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Introductory Essay to John Owen’s Death
of Death in the Death of Christ
by J. I. Packer
I. The Death of Death in the Death of Christ is a polemical work,
designed to show, among other things, that the doctrine of universal
redemption is unscriptural and destructive of the gospel. There are
many, therefore, to whom it is not likely to be of interest. Those who
see no need for doctrinal exactness and have no time for theological
debates which show up divisions between so-called Evangelicals may
well regret its reappearance. Some may find the very sound of
Owen’s thesis so shocking that they will refuse to read his book at all;
so passionate a thing is prejudice, and so proud are we of our
theological shibboleths. But it is hoped that this reprint will find
itself readers of a different spirit. There are signs today of a new
upsurge of interest in the theology of the Bible: a new readiness to
test traditions, to search the Scriptures and to think through the
faith. It is to those who share this readiness that Owen’s treatise is
offered, in the belief that it will help us in one of the most urgent
tasks facing Evangelical Christendom today—the recovery of the gospel.
This last remark may cause some raising of eyebrows, but it seems to
be warranted by the facts.
There is no doubt that Evangelicalism today is in a state of perplexity
and unsettlement. In such matters as the practice of evangelism, the
teaching of holiness, the building up of local church life, the pastor’s
dealing with souls and the exercise of discipline, there is evidence of
widespread dissatisfaction with things as they are and of equally
widespread uncertainty as to the road ahead. This is a complex
phenomenon, to which many factors have contributed; but, if we go
to the root of the matter, we shall find that these perplexities are all
ultimately due to our having lost our grip on the biblical gospel.
Without realising it, we have during the past century bartered that
gospel for a substitute product which, though it looks similar enough
in points of detail, is as a whole a decidedly different thing. Hence
our troubles; for the substitute product does not answer the ends for
which the authentic gospel has in past days proved itself so mighty.
The new gospel conspicuously fails to produce deep reverence, deep
repentance, deep humility, a spirit of worship, a concern for the
church. Why? We would suggest that the reason lies in its own
character and content. It fails to make men God-centred in their
thoughts and God-fearing in their hearts because this is not
primarily what it is trying to do. One way of stating the difference
between it and the old gospel is to say that it is too exclusively
concerned to be “helpful” to man—to bring peace, comfort,
happiness, satisfaction—and too little concerned to glorify God. The
old gospel was “helpful,” too—more so, indeed, than is the new—but
(so to speak) incidentally, for its first concern was always to give
glory to God. It was always and essentially a proclamation of Divine
sovereignty in mercy and judgment, a summons to bow down and
worship the mighty Lord on whom man depends for all good, both in
nature and in grace. Its centre of reference was unambiguously God.
But in the new gospel the centre of reference is man. This is just to
say that the old gospel was religious in a way that the new gospel is
not. Whereas the chief aim of the old was to teach men to worship
God, the concern of the new seems limited to making them feel
better. The subject of the old gospel was God and His ways with men;
the subject of the new is man and the help God gives him. There is a
world of difference. The whole perspective and emphasis of gospel
preaching has changed.
From this change of interest has sprung a change of content, for the
new gospel has in effect reformulated the biblical message in the
supposed interests of “helpfulness.” Accordingly, the themes of
man’s natural inability to believe, of God’s free election being the
ultimate cause of salvation, and of Christ dying specifically for His
sheep, are not preached. These doctrines, it would be said, are not
“helpful”; they would drive sinners to despair, by suggesting to them
that it is not in their own power to be saved through Christ. (The
possibility that such despair might be salutary is not considered; it is
taken for granted that it cannot be, because it is so shattering to our
self-esteem.) However this may be (and we shall say more about it
later), the result of these omissions is that part of the biblical gospel
is now preached as if it were the whole of that gospel; and a half truth
masquerading as the whole truth becomes a complete untruth.
Thus, we appeal to men as if they all had the ability to receive Christ
at any time; we speak of His redeeming work as if He had done no
more by dying than make it possible for us to save ourselves by
believing; we speak of God’s love as if it were no more than a general
willingness to receive any who will turn and trust; and we depict the
Father and the Son, not as sovereignly active in drawing sinners to
themselves, but as waiting in quiet impotence “at the door of our
hearts” for us to let them in. It is undeniable that this is how we
preach; perhaps this is what we really believe. But it needs to be said
with emphasis that this set of twisted half-truths is something other
than the biblical gospel. The Bible is against us when we preach in
this way; and the fact that such preaching has become almost
standard practice among us only shows how urgent it is that we
should review this matter. To recover the old, authentic, biblical
gospel, and to bring our preaching and practice back into line with it,
is perhaps our most pressing present need. And it is at this point that
Owen’s treatise on redemption can give us help.
II. “But wait a minute,” says someone, “it’s all very well to talk like
this about the gospel; but surely what Owen is doing is defending
limited atonement—one of the five points of Calvinism? When you
speak of recovering the gospel, don’t you mean that you just want us
all to become Calvinists?”
These questions are worth considering, for they will no doubt occur
to many. At the same time, however, they are questions that reflect a
great deal of prejudice and ignorance. “Defending limited
atonement”—as if this was all that a Reformed theologian
expounding the heart of the gospel could ever really want to do! “You
just want us all to become Calvinists”—as if Reformed theologians
had no interest beyond recruiting for their party, and as if becoming
a Calvinist was the last stage of theological depravity, and had
nothing to do with the gospel at all. Before we answer these
questions directly, we must try to remove the prejudices which
underlie them by making clear what Calvinism really is; and
therefore we would ask the reader to take note of the following facts,
historical and theological, about Calvinism in general and the “five
points” in particular.
First, it should be observed that the “five points of Calvinism,” so called,
are simply the Calvinistic answer to a five-point manifesto
(the Remonstrance) put out by certain “Belgic semi-Pelagians” in the
early seventeenth century. The theology which it contained (known
to history as Arminianism) stemmed from two philosophical
principles: first, that divine sovereignty is not compatible with
human freedom, nor therefore with human responsibility; second,
that ability limits obligation. (The charge of semi-Pelagianism was
thus fully justified.) From these principles, the Arminians drew two
deductions: first that since the Bible regards faith as a free and
responsible human act, it cannot be caused by God, but is exercised
independently of Him; second, that since the Bible regards faith as
obligatory on the part of all who hear the gospel, ability to believe
must be universal. Hence, they maintained, Scripture must be
interpreted as teaching the following positions:
(1.) Man is never so completely corrupted by sin that he cannot savingly believe the gospel when it is put before him, nor
(2.) is he ever so completely controlled by God that he cannot reject it.
(3.) God’s election of those who shall be saved is prompted by His foreseeing that they will of their own accord believe.
(4.) Christ’s death did not ensure the salvation of anyone, for it did not secure the gift of faith to anyone
(there is no such gift); what it did was rather to create a possibility of salvation for everyone if they believe.
(5.) It rests with believers to keep themselves in a state of grace by keeping up their faith; those
who fail here fall away and are lost. Thus, Arminianism made man’s
salvation depend ultimately on man himself, saving faith being
viewed throughout as man’s own work and, because his own, not God’s in him.
The Synod of Dort was convened in 1618 to pronounce on this
theology, and the “five points of Calvinism” represent its counter affirmations.
They stem from a very different principle—the biblical
principle that “salvation is of the Lord”; and they may be summarized thus:
(1.) Fallen man in his natural state lacks all power
to believe the gospel, just as he lacks all power to believe the law,
despite all external inducements that may be extended to him.
(2.) God’s election is a free, sovereign, unconditional choice of sinners, as
sinners, to be redeemed by Christ, given faith and brought to glory.
(3.) The redeeming work of Christ had as its end and goal the salvation of the elect.
(4.) The work of the Holy Spirit in bringing men to faith never fails to achieve its object.
(5.) Believers are kept in faith and grace by the unconquerable power of God till they come to
glory. These five points are conveniently denoted by the mnemonic
TULIP: Total depravity, Unconditional election, Limited atonement, Irresistible grace, Preservation of the saints.
Now, here are two coherent interpretations of the biblical gospel,
which stand in evident opposition to each other. The difference
between them is not primarily one of emphasis, but of content. One
proclaims a God who saves; the other speaks of a God Who enables
man to save himself. One view presents the three great acts of the
Holy Trinity for the recovering of lost mankind—election by the
Father, redemption by the Son, calling by the Spirit—as directed
towards the same persons, and as securing their salvation infallibly.
The other view gives each act a different reference (the objects of
redemption being all mankind, of calling, those who hear the gospel,
and of election, those hearers who respond), and denies that any
man’s salvation is secured by any of them. The two theologies thus
conceive the plan of salvation in quite different terms. One makes
salvation depend on the work of God, the other on a work of man;
one regards faith as part of God’s gift of salvation, the other as man’s
own contribution to salvation; one gives all the glory of saving
believers to God, the other divides the praise between God, Who, so
to speak, built the machinery of salvation, and man, who by believing
operated it. Plainly, these differences are important, and the
permanent value of the “five points,” as a summary of Calvinism, is
that they make clear the points at which, and the extent to which,
these two conceptions are at variance.
However. it would not be correct simply to equate Calvinism with the
“five points.” Five points of our own will make this clear.
In the first place, Calvinism is something much broader than the
“five points” indicate. Calvinism is a whole world-view, stemming
from a clear vision of God as the whole world’s Maker and King.
Calvinism is the consistent endeavour to acknowledge the Creator as
the Lord, working all things after the counsel of His will. Calvinism is
a theocentric way of thinking about all life under the direction and
control of God’s own Word. Calvinism, in other words, is the
theology of the Bible viewed from the perspective of the Bible—the
God-centred outlook which sees the Creator as the source, and
means, and end, of everything that is, both in nature and in grace.
Calvinism is thus theism (belief in God as the ground of all things),
religion (dependence on God as the giver of all things), and
evangelicalism (trust in God through Christ for all things), all in their
purest and most highly developed form. And Calvinism is a unified
philosophy of history which sees the whole diversity of processes and
events that take place in God’s world as no more, and no less, than
the outworking of His great preordained plan for His creatures and
His church. The five points assert no more than that God is sovereign
in saving the individual, but Calvinism, as such, is concerned with
the much broader assertion that He is sovereign everywhere.
Then, in the second place, the “five points” present Calvinistic
soteriology in a negative and polemical form, whereas Calvinism in
itself is essentially expository, pastoral and constructive. It can
define its position in terms of Scripture without any reference to
Arminianism, and it does not need to be forever fighting real or
imaginary Arminians in order to keep itself alive. Calvinism has no
interest in negatives, as such; when Calvinists fight, they fight for
positive Evangelical values. The negative cast of the “five points” is
misleading chiefly with regard to the third (limited atonement, or
particular redemption), which is often read with stress on the
adjective and taken as indicating that Calvinists have a special
interest in confining the limits of divine mercy. But in fact the
purpose of this phraseology, as we shall see, is to safeguard the
central affirmation of the gospel—that Christ is a Redeemer who
really does redeem. Similarly, the denials of an election that is
conditional and of grace that is resistible, are intended to safeguard
the positive truth that it is God Who saves. The real negations are
those of Arminianism, which denies that election, redemption and
calling are saving acts of God. Calvinism negates these negations in
order to assert the positive content of the gospel, for the positive
purpose of strengthening faith and building up the church.
Thirdly, the very act of setting out Calvinistic soteriology in the form
of five distinct points (a number due, as we saw, merely to the fact
that there were five Arminian points for the Synod of Dort to answer)
tends to obscure the organic character of Calvinistic thought on this
subject. For the five points, though separately stated, are really
inseparable. They hang together; you cannot reject one without
rejecting them all, at least in the sense in which the Synod meant
them. For to Calvinism there is really only one point to be made in
the field of soteriology: the point that God saves sinners. God—the
Triune Jehovah, Father, Son and Spirit; three Persons working
together in sovereign wisdom, power and love to achieve the
salvation of a chosen people, the Father electing, the Son fulfilling
the Father’s will by redeeming, the Spirit executing the purpose of
Father and Son by renewing. Saves—does everything, first to last,
that is involved in bringing man from death in sin to life in glory:
plans, achieves and communicates redemption, calls and keeps,
justifies, sanctifies, glorifies. Sinners—men as God finds them, guilty,
vile, helpless, powerless, unable to lift a finger to do God’s will or
better their spiritual lot. God saves sinners—and the force of this
confession may not be weakened by disrupting the unity of the work
of the Trinity, or by dividing the achievement of salvation between
God and man and making the decisive part man’s own, or by soft pedaling the sinner’s inability
so as to allow him to share the praise
of his salvation with his Saviour. This is the one point of Calvinistic
soteriology which the “five points” are concerned to establish and
Arminianism in all its forms to deny: namely, that sinners do not
save themselves in any sense at all, but that salvation, first and last,
whole and entire, past, present and future, is of the Lord, to whom be
glory for ever; amen.
This leads to our fourth remark, which is this: the five-point formula
obscures the depth of the difference between Calvinistic and
Arminian soteriology. There seems no doubt that it seriously
misleads many here. In the formula, the stress falls on the adjectives,
and this naturally gives the impression that in regard to the three
great saving acts of God the debate concerns the adjectives merely—
that both sides agree as to what election, redemption, and the gift of
internal grace are, and differ only as to the position of man in
relation to them: whether the first is conditional upon faith being
foreseen or not; whether the second intends the salvation of every
man or not; whether the third always proves invincible or not. But
this is a complete misconception. The change of adjective in each
case involves changing the meaning of the noun. An election that is
conditional, a redemption that is universal, an internal grace that is
resistible, is not the same kind of election, redemption, internal
grace, as Calvinism asserts. The real issue concerns, not the
appropriateness of adjectives, but the definition of nouns. Both sides
saw this clearly when the controversy first began, and it is important
that we should see it too, for otherwise we cannot discuss the
Calvinist-Arminian debate to any purpose at all. It is worth setting
out the different definitions side by side.
(i.) God’s act of election was defined by the Arminians as a resolve to
receive sonship and glory a duly qualified class of people: believers in
Christ. This becomes a resolve to receive individual persons only in
virtue of God’s foreseeing the contingent fact that they will of their
own accord believe. There is nothing in the decree of election to
ensure that the class of believers will ever have any members; God
does not determine to make any man believe. But Calvinists define
election as a choice of particular undeserving persons to be saved
from sin and brought to glory, and to that end to be redeemed by the
death of Christ and given faith by the Spirit’s effectual calling. Where
the Arminian says: “I owe my election to my faith,” the Calvinist
says: “I owe my faith to my election.” Clearly, these two concepts of
election are very far apart.
(ii.) Christ’s work of redemption was defined by the Arminians as the
removing of an obstacle (the unsatisfied claims of justice) which
stood in the way of God’s offering pardon to sinners, as He desired to
do, on condition that they believe. Redemption, according to
Arminianism, secured for God a right to make this offer, but did not
of itself ensure that anyone would ever accept it; for faith, being a
work of man’s own, is not a gift that comes to him from Calvary.
Christ’s death created an opportunity for the exercise of saving faith,
but that is all it did. Calvinists, however, define redemption as
Christ’s actual substitutionary endurance of the penalty of sin in the
place of certain specified sinners, through which God was reconciled
to them, their liability to punishment was for ever destroyed, and a
title to eternal life was secured for them. In consequence of this, they
now have in God’s sight a right to the gift of faith, as the means of
entry into the enjoyment of their inheritance. Calvary, in other
words, not merely made possible the salvation of those for whom
Christ died; it ensured that they would be brought to faith and their
salvation made actual. The Cross saves. Where the Arminian will
only say: “I could not have gained my salvation without Calvary,” the
Calvinist will say: “Christ gained my salvation for me at Calvary.” The
former makes the Cross the sine qua non of salvation, the latter sees
it as the actual procuring cause of salvation, and traces the source of
every spiritual blessing, faith included, back to the great transaction
between God and His Son carried through on Calvary’s hill. Clearly,
these two concepts of redemption are quite at variance.
(iii.) The Spirit’s gift of internal grace was defined by the Arminians
as “moral suasion,” the bare bestowal of an understanding of God’s
truth. This, they granted—indeed, insisted—does not of itself ensure
that anyone will ever make the response of faith. But Calvinists
define this gift as not merely an enlightening, but also a regenerating
work of God in men, “taking away their heart of stone, and giving
unto them a heart of flesh; renewing their wills, and by His almighty
power determining them to that which is good; and effectually
drawing them to Jesus Christ; yet so as they come most freely, being
made willing by his grace.” Grace proves irresistible just because it
destroys the disposition to resist. Where the Arminian, therefore, will
be content to say: “I decided for Christ,” “I made up my mind to be a
Christian,” the Calvinist will wish to speak of his conversion in more
theological fashion, to make plain whose work it really was:
“Long my imprisoned spirit lay
Fast bound in sin and nature’s night:
Thine eye diffused a quickening ray;
I woke; the dungeon flamed with light;
My chains fell off: my heart was free:
I rose, went forth, and followed thee.”
Clearly, these two notions of internal grace are sharply opposed to
each other.
Now, the Calvinist contends that the Arminian idea of election,
redemption and calling as acts of God which do not save cuts at the
very heart of their biblical meaning; that to say in the Arminian sense
that God elects believers, and Christ died for all men, and the Spirit
quickens those who receive the word, is really to say that in the
biblical sense God elects nobody, and Christ died for nobody, and the
Spirit quickens nobody. The matter at issue in this controversy,
therefore, is the meaning to be given to these biblical terms, and to
some others which are also soteriologically significant, such as the
love of God, the covenant of grace, and the verb “save” itself, with its
synonyms. Arminians gloss them all in terms of the principle that
salvation does not directly depend on any decree or act of God, but
on man’s independent activity in believing. Calvinists maintain that
this principle is itself unscriptural and irreligious, and that such
glossing demonstrably perverts the sense of Scripture and
undermines the gospel at every point where it is practised. This, and
nothing less than this, is what the Arminian controversy is about.
There is a fifth way in which the five-point formula is deficient. Its
very form (a series of denials of Arminian assertions) lends colour to
the impression that Calvinism is a modification of Arminianism; that
Arminianism has a certain primacy in order of nature, and developed
Calvinism is an offshoot from it. Even when one shows this to be
false as a matter of history, the suspicion remains in many minds
that it is a true account of the relation of the two views themselves.
For it is widely supposed that Arminianism (which, as we now see,
corresponds pretty closely to the new gospel of our own day) is the
result of reading the Scriptures in a “natural,” unbiased,
unsophisticated way, and that Calvinism is an unnatural growth, the
product less of the texts themselves than of unhallowed logic
working on the texts, wresting their plain sense and upsetting their
balance by forcing them into a systematic framework which they do
not themselves provide. Whatever may have been true of individual
Calvinists, as a generalisation about Calvinism nothing could be
further from the truth than this. Certainly, Arminianism is “natural”
in one sense, in that it represents a characteristic perversion of
biblical teaching by the fallen mind of man, who even in salvation
cannot bear to renounce the delusion of being master of his fate and
captain of his soul. This perversion appeared before in the
Pelagianism and semi-Pelagianism of the Patristic period and the
later Scholasticism, and has recurred since the seventeenth century
both in Roman theology and, among Protestants, in various types of
rationalistic liberalism and modern Evangelical teaching; and no
doubt it will always be with us. As long as the fallen human mind is
what it is, the Arminian way of thinking will continue to be a natural
type of mistake. But it is not natural in any other sense. In fact, it is
Calvinism that understands the Scriptures in their natural, one
would have thought, inescapable meaning; Calvinism that keeps to
what they actually say; Calvinism that insists on taking seriously the
biblical assertions that God saves, and that He saves those whom He
has chosen to save, and that He saves them by grace without works,
so that no man may boast, and that Christ is given to them as a
perfect Saviour, and that their whole salvation flows to them from
the Cross, and that the work of redeeming them was finished on the
Cross. It is Calvinism that gives due honour to the Cross. When the
Calvinist sings:
“There is a green hill far away,
Without a city wall,
Where the dear Lord was crucified,
Who died to save us all;
He died the we might be forgiven,
He died to make us good;
That we might go at last to Heaven,
Saved by His precious blood.”
—he means it. He will not gloss the italicised statements by saying
that God’s saving purpose in the death of His Son was a mere
ineffectual wish, depending for its fulfilment on man’s willingness to
believe, so that for all God could do Christ might have died and none
been saved at all. He insists that the Bible sees the Cross as revealing
God’s power to save, not His impotence. Christ did not win a
hypothetical salvation for hypothetical believers, a mere possibility of
salvation for any who might possibly believe, but a real salvation for
His own chosen people. His precious blood really does “save us all”;
the intended effects of His self-offering do in fact follow, just because
the Cross was what it was. Its saving power does not depend on faith
being added to it; its saving power is such that faith flows from it.
The Cross secured the full salvation of all for whom Christ died. “God
forbid,” therefore, “that I should glory, save in the cross of our Lord
Jesus Christ.”
Now the real nature of Calvinistic soteriology becomes plain. It is no
artificial oddity, nor a product of over-bold logic. Its central
confession, that God saves sinners, that Christ redeemed us by His
blood, is the witness both of the Bible and of the believing heart. The
Calvinist is the Christian who confesses before men in his theology
just what he believes in his heart before God when he prays. He
thinks and speaks at all times of the sovereign grace of God in the
way that every Christian does when he pleads for the souls of others,
or when he obeys the impulse of worship which rises unbidden
within him, prompting him to deny himself all praise and to give all
the glory of his salvation to his Saviour. Calvinism is the natural
theology written on the heart of the new man in Christ, whereas
Arminianism is an intellectual sin of infirmity, natural only in the
sense in which all such sins are natural, even to the regenerate.
Calvinistic thinking is the Christian being himself on the intellectual
level; Arminian thinking is the Christian failing to be himself through
the weakness of the flesh. Calvinism is what the Christian church has
always held and taught when its mind has not been distracted by
controversy and false traditions from attending to what Scripture
actually says; that is the significance of the Patristic testimonies to
the teaching of the “five points,” which can be quoted in abundance.
(Owen appends a few on redemption; a much larger collection may
be seen in John Gill’s The Cause of God and Truth.) So that really it
is most misleading to call this soteriology “Calvinism” at all, for it is
not a peculiarity of John Calvin and the divines of Dort, but a part of
the revealed truth of God and the catholic Christian faith.
“Calvinism” is one of the “odious names” by which down the
centuries prejudice has been raised against it. But the thing itself is
just the biblical gospel. In the light of these facts, we can now give a
direct answer to the questions with which we began.
“Surely all that Owen is doing is defending limited atonement?” Not
really. He is doing much more than that. Strictly speaking, the aim of
Owen’s book is not defensive at all, but constructive. It is a biblical
and theological enquiry; its purpose is simply to make clear what
Scripture actually teaches about the central subject of the gospel—the
achievement of the Saviour. As its title proclaims, it is “a treatise of
the redemption and reconciliation that is in the blood of Christ: with
the merit thereof, and the satisfaction wrought thereby.” The
question which Owen, like the Dort divines before him, is really
concerned to answer is just this: what is the gospel? All agree that it
is a proclamation of Christ as Redeemer, but there is a dispute as to
the nature and extent of His redeeming work: well, what saith the
Scripture? what aim and accomplishment does the Bible assign to
the work of Christ? This is what Owen is concerned to elucidate. It is
true that he tackles the subject in a directly controversial way, and
shapes his book as a polemic against the “spreading persuasion...of a
general ransom, to be paid by Christ for all; that he dies to redeem all
and every one.” But his work is a systematic expository treatise, not a
mere episodic wrangle. Owen treats the controversy as providing the
occasion for a full display of the relevant biblical teaching in its own
proper order and connection. As in Hooker’s Laws of Ecclesiastical
Polity, the polemics themselves are incidental and of secondary
interest; their chief value lies in the way that the author uses them to
further his own design and carry forward his own argument.
That argument is essentially very simple. Owen sees that the
question which has occasioned his writing—the extent of the
atonement—involves the further question of its nature, since if it was
offered to save some who will finally perish, then it cannot have been
a transaction securing the actual salvation of all for whom it was
designed. But, says Owen, this is precisely the kind of transaction
that the Bible says it was. The first two books of his treatise are a
massive demonstration of the fact that according to Scripture the
Redeemer’s death actually saves His people, as it was meant to do.
The third book consists of a series of sixteen arguments against the
hypothesis of universal redemption, all aimed to show, on the one
hand, that Scripture speaks of Christ’s redeeming work as effective,
which precludes its having been intended for any who perish, and, on
the other, that if its intended extent had been universal, then either
all will be saved (which Scripture denies, and the advocates of the
“general ransom” do not affirm), or else the Father and the Son have
failed to do what they set out to do—“which to assert,” says Owen,
“seems to us blasphemously injurious to the wisdom, power and
perfection of God, as likewise derogatory to the worth and value of
the death of Christ.”
Owen’s arguments ring a series of changes on this dilemma. Finally,
in the fourth book, Owen shows with great cogency that the three
classes of texts alleged to prove that Christ died for persons who will
not be saved (those saying that He died for “the world,” for “all,” and
those thought to envisage the perishing of those for whom He died),
cannot on sound principles of exegesis be held to teach any such
thing; and, further, that the theological inferences by which universal
redemption is supposed to be established are really quite fallacious.
The true evangelical evaluation of the claim that Christ died for every
man, even those who perish, comes through at point after point in
Owen’s book. So far from magnifying the love and grace of God, this
claim dishonours both it and Him, for it reduces God’s love to an
impotent wish and turns the whole economy of “saving” grace, so called
(“saving” is really a misnomer on this view), into a
monumental divine failure. Also, so far from magnifying the merit
and worth of Christ’s death, it cheapens it, for it makes Christ die in
vain. Lastly, so far from affording faith additional encouragement, it
destroys the Scriptural ground of assurance altogether, for it denies
that the knowledge that Christ died for me (or did or does anything
else for me) is a sufficient ground for inferring my eternal salvation;
my salvation, on this view, depends not on what Christ did for me,
but on what I subsequently do for myself. Thus this view takes from
God’s love and Christ’s redemption the glory that Scripture gives
them, and introduces the anti-scriptural principle of self-salvation at
the point where the Bible explicitly says: “not of works, lest any man
should boast.” You cannot have it both ways: an atonement of
universal extent is a depreciated atonement. It has lost its saving
power; it leaves us to save ourselves. The doctrine of the general
ransom must accordingly be rejected, as Owen rejects it, as a
grievous mistake. By contrast, however, the doctrine which Owen
sets out, as he himself shows, is both biblical and God-honouring. It
exalts Christ, for it teaches Christians to glory in His Cross alone, and
to draw their hope and assurance only from the death and
intercession of their Saviour. It is, in other words, genuinely
Evangelical. It is, indeed, the gospel of God and the catholic faith.
It is safe to say that no comparable exposition of the work of
redemption as planned and executed by the Triune Jehovah has ever
been done since Owen published his. None has been needed.
Discussing this work, Andrew Thomson notes how Owen “makes you
feel when he has reached the end of his subject, that he has also
exhausted it.” That is demonstrably the case here. His interpretation
of the texts is sure; his power of theological construction is superb;
nothing that needs discussing is omitted, and (so far as the writer
can discover) no arguments for or against his position have been
used since his day which he has not himself noted and dealt with.
One searches his book in vain for the leaps and flights of logic by
which Reformed theologians are supposed to establish their
positions; all that one finds is solid, painstaking exegesis and a
careful following through of biblical ways of thinking. Owen’s work is
a constructive, broad-based biblical analysis of the heart of the
gospel, and must be taken seriously as such. It may not be written off
as a piece of special pleading for a traditional shibboleth, for nobody
has a right to dismiss the doctrine of the limitedness of atonement as
a monstrosity of Calvinistic logic until he has refuted Owen’s proof
that it is part of the uniform biblical presentation of redemption,
clearly taught in plain text after plain text. And nobody has done that yet.
“You talked about recovering the gospel,” said our questioner; “don’t
you mean that you just want us all to become Calvinists?”
This question presumably concerns, not the word, but the thing.
Whether we call ourselves Calvinists hardly matters; what matters is
that we should understand the gospel biblically. But that, we think,
does in fact mean understanding it as historic Calvinism does. The
alternative is to misunderstand and distort it. We said earlier that
modern Evangelicalism, by and large, has ceased to preach the
gospel in the old way, and we frankly admit that the new gospel,
insofar as it deviates from the old, seems to us a distortion of the
biblical message. And we can now see what has gone wrong. Our
theological currency has been debased. Our minds have been
conditioned to think of the Cross as a redemption which does less
than redeem, and of Christ as a Saviour who does less than save, and
of God’s love as a weak affection which cannot keep anyone from hell
without help, and of faith as the human help which God needs for
this purpose. As a result, we are no longer free either to believe the
biblical gospel or to preach it. We cannot believe it, because our
thoughts are caught in the toils of synergism. We are haunted by the
Arminian idea that if faith and unbelief are to be responsible acts,
they must be independent acts; hence we are not free to believe that
we are saved entirely by divine grace through a faith which is itself
God’s gift and flows to us from Calvary. Instead, we involve ourselves
in a bewildering kind of double-think about salvation, telling
ourselves one moment that it all depends on God and next moment
that it all depends on us. The resultant mental muddle deprives God
of much of the glory that we should give Him as author and finisher
of salvation, and ourselves of much of the comfort we might draw
from knowing that God is for us.
And when we come to preach the gospel, our false preconceptions
make us say just the opposite of what we intend. We want (rightly) to
proclaim Christ as Saviour; yet we end up saying that Christ, having
made salvation possible, has left us to become our own saviours. It
comes about in this way. We want to magnify the saving grace of God
and the saving power of Christ. So we declare that God’s redeeming
love extends to every man, and that Christ has died to save every
man, and we proclaim that the glory of divine mercy is to be
measured by these facts. And then, in order to avoid universalism,
we have to depreciate all that we were previously extolling, and to
explain that, after all, nothing that God and Christ have done can
save us unless we add something to it; the decisive factor which
actually saves us is our own believing. What we say comes to this—
that Christ saves us with our help; and what that means, when one
thinks it out, is this—that we save ourselves with Christ’s help. This is
a hollow anticlimax. But if we start by affirming that God has a
saving love for all, and Christ died a saving death for all, and yet balk
at becoming universalists, there is nothing else that we can say. And
let us be clear on what we have done when we have put the matter in
this fashion. We have not exalted grace and the Cross; we have
cheapened them. We have limited the atonement far more drastically
than Calvinism does, for whereas Calvinism asserts that Christ’s
death, as such, saves all whom it was meant to save, we have denied
that Christ’s death, as such, is sufficient to save any of them. We have
flattered impenitent sinners by assuring them that it is in their power
to repent and believe, though God cannot make them do it. Perhaps
we have also trivialised faith and repentance in order to make this
assurance plausible (“it’s very simple—just open your heart to the
Lord...”). Certainly, we have effectively denied God’s sovereignty, and
undermined the basic conviction of religion—that man is always in
God’s hands. In truth, we have lost a great deal. And it is, perhaps, no
wonder that our preaching begets so little reverence and humility,
and that our professed converts are so self-confident and so deficient
in self-knowledge, and in the good works which Scripture regards as
the fruit of true repentance.
It is from degenerate faith and preaching of this kind that Owen’s
book could set us free. If we listen to him, he will teach us both how
to believe the Scripture gospel and how to preach it. For the first: he
will lead us to bow down before a sovereign Saviour Who really
saves, and to praise Him for a redeeming death which made it certain
that all for whom He died will come to glory. It cannot be over emphasised that
we have not seen the full meaning of the Cross till
we have seen it as the divines of Dort display it—as the centre of the
gospel, flanked on the one hand by total inability and unconditional
election, and on the other by irresistible grace and final preservation.
For the full meaning of the Cross only appears when the atonement
is defined in terms of these four truths. Christ died to save a certain
company of helpless sinners upon whom God had set His free saving
love. Christ’s death ensured the calling and keeping—the present and
final salvation—of all whose sins He bore. That is what Calvary
meant, and means. The Cross saved; the Cross saves. This is the
heart of true Evangelical faith; as Cowper sang—
“Dear dying Lamb, Thy precious blood Shall never lose its power,
Till all the ransomed church of God Be saved to sin no more.”
This is the triumphant conviction which underlay the old gospel, as it
does the whole New Testament. And this is what Owen will teach us
unequivocally to believe.
Then, secondly, Owen could set us free, if we would hear him, to
preach the biblical gospel. This assertion may sound paradoxical, for
it is often imagined that those who will not preach that Christ died to
save every man are left with no gospel at all. On the contrary,
however, what they are left with is just the gospel of the New
Testament. What does it mean to preach “the gospel of the grace of
God”? Owen only touches on this briefly and incidentally, but his
comments are full of light. Preaching the gospel, he tells us, is not a
matter of telling the congregation that God has set His love on each
of them and Christ has died to save each of them, for these
assertions, biblically understood, would imply that they will all
infallibly be saved, and this cannot be known to be true. The
knowledge of being the object of God’s eternal love and Christ’s
redeeming death belongs to the individual’s assurance, which in the
nature of the case cannot precede faith’s saving exercise; it is to be
inferred from the fact that one has believed, not proposed as a reason
why one should believe. According to Scripture, preaching the gospel
is entirely a matter of proclaiming to men, as truth from God which
all are bound to believe and act on, the following four facts:
(1.) that all men are sinners, and cannot do anything to save themselves;
(2.) that Jesus Christ, God’s Son, is a perfect Saviour for sinners, even the worst;
(3.) that the Father and the Son have promised that all who know
themselves to be sinners and put faith in Christ as Saviour shall be
received into favour, and none cast out (which promise is “a certain
infallible truth, grounded upon the superabundant sufficiency of the
oblation of Christ in itself, for whomsoever [few or more] it be intended”);
(4.) that God has made repentance and faith a duty, requiring of
every man who hears the gospel “a serious full recumbency and
rolling of the soul upon Christ in the promise of the gospel, as an all sufficient Saviour,
able to deliver and save to the utmost them that
come to God by him; ready, able and willing, through the
preciousness of his blood and sufficiency of his ransom, to save every
soul that shall freely give up themselves unto him for that end.”
The preacher’s task, in other words, is to display Christ: to explain
man’s need of Him, His sufficiency to save, and His offer of Himself
in the promises as Saviour to all who truly turn to Him; and to show
as fully and plainly as he can how these truths apply to the
congregation before him. It is not for him to say, nor for his hearers
to ask, for whom Christ died in particular. “There is none called on
by the gospel once to enquire after the purpose and intention of God
concerning the particular object of the death of Christ, every one
being fully assured that his death shall be profitable to them that
believe in him and obey him.” After saving faith has been exercised,
“it lies on a believer to assure his soul, according as he find the fruit
of the death of Christ in him and towards him, of the good-will and
eternal love of God to him in sending his Son to die for him in
particular”; but not before. The task to which the gospel calls him is
simply to exercise faith, which he is both warranted and obliged to do
by God’s command and promise.
Some comments on this conception of what preaching the gospel means are in order.
First, we should observe that the old gospel of Owen contains no less
full and free an offer of salvation than its modern counterpart. It
presents ample grounds of faith (the sufficiency of Christ, and the
promise of God), and cogent motives to faith (the sinner’s need, and
the Creator’s command, which is also the Redeemer’s invitation).
The new gospel gains nothing here by asserting universal
redemption. The old gospel, certainly, has no room for the cheap
sentimentalising which turns God’s free mercy to sinners into a
constitutional soft-heartedness on His part which we can take for
granted; nor will it countenance the degrading presentation of Christ
as the baffled Saviour, balked in what He hoped to do by human
unbelief; nor will it indulge in maudlin appeals to the unconverted to
let Christ save them out of pity for His disappointment. The pitiable
Saviour and the pathetic God of modern pulpits are unknown to the
old gospel. The old gospel tells men that they need God, but not that
God needs them (a modern falsehood); it does not exhort them to
pity Christ, but announces that Christ has pitied them, though pity
was the last thing they deserved. It never loses sight of the Divine
majesty and sovereign power of the Christ whom it proclaims, but
rejects flatly all representations of Him which would obscure His free
omnipotence. Does this mean, however, that the preacher of the old
gospel is inhibited or confined in offering Christ to men and inviting
them to receive Him? Not at all. In actual fact, just because he
recognises that Divine mercy is sovereign and free, he is in a position
to make far more of the offer of Christ in his preaching than is the
expositor of the new gospel; for this offer is itself a far more
wonderful thing on his principles than it can ever be in the eyes of
those who regard love to all sinners as a necessity of God’s nature,
and therefore a matter of course. To think that the holy Creator, who
never needed man for His happiness and might justly have banished
our fallen race for ever without mercy, should actually have chosen to
redeem some of them! and that His own Son was willing to undergo
death and descend into hell to save them! and that now from His
throne He should speak to ungodly men as He does in the words of
the gospel, urging upon them the command to repent and believe in
the form of a compassionate invitation to pity themselves and choose
life! These thoughts are the focal points round which the preaching
of the old gospel revolves. It is all wonderful, just because none of it
can be taken for granted. But perhaps the most wonderful thing of all
—the holiest spot in all the holy ground of gospel truth—is the free
invitation which “the Lord Christ” (as Owen loves to call Him) issues
repeatedly to guilty sinners to come to Him and find rest for their
souls. It is the glory of these invitations that it is an omnipotent King
who gives them, just as it is a chief part of the glory of the enthroned
Christ that He condescends still to utter them. And it is the glory of
the gospel ministry that the preacher goes to men as Christ’s
ambassador, charged to deliver the King’s invitation personally to
every sinner present and to summon them all to turn and live. Owen
himself enlarges on this in a passage addressed to the unconverted.
“Consider the infinite condescension and love of Christ, in his
invitations and calls of you to come unto him for life, deliverance,
mercy, grace, peace and eternal salvation. Multitudes of these
invitations and calls are recorded in the Scripture, and they are all of
them filled up with those blessed encouragements which divine
wisdom knows to be suited unto lost, convinced sinners.... In the
declaration and preaching of them, Jesus Christ yet stands before
sinners, calling, inviting, encouraging them to come unto him.
“This is somewhat of the word which he now speaks unto you: Why
will ye die? why will ye perish? why will ye not have compassion on
your own souls? Can your hearts endure, or can your hands be
strong, in the day of wrath that is approaching?... Look unto me, and
be saved; come unto me, and I will ease you of all sins, sorrows,
fears, burdens, and give rest unto your souls. Come, I entreat you; lay
aside all procrastinations, all delays; put me off no more; eternity lies
at the door...do not so hate me as that you will rather perish than
accept of deliverance by me.
“These and the like things doth the Lord Christ continually declare,
proclaim, plead and urge upon the souls of sinners.... He doth it in
the preaching of the word, as if he were present with you, stood
amongst you, and spake personally to every one of you.... He hath
appointed the ministers of the gospel to appear before you, and to
deal with you in his stead, avowing as his own the invitations which
are given you in his name, 2 Cor. v. 19, 20.”
These invitations are universal; Christ addresses them to sinners, as
such, and every man, as he believes God to be true, is bound to treat
them as God’s words to him personally and to accept the universal
assurance which accompanies them, that all who come to Christ will
be received. Again, these invitations are real; Christ genuinely offers
Himself to all who hear the gospel, and is in truth a perfect Saviour
to all who trust Him. The question of the extent of the atonement
does not arise in evangelistic preaching; the message to be delivered
is simply this—that Christ Jesus, the sovereign Lord, who died for
sinners, now invites sinners freely to Himself. God commands all to
repent and believe; Christ promises life and peace to all who do so.
Furthermore, these invitations are marvellously gracious; men
despise and reject them, and are never in any case worthy of them,
and yet Christ still issues them. He need not, but He does. “Come
unto me...and I will give you rest” remains His word to the world,
never cancelled, always to be preached. He whose death has ensured
the salvation of all His people is to be proclaimed everywhere as a
perfect Saviour, and all men invited and urged to believe on Him,
whoever they are, whatever they have been. Upon these three
insights the evangelism of the old gospel is based.
It is a very ill-informed supposition that evangelistic preaching which
proceeds on these principles must be anaemic and half-hearted by
comparison with what Arminians can do. Those who study the
printed sermons of worthy expositors of the old gospel, such as
Bunyan (whose preaching Owen himself much admired), or
Whitefield, or Spurgeon, will find that in fact they hold forth the
Saviour and summon sinners to Him with a fulness, warmth,
intensity and moving force unmatched in Protestant pulpit literature.
And it will be found on analysis that the very thing which gave their
preaching its unique power to overwhelm their audiences with
broken-hearted joy at the riches of God’s grace-and still gives it that
power, let it be said, even with hard-boiled modern readers—was
their insistence on the fact that grace is free. They knew that the
dimensions of Divine love are not half understood till one realises
that God need not have chosen to save nor given his Son to die; nor
need Christ have taken upon him vicarious damnation to redeem
men, nor need He invite sinners indiscriminately to Himself as He
does; but that all God’s gracious dealings spring entirely from His
own free purpose. Knowing this, they stressed it, and it is this stress
that sets their evangelistic preaching in a class by itself. Other
Evangelicals, possessed of a more superficial and less adequate
theology of grace, have laid the main emphasis in their gospel
preaching on the sinner’s need of forgiveness, or peace, or power,
and of the way to get them by “deciding for Christ.” It is not to be
denied that their preaching has done good (for God will use His
truth, even when imperfectly held and mixed with error), although
this type of evangelism is always open to the criticism of being too
man-centred and pietistic; but it has been left (necessarily) to
Calvinists and those who, like the Wesleys, fall into Calvinistic ways
of thought as soon as they begin a sermon to the unconverted, to
preach the gospel in a way which highlights above everything else the
free love, willing condescension, patient long-suffering and infinite
kindness of the Lord Jesus Christ. And, without doubt, this is the
most Scriptural and edifying way to preach it; for gospel invitations
to sinners never honour God and exalt Christ more, nor are more
powerful to awaken and confirm faith, than when full weight is laid
on the free omnipotence of the mercy from which they flow. It looks,
indeed, as if the preachers of the old gospel are the only people
whose position allows them to do justice to the revelation of Divine
goodness in the free offer of Christ to sinners.
Then, in the second place, the old gospel safeguards values which the
new gospel loses. We saw before that the new gospel, by asserting
universal redemption and a universal Divine saving purpose,
compels itself to cheapen grace and the Cross by denying that the
Father and the Son are sovereign in salvation; for it assures us that,
after God and Christ have done all that they can, or will, it depends
finally on each man’s own choice whether God’s purpose to save him
is realised or not. This position has two unhappy results. The first is
that it compels us to misunderstand the significance of the gracious
invitations of Christ in the gospel of which we have been speaking;
for we now have to read them, not as expressions of the tender
patience of a mighty sovereign, but as the pathetic pleadings of
impotent desire; and so the enthroned Lord is suddenly
metamorphosed into a weak, futile figure tapping forlornly at the
door of the human heart, which He is powerless to open. This is a
shameful dishonour to the Christ of the New Testament. The second
implication is equally serious: for this view in effect denies our
dependence on God when it comes to vital decisions, takes us out of
His hand, tells us that we are, after all, what sin taught us to think we
were—masters of our fate, captain of our souls—and so undermines
the very foundation of man’s religious relationship with his Maker. It
can hardly be wondered at that the converts of the new gospel are so
often both irreverent and irreligious, for such is the natural tendency
of this teaching. The old gospel, however, speaks very differently and
has a very different tendency. On the one hand, in expounding man’s
need of Christ, it stresses something which the new gospel effectively
ignores—that sinners cannot obey the gospel, any more than the law,
without renewal of heart. On the other hand, in declaring Christ’s
power to save, it proclaims Him as the author and chief agent of
conversion, coming by His Spirit as the gospel goes forth to renew
men’s hearts and draw them to Himself. Accordingly, in applying the
message, the old gospel, while stressing that faith is man’s duty,
stresses also that faith is not in man’s power, but that God must give
what He commands. It announces, not merely that men must come
to Christ for salvation, but also that they cannot come unless Christ
Himself draws them. Thus it labours to overthrow self-confidence, to
convince sinners that their salvation is altogether out of their hands,
and to shut them up to a self-despairing dependence on the glorious
grace of a sovereign Saviour, not only for their righteousness but for
their faith too.
It is not likely, therefore, that a preacher of the old gospel will be
happy to express the application of it in the form of a demand to
“decide for Christ,” as the current phrase is. For, on the one hand,
this phrase carries the wrong associations. It suggests voting a
person into office—an act in which the candidate plays no part
beyond offering himself for election, and everything then being
settled by the voter’s independent choice. But we do not vote God’s
Son into office as our Saviour, nor does He remain passive while
preachers campaign on His behalf, whipping up support for His
cause. We ought not to think of evangelism as a kind of
electioneering. And then, on the other hand, this phrase obscures the
very thing that is essential in repentance and faith—the denying of
self in a personal approach to Christ. It is not at all obvious that
deciding for Christ is the same as coming to Him and resting on Him
and turning from sin and self-effort; it sounds like something much
less, and is accordingly calculated to instil defective notions of what
the gospel really requires of sinners. It is not a very apt phrase from
any point of view.
To the question: what must I do to be saved? the old gospel replies:
believe on the Lord Jesus Christ. To the further question: what does
it mean to believe on the Lord Jesus Christ? its reply is: it means
knowing oneself to be a sinner, and Christ to have died for sinners;
abandoning all self-righteousness and self-confidence, and casting
oneself wholly upon Him for pardon and peace; and exchanging
one’s natural enmity and rebellion against God for a spirit of grateful
submission to the will of Christ through the renewing of one’s heart
by the Holy Ghost. And to the further question still: how am I to go
about believing on Christ and repenting, if I have no natural ability
to do these things? it answers: look to Christ, speak to Christ, cry to
Christ, just as you are; confess your sin, your impenitence, your
unbelief, and cast yourself on His mercy; ask Him to give you a new
heart, working in you true repentance and firm faith; ask Him to take
away your evil heart of unbelief and to write His law within you, that
you may never henceforth stray from Him. Turn to Him and trust
Him as best you can, and pray for grace to turn and trust more
thoroughly; use the means of grace expectantly, looking to Christ to
draw near to you as you seek to draw near to Him; watch, pray, read
and hear God’s Word, worship and commune with God’s people, and
so continue till you know in yourself beyond doubt that you are
indeed a changed being, a penitent believer, and the new heart which
you desired has been put within you. The emphasis in this advice is
on the need to call upon Christ directly, as the very first step.
“Let not conscience make you linger,
Nor of fitness fondly dream;
All the fitness He requireth
Is to feel your need of Him”
—so do not postpone action till you think you are better, but honestly
confess your badness and give yourself up here and now to the Christ
who alone can make you better; and wait on Him till His light rises in
your soul, as Scripture promises that it shall do. Anything less than
this direct dealing with Christ is disobedience of the gospel. Such is
the exercise of spirit to which the old evangel summons its hearers. “I
believe—help thou mine unbelief”: this must become their cry.
And the old gospel is proclaimed in the sure confidence that the
Christ of whom it testifies, the Christ who is the real speaker when
the Scriptural invitations to trust Him are expounded and applied, is
not passively waiting for man’s decision as the word goes forth, but is
omnipotently active, working with and through the word to bring His
people to faith in Himself. The preaching of the new gospel is often
described as the task of “bringing men to Christ” if only men move,
while Christ stands still. But the task of preaching the old gospel
could more properly be described as bringing Christ to men, for
those who preach it know that as they do their work of setting Christ
before men’s eyes, the mighty Saviour whom they proclaim is busy
doing His work through their words, visiting sinners with salvation,
awakening them to faith, drawing them in mercy to Himself.
It is this older gospel which Owen will teach us to preach: the gospel
of the sovereign grace of God in Christ as the author and finisher of
faith and salvation. It is the only gospel which can be preached on
Owen’s principles, but those who have tasted its sweetness will not in
any case be found looking for another. In the matter of believing and
preaching the gospel, as in other things, Jeremiah’s words still have
their application: “Thus saith the Lord, Stand ye in the ways, and see,
and ask for the old paths, where is the good way, and walk therein,
and ye shall find rest for your souls.” To find ourselves debarred, as
Owen would debar us, from taking up with the fashionable modern
substitute gospel may not, after all, be a bad thing, either for us, or
for the Church.
More might be said, but to go further would be to exceed the limits of
an introductory essay. The foregoing remarks are made simply to
show how important it is at the present time that we should attend
most carefully to Owen’s analysis of what the Bible says about the
saving work of Christ.
III. It only remains to add a few remarks about this treatise itself. It
was Owen’s second major work, and his first masterpiece. (Its
predecessor, A Display of Arminianism, published in 1642, when
Owen was twenty-six, was a competent piece of prentice-work, rather
of the nature of a research thesis.)
The Death of Death is a solid book, made up of detailed exposition
and close argument, and requires hard study, as Owen fully realised;
a cursory glance will not yield much. (“READER.... If thou art, as
many in this pretending age, a sign or title gazer, and comest into
books as Cato into the theatre, to go out again—thou has had thy
entertainment; farewell!”) Owen felt, however, that he had a right to
ask for hard study, for his book was a product of hard work (“a more
than seven-years’ serious inquiry...into the mind of God about these
things, with a serious perusal of all which I could attain that the wit
of man, in former or latter days, hath published in opposition to the
truth”), and he was sure in his own mind that a certain finality
attached to what he had written. (“Altogether hopeless of success I
am not; but fully resolved that I shall not live to see a solid answer
given unto it.”) Time has justified his optimism.
Something should be said about his opponents. He is writing against
three variations on the theme of universal redemption: that of
classical Arminianism, noted earlier; that of the theological faculty at
Saumur (the position known as Amyraldism, after its leading
exponent); and that of Thomas More, a lay theologian of East Anglia.
The second of these views originated with a Scots professor at
Saumur, John Cameron; it was taken up and developed by two of his
pupils, Amyraut (Amyraldus) and Testard, and became the occasion
of a prolonged controversy in which Amyraut, Daillé and Blondel
were opposed by Rivet, Spanheim and Des Marets (Maresius). The
Saumur position won some support among Reformed divines in
Britain, being held in modified form by (among others) Bishops
Usher and Davenant, and Richard Baxter. None of these, however,
had advocated it in print at the time when Owen wrote.
Goold’s summary of the Saumur position may be quoted. “Admitting
that, by the purpose of God, and through the death of Christ, the
elect are infallibly secured in the enjoyment of salvation, they
contended for an antecedent decree, by which God is free to give
salvation to all men through Christ, on the condition that they
believe on him. Hence their system was termed hypothetic[al]
universalism. The vital difference between it and the strict Arminian
theory lies in the absolute security asserted in the former for the
spiritual recovery of the elect. They agree, however, in attributing
some kind of universality to the atonement, and in maintaining that,
on a certain condition, within the reach of fulfilment by all men...all
men have access to the benefits of Christ’s death.” From this, Goold
continues, “the readers of Owen will understand...why he dwells with
peculiar keenness and reiteration of statement upon a refutation of
the conditional system.... It was plausible; it had many learned men
for its advocates; it had obtained currency in the foreign churches;
and it seems to have been embraced by More.”
More is described by Thomas Edwards as “a great Sectary, that did
much hurt in Lincolnshire, Norfolk, and Cambridgeshire; who was
famous also in Boston, (King’s) Lynn, and even in Holland, and was
followed from place to place by many.” Baxter’s description is kinder:
“a Weaver of Wisbitch and Lyn, of excellent Parts.” (More’s doctrine
of redemption, of course, was substantially Baxter’s own.) Owen,
however, has a poor view of his abilities, and makes no secret of the
fact. More’s book, The Universality of God’s Free Grace in Christ to
Mankind, appeared in 1646 (not, as Goold says, 1643), and must
have exercised a considerable influence, for within three years it had
evoked four weighty works which were in whole or part polemics
against it: A Refutation...of Thomas More, by Thomas Whitfield,
1646; Vindiciae Redemptionis, by John Stalham, 1647; The
Universalist Examined and Convicted, by Obadiah Howe, 1648; and
Owen’s own book, published in the same year.
More’s exposition seems to be of little intrinsic importance; Owen,
however, selects it as the fullest statement of the case for universal
redemption that had yet appeared in English and uses it
unmercifully as a chopping-block. The modern reader, however, will
probably find it convenient to skip the sections devoted to refuting
More (I. viii., the closing pages of II. iii. and IV. vi.) on his first
passage through Owen’s treatise.
Finally, a word about the style of this work. There is no denying that
Owen is heavy and hard to read. This is not so much due to obscure
arrangement as to two other factors. The first is his lumbering
literary gait. “Owen travels through it (his subject) with the
elephant’s grace and solid step, if sometimes also with his ungainly
motion.” says Thomson. That puts it kindly. Much of Owen’s prose
reads like a roughly-dashed-off translation of a piece of thinking
done in Ciceronian Latin. It has, no doubt, a certain clumsy dignity;
so has Stonehenge; but it is trying to the reader to have to go over
sentences two or three times to see their meaning, and this necessity
makes it much harder to follow an argument. The present writer,
however, has found that the hard places in Owen usually come out as
soon as one reads them aloud. The second obscuring factor is Owen’s
austerity as an expositor. He has a lordly disdain for broad
introductions which ease the mind gently into a subject, and for
comprehensive summaries which gather up scattered points into a
small space. He obviously carries the whole of his design in his head,
and expects his readers to do the same. Nor are his chapter divisions
reliable pointers to the structure of his discourse, for though a
change of subject is usually marked by a chapter division, Owen
often starts a new chapter where there is no break in the thought at
all. Nor is he concerned about literary proportions; the space given to
a topic is determined by its intrinsic complexity rather than its
relative importance, and the reader is left to work out what is basic
and what is secondary by noting how things link together. The reader
will probably find it helpful to use a pencil and paper in his study of
the book and jot down the progress of the exposition; and it is hoped
that the subjoined Analysis will also be of service in helping him keep
his bearings.
We would conclude by repeating that the reward to be reaped from
studying Owen is worth all the labour involved, and by making the
following observations for the student’s guidance. (1.) It is important
to start with the epistle “To the Reader,” for there Owen indicates in
short compass what he is trying to do, and why. (2.) It is important to
read the treatise as a whole, in the order in which it stands, and not
to jump into parts III. and IV. before mastering the contents of Parts
I. and II., where the biblical foundations of Owen’s whole position
are laid. (3.) It is hardly possible to grasp the strength and cogency of
this massive statement on a first reading. The work must be read and
re-read to be appreciated.
J. I. PACKER.
of Death in the Death of Christ
by J. I. Packer
I. The Death of Death in the Death of Christ is a polemical work,
designed to show, among other things, that the doctrine of universal
redemption is unscriptural and destructive of the gospel. There are
many, therefore, to whom it is not likely to be of interest. Those who
see no need for doctrinal exactness and have no time for theological
debates which show up divisions between so-called Evangelicals may
well regret its reappearance. Some may find the very sound of
Owen’s thesis so shocking that they will refuse to read his book at all;
so passionate a thing is prejudice, and so proud are we of our
theological shibboleths. But it is hoped that this reprint will find
itself readers of a different spirit. There are signs today of a new
upsurge of interest in the theology of the Bible: a new readiness to
test traditions, to search the Scriptures and to think through the
faith. It is to those who share this readiness that Owen’s treatise is
offered, in the belief that it will help us in one of the most urgent
tasks facing Evangelical Christendom today—the recovery of the gospel.
This last remark may cause some raising of eyebrows, but it seems to
be warranted by the facts.
There is no doubt that Evangelicalism today is in a state of perplexity
and unsettlement. In such matters as the practice of evangelism, the
teaching of holiness, the building up of local church life, the pastor’s
dealing with souls and the exercise of discipline, there is evidence of
widespread dissatisfaction with things as they are and of equally
widespread uncertainty as to the road ahead. This is a complex
phenomenon, to which many factors have contributed; but, if we go
to the root of the matter, we shall find that these perplexities are all
ultimately due to our having lost our grip on the biblical gospel.
Without realising it, we have during the past century bartered that
gospel for a substitute product which, though it looks similar enough
in points of detail, is as a whole a decidedly different thing. Hence
our troubles; for the substitute product does not answer the ends for
which the authentic gospel has in past days proved itself so mighty.
The new gospel conspicuously fails to produce deep reverence, deep
repentance, deep humility, a spirit of worship, a concern for the
church. Why? We would suggest that the reason lies in its own
character and content. It fails to make men God-centred in their
thoughts and God-fearing in their hearts because this is not
primarily what it is trying to do. One way of stating the difference
between it and the old gospel is to say that it is too exclusively
concerned to be “helpful” to man—to bring peace, comfort,
happiness, satisfaction—and too little concerned to glorify God. The
old gospel was “helpful,” too—more so, indeed, than is the new—but
(so to speak) incidentally, for its first concern was always to give
glory to God. It was always and essentially a proclamation of Divine
sovereignty in mercy and judgment, a summons to bow down and
worship the mighty Lord on whom man depends for all good, both in
nature and in grace. Its centre of reference was unambiguously God.
But in the new gospel the centre of reference is man. This is just to
say that the old gospel was religious in a way that the new gospel is
not. Whereas the chief aim of the old was to teach men to worship
God, the concern of the new seems limited to making them feel
better. The subject of the old gospel was God and His ways with men;
the subject of the new is man and the help God gives him. There is a
world of difference. The whole perspective and emphasis of gospel
preaching has changed.
From this change of interest has sprung a change of content, for the
new gospel has in effect reformulated the biblical message in the
supposed interests of “helpfulness.” Accordingly, the themes of
man’s natural inability to believe, of God’s free election being the
ultimate cause of salvation, and of Christ dying specifically for His
sheep, are not preached. These doctrines, it would be said, are not
“helpful”; they would drive sinners to despair, by suggesting to them
that it is not in their own power to be saved through Christ. (The
possibility that such despair might be salutary is not considered; it is
taken for granted that it cannot be, because it is so shattering to our
self-esteem.) However this may be (and we shall say more about it
later), the result of these omissions is that part of the biblical gospel
is now preached as if it were the whole of that gospel; and a half truth
masquerading as the whole truth becomes a complete untruth.
Thus, we appeal to men as if they all had the ability to receive Christ
at any time; we speak of His redeeming work as if He had done no
more by dying than make it possible for us to save ourselves by
believing; we speak of God’s love as if it were no more than a general
willingness to receive any who will turn and trust; and we depict the
Father and the Son, not as sovereignly active in drawing sinners to
themselves, but as waiting in quiet impotence “at the door of our
hearts” for us to let them in. It is undeniable that this is how we
preach; perhaps this is what we really believe. But it needs to be said
with emphasis that this set of twisted half-truths is something other
than the biblical gospel. The Bible is against us when we preach in
this way; and the fact that such preaching has become almost
standard practice among us only shows how urgent it is that we
should review this matter. To recover the old, authentic, biblical
gospel, and to bring our preaching and practice back into line with it,
is perhaps our most pressing present need. And it is at this point that
Owen’s treatise on redemption can give us help.
II. “But wait a minute,” says someone, “it’s all very well to talk like
this about the gospel; but surely what Owen is doing is defending
limited atonement—one of the five points of Calvinism? When you
speak of recovering the gospel, don’t you mean that you just want us
all to become Calvinists?”
These questions are worth considering, for they will no doubt occur
to many. At the same time, however, they are questions that reflect a
great deal of prejudice and ignorance. “Defending limited
atonement”—as if this was all that a Reformed theologian
expounding the heart of the gospel could ever really want to do! “You
just want us all to become Calvinists”—as if Reformed theologians
had no interest beyond recruiting for their party, and as if becoming
a Calvinist was the last stage of theological depravity, and had
nothing to do with the gospel at all. Before we answer these
questions directly, we must try to remove the prejudices which
underlie them by making clear what Calvinism really is; and
therefore we would ask the reader to take note of the following facts,
historical and theological, about Calvinism in general and the “five
points” in particular.
First, it should be observed that the “five points of Calvinism,” so called,
are simply the Calvinistic answer to a five-point manifesto
(the Remonstrance) put out by certain “Belgic semi-Pelagians” in the
early seventeenth century. The theology which it contained (known
to history as Arminianism) stemmed from two philosophical
principles: first, that divine sovereignty is not compatible with
human freedom, nor therefore with human responsibility; second,
that ability limits obligation. (The charge of semi-Pelagianism was
thus fully justified.) From these principles, the Arminians drew two
deductions: first that since the Bible regards faith as a free and
responsible human act, it cannot be caused by God, but is exercised
independently of Him; second, that since the Bible regards faith as
obligatory on the part of all who hear the gospel, ability to believe
must be universal. Hence, they maintained, Scripture must be
interpreted as teaching the following positions:
(1.) Man is never so completely corrupted by sin that he cannot savingly believe the gospel when it is put before him, nor
(2.) is he ever so completely controlled by God that he cannot reject it.
(3.) God’s election of those who shall be saved is prompted by His foreseeing that they will of their own accord believe.
(4.) Christ’s death did not ensure the salvation of anyone, for it did not secure the gift of faith to anyone
(there is no such gift); what it did was rather to create a possibility of salvation for everyone if they believe.
(5.) It rests with believers to keep themselves in a state of grace by keeping up their faith; those
who fail here fall away and are lost. Thus, Arminianism made man’s
salvation depend ultimately on man himself, saving faith being
viewed throughout as man’s own work and, because his own, not God’s in him.
The Synod of Dort was convened in 1618 to pronounce on this
theology, and the “five points of Calvinism” represent its counter affirmations.
They stem from a very different principle—the biblical
principle that “salvation is of the Lord”; and they may be summarized thus:
(1.) Fallen man in his natural state lacks all power
to believe the gospel, just as he lacks all power to believe the law,
despite all external inducements that may be extended to him.
(2.) God’s election is a free, sovereign, unconditional choice of sinners, as
sinners, to be redeemed by Christ, given faith and brought to glory.
(3.) The redeeming work of Christ had as its end and goal the salvation of the elect.
(4.) The work of the Holy Spirit in bringing men to faith never fails to achieve its object.
(5.) Believers are kept in faith and grace by the unconquerable power of God till they come to
glory. These five points are conveniently denoted by the mnemonic
TULIP: Total depravity, Unconditional election, Limited atonement, Irresistible grace, Preservation of the saints.
Now, here are two coherent interpretations of the biblical gospel,
which stand in evident opposition to each other. The difference
between them is not primarily one of emphasis, but of content. One
proclaims a God who saves; the other speaks of a God Who enables
man to save himself. One view presents the three great acts of the
Holy Trinity for the recovering of lost mankind—election by the
Father, redemption by the Son, calling by the Spirit—as directed
towards the same persons, and as securing their salvation infallibly.
The other view gives each act a different reference (the objects of
redemption being all mankind, of calling, those who hear the gospel,
and of election, those hearers who respond), and denies that any
man’s salvation is secured by any of them. The two theologies thus
conceive the plan of salvation in quite different terms. One makes
salvation depend on the work of God, the other on a work of man;
one regards faith as part of God’s gift of salvation, the other as man’s
own contribution to salvation; one gives all the glory of saving
believers to God, the other divides the praise between God, Who, so
to speak, built the machinery of salvation, and man, who by believing
operated it. Plainly, these differences are important, and the
permanent value of the “five points,” as a summary of Calvinism, is
that they make clear the points at which, and the extent to which,
these two conceptions are at variance.
However. it would not be correct simply to equate Calvinism with the
“five points.” Five points of our own will make this clear.
In the first place, Calvinism is something much broader than the
“five points” indicate. Calvinism is a whole world-view, stemming
from a clear vision of God as the whole world’s Maker and King.
Calvinism is the consistent endeavour to acknowledge the Creator as
the Lord, working all things after the counsel of His will. Calvinism is
a theocentric way of thinking about all life under the direction and
control of God’s own Word. Calvinism, in other words, is the
theology of the Bible viewed from the perspective of the Bible—the
God-centred outlook which sees the Creator as the source, and
means, and end, of everything that is, both in nature and in grace.
Calvinism is thus theism (belief in God as the ground of all things),
religion (dependence on God as the giver of all things), and
evangelicalism (trust in God through Christ for all things), all in their
purest and most highly developed form. And Calvinism is a unified
philosophy of history which sees the whole diversity of processes and
events that take place in God’s world as no more, and no less, than
the outworking of His great preordained plan for His creatures and
His church. The five points assert no more than that God is sovereign
in saving the individual, but Calvinism, as such, is concerned with
the much broader assertion that He is sovereign everywhere.
Then, in the second place, the “five points” present Calvinistic
soteriology in a negative and polemical form, whereas Calvinism in
itself is essentially expository, pastoral and constructive. It can
define its position in terms of Scripture without any reference to
Arminianism, and it does not need to be forever fighting real or
imaginary Arminians in order to keep itself alive. Calvinism has no
interest in negatives, as such; when Calvinists fight, they fight for
positive Evangelical values. The negative cast of the “five points” is
misleading chiefly with regard to the third (limited atonement, or
particular redemption), which is often read with stress on the
adjective and taken as indicating that Calvinists have a special
interest in confining the limits of divine mercy. But in fact the
purpose of this phraseology, as we shall see, is to safeguard the
central affirmation of the gospel—that Christ is a Redeemer who
really does redeem. Similarly, the denials of an election that is
conditional and of grace that is resistible, are intended to safeguard
the positive truth that it is God Who saves. The real negations are
those of Arminianism, which denies that election, redemption and
calling are saving acts of God. Calvinism negates these negations in
order to assert the positive content of the gospel, for the positive
purpose of strengthening faith and building up the church.
Thirdly, the very act of setting out Calvinistic soteriology in the form
of five distinct points (a number due, as we saw, merely to the fact
that there were five Arminian points for the Synod of Dort to answer)
tends to obscure the organic character of Calvinistic thought on this
subject. For the five points, though separately stated, are really
inseparable. They hang together; you cannot reject one without
rejecting them all, at least in the sense in which the Synod meant
them. For to Calvinism there is really only one point to be made in
the field of soteriology: the point that God saves sinners. God—the
Triune Jehovah, Father, Son and Spirit; three Persons working
together in sovereign wisdom, power and love to achieve the
salvation of a chosen people, the Father electing, the Son fulfilling
the Father’s will by redeeming, the Spirit executing the purpose of
Father and Son by renewing. Saves—does everything, first to last,
that is involved in bringing man from death in sin to life in glory:
plans, achieves and communicates redemption, calls and keeps,
justifies, sanctifies, glorifies. Sinners—men as God finds them, guilty,
vile, helpless, powerless, unable to lift a finger to do God’s will or
better their spiritual lot. God saves sinners—and the force of this
confession may not be weakened by disrupting the unity of the work
of the Trinity, or by dividing the achievement of salvation between
God and man and making the decisive part man’s own, or by soft pedaling the sinner’s inability
so as to allow him to share the praise
of his salvation with his Saviour. This is the one point of Calvinistic
soteriology which the “five points” are concerned to establish and
Arminianism in all its forms to deny: namely, that sinners do not
save themselves in any sense at all, but that salvation, first and last,
whole and entire, past, present and future, is of the Lord, to whom be
glory for ever; amen.
This leads to our fourth remark, which is this: the five-point formula
obscures the depth of the difference between Calvinistic and
Arminian soteriology. There seems no doubt that it seriously
misleads many here. In the formula, the stress falls on the adjectives,
and this naturally gives the impression that in regard to the three
great saving acts of God the debate concerns the adjectives merely—
that both sides agree as to what election, redemption, and the gift of
internal grace are, and differ only as to the position of man in
relation to them: whether the first is conditional upon faith being
foreseen or not; whether the second intends the salvation of every
man or not; whether the third always proves invincible or not. But
this is a complete misconception. The change of adjective in each
case involves changing the meaning of the noun. An election that is
conditional, a redemption that is universal, an internal grace that is
resistible, is not the same kind of election, redemption, internal
grace, as Calvinism asserts. The real issue concerns, not the
appropriateness of adjectives, but the definition of nouns. Both sides
saw this clearly when the controversy first began, and it is important
that we should see it too, for otherwise we cannot discuss the
Calvinist-Arminian debate to any purpose at all. It is worth setting
out the different definitions side by side.
(i.) God’s act of election was defined by the Arminians as a resolve to
receive sonship and glory a duly qualified class of people: believers in
Christ. This becomes a resolve to receive individual persons only in
virtue of God’s foreseeing the contingent fact that they will of their
own accord believe. There is nothing in the decree of election to
ensure that the class of believers will ever have any members; God
does not determine to make any man believe. But Calvinists define
election as a choice of particular undeserving persons to be saved
from sin and brought to glory, and to that end to be redeemed by the
death of Christ and given faith by the Spirit’s effectual calling. Where
the Arminian says: “I owe my election to my faith,” the Calvinist
says: “I owe my faith to my election.” Clearly, these two concepts of
election are very far apart.
(ii.) Christ’s work of redemption was defined by the Arminians as the
removing of an obstacle (the unsatisfied claims of justice) which
stood in the way of God’s offering pardon to sinners, as He desired to
do, on condition that they believe. Redemption, according to
Arminianism, secured for God a right to make this offer, but did not
of itself ensure that anyone would ever accept it; for faith, being a
work of man’s own, is not a gift that comes to him from Calvary.
Christ’s death created an opportunity for the exercise of saving faith,
but that is all it did. Calvinists, however, define redemption as
Christ’s actual substitutionary endurance of the penalty of sin in the
place of certain specified sinners, through which God was reconciled
to them, their liability to punishment was for ever destroyed, and a
title to eternal life was secured for them. In consequence of this, they
now have in God’s sight a right to the gift of faith, as the means of
entry into the enjoyment of their inheritance. Calvary, in other
words, not merely made possible the salvation of those for whom
Christ died; it ensured that they would be brought to faith and their
salvation made actual. The Cross saves. Where the Arminian will
only say: “I could not have gained my salvation without Calvary,” the
Calvinist will say: “Christ gained my salvation for me at Calvary.” The
former makes the Cross the sine qua non of salvation, the latter sees
it as the actual procuring cause of salvation, and traces the source of
every spiritual blessing, faith included, back to the great transaction
between God and His Son carried through on Calvary’s hill. Clearly,
these two concepts of redemption are quite at variance.
(iii.) The Spirit’s gift of internal grace was defined by the Arminians
as “moral suasion,” the bare bestowal of an understanding of God’s
truth. This, they granted—indeed, insisted—does not of itself ensure
that anyone will ever make the response of faith. But Calvinists
define this gift as not merely an enlightening, but also a regenerating
work of God in men, “taking away their heart of stone, and giving
unto them a heart of flesh; renewing their wills, and by His almighty
power determining them to that which is good; and effectually
drawing them to Jesus Christ; yet so as they come most freely, being
made willing by his grace.” Grace proves irresistible just because it
destroys the disposition to resist. Where the Arminian, therefore, will
be content to say: “I decided for Christ,” “I made up my mind to be a
Christian,” the Calvinist will wish to speak of his conversion in more
theological fashion, to make plain whose work it really was:
“Long my imprisoned spirit lay
Fast bound in sin and nature’s night:
Thine eye diffused a quickening ray;
I woke; the dungeon flamed with light;
My chains fell off: my heart was free:
I rose, went forth, and followed thee.”
Clearly, these two notions of internal grace are sharply opposed to
each other.
Now, the Calvinist contends that the Arminian idea of election,
redemption and calling as acts of God which do not save cuts at the
very heart of their biblical meaning; that to say in the Arminian sense
that God elects believers, and Christ died for all men, and the Spirit
quickens those who receive the word, is really to say that in the
biblical sense God elects nobody, and Christ died for nobody, and the
Spirit quickens nobody. The matter at issue in this controversy,
therefore, is the meaning to be given to these biblical terms, and to
some others which are also soteriologically significant, such as the
love of God, the covenant of grace, and the verb “save” itself, with its
synonyms. Arminians gloss them all in terms of the principle that
salvation does not directly depend on any decree or act of God, but
on man’s independent activity in believing. Calvinists maintain that
this principle is itself unscriptural and irreligious, and that such
glossing demonstrably perverts the sense of Scripture and
undermines the gospel at every point where it is practised. This, and
nothing less than this, is what the Arminian controversy is about.
There is a fifth way in which the five-point formula is deficient. Its
very form (a series of denials of Arminian assertions) lends colour to
the impression that Calvinism is a modification of Arminianism; that
Arminianism has a certain primacy in order of nature, and developed
Calvinism is an offshoot from it. Even when one shows this to be
false as a matter of history, the suspicion remains in many minds
that it is a true account of the relation of the two views themselves.
For it is widely supposed that Arminianism (which, as we now see,
corresponds pretty closely to the new gospel of our own day) is the
result of reading the Scriptures in a “natural,” unbiased,
unsophisticated way, and that Calvinism is an unnatural growth, the
product less of the texts themselves than of unhallowed logic
working on the texts, wresting their plain sense and upsetting their
balance by forcing them into a systematic framework which they do
not themselves provide. Whatever may have been true of individual
Calvinists, as a generalisation about Calvinism nothing could be
further from the truth than this. Certainly, Arminianism is “natural”
in one sense, in that it represents a characteristic perversion of
biblical teaching by the fallen mind of man, who even in salvation
cannot bear to renounce the delusion of being master of his fate and
captain of his soul. This perversion appeared before in the
Pelagianism and semi-Pelagianism of the Patristic period and the
later Scholasticism, and has recurred since the seventeenth century
both in Roman theology and, among Protestants, in various types of
rationalistic liberalism and modern Evangelical teaching; and no
doubt it will always be with us. As long as the fallen human mind is
what it is, the Arminian way of thinking will continue to be a natural
type of mistake. But it is not natural in any other sense. In fact, it is
Calvinism that understands the Scriptures in their natural, one
would have thought, inescapable meaning; Calvinism that keeps to
what they actually say; Calvinism that insists on taking seriously the
biblical assertions that God saves, and that He saves those whom He
has chosen to save, and that He saves them by grace without works,
so that no man may boast, and that Christ is given to them as a
perfect Saviour, and that their whole salvation flows to them from
the Cross, and that the work of redeeming them was finished on the
Cross. It is Calvinism that gives due honour to the Cross. When the
Calvinist sings:
“There is a green hill far away,
Without a city wall,
Where the dear Lord was crucified,
Who died to save us all;
He died the we might be forgiven,
He died to make us good;
That we might go at last to Heaven,
Saved by His precious blood.”
—he means it. He will not gloss the italicised statements by saying
that God’s saving purpose in the death of His Son was a mere
ineffectual wish, depending for its fulfilment on man’s willingness to
believe, so that for all God could do Christ might have died and none
been saved at all. He insists that the Bible sees the Cross as revealing
God’s power to save, not His impotence. Christ did not win a
hypothetical salvation for hypothetical believers, a mere possibility of
salvation for any who might possibly believe, but a real salvation for
His own chosen people. His precious blood really does “save us all”;
the intended effects of His self-offering do in fact follow, just because
the Cross was what it was. Its saving power does not depend on faith
being added to it; its saving power is such that faith flows from it.
The Cross secured the full salvation of all for whom Christ died. “God
forbid,” therefore, “that I should glory, save in the cross of our Lord
Jesus Christ.”
Now the real nature of Calvinistic soteriology becomes plain. It is no
artificial oddity, nor a product of over-bold logic. Its central
confession, that God saves sinners, that Christ redeemed us by His
blood, is the witness both of the Bible and of the believing heart. The
Calvinist is the Christian who confesses before men in his theology
just what he believes in his heart before God when he prays. He
thinks and speaks at all times of the sovereign grace of God in the
way that every Christian does when he pleads for the souls of others,
or when he obeys the impulse of worship which rises unbidden
within him, prompting him to deny himself all praise and to give all
the glory of his salvation to his Saviour. Calvinism is the natural
theology written on the heart of the new man in Christ, whereas
Arminianism is an intellectual sin of infirmity, natural only in the
sense in which all such sins are natural, even to the regenerate.
Calvinistic thinking is the Christian being himself on the intellectual
level; Arminian thinking is the Christian failing to be himself through
the weakness of the flesh. Calvinism is what the Christian church has
always held and taught when its mind has not been distracted by
controversy and false traditions from attending to what Scripture
actually says; that is the significance of the Patristic testimonies to
the teaching of the “five points,” which can be quoted in abundance.
(Owen appends a few on redemption; a much larger collection may
be seen in John Gill’s The Cause of God and Truth.) So that really it
is most misleading to call this soteriology “Calvinism” at all, for it is
not a peculiarity of John Calvin and the divines of Dort, but a part of
the revealed truth of God and the catholic Christian faith.
“Calvinism” is one of the “odious names” by which down the
centuries prejudice has been raised against it. But the thing itself is
just the biblical gospel. In the light of these facts, we can now give a
direct answer to the questions with which we began.
“Surely all that Owen is doing is defending limited atonement?” Not
really. He is doing much more than that. Strictly speaking, the aim of
Owen’s book is not defensive at all, but constructive. It is a biblical
and theological enquiry; its purpose is simply to make clear what
Scripture actually teaches about the central subject of the gospel—the
achievement of the Saviour. As its title proclaims, it is “a treatise of
the redemption and reconciliation that is in the blood of Christ: with
the merit thereof, and the satisfaction wrought thereby.” The
question which Owen, like the Dort divines before him, is really
concerned to answer is just this: what is the gospel? All agree that it
is a proclamation of Christ as Redeemer, but there is a dispute as to
the nature and extent of His redeeming work: well, what saith the
Scripture? what aim and accomplishment does the Bible assign to
the work of Christ? This is what Owen is concerned to elucidate. It is
true that he tackles the subject in a directly controversial way, and
shapes his book as a polemic against the “spreading persuasion...of a
general ransom, to be paid by Christ for all; that he dies to redeem all
and every one.” But his work is a systematic expository treatise, not a
mere episodic wrangle. Owen treats the controversy as providing the
occasion for a full display of the relevant biblical teaching in its own
proper order and connection. As in Hooker’s Laws of Ecclesiastical
Polity, the polemics themselves are incidental and of secondary
interest; their chief value lies in the way that the author uses them to
further his own design and carry forward his own argument.
That argument is essentially very simple. Owen sees that the
question which has occasioned his writing—the extent of the
atonement—involves the further question of its nature, since if it was
offered to save some who will finally perish, then it cannot have been
a transaction securing the actual salvation of all for whom it was
designed. But, says Owen, this is precisely the kind of transaction
that the Bible says it was. The first two books of his treatise are a
massive demonstration of the fact that according to Scripture the
Redeemer’s death actually saves His people, as it was meant to do.
The third book consists of a series of sixteen arguments against the
hypothesis of universal redemption, all aimed to show, on the one
hand, that Scripture speaks of Christ’s redeeming work as effective,
which precludes its having been intended for any who perish, and, on
the other, that if its intended extent had been universal, then either
all will be saved (which Scripture denies, and the advocates of the
“general ransom” do not affirm), or else the Father and the Son have
failed to do what they set out to do—“which to assert,” says Owen,
“seems to us blasphemously injurious to the wisdom, power and
perfection of God, as likewise derogatory to the worth and value of
the death of Christ.”
Owen’s arguments ring a series of changes on this dilemma. Finally,
in the fourth book, Owen shows with great cogency that the three
classes of texts alleged to prove that Christ died for persons who will
not be saved (those saying that He died for “the world,” for “all,” and
those thought to envisage the perishing of those for whom He died),
cannot on sound principles of exegesis be held to teach any such
thing; and, further, that the theological inferences by which universal
redemption is supposed to be established are really quite fallacious.
The true evangelical evaluation of the claim that Christ died for every
man, even those who perish, comes through at point after point in
Owen’s book. So far from magnifying the love and grace of God, this
claim dishonours both it and Him, for it reduces God’s love to an
impotent wish and turns the whole economy of “saving” grace, so called
(“saving” is really a misnomer on this view), into a
monumental divine failure. Also, so far from magnifying the merit
and worth of Christ’s death, it cheapens it, for it makes Christ die in
vain. Lastly, so far from affording faith additional encouragement, it
destroys the Scriptural ground of assurance altogether, for it denies
that the knowledge that Christ died for me (or did or does anything
else for me) is a sufficient ground for inferring my eternal salvation;
my salvation, on this view, depends not on what Christ did for me,
but on what I subsequently do for myself. Thus this view takes from
God’s love and Christ’s redemption the glory that Scripture gives
them, and introduces the anti-scriptural principle of self-salvation at
the point where the Bible explicitly says: “not of works, lest any man
should boast.” You cannot have it both ways: an atonement of
universal extent is a depreciated atonement. It has lost its saving
power; it leaves us to save ourselves. The doctrine of the general
ransom must accordingly be rejected, as Owen rejects it, as a
grievous mistake. By contrast, however, the doctrine which Owen
sets out, as he himself shows, is both biblical and God-honouring. It
exalts Christ, for it teaches Christians to glory in His Cross alone, and
to draw their hope and assurance only from the death and
intercession of their Saviour. It is, in other words, genuinely
Evangelical. It is, indeed, the gospel of God and the catholic faith.
It is safe to say that no comparable exposition of the work of
redemption as planned and executed by the Triune Jehovah has ever
been done since Owen published his. None has been needed.
Discussing this work, Andrew Thomson notes how Owen “makes you
feel when he has reached the end of his subject, that he has also
exhausted it.” That is demonstrably the case here. His interpretation
of the texts is sure; his power of theological construction is superb;
nothing that needs discussing is omitted, and (so far as the writer
can discover) no arguments for or against his position have been
used since his day which he has not himself noted and dealt with.
One searches his book in vain for the leaps and flights of logic by
which Reformed theologians are supposed to establish their
positions; all that one finds is solid, painstaking exegesis and a
careful following through of biblical ways of thinking. Owen’s work is
a constructive, broad-based biblical analysis of the heart of the
gospel, and must be taken seriously as such. It may not be written off
as a piece of special pleading for a traditional shibboleth, for nobody
has a right to dismiss the doctrine of the limitedness of atonement as
a monstrosity of Calvinistic logic until he has refuted Owen’s proof
that it is part of the uniform biblical presentation of redemption,
clearly taught in plain text after plain text. And nobody has done that yet.
“You talked about recovering the gospel,” said our questioner; “don’t
you mean that you just want us all to become Calvinists?”
This question presumably concerns, not the word, but the thing.
Whether we call ourselves Calvinists hardly matters; what matters is
that we should understand the gospel biblically. But that, we think,
does in fact mean understanding it as historic Calvinism does. The
alternative is to misunderstand and distort it. We said earlier that
modern Evangelicalism, by and large, has ceased to preach the
gospel in the old way, and we frankly admit that the new gospel,
insofar as it deviates from the old, seems to us a distortion of the
biblical message. And we can now see what has gone wrong. Our
theological currency has been debased. Our minds have been
conditioned to think of the Cross as a redemption which does less
than redeem, and of Christ as a Saviour who does less than save, and
of God’s love as a weak affection which cannot keep anyone from hell
without help, and of faith as the human help which God needs for
this purpose. As a result, we are no longer free either to believe the
biblical gospel or to preach it. We cannot believe it, because our
thoughts are caught in the toils of synergism. We are haunted by the
Arminian idea that if faith and unbelief are to be responsible acts,
they must be independent acts; hence we are not free to believe that
we are saved entirely by divine grace through a faith which is itself
God’s gift and flows to us from Calvary. Instead, we involve ourselves
in a bewildering kind of double-think about salvation, telling
ourselves one moment that it all depends on God and next moment
that it all depends on us. The resultant mental muddle deprives God
of much of the glory that we should give Him as author and finisher
of salvation, and ourselves of much of the comfort we might draw
from knowing that God is for us.
And when we come to preach the gospel, our false preconceptions
make us say just the opposite of what we intend. We want (rightly) to
proclaim Christ as Saviour; yet we end up saying that Christ, having
made salvation possible, has left us to become our own saviours. It
comes about in this way. We want to magnify the saving grace of God
and the saving power of Christ. So we declare that God’s redeeming
love extends to every man, and that Christ has died to save every
man, and we proclaim that the glory of divine mercy is to be
measured by these facts. And then, in order to avoid universalism,
we have to depreciate all that we were previously extolling, and to
explain that, after all, nothing that God and Christ have done can
save us unless we add something to it; the decisive factor which
actually saves us is our own believing. What we say comes to this—
that Christ saves us with our help; and what that means, when one
thinks it out, is this—that we save ourselves with Christ’s help. This is
a hollow anticlimax. But if we start by affirming that God has a
saving love for all, and Christ died a saving death for all, and yet balk
at becoming universalists, there is nothing else that we can say. And
let us be clear on what we have done when we have put the matter in
this fashion. We have not exalted grace and the Cross; we have
cheapened them. We have limited the atonement far more drastically
than Calvinism does, for whereas Calvinism asserts that Christ’s
death, as such, saves all whom it was meant to save, we have denied
that Christ’s death, as such, is sufficient to save any of them. We have
flattered impenitent sinners by assuring them that it is in their power
to repent and believe, though God cannot make them do it. Perhaps
we have also trivialised faith and repentance in order to make this
assurance plausible (“it’s very simple—just open your heart to the
Lord...”). Certainly, we have effectively denied God’s sovereignty, and
undermined the basic conviction of religion—that man is always in
God’s hands. In truth, we have lost a great deal. And it is, perhaps, no
wonder that our preaching begets so little reverence and humility,
and that our professed converts are so self-confident and so deficient
in self-knowledge, and in the good works which Scripture regards as
the fruit of true repentance.
It is from degenerate faith and preaching of this kind that Owen’s
book could set us free. If we listen to him, he will teach us both how
to believe the Scripture gospel and how to preach it. For the first: he
will lead us to bow down before a sovereign Saviour Who really
saves, and to praise Him for a redeeming death which made it certain
that all for whom He died will come to glory. It cannot be over emphasised that
we have not seen the full meaning of the Cross till
we have seen it as the divines of Dort display it—as the centre of the
gospel, flanked on the one hand by total inability and unconditional
election, and on the other by irresistible grace and final preservation.
For the full meaning of the Cross only appears when the atonement
is defined in terms of these four truths. Christ died to save a certain
company of helpless sinners upon whom God had set His free saving
love. Christ’s death ensured the calling and keeping—the present and
final salvation—of all whose sins He bore. That is what Calvary
meant, and means. The Cross saved; the Cross saves. This is the
heart of true Evangelical faith; as Cowper sang—
“Dear dying Lamb, Thy precious blood Shall never lose its power,
Till all the ransomed church of God Be saved to sin no more.”
This is the triumphant conviction which underlay the old gospel, as it
does the whole New Testament. And this is what Owen will teach us
unequivocally to believe.
Then, secondly, Owen could set us free, if we would hear him, to
preach the biblical gospel. This assertion may sound paradoxical, for
it is often imagined that those who will not preach that Christ died to
save every man are left with no gospel at all. On the contrary,
however, what they are left with is just the gospel of the New
Testament. What does it mean to preach “the gospel of the grace of
God”? Owen only touches on this briefly and incidentally, but his
comments are full of light. Preaching the gospel, he tells us, is not a
matter of telling the congregation that God has set His love on each
of them and Christ has died to save each of them, for these
assertions, biblically understood, would imply that they will all
infallibly be saved, and this cannot be known to be true. The
knowledge of being the object of God’s eternal love and Christ’s
redeeming death belongs to the individual’s assurance, which in the
nature of the case cannot precede faith’s saving exercise; it is to be
inferred from the fact that one has believed, not proposed as a reason
why one should believe. According to Scripture, preaching the gospel
is entirely a matter of proclaiming to men, as truth from God which
all are bound to believe and act on, the following four facts:
(1.) that all men are sinners, and cannot do anything to save themselves;
(2.) that Jesus Christ, God’s Son, is a perfect Saviour for sinners, even the worst;
(3.) that the Father and the Son have promised that all who know
themselves to be sinners and put faith in Christ as Saviour shall be
received into favour, and none cast out (which promise is “a certain
infallible truth, grounded upon the superabundant sufficiency of the
oblation of Christ in itself, for whomsoever [few or more] it be intended”);
(4.) that God has made repentance and faith a duty, requiring of
every man who hears the gospel “a serious full recumbency and
rolling of the soul upon Christ in the promise of the gospel, as an all sufficient Saviour,
able to deliver and save to the utmost them that
come to God by him; ready, able and willing, through the
preciousness of his blood and sufficiency of his ransom, to save every
soul that shall freely give up themselves unto him for that end.”
The preacher’s task, in other words, is to display Christ: to explain
man’s need of Him, His sufficiency to save, and His offer of Himself
in the promises as Saviour to all who truly turn to Him; and to show
as fully and plainly as he can how these truths apply to the
congregation before him. It is not for him to say, nor for his hearers
to ask, for whom Christ died in particular. “There is none called on
by the gospel once to enquire after the purpose and intention of God
concerning the particular object of the death of Christ, every one
being fully assured that his death shall be profitable to them that
believe in him and obey him.” After saving faith has been exercised,
“it lies on a believer to assure his soul, according as he find the fruit
of the death of Christ in him and towards him, of the good-will and
eternal love of God to him in sending his Son to die for him in
particular”; but not before. The task to which the gospel calls him is
simply to exercise faith, which he is both warranted and obliged to do
by God’s command and promise.
Some comments on this conception of what preaching the gospel means are in order.
First, we should observe that the old gospel of Owen contains no less
full and free an offer of salvation than its modern counterpart. It
presents ample grounds of faith (the sufficiency of Christ, and the
promise of God), and cogent motives to faith (the sinner’s need, and
the Creator’s command, which is also the Redeemer’s invitation).
The new gospel gains nothing here by asserting universal
redemption. The old gospel, certainly, has no room for the cheap
sentimentalising which turns God’s free mercy to sinners into a
constitutional soft-heartedness on His part which we can take for
granted; nor will it countenance the degrading presentation of Christ
as the baffled Saviour, balked in what He hoped to do by human
unbelief; nor will it indulge in maudlin appeals to the unconverted to
let Christ save them out of pity for His disappointment. The pitiable
Saviour and the pathetic God of modern pulpits are unknown to the
old gospel. The old gospel tells men that they need God, but not that
God needs them (a modern falsehood); it does not exhort them to
pity Christ, but announces that Christ has pitied them, though pity
was the last thing they deserved. It never loses sight of the Divine
majesty and sovereign power of the Christ whom it proclaims, but
rejects flatly all representations of Him which would obscure His free
omnipotence. Does this mean, however, that the preacher of the old
gospel is inhibited or confined in offering Christ to men and inviting
them to receive Him? Not at all. In actual fact, just because he
recognises that Divine mercy is sovereign and free, he is in a position
to make far more of the offer of Christ in his preaching than is the
expositor of the new gospel; for this offer is itself a far more
wonderful thing on his principles than it can ever be in the eyes of
those who regard love to all sinners as a necessity of God’s nature,
and therefore a matter of course. To think that the holy Creator, who
never needed man for His happiness and might justly have banished
our fallen race for ever without mercy, should actually have chosen to
redeem some of them! and that His own Son was willing to undergo
death and descend into hell to save them! and that now from His
throne He should speak to ungodly men as He does in the words of
the gospel, urging upon them the command to repent and believe in
the form of a compassionate invitation to pity themselves and choose
life! These thoughts are the focal points round which the preaching
of the old gospel revolves. It is all wonderful, just because none of it
can be taken for granted. But perhaps the most wonderful thing of all
—the holiest spot in all the holy ground of gospel truth—is the free
invitation which “the Lord Christ” (as Owen loves to call Him) issues
repeatedly to guilty sinners to come to Him and find rest for their
souls. It is the glory of these invitations that it is an omnipotent King
who gives them, just as it is a chief part of the glory of the enthroned
Christ that He condescends still to utter them. And it is the glory of
the gospel ministry that the preacher goes to men as Christ’s
ambassador, charged to deliver the King’s invitation personally to
every sinner present and to summon them all to turn and live. Owen
himself enlarges on this in a passage addressed to the unconverted.
“Consider the infinite condescension and love of Christ, in his
invitations and calls of you to come unto him for life, deliverance,
mercy, grace, peace and eternal salvation. Multitudes of these
invitations and calls are recorded in the Scripture, and they are all of
them filled up with those blessed encouragements which divine
wisdom knows to be suited unto lost, convinced sinners.... In the
declaration and preaching of them, Jesus Christ yet stands before
sinners, calling, inviting, encouraging them to come unto him.
“This is somewhat of the word which he now speaks unto you: Why
will ye die? why will ye perish? why will ye not have compassion on
your own souls? Can your hearts endure, or can your hands be
strong, in the day of wrath that is approaching?... Look unto me, and
be saved; come unto me, and I will ease you of all sins, sorrows,
fears, burdens, and give rest unto your souls. Come, I entreat you; lay
aside all procrastinations, all delays; put me off no more; eternity lies
at the door...do not so hate me as that you will rather perish than
accept of deliverance by me.
“These and the like things doth the Lord Christ continually declare,
proclaim, plead and urge upon the souls of sinners.... He doth it in
the preaching of the word, as if he were present with you, stood
amongst you, and spake personally to every one of you.... He hath
appointed the ministers of the gospel to appear before you, and to
deal with you in his stead, avowing as his own the invitations which
are given you in his name, 2 Cor. v. 19, 20.”
These invitations are universal; Christ addresses them to sinners, as
such, and every man, as he believes God to be true, is bound to treat
them as God’s words to him personally and to accept the universal
assurance which accompanies them, that all who come to Christ will
be received. Again, these invitations are real; Christ genuinely offers
Himself to all who hear the gospel, and is in truth a perfect Saviour
to all who trust Him. The question of the extent of the atonement
does not arise in evangelistic preaching; the message to be delivered
is simply this—that Christ Jesus, the sovereign Lord, who died for
sinners, now invites sinners freely to Himself. God commands all to
repent and believe; Christ promises life and peace to all who do so.
Furthermore, these invitations are marvellously gracious; men
despise and reject them, and are never in any case worthy of them,
and yet Christ still issues them. He need not, but He does. “Come
unto me...and I will give you rest” remains His word to the world,
never cancelled, always to be preached. He whose death has ensured
the salvation of all His people is to be proclaimed everywhere as a
perfect Saviour, and all men invited and urged to believe on Him,
whoever they are, whatever they have been. Upon these three
insights the evangelism of the old gospel is based.
It is a very ill-informed supposition that evangelistic preaching which
proceeds on these principles must be anaemic and half-hearted by
comparison with what Arminians can do. Those who study the
printed sermons of worthy expositors of the old gospel, such as
Bunyan (whose preaching Owen himself much admired), or
Whitefield, or Spurgeon, will find that in fact they hold forth the
Saviour and summon sinners to Him with a fulness, warmth,
intensity and moving force unmatched in Protestant pulpit literature.
And it will be found on analysis that the very thing which gave their
preaching its unique power to overwhelm their audiences with
broken-hearted joy at the riches of God’s grace-and still gives it that
power, let it be said, even with hard-boiled modern readers—was
their insistence on the fact that grace is free. They knew that the
dimensions of Divine love are not half understood till one realises
that God need not have chosen to save nor given his Son to die; nor
need Christ have taken upon him vicarious damnation to redeem
men, nor need He invite sinners indiscriminately to Himself as He
does; but that all God’s gracious dealings spring entirely from His
own free purpose. Knowing this, they stressed it, and it is this stress
that sets their evangelistic preaching in a class by itself. Other
Evangelicals, possessed of a more superficial and less adequate
theology of grace, have laid the main emphasis in their gospel
preaching on the sinner’s need of forgiveness, or peace, or power,
and of the way to get them by “deciding for Christ.” It is not to be
denied that their preaching has done good (for God will use His
truth, even when imperfectly held and mixed with error), although
this type of evangelism is always open to the criticism of being too
man-centred and pietistic; but it has been left (necessarily) to
Calvinists and those who, like the Wesleys, fall into Calvinistic ways
of thought as soon as they begin a sermon to the unconverted, to
preach the gospel in a way which highlights above everything else the
free love, willing condescension, patient long-suffering and infinite
kindness of the Lord Jesus Christ. And, without doubt, this is the
most Scriptural and edifying way to preach it; for gospel invitations
to sinners never honour God and exalt Christ more, nor are more
powerful to awaken and confirm faith, than when full weight is laid
on the free omnipotence of the mercy from which they flow. It looks,
indeed, as if the preachers of the old gospel are the only people
whose position allows them to do justice to the revelation of Divine
goodness in the free offer of Christ to sinners.
Then, in the second place, the old gospel safeguards values which the
new gospel loses. We saw before that the new gospel, by asserting
universal redemption and a universal Divine saving purpose,
compels itself to cheapen grace and the Cross by denying that the
Father and the Son are sovereign in salvation; for it assures us that,
after God and Christ have done all that they can, or will, it depends
finally on each man’s own choice whether God’s purpose to save him
is realised or not. This position has two unhappy results. The first is
that it compels us to misunderstand the significance of the gracious
invitations of Christ in the gospel of which we have been speaking;
for we now have to read them, not as expressions of the tender
patience of a mighty sovereign, but as the pathetic pleadings of
impotent desire; and so the enthroned Lord is suddenly
metamorphosed into a weak, futile figure tapping forlornly at the
door of the human heart, which He is powerless to open. This is a
shameful dishonour to the Christ of the New Testament. The second
implication is equally serious: for this view in effect denies our
dependence on God when it comes to vital decisions, takes us out of
His hand, tells us that we are, after all, what sin taught us to think we
were—masters of our fate, captain of our souls—and so undermines
the very foundation of man’s religious relationship with his Maker. It
can hardly be wondered at that the converts of the new gospel are so
often both irreverent and irreligious, for such is the natural tendency
of this teaching. The old gospel, however, speaks very differently and
has a very different tendency. On the one hand, in expounding man’s
need of Christ, it stresses something which the new gospel effectively
ignores—that sinners cannot obey the gospel, any more than the law,
without renewal of heart. On the other hand, in declaring Christ’s
power to save, it proclaims Him as the author and chief agent of
conversion, coming by His Spirit as the gospel goes forth to renew
men’s hearts and draw them to Himself. Accordingly, in applying the
message, the old gospel, while stressing that faith is man’s duty,
stresses also that faith is not in man’s power, but that God must give
what He commands. It announces, not merely that men must come
to Christ for salvation, but also that they cannot come unless Christ
Himself draws them. Thus it labours to overthrow self-confidence, to
convince sinners that their salvation is altogether out of their hands,
and to shut them up to a self-despairing dependence on the glorious
grace of a sovereign Saviour, not only for their righteousness but for
their faith too.
It is not likely, therefore, that a preacher of the old gospel will be
happy to express the application of it in the form of a demand to
“decide for Christ,” as the current phrase is. For, on the one hand,
this phrase carries the wrong associations. It suggests voting a
person into office—an act in which the candidate plays no part
beyond offering himself for election, and everything then being
settled by the voter’s independent choice. But we do not vote God’s
Son into office as our Saviour, nor does He remain passive while
preachers campaign on His behalf, whipping up support for His
cause. We ought not to think of evangelism as a kind of
electioneering. And then, on the other hand, this phrase obscures the
very thing that is essential in repentance and faith—the denying of
self in a personal approach to Christ. It is not at all obvious that
deciding for Christ is the same as coming to Him and resting on Him
and turning from sin and self-effort; it sounds like something much
less, and is accordingly calculated to instil defective notions of what
the gospel really requires of sinners. It is not a very apt phrase from
any point of view.
To the question: what must I do to be saved? the old gospel replies:
believe on the Lord Jesus Christ. To the further question: what does
it mean to believe on the Lord Jesus Christ? its reply is: it means
knowing oneself to be a sinner, and Christ to have died for sinners;
abandoning all self-righteousness and self-confidence, and casting
oneself wholly upon Him for pardon and peace; and exchanging
one’s natural enmity and rebellion against God for a spirit of grateful
submission to the will of Christ through the renewing of one’s heart
by the Holy Ghost. And to the further question still: how am I to go
about believing on Christ and repenting, if I have no natural ability
to do these things? it answers: look to Christ, speak to Christ, cry to
Christ, just as you are; confess your sin, your impenitence, your
unbelief, and cast yourself on His mercy; ask Him to give you a new
heart, working in you true repentance and firm faith; ask Him to take
away your evil heart of unbelief and to write His law within you, that
you may never henceforth stray from Him. Turn to Him and trust
Him as best you can, and pray for grace to turn and trust more
thoroughly; use the means of grace expectantly, looking to Christ to
draw near to you as you seek to draw near to Him; watch, pray, read
and hear God’s Word, worship and commune with God’s people, and
so continue till you know in yourself beyond doubt that you are
indeed a changed being, a penitent believer, and the new heart which
you desired has been put within you. The emphasis in this advice is
on the need to call upon Christ directly, as the very first step.
“Let not conscience make you linger,
Nor of fitness fondly dream;
All the fitness He requireth
Is to feel your need of Him”
—so do not postpone action till you think you are better, but honestly
confess your badness and give yourself up here and now to the Christ
who alone can make you better; and wait on Him till His light rises in
your soul, as Scripture promises that it shall do. Anything less than
this direct dealing with Christ is disobedience of the gospel. Such is
the exercise of spirit to which the old evangel summons its hearers. “I
believe—help thou mine unbelief”: this must become their cry.
And the old gospel is proclaimed in the sure confidence that the
Christ of whom it testifies, the Christ who is the real speaker when
the Scriptural invitations to trust Him are expounded and applied, is
not passively waiting for man’s decision as the word goes forth, but is
omnipotently active, working with and through the word to bring His
people to faith in Himself. The preaching of the new gospel is often
described as the task of “bringing men to Christ” if only men move,
while Christ stands still. But the task of preaching the old gospel
could more properly be described as bringing Christ to men, for
those who preach it know that as they do their work of setting Christ
before men’s eyes, the mighty Saviour whom they proclaim is busy
doing His work through their words, visiting sinners with salvation,
awakening them to faith, drawing them in mercy to Himself.
It is this older gospel which Owen will teach us to preach: the gospel
of the sovereign grace of God in Christ as the author and finisher of
faith and salvation. It is the only gospel which can be preached on
Owen’s principles, but those who have tasted its sweetness will not in
any case be found looking for another. In the matter of believing and
preaching the gospel, as in other things, Jeremiah’s words still have
their application: “Thus saith the Lord, Stand ye in the ways, and see,
and ask for the old paths, where is the good way, and walk therein,
and ye shall find rest for your souls.” To find ourselves debarred, as
Owen would debar us, from taking up with the fashionable modern
substitute gospel may not, after all, be a bad thing, either for us, or
for the Church.
More might be said, but to go further would be to exceed the limits of
an introductory essay. The foregoing remarks are made simply to
show how important it is at the present time that we should attend
most carefully to Owen’s analysis of what the Bible says about the
saving work of Christ.
III. It only remains to add a few remarks about this treatise itself. It
was Owen’s second major work, and his first masterpiece. (Its
predecessor, A Display of Arminianism, published in 1642, when
Owen was twenty-six, was a competent piece of prentice-work, rather
of the nature of a research thesis.)
The Death of Death is a solid book, made up of detailed exposition
and close argument, and requires hard study, as Owen fully realised;
a cursory glance will not yield much. (“READER.... If thou art, as
many in this pretending age, a sign or title gazer, and comest into
books as Cato into the theatre, to go out again—thou has had thy
entertainment; farewell!”) Owen felt, however, that he had a right to
ask for hard study, for his book was a product of hard work (“a more
than seven-years’ serious inquiry...into the mind of God about these
things, with a serious perusal of all which I could attain that the wit
of man, in former or latter days, hath published in opposition to the
truth”), and he was sure in his own mind that a certain finality
attached to what he had written. (“Altogether hopeless of success I
am not; but fully resolved that I shall not live to see a solid answer
given unto it.”) Time has justified his optimism.
Something should be said about his opponents. He is writing against
three variations on the theme of universal redemption: that of
classical Arminianism, noted earlier; that of the theological faculty at
Saumur (the position known as Amyraldism, after its leading
exponent); and that of Thomas More, a lay theologian of East Anglia.
The second of these views originated with a Scots professor at
Saumur, John Cameron; it was taken up and developed by two of his
pupils, Amyraut (Amyraldus) and Testard, and became the occasion
of a prolonged controversy in which Amyraut, Daillé and Blondel
were opposed by Rivet, Spanheim and Des Marets (Maresius). The
Saumur position won some support among Reformed divines in
Britain, being held in modified form by (among others) Bishops
Usher and Davenant, and Richard Baxter. None of these, however,
had advocated it in print at the time when Owen wrote.
Goold’s summary of the Saumur position may be quoted. “Admitting
that, by the purpose of God, and through the death of Christ, the
elect are infallibly secured in the enjoyment of salvation, they
contended for an antecedent decree, by which God is free to give
salvation to all men through Christ, on the condition that they
believe on him. Hence their system was termed hypothetic[al]
universalism. The vital difference between it and the strict Arminian
theory lies in the absolute security asserted in the former for the
spiritual recovery of the elect. They agree, however, in attributing
some kind of universality to the atonement, and in maintaining that,
on a certain condition, within the reach of fulfilment by all men...all
men have access to the benefits of Christ’s death.” From this, Goold
continues, “the readers of Owen will understand...why he dwells with
peculiar keenness and reiteration of statement upon a refutation of
the conditional system.... It was plausible; it had many learned men
for its advocates; it had obtained currency in the foreign churches;
and it seems to have been embraced by More.”
More is described by Thomas Edwards as “a great Sectary, that did
much hurt in Lincolnshire, Norfolk, and Cambridgeshire; who was
famous also in Boston, (King’s) Lynn, and even in Holland, and was
followed from place to place by many.” Baxter’s description is kinder:
“a Weaver of Wisbitch and Lyn, of excellent Parts.” (More’s doctrine
of redemption, of course, was substantially Baxter’s own.) Owen,
however, has a poor view of his abilities, and makes no secret of the
fact. More’s book, The Universality of God’s Free Grace in Christ to
Mankind, appeared in 1646 (not, as Goold says, 1643), and must
have exercised a considerable influence, for within three years it had
evoked four weighty works which were in whole or part polemics
against it: A Refutation...of Thomas More, by Thomas Whitfield,
1646; Vindiciae Redemptionis, by John Stalham, 1647; The
Universalist Examined and Convicted, by Obadiah Howe, 1648; and
Owen’s own book, published in the same year.
More’s exposition seems to be of little intrinsic importance; Owen,
however, selects it as the fullest statement of the case for universal
redemption that had yet appeared in English and uses it
unmercifully as a chopping-block. The modern reader, however, will
probably find it convenient to skip the sections devoted to refuting
More (I. viii., the closing pages of II. iii. and IV. vi.) on his first
passage through Owen’s treatise.
Finally, a word about the style of this work. There is no denying that
Owen is heavy and hard to read. This is not so much due to obscure
arrangement as to two other factors. The first is his lumbering
literary gait. “Owen travels through it (his subject) with the
elephant’s grace and solid step, if sometimes also with his ungainly
motion.” says Thomson. That puts it kindly. Much of Owen’s prose
reads like a roughly-dashed-off translation of a piece of thinking
done in Ciceronian Latin. It has, no doubt, a certain clumsy dignity;
so has Stonehenge; but it is trying to the reader to have to go over
sentences two or three times to see their meaning, and this necessity
makes it much harder to follow an argument. The present writer,
however, has found that the hard places in Owen usually come out as
soon as one reads them aloud. The second obscuring factor is Owen’s
austerity as an expositor. He has a lordly disdain for broad
introductions which ease the mind gently into a subject, and for
comprehensive summaries which gather up scattered points into a
small space. He obviously carries the whole of his design in his head,
and expects his readers to do the same. Nor are his chapter divisions
reliable pointers to the structure of his discourse, for though a
change of subject is usually marked by a chapter division, Owen
often starts a new chapter where there is no break in the thought at
all. Nor is he concerned about literary proportions; the space given to
a topic is determined by its intrinsic complexity rather than its
relative importance, and the reader is left to work out what is basic
and what is secondary by noting how things link together. The reader
will probably find it helpful to use a pencil and paper in his study of
the book and jot down the progress of the exposition; and it is hoped
that the subjoined Analysis will also be of service in helping him keep
his bearings.
We would conclude by repeating that the reward to be reaped from
studying Owen is worth all the labour involved, and by making the
following observations for the student’s guidance. (1.) It is important
to start with the epistle “To the Reader,” for there Owen indicates in
short compass what he is trying to do, and why. (2.) It is important to
read the treatise as a whole, in the order in which it stands, and not
to jump into parts III. and IV. before mastering the contents of Parts
I. and II., where the biblical foundations of Owen’s whole position
are laid. (3.) It is hardly possible to grasp the strength and cogency of
this massive statement on a first reading. The work must be read and
re-read to be appreciated.
J. I. PACKER.