Claims of Truth, The: John Owen’s Trinitarian Theology

Carl Trueman analyses the theology of the great Puritan theologian, John Owen, paying particular attention to his vigorous trinitarianism. To understand Owen, we need to see him as a seventeenth-century representative of the Western trinitarian and anti-Pelagian tradition. Trueman demonstrates how Owen used the theological insights of patristic, medieval, and Reformation theologians to meet the challenges posed to Reformed Orthodoxy by his contemporaries. A picture emerges of a theologian whose thought represented a critical reappropriation of aspects of the Western tradition for the purpose of developing a systematic restatement of Reformed theology capable of withstanding the assaults of both the subtly heterodox and the openly heretical.

288 pages.

View excerpt here.

Table of Contents: 

1. Owen in Context

2. The Principles of Theology

3. The Doctrine of God

4. The Person and Work of Christ

5. The Nature of Satisfaction

6. The Man Who Wasn’t There

Appendix One: The Role of Aristotelian Teleology in Owen’s Doctrine of Atonement

Appendix Two: Owen, Baxter, and the Threefold Office

“Drawing on recent scholarship from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the author brings attention to the important continuity that exists between the theology of John Owen and Reformation thought on the one hand and the continuity between theological method and that of the Church Fathers and Medieval doctors on the other hand . . . sound historical methodology and . . . a successful attempt to debunk many of the myths surrounding Reformed Scholasticism.” – Willem J. Asselt, University of Utrecht