Edwin Tay: John Owen and the Theology of Atonement

Background:

“How do you spell your surname?” This is by far the most frequent question posed to me since my arrival in Scotland. After searching for some common ground for bridge-building with the local Scots, I’ve found the Firth of Tay a most convenient reference point on every social occasion as a conversation starter.

My homeland is arguably the greenest and safest city on the face of this planet, sometimes known as “The Lion city”.

Before coming to the UK, I spent three years as an undergraduate, trying to make sense of the complexity of human behavior (BA Psychology and Social Work), three years in a para-church setting, two years as a pastoral assistant in a Methodist Church, and two years in a theological college. I then read for the MA Systematic Theology at King’s College London for a year before reading for the PhD at New College.

Research:

My interest in John Owen is primarily theological. Despite being the greatest theologian that England has ever produced (in my opinion), Owen has sadly not been accorded the status that he rightly deserves in the history of the development of doctrine. I hope that my research is able to contribute in a small way towards a more serious appreciation of Owen as a theologian of historic standing. Towards this end, I hope to demonstrate the coherence of Owen’s atonement theology within the context of the Western theological tradition in general, and of Reformed Orthodoxy in the late-sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in particular. The specific shape of my study takes its cue from his epochal work, Salus Electorum, Sanguis Jesus, or The Death of Death in the Death of Christ (1647).

For a taste of Owen, here are two theologically loaded excerpts from the Death of Death:

"The agent in, and chief author of, this great work of our redemption is the whole blessed Trinity; for all the works which outwardly are of the Deity are undivided and belong equally to each person, their distinct manner of subsistence and order being observed."

"The sum is, that the oblation and intercession of Jesus Christ are one entire means for the producing of the same effect, …so that it cannot be affirmed that the death or offering of Christ concerned any one person or thing more, in respect of procuring any good, than his intercession doth for the collating of it: for, …it is evident that every one for whom Christ died must actually have applied unto him all the good things purchased by his death."