from God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ” (Eph 6:23).

The Christian life, like Ephesians itself, begins and ends on a Trinitarian note. But is that just a footnote in your Christian life and understanding? Is it the way you think about God, meditate on his truth, and live for him every day? Would it make a difference if we embraced the splendidly particular and peculiar and distinctive Trinitarian-ness of Christian faith more boldly?

II. John Owen and Anti-Trinitarians

These are questions which greatly exercised the great John Owen, the celebrated seventeenth-century pastor and theologian. In his days, the church was troubled by various sects and radical religious groups, such as the Quakers, the Ranters, and the Fifth Monarchists. Many of these groups were heretical when it came to key doctrines of the Christian faith. A number of these extremist groups were anti-Trinitarian. These were often labelled “Socinian”, after Socinus, a famous Italian-born heretic. He had a particular following in Poland known as the Polish Brethren, with their own seminary at Rakow and a widely circulated manifesto known as the Racovian Catechism.

In 1655, Dr Owen was asked by the Council of State, effectively the cabinet of the day, to write a book against the anti-Trinitarians. The government were sufficiently worried by these unorthodox developments that they wanted John Owen, at this point Vice Chancellor of Oxford University, to counter their dangerous doctrine, which was becoming increasingly popular, and was creeping into the church in subtle and insidious ways, often unawares. Someone anonymously translated and published a Socinian commentary on the book of Hebrews in 1646, for example, and very few noticed that it was unorthodox on the Trinity. Even the Puritan censor had to later apologise for not having read it properly and seen that, but it was too late, and the commentary was already in the hands of many who had no idea what kind of book it was. Unitarian views of God and Unitarian interpretations of Scripture were slowly gaining ground.^[1]

For many theologians at this time, Socinianism was “an intellectual abomination”,^[2] and theologians all over Europe, both Catholic and Protestant, wrote against it. As one historian has said, “Socinianism, with its denial of the Trinity and the atonement as well as its grace-denying moralism, was a more complete challenge to Calvinist orthodoxy than Arminianism had been.”^[3] That’s why, I think, Socinianism replaced Roman Catholicism as the biggest bogeyman to be refuted, as the seventeenth century wore on. Owen’s work is an example of “the eclipse of Romanism by Socinianism as the chief bugbear of the Reformed Protestant world by the third quarter of the seventeenth century.”^[4]

Owen’s 1655 book was called Vindiciae Evangelicae; or The Mystery of the Gospel Vindicated and Socinianism Examined. His main point is that the Socinians and their Racovian Catechism twisted the text of the Bible because, when you examine it honestly, it is clearly Trinitarian. Or, as he said, in one of his not-untypically obscure insults: “This naked and unprejudiced view of the text is sufficient to obviate all the operose and sophistical exceptions of our catechists.”^[5] (As Jim Packer said, Owen often “reads like the roughly dashed-off translation of a piece of thinking done in Ciceronian Latin”).^[6] This misreading of Scripture by the Socinians is one reason why he also spent a huge amount of time countering their exegesis of Hebrews, in his own massive commentary on Hebrews. There he claimed that a Socinian interpretation of the Bible “sinks under its own weakness and absurdity… Who not overpowered with prejudice could once imagine any such sense in these words, especially considering that it is as contrary to the design of the apostle as it is to the importance of the words themselves? This is that which Peter calls men’s ‘wresting the Scripture’ to their own perdition.”^[7]

Later in the century, Socinian ways of interpreting the Bible became very popular in the Church of England and amongst the Establishment. They were encouraged by the leading Bible commentaries of people such as Hugo Grotius and Henry Hammond, even if the authors of those commentaries claimed that they were themselves Trinitarian.^[8] After Owen’s death, Unitarianism became an even more virulent force, and many pulpits and churches turned Unitarian in teaching and practice, if not in name. This happened mostly amongst nonconformists, rather than Anglicans. As one scholar has rightly affirmed, “the liturgy far more than theology kept alive in Christian consciousness the trinitarian structure of Christian faith”;^[9] while another is surely correct to say that “[t]he sheer rhythm of the Liturgy familiarized churchgoers with belief in the Trinity.”^[10] But in nonconformist churches, where there was little in the way of liturgy and the ministers had in some cases rejected the idea of subscribing to confessions of faith and even the Creed, anti-Trinitarianism was rife. And it eventually emptied churches left, right, and centre, because its rationalism and unorthodoxy chimed in so well with the spirit of the age that those churches became indistinguishable from the world and lost the cutting edge of the gospel.

III. Trinitarian Piety

But it wasn’t just in the academic and theological arena that Unitarianism was a problem. My main purpose is not to outline the scholastic debates about the Trinity which rocked the mid-seventeenth century church. Rather, I want to look not at Owen’s academic output on this subject but at his more sermonic contribution in this area. Because, as well as being the de facto head of Oxford University and Dean of Christ Church College and cathedral there, he was a preacher and a pastor to students, just as he had been a pastor in Fordham and Coggeshall. It is in that role that he preached a series of sermons in Oxford (or possibly first in Coggeshall) on fellowship with God the Holy Trinity. A few years later, after some pressure from various people who had found these sermons to be especially edifying, he wrote them up and published them as a book in 1657. That book was called Of Communion with God the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, each Person Distinctly, in Love, Grace, and Consolation; or The Saint’s Fellowship with the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost Unfolded. As you can tell from that magnificent long title, it is a book about living as a distinctly Trinitarian Christian, relating to God explicitly as Father, as Son, and as Holy Spirit. It is a work of Trinitarian piety for ordinary believers to enjoy their relationship with our unique and wonderful God-in-three-Persons.

He begins with a verse from 1 John 1, where the apostle writes, “Indeed our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son Jesus Christ” (1 John 1:3). He says that John wrote in a time when the outward appearance and condition of God’s people was “very mean and contemptible”. Christian leaders, he writes, were “being accounted as the filth of this world and as the offscouring of all things.” The faith was looked down on and its leaders were considered wicked. So, it seemed odd at that time to be inviting people to join the church and be in fellowship with Christians. “What benefit is there in communion with them?”, people might have asked, “Is it anything else but to be sharers in troubles, reproaches, scorns, and all manner of evils?” Being part of the church would just make us open to persecution and to being considered morally wrong by our society, so why would we want to do that? And John wrote to say that despite all these disadvantages, and the way Christians were seen by the carnal people of his day, it was in fact “very honourable, glorious, and desirable” because our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son Jesus Christ.^[11]

To have fellowship with God, or as he sometimes says, “communion with God”, is a stunning and amazing blessing. He’s not talking about communion as in holy communion, the Lord’s Supper, the bread and wine. He’s talking about a relationship, an association, a union, a bond, or a connection with God. And yet, how could any human being have such a close and intimate relationship with God? To quote from Ephesians, the New Testament letter with which we began, human beings are spiritually dead, without hope, without God in the world, alienated from the life of God, because of our sins of body, mind, and spirit (Eph 2:1-3, 2:12, 4:18). So as Owen says, “While there is this distance between God and man, there is no walking together for them in any fellowship or communion.”^[12] We can’t be friends with God like this.

For Owen, and the Bible, the only way we can be friends with God is if God does something about the barrier between us. We are unable, because of our sinfulness, to knock it down ourselves and reach out to him. He alone can reach across the divide. And this is what he has done, in Jesus Christ, who at the first Christmas became man, joining in himself the human and the divine, so that he might die in our place to take the punishment which our sins deserve and reconcile us to God. The end goal of this gracious initiative is not that we start behaving ourselves as if it had all just been about persuading us to be more moral and obedient. The end goal of redemption is that we might have communion, and fellowship, with God.

The tremendous thing is that as redemption is accomplished in the life, death, and resurrection of Christ, God himself is revealed to be a Trinity: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. There may be hints of this in the Old Testament, but the obscurity of the Old Testament is wonderfully clarified in the accomplishment of our salvation in Christ, and the sending of the Spirit.^[13] So, the gospel in the New Testament reveals so much more. It is there that we discover the eternal Trinity. Of course, God has always been a Trinity, but the clear revelation of this aspect of his nature and work was kept until the coming of Jesus and the Spirit. What a privilege it is to live this side of the incarnation and of Pentecost.^[14]

The really revolutionary thing which Owen does in this book is to go on in chapter two to say this: “the saints [that is, all believers] have a distinct communion with the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit (that is, distinctly as the Father, and distinctly with the Son, and distinctly with the Holy Spirit).”^[15] As Brian Kay says in his book on Trinitarian Spirituality, this “breaks new ground” because it’s not just about showing how important the Trinity is as a foundational doctrine, but it shows “how the Christian’s devotional response to God takes on a distinctively trinitarian shape.”^[16] Since, as Kelly Kapic says, Owen has a “persistent unwillingness to speak in abstractions devoid of experiential content”, he is so often thinking of the application to life when he is talking about doctrine.^[17] Owen broke new ground here, because as Ryan McGraw rightly points out, few scholars have ever “dealt with the Trinity in terms of personal piety in their devotional literature”, and so, “Owen stands out in his self-consciously Trinitarian approach to Christian experience.”^[18]

Owen sees in 1 Corinthians 12:4-6, a testimony to this working of the Trinity towards believers. Paul wrote: “Now there are varieties of gifts, but the same Spirit; and there are varieties of service, but the same Lord; and there are varieties of activities, but it is the same God who empowers them all in everyone.” Traditionally, this has been read as referring to the Spirit, the Son, and the Father, and their distinct actions. He also examines Ephesians 2:18, which says: “For through [Christ] we both have access in one Spirit to the Father.” Our access to God, he points out, is through Christ, in the Spirit, to the Father. The persons of the Trinity are engaged in distinct ways in our salvation. We are baptised into the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit at the start of our Christian lives. And, of course, Owen doesn’t fail to notice the verse which ends every service of Evening Prayer in the Book of Common Prayer: “The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all” (2 Cor 13:14). The liturgy quietly but emphatically emphasises the Trinity and reinforces this idea of the grace, love, and fellowship of the Son, Father, and Spirit.

So, Owen concludes that all acts of worship or obedience to God which we give are distinctly directed to the Father, to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit. We believe and trust in each of them. We love each of them. We worship each of them. And all the benefits we receive from them are ascribed jointly yet distinctly to each person in the Deity. We are taught by God (John 6:45). We are taught by our Master, Christ (Matt 17:5). We are taught by the Holy Spirit (John 14:26; 1 John 2:27). All these distinctions are found in Scripture. There is a distinct communication of grace from each of the persons, which proves that we have distinct communion or fellowship with each.

At the same time, there is a peculiar, particular way in which we have communion with each person distinctly. Now, we do need to be careful here: the persons of the Trinity never act alone; when one is at work, they are all there and involved. The persons of the Trinity are not lone rangers. As Augustine had already pointed out, opera Trinitatis ad extra sunt indivisa, the outward, external acts of the Trinity are indivisible, undivided.^[19] But at the same time, the works of each can be distinguished. For example, creation is particularly the work of the Father, and redemption is peculiarly the work of the Son. Some works of the Trinity are eminently and specially the work of one of the persons.

Owen summarises the distinct and particular fellowship that we have with each person in this way: Communion with the Father consists in love. Communion with the Son consists in grace. Communion with the Spirit consists in consolation, or comfort. The love of the Father, the grace of the Son, and the comfort of the Spirit.

IV. New Ideas

Let me pause to say that it’s not very common in the history of theology that someone truly comes up with a new idea and “breaks new ground”. There’s nothing new under the sun, as they say (Eccl 1:9). And often, if a theologian does come up with something distinctive and new, it can be wildly unorthodox, and that’s why no one has ever thought of it before or written it down. It’s so wrong, no one ever thought it worth seriously considering. Or it was considered, and refuted thoroughly, and so hasn’t come up again.

For example, there was something recently called “the new perspective on Paul”, which made all sorts of observations about the apostle Paul and his theology. On closer examination, I found that earlier theologians such as Augustine and Calvin had actually come across these supposedly new ideas before, in the writings of various heretics, and had thought of the responses to them as well. So, it wasn’t really very new. And it was, said Calvin “utterly silly… Even schoolboys would hoot at such impudence.”^[20] As G.K. Chesterton says somewhere: “You can find all the new ideas in the old books; only there you will find them balanced, kept in their place, and sometimes contradicted and overcome by other and better ideas. The great writers did not neglect a fad because they had not thought of it, but because they had thought of it and all of the answers to it as well.”^[21]

Owen’s thought here, which he develops at length, that we have a distinct fellowship with the Father, and with the Son, and with the Spirit, is that rare breed: a new thought that is orthodox and good. It may be there in seed form in earlier works. The theologian Gregory of Nazianzus says, “No sooner do I conceive of the One than I am illumined by the Splendour of the Three; no sooner do I distinguish Them than I am carried back to the One.”^[22] Owen cites this saying of Gregory from the fourth century, as his inspiration. But he himself is the one who takes the idea of the distinct communion we have with the Three and runs with it.

Why did he suddenly come up with this? I think it must be, in part at least, because of the anti-Trinitarian Socinian threat. In a context where the doctrine of the Trinity was being hotly disputed, orthodox theologians were forced to go back to the Bible and think again, to counter a new species or new variant of heresy. Paul perhaps hints at this sort of thing in 1 Corinthians 11 when he says, “There must be factions among you in order that those who are genuine among you may be recognized” (1 Cor 11:19). St Augustine certainly found it to be true. He confessed that,

while the hot restlessness of heretics stirs questions about many articles of the catholic faith, the necessity of defending them forces us both to investigate them more accurately, to understand them more clearly, and to proclaim them more earnestly; and the question mooted by an adversary becomes the occasion of instruction.”^[23]

Many centuries later, an Augustinian monk named Martin Luther found something similar to be true. I am, he said, “deeply indebted to my papists that through the devil’s raging they have beaten, oppressed, and distressed me so much. That is to say, they have made a fairly good theologian of me, which I would not have become otherwise.”^[24] In the same way, Owen benefited from the heresies of the Socinians, and took advantage of the opportunity afforded by their false teaching to dwell on the truths of the doctrine of the Trinity more deeply. His gain is also ours. In some ways, however, it is not so much that Owen came up with a brand new idea from scratch; more that he gave this idea which had been lying somewhat dormant the most careful and extended treatment it had ever had, and so brought out facets of the truth which had not been so appreciated and understood in this way before.

In the quotation above from Augustine, the North African bishop was speaking particularly about those who claimed to be Christian but lived “abandoned lives”, as well as those who openly separated themselves from the church by their false teaching. Perhaps in our day, if we also find ourselves assailed by “the hot restlessness of heretics” and those who have abandoned traditional Christian teaching and living, it might also enable and encourage us to drink more deeply from the old wells and perhaps dig out new things, which we will then appreciate more fully than before. To do that, without falling into heresy and apostasy ourselves, is not, however, easy.

V. Distinct Communion

Returning to John Owen and the Trinity, we find that Owen summarises the distinct and particular fellowship that we have with each person in this way: Communion with the Father consists in love. Communion with the Son consists in grace. Communion with the Spirit consists in consolation. The love of the Father, the grace of the Son, and the comfort of the Spirit. He spends a great deal of time examining the biblical witness to see how these things are presented in Scripture itself.

The communion we have with the Father, he says, is especially in love — “free, undeserved, and eternal love”.^[25] “This the Father peculiarly fixes upon the saints.” The Father as the fountain of Deity is known as a God of justice, full of wrath and indignation against sin; but in the gospel, we now also discover that he is full of love towards us. As Paul says in Titus 3, the arrival of Jesus is the time “when the goodness and loving kindness of God our Saviour appeared” (Titus 3:4). God is love (1 John 4:8), and the next verse clarifies for us that this is particularly the Father: “In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him.” He himself sent his Son to be a propitiation for our sins — to take the wrath of God upon himself — out of love for us.

It’s very important to note here, as Sinclair Ferguson does, that “for Owen, the death of Christ did not purchase the Father’s love but is the way in which that love is communicated. The death of Christ is not the cause of the Father’s love but is its effect.”^[26] So we may have “dark and disturbing thoughts” about God while we are “in the troublesome region of hopes and fears, storms and clouds”. But weary souls should rest in the knowledge that God loves his people. As he says, “The love of the Father is the only rest of the soul”.^[27] And we ought to return love to him. The love of God is a love of bounty, and our love for him is a love of duty and delight.^[28] We can love him because he first loved us. As Kelly Kapic puts it, “Divine action is first, union with Christ is the result, and human response is the desired consequence.”^[29] Once we have union, then we can have communion. God acts first, but we are called to return his love in joyful, loving obedience, since as Owen says, “Communion consists in giving and receiving”; and, “God loves, that he may be beloved.”^[30] We are not to have anxious and doubtful thoughts, and think of him as an angry Father — because children always hide from angry parents — but as full of love toward us. This should cause us to run to him, even when we sin.

Our communion with the Son is eminently a communion in grace. The love of the Father, the grace of the Son. As John’s Gospel says, Christ is “full of grace and truth… For from his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace…grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.” (John 1:14-17). And the grace of Christ is presented to us in Scripture, particularly as a marriage, between Christ and the soul of the believer. His kindness and condescension towards poor, wretched sinners, who by nature hate and reject him, is alluring and seductive. Owen goes to town here with illustrations of this gracious love from the Old Testament book, Song of Songs. He’s not unusual in this, but we may find it strange because many of us are not used to thinking of Jesus this way.^[31]

Finally, our communion, our relationship with the Holy Spirit is particularly one of comfort and consolation. Not that he exists to make us comfortable and happy. Not that at all. But that God the Holy Spirit is given to us, as Jesus said, to be our Comforter — reminding us of his teaching and his promises, that we rely on; pointing us back to our gracious Saviour and loving Father; confirming and assuring us of their connection to us; giving us a foretaste of the glory to come; enabling us to live for Christ and long for that day. In return, we maintain our communion with the Holy Spirit by praying in the Spirit and keeping in step with him along the way of holiness. As it says in Acts 9:31, “So the church throughout all Judea and Galilee and Samaria had peace and was being built up. And walking in the fear of the Lord and in the comfort of the Holy Spirit, it multiplied.” Whatever happens in this life, we have the comfort of the Spirit in the midst of troubles, which outweighs the evil, trouble, or perplexity we may have to face.^[32]

VI. Conclusion

Obviously, there is more I could say about this. Owen’s book on communion with God as Trinity is hundreds of pages long! But the burden of it is simple: the great blessing of being a Christian is that we now have fellowship with the one true God, which in our natural, unbelieving state we could never enjoy or have access to. Since God is actually a Trinity, we have distinct communion with him as Father, as Son, and as Holy Spirit. Each of these persons of the Trinity is fully God, and they always act together. But certain things are eminently ascribed to particular persons, with regard to their relationship to us. As the Savoy Declaration, a confession of faith which Owen helped to write, puts it, “the doctrine of the Trinity is the foundation of all our communion with God, and comfortable dependence on him.”^[33]

This is not meant to be academic. It is deeply personal and pastoral. It is how we enjoy our unique God and live in a way that is pleasing to him. We must fill our minds with thoughts of God’s love. We should ponder the graciousness of our divine Saviour. We should rely on the comfort of the Holy Spirit as we walk in his way, use the sword of the Spirit which is the word of God, and make every effort not to grieve, resist, or quench the Spirit (Eph 4:30, Acts 7:51, 1 Thess 5:19), or show contempt for his ministry towards us. He is love, grace, and comfort for us, and as we respond to him, the relationship he established with us by grace alone, is strengthened.

So, may the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with us all, evermore, Amen.

Footnotes

^[1] For more on this see Lee Gatiss, “Socinianism and John Owen,” in Southern Baptist Journal of Theology 20.4 (2016).

^[2] S. Hampton, Anti-Arminians: The Anglican Reformed Tradition from Charles II to George I (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 73.

^[3] D. Wallace, Shapers of English Calvinism, 1660–1714: Variety, Persistence, and Transformation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 235.

^[4] Lee Gatiss, “Adoring the Fullness of the Scriptures in John Owen’s Commentary on Hebrews” (PhD, University of Cambridge, 2013), 251.

^[5] John Owen, The Works of John Owen, ed. William H. Goold (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1862), 12:233.

^[6] J. Packer, Among God’s Giants: The Puritan Vision of the Christian Life (Eastbourne: Kingsway, 1991), 192.

^[7] Owen, Works, 20:73 on Heb 1:1-2.

^[8] See Gatiss, “Adoring the Fullness of the Scriptures,” 84ff on the crypto-Socinianism of Hugo Grotius and Henry Hammond.

^[9] Catherine LaCugna, God For Us (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1991), 210.

^[10] Philip Dixon, Nice and Hot Disputes: The Doctrine of the Trinity in the Seventeenth Century (London: T&T Clark, 2003), 215-216. See also H. J. MacLachlan, Socinianism in Seventeenth Century England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1951), 334.

^[11] John Owen, Communion with the Triune God (edited by Kelly M. Kapic and Justin Taylor; Wheaton: Crossway, 2007), 89-90.

^[12] Ibid, 91.

^[13] As Owen says, “although the substance of the will and mind of God concerning salvation by the Messiah was made known unto them all, yet it was done so obscurely to Moses and the prophets that ensued, that they came all short in the light of that mystery to John the Baptist, who did not rise up in a clear and distinct apprehension of it unto the least of the true disciples of Christ”. Works, 20:32-33 on Heb 1:1-12. Other passages might be added where he contrasts the Old and New Testament by means of this obscure-clarity dichotomy, e.g. “Although the work of regeneration by the Holy Spirit was wrought under the Old Testament, even from the foundation of the world, and the doctrine of it was recorded in the Scriptures, yet the revelation of it was but obscure in comparison, of that light and evidence which it is brought forth into by the gospel.” Works, 3:210.

^[14] “It is true that both these and other prophets had revelations concerning his sufferings also. For “the Spirit of Christ that was in them testified beforehand of his sufferings, and the glory that should follow,” 1 Peter 1:11 — an illustrious testimony whereunto we have given us, Ps 22, and Isa 53. Nevertheless, their conceptions concerning them were dark and obscure.” Works, 1:102.

^[15] Owen, Communion, 95.

^[16] Brian Kay, Trinitarian Spirituality: John Owen and the Doctrine of God in Western Devotion (Milton Keynes: Paternoster, 2007), 115-116.

^[17] Owen, Communion, 152.

^[18] Ryan McGraw, A Heavenly Directory: Trinitarian Piety, Public Worship and a Reassessment of John Owen’s Theology (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 2014), 58-59.

^[19] As Owen says elsewhere, “It is a saying generally admitted, that Opera Trinitatis ad extra sunt indivisa. There is no such division in the external operations of God that any one of them should be the act of one person, without the concurrence of the others; and the reason of it is, because the nature of God, which is the principle of all divine operations, is one and the same, undivided in them all.” Works 3:162.

^[20] Quotations from Calvin, Institutes, 3.11.19-20. See Lee Gatiss, “Justified Hesitation? J. D. G. Dunn and the Protestant Doctrine of Justification,” in Cornerstones of Salvation: Foundations and Debates in the Reformed Tradition (Welwyn: Evangelical Press, 2015), 69-92.

^[21] See “On Reading,” in G.K. Chesterton, The Common Man (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1950), 23.

^[22] Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 40: The Oration on Holy Baptism, in NPNF² 7:375 PG 36 col. 417B. See Owen, Communion, 95.

^[23] P. Schaff (ed.), St. Augustine’s City of God and Christian Doctrine (Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, First Series, Volume 2. Translated by M. Dods; Peabody, Massachusetts: Hendrickson, 1999), 309-310 (Book 16, chapter 2).

^[24] Martin Luther, Luther’s Works, Vol. 34: Career of the Reformer IV, eds. Jaroslav Jan Pelikan, Hilton C. Oswald, and Helmut T. Lehmann (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1999), 287.

^[25] Owen, Communion, 107.

^[26] Sinclair Ferguson, John Owen on the Christian Life (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 1987), 77.

^[27] Owen, Communion, 112.

^[28] Ibid., 118.

^[29] Kelly Kapic, Communion with God: The Divine and the Human in the Theology of John Owen (Grand rapids: Baker Academic, 2007), 157.

^[30] Owen, Communion, 111, 113.

^[31] See, however, E. Clarke, Politics, Religion and the Song of Songs in Seventeenth-Century England (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).

^[32] Owen, Communion, 392.

^[33] See Savoy Declaration 2.3 in A. Matthews (ed.), The Savoy Declaration of Faith and Order 1658 (London: Independent Press, 1959), 79.