John Owen. Reformed Catholic, Renaissance Man, Carl Trueman (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 132 pages.
(Review copy courtesy of Ashgate Publishing).
Somebody once described reading John Owen (17th Century Reformed theologian) as being like stirring porridge with a plastic spoon. That’s both unfair and true – he is hard reading because he is engaging with the sharpest minds in Europe on some of the most contested and complex problems of theology. His writings are exhaustingly exhaustive, his theological arguments are mathematically (at times mechanically) precise. His learning in an age before information overload was both deep and wide, ranging across the Western tradition of theology and philosophy. His writing on the Being of God, woven throughout much of his Works is a metaphysical tour de force; the treatises on the Holy Spirit and spirituality remain classics of Reformed spiritual theology.
It is one of the strengths of Carl Trueman’s book that he places Owen in his historical context as a Reformed Catholic and Renaissance Man. In other words Trueman severely qualifies the title ‘Puritan’ as applied to Owen because it is too narrow, too constraining both of his theology, and of his preferred sources for theologising. Thus Owen’s pneumatology should first be understood in its proper systematic context, which is Owen’s deliberately constructed Trinitarian framework. Only then is his encyclopedic treatment of the Holy Spirit to be held up as one of the most authoritative Reformed Orthodox spiritual treatises of the vastly productive, theologically argumentative 17th century.
Likewise, when Owen argues his powerfully, at times overwhelmingly persistent biblical theology, he is participating in a Europe wide campaign of polemical and constructive theology now described as Post Reformation Reformed Scholasticism. These Reformed theological and intellectual armaments were aimed at Arminian, Socinian and Roman Catholic errors. But even here Trueman is impatient with broad brush special pleadings by over-enthusiastic Reformed fans of Owen. While targeting obvious doctrinal errors in Roman Catholic teaching, he nevertheless valued and used much Roman Catholic learning, theology and biblical scholarship that was free from such errors. He was a discriminating admirer of Bellarmine, the most influential, able and erudite Jesuit apologist in Europe at the time. In other words Owen was a discerning and not ungenerous theological opponent, whose aim was fixing truth rather than discrediting opponents.
Now by ‘Catholic’ Trueman means one who holds the wider church tradition, its historical and theological diversity, yet its ecclesial continuity, as an indispensable source of theological wisdom, second only to Scripture in authority. Trueman makes a lot of Owen’s library catalogue to show the breadth of interests of this renaissance man – I particularly like the idea that alongside theological tomes Owen had books on parliamentary procedure (he preached before parliament), gardening, music theory, the life of silk worms and the advantages of warm beer!
Following the initial chapter on Owen as Reformed Catholic and Renaissance Man, Trueman goes on to examine Owen’s theology in three more chapters. In chapter 2 the conception of God Owen sets out in such intricately argued detail is thoroughly Trinitarian – the deity of Christ and of the Holy Spirit, co-equal with the Father, are foundational presuppositions of Owen’s theology of God. In the third chapter, the covenant of grace and catholic christology, are placed at the centre of Reformed dogmatics – the foundational conception of God as sovereign, revealed in Christ for the salvation of those elect from eternity, defines the nature and means of atonement and justification. The article by which the church stands or falls, justification, expounded with forensic precision by Owen and explained with scholarly relish by Trueman, bring this study to a close in its final chapter.
Each chapter is closely argued, considering Owen’s historical milieu and engaging Owen’s writings with which Trueman is obviously and impressively familiar. Carl Trueman is one of several prominent historical theologians seeking to overturn the revisionist view that post Reformation European Reformed Scholasticism of the 17th and 18th centuries was the imposition upon an earlier Calvinism, of metaphysical categories, Aristotelian rationalism and arid biblical proof-texting in contrast to the Reformed Calvinism of earlier generations.
This apologetic and reactive thrust is felt all the way through Trueman’s book, and it gets in the way at times. For example, Owen’s spirituality is almost incidental, so that he does indeed come over as a cerebral, polemical, meticulous logician, using massive learning to establish what at times are quite speculative metaphysical concepts (such as the Covenant of redemption, or Owen’s construal of intra-Trinitarian relations). Again, Trueman is brilliant on John Owen’s contribution to the developing expertise of Reformed hermeneutics, but Owen’s fusion of speculative metaphysics controlled by biblical exegesis and Reformed dogmatics, argues a richer vein of spiritual experience than comes over in some of these patiently disentangled controversies. But that’s perhaps to ask for another kind of book which Trueman has already shown he can write. His Legacy of Luther is just such a consideration of historical context, theological exposition and intellectual biography. And his earlier book on Owen also provides some of the balance. But this book is in the series Great Theologians, and Owen’s greatness has deep spiritual roots as well as high metaphysical reach.
This treatment of Owen is, despite those comments, a very impressive example of how to answer those who accuse later Reformed Scholasticism of turning an earlier purer Calvinism, into an iron-cast predestinarian system. Trueman allows Owen to be understood as a man of his own times, defended from anachronistic criticisms by modern anti-Reformed and pro-Reformed writers and readers alike. So both R T Kendall’s revisionist thesis of original authentic Calvinism degenerating into later scholasticism, and J I Packer’s claim that Owen is a Puritan of the Puritans of the Banner of Truth school, are carefully and authoritatively corrected. Trueman is himself a scholar of the Reformed persuasion – but his Reformed stance is solidly grounded on historical and theological scholarship of the highest order.
This is an important exposition of a theologian beginning to be taken seriously after centuries of neglect by mainstream academic theology – which as Trueman’s book demonstrates, has been an irony and injustice, for Owen was cutting edge in his own theological engagements and scholarship.
