Does the Trinity Really Matter? A Layman’s Guide to John Owen’s Communion with God (Ryan M. McGraw)

In the new issue of Credo Magazine, “The Prince of Puritans: John Owen,” Ryan M. McGraw has contributed an article called, “Does the Trinity Really Matter? A Layman’s Guide to John Owen’s Communion with God.”  Ryan McGraw is pastor of First Orthodox Presbyterian Church in Sunnyvale, California, research associate at the University of the Free State, and adjunct professor of systematic theology at Greenville Presbyterian Theological Seminary. He is the author of The Foundation of Communion with God: The Trinitarian Piety of John Owen (his inexpensive book!) and A Heavenly Directory: Trinitarian Piety, Public Worship and a Reassessment of John Owen’s Theology (Reformed Historical Theology) (his expensive book!).

Here is the start of his article:

Writing on John Owen is like building an iPad (sorry in advance to non-Apple fans). The R&D department must work hard to engineer a product using terms that the average person does not understand, but without which there could be no iPad. After long hours of research, planning, meetings, tests, and trips to China, the iPads begin rolling off the assembly line. The end product must be useable, and someone then tries to show people why they need one.

I wrote a very expensive book on Owen and a very inexpensive book on Owen. The very expensive book has hundreds of footnotes and takes great pains to argue from primary sources, set Owen in his historical context, and interact with other scholars. It is very expensive partly because some of these scholars need a paycheck for combing through such works in order to make them better. My very inexpensive book on Owen represents what happens when church members ask, “Why have you spent so much time writing about John Owen?” My primary answer is that Owen is the best author in English to teach us how to enjoy fellowship with all three persons in the Trinity. In that light, my aim is to sell you an “Owen iPad” by helping you understand why he is important and how he can help you know the triune God better.

How to Build an Owen iPad: The Context of Owen’s Trinitarian Piety

Some scholars have called Owen the greatest theologian that England ever produced. Yet he is old and dead, so why should you care? He neither wrote blog posts nor had Facebook or Twitter accounts. The Apostle Paul wrote in Ephesians 4:11-16,

And He Himself gave some to be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, and some pastors and teachers, for the equipping of the saints for the work of ministry, for the edifying of the body of Christ, till we all come to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to a perfect man, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ; that we should no longer be children, tossed to and fro and carried about with every wind of doctrine, by the trickery of men, in the cunning craftiness of deceitful plotting, but, speaking the truth in love, may grow up in all things into Him who is the head—Christ—from whom the whole body, joined and knit together by what every joint supplies, according to the effective working by which every part does its share, causes growth of the body for the edifying of itself in love.

Paul included “pastors and teachers” among the offices listed here. Christ’s positive purposes in giving such men to the church are to equip the saints and to promote unity in the faith and spiritual maturity. His negative purpose is to protect believers from theological and practical instability as well as from false teachers. Christ’s plan for your life is for you to read your Bible daily and to sit under sound preaching (Acts 17:10-11). We are not obligated to read theologians from the past in the same way that we are obligated to belong to local churches and to sit under a local ministry. Yet can we not benefit from those men who are among Christ’s greatest “gifts” to the church in her history? …

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Church history matters. We are not the first generation to read the Bible. So looking to the help of those who have come before us is incredibly valuable. There is no need to reinvent the wheel. Many godly individuals have preceded us and more often than not their insights into God’s Word tend to be far more valuable than what you will find on the best seller rack of a Christian bookstore. By looking to those giants of the faith in the history of the church, not only do we avoid falling prey to the heresies of the past, but we also stand firmly on the shoulders of others so that we persevere in sound doctrine (Titus 2:1).

One set of broad shoulders belongs to the seventeenth-century Puritan John Owen. It is hard to exaggerate the importance and influence of Owen’s life and writings. His books were and still are some of the best works in theology that we have, standing alongside those of Augustine, Luther, Calvin, and many others. The Christian today will benefit in countless ways from works like On Communion with God, The Doctrine of Justification by Faith, On the Mortification of Sin, and Of Indwelling Sin in Believers.

What is so remarkable about Owen, however, is not merely the robust, biblical theology nature of his writings, but his insistence that theology affects the Christian life. In other words, Owen refused to separate head and heart. Doctrine must lead to doxology every time, otherwise we have not truly understood its purpose. Therefore, Owen is the Doctor who looks into the human soul in order to diagnose our spiritual disease and offer us a cure in Jesus Christ. If read carefully, it is hard not to finish a book by Owen without feeling a desire to know God more.

The upcoming year, 2016, will be the four hundredth anniversary of Owen’s birth. So what better timing for an issue of Credo Magazine that aims to introduce some of Owen’s theology and writings. But as much as we love you reading Credo Magazine, this issue would be a failure if you did not study and read this Prince of Puritans for yourself.

Contributors include: J. V. Fesko, Ryan M. McGraw, Geoff Thomas, Daniel R. Hyde, Joel Beeke, Leonardo De Chirico, Kelly M. Kapic, Michael Haykin, and many others.