Polemical Development

November 2016 133 Polemical Development John Owen was a staunch, polemical defender of Reformed orthodoxy. Often, some three hundred years beforehand, he exposed and condemned errors that plague Reformed and Presby- terian churches in the twenty-first century. Jesus Christ was not for Owen the sweet, loving, but helpless Savior of all humans, de- sirous of saving all, but frustrated by the contrary will of many—the Jesus of the well-meant offer and of the invitation system. And what power...