introductory essay to John Owen's
Death of Death and the Death of Christ and Give thanks that
I've been given permission to use this by Banner of Truth Trust
for today's recording and it is First published in 1959 by
Banner of Truth Trust in the death of death in the death of
Christ and That's the Banner of Truth Trust out of Carlisle,
PA by J.I. Packer. Introductory essay to
John Owens, The Death of Death and the Death of Christ by J.I. Packer. One. The death of death and the death
of Christ is a polemical work designed to show, among other
things, that the doctrine of universal redemption is unscriptural
and destructive of the gospel. There are many, therefore, to
whom it is not likely to be of interest. Those who see no need
for doctrinal exactness and have no time for theological debates,
which show up divisions between so-called evangelicals, may well
regret its reappearance. Some may find the very sound
of Owen's thesis so shocking that they will refuse to read
his book at all. So passionate a thing is prejudice,
and so proud are we of our theological shibboleths. But it is hoped
that this reprint will find itself readers of a different spirit.
There are signs today of a new upsurge of interest in the theology
of the Bible, a new readiness to test traditions, to search
the scriptures, and to think through the faith. It is to those
who share this readiness that Owen's treatise is offered, in
the belief that it will help us in one of the most urgent
tasks facing evangelical Christendom today, the recovery of the gospel. This last remark may cause some
raising of eyebrows, but it seems to be warranted by the facts.
There is no doubt that evangelicalism today is in a state of perplexity
and unsettlement. In such matters as the practice
of evangelism, the teaching of holiness, the building up of
local church life, the pastors dealing with souls in the exercise
of discipline, there is evidence of widespread dissatisfaction
with things as they are, and of equally widespread uncertainty
as to the road ahead. This is a complex phenomenon,
to which many factors have contributed. But if we go to the root of the
matter, we shall find that these perplexities are all ultimately
due to our having lost our grip on the biblical gospel. Without
realizing it, we have, during the past century, bartered that
gospel for a substitute product, which, though it looks similar
enough in points of detail, is, as a whole, a decidedly different
thing. Hence our troubles. For the substitute
product does not answer the ends for which the authentic gospel
has in past days proved itself so mighty. The New Gospel conspicuously
fails to produce deep reverence, deep repentance, deep humility,
a spirit of worship, a concern for the Church. Why? We would suggest that the reason
lies in its own character and content. It fails to make men
God-centered in their thoughts and God-fearing in their hearts,
because this is not primarily what it is trying to do. One
way of stating the difference between it and the Old Gospel
is to say that it is too exclusively concerned to be helpful to man,
to bring peace, comfort, happiness, satisfaction, and too little
concerned to glorify God. The Old Gospel was helpful too,
more so, indeed, than is the New, but, so to speak, incidentally,
for its first concern was always to give glory to God. It was
always and essentially a proclamation of divine sovereignty in mercy
and judgment, a summons to bow down and worship the mighty Lord
on whom man depends for all good, both in nature and in grace.
Its center of reference was unambiguously God. But in the New Gospel, the
center of reference is man. This is just to say that the
Old Gospel was religious in a way that the New Gospel is not. Whereas
the chief aim of the Old was to teach men to worship God,
the concern of the New seems limited to making them feel better.
The subject of the old gospel was God and his ways with men.
The subject of the new is man and the help God gives him. There
is a world of difference. The whole perspective and emphasis
of gospel preaching has changed. From this change of interest
has sprung a change of content. For the new gospel has, in effect,
reformulated the biblical message in the supposed interests of
helpfulness. Accordingly, the themes of man's
natural inability to believe, of God's free election being
the ultimate cause of salvation, and of Christ dying specifically
for His sheep are not preached. These doctrines, it would be
said, are not helpful. They would drive sinners to despair
by suggesting to them that it is not in their own power to
be saved through Christ. The possibility that such despair
might be salutary is not considered. It is taken for granted that
it cannot be, because it is so shattering to our self-esteem.
However this may be, and we shall say more about it later, the
result of these omissions is that part of the biblical gospel
is now preached as if it were the whole of that gospel, and
a half-truth masquerading as the whole truth becomes a complete
untruth. Thus we appeal to men as if they
all had the ability to receive Christ at any time. We speak
of His redeeming work as if He had done no more by dying than
make it possible for us to save ourselves by believing. We speak
of God's love as if it were no more than a general willingness
to receive any who will turn and trust, and we depict the
Father and the Son, not as sovereignly active in drawing sinners to
themselves, but as waiting in quiet impotence, at the door
of our hearts, for us to let them in. It is undeniable that
this is how we preach. Perhaps this is what we really
believe. But it needs to be said with
emphasis that this set of twisted half-truths is something other
than the biblical gospel. The Bible is against us when
we preach in this way, and the fact that such preaching has
become almost standard practice among us only shows how urgent
it is that we should review this matter. To recover the old, authentic,
biblical gospel and to bring our preaching and practice back
into line with it is perhaps our most pressing present need. And it is at this point that
Owen's treatise on redemption can give us help. 2. But wait a minute, says someone. It's all very well to talk like
this about the gospel, but surely what Owen is doing is defending
limited atonement, one of the five points of Calvinism. When
you speak of recovering the gospel, don't you mean that you just
want us all to become Calvinists? These questions are worth considering,
for they will no doubt occur to many. At the same time, however,
they are questions that reflect a great deal of prejudice and
ignorance. Defending limited atonement, as if this was all
that a Reformed theologian expounding the heart of the gospel could
ever really want to do. You just want us all to become
Calvinists, as if Reformed theologians had no interest beyond recruiting
for their party. and as if becoming a Calvinist
was the last stage of theological depravity and had nothing to
do with the gospel at all. Before we answer these questions
directly, we must try to remove the prejudices which underlie
them by making clear what Calvinism really is. And therefore, we
would ask the reader to take note of the following facts,
historical and theological, about Calvinism in general and the
five points in particular. First, it should be observed
that the five points of Calvinism, so-called, are simply the Calvinistic
answer to a five-point manifesto, the remonstrance, put out by
certain Belgic semi-Pelagians in the early 17th century. The
theology which it contained, known to history as Arminianism,
stemmed from two philosophical principles. First, that divine
sovereignty is not compatible with human freedom, nor therefore
with human responsibility. Second, that ability limits obligation. The charge of semi-Pelagianism
was thus fully justified. From these principles, the Arminians
drew two deductions. First, that since the Bible regards
faith as a free and responsible human act, it cannot be caused
by God, but is exercised independently of Him. Second, that since the
Bible regards faith as obligatory on the part of all who hear the
gospel, ability to believe must be universal. Hence, they maintained,
Scripture must be interpreted as teaching the following positions.
1. Man is never so completely corrupted
by sin that he cannot savingly believe the gospel when it is
put before him. Nor 2. Is he ever so completely
controlled by God that he cannot reject it. 3. God's election of those who
shall be saved is prompted by his foreseeing that they will
of their own accord believe. 4. Christ's death did not ensure
the salvation of anyone, for it did not secure the gift of
faith to anyone. There is no such gift. What it
did was rather to create a possibility of salvation for everyone if
they believe. 5. It rests with believers to keep
themselves in a state of grace by keeping up their faith. Those
who fail here fall away and are lost. Thus, Arminianism made
man's salvation depend ultimately on man himself, saving faith
being viewed throughout as man's own work and, because his own,
not God's in him. The Synod of Dort was convened
in 1618 to pronounce on this theology, and the five points
of Calvinism represent its counter-affirmations. They stem from a very different
principle, the biblical principle that salvation is of the Lord,
and they may be summarized thus. Fallen man in his natural state
lacks all power to believe the gospel, just as he lacks all
power to believe the law, despite all external inducements that
may be extended to him. 2. God's election is a free, sovereign,
unconditional choice of sinners as sinners to be redeemed by
Christ, given faith and brought to glory. 3. The redeeming work of Christ
had as its end and goal the salvation of the elect. 4. The work of
the Holy Spirit in bringing men to faith never fails to achieve
its object. 5. Believers are kept in faith and
grace by the unconquerable power of God till they come to glory. These five points are conveniently
denoted by the mnemonic TULIP. Total depravity. Unconditional
election. Limited atonement. Irresistible
grace. Preservation of the saints. Now,
here are two coherent interpretations of the biblical gospel. which
stand in evident opposition to each other. The difference between
them is not primarily one of emphasis, but of content. One proclaims a God who saves.
The other speaks of a God who enables man to save himself.
One view presents the three great acts of the Holy Trinity for
the recovering of lost mankind— election by the Father, redemption
by the Son, calling by the Spirit— as directed towards the same
persons and as securing their salvation infallibly. The other
view gives each act a different reference. the objects of redemption
being all mankind, of calling, those who hear the gospel and
of election, those hearers who respond, and denies that any
man's salvation is secured by any of them. One makes salvation
depend on the work of God, the other on a work of man. One regards
faith as part of God's gift of salvation, the other as man's
own contribution to salvation. One gives all the glory of saving
believers to God. The other divides the praise
between God, who, so to speak, built the machinery of salvation,
and man, who, by believing, operated it. Plainly, these differences
are important, and the permanent value of the five points, as
a summary of Calvinism, is that they make clear the points at
which, and the extent to which, these two conceptions are at
variance. However, it would not be correct
simply to equate Calvinism with the five points. Five points
of our own will make this clear. In the first place, Calvinism
is something much broader than the five points indicate. Calvinism
is a whole-world view stemming from a clear vision of God as
the whole world's maker and king. Calvinism is the consistent endeavor
to acknowledge the Creator as the Lord, working all things
after the counsel of His will. Calvinism is a theocentric way
of thinking about all life under the direction and control of
God's own Word. Calvinism, in other words, is
the theology of the Bible viewed from the perspective of the Bible.
the God-centered outlook which sees the Creator as the source
and means and end of everything that is both in nature and in
grace. Calvinism is thus theism, belief
in God as the ground of all things, religion, dependence on God as
the giver of all things, and evangelicalism, trust in God
through Christ for all things. all in their purest and most
highly developed form. And Calvinism is a unified philosophy
of history, which sees the whole diversity of processes and events
that take place in God's world as no more and no less than the
outworking of His great preordained plan for His creatures and His
Church. The five points assert no more
than that God is sovereign in saving the individual. But Calvinism,
as such, is concerned with the much broader assertion that he
is sovereign everywhere. Then in the second place, the
five points present Calvinistic soteriology in a negative and
polemical form, whereas Calvinism in itself is essentially expository,
pastoral, and constructive. It can define its position in
terms of scripture without any reference to Arminianism, and
it does not need to be forever fighting real or imaginary Arminians
in order to keep itself alive. Calvinism has no interest in
negatives as such. When Calvinists fight, they fight
for positive evangelical values. The negative cast of the five
points is misleading chiefly with regard to the third, limited
atonement or particular redemption, which is often read with stress
on the adjective and taken as indicating that Calvinists have
a special interest in confining the limits of divine mercy. But
in fact, the purpose of this phraseology, as we shall see,
is to safeguard the central affirmation of the Gospel, that Christ is
a Redeemer who really does redeem. Similarly, the denials of an
election that is conditional and of grace that is resistible
are intended to safeguard the positive truth that it is God
who saves. The real negations are those
of Arminianism, which denies that election, redemption, and
calling are saving acts of God. Calvinism negates these negations
in order to assert the positive content of the gospel, for the
positive purpose of strengthening faith and building up the Church. Thirdly, The very act of setting
out Calvinistic soteriology in the form of five distinct points,
a number due, as we saw, merely to the fact that there were five
Arminian points for the Synod of Dort to answer, tends to obscure
the organic character of Calvinistic thought on this subject. For
the five points, though separately stated, are really inseparable. They hang together. You cannot
reject one without rejecting them all, at least in the sense
in which the synod meant for them. For to Calvinism, there
is really only one point to be made in the field of soteriology. The point that God saves sinners.
God, the triune Jehovah, Father, Son, and Spirit. Three persons
working together in sovereign wisdom, power, and love to achieve
the salvation of a chosen people. the Father electing, the Son
fulfilling the Father's will by redeeming, the Spirit executing
the purpose of Father and Son by renewing, saves, does everything,
first to last, that is involved in bringing man from death in
sin to life in glory, plans, achieves, and communicates redemption,
calls and keeps, justifies, sanctifies, glorifies. sinners. Men, as God finds them guilty,
vile, helpless, powerless, unable to lift a finger to do God's
will or better, their spiritual lot, God saves sinners. And the force of this confession
may not be weakened by disrupting the unity of the work of the
Trinity, or by dividing the achievement of salvation between God and
man and making the decisive part man's own, or by soft-peddling
the sinner's inability so as to allow him to share the praise
of his salvation with his Savior. This is the one point of Calvinistic
soteriology which the Five Points are concerned to establish, and
Arminianism, in all its forms, to deny. namely, that sinners
do not save themselves in any sense at all, but that salvation,
first and last, whole and entire, past, present, and future, is
of the Lord, to whom be glory forever. Amen. This leads to
our fourth remark, which is this. The five-point formula obscures
the depth of the difference between Calvinistic and Arminian soteriology. There seems no doubt that it
seriously misleads many here. In the formula, the stress falls
on the adjectives, and this naturally gives the impression that in
regard to the three great saving acts of God, the debate concerns
the adjectives merely, that both sides agree as to what election,
redemption, and the gift of internal grace are, and differ only as
to the position of man in relation to them. Whether the first is
conditional upon faith being foreseen or not, whether the
second intends the salvation of every man or not, whether
the third always proves invincible or not. But this is a complete
misconception. The change of adjective in each
case involves changing the meaning of the noun. An election that
is conditional, a redemption that is universal, an internal
grace that is resistible is not the same kind of election, redemption,
internal grace as Calvinism asserts. The real issue concerns not the
appropriateness of adjectives, but the definition of nouns.
Both sides saw this clearly when the controversy first began,
and it is important that we should see it too, for otherwise we
cannot discuss the Calvinist-Arminian debate to any purpose at all.
It is worth setting out the different definitions side by side. 1. God's act of election was defined
by the Arminians as a resolve to receive sonship and glory,
a duly qualified class of people, believers in Christ. This becomes
a resolve to receive individual persons only in virtue of God's
foreseeing the contingent fact that they will of their own accord
believe. There is nothing in the decree
of election to ensure that the class of believers will ever
have any members. God does not determine to make
any man believe. But Calvinists define election
as a choice of particular, undeserving persons to be saved from sin
and brought to glory, and to that end, to be redeemed by the
death of Christ and given faith by the Spirit's effectual calling.
Where the Arminian says, I owe my election to my faith, the
Calvinist says, I owe my faith to my election. Clearly, these
two concepts of election are very far apart. 2. Christ's work of redemption was
defined by the Arminians as the removing of an obstacle. The
unsatisfied claims of justice, which stood in the way of God's
offering pardon to sinners, as He desired to do, on condition
that they believe. Redemption, according to Arminianism,
secured for God a right to make this offer, but did not of itself
ensure that anyone would ever accept it. For faith, being a
work of man's own, is not a gift that comes to him from Calvary. Christ's death created an opportunity
for the exercise of saving faith, but that is all it did. Calvinists,
however, define redemption as Christ's actual substitutionary
endurance of the penalty of sin in the place of certain specified
sinners through which God was reconciled to them, their liability
to punishment was forever destroyed, and a title to eternal life was
secured for them. In consequence of this, they
now have in God's sight a right to the gift of faith, as the
means of entry into the enjoyment of their inheritance. Calvary,
in other words, not merely made possible the salvation of those
for whom Christ died, it ensured that they would be brought to
faith and their salvation made actual. The cross saves, where
the Arminian will only say, I could not have gained my salvation
without Calvary. The Calvinist will say, Christ
gained my salvation for me at Calvary. The former makes the
cross the cinquanan of salvation. The latter sees it as the actual
procuring cause of salvation, and traces the source of every
spiritual blessing, faith included, back to the great transaction
between God and His Son carried through on Calvary's hill. Clearly,
these two concepts of redemption are quite at variance. 3. the Spirit's gift of internal
grace was defined by the Arminians as moral suasion, the bare bestowal
of an understanding of God's truth. This, they granted, indeed
insisted, does not of itself ensure that anyone will ever
make the response of faith. But Calvinists define this gift
as not merely an enlightening, but also a regenerating work
of God in men, taking away their heart of stone and giving unto
them a heart of flesh, renewing their wills, and by His almighty
power determining them to that which is good, and effectually
drawing them to Jesus Christ. Yet so as they come most freely,
being made willing by His grace, Grace proves irresistible just
because it destroys the disposition to resist. Where the Arminian,
therefore, will be content to say, I decided for Christ. I made up my mind to be a Christian. The Calvinist will wish to speak
of his conversion in more theological fashion, to make plain whose
work it really was. Long my imprisoned spirit lay,
Fast bound in sin and nature's night, Thine eye diffused a quickening
ray, I woke, the dungeon flamed with light, My chains fell off,
my heart was free, I rose, went forth, and followed Thee. Clearly, these two notions of
internal grace are sharply opposed to each other. Now, the Calvinist
contends that the Arminian idea of election, redemption, and
calling as acts of God, which do not save, cuts at the very
heart of their biblical meaning. That to say, in the Arminian
sense, that God elects believers, and Christ died for all men,
and the Spirit quickens those who receive the word, is really
to say that in the biblical sense, God elects nobody. and Christ
died for nobody, and the Spirit quickens nobody. The matter at
issue in this controversy, therefore, is the meaning to be given to
these biblical terms, and to some others which are also soteriologically
significant, such as the love of God, the covenant of grace,
and the verb save itself, with its synonyms. Arminians gloss
them all in terms of the principle that salvation does not directly
depend on any decree or act of God, but on man's independent
activity in believing. Calvinists maintain that this
principle is itself unscriptural and irreligious, and that such
glossing demonstrably perverts the sense of scripture and undermines
the gospel at every point where it is practiced. This and nothing
less than this is what the Armenian controversy is about. There is a fifth way in which
the five-point formula is deficient. Its very form, a series of denials
of Arminian assertions, lends color to the impression that
Calvinism is a modification of Arminianism. That Arminianism
has a certain primacy in order of nature and developed Calvinism
is an offshoot from it. Even when one shows this to be
false as a matter of history, the suspicion remains in many
minds that it is a true account of the relation of the two views
themselves. For it is widely supposed that
Arminianism, which, as we now see, corresponds pretty closely
to the New Gospel of our own day, is the result of reading
the scriptures in a natural, unbiased, unsophisticated way,
and that Calvinism is an unnatural growth. the product less of the
text themselves than of unhallowed logic working on the texts, resting
their plain sense and upsetting their balance by forcing them
into a systematic framework which they do not themselves provide.
Whatever may have been true of individual Calvinists, as a generalization
about Calvinism, nothing could be further from the truth than
this. Certainly, Arminianism is natural in one sense, in that
it represents a characteristic perversion of biblical teaching
by the fallen mind of man, who even in salvation cannot bear
to renounce the delusion of being master of his fate and captain
of his soul. This perversion appeared before
in the Pelagianism and Semi-Pelagianism of the Patristic period and the
later Scholasticism. and has recurred since the 17th
century both in Roman theology and, among Protestants, in various
types of rationalistic liberalism and modern evangelical teaching.
And no doubt it will always be with us, as long as the fallen
human mind is what it is. The Arminian way of thinking
will continue to be a natural type of mistake. but it is not
natural in any other sense. In fact, it is Calvinism that
understands the scriptures in their natural, one would have
thought, inescapable meaning. Calvinism that keeps to what
they actually say, Calvinism that insists on taking seriously
the biblical assertions that God saves, and that he saves
those whom he has chosen to save, and that he saves them by grace
without works, so that no man may boast, and that Christ is
given to them as a perfect Savior, and that their whole salvation
flows to them from the cross, and that the work of redeeming
them was finished on the cross. It is Calvinism that gives due
honor to the cross. When the Calvinist sings, There
is a green hill far away, without a city wall, where the dear Lord
was crucified, who died to save us all. He died that we might
be forgiven. He died to make us good, that
we might go at last to heaven, saved by His precious blood.
He means it. He will not gloss the italicized
statements by saying that God's saving purpose in the death of
his son was a mere ineffectual wish, depending for its fulfillment
on man's willingness to believe. So that for all God could do,
Christ might have died and none been saved at all. He insists
that the Bible sees the cross as revealing God's power to save,
not his impotence. Christ did not win a hypothetical
salvation for hypothetical believers, a mere possibility of salvation
for any who might possibly believe, but a real salvation for his
own chosen people. His precious blood really does
save us all. The intended effects of his self-offering
do in fact follow. just because the cross was what
it was. Its saving power does not depend
on faith being added to it. Its saving power is such that
faith flows from it. The cross secured the full salvation
of all for whom Christ died. God forbid, therefore, that I
should glory save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ. Now the real nature of Calvinistic
soteriology becomes plain. It is no artificial oddity, nor
a product of overbold logic. Its central confession, that
God saved sinners, that Christ redeemed us by his blood, is
the witness both of the Bible and of the believing heart. The
Calvinist is the Christian who confesses before men in his theology
just what he believes in his heart before God when he prays. He thinks and speaks at all times
of the sovereign grace of God in the way that every Christian
does when he pleads for the souls of others, or when he obeys the
impulse of worship which rises unbidden within him, prompting
him to deny himself all praise and to give all glory of his
salvation to his Savior. Calvinism is the natural theology,
written on the heart of the new man in Christ, whereas Arminianism
is an intellectual sin of infirmity, natural only in the sense in
which all such sins are natural, even to the regenerate. Calvinistic
thinking is the Christian being himself on the intellectual level.
Arminian thinking is the Christian failing to be himself through
the weakness of the flesh. Calvinism is what the Christian
church has always held and taught when its mind has not been distracted
by controversy and false traditions from attending to what scripture
actually says. That is the significance of the
patristic testimonies to the teaching of the five points,
which can be quoted in abundance. Owen appends a few on redemption. A much larger collection may
be seen in John Gill's The Cause of God and Truth. so that really
it is most misleading to call this soteriology Calvinism at
all. For it is not a peculiarity of
John Calvin and the divines of Dort, but a part of the revealed
truth of God and the Catholic Christian faith. Calvinism is
one of the odious names by which down the centuries prejudice
has been raised against it. But the thing itself is just
the biblical gospel. In the light of these facts,
we can now give a direct answer to the questions with which we
began. Surely all that Owen is doing is defending limited atonement.
Not really. He's doing much more than that.
Strictly speaking, the aim of Owen's book is not defensive
at all, but constructive. It is a biblical and theological
inquiry. Its purpose is simply to make
clear what Scripture actually teaches about the central subject
of the Gospel—the achievement of the Savior. As its title proclaims,
it is a treatise of the redemption and reconciliation that is in
the blood of Christ, with the merit thereof and the satisfaction
wrought thereby. The question which Owen, like
the Dort Divines before him, is really concerned to answer
is just this. What is the Gospel? All agree
that it is a proclamation of Christ as Redeemer, but there
is a dispute as to the nature and extent of his redeeming work. Well, what sayeth the Scripture?
What aim and accomplishment does the Bible assign to the work
of Christ? This is what Owen is concerned
to elucidate. It is true that he tackles the
subject in a directly controversial way and shapes his book as a
polemic against the spreading persuasion of a general ransom
to be paid by Christ for all, that he dies to redeem all and
every one. But his work is a systematic
expository treatise, not a mere episodic wrangle. Owen treats
the controversy as providing the occasion for a full display
of the relevant biblical teaching in its own proper order and connection. As in Hooker's laws of ecclesiastical
polity, the polemics themselves are incidental and of secondary
interest. Their chief value lies in the
way that the author uses them to further his own design and
carry forward his own argument. That argument is essentially
very simple. Owen sees that the question which has occasioned
his writing, the extent of the atonement, involves the further
question of its nature. Since if it was offered to save
some who will finally perish, then it cannot have been a transaction
securing the actual salvation of all for whom it was designed.
But, says Owen, this is precisely the kind of transaction that
the Bible says it was. The first two books of his treatise
are a massive demonstration of the fact that according to scripture,
the Redeemer's death actually saves his people, as it was meant
to do. The third book consists of a
series of 16 arguments against the hypothesis of universal redemption. all aim to show, on the one hand,
that Scripture speaks of Christ's redeeming work as effective,
which precludes its having been intended for any who perish,
and on the other, that if its intended extent had been universal,
then either all will be saved, which Scripture denies, and the
advocates of the general ransom do not affirm, or else the father
and the son have failed to do what they set out to do, which
to assert, says Owen, seems to us blasphemously injurious to
the wisdom, power, and perfection of God, as likewise derogatory
to the worth and value of the death of Christ. Owen's arguments
ring a series of changes on this dilemma. Finally, in the fourth
book, Owen shows with great cogency that the three classes of texts
alleged to prove that Christ died for persons who will not
be saved, those saying that he died for the world, for all,
and those thought to envisage the perishing of those for whom
he died, cannot on sound principles of exegesis be held to teach
any such thing. and further, that the theological
inferences by which universal redemption is supposed to be
established are really quite fallacious. The true evangelical
evaluation of the claim that Christ died for every man, even
those who perish, comes through at point after point in Owen's
book. So far from magnifying the love
and grace of God, this claim dishonors both it and him. For
it reduces God's love to an impotent wish and turns the whole economy
of saving grace, so-called, saving is really a misnomer on this
view, into a monumental divine failure. Also, so far from magnifying
the merit and worth of Christ's death, it cheapens it, for it
makes Christ die in vain. Lastly, so far from affording
faith additional encouragement, it destroys the scriptural ground
of assurance altogether, for it denies that the knowledge
that Christ died for me, or did, or does anything else for me,
is a sufficient ground for inferring my eternal salvation. My salvation
on this view depends not on what Christ did for me, but on what
I subsequently do for myself. Thus, this view takes from God's
love and Christ's redemption the glory that scripture gives
them and introduces the anti-scriptural principle of self-salvation at
the point where the Bible explicitly says, not of works, lest any
man should boast. You cannot have it both ways.
An atonement of universal extent is a depreciated atonement. It
has lost its saving power. It leaves us to save ourselves. The doctrine of the general ransom
must accordingly be rejected, as Owen rejects it, as a grievous
mistake. By contrast, however, the doctrine
which Owen sets out, as he himself shows, is both biblical and God-honoring. It exalts Christ, for it teaches
Christians to glory in his cross alone, and to draw their hope
and assurance only from the death and intercession of their Savior. It is, in other words, genuinely
evangelical. It is, indeed, the gospel of
God and the Catholic faith. It is safe to say that no comparable
exposition of the work of redemption as planned and executed by the
triune Jehovah has ever been done since Owen published his.
None has been needed. Discussing this work, Andrew
Thompson notes how Owen makes you feel when he has reached
the end of his subject, that he has also exhausted it. That
is demonstrably the case here. His interpretation of the text
is sure. His power of theological construction
is superb. Nothing that needs discussing
is omitted. And so far as the writer can
discover, no arguments for or against his position have been
used since his day, which he has not himself noted and dealt
with. One searches his book in vain for the leaps and flights
of logic by which Reformed theologians are supposed to establish their
positions. All that one finds is solid, painstaking exegesis
and a careful following through of biblical ways of thinking.
Owen's work is a constructive, broad-based biblical analysis
of the heart of the gospel, and must be taken seriously as such. It may not be written off as
a piece of special pleading for a traditional shibboleth, for
nobody has a right to dismiss the doctrine of the limitedness
of atonement as a monstrosity of Calvinistic logic until he
has refuted Owen's proof that it is part of the uniform biblical
presentation of redemption. clearly taught in plain text
after plain text. And nobody has done that yet.
You talked about recovering the gospel, said our questioner.
Don't you mean that you just want us all to become Calvinists?
This question presumably concerns not the word, but the thing.
Whether we call ourselves Calvinists hardly matters. What matters
is that we should understand the gospel biblically. But that,
we think, does in fact mean understanding it as historic Calvinism does. The alternative is to misunderstand
and distort it. We said earlier that modern evangelicalism,
by and large, has ceased to preach the gospel in the old way. And
we frankly admit that the new gospel, insofar as it deviates
from the old, seems to us a distortion of the biblical message. And
we can now see what has gone wrong. Our theological currency
has been debased. Our minds have been conditioned
to think of the cross as a redemption which does less than redeem,
and of Christ as a Savior who does less than save, and of God's
love as a weak affection which cannot keep anyone from hell
without help, and of faith as the human help which God needs
for this purpose. As a result, we are no longer
free either to believe the biblical gospel or to preach it. We cannot
believe it because our thoughts are caught in the toils of synergism. We are haunted by the Arminian
idea that if faith and unbelief are to be responsible acts, they
must be independent acts. Hence, we are not free to believe
that we are saved entirely by divine grace through a faith
which is itself God's gift and flows to us from Calvary. Instead,
we involve ourselves in a bewildering kind of double-think about salvation,
telling ourselves one moment that it all depends on God and
the next moment that it all depends on us. The resultant mental model
deprives God of much of the glory that we should give him as author
and finisher of salvation, and ourselves of much of the comfort
we might draw from knowing that God is for us. And when we come to preach the
gospel, our false preconceptions make us say just the opposite
of what we intend. We want, rightly, to proclaim
Christ as Savior, Yet we end up saying that Christ, having
made salvation possible, has left us to become our own saviors.
It comes about in this way. We want to magnify the saving
grace of God and the saving power of Christ, so we declare that
God's redeeming love extends to every man and that Christ
has died to save every man, and we proclaim that the glory of
divine mercy is to be measured by these facts. And then, in
order to avoid universalism, we have to depreciate all that
we were previously extolling. And to explain that, after all,
nothing that God and Christ have done can save us unless we add
something to it. The decisive factor which actually
saves us is our own believing. What we say comes to this, that
Christ saves us with our help. And what that means, when one
thinks it out, is this, that we save ourselves with Christ's
help. This is a hollow anti-climax.
But if we start by affirming that God has a saving love for
all, and Christ died a saving death for all, and yet balk at
becoming universalists, there's nothing else that we can say.
And let us be clear on what we have done when we have put the
matter in this fashion. We have not exalted grace and
the cross. We have cheapened them. We have
limited the atonement far more drastically than Calvinism does.
For whereas Calvinism asserts that Christ's death as such saves
all whom it was meant to save, We have denied that Christ's
death, as such, is sufficient to save any of them. We have
flattered impenitent sinners by assuring them that it is in
their power to repent and believe, though God cannot make them do
it. Perhaps we have also trivialized faith and repentance in order
to make this assurance plausible. It's very simple. Just open your
heart to the Lord. Certainly, we have effectively
denied God's sovereignty and undermined the basic conviction
of religion that man is always in God's hands. In truth, we
have lost a great deal. And it is perhaps no wonder that
our preaching begets so little reverence and humility. and that
our professed converts are so self-confident and so deficient
in self-knowledge and in the good works which Scripture regards
as the fruit of true repentance. It is from degenerate faith and
preaching of this kind that Owen's book could set us free. If we
listen to him, he will teach us both how to believe the scripture
gospel and how to preach it. For the first, he will lead us
to bow down before a sovereign savior who really saves and to
praise him for redeeming death, which made it certain that all
for whom he died will come to glory. It cannot be overemphasized
that we have not seen the full meaning of the cross till we
have seen it as the divines of Dort display it, as the center
of the gospel, flanked on the one hand by total inability and
unconditional election, and on the other by irresistible grace
and final preservation. For the full meaning of the cross
only appears when the atonement is defined in terms of these
four truths. Christ died to save a certain
company of helpless sinners upon whom God has set his free-saving
love. Christ's death ensured the calling
and keeping, the present and final salvation of all whose
sins he bore. That is what Calvary meant and
means. The cross saved. The cross saves. This is the heart of true evangelical
faith. As Cooper sang, Dear dying lamb,
thy precious blood shall never lose its power till all the ransomed
church of God be saved to sin no more. This is the triumphant
conviction which underlay the Old Gospel, as it does the whole
New Testament, and this is what Owen will teach us unequivocally
to believe. Then secondly, Owen could set
us free, if we would hear him, to preach the biblical gospel.
This assertion may sound paradoxical, for it is often imagined that
those who will not preach that Christ died to save every man
are left with no gospel at all. On the contrary, however, what
they are left with is just the gospel of the New Testament.
What does it mean to preach the gospel of the grace of God? Owen
only touches on this briefly and incidentally, but his comments
are full of light. Preaching the gospel, he tells
us, is not a matter of telling the congregation that God has
set his love on each one of them and Christ has died to save each
of them, for these assertions, biblically understood, would
imply that they will all infallibly be saved. And this cannot be
known to be true. The knowledge of being the object
of God's eternal love and Christ's redeeming death belongs to the
individual's assurance, which in the nature of the case cannot
precede faith's saving exercise. It is to be inferred from the
fact that one has believed, not proposed, as a reason why one
should believe. According to scripture, preaching
the gospel is entirely a matter of proclaiming to men as truth
from God, which all are bound to believe and act on the following
four facts. One, that all men are sinners
and cannot do anything to save themselves. Two, that Jesus Christ,
God's son, is a perfect savior for sinners, even the worst.
3. That the Father and the Son have
promised that all who know themselves to be sinners and put faith in
Christ as Savior shall be received into favor, and none cast out,
which promise is a certain infallible truth, grounded upon the superabundant
sufficiency of the oblation of Christ in itself, for whomsoever,
few or more, it be intended. 4. That God has made repentance
and faith a duty requiring of every man who hears the gospel,
a serious, full recumbency and rolling of the soul upon Christ
in the promise of the gospel, as an all-sufficient Savior,
able to deliver and save to the utmost them that come to God
by Him. ready, able, and willing, through
the preciousness of His blood and sufficiency of His ransom,
to save every soul that shall freely give up themselves unto
Him for that end." The preacher's task, in other words, is to display
Christ, to explain man's need of Him, his sufficiency to save,
and his offer of himself in the promises as Saviour to all who
truly turn to him, and to show as fully and plainly as he can
how these truths apply to the congregation before him. It is
not for him to say, nor for his hearers to ask, for whom Christ
died in particular. There is none called on by the
Gospel once to inquire after the purpose and intention of
God concerning the particular object of the death of Christ,
every one being fully assured that his death shall be profitable
to them that believe in him and obey him. After saving faith
has been exercised, it lies on a believer to assure his soul,
according as he find the fruit of the death of Christ in him
and towards him, of the goodwill and eternal love of God to him
in sending his son to die for him in particular, but not before. The task to which the gospel
calls him is simply to exercise faith. which he is both warranted
and obliged to do by God's command and promise. Some comments on
this conception of what preaching the gospel means are in order. First, we should observe that
the Old Gospel of Owen contains no less full and free in offer
of salvation than its modern counterpart. It presents ample
grounds of faith, the sufficiency of Christ and the promise of
God, and cogent motives to faith, the sinner's need and the Creator's
command, which is also the Redeemer's invitation. The New Gospel gains
nothing here by asserting universal redemption. The Old Gospel certainly
has no room for the cheap sentimentalizing which turns God's free mercy
to sinners into a constitutional soft-heartedness on His part,
which we can take for granted. Nor will it countenance the degrading
presentation of Christ as the baffled Savior, balked in what
he hoped to do by human unbelief. Nor will it indulge in maudlin
appeals to the unconverted to let Christ save them out of a
pity for his disappointment. The pitiable Savior and the pathetic
God of modern pulpits are unknown to the Old Gospel. The Old Gospel
tells men that they need God, but not that God needs them,
a modern falsehood. It does not exhort them to pity
Christ, but announces that Christ has pitied them, though pity
was the last thing they deserved. It never loses sight of the divine
majesty and sovereign power of the Christ whom it proclaims,
but rejects flatly all representations of Him which would obscure His
free omnipotence. Does this mean, however, that
the preacher of the old gospel is inhibited or confined in offering
Christ to men and inviting them to receive him? Not at all. In
actual fact, just because he recognizes that divine mercy
is sovereign and free, he is in a position to make far more
of the offer of Christ in his preaching than is the expositor
of the new gospel. For this offer is itself a far
more wonderful thing on His principles than it can ever be in the eyes
of those who regard love to all sinners as a necessity of God's
nature, and therefore a matter of course. To think that the
Holy Creator, who never needed man for His happiness, and might
justly have banished our fallen race forever without mercy, should
actually have chosen to redeem some of them? And that His own
Son was willing to undergo death and descend into hell to save
them? and that now from his throne he should speak to ungodly men
as he does in the words of the gospel, urging upon them the
command to repent and believe in the form of a compassionate
invitation to pity themselves and choose life. These thoughts
are the focal points around which the preaching of the old gospel
revolves. It is all wonderful, just because
none of it can be taken for granted. But perhaps the most wonderful
thing of all, the holiest spot in all the holy ground of gospel
truth, is the free invitation which the Lord Christ, as Owen
loves to call him, issues repeatedly to guilty sinners to come to
him and find rest for their souls. It is the glory of these invitations
that it is an omnipotent King who gives them, just as it is
a chief part of the glory of the enthroned Christ that he
condescends still to utter them. and that it is the glory of the
gospel ministry that the preacher goes to men as Christ's ambassador,
charged to deliver the king's invitation personally to every
sinner present and to summon them all to turn and live. Owen himself enlarges on this
in a passage addressed to the unconverted. Consider the infinite
condescension and love of Christ. in his invitations and calls
of you to come unto him for life, deliverance, mercy, grace, peace,
and eternal salvation. Multitudes of these invitations
and calls are recorded in the scripture, and they are all of
them filled up with those blessed encouragements which divine wisdom
knows to be suited unto lost, convinced sinners. in the declaration
and preaching of them. Jesus Christ yet stands before
sinners, calling, inviting, encouraging them to come unto him. This is somewhat of the word
which he now speaks unto you. Why will ye die? Why will ye
perish? Why will ye not have compassion
on your own souls? Can your hearts endure? Or can
your hands be strong in the day of wrath that is approaching?
Look unto me and be saved. Come unto me and I will ease
you of all sins, sorrows, fears, burdens, and give rest unto your
souls. Come, I entreat you, lay aside
all procrastinations, all delays. Put me off no more. Eternity
lies at the door. Do not so hate me as that you
will rather perish than accept of deliverance by me. These and
the like things doth the Lord Christ continually declare, proclaim,
plead, and urge upon the souls of sinners. He doth, it in the
preaching of the word, as if he were present with you, stood
amongst you, and spake personally to every one of you. He hath
appointed the ministers of the gospel to appear before you and
to deal with you in his stead. avowing his own the invitations
which are given you in his name." 2 Corinthians 5, 19 and 20. These invitations are universal.
Christ addresses them to sinners as such and every man as he believes
God to be true. is bound to treat them as God's
words to him personally and to accept the universal assurance
which accompanies them, that all who come to Christ will be
received. Again, these invitations are
real. Christ genuinely offers himself to all who hear the gospel
and is, in truth, a perfect Savior to all who trust him. The question
of the extent of the atonement does not rise in evangelistic
preaching. The message to be delivered is simply this, that
Christ Jesus, the sovereign Lord who died for sinners, now invites
sinners freely to himself. God commands all to repent and
believe. Christ promises life and peace
to all who do so. Furthermore, these invitations
are marvelously gracious. Men despise and reject them and
are never in any case worthy of them, and yet Christ still
issues them. He need not, but he does. Come unto me and I will give
you rest, remains his word to the world never canceled, always
to be preached. He whose death has ensured the
salvation of all his people is to be proclaimed everywhere as
a perfect Savior, and all men invited and urged to believe
on him. Whoever they are, whatever they
have been, upon these three insights the evangelism of the Old Gospel
is based. It is a very ill-informed supposition
that evangelistic preaching, which proceeds on these principles,
must be anemic and half-hearted by comparison with what Arminians
can do. Those who study the printed sermons
of worthy expositors of the Old Gospel, such as Bunyan, who's
preaching Owen himself much admired, or Whitefield, or Spurgeon, will
find that in fact, They hold forth the Savior and summon sinners
to him with a fullness, warmth, intensity, and moving force unmatched
in Protestant pulpit literature. And it will be found on analysis
that the very thing which gave their preaching its unique power
to overwhelm their audiences with broken-hearted joy at the
riches of God's grace and still gives it that power, let it be
said, even with hard-boiled modern readers, was their insistence
on the fact that grace is free. They knew that the dimensions
of divine love are not half understood till one realizes that God need
not have chosen to save nor given his Son to die, nor need Christ
have taken upon him vicarious damnation to redeem men. nor
need he invite sinners indiscriminately to himself as he does, but that
all God's gracious dealings spring entirely from his own free purpose. Knowing this, they stressed it,
and it is this stress that sets their evangelistic preaching
in a class by itself. Other evangelicals possessed
of a far more superficial and less adequate theology of grace
have laid the main emphasis in their gospel preaching on the
sinner's need of forgiveness, or peace, or power, and of the
way to get them by deciding for Christ. It is not to be denied
that their preaching has done good, for God will use his truth
even when imperfectly held and mixed with error. Although this
type of evangelism is always open to the criticism of being
too man-centered and pietistic, But it has been left, necessarily,
to Calvinists and those who, like the Wesleys, fall into Calvinistic
ways of thought as soon as they begin a sermon to the unconverted.
To preach the gospel in a way which highlights, above everything
else, the free love, willing condescension, patient long-suffering,
and infinite kindness of the Lord Jesus Christ. And without
doubt, this is the most scriptural and edifying way to preach it.
For gospel invitations to sinners never honor God and exalt Christ
more, nor are more powerful to awaken and confirm faith than
when full weight is laid on the free omnipotence of the mercy
from which they flow. It looks, indeed, as if the preachers
of the Old Gospel are the only people whose position allows
them to do justice to the revelation of divine goodness in the free
offer of Christ to sinners. Then in the second place, the
Old Gospel safeguards values which the New Gospel loses. We
saw before that the New Gospel, by asserting universal redemption
and a universal divine saving purpose, compels itself to cheapen
grace and the cross by denying that the Father and the Son are
sovereign in salvation. For it assures us that, after
God and Christ have done all that they can or will, it depends
finally on each man's own choice whether God's purpose to save
him is realized or not. This position has two unhappy
results. The first is that it compels us to misunderstand the
significance of the gracious invitations of Christ in the
Gospel of which we have been speaking. For we now have to
read them, not as expressions of the tender patience of a mighty
sovereign, but as the pathetic pleadings of impotent desire.
And so the enthroned Lord is suddenly metamorphosed into a
weak, futile figure tapping forlornly at the door of the human heart,
which he is powerless to open. This is a shameful dishonor to
the Christ of the New Testament. The second implication is equally
serious, for this view in effect denies our dependence on God
when it comes to vital decisions. takes us out of his hand, tells
us that we are, after all, what sin taught us to think we are,
masters of our fate, captain of our souls, and so undermines
the very foundation of man's religious relationship with his
maker. It can hardly be wondered that the converts of the new
gospel are so often both irreverent and irreligious, for such is
the natural tendency of this teaching. The Old Gospel, however,
speaks very differently and has a very different tendency. On
the one hand, in expounding man's need of Christ, it stresses something
which the New Gospel effectively ignores, that sinners cannot
obey the Gospel any more than the law, without renewal of heart. On the other hand, in declaring
Christ's power to save, it proclaims him as the author and chief agent
of conversion, coming by his spirit as the gospel goes forth
to renew men's hearts and draw them to himself. Accordingly,
in applying the message, the Old Gospel, while stressing that
faith is man's duty, stresses also that faith is not in man's
power, but that God must give what he commands. It announces
not merely that men must come to Christ for salvation, but
also that they cannot come unless Christ himself draws them. Thus
it labors to overthrow self-confidence, to convince sinners that their
salvation is altogether out of their hands, and to shut them
up to a self-despairing dependence on the glorious grace of a sovereign
Savior, not only for their righteousness, but for their faith too. It is
not likely, therefore, that a preacher of the Old Gospel will be happy
to express the application of it in the form of a demand to
decide for Christ, as the current phrase is. For on the one hand,
this phrase carries the wrong associations. It suggests voting
a person into office, an act in which the candidate plays
no part beyond offering himself for election and everything then
being settled by the voter's independent choice. But we do
not vote God's son into office as our savior, nor does he remain
passive while preachers campaign on his behalf, whipping up support
for his cause. We ought not to think of evangelism
as a kind of electioneering. And then, on the other hand,
this phrase obscures the very thing that is essential in repentance
and faith, the denying of the self in a personal approach to
Christ. It is not at all obvious that
deciding for Christ is the same as coming to him and resting
on him and turning from sin and self-effort. It sounds like something
much less and is accordingly calculated to instill defective
notions of what the gospel really requires of sinners. It is not
a very apt phrase from any point of view. To the question, what
must I do to be saved? The Old Gospel replies, believe
on the Lord Jesus Christ. To the further question, what
does it mean to believe on the Lord Jesus Christ? Its reply
is, it means knowing oneself to be a sinner and Christ to
have died for sinners, abandoning all self-righteousness and self-confidence
and casting oneself wholly upon him for pardon and peace. and
exchanging one's natural enmity and rebellion against God for
a spirit of grateful submission to the will of Christ through
the renewing of one's heart by the Holy Ghost. And to the further
question still, how am I to go about believing on Christ and
repenting if I have no natural ability to do these things? It
answers, look to Christ. Speak to Christ. Cry to Christ. Just as you are, confess your
sin, your impenitence, your unbelief, and cast yourself on His mercy. Ask Him to give you a new heart,
working in you true repentance and firm faith. Ask Him to take
away your evil heart of unbelief and to write His law within you,
that you may never henceforth stray from Him. Turn to Him and
trust Him as best you can, and pray for grace to turn and trust
more thoroughly. Use the means of grace expectantly,
looking to Christ to draw near to you as you seek to draw near
to Him. Watch. Pray, read and hear God's
Word, worship and commune with God's people, and so continue
till you know in yourself beyond doubt that you are indeed a changed
being, a penitent believer, and the new heart which you desired
has been put within you. The emphasis in this advice is
on the need to call upon Christ directly as the very first step. Let not conscience make you linger,
nor of fitness fondly dream. All the fitness he requireth
is to feel your need of him. So do not postpone action till
you think you are better, but honestly confess your badness
and give yourself up here and now to the Christ who alone can
make you better. and wait on him till his light
rises in your soul. As scripture promises that it
will do, anything less than this direct dealing with Christ is
disobedience of the gospel. Such is the exercise of spirit
to which the Old Evangel summons its hearers. I believe, help
thou mine unbelief. This must become their cry. And the Old Gospel is proclaimed
in the sure confidence that the Christ of whom it testifies,
the Christ who is the real speaker when the scriptural invitations
to trust him are expounded and applied, is not passively waiting
for man's decision as the Word goes forth, but is omnipotently
active, working with and through the Word to bring his people
to faith in himself. The preaching of the New Gospel
is often described as the task of bringing men to Christ, if
only men move while Christ stands still. But the task of preaching
the Old Gospel could more properly be described as bringing Christ
to men, for those who preach it know that as they do their
work of setting Christ before men's eyes, the mighty Savior
whom they proclaim is busy doing His work through their words,
visiting sinners with salvation, awakening them to faith, drawing
them in mercy to Himself. It is this older gospel which
Owen will teach us to preach, the gospel of the sovereign grace
of God in Christ as the author and finisher of faith and salvation. It is the only gospel which can
be preached on Owen's principles, but those who have tasted its
sweetness will not in any case be found looking for another.
In the matter of believing and preaching the gospel, as in other
things, Jeremiah's words still have their application. Of us
saith the Lord, stand ye in the ways, and see, and ask for the
old paths. Where is the good way? And walk
therein, and ye shall find rest for your souls. To find ourselves
debarred, as Owen would debar us, from taking up the fashionable
modern substitute gospel may not, after all, be a bad thing,
either for us or for the church. More might be said, but to go
further would be to exceed the limits of an introductory essay.
The foregoing remarks are made simply to show how important
it is at the present time that we should attend most carefully
to Owen's analysis of what the Bible says about the saving work
of Christ.