The Holy Spirit and the Humanity of Christ in John Owen: A Re-Examination

This article re-examines John Owen’s construal of the Holy Spirit’s activity in the humanity of Christ. While Owen’s ‘Spirit Christology’ is both lauded as exemplary and criticized as nearly Nestorian, both positions are largely based on a shared (yet faulty) assumption regarding the key text of Owen’s ‘Spirit Christology’ (Pneumatologia 3:159–88; esp. pp. 160–1). In order to correct this assumption, this article examines the claims that Owen makes in this section of Pneumatologia within three different contexts: (1) Owen’s historical context; (2) the context of Owen’s broader corpus; and (3) the immediate context of these claims within the structure and argumentation of Pneumatologia as a whole. I suggest that this rereading of Owen’s Spirit Christology is able to retain many of the desirable theological implications of the original interpretation without the same theological difficulties.