The Church, the Scriptures, and the Sacraments (Volume 28) E-Book

John Owen

• Herausgeber: Crossway
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Serie: The Complete Works of John Owen
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

Crossway Introduces the Collected Works of John Owen, Updated for Modern Readers Regarded as one of the greatest theologians in history, 17th-century pastor John Owen wrote extensively on holiness, Scripture, the Trinity, missions, and ecclesiology. His classic works—which have inspired many Christian thinkers including Charles Spurgeon, J. I. Packer, and John Piper—remain influential, but until now haven't been offered in an easy-to-read collection. The Complete Works of John Owen is a 40-volume series that brings together all of Owen's original theological writings, reformatted for modern readers. Volume 28, edited by Andrew M. Leslie, includes a variety of Owen's treatises, sermons, short letters, and tracts. These works cover scriptural, sacramental, and ecclesiological topics, including the integrity of Scripture, identifying and responding to habitual sin, and the importance of devotion and worship. Along with extensive introductions by the editor, this volume includes outlines, footnotes, and other supporting resources. This landmark series—which will be published over a number of years—presents Owen's prolific work in an easy-to-read layout to reach and inspire a new generation of Bible readers and scholars to deeper faith. - Edited and Formatted for Modern Readers: Presents Owen's original writing, newly typeset with text breaks, headings, and footnotes - Insightful Introductions and Outlines: Provide historical, theological, and personal context, as well as an explanation of pastoral debates up to and following each work - Part of the Complete Works of John Owen Collection: 40 hardcover volumes will release over a number of years and include material not previously published - Perfect for Churches and Schools: Invites students, pastors, theologians, and those interested in the Holy Spirit and the Puritans to explore worship and ecclesiology, gain a Christ-centered vision, and pursue holiness 

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The Complete Works of John Owen

The Complete Works of John Owen

The Trinity

Vol. 1  Communion with God

Vol. 2  The Trinity Defended: Part 1

Vol. 3  The Trinity Defended: Part 2

Vol. 4  The Person of Christ

Vol. 5  The Holy Spirit—His Person and Work: Part 1

Vol. 6  The Holy Spirit—His Person and Work: Part 2

Vol. 7  The Holy Spirit—The Helper

Vol. 8  The Holy Spirit—The Comforter

The Gospel

Vol. 9The Death of Christ

Vol. 10Sovereign Grace and Justice

Vol. 11Justification by Faith Alone

Vol. 12The Saints’ Perseverance: Part 1

Vol. 13The Saints’ Perseverance: Part 2

Vol. 14Apostasy from the Gospel

The Christian Life

Vol. 15Sin and Temptation

Vol. 16An Exposition of Psalm 130

Vol. 17Heavenly-Mindedness

Vol. 18Sermons and Tracts from the Civil Wars (1646–1649)

Vol. 19Sermons from the Commonwealth and Protectorate (1650–1659)

Vol. 20Sermons from the Early Restoration Years (1669–1675)

Vol. 21Sermons from the Later Restoration Years (1676–1682)

Vol. 22Miscellaneous Sermons and Lectures

The Church

Vol. 23The Nature of the Church: Part 1

Vol. 24The Nature of the Church: Part 2

Vol. 25The Church Defended: Part 1

Vol. 26The Church Defended: Part 2

Vol. 27The Church’s Worship

Vol. 28The Church, the Scriptures, and the Sacraments

Hebrews

Vol. 29An Exposition of Hebrews: Part 1, Introduction to Hebrews

Vol. 30An Exposition of Hebrews: Part 2, Christ’s Priesthood and the Sabbath

Vol. 31An Exposition of Hebrews: Part 3, Jesus the Messiah

Vol. 32An Exposition of Hebrews: Part 4, Hebrews 1–2

Vol. 33An Exposition of Hebrews: Part 5, Hebrews 3–4

Vol. 34An Exposition of Hebrews: Part 6, Hebrews 5–6

Vol. 35An Exposition of Hebrews: Part 7, Hebrews 7–8

Vol. 36An Exposition of Hebrews: Part 8, Hebrews 9–10

Vol. 37An Exposition of Hebrews: Part 9, Hebrews 11–13

Latin Works

Vol. 38The Study of True Theology

Shorter Works

Vol. 39The Shorter Works of John Owen

Indexes

Vol. 40Indexes

The Complete Works of John Owen

The Church

Volume 28

The Church, the Scriptures, and the Sacraments

John Owen

Introduced and Edited by

Andrew M. Leslie

General Editors

Lee Gatiss and Shawn D. Wright

The Church, the Scriptures, and the Sacraments

© 2024 by Crossway

Published by Crossway1300 Crescent StreetWheaton, Illinois 60187

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher, except as provided for by USA copyright law. Crossway® is a registered trademark in the United States of America.

Cover design: Jordan Singer

Cover image: Marble Paper Artist: Vanessa Reynoso, Marble Paper Studio

First printing 2024

Printed in China

Scripture quotations marked ESV are from the ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved. The ESV text may not be quoted in any publication made available to the public by a Creative Commons license. The ESV may not be translated into any other language.

Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-4335-6037-8 ePub ISBN: 978-1-4335-8639-2 PDF ISBN: 978-1-4335-8637-8

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Owen, John, 1616–1683, author. | Leslie, Andrew M., editor.

Title: The church, the scriptures, and the sacraments / John Owen ; introduced and edited by Andrew M. Leslie ; general editors, Lee Gatiss and Shawn D. Wright.

Description: Wheaton, Illinois : Crossway, 2024. | Series: The complete works of John Owen; volume 28 | Includes bibliographical references and indexes.

Identifiers: LCCN 2022055011 (print) | LCCN 2022055012 (ebook) | ISBN 9781433560378 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781433586378 (pdf) | ISBN 9781433586392 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: Bible—Criticism, interpretation, etc. | Sacraments. | Church.

Classification: LCC BS511.3 .O87 2024  (print) | LCC BS511.3  (ebook) | DDC 220.6—dc23/eng/20230419

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022055011

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022055012

Crossway is a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers.

2024-01-03 01:40:58 PM

Volume 28

Contents

Works Preface

Editor’s Introduction

Part 1: Works on Scripture

Of the Divine Original

Of the Integrity

Part 2: Works on the Lord’s Supper

Twenty-Five Discourses Suitable to the Lord’s Supper

Three Discourses Delivered at the Lord’s Table

Part 3: Collected Works on Ecclesiology

Several Practical Cases of Conscience Resolved

Reflections on a Slanderous Libel

A Letter concerning the Matter of the Present Excommunications

A Discourse concerning the Administration of Church Censures

An Answer unto Two Questions

Twelve Arguments, against Any Conformity of Members of Separate Churches, to the National Church

Of Infant Baptism, and Dipping

Of Marrying after Divorce in Case of Adultery

General Index

Scripture Index

Works Preface

John Owen (1616–1683) is one of the most significant, influential, and prolific theologians that England has ever produced. His work is of such a high caliber that it is no surprise to find it still in demand more than four centuries after his birth. As a son of the Church of England, a Puritan preacher, a statesman, a Reformed theologian and Bible commentator, and later a prominent Nonconformist and advocate of toleration, he is widely read and appreciated by Christians of different types all over the globe, not only for the profundity of his thinking but also for the depth of his spiritual insight.

Owen was born in the year that William Shakespeare died, and in terms of his public influence, he was a rising star in the 1640s and at the height of his power in the 1650s. As chaplain to Oliver Cromwell, dean of Christ Church, and vice-chancellor of Oxford University, he wielded a substantial degree of power and influence within the short-lived English republic. Yet he eventually found himself on the losing side of the epic struggles of the seventeenth century and was ousted from his position of national preeminence. The Act of Uniformity in 1662 effectively barred him from any role in the established church, yet it was in the wilderness of those turbulent post-Restoration years that he wrote many of his most momentous contributions to the world of theological literature, despite being burdened by opposition, persecution, family tragedies, and illness.

There was an abortive endeavor to publish a uniform edition of Owen’s works in the early eighteenth century, but this progressed no further than a single folio volume in 1721. A century later (1826), Thomas Russell met with much more success when he produced a collection in twenty-one volumes. The appetite for Owen only grew; more than three hundred people had subscribed to the 1721 and 1826 editions of his works, but almost three thousand subscribed to the twenty-four-volume set produced by William H. Goold from 1850 onward. That collection, with Goold’s learned introductions and notes, became the standard edition. It was given a new lease on life when the Banner of Truth Trust reprinted it several times beginning in 1965, though without some of Owen’s Latin works, which had appeared in Goold’s edition, or his massive Hebrews commentary, which Banner did eventually reprint in 1991. Goold corrected various errors in the original seventeenth- and eighteenth-century publications, some of which Owen himself had complained of, as well as certain grammatical errors. He thoroughly revised the punctuation, numeration of points, and Scripture references in Owen and presented him in a way acceptable to nineteenth-century readers without taking liberties with the text.

Since the mid-nineteenth century, and especially since the reprinting of Goold’s edition in the mid-twentieth century, there has been a great flowering of interest in seventeenth-century Puritanism and Reformed theology. The recent profusion of scholarship in this area has resulted in a huge increase of attention given to Owen and his contribution to these movements. The time has therefore come to attempt another presentation of Owen’s body of work for a new century. This new edition is more than a reprint of earlier collections of Owen’s writings. As useful as those have been to us and many others, they fail to meet the needs of modern readers who are often familiar with neither the theological context nor the syntax and rhetorical style of seventeenth-century English divinity.

For that reason, we have returned again to the original editions of Owen’s texts to ensure the accuracy of their presentation here but have conformed the spelling to modern American standards, modernized older verb endings, reduced the use of italics where they do not clarify meaning, updated some hyphenation forms, modernized capitalization both for select terms in the text and for titles of Owen’s works, refreshed the typesetting, set lengthy quotations in block format, and both checked and added Scripture references in a consistent format where necessary. Owen’s quotations of others, however, including the various editions of the Bible he used or translated, are kept as they appear in his original. His marginal notes and footnotes have been clearly marked in footnotes as his (with “—Owen” appearing at the end of his content) to distinguish them from editorial comments. Foreign languages such as Greek, Hebrew, and Latin (which Owen knew and used extensively) have been translated into modern English, with the original languages retained in footnotes for scholarly reference (also followed by “—Owen”). If Goold omitted parts of the original text in his edition, we have restored them to their rightful place. Additionally, we have attempted to regularize the numbering system Owen employed, which was often imprecise and inconsistent; our order is 1, (1), [1], {1}, and 1st. We have also included various features to aid readers’ comprehension of Owen’s writings, including extensive introductions and outlines by established scholars in the field today, new paragraph breaks marked by a pilcrow (¶), chapter titles and appropriate headings (either entirely new or adapted from Goold), and explanatory footnotes that define archaic or obscure words and point out scriptural and other allusions in the text. When a contents page was not included in the original publication, we have provided one. On the rare occasions when we have added words to the text for readability, we have clearly marked them using square brackets. Having a team of experts involved, along with the benefit of modern online database technology, has also enabled us to make the prodigious effort to identify sources and citations in Owen that Russell and Goold deliberately avoided or were unable to locate for their editions.

Owen did not use only one English translation of the Bible. At various times, he employed the Great Bible, the Geneva Bible, or the Authorized Version (KJV), as well as his own paraphrases or translations from the original languages. We have not sought to harmonize his biblical quotations to any single version. Similarly, we have left his Hebrew and Greek quotations exactly as he recorded them, including the unpointed Hebrew text. When it appears that he has misspelled the Hebrew or Greek, we have acknowledged that in a footnote with reference to either Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia or Novum Testamentum Graece.

This new edition presents fresh translations of Owen’s works that were originally published in Latin, such as his Θεολογούμενα Παντοδαπά (1661) and A Dissertation on Divine Justice (which Goold published in an amended eighteenth-century translation). It also includes certain shorter works that have never before been collected in one place, such as Owen’s prefaces to other people’s works and many of his letters, with an extensive index to the whole set.

Our hope and prayer in presenting this new edition of John Owen’s complete works is that it will equip and enable new generations of readers to appreciate the spiritual insights he accumulated over the course of his remarkable life. Those with a merely historical interest will find here a testimony to the exceptional labors of one extraordinary figure from a tumultuous age, in a modern and usable critical edition. Those who seek to learn from Owen about the God he worshiped and served will, we trust, find even greater riches in his doctrine of salvation, his passion for evangelism and missions, his Christ-centered vision of all reality, his realistic pursuit of holiness, his belief that theology matters, his concern for right worship and religious freedom, and his careful exegetical engagement with the text of God’s word. We echo the words of the apostle Paul that Owen inscribed on the title page of his book Χριστολογία (1679), “I count all things but loss for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord, for whom I have suffered the loss of all things, and do count them but dung that I may win Christ” (Phil. 3:8).

Lee Gatiss

Cambridge, England

Shawn D. Wright

Louisville, Kentucky, United States

Editor’s Introduction

Andrew M. Leslie

General Comments on the Origin of the Contents in This Present Volume

The two major treatises in this volume, Of the Divine Original, with the Authority, Self-Evidencing Power, and Light of the Scriptures and Of the Integrity and Purity of the Hebrew and Greek Text of the Scripture, were two of three treatises by Owen on Holy Scripture that were published in 1659. While Of the Divine Original and Of the Integrity were published together with a single “Dedicatory Epistle,”1 the third treatise was published separately in Latin, Pro Sacris Scripturis adversus Huius Temporis Fanaticos Exercitationes Apologeticae Quatuor.2

The remaining content of the present volume consists largely of posthumous collections of sermons that were arranged and published according to a particular theme, as well as several short letters and tracts. As Crawford Gribben notes, the 1721, 1756, and 1760 collections of sermons reproduce material that was initially transcribed in shorthand by John Hartopp and then expanded into a longhand form that is recorded in his notebooks.3 The Hartopp family was connected to Owen via his friend Charles Fleetwood and Fleetwood’s third wife, Mary Hartopp. John Hartopp was Mary’s son from her first marriage, and together they formed part of Owen’s post-Restoration congregation that met initially in Fleetwood’s home.4 According to Gribben, the material contained in Hartopp’s extant notebooks is “detailed and convincing” in its attempt to represent Owen accurately and honest about its limitations where need be.5

Two tracts in the present volume, An Answer unto Two Questions with its sequel, Twelve Arguments, against Any Conformity of Members of Separate Churches, to the National Church, were published by William and Joseph Marshall in 1720.6 According to the “Booksellers Advertisement” of the two-volume collection in which these two tracts are contained, the collection consisted of material that had been under the possession of the Marshalls and was reprinted for posterity because it had become “very scarce and out of print.”7 Whatever points of correspondence we can identify with Owen’s output published within his own lifetime, a question mark is likely to remain over the provenance of some of this posthumous material, despite protestations to the contrary by the respective publishers.

Introduction to Of the Divine Original (1659)

Gribben overviews the historical circumstances that led Owen to turn his hand to the subject of biblical authority, not least of which was the gradual appearance of Brian Walton’s monumental Biblia sacra polyglotta from 1653, and especially the publication of its Prolegomena and Appendix in 1657.8 But while Owen makes the odd oblique reference to the London Polyglot Bible in Of the Divine Original, there is every reason to believe the decision to publish both treatises together with a single “Dedicatory Epistle” was an alteration to an earlier intention to publish Of the Divine Original separately. Indeed, Owen begins to give focused attention to Walton’s production only in the “Dedicatory Epistle” and Of the Integrity.

By comparison to Of the Integrity, Owen’s tone in Of the Divine Original is far more irenic and constructive. Certainly, there is the occasional hint at the contextual forces that will become much more explicit in its sequel. The most notable of these is taken up in chapter 1, where Owen engages with the Salmurian theologian Louis Cappel (1585–1658) and his controversial opinions regarding emendations to the original Hebrew text of the Old Testament. As we shall see further below in this introduction, Owen is undoubtedly keen to defend the integrity of the extant original copies of Scripture, as a direct corollary of God’s ongoing providential care for his church.9 Aside from this, however, Owen’s immediate polemical concerns in Of the Divine Original are rather muted. As Gribben mentions, it is possible that he is troubled by the proliferation of poor and inadequate translations that had been published of late, and the doubts this might sow in a believer’s mind about the authority and reliability of Scripture.10 Indeed, the major constructive theme in Of the Divine Original is Scripture’s self-authentication, or the way in which it continues to manifest its divine authority to the faithful. Moreover, there are certainly suggestions that Owen is particularly alarmed by the way the Catholics had capitalized on any doubts about the authority of Scripture. He explicitly responds to the claim that Scripture’s authority as the word of God is restricted to itself but does not extend to us (quoad nos), therein requiring the authentication of the Roman magisterium and its now officially authorized Vulgate translation. Owen’s own recognizably Protestant account of Scripture’s self-authentication, with its customary appeal to the internal work of the Spirit, betrays a marked sensitivity to the typical Catholic charges against it.11 Appeals to the Spirit had become especially fraught with the rise of sectarianism during the Interregnum. In 1654, while vice-chancellor of Oxford University, Owen famously expelled two Quaker prophets for their displays of religious fanaticism. He was obviously sufficiently haunted by this experience over the immediately subsequent years that he explicitly set out to refute their notorious appeals to the Spirit’s “inner light” in the third treatise of 1658, Pro Sacris Scripturis.12 That Owen was looking over his shoulder in expectation that any Protestant reliance on the Spirit’s internal testimony would be tarred with the brush of “vain enthusiasm” is abundantly clear throughout this treatise, as Gribben readily observes.13

There are a couple of features in Of the Divine Original that are worthy of our attention. The first is its defense of the so-called plenary inspiration of Scripture. A much more developed and sophisticated account of inspiration may be found in Owen’s later Πνευματολογια: Or, A Discourse concerning the Holy Spirit of 1674;14 nonetheless an outline of it is already evident in Of the Divine Original, where his position on the matter unfolds from what he perceives to be a straightforward exposition of 1 Peter 1:10–12 and various related claims in the New Testament such as Hebrews 1:1 and 2 Timothy 3:16. In particular, where God is said to have spoken “in the prophets” (ἐν τοῖς προφήταις) of old (Heb. 1:1), Owen draws two closely related inferences. The first is that every detail of what they recorded was revealed to them immediately by God so that no detail was left to their independent rational formulation or memory of events. A second inference follows: “They were not themselves enabled by any habitual light, knowledge or conviction of truth, to declare his mind and will, but only acted, as they were immediately moved by him.”15 It is true that Owen presents here a slightly stricter account of inspiration than some of his Protestant brethren.16As Richard Muller points out, some early modern Reformed theologians were willing to concede that no special revelation of the Spirit was necessary for matters a writer already knew or could discover from other sources, even if the Spirit still superintended and inspired the actual process of writing to prevent the possibility of error creeping into the text.17 In making the stronger affirmation, Owen may well have been conscious of the way certain Catholic polemicists had adopted the looser approach with undesirable consequences.18 Moreover, the divine inspiration of the writer did not stop with a mental illumination of content, Owen insists, but extended as far as the words chosen, right down to the last “tittle,” so as to ensure that the original autograph of Scripture was infallible and “entirely” from God. Owen should not be caricatured as advancing a highly mechanistic account of inspiration that crudely bypasses the rational processes of the writer. He insists the writers not only made a “diligent inquiry” into what they received (1 Pet. 1:10) but also consciously concurred with the words that were chosen.19 Once again, it is certainly true that Owen’s commitment to the divine illumination of particular words is stronger than some,20 but his general account stands in continuity with a broad doctrine of prophetic and biblical inspiration, which, as Muller notes, is ubiquitous in earlier medieval thought and passes over “virtually untouched by revision, into the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.”21 In other words, Owen’s account of inspiration is unlikely to have been particularly controversial in his day.

What was more controversial, at least from a Catholic perspective, was the appeal to the Spirit’s internal testimony as the means by which the divine authority of Scripture authenticates itself to a believer. Having dismantled the Catholic reliance on ecclesiastical authority and replaced it with an exclusive dependence on the supremacy of Scripture, Protestants quickly found themselves charged with undermining religious certainty and promoting a dangerous individualism in biblical interpretation that had opened the floodgates to the sort of religious fanaticism that was beginning to tear Europe apart. In this context, the standard Protestant appeal to the internal testimony of the Spirit as the guarantor of biblical authority only made matters worse—so much so that by the second half of the seventeenth century, it was no longer considered doctrinally viable, even among some Protestants.22

We have already noted Owen’s alertness to a Catholic method of resolving the dilemma of religious certainty that distinguishes between Scripture’s authority in itself as the word of God and its authentication “in respect of us” (quoad nos) through the testimony of the church.23 This sort of distinction surfaced in the polemics between Catholics and Protestants in the latter half of the sixteenth century. As someone like Thomas Stapleton (1535–1598) maintained, the appeal to the public testimony of the church was considered the only viable way of sidestepping the specter of “spiritualism” or “enthusiasm,” or even some Satanic delusion, which would accompany a “private” spiritual testimony to biblical authority.24 In responding to this, Protestants were increasingly inclined to accentuate a public dimension to this spiritual testimony through objective evidence or marks that could be formulated into an argument supporting the Bible’s authority as the inspired word of God. That way, an ongoing orthodox conviction of the Spirit’s necessary internal work at the foundation of Christian faith could be framed in a way that explicitly avoided any suggestion that it amounted to an afflatus or private word from God to every individual believer. For however much the Spirit communicates the power and authority of God through Scripture to a believer, he does so in a way that radiates the objective and rational credibility of these marks.25

By the time Owen came to write his mature exposition of biblical authority, The Reason of Faith, or An Answer unto That Enquiry, Wherefore We Believe the Scripture to Be the Word of God in 1677, Protestant convictions about the necessity of the Spirit’s internal work had begun to collapse. And here he would explicitly lock horns with some of his post-Restoration contemporaries who had gone as far as to rely almost entirely on the rational credibility of various arguments to defend the authority of Scripture. Owen was resolutely orthodox on this score and believed that without the Spirit’s internal work at the foundation of Christian faith, all is lost. Yet TheReason of Faith offers what is easily one of the most sophisticated early modern Reformed defenses of the Bible’s self-authenticating divine authority, responding to the anxieties of his contemporaries without in any way capitulating to a destructive rationalism.

This polemical context is not yet on the horizon in Of the Divine Original; nonetheless, many of the dogmatic foundations for Owen’s later response certainly are. Like his orthodox Reformed brethren, Owen sought to articulate the spiritual authority of Scripture in a way that brought together the necessary internal or subjective work within a believer’s faculties and its objective or public foundations in Scripture itself. Whatever it is that needs to happen within a believer in bringing them to faith in the authority of Scripture, it is only something the Spirit accomplishes “in and by” Scripture itself. On this score, Owen distinguished between the “subjective” and “objective” “testimony” of the Spirit. The objective testimony is what the Spirit communicates to a believer through Scripture itself. What is most distinctive about Owen’s way of framing this objective testimony, however, is the way he disentangles from it any of the traditional marks or rational arguments. The Protestant habit of incorporating the traditional arguments into the Spirit’s testimony, evident from as early on as William Whitaker’s engagement with Stapleton and Robert Bellarmine, has been met with equivocal reception in secondary literature. Some regard it as a credible, thoroughly orthodox attempt to stave off any excessively fideistic subjectivism within confessional Protestantism, while others consider it to be an early capitulation, however partial, to a rationalizing trajectory that would become prominent within Protestantism by the eighteenth century.26 Without delving into this debate here, at the very least it suggests a certain lack of dogmatic clarity in the later development, something that Owen successfully managed to circumvent.

Owen agrees with his brethren that the traditional “artificial” arguments defending the authority of Scripture have a place, but they are subordinate to and, importantly, distinct from the objective and subjective testimony of the Spirit. Indeed, he explicitly walls them off from his discussion of the Spirit’s testimony and mentions only those he considers credible as an afterword in the final chapter of the treatise (even here, Owen is doubtful that some are of much use, such as the traditional appeal to miracles).27

The two decisive dimensions of the Spirit’s role in mediating the authority of Scripture to a believer are what Owen identifies as a communication of divine “light” and “power.” These dimensions are “the formal reason of our faith,” or the reason “why and wherefore we do receive and believe the Scripture to be the word of God.”28 In Of the Divine Original, Owen calls them “innate arguments” insofar as they are mediated through what the Spirit has inspired within the text of Scripture. But importantly, they are distinct from other “innate” arguments that have traditionally been used apologetically, like those “artificial arguments” he mentions in chapter 6, such as the nature of the doctrines contained in Scripture or Scripture’s internal harmony and coherence. Rather, his account of Scripture’s self-evidencing light and power gives them a unique theological status with a distinctly metaphysical hue that sets them apart from the other artificial, innate arguments.

In describing Scripture’s self-evidencing light, he situates it within a more general context of what he calls “spiritual, moral, intellectual light, with all its mediums,” a light that ultimately emanates from its origin in God himself through what he has communicated in all his external works. And it is by this light that God is “known.” At a metaphysical level, Owen is clearly assuming the rudiments of the typical late medieval appropriation of the peripatetic cognitive tradition.29 Here intellectual light is communicated from an object through a transparent medium via a multiplication of its form, or an intelligible species that would result in understanding of the object. Through the impression of an intelligible species of the object, the knower’s mind is said to be formally “adequated” or conformed to the known object. Accordingly, with this metaphysical assumption in place, Owen is making the theological claim that God has communicated “self-evidencing” light, or his own formal likeness in all his external works (obviously in an accommodated or analogical fashion), thereby enabling him to be known by the human knower. And within God’s economy, Scripture has a special place among all his works, having been inspired to be the unique medium for communicating the divine “light of the [glorious] gospel of Christ,” words of the apostle Paul in 2 Corinthians that Owen quotes so frequently throughout his corpus, indicating that he clearly cherishes their profound significance (2 Cor. 4:4). Of course, as Paul indicates in this passage of his letter, and as Owen is quick to add, Scripture might well contain an objective impression of divine light, but sinners are naturally blind to it and therefore unable to recognize it as such. “Light is not eyes,” he says, and cannot itself “remove the defect of the visive faculty.” But in the case of a spiritually regenerated believer, this light is apprehended as “nothing but the beaming of the majesty, truth, holiness, and authority of God, given unto it, and left upon it, by its author the Holy Ghost.” In other words, a believer recognizes the divine authority of Scripture through its self-evidencing reflection of divine light, with its capacity to dive “into the consciences of men, into all the secret recesses of their hearts” (alluding to Heb. 4:12–13).30

The question this begs about the authority of Scripture over the resistance of unbelief is resolved by the second dimension of Scripture’s self-evidencing authority—namely, its “power.” Here Owen cites a plethora of New Testament texts that attest to the sovereign power of God’s word, something that is accompanied with “all manner of assurance and full persuasion of itself” (with specific allusions to 1 Cor. 2:4 and 1 Thess. 1:5). Owen is clear that this power is not somehow enclosed within Scripture itself but is always relative to God’s creatures as an instrument of his authority. Again, alluding to texts such as John 6:68–69, Acts 20:32, 1 Corinthians 6:15, 15:57, Colossians 1:6, 2 Timothy 3:15, Hebrews 4:12, James 1:21, and so on, it is a power that is capable of conquering rebellion and bringing salvation, “causing men of all sorts, in all times and places, so to fall down before its divine authority, as immediately to renounce all that was dear to them in the world, and to undergo whatever was dreadful, terrible and destructive to nature in all its dearest concernments.”31

Owen summarizes his discussion of these two “innate,” “self-evidencing” “arguments” by concluding that the Scriptures “have that glory of light and power accompanying of them, as wholly distinguishes them by infallible signs and evidences from all words and writings not divine, conveying their truth and power, into the souls and consciences of men, with an infallible certainty.”32While he does not arrive at the distinction between the “objective” and “subjective” dimensions of the Spirit’s “testimony” until chapter 5, it is clear that these two innate self-evidencing arguments exactly correspond to the “testimony of the Spirit, that respects the object, or the word itself.”33 Against Roman Catholic complaints about the Protestant appeal to the Spirit’s self-authentication of Scripture, Owen will simply respond that the Spirit’s authentication of Scripture is always “in and by” Scripture itself, and therefore thoroughly “public” in nature: “it is the public testimony of the Holy Ghost given unto all, of the word, by and in the word, and its own divine light, efficacy, and power.”34

In Of the Divine Original, Owen has therefore managed to furnish a theological account of Scripture’s authority that not only vindicates it as the sole, public, and objective medium of divine authority but also is uncompromisingly supernatural and spiritual in its character. The genius of his argument is the way he situates Scripture within the broader divine economy, in which every created element to varying degrees objectively communicates the truth and authority of God through a kind of analogical participation. At the same time, the uniqueness of Scripture among all God’s works, and its distinctive role in the supernatural or salvific economy, remains intact in Owen’s account. For now, at least, Scripture’s divine authority is properly recognized only among the regenerate, or among those who actually encounter its saving power. Indeed, as an index of Scripture’s peculiar role within the redemptive economy, Owen maintains there is still a necessary “subjective” dimension to the Spirit’s attestation of its authority, a dimension that is clearly bound up with a believer’s spiritual regeneration. First, “illumination,” or an effectual communication of Scripture’s saving light to overcome our natural, sinful blindness, is required. Second, the Spirit communicates an “effectual persuasion” of the mind, through the provision of spiritual wisdom and understanding, and renewed sensibility to spiritual things (alluding to Heb. 5:14). None of this amounts to some afflatus or “internal word.” In a sense, it should be understood as the impact of the powerful word itself within the subjective domain of the individual’s soul, providing the newly regenerate believer with the capacity to discern the divine power and wisdom spiritually at work “in and by” the word itself.

Thematic Outline

The primary question Owen proposes to address in Of the Divine Original is “how we may know assuredly the Scripture to be the word of God,” which frames the bulk of the treatise proceeding from where he first poses it at the beginning of chapter 2.

Chapter 1 contains some preliminary observations regarding the divine inspiration of the Old and New Testaments, which he regards as foundational to the constructive discussion that will follow. He begins this by drawing attention to biblical texts that attest to the Holy Spirit’s inspiration of Old Testament prophets (e.g., Heb. 1:1; 1 Pet. 1:10–11), followed by the inspiration of the written word (2 Pet. 1:20–21; 2 Tim. 3:16).35 Something Owen particularly wishes to infer from these scriptural claims is that the original biblical autographs had to have been providentially superintended by the Spirit right down to the very “tittle,” not just in their doctrinal content but even in their precise verbal form.36 In his later treatise, Πνευματολογια (1674),37 Owen discusses the manner of prophetic inspiration more comprehensively. Here he is simply content to insist that however much the prophet’s “mind and understanding were used in the choice of words,” the words they chose were nonetheless “not their own, but immediately supplied unto them [. . .] from God himself.”38 The significance of this claim extends to not only the inspiration of the original autographs but also the providential preservation of their substance in subsequent copies and translations. Herein lies the reason for Owen’s acute concern regarding any critical emendation of the copies, which became a flashpoint within English Protestantism when Walton’s London Polyglot began to appear in 1653. Owen flags his concerns about this practice here, and he will take them up more fully in Of the Integrity.39 Having spoken to these issues, he concludes this chapter with a brief statement extending the same principle of divine inspiration to the New as well as Old Testaments.

With this preliminary claim in place, the question that naturally ensues is the basis upon which we can have confidence in its veracity—namely, that the Scriptures are truly the inspired word of God. Chapter 2 begins by outlining this question and stating the answer in summary form. The ultimate foundation or “formal reason” for confidence in the divine origin of Scripture, Owen believes, is no less than the authority of God himself. But a distinctive feature of his approach to this question is his sensitivity to the way this authority is mediated and evidenced directly to a believer through Scripture itself, hence his objection to the typical Catholic claim that Scripture’s authority is self-contained in a way that it has no authority quoad nos, “in respect of us.”40

Having outlined his answer in summary form, he proceeds to confirm it in the remainder of the treatise under three headings that stretch across the subsequent chapters.41

The first of these concludes chapter 2, where Owen defends the claim that each mode of divine revelation—his external “works,” the internal “light of nature,” and especially the “word”—each carry within them sufficient evidence to demonstrate their divine origin.42

In chapters 3–5, Owen outlines his second point, which drills down on the precise manner in which that evidence is conveyed in the scriptural word. Chapter 3 begins by observing that there are in general two kinds of arguments or testimonies that confirm the veracity of a thing: “inartificial” and “artificial.” “Inartificial” arguments are immediately conveyed by the thing itself, whereas “artificial” arguments are rational inferences we may legitimately draw about the thing, to corroborate any inartificial testimony it makes about itself. When it comes to Scripture, Owen is particularly concerned with the inartificial testimony it communicates to authenticate its divine origin, and this is the subject of his second major point. People of faith not only are obliged to stand by this testimony, he says, but also will find rest in it alone against the objection of others. By contrast, artificial arguments—as true and valuable as they may be—have the more limited role of responding rationally to opponents of Scripture but do not form the foundation of a believer’s faith.43

Owen proceeds by referring to two dimensions of an inartificial testimony to Scripture’s divine origin. There is its own self-declaration as something that is θεόπνευστος or “divinely inspired” (2 Tim. 3:16), which is also accompanied by evidence “ingrafted” within or “innate” to Scripture itself. As he explains at chapter 3, sections 9–11, God does not make any self-declaration of his authority that must be received upon threat of eternal damnation without providing “infallible tokens” (τεκμήρια) or a communication of “divine power” (θεῖον) to accompany and validate the declaration (cf. Jer. 23:29). By the “infallible tokens,” Owen does not intend any miracles that might have accompanied the delivery of the divine word, which do not have the capacity to induce Christian faith, he insists.44 Rather, he has in mind the kind of evidence “ingrafted” within Scripture itself, which he further outlines in chapter 4. This dimension of Scripture’s inartificial testimony is of particular interest and concern to Owen, as it is by this evidence that the very authority of God is conveyed to provide the “formal reason of our faith.” He breaks this ingrafted and innate evidence up into two categories—namely, God’s very “light” and “power” that he communicates through Scripture as the basis of its authentication.45

In chapter 5, Owen seeks to clarify how this inartificial testimony relates to what is commonly referred to as the “testimony of the Spirit” regarding Scripture’s divine authority. Here it is apparent that Owen thinks this inartificial self-testimony makes up the “objective” or “public” dimension of the Spirit’s testimony “in and by” Scripture itself.46Against the typical accusation that any talk of the Spirit’s testimony amounts to an appeal to some private afflatus, Owen seeks to differentiate the “subjective” or internal work of the Spirit in restoring the sinner’s faculties from the external or public testimony within Scripture itself. However necessary the subjective dimension is to grasping the authority of Scripture, a Christian’s faith in its divine origin is grounded exclusively in the public dimension of the testimony. Finally, he draws his extended discussion of this point to a close by highlighting the folly of grounding the authority of Scripture in tradition and miracles, concluding that it is simply inconceivable that God would fail to self-authenticate his word, let alone make its authenticity depend on human judgment.47

In chapter 6, Owen turns to his third confirmation of the claim by briefly outlining some “artificial” arguments or testimonies. Though falling short of inducing Christian faith, they are nonetheless of “great use,” capable of convincing to the level of “undeniable probability,” and prevailing “irresistibly on the understanding of unprejudiced men.” Without intending to provide a comprehensive list, he expands on two he finds particularly persuasive—namely, the character of various doctrines in Scripture (referring to the atonement, worship, and the Trinity) and Scripture’s overall design. At the beginning of chapter 3, Owen suggested that these arguments may be used against those who oppose the authority of Scripture, and here at the end of chapter 6 he adds that they may be of use in supporting a believer “in trials and temptations, and the like seasons of difficulty.”48

Introduction to Of the Integrity (1659)

In the opening paragraph of Of the Integrity, Owen indicates that he set out to write this treatise upon receipt of the recently published Prolegomena and Appendix to Walton’s London Polyglot. As we noted earlier, Owen quite likely delayed the publication of Of the Divine Original until he had completed his response to Walton in Of the Integrity. Alarmed by what he now saw in Walton’s Prolegomena and Appendix, Owen feared they rendered his earlier attempt at defending the integrity of the original biblical autographs somewhat incomplete.49Of the Integrity is an attempt to settle the score with a detailed response to what he considers the most problematic aspects of Walton’s work.

One chief concern stands out among the “sundry principles” in the Prolegomena that Owen regards as “prejudicial to the truth.” Fundamentally, it is the assumption that the extant Hebrew and Greek versions of the Old and New Testaments do not exactly correspond to the inspired original autographs, something that Walton believes licenses careful emendation of the extant texts through comparison with variant readings in other ancient translations. So deleterious is this assumption that Owen considers it to be “the foundation of Mohammedanism, [. . .] the chiefest and principal prop of popery, the only pretense of fanatical antiscripturists, and the root of much hidden atheism in the world.”50

The magnitude of Owen’s worry requires some appreciation of the wider context. In the “Dedicatory Epistle” Owen refers to the gradual evolution of a controversy between Protestants and Catholics concerning the authenticity of the Hebrew Old Testament text that came to a head in the first half of the seventeenth century, culminating in the publication of the “Paris Polyglot” in 1645.

The first of the four great polyglot Bibles, the so-called Complutensian Polyglot, was published under the patronage of the Spanish Cardinal Francisco Jiménez de Cisneros (known as “Ximenes,” 1436–1517) as early as 1514–1517. A remarkable achievement, the Complutensian set out the Hebrew text alongside the Greek Septuagint with the Latin Vulgate in between, and the Aramaic Targum Onkelos printed at the bottom of the pages of the Pentateuch. In his introduction, Ximenes famously compared this arrangement to the crucifixion of Christ between the two thieves, with the Vulgate placed, as it were, “between the Synagogue and the Eastern Church.”51 Even still, as Eveline van Staalduine-Sulman points out, this remark was not so much a reference to the versions themselves but to the interpretive voices associated with the respective texts. Indeed, the Complutensian retains a relatively high view of the Hebrew version, something with which Owen himself readily concurred.52 While Ximenes regarded the extant Vulgate as the final authority for church doctrine, he nonetheless acknowledged the value of the Hebrew and Aramaic versions for correcting any corruptions that had entered various manuscripts of the Vulgate.53

As Owen alludes, however, the relatively sober assessment of the “Hebrew verity” found in the Complutensian, and in other Catholic writings before and after the Council of Trent such as in the noteworthy contributions of Arias Montanus (1527–1598),54 eventually gave way to the much more negative appraisal exemplified in the Paris Polyglot. Michel Lejay’s (1588–1674) Parisian production was championed by a Huguenot convert to Catholicism, Jean Morin (1591–1659), whose own Samaritan Pentateuch was included within it. In the preface to a new edition of the Septuagint in 1628, Morin had already argued that the Greek and Latin versions of the Bible had equal canonical status and were less susceptible to corruption than the Hebrew text, arguments that he extended in the first part of his famous Exercitationes biblicae, published in 1633.55And as Peter N. Miller points out, these arguments were essentially reproduced in the anonymous preface to the Paris Polyglot, which Owen believes is likely to have been the work of Morin.56

By the first half of the seventeenth century, this polemicizing of the Hebrew text’s veracity essentially bound the remarkable flowering in humanist biblical scholarship represented by the polyglots to the ecclesiastical politics between Protestants and Catholics concerning the papacy and its authorized Vulgate edition of the Scriptures.

As one might expect, Owen reserves fairly savage criticism for Morin’s agenda, but amid his general cynicism, one issue of particular concern surfaces—namely, the dating of the vowel points in the extant Hebrew text. As Muller points out, there was no particular controversy surrounding the vowel points in the early sixteenth century, with a range of viewpoints among Catholics and Protestants regarding their origin, from the moment Moses received the Law on Sinai through to a much later Masoretic origin.57 In 1538, the Jewish grammarian Elias Levita (1469–1549) published his commentary on the Masora in which he carefully argued that the insertion of the vowel points was the meticulous work of the Masoretes. Levita was well known among the Protestant community, and his work was generally greeted with enthusiasm. By the second half of the sixteenth century, however, influential Catholic polemicists like Robert Bellarmine, and numerous others, were increasingly leveraging the late dating of the vowel points to insist that the Hebrew Old Testament had been subject to Jewish corruption, necessitating reliance on the papally authorized Vulgate to emend the corrupted text.

Naturally enough, Morin put this polemic to full effect in his advocacy for the Paris Polyglot in the first half of the seventeenth century. By this stage, numerous Protestants had locked horns with their Catholic opponents, and Levita’s contribution was no longer met with the enthusiasm it once had received. Most significant among these Protestant voices was the remarkable work of the father and son duo Johann Buxtorf Sr. (1564–1629) and Johann Buxtorf Jr. (1599–1664). In his Tiberias, sive Commentarius Masorethicus, published in 1620, Buxtorf Sr. argued that the vowel points were the work of the great synagogue called by Ben Ezra, the so-called Men of the Great Assembly, which is thought to have been held from about 516 to 332 BC.58 In Buxtorf Sr.’s mind, an early date for the vowel points was considered critical for guarding the spiritual inspiration of an originally perspicuous Old Testament text. For the “vowel points are the souls of the expressions and words, which enliven them. . . . Whence the word written with naked consonants, without the vowel points cannot be read and understood.”59

For those inclined to sympathize with Buxtorf Sr.’s doctrinal concerns, matters were made worse by the Protestant contribution of Louis Cappel to the debate in 1624, Arcanum punctationis revelatum.60 Cappel carefully revived Levita’s argument concerning the Masoretic origin of the vowel points. Cappel was initially optimistic about the accuracy of the oral tradition in preserving the vocalization of the consonants. However, by the time he published his Critica sacra in 1650,61 he had come to assume that corruption had entered the transmission and that the extant Textus Receptus ought to be amended through comparison to ancient translations such as the Chaldee, Syriac, and the Septuagint. As noted already, the immediate trigger for Owen’s Of the Integrity was the publication of Walton’s London Polyglot. But in many ways, it was Cappel’s contribution that proved to be the thin end of the wedge. For the first time, a significant Protestant voice was now arguing in favor of making critical amendments to an allegedly corrupted Hebrew original.

The London cleric and later Bishop Brian Walton (1600–1661) hatched the idea of an English polyglot Bible under the patronage of Archbishop William Laud (1573–1645).62With the execution of Laud in 1645, the project did not actually begin to materialize until 1652, when the Council of State agreed to endorse it with the support of prominent figures such as Archbishop James Ussher (1581–1656) and the parliamentarian John Selden (1584–1654). Walton then collaborated with several of the most significant Hebraists in England to produce the Polyglot, which gradually appeared from 1653 to 1657.63 Eventually, six volumes were produced. Four of these contain the various versions set out across the page in up to nine different languages. These core volumes are bookended by Walton’s Prolegomena and an Appendix, the latter of which gathers together a number of collections of variant readings.

Undoubtedly the pinnacle of the four polyglot editions, the London Polyglot remained highly influential till the nineteenth century. In comparison to the Paris Polyglot, or even Cappel’s later work, its critical stance is relatively conservative. As Miller points out, Walton generally had a high view of the inspired Hebrew original and its priority over the translations.64 He rejected any conspiracies about a Jewish corruption of the text and was confident of God’s providential preservation of its authenticity over successive generations.65

A commitment to the divine providential preservation of the inspired texts was also a central concern of Owen’s, a point Owen reiterates in Of the Divine Original and Of the Integrity.66 As he puts it in his later Causes, Ways, and Means of Understanding the Mind of God as Revealed in his Word (1678), Owen is adamant that the protection of the text from any material corruption is a direct function of Christ’s spiritual care for his church. To suggest otherwise is “to countenance the atheistical notion that God has no especial regard to his word and worship in the world.”67 In large measure, Walton would agree. Indeed, at times, one may be forgiven for wondering whether the substance of any disagreement between Owen and Walton is considerably less significant than the polemical tone that Owen’s treatise might otherwise suggest.68 Certainly, in his rejoinder to Owen, Walton strenuously reiterates his commitment to the divine preservation of the originals and takes great exception to any insinuation to the contrary.69 It is true that Walton had conceded that “casual” and “involuntary” scribal errors are likely to have touched matters of relative insignificance in the extant copies,70 even while insisting that anything pertaining to “faith,” “obedience,” “life,” or “salvation” was untouched and remained intact.71 Perhaps this admission was a step too far for Owen, although even he would agree that in some ancient copies of the New Testament, “diverse readings, in things or words of less importance” do readily exist.72 And like Walton, Owen believes that differences like this, along with the various scribal marginalia in the Masoretic Text, or the Qere and Ketiv, can easily be harmonized through appeal to the analogy of faith.73

Yet for all Walton and Owen share in common in their attitude to the originals, Owen has a couple of lingering concerns. And to his mind, they are far from insignificant. The first is a question of degree. For all Walton’s protestations about the integrity of the originals, Owen is clearly troubled by a contrary impression created by the enormous bulk of “lections” (variant readings) from various ancient copies and translations indiscriminately presented in the Appendix to the Polyglot. Here, Owen believes, one will find unnecessary duplication (e.g., of the Qere and Ketiv), many instances that are too conjectural or insignificant to be considered genuine lections, not to mention supposed variants that arise from translations whose authenticity can easily be set aside. Owen fears that to the unwary eye, such a “bulky collection” all too readily suggests that “gross corruptions” have indeed entered the extant copies of the originals after all.74 Even he was “startled” at first sight of the volume. In other words, there was enough smoke in Walton’s production to suspect a fire!

A similar concern stems from Walton’s commitment to the late dating of the Hebrew vowel points. In Owen’s mind, the absence of the points clearly casts a shadow over the perspicuity of the text: “vowels are the life of words,” he remarks; “consonants without them are dead and immovable.”75Once again, there is a sense in which Walton would readily agree,76 insisting that under the care of the Holy Spirit, the Masoretic pointing merely made explicit what was already implied in the divinely inspired arrangement of the consonants.77 Walton insists there is nothing remarkable in this claim: a claim that is furnished with good Protestant pedigree.78 Even though Owen undoubtedly ties the perspicuity of the Hebrew text more closely to the presence of vowel points than Walton, he too is alert to the distinction that is implied in Walton’s position between the spiritual sense of the text and the outward signs through which that sense is represented. With the Buxtorfs, Owen traces the origin of the points to the Men of the Great Assembly rather than the first inspiration of the Hebrew text.79 Yet to make such an admission, Owen clearly has to commit himself to distinguishing between the initial inspiration of the vowels, as they were implied in the arrangement of the original script, and the later addition of the points that make those vowels outwardly explicit. And sure enough, Owen cites the Italian Jewish Hebraist Azariah de’ Rossi (1511–1578) in precise acknowledgement of this fact: “And the same Azarias shows the consistency of the various opinions that were among the Jews about the vowels, ascribing them as to their virtue and force, to Moses, or God on Mount Sinai; as to their figure and character to Ezra; as to the restoration of their use, unto the Masoretes.”80 So once again, one might wonder whether there is anything of substance separating the two on this score, for whatever differences they might have about the exact dating of the points.

For Owen, however, the bigger issue with the late dating of the points is the implication he sees in surrendering responsibility for the text’s final form to the work of the non-Christian Masoretes, the “foundation of whose religion,” he says, “was infidelity, and . . . an opposition to the gospel.”81 Aside from his incredulity that the vowel sounds could have been preserved through oral tradition when the Hebrew tongue had not been the vulgar tongue for a thousand years,82 Owen thought it was simply “not tolerable” to countenance that God would have deployed these men as his chosen instrument to inspire the points. Indeed, Owen is so appalled by the prospect that should it be conclusively proven that the punctuation was their work, he would “labor to the utmost to have it utterly taken away out of the Bible.”83 In other words, the intolerable consequence Owen sees lurking beneath the surface here is yet again the possible corruption of the text, this time at the hands of men who simply could not be entrusted with the addition of something as important as the vowel points. It should be noted, of course, that Owen would not see the same difficulty in tracing the punctuation to the Men of the Great Assembly. Unlike the Masoretes, those men actually belonged to the church under its Old Testament Jewish administration, which, at least as tradition has it, included the postexilic prophets, Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi.

If Owen’s first major concern with Walton’s Polyglot consists in the shadow it might cast over the integrity of the originals, the second concern is with Walton’s approval of the practice of textual emendation. Here too Walton’s proposal is relatively modest. Having ruled out the possibility of any substantial doctrinal error in the extant originals, only minor corrections are in view. And with an application of the analogy of faith, the analogy of Scripture, together with a sober preference for the most ancient, and more widely accepted lection in the instance of some variant, he is confident that the text can be improved by the practice.84 As Miller puts it, “Walton saw the glass as half-full: comparison did not threaten the text but rather allowed for its repair.”85 Owen is most troubled by the appeal to differing ancient translations as arbiters for amending the original. It is “to set up an altar of our own by the altar of God, and to make equal the wisdom, care, skill, and diligence of men, with the wisdom, care, and providence of God himself.”86Morin’s advocacy for the Vulgate is clearly the most flagrant example of this practice, as Owen readily acknowledges. But he also singles out Cappel, and especially his deference to the Septuagint, as a worrying Protestant precedent and wonders whether Walton’s proposal is really any different.87 Walton denies that he ever advocated the use of translations to “correct the original”—explicitly distancing himself from the likes of Morin—so much as an aid to discern whether an error has crept into the original.88 But for Owen, even this seems to be a step too far. In his mind, the only valid use of translations is as an aid to the exposition of Scripture, and nothing more.89

Miller draws attention to what he calls an “antiquarianization” of biblical scholarship in Walton’s project. For all of Walton’s affirmations concerning the integrity of the originals, there is nonetheless a subtle tendency to elevate the significance of tradition and the judgment of the church in deciding upon the final form of the text. Miller also speaks of a “mitigated skepticism” in Walton’s posture of assuming that minor scribal errors crept into the copies, which at least echoes the much more exaggerated skeptical tone of those advocating for the supremacy of the Vulgate.90Nicholas Hardy may be right in questioning whether Walton’s project was as ideologically driven or consciously coherent as this. In reality, it looks more like a hotchpotch, or a “messy and contentious accommodation of different Protestant and Catholic positions.”91 Even so, couple Walton’s mitigated skepticism about the text with a deference to ancient translations and the consensus of the church in detecting scribal error, and it is perhaps no wonder that a “hotter sort of Protestant” like Owen is rather alarmed by what he sees.

Posterity has not looked favorably on Owen’s argument, especially in regard to the dating of the vowel points.92 And one may justifiably question Owen’s concern to tie the inherent perspicuity of the Hebrew original closely to the presence of the vowel points, even by the yardstick of classical Protestant precedent. But in assessing Owen’s position by modern standards, the polemics of his own context need to be remembered. Underneath Owen’s position lay an orthodox Protestant devotion to the inherent perspicuity of Scripture, both in the original and in its extant copies, reflecting God’s faithfulness and providential care of his church. And in his mind, the emerging doubts about the integrity of the originals, together with an evolving permissiveness toward critical emendations of the text simply clashed with this commitment and could not be tolerated any more than the Catholic elevation of the Vulgate. Indeed, in some ways Owen’s fears were prescient, at least in regard to the eventual collapse in confidence regarding the integrity and perspicuity of the original biblical text. And in this respect, hindsight also allows one to see that Walton’s convictions regarding the stability of the church’s tradition and judgment would quickly prove to be rather naive. As Miller puts it, “The collapse of historica critica in turn undermined the philology represented in the Polyglot Bibles.”93

Owen’s Of the Integrity should be recognized as a sophisticated and scholarly attempt to defend the veracity of Scripture in an increasingly complex intellectual environment, proceeding from a settled conviction that God has revealed himself clearly and authoritatively in this text. It is an attempt; and like all attempts, it will be open to objection and disagreement at points. But if the primary intention is to cast judgment, one may fail to see it for what it is on its own terms as it is situated within its own historical context.94

Thematic Outline

Owen begins this treatise with an explanation of its occasion—namely, his receipt of Walton’s Prolegomena and Appendix to the London Polyglot Bible. As Owen explains, the manuscript of his treatise Of the Divine Original was already complete when he received the Prolegomena and Appendix, but having now engaged with the latter, he feels compelled to compose this treatise as a supplement to Of the Divine Original, lest Walton’s work threaten his earlier conclusions about God’s providential preservation of the authentic scriptural text.95