Owen’s defense of Reformed teachings such as definite (or limited) atonement, unconditional election, and the priority of the divine decree are particularly expressed through scholastic methodology. Owen provides a valuable model for those in the Reformed and Protestant tradition for how theology may be done with depth, insight, and profundity.

John Owen (1616-1683), sometimes called “The Prince of Puritan Divines” is widely recognized as one of the greatest Reformed theologians ever to have lived. Owen’s works are valued for their theological depth and insight.  Owen’s writings demonstrate both rigorous logic and profound eloquence, as he marshals a host of intellectual resources in the task of articulating the truths of the Christian faith. While Owen was very well connected politically and in public life, serving as vice-chancellor of Oxford under Oliver Cromwell from 1651 to 1657, it is the richness of his thought that brought him the most recognition and attention.[1] Carl Trueman notes, “Owen was without doubt the most significant theological intellect in the third quarter of the seventeenth century, and one of the two or three most impressive protestant theologians in Europe at the time.”[2] Owen’s profound theological insight brought him widespread recognition and a reputation for depth of thought which remains to this day.
Yet, Owen cannot be seen in isolation from the world of which he was part. Indeed, Owen is rightly seen as part of a broader movement of intellectual currents present in Western Europe at the time. It is these movements which are key to properly understanding Owen in his own intellectual development and context. Chief among these is scholasticism. John Owen may be rightly said to be a Protestant scholastic, in a very similar manner to other great theologians of the era, such as Francis Turretin (1623-1687) and Gisbertus Voetius (1589-1676). It is the purpose of this essay to explain Owen’s Protestant scholasticism and how it contributed to his articulation of classic Reformed theology.
Scholasticism
Scholasticism as a movement began in the Middle Ages as a method to teaching within the schools. It is from this that it receives its name. It was a movement of the schola, the school. As the great universities developed in Europe, they began to develop systematic methodological approaches to teaching theology, philosophy, and other subjects. At the heart of the scholastic method was the disputation, where magisters (teachers) and their students would engage in public debate over disputed points of teaching. The disputed points would be characterized in the form of a question. This method became known as the quaestio method.[3] This method was valued throughout the history of scholasticism. It can thus be seen in both the Summa Theologica of Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century and the Institutes of Elenctic Theology of Francis Turretin in the seventeenth century.  Thus one of the core features of scholastic theology was its concern with working through questions of dispute and analyzing them exhaustively.
There are several points to be made about scholasticism. First, scholasticism was a method. It was not a communication of specific content. A specific doctrine or teaching would not qualify as “scholastic.” Scholasticism is a reference to the approach to teaching and assessing the content of the discipline. It is an approach which was developed in the schools as a way of handling different types of content. As Richard Muller notes, “’scholasticism,’ properly understood, indicates a method, capable of presenting and arguing a variety of theological and philosophical conclusions, and not a particular theology or philosophy.”[4]
The second point to be made about scholasticism is that it built upon formal principles of logic. Many of the debates and approaches were highly technical and focused upon logical analysis of argument. Questions in disputations often came down to discussions of whether or not a particular argument was logical or if it committed a certain type of fallacy. To this end, Aristotle’s logic was used. Aristotle’s Organon, or his logical writings, served to provide a logical foundation for the approach to theology and philosophy.[5] These writings provided theologians and philosophers with the tools necessary to analyze arguments and to judge their validity.
A third point to be made about scholasticism is that it was a method which made very fine distinctions and categories. This was an approach which allowed thinkers to work delicately and finely through each aspect of an issue, making important distinctions for each topic.[6] One example may be given of the distinction between the secret and the revealed will of God: one refers to His eternal decree, the other to his revealed law.[7] This type of distinction was made often in scholastic theology. Many theological categories and distinctions were developed through this approach.
Thus scholasticism, established in the medieval era, provided a means by which scholars could rigorously and logically work through certain subjects and handle them in a comprehensive fashion. This method was not immediately discarded in the Renaissance and the Reformation. Rather, it was adopted and utilized in new ways by Protestants.
Protestant Scholasticism
When Protestantism arose in the early 1500s, Protestantism took over many of the institutions of society, including the universities. As Protestantism developed in these contexts, Protestants began to use the tools and the training of these institutions for their use. This led to the development of Protestant scholasticism, where many of the same techniques and methods utilized in the medieval era were adopted in service of Protestantism. Protestant scholasticism was not completely identical to medieval scholasticism, but there was a commonality in that scholastic approaches were used in a university setting. These included the disputation, the use of Aristotelian logic, and the development of fine categories and distinctions in argumentation. The Reformed utilized this method particularly effectively across Europe, thus leading to the particular phenomena of Reformed scholasticism.
Reformed scholasticism was the use of scholastic methods in the service of Reformed theology. Following the Reformed tradition and theologians such as John Calvin, Martin Bucer, and Ulrich Zwingli, Reformed scholasticism utilized these same approaches in defense of Reformed teaching. The teaching of the Reformed confessions, such as the Heidelberg Catechism, the Belgic Confession, the Canons of Dordt, and the Westminster Standards found great expression in the work of Reformed scholastic theologians.
The Reformed scholastics used methods like the quaestio method to achieve greater precision and accuracy in teaching and in developing their theology. They utilized the disputation as well, engaging in public disputations upon contested issues. The Reformation did not actually lead to a rejection of scholasticism, but a renewal of it in a new Protestant context.
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We are not called to produce a certain yield, we are called to be faithful. The results, in the end, are his alone. And we can be happy with that because it frees us from the tyranny of thinking they rest upon us.

We all know that the results in ministry aren’t up to us. You do know that, right? My working theory is that enough of us didn’t know this, or acted as though we didn’t know this, that the Lord brought covid to us so that he could show us in no uncertain terms how little he needs us.
When we were entirely shut down and could not readily meet, the Lord seemed to grow our people. When we could run no programmes nor spend time with anybody meaningfully, the Lord seemed to be at work saving people. It is a lesson I am slow to learn and so the Lord continues showing me again and again. He does not need me to do what he wants doing.
I am minded of the person who became a believer whilst we were locked down and couldn’t do any outreach. I am reminded of the other person who trusted in Christ by engaging with all sorts of stuff I wouldn’t recommend to anyone. I am reminded of the person who, though a believer themselves, was in a church with radically different doctrine and a faulty understanding of the gospel. They figured what they were hearing wasn’t right simply because they were reading the Bible and saw it didn’t tally. I can think of several other stories besides.
In all these cases, we had very little (if anything) to do with it. The Lord worked by his Spirit through his Word to achieve what he wanted to achieve. In one case where something we did seemed to play a part, it did not lead to someone joining our church. They went to another church (a good, gospel preaching church) for various reasons. In the other cases, we had nothing really to do with it at all yet the Lord blessed our church as a result.

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Luke the historian and the theologian gives this call—we do know these things about Jesus—that he lived, taught, performed miracles, was hung on a cross and died, then rose from the dead, validating his claim to be the son of God, the savior of the world. When we realize these things about Jesus, we become part of something bigger than ourselves. We become part of this fire that has spread through the entire world.

A few years ago, my daughter and I were playing Battleship, and she shot misses on spaces C 8,9, and 10. Or that’s how I remember it and had it marked. But later she said “C9,” and I said, “you already tried that one, sweetie.” She said “No I didn’t. I shot J 8,9, and 10.” And I said, “No, I marked them; you said C 8,9, and 10.” She insisted just as vehemently, “No, Dad. I said J 8,9, and 10.” Now, of course, there’s a true answer to that question, but we’ll never recover it, because we were the only two people there, and we just flat out are both sure—even to this day!—that we were right.
That’s a bit of a parable, you might say—a silly example of a big problem in our world these days. Any truth seems to immediately get challenged by a flood of false claims. We live in the middle of an infodemic, as Ed Yost at The Atlantic termed it a couple of years back, and that infodemic wasn’t just about COVID and vaccines. It seems to be about everything—the environment, the government, foreign policy, race—you name it. A society awash in information has no way anymore to control and debunk false information. Now add in the power of AI and deepfakes, and, well…
And in a few things—a VERY few things—I’m an expert; I know a lot. But in most things, I hardly know this or that for sure for myself. It depends on who you read and where you get your news. How can you possibly know what’s true anymore? It’s easy to despair of knowing the truth on much anything, to just throw up your hands, say “Who knows?” and then go on with life as a cynic.
But here’s the thing—there’s no doubt that my daughter and I did play Battleship. Even if we can’t be certain of every detail of the past, we can be certain of some things—and here’s the important point—certain enough to act.
To switch the example, if you want to drive from Washington, DC down to Charlottesville, VA, you can get out a map and figure out the route. Now are you truly, 100%, no matter what, certain you read the map correctly? Is it truly impossible that you misread the map? Of course not. But you still get on the road and start driving.
Or maybe you get directions these days more by trust. You let the Waze lady, or the Apple Maps voice, or the Google Maps Voice direct—you just do what she says. Now do you absolutely, no matter what, know that the GPS hasn’t made an error? That the programmers didn’t mess up, or that the phone didn’t get north and south backwards? No, you can’t know it in that sense. But you DO get in the car and trust that voice and start driving.
Even if you don’t have true, undeniable, perfect epistemic certainty, you can live your life, you act on what you know to be true.
In our education system, we teach people to question assumptions, to overturn ideas, to test if what they think is really true. The ancient philosopher Aristotle said, “It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.”
BUT the purpose of that questioning is to find out what really is true and correct and good, not to wallow in uncertainty forever!
And the biblical historian Luke wrote to make sure we realize that we can be certain of the gospel, certain enough to stake our lives on it.
Luke’s history is a two-part narrative, starting with the Gospel of Luke, which bears his name. That got us to Easter. Now he brings us further with the book of Acts. Starting with the beginning of the book, v.1-3, Luke tells what we know about Jesus:
“In the first book, O Theophilus, I have dealt with all that Jesus began to do and teach, until the day when he was taken up, after he had given commands through the Holy Spirit to the apostles whom he had chosen. He presented himself alive to them after his suffering by many proofs, appearing to them during forty days and speaking about the kingdom of God.”
Luke packs a lot in here, first that we are reading the sequel, or maybe better put, we’re reading volume 2. Luke had always planned this to be a 2-book series, so to speak, and he makes it clear right at the start. Look at his first words: “In my first book”—that this is the continuation of the story he has been telling since chapter 1 of the gospel that bears his name.
In fact, if we look at the way he addresses this in v.1—“O Theophilus”—he’s meaning to tie this book tightly to what he had already written. In antiquity, if you wrote a multivolume work, you added a preface to the first volume that was supposed to apply to the entire series. And Luke is widely recognized as a detailed and accurate historian. What he writes comports very well with what we know of the Roman world of the time and his style matches that of other historical authors.
So, the purpose statement for both books is really verse 4 of chapter 1 of the Gospel of Luke. There Luke writes:
“Inasmuch as many have undertaken to compile a narrative of the things that have been accomplished among us, just as those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and ministers of the word have delivered them to us, it seemed good to me also, having followed all things closely for some time past, to write an orderly account for you, most excellent Theophilus, that you may have certainty concerning the things you have been taught.”
Luke had spent years with the apostle Paul, and he had also spent years researching what he wrote. Later in Acts, he begins saying, “we” as in “We did this; we went here; etc.,” meaning that later he becomes an eyewitness, but he carefully researched everything before he became part of the events himself.
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