Explanatory comments:

At the out-set, my proper intention here is document what looks to be Trueman’s acknowledgment that Owen’s double-payment argument does rest on a crude commercial theory of the atonement. With that in mind, the following explanatory comments from me are secondary and should not distract the reader from my principal intention. They are offered here for the purposes of clarification.

1) The following are two sections from Carl Trueman’s, The Claims of Truth, John Owen’s Trinitarian Theology, (Carlisle, Cumbria: Paternoster Press, 1998), 139-140. For our purposes here, I will cite the immediate paragraph, then the shorter footnote, and then an extended footnote comment relevant to this paragraph. I will include these as inline texts, and not as proper footnotes. All actual footnotes are mine, as is the underlining for emphasis.

2) Trueman’s remarks here are directed to claims made by A.C. Clifford and Hans Boersma. A few opening comments needed. 1) I am not sure either Clifford or Boersma claimed that Owen subordinated, wholesale, his theology to Aristotle’s logic and methodology. 2) I am far from convinced by Trueman’s assertions here that Owen did not hold to a linear and monist teleology. I think the issue has a lot to do with Owen’s linear causality effecting a single teleology with regard to soteriological ends, proper. What is interesting is that Trueman thinks that because Owen could affirm auxiliary “ends” such as common grace¹ he has dealt with Clifford’s objections. Rather, the issue is that within the divine soteriological activity itself, are there multiple ends or a single end? Set in this frame, the answer is for Owen that the work of Christ has a monist teleology (in my opinion).

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