The Pneumatology Of The “Lost” Image In John Owen

By Suzanne Mcdonald

[Suzanne McDonald is Assistant Professor of Theology at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Mich.]

In recent decades there has been a relative blossoming in Owen studies, from re-appraisals of his theological method in its historical context to suggestions for the positive re-appropriation of elements of his thought for contemporary theology.[1] One rich and intriguing aspect of his thought which has as yet received relatively little sustained attention is his account of the image of God.[2]

Without doubt this is in part because of the nature of Owen’s corpus. While he is rigorously systematic in drawing out the interconnections between the doctrines with which he deals, his is not a “systematic” enterprise. Owen offers nothing comparable to Francis Turretin’s Institutio theologiae elencticae or to Calvin’s Institutio, and nowhere offers us a treatise devoted specifically to the imago dei.[3] Instead, the image, in common with his presentation of many other doctrinal loci, is discussed and clarified less for its own sake than as part of wider concerns.

Nevertheless, Owen offers a sufficiently wide-ranging account of the image for a consistent picture to emerge with considerable detail and clarity, and for the distinctiveness of his voice to be heard.[4] I shall not attempt a comprehensive synthesis and survey here, but will focus upon one element of his account that is both intriguing from the perspective of historical theology and important for the wider theological issues that it raises. This element is his marked emphasis upon the loss of the image through sin, so that its presence in humanity is essentially confined to Christ, and derivatively, to the elect as they are united to him by the Spirit.

On the whole, the historic Reformed tradition attempts to eschew an absolute either/or on this question for a nuanced both/and. It does so by distinguishing between what we might term the “creational” and “soteriological” aspects of the image, representing a facultative and relational emphasis respectively. A purely facultative understanding of the image is rejected, since the essence of the image lies in the right relatedness to God which issues in the right ordering of our whole being towards God. Nevertheless, while sin corrupts every aspect of our being, it is possible to speak of the image as an abiding, albeit distorted and misdirected, feature of our creation as human beings, typically located in our rational faculties. While it remains soteriologically irrelevant, this vestige of the image is nevertheless fundamental to what it is to be human.

Owen retains but severely minimizes this distinction between the facultative and relational elements of the image. The difference between his emphasis and Turretin’s (and even between his and Calvin’s) is striking. Across the twenty-four volumes that constitute his collected works, Owen insists with very few exceptions upon the utter loss of the image in all save the elect.[5] Why?

One recent suggestion to help to account for Owen’s persistent downplaying of the indelible facultative elements of the image is that he retrieves the patristic distinction, rejected by Calvin, between “image” (essentially facultative, retained after the fall) and “likeness” (associated with right-relatedness with God, and so lost).[6] Attractive as this suggestion seems, Owen’s terminological distinctions do not seem to be sufficiently clear or consistent for it to be established. Many of Owen’s references to “likeness” are paired with “image” and reflect the kind of parallelism that Calvin maintains is the best exegetical approach to Gen 1:26. So, in a characteristic remark, Owen states, “We had by sin lost the image of God, and thereby all gracious acceptance with him.... In our recovery . . . this image is again to be restored unto us, or we are to be renewed into the likeness of God.”[7] The image, as much as the likeness, has been lost, and the renewal of both is seen to be interchangeable.

A helpful summary of Owen’s typical approach can be found in his Pneumatologia. He states, “Our likeness to God, that wherein we bear his image, is our holiness.”[8] Once again, image and likeness appear to be interchangeable, and both are identified with right relationship to God. However, he goes on to remark that “though all children do partake of the nature of their parents, yet they may be . . . very deformed and bear very little of their likeness. So . . . we may have the image of God and yet come short of that likeness unto him, in its degrees and improvements, that we ought to aim at.”[9] Surely this is an example of a clear distinction between the (universal, indelible) image and the (deformed) likeness? But no—Owen is speaking here only of the elect, who are precisely to be distinguished from all others, not because all retain something of the image of God but have lost the true likeness, but because all other than the elect have lost the image of God. Hence, he remarks that we (those united to Christ by the Spirit) must seek always to increase in holiness, because “in our likeness unto God consists the excellency and pre-eminence of our nature above that of all other creatures in the world, and of our persons above those other men who are not partakers of his image.”[10] The loss of the image in all save the elect is a recurring and important theme in Owen, as is the specific association of the image with right relationship with God. It seems to me that throughout his corpus the vast majority of references indicate that image and likeness are all but interchangeable for Owen, and that both refer primarily to relational categories.

If the suggestion of a revival of the patristic distinction between image and likeness proves less helpful than might have been thought, where might we look to find other explanations for Owen’s persistent downplaying of the facultative aspects of the image, and his dogged emphasis upon its loss through sin? In part, as we shall see, Owen’s position and the rigor with which he maintains it are related to his life-long battle against what he considers to be one of the two greatest threats to the integrity of the gospel: the impact of Socinian thought (the other threat being Arminianism). There is a great deal more to the view Owen adopts on the imago dei than polemics, however. Brief comparisons with Owen’s near-contemporary Francis Turretin and with aspects of Calvin’s thought on the imago dei suggest broader theological reasons for his approach. In particular, it is the attention he pays to the consistency of the person and work of the Holy Spirit that exerts a significant influence on his account of the image.

I. The Filioque-Shaped Dynamic Of Owen’s Theology

For this reason, it is helpful to begin with a brief account of the Trinitarian principles that shape Owen’s theology as a whole, with the Spirit particularly in mind. The Trinitarian dynamic of Owen’s work has been decisively demonstrated and insightfully discussed in Carl Trueman’s seminal work, The Claims of Truth: John Owen’s Trinitarian Theology. Here we simply need to note that it is a rigorously applied axiom throughout Owen’s theology that the economic acts of God express the being of God, or in his own terms, that “the order of the dispensation of the divine persons towards us ariseth from the order of their own subsistence.”[11]

Inner-Trinitarian relations are therefore a touchstone for the right understanding of all doctrines. Owen is firmly conventional in his adherence to the Western theological tradition’s understanding that the NT witness to Christ as the bearer and bestower of the Spirit, and to the inseparability of the Spirit’s work from that of Christ, provides both the warrant for and expression of the dual procession. As will be seen, Owen’s pneumatology in relation to the image reflects the implications of the NT witness concerning the Spirit’s role towards Christ and towards us, and in turn bears witness to a principle which is close to the heart of Owen’s theology as a whole: the filioque-shaped Trinitarian consistency of all of God’s dealings with the created order.

In particular, since the Spirit is the logically sequential “third” in the Trinity, in every work of God, “the concluding, completing, perfecting acts are ascribed to the Holy Ghost.”[12] Owen therefore sees the Spirit as the only way in which God chooses to act directly in the created order.[13] It is the Spirit’s primary overall function to be the “immediate . . . efficient cause of all external divine operations.”[14]

In turn, the Spirit’s role in relation to us clearly corresponds to the notion of the Spirit as the vinculum amoris who both expresses and completes the mutual love of Father and Son in the Trinity. His person and work mean that he particularly is the one who conveys the love of God to humanity and enables the human response of love to God in return. Hence, “As the descending of God towards us in love and grace issues or ends in the work of the Spirit in us and on us, so all our ascending towards him begins therein.”[15]

II. The Spirit And The Image In Owen

When we turn to Owen’s reflections on the image of God, these basic principles are clearly in evidence: the Spirit is both the one through whom God acts in the created order and the only possibility of a life lived in loving obedience towards God. In addition, we must note that Owen considers that our only access to understanding the image as created is through the lens of the image as it is restored, firstly in the person of Christ and secondly in those united to him. Owen remarks that since the image has been “lost from our nature, it [is] utterly impossible we should have a just comprehension of it . . . until it was renewed and exemplified in the human nature of Christ.”[16]

Since it is only in the work of new creation that we can understand the original nature of the image, and since the NT makes clear that the Spirit is the agent of that new creation, it is part of the integrity of the Spirit’s person and work for Owen that he must also be integral to the image as first created. In the NT account of the restoration of the image in us, “it is plainly asserted that the Holy Ghost is the immediate operator.... And he doth thereby restore his own work . . . the Holy Spirit renews in us the image of God, the original implantation whereof was his peculiar work. And thus Adam may be said to have had the Spirit of God in his innocency.”[17]

Owen identifies the image in unfallen Adam with a mind able rightly to discern the will of God, a will wholly in accord with God, and the ready “compliance in his affections” in order that he may actually do God’s will and refrain from all sin. Owen goes on to say that “all these things were the peculiar effects of the immediate operation of the Holy Ghost.”[18] This is so in unfallen Adam, and also, for that matter, in the person of Christ. Since the natural faculties, even in their sinless perfection, are “not enough to enable any rational creature to live to God,” the wholly Godward life which is the Son’s imaging of God in his humanity “was wrought in Christ by the Holy Spirit.”[19] What at first might appear to be Owen’s somewhat speculative account of the role of the Spirit towards unfallen Adam is therefore intimately bound to an understanding of the integrity of the person and work of the Spirit towards Christ and towards us, as this may be inferred from the NT witness.

Owen is therefore adamant that the image of God, even in its first created perfection, is not to be understood as an innate feature of humanness. It “did not flow naturally from the principles of the rational soul,” nor was this capacity to live unto God “inlaid” in those natural faculties, but only a Spirit-enabled possibility.[20] For this reason, while the image is to be distinguished but not separated from the natural faculties in unfallen Adam, it is emphatically to be both distinguished and separated from them as a consequence of sin. The very best that can be said of our intellectual faculties, for example, is that they may be spiritually “quickened and saved”: since they were once the subject of original righteousness, and therefore, when rightly ordered, were able to give expression to the image of God, so they are “meet to receive again the renovation of the image of God in Jesus Christ” when those who are otherwise wholly spiritually dead are brought to spiritual life in an act of new creation by the Holy Spirit.[21]

III. Owen, Turretin, And “Concreation”

A brief examination of the way in which Owen and Francis Turretin employ the notion of “concreation” brings out the contrast between Owen and the more usual approach of Reformed orthodoxy. Both theologians maintain that the rectitude and integrity of unfallen humanity is “concreated”—created with, but distinguishable and separable from, intrinsic human faculties and abilities.[22] For Turretin, the image in Adam is located primarily in the “substance of the soul,” secondly in “concreated” rectitude and integrity, and finally in the dominion over the rest of creation and immortality that derive from the first two.[23] He therefore defines the image as partly lost and partly corrupt, while making clear that when speaking soteriologically, it refers strictly to original righteousness and can thus be spoken of as lost.[24]

For Owen, however, the Godward orientation of the whole person is the imago dei.[25] Owen is therefore quite clear that it is the image of God itself that is “concreated” with Adam’s rational and other natural faculties:

This in Adam was the image of God, or an habitual conformity unto God, his mind and will, wherein the holiness and righteousness of God himself was represented.... In this image he was created, or it was concreated with him.... It was the rectitude of all the faculties of his soul with respect unto his supernatural end.[26]

As already noted, with only the rarest of exceptions across his corpus, Owen identifies the image with the right ordering of our faculties in this way.[27] As such, the overwhelming emphasis for Owen is that the image is not partly lost or partly corrupt; instead, one is either in the image of God or one is not. Tellingly, if somewhat unpalatably, the difference between Owen and Turretin may be summed up in that while Turretin remarks that is it possible for a person to be both in the image of God (through the possession of a rational soul) and in the image of the Devil (as unregenerate), for Owen one is either in the image of God or in the image of Satan.[28] He goes so far as to claim that to deny the loss of the image through sin and its restoration only through union with Christ by the Spirit is to “renounce the whole gospel.”[29]

Owen is therefore unhesitating and blunt in binding the image and election. With explicit and implicit reference to Rom 8:29, Owen consistently describes the image as that to which the elect are predestined.[30] The elect are to be distinguished from the rest of humanity precisely in that the image is restored in them, whereas it remains lost to unbelievers.[31]

IV. The “Ethics” Of The Image—A Distinctive Twist

Owen is therefore distinctive even within his own tradition for his evident reluctance to speak of any remnant of the image outside the elect. While the scriptural implications for the connection between election and the image are strong, a scripturally based theological anthropology will always struggle to sustain the argument that the image of God is confined to the elect. It is not surprising to find Owen dealing only rarely and awkwardly with Gen 9:6 and Jas 3:9.

Following Calvin, Reformed orthodoxy is generally happy to use these texts to speak of a universal vestige of the image. However distorted and soteriologically irrelevant it may be, the continuance of some aspect of the image in humanity as a whole is the foundation for just and loving dealings between all human beings. When we turn to Owen, we find that Jas 3:9 is cited only twice in Owen’s entire corpus, both times in the polemical Vindicae Evangelicae, in close association with Gen 9:5-6, firstly as part of his denial that the concept of the image implies corporeality in God and then to make the exegetically dubious claim that in neither text does it refer to human beings as they are now, but only as originally created.[32] He is nevertheless forced two paragraphs later into a rare and reluctant concession that while the image is indeed “utterly lost” there may be “footsteps” of it as a disincentive to mutual wrong and violence.[33]

Much more typical of Owen’s position is the way in which he turns the usual Reformed approach to what we might term the “ethics” of the image on its head. Owen exhorts the elect to deal lovingly with all people, not because of any notion of a vestige of the image of God in humanity as a whole, but because as those in whom the image of God is restored by the Spirit, the elect are to represent God to all other human beings. So, says Owen, when believers “make the self and its concernments the end of their lives . . . they do very little either represent or glorify God in the world.” Instead, in our dealings with all, and most particularly “our enemies and persecutors, the worst of them . . . towards all mankind as we have opportunity, [we must] labour after conformity unto God, and to express our likeness unto him” in our readiness to forgive, help, and relieve.[34]

V. Neither Reason Nor Reformation Of Life, But The Transforming Work Of The Spirit

Owen’s battles against Socinian rationalism and the closely allied attempt to identify the image of God with the practice of moral virtue undoubtedly influence both the position that he adopts and the uncompromising rigor with which he maintains it. While Owen strongly upholds the place and exercise of sanctified reason, unaided reason cannot itself constitute the image of God in us precisely because it cannot recognize Christ as the one true image of God. We have seen that to be the perfect human being in the image of God is the work of the Spirit in the incarnate Son, as it is in us. That which is unique to the incarnate Son’s imaging of God, however, is the fullness of his divinity as homoousios with the Father. As Owen points out, “Were [Christ] not the essential image of the Father in his own divine person, he could not be the representative image of God unto us as he is incarnate.”[35]

That in the person of Jesus Christ we see the image of the invisible God therefore requires nothing less than the acknowledgement of Christ’s full divinity. Such an acknowledgement requires the gift and work of the Spirit in the transformation and renewal of our minds, which forms part of the restoration of the image in us. Since reason alone cannot recognize Christ the image of God in his two natures, unaided reason can therefore have nothing to do with the restoration of the image in us. Only as the Spirit removes the veil over our minds and enables the vision of faith can the glory of God be seen in the face of Jesus Christ.[36]

Nevertheless, Owen is equally insistent that a mere “rational” acquiescence to the two natures doctrine is as utterly irrelevant as a “rational” denial of it. Propositional knowledge is of no account without union with Christ by the Spirit.[37] It is the love that flows from this union with Christ, firstly towards Christ in his divinity and humanity and then towards others, that constitutes our imaging. This love is the “vital principle” worked in us by the Spirit such that without it, “whatever there may be besides, there is nothing of the image of God.”[38]

With this we confront Owen’s rejection not only of reason per se as the locus of the image in us, but also of any attempt to identify gospel holiness and the image of God in us with mere “moral reformation.”39 Attempts to live virtuously or even specifically to imitate Christ apart from faith and love are meaningless in this regard. In a typically biting comment, he remarks that to “labour after conformity unto God by outward actions only is to make an image of the living God, hewed out of the stock of a dead tree.”[40] Instead, the restoration of the image involves the growth in Christlikeness which is nothing less than the total transformation of our entire being by the power of the Spirit through union with Christ.[41]

Owen closes his extended treatment of the Spirit’s work in sanctification in Pneumatologia with a fierce flourish of rhetorical questions, binding together election, the image of God, and the work of the Holy Spirit against any reduction of the image to moral virtue. Is mere moral virtue, he asks, “that which God hath predestined or chosen us unto before the foundation of the world? Is it that which he worketh in us in the pursuit of his electing love? Is [this] the principle of spiritual life . . . enabling us to live to God . . . by the effectual operation of the Holy Ghost? . . . Is it the image of God in us, and doth our conformity to Christ consist therein?”[42]

For Owen the response is unequivocal. Just as reason, exercised without the Spirit’s gift of faith, cannot be considered as the image of God, so to identify the holiness in which the image consists with the practice of moral virtue apart from faith in and love towards Christ is “absolutely opposite unto and destructive of the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ.”[43] We might also add that it is destructive of the integrity of the person and work of the Spirit.

VI. The Pneumatological Logic Of Owen’s Position

As has been noted, it is therefore not simply the pressure of polemics that leads Owen to the strict identification of election and the image, but his desire to offer a scripturally and Trinitarianly consistent account of the Spirit’s role.

It is here that a brief comparison with Calvin is instructive. Calvin likewise has no hesitation in binding the restoration of the image to the work of the Spirit in the unfolding of individual double predestination. The image is so corrupted by sin that “in some part it is now manifest in the elect, in so far as they have been reborn in the [S]pirit; but it will attain its full splendor in heaven.”[44] Nevertheless, the image itself is neither wholly lost through sin, for example, nor seen exclusively as a supernatural gift rather than a natural endowment.[45]

While there are scattered examples of Owen’s (often reluctant) concessions to a continuing vestige of the image in us, we search in vain for a level of ambivalence comparable to that so frequently debated in Calvin studies.[46] Very possibly, as Torrance pointed out, had Calvin drawn out the full implications of his doctrine of election for his doctrine of the imago dei, he would have found no room for equivocation either.[47] A significant reason for the difference in overall emphasis between Calvin and Owen, however, is not so much that Owen delineates a more grimly rigorous interconnection between the image and election by allowing deductions from the latter to shape the former, but that Owen gives more consistent attention to pneumatological concerns.

Richard Prins points us to the issues in question by remarking that the apparently intractable difficulties in Calvin’s account of the imago dei have their source at least in part in a relatively underdeveloped pneumatology in this area of his theology.[48] He suggests that in order for Calvin to be pneumatologically consistent in upholding the Spirit as source and sustainer of all that enables human beings to image God, there must either be a recognition that neither reason nor any other faculty can in any sense be considered as the locus of the imago dei or an admission that the image has been wholly lost through sin.[49] This is essentially Owen’s pneumatological point in his presentation of the image as created, lost through sin, and restored in the elect.

Prins likewise points out the related pneumatological flaw preventing a clearer relationship in Calvin between the image in unfallen Adam and its restoration in Christ. While Calvin claims that our understanding of the created image is derived from its restoration in Christ, the Spirit is given no role in this regard towards unfallen Adam. For Calvin, it is the work of the Spirit in Christ and in believers that distinguishes the renewed image from its original in Adam, making the former superior to the latter.[50] For Owen, as we have noted, it is part of the consistency and integrity of the person and work of the Spirit that the Spirit is at the heart of all human imaging of God, in Adam, in Christ, and in the elect.

It may be that this contrast is rooted in part in contrasting patristic influences, with the possibility that Owen prefers an Irenaean approach and Calvin that of Clement of Alexandria. For Clement, unfallen Adam cannot be said to have the Spirit; rather, he had the potential to receive the Spirit as part of his growth in the likeness of God, had he not sinned. With the entrance of sin, the gift of the Spirit is bound to regeneration in Christ. By contrast, Irenaeus considers that it is the Spirit who assists unfallen humanity to walk in right relationship with God. Thus, he speaks of Adam’s sin meaning the loss of the “robe of holiness” that had been his through the Spirit.[51]

Intriguing as these possible influences may be, however, Calvin does not refer to Clement in this context, and as is usual with Owen, neither does he point us directly to his patristic sources.[52] A further suggestion as to why Owen offers a more radically pneumatological account of the image in unfallen Adam than does Calvin is the Trinitarian dynamic of Owen’s approach to the covenant of works. For Calvin, it is most particularly the Son as Mediator who is given a role towards unfallen Adam to enable his right relationship to God. He reminds us that “even if man had remained free from all stain, his condition would have been too lowly for him to reach God without a mediator.”[53] For Owen, however, the focus is more strongly upon the role of the Spirit, although, as the one who proceeds from the Son as well as the Father, the Spirit’s work is always inseparable from the Son’s. Thus, while Adam most certainly “had the Spirit in his innocency,” and so under the covenant of works, he did not have the Son as “Mediator” since the Son does not assume this role towards humanity before the entrance of sin and the unfolding of the covenant of grace. Unfallen Adam does indeed relate to the Father through the Son by the Spirit, but he encounters the second person of the Trinity not as Mediator, but as Word—as the verbum endiathetos implanted by the Spirit by which he receives true knowledge of God.

The difference between Owen and Calvin here has more to do with the way in which the term “mediator” is employed than issues of theological substance. For Calvin, the point is that even in the condition of sinlessness, access to the Father is still through the Son. For Owen too, unfallen Adam only knows God through the Son and Word—although as we have seen, this can never be without the mediating role of the Spirit too, as the one who enables human beings in their creaturely lowliness (even unfallen Adam, and Christ in the sinless perfection of his humanity) to relate rightly to God. It is simply that within Owen’s fully worked out federal understanding of God’s dealings with us, the term “Mediator” is confined to the more restricted sense of the one who is needed to heal a ruptured relationship in the covenant of grace.

Nevertheless, what is apparent is that once again, it is characteristic of Calvin to speak of the Son in relation to unfallen Adam rather than the Spirit, and that Owen’s preference is to speak of the Spirit’s work in mediating the Son to Adam.[54] For Owen it is on the basis of precisely the principles claimed by Calvin (although not followed through by him with pneumatological rigor) that the created image can only be understood in the light of its restoration in Christ, and also of the unity of the person and work of the Spirit ad intra and ad extra, that Owen emphatically maintains a pneumatological unity between the image as created and as restored, where Calvin suggests a distinction.

VII. Conclusion

Although here is not the place to explore Owen’s rich account of the Spirit’s role towards Christ and the elect in this regard, the foregoing sketch at least gives an indication of Owen’s powerfully integrated understanding of the Spirit’s role in relation to the imago dei. It is this above all, it seems to me, that provides the systematic impetus that leads Owen to maintain the loss of the image in all save the elect with such frequency and rigor. This thoroughgoing pneumatological approach to the image sees Owen self-consciously endeavoring to take full account of the implications of the NT witness to the Spirit’s work towards Christ and towards us, and to anchor his account of the doctrine in the foundational principle that the acts of God ad extra express God’s Trinitarian life ad intra. It is one further example of the scripturally derived, filioque-shaped pattern of thinking that exerts such a shaping influence on Owen’s theology.

The above account also bears witness to the difficulties Owen faces in integrating his scripturally founded systematic concerns in relation to the Spirit with the full contours of the scriptural presentation of image. As has been noted, his reluctance to speak of even a distorted remnant of the image in sinful humanity apart from union with Christ by the Spirit is matched by his extreme awkwardness in dealing with texts such as Gen 9:6 and Jas 3:9. To draw out some of the issues of abiding significance for Reformed systematic theology raised by Owen’s approach to the Spirit, the image, and election is a task for another occasion. Historical theology also has much to reflect upon with regard to this under-explored facet of Owen’s theology. To place his account of the image in the context of his life-long battle against the corrosive influence of Socinian (and Arminian) thinking offers scope for an intriguing further study into the relationship between systematics, Scripture, and polemics in Owen’s theology.

Notes

1. For recent expositions of aspects of Owen’s life and thought, see Carl Trueman, John Owen: Reformed, Catholic, Renaissance Man (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007); Alan Spence, Incarnation and Inspiration: John Owen and the Coherence of Christology (London: T&T Clark, 2007); and Kelly M. Kapic, Communion With God: The Divine and the Human in the Theology of John Owen (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2007). Accounts of Owen’s theological method and the contours of his theology as a whole include Sinclair B. Ferguson, John Owen on the Christian Life (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 1987); Carl R. Trueman, The Claims of Truth: John Owen’s Trinitarian Theology (Carlisle, U.K.: Paternoster, 1998); and Sebastian Rehnman, Divine Discourse: The Theological Methodology of John Owen (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2002). Other works focused on specific aspects of his thought include Randall C. Gleason, John Calvin and John Owen on Mortification: A Comparative Study in Reformed Spirituality (SCH 3; New York: Peter Lang, 1995); Colin Gunton’s considerations of Owen’s ecclesiology and pneumatology in “Election and Ecclesiology in the Post-Constantinian Church,” SJT 53 (2000): 212-27; and Jon D. Payne, John Owen on the Lord’s Supper (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 2004).
2. The two most substantial treatments of the topic are Kapic, Communion With God, Chapter 2, “Created to Commune With God: Owen’s Formulation of the Imago Dei,” which forms part of his highly insightful account of Owen’s “anthroposensitive” theological anthropology; and Spence, Incarnation and Inspiration, pp. 22-26 and Chapter 3, “Inspiration: The Spirit Renews God’s Image in Christ’s Human Nature.”
3. As Trueman points out, only one of Owen’s works—his Theologoumena Pantodapa (1661; in vol. 17 of Works [see n. 4 below])—offers a form of theological “summa” (Claims of Truth, 48). In a study of Owen that in many ways complements Trueman’s, Rehnman (Divine Discourse) makes Theologoumena Pantodapa a principal text for analyzing Owen’s theological method.
4. References to Owen’s works are cited from The Works of John Owen (ed. William H. Goold; 24 vols.; London: Johnstone & Hunter, 1850-1855). The contours of Owen’s understanding of the image can be drawn from Pneumatologia, or A Discourse Concerning the Holy Spirit (vols. 3 and 4 of Works; since the issues of particular concern here are found in the third volume, all page references to Pneumatologia refer to vol. 3); and Christologia, or A Declaration of the Glorious Mystery of the Person of Christ—God and Man (Works, 1:1-272).
5. Many of these exceptions occur in the polemical context of his anti-Socinian tract against John Biddle, Vindicae Evangelicae (in Works, vol. 12) in response to his opponent’s use of the doctrine. Two less polemically oriented examples occur in Pneumatologia: one in which he acknowledges that the image has been “defaced” by sin, and that restoration of the image in us is one of the primary reasons for the coming of Christ (629); and the other in which, while discussing human dominion over the rest of creation, he remarks in passing that “notwithstanding some feeble relics of this image yet abiding with us” we are closer to the beasts than we are to God (580). See also Christologia, 191. Owen also refers once in passing to fallen reason as a “spark” of the image in A Display of Arminianism (Works, 10:78). Nevertheless, such concessions to a vitiated remnant of the image are few. Kapic rightly points out that even for Owen, it is a matter of “degrees along a continuum” rather than a blunt either the image has been lost or it is largely unaffected by sin (Communion With God, 40), but in placing theologians within that spectrum on the basis of their primary emphases, Owen’s overall outlook situates him considerably further along the continuum towards the utter loss of the image than major Reformed theological predecessors or contemporaries.
6. Kapic, Communion with God, 37, 41.
7. Christologia, 218.
8. Pneumatologia, 578; my emphasis.
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid., 579; Owen’s emphasis.
11. Ibid., 61.
12. Ibid., 94; Owen’s emphasis.
13. Ibid., 94. Although it cannot be discussed here, this exerts a decisive influence on Owen’s Christology. See Alan Spence, Incarnation and Inspiration, for a strongly appreciative account of this aspect of Owen’s thought.
14. Pneumatologia, 161.
15. Ibid., 200; see also, e.g., 157, where Owen reminds us that no grace or mercy comes to us from God except by the Spirit, and neither is there any return of faith or love by us to God “but what is effectually wrought in us...by him alone.”
16. Christologia, 171-72.
17. Pneumatologia, 102.
18. Ibid.
19. Ibid., 168-69. See also, e.g., 330.
20. Ibid., 284-85.
21. Ibid., 296 (see 295-96). Chapter 4, 282-97 passim gives an account of our spiritual death apart from the Spirit’s gift of new life in Christ.
22. For Owen, see esp. ibid., 102, 284-85. For Turretin on the image, see Francis Turretin, Institutes of Elenctic Theology (ed. James T. Dennison; trans. George Musgrave Giger; 3 vols.; Phillipsburg, N.J.: Presbyterian & Reformed, 1992-1997), 1:464-73; 611-13.
23. Institutes of Elenctic Theology, 466-70.
24. Ibid., 466, 611-13.
25. In addition to the references already given, for other typical examples see Pneumatologia, 101, in which the image refers to the “moral condition and principle of obedience unto God” which consists in a “universal rectitude of nature” in which all the faculties are rightly ordered to their goal of living towards God; see also ibid., 222, where the image consists principally of “the uprightness, rectitude and ability of his whole soul, his mind, will and affections . . . for the obedience that God required of him.”
26. Ibid., 285.
27. See n. 5 above.
28. Turretin, Institutes of Elenctic Theology, 1:466; Owen, Christologia, 37, 184.
29. Pneumatologia, 287-88.
30. So, e.g., Christologia, 36, 170-71; Pneumatologia, 509, 526-27.
31. The inability of human beings, deprived of the image, to be in any sense acceptable to God is a commonplace throughout his theology; for an extended discussion of this and other consequences of the loss of the image see Christologia, 185-96.
32. Vindicae Evangelicae, in Works, 12:100-101 and 161-62 respectively.
33. Ibid., 162. Apart from referring to it as a supporting text to maintain a Trinitarian interpretation of Gen 1:26, Owen, in his only other use of Gen 9:6 (Theologoumena Pantodapa, in Works, 17:161), finishes his citation at v. 6a, thereby avoiding the question of the image altogether!
34. Pneumatologia, 587-88; see also 582-84.
35. Christologia, 78.
36. For representative discussions of the relationship between reason, revelation, and faith with regard to recognizing Christ as the image of God and therefore our transformation into his image by the Spirit as we behold the glory of God in the face of Christ, see, e.g., Christologia, 74-79, and Pneumatologia, Chapter 3, “Corruption and Depravation of the Mind by Sin,” 242-82.
37. E.g., Christologia, 81: “Professors of the truth, if separated from Christ as unto real union, are withered branches.” See also, e.g., Pneumatologia, 260.
38. Christologia, 155, 146.
39. For a summary of Owen’s objections to equating the restoration of the lost image with moral reformation, see Pneumatologia, 217-24.
40. Christologia, 155.
41. The theme is pervasive. So, e.g., it is the gradual process of sanctification, in the “universal renovation of our natures by the Holy Spirit” that the restoration of the image of God in us consists (Pneumatologia, 386). The entirety of Book 4 of Pneumatologia (some 300 pages) is an extensive treatment of the Spirit’s work in sanctification. Not surprisingly, the theme of the restoration of the image in the elect through their union with Christ is never far from the surface.
42. Pneumatologia, 526-27.
43. Ibid., 527.
44. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion (ed. John T. McNeill; trans. Ford Lewis Battles; 2 vols.; LCC; Philadephia: Westminster, 1960), 1:190 (see 189-90) (1.15.4).
45. Although the definition of the terms of the debate and the nature of the issues at stake for Reformed orthodoxy mean that by this period the distinction between the two is by no means as straightforward as is often described. A very brief summary of Turretin’s position, in dialogue with Bellarmine, helps to clarify matters. Turretin insists that the image, understood as universal rectitude, is not to be seen simply as “supernatural” (which may tend towards the position that “only” a supernatural quality has been lost by the Fall, leaving the way open for the notion, for example, that our rational faculties may be largely untainted by sin), but that it is both natural to unfallen human beings (in the sense of being wholly fitting for that unfallen condition, and indeed that without which the condition of human perfection before God would be impossible), and also pure, gracious gift. See Institutes of Elenctic Theology, 1:470-73.
46. Significant texts include T. F. Torrance, Calvin’s Doctrine of Man (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1957); Mary Potter Engel, John Calvin’s Perspectival Anthropology (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1988); and Susan Schreiner, The Theater of His Glory: Nature and the Natural Order in the Thought of John Calvin (Durham, N.C.: Labyrinth, 1991).
47. Torrance, Calvin’s Doctrine of Man, 93.
48. Richard Prins, “The Image of God in Adam and the Restoration of Man in Jesus Christ: A Study in Calvin,” SJT 25 (1972): 32-44. We might also add to this critical assessment the positive suggestion that Calvin is content to express, rather than to resolve, the scriptural indications both that the image is in some way shared by the whole of sinful humanity, while also being expressed supremely in the person of Christ and particularly in his people.
49. Ibid., 37-38.
50. Ibid., 43. See, e.g., John Calvin, The First Epistle of Paul the Apostle to the Corinthians (ed. David W. Torrance and Thomas F. Torrance; trans. John W. Farmer; Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd, 1960), 33840, in which he indicates that it is the pouring out of the Spirit firstly upon Christ, and then through him upon others which distinguishes Christ from Adam, and all other human beings from the regenerate: “The condition which we acquire through Christ is far better than the situation of the first man, because a living soul was given to Adam for himself and for his posterity, but Christ . . . has brought us the Spirit who is Life” (339).
51. Irenaeus, Haer. 3.23.5. For a comparison between Irenaeus and Clement on the image and wider issues of theological anthropology, see John Behr, Asceticism and Anthropology in Irenaeus and Clement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
52. It should also be noted that if Owen is influenced by Irenaeus here, it is only as filtered through his own very different theological assumptions. So, e.g., Irenaeus identifies the Spirit’s role in enabling unfallen Adam’s righteousness before God with the likeness to God, which is subsequently lost, while the image of God is retained (e.g., Haer. 5.6.1). As noted above, however, Owen eschews any clear-cut distinction between image and likeness, and it is the Spirit’s role in the image/ likeness in unfallen Adam that is integral to Owen’s emphasis upon the loss of the image through sin. Likewise, Irenaeus’s account opens the way to the development of the notion that sin leads to the loss of the “supernatural” gifts of God, in contrast to the facultative endowments, which are retained. Although Owen and Turretin differ in the value they place upon the facultative aspect of the image, Owen is at one with Turretin in rejecting the idea that the right ordering of the faculties, lost through the fall, constitutes a “supernatural” gift in the way that scholasticism went on to develop the concept (for Turretin on this point, see n. 45 above. For Owen’s less precisely expressed rejection of it, see, e.g., Pneumatologia, 102).
53. Institutes, 1:465 (2.12.1).
54. It is at this point that the emphasis in aspects of Trueman’s account needs to be qualified a little (Claims of Truth, esp. 58-59, 63). His desire above all is to stress the graciousness of the covenant of works in Owen and that there is no relatedness to God, either before or after the Fall, save through the Son. In both respects, Trueman rightly draws attention to central aspects of Owen’s theology: that the knowledge of God with which Adam is endowed, and which constitutes a vital element of the image of God in him, is pure gift and not an innate property of created humanness, and that this implanted true knowledge of God is intrinsically related to the Word. Nevertheless, Trueman is so keen to stress that unfallen Adam does indeed relate to the Father through the Son that he does not take sufficient account of Owen’s distinctive emphasis upon the role of the Holy Spirit. Thus, Trueman asserts that the fundamental continuity between pre-and post-Fall theology for Owen centers upon the Son, without reference to the Spirit. In fact, strict continuity resides more straightforwardly in the work of the third person of the Trinity than with the second. As in his person the Spirit proceeds from the Son as well as the Father, so his role in the economy is always to bring the Son to us according to the will of the Father. With the intrusion of sin, however, it is the Spirit’s role that remains essentially unchanged, while the Son stands in a different relation to humanity through the Spirit than before. His role in the Trinitarian engagement of God with humanity is no longer simply as the Word who expresses true knowledge of God, but as the necessary Mediator, through whom alone right relation with God can be restored.