The Four-Fold Context Of John Owen’s "The Work Of The Holy Spirit In Prayer" (1682) -- By: Brian Golez Najapfour
Journal: Reformed Baptist Theological Review
Volume: RBTR 07:2 (Jul 2010)
Article: The Four-Fold Context Of John Owen’s "The Work Of The Holy Spirit In Prayer" (1682)
Author: Brian Golez Najapfour
RBTR 7:2 (July 2010) p. 73
The Four-Fold Context Of John Owen’s The Work Of The Holy Spirit In Prayer (1682)
Brian G. Najapfour, who holds a Th.M. degree in historical theology from Puritan Reformed Theological Seminary, Grand Rapids, MI, is a Ph.D. student in Biblical Spirituality at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, Louisville, KY.
John Owen (1616-1683) considered prayer the heart of all religion. “All men will readily acknowledge that as without it [prayer] there can be no religion at all, so the life and exercise of all religion doth principally consist therein.”1 For Owen, prayer was an indispensable element of religion, as he again said, “[W]ithout it there neither is nor can be the exercise of any religion in the world.”2 He discussed the subject of prayer at length in his treatise, The Work of the Holy Spirit in Prayer (1682).3
Owen typically thought and wrote inseparably as a theologian of the Holy Spirit, a polemicist, a Puritan Renaissance man, and a pastor.4 Thus, it is important to study his view of prayer in these four contexts: (1) pneumatological; (2) polemical; (3) the Puritans as a Renaissance movement; and (4) pastoral.
The Pneumatological Context
RBTR 7:2 (July 2010) p. 74
Owen did not really write a book on prayer per se. His Communion with God (1657),5 which is often thought to be a work on prayer, is not really about prayer; it is rather a doctrinal and experiential treatise on the Trinity. Timothy George states that Communion with God is Owen’s “classic study of Trinitarian spirituality.”6 Moreover, The Work of the Holy Spirit in Prayer, while it deals with the subject of prayer, is not a general discourse on prayer, but on the Holy Spirit as the Spirit of prayer. William H. Goold, in his Prefatory Note to Owen’s treatise, pointed out:
The treatise itself unfolds the evidence and nature of the gracious operation of the Holy Spirit in prayer, and would be esteemed meager and incomplete if it were regarded as a treatise on the whole subject of prayer. To understand its precise scope, it must be considered simply as another book in the general work of our author on the dispensation and operations of the Holy Spirit. Even the subsidiary discussions, on the mental prayer of the church of Rome, and the use of devotional formulas, are evidently connected with the pec...
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