Among the chief characteristics of Puritanism is its high view of Scripture. For the Puritans, the Bible was the inspired Word of God and therefore the only authority for faith and life. In this respect also they firmly stood with the Reformers, all of whom believed in the sole authority, absolute necessity, as well as the clarity and sufficiency of Holy Scripture. However, the Puritans were not merely followers of the Reformers in this respect. They also went beyond them, especially when it concerns the work of the Holy Spirit in enabling men to understand the Scriptures in a saving way. No one has set forth this aspect of the doctrine of Scripture in a clearer way than the most learned of all Puritans, John Owen (1616-1683).

Although he was regarded by his contemporaries as an able preacher of the Gospel, Owen's reputation is based largely on his theological writings. His greatest legacy consists of an enormous output of books and treatises on a wide range of subjects, both polemical and devotional. His best works are those in which he expounds Scripture (e.g., his commentaries on Hebrews and Psalm 130 as well as his treatises on the Work of the Holy Spirit and on Temptation and Mortification of Sin). In these works Owen displays a tremendous grasp of Scripture truth and spiritual life in all its ramifications.

Throughout his ministry Owen opposed Arminianism, Socinianism and Catholicism. He vigorously defended the Reformed faith which for him was much more than a system of sound doctrines. It was a way of life in humble dependence upon the sovereign grace of God, mortifying sin and striving after holiness.

John Owen was undoubtedly the theologian of the Puritan movement. Although his style is not exactly "user-friendly," those who are willing to take the trouble to read him will be amply compensated for their trouble. In Owen's Works the patient digger will find a gold mine of Scriptural and experiential truth waiting to be mined.

For now our focus is on Owen's view of Scripture, particularly on one aspect of this subject that has often been neglected, namely how sinful men come to understand God's Word in a saving way. Owen begins by explaining how God communicates His mind to the minds of men. God, he says, instructs us in His mind and will in and by the rational faculties of our souls.

Because we are God's image-bearers, we are capable of receiving and responding to communications from our Creator. Consequently, God can speak to us in words and we, within the limits of His self-disclosure, can comprehend Him in our thoughts. According to Packer, Owen, like Calvin before him, was a Christian rationalist who would have been totally opposed to the irrationalism of the neo-orthodox school of theology which is so dominant today even in Reformed circles. According to Karl Barth, the founder of this school, man does not have the capacity to receive propositional truth from God, i.e., God does not speak to us in words and sentences. Instead, Barth says, the only "knowledge" of God we can ever receive comes in the form of non-communicative encounters with him.

What about the Bible then? Well, for Barth the Scriptures contain only the words of man which become the Word of God during these encounters. At such moments one experiences God; there is an overwhelming sense of awe and a profound awareness of His Presence. The Old Testament prophets and New Testament apostles who had such experiences did indeed record them, but this does not mean that what they wrote was the Word of God. It was merely their witness to God's revelation, and as such fallible, since they were only human with all the limitations this implies.

Owen would have rejected this view out of hand. God has given us a mind, he would say, and this implies He can communicate real verbal knowledge of Himself to us.

Owen was aware, of course, that as a result of the fall, man's mind underwent a profound change. We are no longer in the same position as Adam whose mind was in complete harmony with God's mind. Sin has had noetic (effecting the mind) as well as behavioral consequences for fallen human nature. Part of our legacy from Adam is that we are no longer responsive to spiritual truth. Scripture describes our natural state as one of hardness and blindness of heart.

Although fallen man is capable of understanding divine truth to a degree, he is not capable of discerning its spiritual meaning. The classic proof texts here are 1 Corinthians 2:14, where Paul says, "The natural man does not receive the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him: neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned," and Romans 8:7 where the same apostle says, "The carnal mind is enmity against God for it is not subject to the law of God; neither indeed can be."

How will man so understand the Word of God that he will agree with it, love it and be motivated to obey it? For that, Owen says, we need the Holy Spirit "who alone can open our heart to God's Word and God's Word to our hearts. Only Divine illumination can bring understanding of, conviction about, and consent to, the things that God declares."

In Packer's estimation, no Puritan has had a sharper sense than Owen of the tragic darkness and perversity of the fallen human mind and therefore of the absolute necessity that the Spirit should work in preacher and hearer alike, if effective communication of divine things is ever to take place. This illumination, however, has been promised to the Church, Owen says. Our Saviour told His disciples that it would be the office of the coming Holy Spirit to bring sinners to faith in Scripture as divinely inspired and to guide them into all the truth.

According to Owen, we believe the Bible to be God's Word, not because the Church says so, but because of the Spirit's witness in our hearts. Rome taught and still teaches that whatever we are to believe we must believe on the authority of Mother Church. Owen rejects this because this would mean that faith rests on human testimony. In his view, the proper foundation of our faith is a divine witness, namely that of the Holy Spirit Who convinces us first of the divine character of God's Word, everything the Bible teaches concerning Christ and the way of salvation, as well as all other matters. The implication is that saving faith in Christ depends on prior faith in the divine inspiration of Holy Scripture.

This raises the question, did Owen and other Puritans teach that no one can believe in Christ as his Saviour until he knows and accepts the Bible as God's infallible and inerrant Word? This question is relevant because there are many people in Evangelical and Reformed churches today who claim that one can be a true Christian while denying the plenary or full inspiration of the Bible.

In answer to this question it should be pointed out that in Owen's day the inspiration and trustworthiness of Scripture were not challenged. It was simply assumed, therefore, that a Christian would accept the Bible as God's Word. We may be sure, however, that Owen would take a very dim view of the modern notion that a person can legitimately claim to believe in Christ while denying that the Bible is the Word of God. To Owen those two things would have been mutually exclusive. He would contend that the only Christ there is, is the Christ of the Scriptures and that therefore faith in Christ necessarily presupposes faith in what Scripture says about Him.

Moreover, as Packer points out, Owen would insist that the ministry of the Spirit whereby He enlightens sinners to receive the man Jesus as the divine Saviour, is the same ministry whereby He persuades them to accept the human Scriptures as the divine Word. In other words, everyone in whose heart the Spirit bears witness to the divine Saviourhood of Jesus does in fact receive a similar testimony to the divine original of the Scriptures.

In explaining the work of the Holy Spirit in witnessing to the divine character of Scripture, Owen goes beyond the continental reformers, including Calvin. In his Institutes of the Christian Religion, Calvin had set forth his doctrine of the witness of the Spirit as the ground of faith in the Scriptures. Over against Rome, which laid emphasis on the external testimony of the Church, Calvin had stressed the internal witness of the Spirit. In doing so he had not paid much attention to the external testimony of the Spirit to the Word to which His inward witness in the believer's heart corresponds. Owen does pay a great deal of attention to this aspect and thus complements Calvin at this point. Owen teaches a double testimony of the Holy Spirit to Scripture. This is how he defines it:

Herein consists that testimony which the Spirit gives unto the Word of God that it is so. The Holy Ghost being the immediate author of the whole Scripture, doth therein and thereby give testimony unto the divine truth and original of it, by the characters of divine authority and veracity impressed on it, and evidencing themselves in its power and efficacy. By this means the Scriptures of the Old and New Testament do abundantly and uncontrollably manifest themselves to be the word of the living God.

According to Owen, the Holy Spirit brings about this effect by a three-fold activity. First, he imparts to the Scriptures the permanent quality of light. Light by its very nature is self-evidencing. Let a light be ever so insignificant and contemptible, Owen says, yet it shines. It casts out beams and rays in a dark place and it will evidence itself. So Scripture also shines in the sense of giving spiritual illumination. We begin to see who and what we are in the sight of God and also who and what Christ is, as well as how we are to live. Second, the Spirit makes the Scriptures powerful to produce spiritual effects. They evidence their divine origin by their disruptive and recreative impact on human lives (Heb. 4:12; Acts 20:31; 1 Cor. 1:18). Third, the Holy Spirit makes Scripture impinge on the individual consciousness as a word addressed personally to each man by God himself, evoking awe and a sense of being in God's presence and under His eye.

This is what Owen means when he speaks of the majesty of the Scriptures. In this way, the external testimony of the Holy Spirit is recognized and received by His internal testimony. How does this take place? Not by an inward voice, says Owen, whereby facts otherwise unknown and unknowable are communicated by private revelation. Nor is it an irrational conviction welling up from within apart from any objective reference. Rather, it is an activity of inward illumination whereby a man's natural spiritual blindness is removed, the veil is taken from the eyes of his heart, his pride and prejudice are alike broken down and he is given both an understanding and a taste of spiritual realities. For Scriptural proof he referred to such passages as Matthew 11:25-27, Ephesians 1:17­-19 and 1 John 2:27.

To those who receive this double testimony, Owen says, the Scripture now appears coherent. It is no longer "a bewildering jumble of isolated items but all the parts of Scripture in their harmony and correspondence, all the truths of it in their power and necessity, come together to give evidence one to another and all of them to the whole." Let me quote Owen further on this matter:

The Spirit gives to believers a spiritual sense of the power and reality of the things believed, whereby their faith is greatly established ... And on the account of this spiritual experience, is our perception of spiritual things so often expressed by acts of sense, as tasting, seeing, feeling and the like means of assurance in things natural. And whereas this spiritual experience which believers obtain through the Holy Ghost, is such as cannot rationally be contended about, seeing those who have received it cannot fully express it, and those who have not, cannot understand it, nor the efficacy which it has to secure and establish the mind; it is left to be determined by them alone who have their senses exercised to discern good and evil. And this belongs unto the internal subjective testimony of the Holy Ghost.

How does one receive this double testimony of the Spirit? Owen stresses the necessity of frequent reading of the Word and especially personal prayer for the teaching ministry of the Spirit to be effective in one's own life. Apart from this ministry it is impossible, Owen contends, that anyone should learn the power as well as the truth of God's Word. "Come with a humble, prayerful spirit; aim in your study at the ends for which God has given His Word: to reveal Himself, to provide a guide to direct men's ways, to bring consolation and hope and to assure believers of eternal life."

If Owen's views on Scripture and the way in which we come to understand it savingly would have been followed and put into practice, the Reformed churches which have now departed to such an alarming extent, may well have been kept from apostasy. How can anyone who has seen the glory and majesty of God, the Author of Scripture, dare to question its truthfulness or try to place limitations upon its authority? To ask questions such as, does Scripture speak authoritatively on matters other than salvation, would have amazed Owen and the other Puritans. For them it was axiomatic that if God has inspired the Bible, all of Scripture speaks with equal authority on any issue it addresses.

Of course, for the Puritans' Scripture was also, first of all, the authoritative standard for testing religious truth. It was "the touchstone that tries all doctrines, the judge and determiner of all questions and controversies in religion."

Next, they extended biblical authority to matters of morality. They viewed Scripture as "sufficient to govern all our actions by, the perfect system or frame of laws to guide all the moral actions of man."

Scripture was also seen as governing ecclesiastical issues. Thomas Cartwright started a revolution in the Church of England when he declared that "the word of God contains the direction of all things pertaining to the church." The Puritans, however, did not limit the authority of Scripture to religious issues. They believed that all of life is religious. "There is not a condition into which a child of God can fall," wrote Thomas Gouge, "but there is a direction and rule in the Word, in some measure suitable thereunto." Richard Sibbes concurred: "There is not anything or any condition that befalls a Christian in this life but there is a general rule in the Scripture for it, and this rule is quickened by example, because it is a practical knowledge." For Cartwright the Bible "contains the direction of whatsoever things can fall into any part of man's life." According to William Perkins the Bible "comprehends many holy sciences ... (so that) all subjects in schools and universities can be related to it."

Today this high view of Scripture and its authority on all things, is often dismissed as "bibliolatry." This charge is frivolous because everyone claims some authority for his or her beliefs. To hold the Bible as the ultimate authority does not mean that the Puritans worshipped the Bible. As Increase Mather put it: "Though we ought to reverence the blessed Bible above all other books, yet we may not worship it, but the author of it only." Since the Puritans had an extremely exalted view of the Author, they could not but hold His book in the highest possible regard. Should we do less?