John Owen on Natural / general revelation

Objectively clear and sufficient to leave everyone without excuse; the failure is moral suppression, not insufficient evidence — though it cannot itself save

THE POSITION

The works of God in creation are sufficient to convict, and the failure is culpable rather than evidential. Owen holds that the moral law was "implanted in his nature and written in his heart by creation" and binds all men still on that ground rather than because it was given at Horeb — but he is equally firm that this knowledge saves no one, since the whole of the catechism's answer to the state of corrupted nature is that no man can escape wrath by anything of his own.

8 OTHERS HOLD THIS

ABOUT THIS FIGURE

The most formidable English Puritan theologian: Dean of Christ Church and Vice-Chancellor of Oxford under Cromwell, later a nonconformist pastor in London. This entry rests on The Death of Death in the Death of Christ (1647), The Doctrine of Justification by Faith (1677), Pneumatologia and the Discourse of Spiritual Gifts (1674), and the Two Short Catechisms (1645), read in the Goold edition of the Works.