Eamon Younis: John Owen and the Immediacy of Christ’s Authority over Christian Worship

By Andrew M. Leslie

[Andrew M. Leslie is Lecturer in Christian Doctrine at Moore Theological College in Newtown, New South Wales. An earlier version of this article was presented at the Edinburgh Dogmatics Conference on Reformed Worship, September 2015.]

ABSTRACT

For John Owen, the shape and content of public worship is not simply an issue of what the Bible explicitly forbids and prescribes (the so-called regulative principle). It is a matter of profound christological significance. As the sole mediator of the new covenant, Christ retains immediate authority over the consciences of his people in their corporate life together. This authority has several dimensions. It stems from the donation of the kingdom to the Son, grounded in the eternal covenant of redemption. It rests on the necessity and infinite value of his priestly work as the only foundation for proper worship after the fall. And it is ultimately communicated through the intimate proximity of his eventual incarnation. Here he directly expressed every necessary ordinance of Christian worship, setting aside all previous administrations. The sufficiency of Christ’s three-fold office establishes the regulative authority of Scripture over worship since it is the instrument of his rule. It also furnishes a hermeneutical axiom that limits any “regulative principle” to the specific injunctions of the incarnate Son, alongside his apostolic eye-witnesses and emissaries. In articulating the character of this authority, Owen is attentive to the complex interface between the supernatural and spiritual dimensions of worship and their necessary dependence on the natural and public modes through which that worship is expressed. But he resists any impositions on worship that interfere with the immediacy of Christ’s authority or unnecessarily bind the consciences of the worshiper. Owen believes Christ preserves his immediate authority over public worship objectively through Scripture and subjectively through a perpetual spiritual presence amidst his people. This presence is conveyed through regeneration which habitually inclines the elect to heed Christ’s obligations to gather in congregations, appoint elders directly gifted by him, and participate in all the prescribed ordinances of worship.

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I. Introduction

Joel R. Beeke and Mark Jones have rightly observed that the full “sufficiency of Scripture” is one of the “great themes that forms John Owen’s theology of worship.”[1] In the words of the great seventeenth-century English Puritan himself, the point may be stated simply: “Religious worship not divinely instituted and appointed is false worship, not accepted with God.”[2] It goes without saying, of course, that the application of this so-called “regulative principle logic” is likely to generate a good deal of heated discussion in contemporary Reformed circles, especially where it is considered a legalistic and, ironically, unbiblical incursion on Christian liberty and the natural God-given wisdom which remains intact after the fall.[3] At the very least, it has often been regarded as a quaintly Puritan prerogative somewhat remote from the flexibility of the Magisterial Reformers, although Beeke and Jones make a good case for a widespread commitment to the general principle throughout the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century international Reformed community.[4]

While Owen’s commitment to the exclusive rule of Scripture in worship is widely understood, what has often been overlooked is a vitally significant christological principle which both supports his convictions regarding worship and carefully shapes his application of scriptural authority to its practice. The immediacy of Christ’s rule over the church is a theme to which Owen often returns when discussing the nature of its worship. Arguably this conviction grew out of years poring over the distinctive christological claims contained within the epistle to the Hebrews. The definitive fruit of this labor—Owen’s massive and once greatly revered commentary on this letter—is now starting to reclaim some of the attention it deserves.[5] Gradually published from 1668 through to 1684—the year after his death—the commentary is perhaps the high point of his hugely significant post-Restoration output. And Tweeddale is almost surely correct to suggest that much of Owen’s mature theological formation owes a great deal to his life-long reflection on this letter.[6] Certainly, in the preface to the first volume, Owen himself remarks that the “whole course” of his studies were “not without some regard” to this work.[7]

Among the numerous theological loci Owen explores throughout the commentary, Christology is undoubtedly the most prominent, as the very title of the work intimates.[8] And at several points, Owen is particularly concerned to explore the comprehensive significance of the Father’s messianic appointment of the Son as “heir of all things” (Heb 1:2). This is an inheritance which concentrates, no less, on God’s plans and purposes for the church—a point Owen notices in the letter’s description of Christ as the “faithful” “son” over God’s own “house” (Heb 3:6). Together with the associated claim that he is the unique “builder” of God’s house (vv. 3–4), this leads Owen to conclude that Christ has been granted the exclusive, immediate right to regulate the affairs of the church and all its worship.[9] He is the “sole lawgiver of his church,” Owen suggests, “the only fountain and disposer of his worship.”[10]

Drawing both upon material within his Hebrews commentary alongside his wider mature theological and ecclesiological writings, in this article I intend to explore Owen’s concern for the primacy of Christ’s authority over the church’s public worship—particularly the immediacy of that authority—and to highlight some important implications and conclusions he draws from this principle. As Owen reflects on this theological principle, he considers the immediate rule of Christ both objectively, in terms of its reasons or motives, and subjectively, as that authority is actually put into effect.

II. The Immediacy of Christ’s Authority Objectively Considered: King, Priest, and Incarnate Prophet of the Church

It was typical among Reformed thinkers like Owen to assume the basic moral obligation to worship God is enshrined in the natural law, or what is sometimes called the “law of creation.” As Owen puts it in his 1667 treatise Brief Instruction in the Worship of God and Discipline of the Churches of the New Testament, the very nature of God as sovereign creator demands human worship as an expression of our obedience and dependence on him.[11] Like others, however, Owen believes the ways and means of worship—as distinct from the essential moral obligation—belong not so much to the natural law, but have always been arbitrarily dependent upon God’s will and good pleasure, and therefore hinge on further specific divine revelation, or what is sometimes called the “positive law.”[12] In the prolegomena to his Hebrews commentary, for instance, Owen distinguishes between a purely natural Sabbath principle stipulating an obligation to set aside one day for worship, and the specific divine hallowing of the seventh day in Gen 2:3, confirming it as the particular day of rest.[13] Of course, the most famous example of the so-called “positive” pre-fall worship stipulations are the commands concerning the trees in the Garden, established out of no natural necessity, but appointed specifically as a worship ordinance to test Adam’s faith and obedience in that innocent state.[14]

To Owen’s mind, both these dimensions to divine worship—as it is an unchanging natural obligation, and as something whose “ways and means,” or specific outward ordinances, depend on God’s positive, revealed command—are explicitly re-affirmed in the second commandment.[15] Consequently, it is unsurprising that when Owen comes to outline specific instructions on Christian worship, he insists that nothing Christ has done or instituted in Christian worship has altered the natural or “moral and internal” obligation, but pertains specifically to its “superadded” outward institutions which he has expressly set in place.[16]

Does this mean, then, that Owen thinks Christ only partly regulates Christian worship—in its outward forms, perhaps—whilst leaving the inward moral aspect to the direct rule of natural law? For several important reasons, Owen believes the answer to this must be no. To Owen’s mind, the kingly, priestly, and prophetic prerogatives of Christ’s mediatorial office now grant him an exclusive domain over all acceptable worship. It is worth exploring these three dimensions in some more detail.

1. King

As we have already begun to see, Owen infers that as a function of his universal messianic inheritance (Heb 1:2), Christ has been granted lordship over all things, both terrestrial and spiritual. First intimated in the promise of Gen 3:15, this donation rests on Christ’s divinity as the sovereign creator, but issues particularly from the eternal plan of redemption to conquer evil, judge his enemies, and gather up a reconciled family of angels and elect human beings under his headship (cf. Eph 1:10).[17] As Owen explains, numerous OT promises foreshadow an eventual victory over Satan that would be “attended with rule, power, and dominion”—something which is confirmed particularly in the promises to Abraham and Judah, in the eventual emergence of the Davidic kingdom, and in the latter prophets.[18] These promises have, of course, been fulfilled with the Son’s eventual incarnation, the accomplishment of his redemptive work, and his heavenly exaltation—as the NT frequently attests.[19] Consequently, while all creation is unquestionably the work of one, undivided Trinity, Owen surmises that the same God has ultimately chosen not to glorify himself completely in this passing age but in a new creation, beginning in the Garden with the first hint of a redeemer, and finally to be consummated both in conquest and a magnificent liberation converging on the exalted Christ and the “manifestation” of his adopted children (cf. Rom 8:19–22).[20]

Recognizing the cosmic scope of Christ’s kingdom, Owen divides his discussion of it into the angelic and human domains, together with “all things besides.”[21] The primary consequence of all this is that Christ now rules history to advance his plans for the church. The church, together with the political and natural spheres, has been handed over to his immediate authority. Indeed, all gifts and graces bestowed on human beings now fall rightfully within his domain.[22] In distinctly supralapsarian pitch, Owen even intimates that the purely natural gifts of the “old creation” were always designed to come under his eventual messianic rule.[23] Whilst their natural integrity remains intact, Christ now directs and disposes them to the “especial ends of his glory, in doing good unto his church.”[24] Consequently, it is no surprise, then, that when it comes to the church in particular, Owen will portray Christ as its “only head, lord, ruler, and lawgiver,” possessing the sole, immediate prerogative for prescribing its form and manner of worship, both in respect to its inward reality and outward expression.[25]

2. Priest

A further reason Owen sees for the immediate rule of Christ over the church’s worship stems from the sinner’s dependence on his priestly work. In his Christologia, Owen makes a significant observation that with the advent of sin, the natural or moral law can no longer function as the immediate rule of acceptable obedience to God. True evangelical obedience can now only grow out of faith in the redemptive mediator, the grace we receive by him, and the particular motives his saving work provides for our loving obedience to God.[26] In other words, the reality of sin dictates that both the rule of moral obedience and the means for its fulfilment now necessarily lie directly in the hands of God’s appointed mediator. The obligations of the natural law may still stand—and Christ undoubtedly continues to uphold them—but his mediatorial authority is now interposed by God as the direct foundation for all evangelical obedience.[27]

In his Hebrews commentary, Owen eloquently illustrates this point with specific reference to Christian worship. Whereas before the fall Adam’s worship was in a very real sense offered immediately in its own right, under the rule of God’s natural and positive law sin has now ruined any possibility of offering acceptable worship to God without the perfect, representative, and sacrificial priesthood of Christ. Christ has effectively undertaken to fulfil the office of true worship on a sinner’s behalf.[28] Accordingly, at a later point Owen argues it is only with “full assurance of faith” in the complete, final efficacy of his priestly work that we may now approach God acceptably (Heb 10:22; cf. 11:6). Indeed, the exercise of faith being necessary in every particular duty of our worship, he adds, “Without this no outward solemnity of worship, no exercise of it will avail us.”[29]

Consequently, Owen can refer to Christ as the uniquely glorious cause of all Christian worship in three distinct but inseparable respects. As God, equal with the Father, his sheer divine authority provides the “absolute” or “ultimate” formal reason for worship. Hence Stephen rightly prays to Christ (Acts 7:59), even as we pray to the Father. Secondly, as incarnate mediator he is the “immediate” formal reason inasmuch as it is “he who hath procured acceptance for us, who pleads our cause, manageth our affairs, justifies our persons, and prevails for grace and mercy.”[30] As priest, Christ not only satisfies the sinner’s outstanding obligation for pure and undefiled worship, but now enables the church’s worship—still tarnished by the lingering effects of the fall—to be thoroughly acceptable in God’s sight. In other words, a sinner’s utter dependency on the vicarious priesthood of Christ is in large part why all worship is now immediately grounded in his specific mediatorial authority which the Father has granted him as “son over his own house” (cf. Heb 3:6). But, finally, it is the inherent worth of this redemptive, mediatorial work—“his building of the house of God”—that furnishes the “great motive” of all the glory that will forever be exclusively ascribed to him (cf. Rev 5:8–13).[31] So eminent is the Son’s offering on behalf of sinners—this house built “without human hands”—that its inherent worth is no less than the precise means by which God has chosen to glorify his attributes in the new creation (Heb 3:3–6).[32] Therefore, any value in Christian worship is exclusively tied up with the inherent dignity of his priestly work. If the whole body rejoices when “any one member” is honored (1 Cor 12:26), Owen exclaims, how much do “all the members” of this body or house “have cause to rejoice in this unspeakable honour and glory of their head, whence all their honour in particular doth flow!”[33]

With Christ now the eminently glorious cause of true worship after the fall, Owen can therefore conclude, “It is but one and the same worship that is given unto the Lamb and to him that sits upon the throne, even the Father.”[34] That is to say, if communion with God’s “holy majesty” is a chief end of worship, its possibility after the fall lies exclusively under the domain of Christ and faith in his priestly work.[35]

It is true that the immediacy of Christ’s authority in worship has been radically heightened with the Son’s appearance in the flesh, and the final accomplishment of his priestly work. Indeed, so long as the “first tabernacle was standing,” there is a real sense in which the “way into the Most Holy Place was not yet made manifest,” to use the language of Heb 9:8. As Owen explains, the “way” into the presence of God did not actually exist until the Son assumed flesh and made atonement for sin. Of course, immediately after the fall, God instituted various new ordinances of worship, beginning with the first appointment of sacrifices hinted at in the approval of Abel’s offering (Gen 4:4), through to the elaborate institutions of the Sinai covenant.[36] And these were undoubtedly designed to prefigure and represent in type the priesthood of Christ. On the grounds of the eternal covenant of redemption, their divine appointment provided a virtual communication of the benefit Christ would actually procure in the flesh.[37] Yet their very elaborateness and burdensome nature only served to highlight that they were not the reality to which they pointed, and contained no actual efficacy in and of themselves. Consequently, Owen repeatedly highlights the privilege of NT worship and its ordinances; specifically in the way they provide far more immediate access to the “most holy place,” opened up by Christ.[38] The stipulations of the gospel may not in themselves be the “way” into this place—who is Christ alone—yet unlike the old covenant institutions, they provide a “plain declaration and manifestation” of the “way,” how we may use it, and by it, confidently enter into the most holy place.[39]

3. Prophet

Finally, aside from the accomplishment of his priestly work, Owen thinks the Son’s eventual incarnation also serves to secure the immediacy of his communication or prophetic revelation to the church. Owen makes this point in reference to Heb 1:1–2. Whereas in the past, God spoke through the prophets, and delivered the Law through Moses, in these last days, the Son has directly communicated the gospel to us through his very own humanity.[40] Owen describes Christ as the “single author” of “this theology,” by which he means everything pertaining to the NT administration of the church.[41] When Christ commissions people to make disciples who will obey everything he has commanded (Matt 28:18–20), Owen takes him to mean precisely that:[42] Christ declares his authority is both exclusive and sufficient for regulating the affairs of the NT church, including its ordinances of worship. Inspired Scripture may well be his sole chosen vehicle for revealing those ordinances, but the immediate communication of the Son in “these last days” furnishes a hermeneutical axiom that effectively limits any “scripture” or so-called “regulative” “principle” regarding worship to the specific injunctions of the incarnate Son, alongside his apostolic eye-witnesses and emissaries. Therefore, to re-erect OT patterns of worship on the grounds they are taught in Scripture would entail a direct violation of the Son’s express wish to end these things in establishing new patterns for his church.[43]

Of course, none of this is to suggest the Son had no immediate authority over his church prior to his incarnation. Owen assumes that from the very first promise to Adam in the Garden, “the Son of God did, in an especial manner, undertake the care of the church.”[44] And for all the relative indirectness of the Son’s OT manifestations and communication—having delegated a certain authority to Moses and the like—Owen is emphatic that Christ was still “immediately present with the church, requiring obedience in the name and majesty of God.”[45] But there is an undeniably greater immediacy to Christ’s rule over the NT church and its worship, both in terms of what he has accomplished in the flesh, and in respect of what he has directly commanded.[46]

III. Some Implications: Nature, Grace, and Christian Liberty in Public Worship

Drawing all this together, then, here is how Owen sums up the general case for Christ’s immediate authority over Christian worship:

Christ alone is the author, institutor, and appointer, in a way of authority and legislation, of the gospel church-state, its order, rule, and worship, with all things constantly and perpetually belonging thereunto, or necessary to be observed therein.[47]

What are the implications Owen sees in this principle? One of the most significant corollaries is his conclusion that God has left no substantial aspect of Christian worship to the immediate civil rule of human beings or, indeed, the natural law. Even if some gospel ordinances happen to be agreeable to the natural law—such as the moral obligation to gather together to worship, pray, and sing God’s praises—the “formal reason” of our observance must ultimately be the authority of Christ and his express appointment.[48]

Here it is interesting to compare Owen’s position with that of someone like the Elizabethan Anglican Richard Hooker. While Hooker affirmed the reality of a mystical and invisible church made up of everyone elect to salvation in Christ, he also insisted that the visible, political order of the church’s worship, its external rites, manner of government and discipline, are not necessary doctrines of faith and salvation. On that basis, these things may be left to the domain of God’s natural law and its human application, albeit guided by the general light of Scripture.[49] As Torrance Kirby and, more recently, Bradford Littlejohn have argued, this reflects a nuanced, overlapping dialectic Hooker sees between the true, spiritual—but essentially inward and invisible—worship shaped solely by the light of grace and the rule of Scripture, versus the outward and visible expression of worship occurring within the realm of nature.[50] According to Kirby, Hooker understands the relationship between these two dimensions of the church—its mystical or spiritual reality and its visible or political form—in an analogous fashion to the two natures of Christ.[51] Following the Chalcedonian paradigm, these two realities are at once bound together, but without any confusion of their distinct properties. Both are ultimately subject to God’s rule, but in different modes: the spiritual subject to revealed supernatural law, the political subject to natural law. Nevertheless, Kirby argues, for Hooker there is a communicatio idiomatum of sorts, which accents the downward priority of the spiritual reality over the outward political form, such that “Lawes humane must be made according to the generall Lawes of nature,” but “without contradiction unto any positive law in scripture. Otherwise they are ill made.”[52]

While Owen insists the rule of Christ immediately governs all substantial aspects of worship whether in its inward or outward dimensions, like Hooker, he is not at all unaware of the challenge to integrate coherently the realms of nature and grace in considering its public, visible expression. It is worth exploring the way he understands this interface in a little more detail.

To begin with, Owen certainly does not think the immediacy of Christ’s rule requires his followers to forego all use of natural reason in their Christian life and practices of worship.[53] Owen illustrates this with reference to a well-known distinction between the explicitly prescribed “ordinances” of public worship and the “circumstances” of their use. Metaphysically speaking, the ordinances pertain to the “substance” of worship, whilst the circumstances are merely “accidentary.” As he explains, an accidental circumstance necessarily accompanies some substantial action as an action. In other words, an action of worship “cannot be without them.”[54] For instance, if public prayer is a substantial part of worship, the time and physical location of this activity is a necessary circumstance. Such circumstances are a matter of indifference, he insists, and do not form a substantial part of the worship itself.[55] Accordingly, then, any circumstance belonging to the “government, order, rule, and worship of the church, or for the due improvement of things in themselves indifferent unto its edification, as occasion shall require” may be guided by the “light of nature.”[56] This kind of distinction recognizes that however much the substance of public worship issues from the supernatural light of grace and Christ’s express rule, the ordinances he prescribes are not somehow disconnected from the pre-existing world of nature and reason.[57] Rather, they are set within a mutually dependent relationship of substance and accident, without confusion, or indeed, separation: just as no accident can exist apart from its inherence in a particular substance, so too no substance actually exists without some accidents.

Owen, therefore, readily concedes that any necessary accident to a prescribed ordinance of worship may safely be guided by natural wisdom. Nevertheless, he still believes this liberty over the circumstances ought to be directed by the “general rules” of Scripture.[58] The light of grace takes precedence over the light of nature—not by overturning its judgments, by perfecting them instead.[59] Indeed, Owen sees no reason why the circumstances may not themselves be engaged in the expression of spiritual worship. Consistent with the nature of Christ’s immediate authority over all aspects of worship, Owen insists the spiritual exercise of ordinances, as well as their capacity to produce genuine edification, do not ultimately depend on the natural abilities of the minister or worshiper but upon the spiritual graces Christ provides to that end.[60] As we shall see further below, the minister needs to be spiritually gifted for his office. And if participants are to derive any spiritual nourishment from public worship, they need the regenerative grace of faith. Nonetheless, when discussing the spiritual gifts necessary for “external” or vocalized prayer, for instance—whether that prayer be in private or in public—Owen is well aware that there is a “stock of natural abilities” into which these gifts are “planted.” However spiritual it may be, no prayer can be uttered apart from the natural endowments of “invention, judgment, memory, elocution,” and the like. Indeed, the range of different natural skills is what furnishes a healthy variety “in the outward modes and circumstances” of this ordinance.[61] Once again, the spiritual fruit of public prayer—the edification of God’s people—does not depend on these natural skills, but upon the Spirit’s assistance and the requisite spiritual gift, much as a preacher’s natural rhetorical ability in itself makes no essential contribution to the spiritual effectiveness of his ministry.[62] On the other hand, Owen readily grants that a spiritual gift may well turn “the nature of those abilities into itself, and modifieth them according unto its own efficacy and virtue.”[63]

In other words, Owen does seem open to the possibility that a purely natural circumstance can be “spiritualized by grace,” and for all its merely accidental character, somehow engaged in the substantial act of worship—after all, the natural ability is no less a gift of God as well. As Owen is careful to qualify, it is not that the natural ability or circumstance somehow modifies or enhances the spiritual gift itself.[64] Rather, his point seems to be that the spiritual reality of worship can be genuinely expressed through the natural abilities and circumstances, in a way that accents and displays the true excellency of the spiritual gift. As he asks,

Why should not men use in the service and worship of God what God hath [naturally] given them that they may be able to serve and worship him? Yea, it setteth off the use and excellency of this spiritual gift, that in the exercise of it we may use and act our natural endowments and abilities, as spiritualized by grace.[65]

Of course, if a person should use a natural gift in a self-seeking fashion, “in competition” with a spiritual gift, as it were, no such benefit would accrue. But where believers’ natural endowments are engaged constructively in service of the supernatural gift, Owen thinks it can actually have the effect of focusing their whole soul more intently on the spiritual duty, from where the spiritual nourishment will ultimately arise.[66]

This willingness to acknowledge a connection between the spiritual, supernatural reality of public worship and its outward, natural circumstances may explain why Owen is comfortable to suggest appropriate postures of prayer. “Lifting up our eyes and hands towards heaven upon our thoughts of him, and sometimes the casting down of our whole persons before him,” he remarks, are fitting bodily expressions of “deep thoughts with reverence.”[67] Indeed, “invocations or prayers, vows, and sacred, solemn entreaties of the divine power, as present, all-seeing and ruling,” naturally “express” (exprimunt) the inward affections of “moral worship.” “Simply and almost naturally, [these things] also exhibit themselves in genuflections, bodily prostrations, adorations, being perceived in other similar external manifestations of the soul as well.”[68] Of course, the posture of prayer is something purely circumstantial, and therefore, a matter of natural liberty. In a similar fashion, Owen can also refer to the NT practices of foot washing and the “holy kiss” as entirely voluntary “sanctified” appropriations of “civil customs” to express Christian brotherly love.[69] By contrast, Christ’s specific institution of something like the commonplace elements for the Lord’s Supper incorporates them into a mandatory ordinance of public worship.[70] But the same principle applies. It is not that bread and wine can actually communicate any spiritual benefit themselves, any more than the ultimate effectiveness of prayer somehow turns on one’s bodily posture. They are but “empty cisterns,” as one of Owen’s contemporaries puts it.[71] But just as the posture of prayer may express the spiritual reality and engage our souls more intently on the task, so too our tangible, sensory participation in the natural elements of the Supper can both express and engage faith’s “spiritual sense” of its object, Christ.[72]

Like Hooker, then, Owen is concerned to uphold the inseparable connection between the supernatural and natural elements of public worship, both in a way that retains their distinct integrity whilst affirming the priority of the spiritual reality. Yet, as we have just seen in relation to the sacraments, Owen does not think every aspect pertaining to the visible form of public worship is purely accidental or circumstantial, however “natural” it may otherwise be. Something ceases to be a circumstantial accident, Owen says, when it is no longer a mere accompaniment to a substantial action of worship as an action. Clearly, for instance, the appointment of bread and wine as representations of Christ and the gospel promises “have no other foundation in reason or the light of nature.”[73] These are not natural accidents of the gospel proclamation itself, but direct—albeit voluntary or arbitrary—impositions of Christ, and, accordingly, have become a “substantial” (albeit visible) part of worship. But it is also possible, Owen contends, for governments, ministers, and worshipers to impose arbitrary actions of their own which in themselves have no natural or necessary circumstantial relationship to a substantial ordinance of worship.[74] Language, posture, time, and location may be necessary circumstances of prayer, but the use of an image is not, nor is it commanded by Christ—if anything, Scripture expressly forbids images. Therefore, to Owen’s mind, the imposition of ceremonies, images, vestments, incense, and the like—as if their own avowed symbolism is deemed necessary to aid or enhance the act of prayer—has the effect of incorporating them into the very substance of the worshipful act.[75]

This is precisely the point where Owen’s divergence from someone like Hooker is most pronounced. Whereas Hooker regards the Act of Uniformity with its imposition of The Book of Common Prayer as a straightforward application of natural and civil law to the propriety and order of worship (not least, for the benefit of society at large), Owen has a very different take on the Act’s later incarnation in 1662. With the legal imposition of a set form of prayer, Owen believes something purely arbitrary has illegitimately intruded into the substance of Christian worship. Of course, he knew full well that the newly re-established Church of England did not necessarily claim Prayer Book liturgy adds to or affects the inner spiritual substance of the gospel ordinances—prayer, preaching, the sacraments, and the like—but instead considered it as something pertaining merely to the outward, public circumstances of their use. Liturgy simply brought “decency and order” to the ordinances; after all, this is a principle Christ explicitly commanded through his apostle, is it not (cf. 1 Cor 14:40)? To Owen’s mind, however, a prescribed form of words cannot be claimed as a necessary accident of worship. Public prayer needs a form of words, a certain posture, a location, to be sure, but not any binding prescriptions regarding these things. Consequently, the natural principle of “decency and order,” which does indeed regulate those accidental circumstances of prayer, allows for liberty in its application from one context to the next. In other words, Christ has sanctioned the precise form of words to be a matter of relative freedom and indifference, subject to the rule of natural law. To impose a prescription like this on worshipers, where Christ has permitted freedom, unlawfully intrudes on the very substance of worship. Indeed, since Christ has not impressed the Prayer Book on the consciences of his worshipers, such an imposition has the effect of turning this “common prayer” into a matter of pure civil obedience and no more, “which seems inconsistent with the nature of the worship of God.”[76]

As we have seen, this is the chief issue for Owen. Christ alone possesses the immediate authority to bind the consciences of worshipers, and thus to determine what is substantial or essential to worship, versus what is purely circumstantial and open to the liberty of natural wisdom. Arbitrary additions, where they are introduced to aid or improve an act of worship, represent an illegitimate incursion on his rule. In practice, this may look like a “regulative” or “scripture” principle, inasmuch as Scripture is Christ’s chosen instrument of authority. But this is not mere biblicism, nor does it suggest a naïve disregard for the complex inter-relationship between grace and nature in public worship. For Owen, the issue is ultimately a christological one, driven by his exegesis of Scripture, not least key texts in the book of Hebrews which point to Christ’s unique and exclusive authority to regulate the substance of Christian worship as “son over his own house.”

However, what if a minister or worshiper freely chooses to incorporate liturgy or a set form of words in the administration of an instituted gospel ordinance—as a mere circumstance? As Owen indicates in his Discourse Concerning Liturgies, the chief concern he has with the Prayer Book is its legally binding imposition on worship, transposing it into something substantial rather than circumstantial.[77] But concerning the voluntary practice of using set forms itself, he does not seem to harbor nearly the same reservations as he does towards other customs, such as the use of images or vestments, which to his mind much more readily conflict with Scripture and the proper spiritual simplicity of gospel worship.[78] Owen certainly appears ambivalent to the practice at best, but there is nothing “of intrinsical evil” in the composition of prayers. Indeed, he concedes they may be useful as a “directive and doctrinal” help to others “as to the matter and method to be used” in discharging the duty of prayer. They may also offer valuable aids to inform meditation and prayer itself, although he wryly adds, “I must acknowledge I never heard any expressing any great benefit which they had received thereby”![79] He even refrains from judging the consciences of those who happily embrace this practice, or the specific use of the Prayer Book in public worship.[80] Consistent with the principle of liberty regarding the circumstances of prayer, Owen is content to give scope to the judgment of individual conscience on this matter, provided a practice is “not contrary unto, or inconsistent with, or … in a way exclusive of” the Holy Spirit’s work in prayer.[81] Indeed, here we get a hint of precisely the theological motivation behind Owen’s tireless efforts to promote the cause of toleration after 1662—to uphold liberty of conscience in worship where Christ himself has allowed it.[82] That said, despite desiring to maintain a certain degree of principled indifference to the gratuitous incorporation of set forms, Owen’s determined aversion to their imposition, or even simply to an over-reliance upon them, stems from another dimension he sees to Christ’s authority over Christian worship. It is to this subjective dimension that we now turn, and the implications this has for the use of set forms will become apparent in due course.

IV. The Subjective Application of Christ’s Authority

If much of what we have seen so far concerns Owen’s desire to defend Christ’s objective right of immediate authority over worship, it remains for us to consider how he thinks this immediate rule is actually put into effect, subjectively. As Owen notices in the so-called “Great Commission,” not only does Christ command exclusive allegiance from his subjects, but he also promises his ongoing presence: “lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world” (Matt 28:20). “All the benefits and blessings,” Owen says,

all the comfort and use of church assemblies and communion, depend alone on the promise of the presence of Christ with them. Thence doth all the authority that may be exercised in them proceed, and thence doth the efficacy of what they do unto the edification of the souls of men arise and flow.[83]

Of course, as a beneficiary of the Augustinian tradition, Owen believes the experience of Christ’s divine presence is always mediated through its created effects. No creature can ever directly experience or know Christ in his divine essence, but only through some created means.[84] Nonetheless, Owen remains adamant that the means by which Christ’s presence is experienced in worship still fall under his immediate authority.

There are two notable features of Owen’s ecclesiology worth singling out to demonstrate how he thinks Christ perpetuates this presence within the essence and affairs of the church. Both these features can be illustrated in connection with the two kinds of graces Owen deems Christ to have provided the church for its ongoing existence in the world. Consistent with what we have seen, Owen maintains the “supreme cause” for the church’s continual existence is the Father’s grant of a “perpetual kingdom in this world unto Jesus Christ,” manifesting itself in spiritually regenerated subjects who in every age visibly seek to profess their faith and worship in particular churches or congregations.[85] Accordingly, the way Christ extends his kingdom is specifically through the “dispensation and communication of the Spirit,” with the various graces he grants to the church.[86] As Owen puts it in his posthumously published Discourse of Spiritual Gifts (1692), it is Christ’s person, vested with his mediatorial offices, which is the “immediate fountain” of all the spiritual grace necessary for the church’s being and organization.[87] And at various points in this treatise, he will differentiate this spiritual administration of Christ’s “kingly power” according to the internal and external form of the church. So on the one hand, the Spirit preserves the inward reality of the church by continually communicating “effectual saving grace unto the elect,” drawing them into spiritual union with Christ.[88] Through participating in this grace “men become members of this church, and no otherwise.” This is how the “professing church” is “quickened and enabled unto profession in an acceptable manner.”[89] On the other hand, the Spirit furnishes spiritual gifts on the “professing church to render it visible in a way as whereby God is glorified.” In other words, if saving grace “gives an invisible life to the church,” spiritual gifts provide the church with its proper “organical” shape as a visible, professing community.[90] How, then, do these particular spiritual graces mediate the ongoing sovereign presence of Christ within the church’s worship?

1. Saving Grace

Let us first consider the nature of “saving grace.” In his Discourse of Spiritual Gifts, a chief distinctive of saving grace vis-à-vis the spiritual gifts is its supernatural work in renovating the whole soul, “enabling it in all its powers and faculties to act obediently unto God.” In itself, saving grace is specifically a “habit” disposing the soul to act in “faith, love, and holiness in all things.” Indeed, it is no less than a restoration of the image of God “to make us like unto him.” By contrast, spiritual gifts generally only touch the mind or understanding, and have no renewing effect on the whole soul.[91]

The depiction of saving grace as a habit is instructive, not least because elsewhere Owen will spell out the significance of such a habit in the perpetual existence of particular church congregations as the proper context for public worship. In his late ecclesiological treatise, An Inquiry into the Original, Nature, Institution, Power, Order, and Communion of Evangelical Churches (1681), Owen discusses the causes and means for the origin and continuation of the “church-state,” with the promise of Matt 28:17–20 quite explicitly in view.[92] We have already noticed that the “supreme cause” is the Father’s donation of a kingdom to Christ. But Owen also lists a number of “means,” which depend on several things “in believers themselves.” Arguably, chief amongst these means is what he calls the “instinct of the new creature,” or as he explains, “the inward principles and inclinations which, by his Spirit and grace, he hath implanted in the hearts of them that believe.”[93] Elsewhere he refers to this as the “quickening principle” of the soul, by which he undoubtedly intends the gracious habit infused within a person upon their regeneration.[94]

Modern Protestants have sometimes assumed that any notion of infused habits disappeared from Protestant theology at the Reformation, or at least was radically modified with its desire to speak of God’s grace chiefly in terms of his merciful actions towards sinners rather than some infused substance. Whilst there is an element of truth here, the fact is this kind of language quickly emerged again in Protestant discourse in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but in a revised fashion that retained the distinctively Protestant emphases on the gracious activity of God and the forensic rather than sacramental nature of justification.[95] In scholastic parlance, of course, it is not strictly correct to describe infused grace as a “substance.” It is, in fact, an “accidental quality” which the Spirit inheres within a person’s soul at his conversion. It does not so much add to or change the substance of their soul but gives it new characteristics and capacities. And Reformed writers like Owen recognized the usefulness of this concept to underscore the radical and permanent qualitative difference regeneration makes to a Christian: they are no less than a new creature.[96]

Owen shapes his understanding of this infused habit around various texts which speak of the formation of Christ’s very life and image—together with his gospel word—within regenerate believers (e.g., John 15:5; 2 Cor 3:3; Col 3:3–4, 16; Gal 2:20; Jas 1:18, 21; 1 Pet 1:23). As I have argued elsewhere, Owen thinks the qualitative formation of the word within a believer’s soul illumines the mind with its truth and heals the will of its sinful resistance, enabling a person to recognize and respond to the very same truth as it is read and proclaimed in Scripture. If the light of nature consists in the habitual formation of the natural law within the soul, enabling a person to recognize its material demands, the light of grace enables a person to respond with faith and obedience to Christ’s mediatorial rule as it is expressed in the gospel word.[97]

To Owen’s mind, this infused habit of grace irresistibly directs a regenerate person to heed all the obligations of Christ, including the requirement to gather in church fellowships and engage in all the ordinances of public worship.[98] As he puts it,

The laws of Christ in and unto his church, as unto all outward obedience, are suited unto those inward principles and inclinations which, by his Spirit and grace, he hath implanted in the hearts of them that believe. Hence his yoke is easy, and his commandments are not grievous.[99]

By immediately infusing this habit through his Spirit, Christ creates a kind of perspicuous interface between the objective medium of his rule—the inspired word—and the subjective means—the habit—by which that rule is put into effect in his subjects. The infused habit of grace, together with the Spirit’s effectual concurrence enables a believer to enjoy spiritual communion with God in the duties of worship. Here is how he brings these together in “The Nature and Beauty of Gospel Worship”:

It is the Holy Ghost that works in believers faith, love, delight, fervency, watchfulness, perseverance;—all those graces that give the soul communion with God in his worship,—and in Christ renders their prayers effectual. He doth this radically, by begetting, creating, ingenerating them in the hearts of believers, in the first infusion of the new, spiritual, vital principle with which they are endued when they are born of him; and also by acting, exciting, and stirring them up in every duty of the worship of God that they are called unto; so enabling them to act according to the mind of God.[100]

Arguably the nature of this grace influences the way Owen thinks about ecclesiastical power. This was a significant point of contention in seventeenth-century Britain, of course, as a complex variety of ecclesiastical models vied for general acceptance.[101] In Owen’s view, the “essential” power of the church for its existence and constitution always remains with local congregations comprised of those spiritually regenerated subjects who sense their duty to Christ to gather voluntarily for public worship and exercise the instituted ordinances.[102] The problem is, the ordinances of worship clearly cannot be administered by all members of the church at once, so how do particular individuals come to assume that right in a way that preserves Christ’s immediate authority over his subjects? To Owen’s mind, if elders were simply imposed on a congregation by a diocesan bishop or some national assembly without their consent, this would necessarily interfere with the immediacy of Christ’s rule over that congregation.[103] Consequently, Owen believes the essential power of any fellowship of regenerate believers finally extends, under the guidance of Scripture, to the recognition and appointment of gifted elders or “ordinary officers” who may lawfully administer the ordinances of worship.[104] In this respect, Christ intends that the legitimacy of a minister’s appointment always depends on the essential power he has given immediately to the church as a whole.[105]

But then, does this mean Christ somehow relinquishes his immediate authority over ministerial appointment to the essential power of the congregation? It is true that Christ effects his rule and establishes his desired structure of congregational worship through the medium of his habitually regenerated subjects, who follow his directions and put that structure in place. Christ’s divine presence is always a mediated presence, as we said before. Nonetheless, Owen certainly does not mean that Christ thereby surrenders his rule to those subjects as if they can somehow exercise their power of appointment on their own, ex opere operantis, as it were. To start with, we have already seen that the habit of grace within each regenerate believer depends on the effectual concursus of Christ’s Spirit in its specific acts.[106] No habit—individually or collectively considered—can act on its own without Christ. And therefore, no ministerial appointment can occur without the immediate concursus of Christ’s Spirit. What is more, Owen is clear that the appointment of elders does not so much consist in the conferral of power from congregation to minister, but in the congregation’s recognition of the one whom Christ has specifically gifted for the task.[107] Obviously this raises all the usual questions about the precise interface between Christ’s divine sovereignty and the voluntary decisions of his subjects. But the point is, the actual choice of elders always remains under Christ’s immediate control, even if it operates through the medium of the church’s essential power, or the habitual grace he has collectively infused into its members.

What if a church makes a bad appointment, or indeed, is saddled with a minister they do not want—has Christ somehow lost control of the church’s affairs? We will consider this question towards the end of this article; suffice it to say for now that Owen is well aware of the difference between the de jure ideal—the way things ought to be—and de facto reality, or the way things often are.

2. Spiritual Gifts

But if the legitimacy of a minister’s appointment always depends on Christ’s immediate rule over the members of a congregation, it is also the case—as we have just begun to see—that Owen thinks an elder receives his power of office directly from Christ and the spiritual gifts he dispenses for their ministry.[108] This second feature of Owen’s ecclesiology distinguishes his Congregationalism from the thoroughly “democratical” models of more radical seventeenth-century separatists, who believed any elder’s authority is only ever delegated from the power vested in the congregation as a whole.[109] Like his fellow moderate Independents who authored the famous tract presented before Parliament in 1644, An Apologeticall Narration, Owen’s concern is to uphold yet again the immediacy of Christ’s rule over the church’s affairs and corporate worship.[110]

Echoing earlier influential Reformed thinkers such as William Ames, Owen divides his extensive discussion of spiritual gifts into “extraordinary” and “ordinary” gifts.[111] The extraordinary gifts and offices were particularly critical for the first spiritual establishment of Christ’s kingdom and the doctrinal confirmation of the gospel. They have since given way to the ordinary gifts which Christ bestows on all believers, not least a congregation’s appointed elders and ministers. Once again, Owen is concerned to underline Christ’s sovereignty over the exercise of these gifts. If the spiritual gifts required by appointed officers to perform the ordinances of worship are not derived from the church itself but granted to them directly by Christ, neither does Owen think these gifts are given to ministers for them to begin wielding their power ex opere operantis. Even in the case of an extraordinary office like that of an apostle, the power of the spiritual gifts is strictly instrumental or ministerial, not autocratical,[112] as Owen is often wont to point out, paraphrasing the apostle in 2 Corinthians: “No men can be lords of our faith, though they may be ‘helpers of our joy’” (cf. 2 Cor 1:24).[113] What this means, then, is the spiritual effectiveness of an elder’s ministry in nourishing Christian faith and edifying the church is always dependent on the grace and presence of Christ, and—certainly in the case of ordinary officers—is limited by what Christ has explicitly ordained in his written word.[114] Ministers should expect no blessing for introducing ordinances that Christ has not expressly condoned, and nor should they suppose Christ will honor their ministry if they fail to exercise the ordinances in dependence on him, and in the manner he has objectively set out in Scripture.[115] In other words, both the spiritual gift and the direction of Scripture are entirely sufficient to enable a minister to perform the ordinances and apply an appropriate degree of natural wisdom to their circumstances. Indeed, to return to an earlier observation, this is precisely the reason Owen expresses reserve about a minister’s over-reliance on set forms of liturgical prayer (even, perhaps, without their external imposition). To lean excessively on set prayers not explicitly warranted as necessary in Scripture could impugn the sufficiency of the gift, he thinks, and might lead a minister to a lazy neglect of his duty.

As a final observation, Owen is well aware that many churches fall short of demonstrating faithfulness to Christ’s rule over their affairs and worship. In the worst of these situations, it may well be that Christ has removed his “candlestick,” as it were (cf. Rev 1:20), and departed from their midst.[116] Indeed, Owen is open to the possibility that at certain points in history, the state of public worship may become so dire that the faithful visible church may almost entirely recede from view.[117] Even so, Owen appears to concede that in many cases, Christ may well stay sovereignly committed to a church—notwithstanding their self-reliance, poor appointments, or unauthorized practices and impositions—so long as they retain some remnants of true worship. A “de facto” declension in the celebration of divine worship need not “prove that there was a total failure” in the constitution of a church.[118] Owen actually prefers to remain somewhat agnostic on this question:

I do not know how far God may accept of churches in a very corrupt state, and of worship much depraved, until they have new means for their reformation; nor will I make any judgment of persons, as unto their eternal condition, who walk in churches so corrupted, and in the performance of worship so depraved.

Of course, “it is a damnable sin,” he adds, for those “who know them to be so corrupted and depraved … to join with them or not to separate from them, Rev 18:4.”[119]

In any event, however, Owen is confident nothing will thwart Christ’s kingly rule and promises to his church. Accordingly, Christ will always necessarily preserve an unspecified number of sincere believers who will “openly profess subjection and obedience unto him.” And so long as this is the case, these true subjects retain an “indefeasible right” and obligation not only to gather in congregations, Owen insists, but also continually to reform their worship in light of Christ’s command, whatever its de facto state.[120]

V. Conclusion

Whatever may be said for the historical provenance of a regulative or Scripture principle, for Owen the question of what is permissible in public worship is not merely a matter of Protestant biblicism, but ultimately an issue of Christology. Owen believes that, as the appointed “heir of all things,” the Son’s exclusive messianic domain necessarily extends as far as the individual worshiper’s conscience. With the possibility of offering acceptable natural worship now well-and-truly defunct, the Son’s peculiar authority stems from an eternal decision to assume a mediatorial office wherein these obligations would be met by him in the flesh, on the sinner’s behalf. Accordingly, while Christ’s divinity ultimately undergirds his jurisdiction over the worshiper, his messianic accomplishments and specific prophetic instruction provide the immediate and sufficient focus of all Christian faith and obedience. To Owen’s mind, this principle gives proper redemptive-historical clarity to the hermeneutical application of scriptural injunctions to worship, and furnishes the context in which genuine Christian liberty can flourish. Christ directly determines what is necessary for worship in the NT church—in respect to both its inward reality and outward, public expression—and in doing so, delineates what is purely a matter for natural, circumstantial liberty. Any further impositions on worship impugn both the right and sufficiency of Christ’s rule and unlawfully intrude on Christian freedom.

With trademark theological precision, Owen is meticulous in exploring how this objective principle is consistently upheld within the subjective reality of Christian experience and congregational life. For Owen, Christ preserves his immediate authority over Christian worship through a perpetual, spiritual presence amidst his people. On the one hand, the grace of regeneration provides a direct, perspicuous interface between each believer and the instruction Christ has left in Scripture, regulating Christian obedience even as far as determining the shape of the church’s corporate life. In conjunction with Christ’s effectual concursus, this grace equips his people to identify gifted elders who may lawfully administer the ordinances within each congregation, according to the guidance of Scripture. On the other hand, lest he somehow be thought to relinquish the power of Christian leadership to the suffrage of his people, Owen feels it is equally important to maintain that Christ grants the necessary gifts of ministry directly to those appointed elders.

Marked by theological rigor and keen exegetical insight, Owen’s thoroughly christological vision for worship belies the usual caricatures of Puritan “regulative principle logic.” This is no blunt, legalistic imposition of scriptural authority to the denial or detriment of natural gifts, wisdom, or freedom, but a straight-forward acknowledgement of Christ’s right to determine the affairs of his people, whom he sufficiently empowers to submit willingly and gladly to his rule.

Notes

Joel R. Beeke and Mark Jones, A Puritan Theology: Doctrine for Life (Grand Rapids: Reformation Heritage, 2012), 662.
See the posthumously published discourse, John Owen, An Answer unto Two Questions: with Twelve Arguments against any Conformity of Members of Separate Churches to the National Church, in The Works of John Owen, ed. William H. Goold, 24 vols. (Edinburgh: Johnstone & Hunter, 1850–1855), 16:249; quoted in Beeke and Jones, Puritan Theology, 666. References to The Works of John Owen will hereafter be abbreviated Works with volume and page number.
For some recent criticism along these lines, see W. Bradford Littlejohn, “Sola Scriptura and the Public Square: Richard Hooker and a Protestant Paradigm for Political Engagement,” in The Bible: Culture, Community, Society, ed. Angus Paddison and Neil Messer (London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2013), esp. 213–14. The phrase “regulative principle logic” was coined by Littlejohn; see Littlejohn: “‘The Edification of the Church’: Richard Hooker’s Theology of Worship and the Protestant Inward/Outward Disjunction,” Perichoresis 12, no. 1 (2014): 13n4.
Beeke and Jones seek to correct arguments along these lines from J. I. Packer and R. J. Gore concerning John Calvin (Puritan Theology, 663–66). Derek Thomas makes a similar case; Derek W. H. Thomas, “The Regulative Principle: Responding to Recent Criticism,” in Give Praise to God: A Vision for Reforming Worship, ed. Philip Graham Ryken, Derek W. H. Thomas, and J. Ligon Duncan III (Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian & Refomed, 2003), 78–84. Cf. J. I. Packer, A Quest for Godliness: The Puritan Vision of the Christian Life (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 1990), 245–49; R. J. Gore, Covenantal Worship: Reconsidering the Puritan Regulative Principle (Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian & Reformed, 2002), 93–95. Littlejohn also suggests a Puritan divergence from Calvin on this point (“Edification of the Church,” 13n4).
Some of the substantial secondary literature that has appeared in recent times includes Henry M. Knapp, “John Owen’s Interpretation of Hebrews 6:4–6: Eternal Perseverance of the Saints in Puritan Exegesis,” Sixteenth Century Journal 34 (2003): 29–52; John W. Tweeddale, “John Owen’s Commentary on Hebrews in Context,” in The Ashgate Research Companion to John Owen’s Theology, ed. Kelly M. Kapic and Mark Jones (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012), 49–63; Lee Gatiss, “Adoring the Fullness of the Scriptures in John Owen’s Commentary on Hebrews” (PhD diss., University of Cambridge, 2014).
Tweeddale points to the influence of this epistle on his understanding of apostasy and the Sabbath (Tweeddale, “John Owen’s Commentary,” 54; cf. 52–55). The connection between Owen’s exegesis of Hebrews and his distinctive understanding of the Mosaic covenant is also indisputable. See, e.g., Mark Jones, “The ‘Old’ Covenant,” in Drawn into Controversie: Reformed Theological Diversity and Debates Within Seventeenth-Century British Puritanism, ed. Mark Jones and Michael A. G. Haykin (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2011), 183–203.
Owen, Works, 18:9.
Ibid., 18:1; cf. Tweeddale, “John Owen’s Commentary,” 57–61.
Owen, Works, 20:547–54; cf. 15:237, 454–55, 462–65; 486–89; 549–50; 16:65; 21:385.
Ibid., 15:4.
Ibid., 15:447. Cf. Westminster Confession of Faith, 21.1; Savoy Declaration, 22.1. Cf. also Girolamo Zanchi, Tractationum theologicarum volumen de statu peccati et legali: librum de operibus creatonis proxime sequens: & primam tractatus de redemptione (Neustadt: Harnisii, 1603), 250; William Ames, Medulla theologica (Amsterdam: Apud J. Janssonium, 1659), 2.5 (224–25); Petrus van Mastricht, Theoretico-practica theologia (Utrecht: W. van de Water, 1724), 6.8.17 (840a).
Compare, e.g., Petrus van Mastricht’s characteristically transparent way of putting it when describing the divinely prescribed duties of worship: Quae officia cultus instituti, quoad radicem & fundamentum suum, sint juris naturalis; quoad tamen particularem determinationem, sunt juris positivi, a solo arbitrio divino pendentis (Mastricht, Idea theologia moralis 2.13, in Theoretico-practica theologia, 1238).
Owen, Works, 19:344–47, 356. Cf. James Durham, The law unsealed, or, a practical exposition of the Ten Commandments. With a resolution of several momentous questions and cases of conscience (Edinburgh: Thomas Lumisden and John Robertson, 1735), 7, 215, 219, 231. There is, of course, some variety among Reformed thinkers concerning the extent to which the fourth commandment restates a natural or moral law and how much of it is merely ceremonial and positive. See the discussion in Beeke and Jones, Puritan Theology, 653–62. See, too, James T. Dennison Jr., The Market Day of the Soul: The Puritan Doctrine of the Sabbath in England, 1532–1700 (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1983); Keith L. Sprunger, “English and Dutch Sabbatarianism and the Development of Puritan Social Theology (1600–1660),” CH 51 (1982): 24–38.
Owen, Works, 15:472.
Ibid., 15:448; cf. 38. Cf. also Mastricht, Idea, 2.13.
Owen, Works, 15:8–9; cf. 447, 448–52.
These twin foundations of the Son’s messianic rule appear repeatedly throughout this discussion (ibid., 20:51–52, 54–55, 56; cf. 47–69). Of course, here the pactum salutis—which Owen explores extensively in the opening exercitations to the commentary—is never far from view. See further, e.g., Willem van Asselt, “Covenant Theology as Relational Theology: The Contributions of Johannes Cocceius (1603–1669) and John Owen (1616–1683) to a Living Reformed Theology,” in Ashgate Research Companion, 65–84.
Owen cites numerous OT references to illustrate (Owen, Works, 20:47–48).
Citing Matt 2:2, 6; 11:27; 28:18; John 5:22, 23; Acts 2:35, 36; 5:31; Rom 14:7–9; 1 Cor 15:25; Eph 1:20–22; Phil 2:9–11; Rev 5:12–14; 19:16 (Owen, Works, 20:48).
Ibid., 20:80–83; cf. 1:188–205. Trueman is right that Owen tends to avoid speculation about the order of decrees regarding election. Nonetheless, Owen’s emphasis on God’s plan to create a world with the express intention to glorify his attributes in salvation and the new creation certainly does appear to lean in a supralapsarian direction. See Carl R. Trueman, The Claims of Truth: John Owen’s Trinitarian Theology (Carlisle: Paternoster, 1998), 127–28.
Owen, Works, 20:59; see also 47–69.
Ibid., 20:63–67.
Ibid., 20:82–83.
Ibid., 20:63.
Ibid., 20:67–68.
Ibid., 1:134–39.
“God hath given unto the Lord Christ all power in his name, to require this obedience from all that receive the gospel. Others are left under the original authority of the Law, either as implanted in our natures at their first creation, as are the Gentiles; or as delivered by Moses and written in tables of stone, as it was with the Jews, Rom 2:12–15. But as unto them that are called unto the faith of the gospel, the authority of Christ doth immediately affect their minds and consciences. ‘He feeds’ or rules his people ‘in the strength of the LORD, in the majesty of the name of the LORD his God,’ Micah 5:4” (Owen, Works, 1:137).
Ibid., 21:411–15. Cf. also Owen’s comments in a sermon on Eph 2:18 entitled, “The Nature and Beauty of gospel Worship” (ibid., 9:67–69). On this, see also Ryan M. McGraw, A Heavenly Directory: Trinitarian Piety, Public Worship and Reassessment of John Owen’s Theology (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2014), 74–76, 180–82.
Owen, Works, 23:511; cf. 510–11; 15:230.
Ibid., 20:550.
Ibid., 20:551–52.
Ibid., 20:547–54.
Ibid., 20:554.
Ibid., 20:552. On the different respects in which Christ may be described as the object of worship, cf. James Durham, A commentarie upon the book of Revelation (Edinburgh: Christopher Higgins, 1658), 12–19.
Cf. Owen, Works, 15:473, 458. On the close connection Owen sees between worship and communion with the triune Persons, see McGraw, Heavenly Directory, 69–79, 178–82.
A large part of Owen’s substantial treatise Theologoumena pantodapa sive, de natura, ortu, progressu, et studio verae theologiae (1661) is devoted to outlining the gradual historical evolution of the covenant of grace prior to the Son’s incarnation—not least, with respect to the ordinances of worship (Owen, Works, 17:2–5). On this, see Sebastian Rehnman, Divine Discourse: The Theological Methodology of John Owen (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2002), 167–77.
Prior to the accomplishment of Christ’s priestly work, Owen remarks that the tabernacle “was not yet actually existent, but only was virtually so. The Lord Christ had not yet actually offered himself unto God nor made atonement for sin. Howbeit by virtue of the eternal agreement that was between the Father and him, concerning what he should accomplish in the fulness of time, the benefit of what he was so to do was applied unto them that did believe; they were saved by faith, even as we are” (Works, 23:240).
Ibid., 23:240–41, 371; cf. 9:79–84.
Ibid., 23:241.
Ibid., 21:22–23.
Auctor ideo theologiae evangelicae immediatus est ipse Jesus Christus, Filius Dei unigenitus. Concessimus quidem superius, omnem peccatorum theologiam aliquo sensu dici posse evangelicam. Etiam ejus utcunque administratae auctor primarius erat ipse Dei Filius.... At peculiaris administrationis respectu, ea solum theologia evangelica dicitur, quam ipse Dei Filius in persona sua, e sinu Patris egrediens, exposuit. Is ergo hujus theologiae auctor singularis; unde habet, quod, ut sit perfectissima, ita ultima Dei revelatio (ibid., 17:6.1.2).
Quoting these verses, he remarks that “authority is not only ascribed unto Jesus Christ in the Scripture, but it is enclosed unto him so as that no other can have any interest in it” (ibid., 15:237).
Cf. ibid., 17:6.7.8–9; 21:131–32.
Ibid., 1:88.
Ibid., 1:138. See also 17:6.1.2 (cf. n. 41 above).
Cf. ibid., 20:23–36.
Ibid., 25:244.
Ibid., 25:332, 478. “But it is evident,—First, that our Lord Jesus Christ being the king and head of his church, the lord over the house of God, nothing is to be done therein but with respect unto his authority.… Secondly, And that, therefore, the suitableness of any thing to right reason or the light of nature is no ground for a church-observation of it, unless it be also appointed and commanded in especial by Jesus Christ. Thirdly, that being so appointed and commanded, it becomes an especial institution of his, and as such is to be observed. So that in all things that are done, or to be done, with respect unto the worship of God in the church, the authority of Christ is always principally to be considered, and every thing to be observed as commanded by him, without which consideration it hath no place in the worship of God” (ibid., 25:479).
E.g., Richard Hooker, Of the Lawes of Ecclesiasticall Politie: Preface, Books I–IV, ed. W. Speed Hill, Folger Library Edition of the Works of Richard Hooker (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1977), 3.2–9 (207–39).
See, e.g., Torrance W. Kirby, Richard Hooker’s Doctrine of the Royal Supremacy (Leiden: Brill, 1990), 59–91; Kirby, Richard Hooker, Reformer and Platonist (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005); W. Bradford Littlejohn, The Peril and Promise of Christian Liberty: Richard Hooker, the Puritans, and Protestant Political Theology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2017), 166–74; Littlejohn, “Edification of the Church,” 13–14.
Kirby, Richard Hooker’s Doctrine, 66, 70, 74–79; Kirby, Richard Hooker, Reformer and Platonist, 90–95.
Kirby, Richard Hooker, Reformer and Platonist, 94, quoting Hooker, Of the Lawes: I–IV, 3.9.2 (237). Cf. Littlejohn, “Edification of the Church,” 13–14.
“The Lord Christ, in the institution of gospel churches, their state, order, rule, and worship, doth not require of his disciples that in their observance of his appointments they should cease to be men, or forego the use and exercise of their rational abilities, according to the rule of that exercise, which is the light of nature” (Owen, Works, 15:243).
Ibid., 15:35.
“These in themselves, nakedly considered, have in them neither good nor evil, nor are any circumstances in the worship of God, much less circumstantial parts of his worship, but only circumstances of those actions as actions whereby it is performed” (ibid., 15:36).
Ibid., 15:244.
As he puts it, “Religious actions in the worship of God are actions still. Their religious relation doth not destroy their natural being” (ibid., 15:35).
“There are in the Scripture general rules directing us, in the application of natural light, unto such a determination of all circumstances, in the acts of church rule and worship, as are sufficient for their performance ‘decently and in order’” (ibid., 15:244).
In his Meditations and Discourses on the Glory of Christ Owen remarks that “this new light [of grace] doth not abolish, blot out, or render useless, the other light of nature, as the sun, when it riseth, extinguisheth the light of the stars; but it directs it and rectifies it as unto its principle, object, and end” (ibid., 1:382). Cf. too his comments on the interface between spiritual illumination and natural reason in biblical interpretation (ibid., 4:162).
Cf. ibid., 4:425–38, 503–4. For a succinct exposition of this point, see Owen’s posthumously published sermon on the spiritual nature of ministry (ibid., 9:441–52).
Ibid., 4:306–7.
Ibid.; cf. 4:504–8. In relation to the gift of “utterance” necessary for a minister’s public prayer and preaching ministry, he cautions against understanding it as a “natural volubility of speech,” or “a rhetorical ability to set off discourses with a flourish of words.” These can actually corrupt the ordinance of preaching “by a foolish affectation of words.” But Owen is not denying the inherent validity or presence of these natural abilities. His point is simply this: “The great dispensation of the word by virtue of [the spiritual gifts], though under great variety from the various degrees wherein they are communicated, and the different natural abilities of them that do receive them, will be sufficiently distinguished and remote from that empty, wordy, sapless way of discoursing of spiritual things, which is the mere effect of the wit, fancy, invention, and projection of men destitute of the saving knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ and the mysteries of the gospel” (ibid., 4:512–13).
Ibid., 4:307.
“[The spiritual gift] is not itself changed by them” (ibid.).
Ibid., 4:306.
“The more the soul is engaged in its faculties and powers, the more intent it is in and unto the duty” (ibid.).
Ibid., 1:107.
Cultum moralem fides, spes, amor, et in omnibus religiosa animae subjectio absolvunt. Eas animae affectiones exprimunt invocationes, seu preces, vota, et numinis quasi praesentis et omnia videntis et regentis contestationes sacrae et solennes. Etiam simpliciter et pene naturaliter se exserunt in genuflexionibus, corporis prostrationibus, adorationibus, aliisque similibus externis sensus animi indiciis (ibid., 17:5.6.2).
Ibid., 15:465–66.
Owen remarks that some “external signs”—like the posture of prayer—are “natural and occasional,” while others are “solemn, stated, or instituted.” “Outward instituted signs of this internal adoration are all the ordinances of evangelical worship. In and by them do we solemnly profess and express our inward veneration of him” (ibid., 1:107).
David Clarkson, The practical works of David Clarkson, 3 vols. (Edinburgh: James Nichol, 1864), 3:171.
In his posthumously published sermons on the sacraments, Owen speaks of the different degrees and acts of faith, one of which is a “spiritual, sensible experience” of its object. Regarding the Supper, then, “that which the Holy Ghost would teach us by this ordinance, when we receive it by eating and drinking … are things of sense; and things of sense are chosen to express faith wrought up to an experience” (Works, 9:591; cf. 8:562–63).
Ibid., 8:562.
For this and the following, see the discussion in Owen’s treatise A Discourse Concerning Liturgies, and their Imposition (ibid., 15:33–42).
“Whatever men may call such additions, they are no less parts of the whole wherein they serve than the things themselves whereunto they are adjoined. The schoolmen tell us that that which is made so the condition of an action, that without it the action is not to be done, is not a circumstance of it, but such an adjunct as is a necessary part” (ibid., 15:36).
Ibid., 15:44. As Owen explains here, God mandates civil obedience inasmuch as he appoints kings and magistrates to exercise good and evil through their judgments. But in worship, consciences ought to be in immediate submission to the will of God, apart from any civil authority.
Ibid., 15:34.
It is also worth adding that he explicitly refrains from making any judgment on The Book of Common Prayer itself (ibid., 15:33). Even in his pointed “Twelve Arguments against any Conformity of Members of Separate Churches to the National Church” it is clear that Owen’s primary point of contention rests with the Prayer Book’s legal imposition—and any complicity with this imposition on the part of worshipers (ibid., 16:248–49). At this point, Thomas’s aside that Owen harbored a “disdain for liturgy” needs a little more nuance (Thomas, “Regulative Principle,” 83). Similarly, Packer’s remark that Owen considered “all liturgies unlawful” is not quite the point (Packer, Quest for Godliness, 256). For a discussion of Owen’s unyielding resistance to the use of images in worship, see McGraw, Heavenly Directory, 220–31.
Owen, Works, 4:348; cf. 347–48.
“They who are willing to take it upon their consciences that the best way to serve God in the church, or the best ability that they have for the discharge of their duty therein, consists in the reading of such a book … shall not by me be opposed in their way of practice” (ibid., 15:34; cf. 4:348).
Ibid., 4:348.
On Owen’s campaign to promote tolerance in regards to worship post-1662, see Paul C. H. Lim, “The Trinity, Adiaphora, Ecclesiology, and Reformation: John Owen’s Theory of Religious Toleration in Context,” WTJ 67 (2005): 281–300.
Owen, Works, 15:144.
In Early Modern Reformed thought, this principle is reflected in the famous distinction between “archetypal” and “ectypal” theology. On this see, e.g., Willem van Asselt, “The Fundamental Meaning of Theology: Archetypal and Ectypal Theology in Seventeenth-Century Reformed Thought,” WTJ 64 (2002): 319–35.
Owen, Works, 15:251–57.
Ibid., 15:503.
Ibid., 4:432.
Ibid., 4:503.
Ibid., 4:427.
Ibid., 4:428; cf. 503–4.
Ibid., 4:437; cf. 435–37.
Ibid., 15:250–51, 254.
Ibid., 15:256.
Ibid., 3:288. Compare his depiction of this “quickening principle” in unfallen Adam (ibid., 3:285).
Comparatively little has been written on this development, but see, e.g., Maarten Wisse, “Habitus Fidei: An Essay on the History of the Concept,” SJT 53 (2003): 172–89; J. V. Fesko, “Aquinas’s Doctrine of Justification and Infused Habits in Reformed Soteriology,” in Aquinas Among the Protestants, ed. Manfred Svensson and David VanDrunen (Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2018), 249–65. For Owen’s use of the concept in this wider context, see further Andrew M. Leslie, The Light of Grace: John Owen on the Authority of Scripture and Christian Faith (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2015), 107–15; Christopher H. Cleveland, Thomism in John Owen (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), 69–120.
Compare Stephen Charnock: “As the habit of sin is called flesh in regard of its nature, and death in regard of its consequent, so the habit of grace is called the new creature and spirit, Gal 5:17, in regard of its term and consequent, life. This habitual grace is the principle of all supernatural acts, as the soul concurs as an immanent principle to all works by this or that faculty. As Christ had a body prepared him to do the work of a mediator, so the soul hath a habit prepared it to do the work of a new creature” (Stephen Charnock, The Complete Works, 5 vols. [Edinburgh: Nichol, 1864–1866], 3:106). This treatise, A Discourse of the Nature of Regeneration, contains an extensive discussion of the habit of grace (3:105–18). Similarly, Gisbertus Voetius, who describes the “proximate” terminus ad quem of active regeneration like this: Terminus Proximus seu formalis sunt supernaturales qualitates seu dispositiones, quas Deus in nobis producit, quas scriptura vocat novam creaturam (Gal 6:15), novam hominem (Eph 4:24), Dei imaginem (Col 3:10), divinam naturam (2 Pet 1:4), spiritum (Gal 5:17), interiorem hominem (Rom 7:22), legem mentis (Rom 7:24), mentem (Rom 7:25), cujus partes & actus recensentur (Eph 4; Col 3; 2 Pet 1) (Gisbertus Voetius, Selectarum disputationum theologicarum, 5 vols. [Utrecht: J. a Waesberge, 1648–1667], 2:437).
Leslie, Light of Grace, 115–25.
On this, see also ibid., 231–34.
Owen, Works, 15:256.
Ibid., 9:73.
See the recent discussion in Hunter Powell, The Crisis of British Protestantism: Church Power in the Puritan Revolution, 1638–44 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015).
Owen, Works, 15:487–89; 16:36–37.
See, e.g., his comments on the means by which the church is continued or discipline is to be exercised (ibid., 15:257–61, 268–77, respectively). In the early church, Owen concedes that certain “extraordinary officers”—specifically those designated “evangelists” like Timothy and Titus—were temporarily appointed by the apostles to lead newly planted churches in their infancy “until they came unto completeness and perfection.” “When this end was attained,” Owen adds, “and the churches were settled under ordinary elders of their own, the evangelists removed unto other places, according as they were directed or disposed” (ibid., 4:447–48). Nonetheless, not even the apostles were granted the authority to impose elders without the willing consent of congregations (ibid., 4:444).
Ibid., 16:36–37. See Leslie, Light of Grace, 232.
For his discussion of this, see Owen, Works, 16:54–74.
As Owen puts it in his Pneumatologia, “He dwelleth in believers, preserving in them the root and principle of all their grace by his own immediate power.… He brings them forth from the stock that he hath planted in the heart. And we cannot act any one grace without his effectual operation therein” (ibid., 3:389–90).
“This choice or election doth not communicate a power from them that choose unto them that are chosen, as though such a power as that whereunto they are called should be formally inherent in the choosers antecedent unto such choice” (ibid., 16:67). Moreover, “antecedently unto any actings of the church towards such a person with respect unto office, [it is necessary that] he be furnished by the Lord Christ himself with graces, and gifts, and abilities, for the discharge of the office whereunto he is called. This divine designation of the persons to be called rests on the kingly office and care of Christ towards his church” (ibid., 16:73; cf. 4:494–95).
“Though they are chosen and set apart to their office by the church, yet they are made overseers by the Holy Ghost, Acts 20:28. Though they have their power by the church, yet they have it not from the church” (ibid., 15:501; cf. 16:67–68).
Owen makes reference to this more radical position (ibid., 16:112).
Owen adds, “Nor was that power whereof [officers] are made partakers, as was said, formally resident in the body of the church, before their participation of it, but really in Christ himself alone, and morally in his word or law. And thence is the rule and guidance of the church committed unto them by Christ, Heb 13:7, 17; 1 Pet 5:2; 1 Tim 3:5” (ibid., 15:501; cf. 4:488–96; 16:51–54). Powell shows how this same principle manifests itself in the ecclesiology of the Apologists (Thomas Goodwin, Philip Nye, Sidrach Simpson, Jeremiah Burroughs, and William Bridge) (Powell, Crisis of British Protestantism, 130–31). Cf. Goodwin and Nyes’s prefatory “To the Reader,” in John Cotton, The Keyes of the Kingdom of Heaven, and Power thereof, according to the Word of God (Boston: Tappan & Dennet, 1843), 4–14.
Cf. Beeke and Jones, Puritan Theology, 643. For Ames’s discussion of extraordinary and ordinary ministers, see respectively, Ames, Medulla, 1.33 (145–50); 1.35 (156–65).
Owen, Works, 16:131.
Ibid., 4:19. Regarding the application of this principle to the apostles, see 15:234–35.
“And all those gifts are bestowed on men on purpose for the good and edification of others; they are never exercised in a due manner, but they have a farther reach and efficacy in and upon the souls of the saints, than he that is intrusted with them was able to take a prospect of. He little knows how many of his words and expressions are, in the infinite wisdom of the Holy Ghost, suited in an unspeakable variety to the conditions of his saints;—here one, there another, is wrought upon, affected, humbled, melted, lifted up, rejoiced by them; the Holy Ghost making them effectual to the ends for which he hath given out the gifts from whence they do proceed” (ibid., 9:76).
See, e.g., ibid., 4:504–5, 507; 15:501. Owen extensively discusses the office and duties of pastors and teachers—those particularly responsible for the administration of worship ordinances—in 16:74–106.
Ibid., 15:331.
Ibid., 15:332.
Ibid., 15:253.
Ibid., 15:333.
Ibid., 15:332–34; cf. 253–54.

Eamon Younis

Wednesday 2 February 2022

John Owen and the Immediacy of Christ’s Authority over Christian Worship

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