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Stephen R. Holmes, Divine Discourse: The Theological Methodology of John Owen. By Sebastian Rehnman. Pp. 215. (Texts and Studies in Reformation and Post-Reformation Thought.) Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2002. isbn 0 8010 2501 X. Paper $19.99, The Journal of Theological Studies, Volume 56, Issue 2, October 2005, Pages 836–837, https://doi.org/10.1093/jts/fli262
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This is an exhaustive and interesting treatment of a limited topic. John Owen (1616–83), for so long forgotten as ‘just another Calvinist Puritan’, is being increasingly recognized as a remarkably creative and able theologian. Rehnman, in a revised doctoral thesis, investigates Owen's account of the ‘prolegomena’: the nature and organization of theology; concepts of theological knowledge, faith and evidence, and so on. This is all placed in helpful historical context, often through the extensive footnotes that are included. The whole is, as I say, interesting, but frustratingly limited: Owen's corpus has not been extensively mined, and again and again I wanted to ask how this or that methodological commitment was played out in the constructive theology of The Death of Death, the original christological constructions, or the exegetical decisions that inform the massive Hebrews commentary. Still it is idle to be frustrated at what a book doesn't attempt to do, and this is a useful contribution that achieves its stated aims.
