Chambers:
FAITH
The soul can do without anything but the word of God; and apart from the word it has no means of help. When it has the word, however, it has no need of anything else.1
Owen’s presentation confronts the reader with two issues in relation to faith. Firstly, is faith properly conceived as ‘purchased’ for believers on the cross, and, secondly, is unbelief a sin like any other, the penalty for which Christ suffered on the cross? As was seen in the summary of Owen’s argument both of these assertions are important to Owen’s position and each will be considered in turn.
The purchase of faith.
Owen introduces the idea of the purchase of faith, considered as the essential means of salvation, early in the second book.2 In chapter one, considering the intermediate end of Christ work which is work, which is “bringing many sons to glory”, he tells us that this subservient end can be “considered distinctly in two parts, whereof one is the end and the other the means for attaining of that end.” He is insistent that both, “the one the condition, and the other the thing promised upon that condition”, are
equally and alike procured for us by Jesus Christ; for if either be omitted in his purchase, the other would be vain and fruitless.3 [my italics]
The means are characterized as grace, holiness, and faith; the ends as glory, blessedness and salvation. Owen focuses on faith as the means and condition, salvation as the end or promised inheritance, and, demonstrating what Muller calls “the Ramist tendency to delineate exhaustive and inclusive categories,”4 expands faith to be a category that comprehends “all saving grace that accompanies it,” that is “all the effectual means of faith, both external and internal”, “all advancement of state and condition attending it,” and “all fruits flowing from it”5. Salvation is likewise taken to encompass “the whole ‘glory to be revealed.’.” He concludes the chapter thus
A real, effectual, and infallible bestowing and applying of all these things (that is faith and all that accompanies it N. C. J . . . unto all and everyone for whom he died, do we maintain to be the end proposed and effected by the blood-shedding of Jesus Christ, with those other acts of his mediatorship which we before declared to be therewith inseparably conjoined: so that everyone for whom he died and offered up himself hath, by virtue of his death or oblation, a right purchased for him unto all these things, which in due time he shall certainly and infallibly enjoy.6
While some of these things are bestowed “upon condition that they do believe” Owen is insistent that faith itself is bestowed “absolutely upon no condition at all.”7 Thus the elect have a right to the means of salvation purchased for them by Christ, and faith is seen as the principal of these means whose bestowal is guaranteed unconditionally by the purchase of Christ. Owen recognizes the