John Owen (1616–83), often called the Prince of the Puritans, was a prominent Reformed pastor-theologian. Serious Christians continue to devote attention to his work, with many thoughtful readers turning to Owen expecting to benefit from his theology. Crossway, for example, is republishing Owen’s books with updated introductions and notes. From my work on Owen, I would like to set out several important concepts as a guide in reading him well. In this article, we will briefly consider three things: the basic concept of the affections, his use of the affections in his view of mortification, and his view of the affections in relation to worship.

At the outset, John Owen’s concept of the affections must be clarified. The affections, in simple terms, may be described using academic language related to emotion. They are often treated as a synonym for love but are a more nuanced category than love alone. Historian Thomas Dixon has shown that prior to the eighteenth century, terms such as affections and passions of the soul were used to describe aspects of inner life that involve thought, desire, and moral direction. In that period, passions and affections were often used in distinct and specific ways.

For example, in the sixteenth century, the affections were understood as mental states that could be influenced by external circumstances. These states included a range of experiences such as joy, happiness, compassion, greed, fear, and annoyance. Within that wider language range, affections in particular referred to directed inclinations of love, a tendency that reaches out toward someone or something. Dixon notes that Christian theologians tended to prefer the term affections, while modern psychology eventually replaced this vocabulary with emotions, reflecting a shift from theological and moral concerns to psychological description.

In the modern period, emotion has largely become the umbrella term for inward experience. At the same time, contemporary affect theory, in conversation with figures such as Baruch Spinoza (1632–77) and Gilles Deleuze (1925–95), speaks of affect in terms of the human capacity to affect and to be affected by others.¹ But unlike secular affect theory—which often focuses on bodily intensity and social forces—Christian theologians have historically understood the affections as movements of the soul rather than mere physiological feelings.² In this theological tradition, affections are not synonymous with fleeting feelings; they are the deep-seated inclinations and dispositions of the soul that determine its moral and spiritual direction. Consequently, our inner life is not isolated or neutral. We are constantly being moved, impressed upon, stirred, and drawn by others. From this perspective, the affections shape both one’s subjectivity and one’s relationships. Owen would agree at the level of description that the human person is impressible and responsive. But unlike these modern accounts, Owen does not leave the affections morally undefined. For him, the affections are not simply energetic movements inside us. They are either ordered toward God or corrupted by sin, and therefore must be judged theologically.

Returning to the older language of the affections invites us to reflect again on the spiritual and moral dimensions of our inclinations, especially as they relate to love. The affections are not merely private moods, but covenantal and ethical in nature. They are central to Christian life.

What, then, are some characteristics of the affections, if they are not simply identical to love? Several features should be noted. First, the affections are one of the faculties of the soul. In Owen’s understanding of human faculties of the soul, the mind (or intellect), the will, and the affections each play a distinct and significant role.³ Owen understood the mind to be the chief leading and ruling faculty. The affections, however, are a substantial faculty that moves or motivates both the will and the mind. The affections influence the mind to choose what the heart desires, because the affections are intrinsically related to the habitual inclination and disposition of the soul.⁴ In other words, the affections direct the person toward some object as desirable.

Second, the affections are turbulent and dynamic. Ordering and governing the affections is essential for sanctification. When the affections are misdirected, the heart grows restless and corrupt. When they are rightly ordered toward God, even afflictions may become blessings. Owen observes that the human heart is unstable. Our natural and sinful affections are drawn to vain and unstable things, and only the renewing work of the Spirit can reorient them toward holiness. The transformation of the affections is therefore not accomplished by human effort, but by divine grace.

Third, the affections have a dual inclination. They move dynamically either toward sin or toward God. Following Augustine, Owen emphasizes that fallen humanity is ruled by carnal affections that resist the holiness of God. At the same time, he insists that the affections can be restored and directed toward spiritual ends. Drawing on an Aristotelian line of thought, Owen notes that the affections “affect some good or bad,” and thereby incline the heart according to what it desires. To reorient the affections is, therefore, to reorder desire itself. Here we see that the affections can either drag the person into sin or carry the person toward God. They do not sit idle. They are always in motion.

Fourth, Owen connects the affections to virtue by appealing to something very close to the Thomistic idea of habitus. While the Aristotelian tradition viewed habitus primarily as a stable disposition acquired through the repetition of human acts, Thomas Aquinas (and Owen after him) understood it as an active power or an operative principle that moves the soul’s faculties toward their proper end.⁵ Moral instruction on its own cannot produce holiness. The Holy Spirit must illuminate the mind, free the will, and capture the affections. By infusing what Owen calls a new “habit of grace,” God transforms the believer’s disposition and inward inclination toward joy and delight in spiritual things. This is essential to Owen’s view of sanctification. Sanctification is not merely outward adjustment of behavior. It is the inward renewal of what the soul actually loves. At this point, it is important to be precise in Reformed terms. Owen is not confusing justification and sanctification. He does not ground our acceptance with God in infused grace. Our standing before God rests on the imputed righteousness of Christ alone. The “habit of grace” concerns sanctification—namely, the Spirit’s ongoing work in the believer to conform that believer to Christ.

Given these characteristics, Owen emphasizes the role of the affections when he explains how the Holy Spirit works in the hearts of believers. For Owen, God’s work of concurrence—the “running together” of divine power and human action—enables human beings to live suitably unto God.⁶ He works with our human faculties.⁷ Because God’s work precedes human action and is the decisive cause, Owen’s doctrine of concurrence is not cooperation in the Pelagian or synergistic sense. He explicitly denies that God requires “any active co-operation on our part” in order to impart salvation. At the same time, human beings are not passive instruments or robots in the reception of grace. The Spirit does not believe, repent, or obey instead of us. God moves the heart and mind so that we ourselves respond actively to his work. In this way, the Spirit is the true author of mortification, and yet mortification remains an act of real, conscious obedience in the believer.

The Mortification of Sin

Owen’s strong emphasis on concurrence, together with his faculty psychology, comes into view in his teaching on mortification and the Christian life. In his treatment of the mortification of sin, Owen explains the way in which the Holy Spirit works in the faculties. He writes:

[The Holy Spirit] doth not so work our mortification in us as not to keep it still an act of our obedience. The Holy Ghost works in us and upon us, as we are fit to be wrought in and upon; that is, so as to preserve our own liberty and free obedience. He works upon our understandings, wills, consciences, and affections, agreeably to their own natures. He works in us and with us, not against us or without us; so that his assistance is an encouragement as to the facilitating of the work, and no occasion of neglect as to the work itself.⁸

In other words, Owen explains both the role of the affections and the way the Spirit works through the faculties in mortifying sin. His understanding of human faculties and affective spirituality is central to his theology. He explains how the Holy Spirit works in a real and transformative way within believers, especially in regeneration. In his view, the Spirit restores spiritual affections in place of carnal ones, shaping the will and enabling believers to live in a spiritually minded way. He clarifies the relationship between the work of God and human responsibility by appealing to concurrence and by showing how the Spirit renews the affections. It is the work of the Holy Spirit to infuse a new habit of grace and to mortify the sinful nature in believers. The Spirit leads Christians into conformity to Christ. Therefore, believers should continually grow and rest in God, living in holiness and godly fear, because the Holy Spirit truly works within their hearts and affections.

Emotionalism and Worship

Owen’s affective spirituality remains deeply relevant in the present age, especially in a time when much of the church has turned worship into an experience of being moved. Worship is often treated as a viewing event, or even a form of religious entertainment, with the stated goal of “touching” the emotions of the congregation. Owen teaches the opposite order. “When affections go before believing,” he writes, “they are little worth; but when they follow it, they are exceeding acceptable and precious in the sight of God.”⁹ It is not our emotional state that qualifies us to worship God. Rather, when we worship God as he has instituted, our affections are then rightly stirred and reshaped. In Reformed terms, worship must be offered to God in the manner he commands, which the Reformed tradition summarizes in the Regulative Principle of Worship. Worship is not something we invent to excite ourselves. It is something God regulates by his Word.

When worship is offered according to God’s ordinance, through the ordinary means of grace that Christ himself has given to the church—namely, the preaching of the Word and the sacraments—our affections and emotions are then transformed. In this way God brings the heart into delight at obeying his statutes and mortifies carnal affections.

The danger of much modern worship is that it tempts us to worship our own emotional experience rather than God himself. We are sinners, and therefore vulnerable to making our emotions into the true object of devotion. The heart in worship certainly matters, but not in the sense of chasing a certain kind of feeling. What God requires is faith, reverence, and trust in Christ and his promises.

Another danger of emotionalism in worship is pastoral. If we treat visible, intense emotion as the mark of “successful” worship, then we will feel that worship has failed whenever we do not come away with a strong impression. In that case, we quietly teach ourselves that worship exists to produce a feeling in us. That is a form of self-worship. It makes emotion both the standard and the object of worship.

What is needed is reformation in worship. The use of new technologies, dramatic lighting, or polished music does not make worship reasonable. We must worship the Lord as he desires to be worshiped. When we offer to him what is pleasing to him, our “reasonable service” restores and purifies our spiritual affections by mortifying carnal affections.

Conclusion

To put Owen’s teaching in contemporary language, the Christian faith is not grounded in emotion. Faith may include joy and delight, but those affective experiences do not precede faith, and they do not constitute faith. Rather, the Christian faith is wholehearted trust in God through Christ, resting on Christ’s finished work and promise, not on the intensity of my own inner state. Yet this trust does indeed include and produce renewed affections. In stressing the affective aspect of worship, Owen maintains that the affections must continually drive the believer to cleave to the Lord. For that reason, Christian faith and worship are not one-time events. They are the ongoing work of God in the heart, in which the Spirit keeps drawing the affections to God, fixing them on him, and ordering them toward holiness.

In sum, Owen teaches that true Christianity is neither cold intellectualism nor shallow emotionalism. The Holy Spirit renews the whole person: enlightening the mind with truth, freeing the will to obey, and reordering the affections so that the believer loves what God loves and hates what God hates. Mortification, then, is not merely suppressing outward behavior. It is the Spirit actively killing sinful affections and planting holy ones in the believer, so that the believer truly obeys. Worship, likewise, is not about producing an emotional moment. It is about approaching God as he has commanded in his Word, through the means he has appointed, and in that obedience the Spirit rightly stirs, stabilizes, and directs our affections toward God himself.

Notes

1. Affect theory is an interdisciplinary approach that examines how human beings are shaped through relational forces rather than through conscious emotion alone. Drawing on thinkers such as Baruch Spinoza and Gilles Deleuze, it describes affect as the capacity to affect and to be affected—the way persons are continually moved by others, social conditions, and their environment. While this framework helpfully underscores the relational and non-neutral nature of human experience, it typically suspends moral judgment. By contrast, the Christian tradition understands the affections as morally significant dispositions of the soul, ordered either toward God or distorted by sin. For further references, see Donovan O. Schaefer, Religious Affects: Animality, Evolution, and Power (Duke University Press, 2015); Donovan O. Schaefer, The Evolution of Affect Theory, Cambridge Elements (Cambridge University Press, 2019); Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth, eds., The Affect Theory Reader (Duke University Press, 2010)
2. While modern psychology often collapses “affections” into “emotions” (movements related to bodily feelings), classical Christian theology distinguishes the two. As Thomas Dixon notes, the “passions” were traditionally associated with the body and the “animal” soul, whereas “affections” were viewed as movements of the higher, rational soul—specifically the will—involving thought, desire, and moral direction. See Thomas Dixon, From Passions to Emotions: The Creation of a Secular Psychological Category (Cambridge University Press, 2003); Dale M. Coulter, “Introduction: The Language of Affectivity and the Christian Life,” in The Spirit, the Affections, and the Christian Tradition, ed. Dale M. Coulter and Amos Yong (University of Notre Dame Press, 2016): 1–28; Ryan J. Martin, Understanding Affections in the Theology of Jonathan Edwards: “The High Exercises of Divine Love” (T&T Clark, 2018).
3. Owen’s account of the human faculties, often described in terms of faculty psychology, is commonly framed as a triad of intellect, will, and affections. While the intellect functions as a principal faculty, the affections decisively shape both the will and the mind by orienting desire and aversion. Accordingly, Owen treats the affections as a motivational dimension of human agency that directs deliberation and moves the will. For spiritual-mindedness, therefore, the renewal of the affections is essential. For further discussion, see Sam Hyeong Rae Jo, “Sensing the Divine: John Owen’s Anthroposensitive Theology and Affective Spirituality” (PhD diss., Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, 2023), 38–44; Cf. Richard A. Muller, Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics, 4 vols. (Baker Academic, 2003), 1:355–56.
4. John Owen, The works of John Owen, 16 vols., ed. William H. Goold (Banner of Truth, vols. 1–16 in 1965; and vols. 17–23 [on Hebrews] in 1991), 3:239–40.
5. Owen, Works, 3:218–24, 468–69, 472–76; Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province (Benziger Bros., 1947), 1a2ae 49.3, 1a2ae 51.4; Christopher Cleveland, Thomism in John Owen (Routledge, 2013), 69–120; John V. Fesko, “Aquinas’s Doctrine of Justification and Infused Habits in Reformed Soteriology,” in Aquinas Among the Protestants, ed. Manfred Svensson and David VanDrunen (Wiley Blackwell, 2018), 249–66; Aaron R. Prelock, “The Pastoral Disposition in the Thought of John Owen” (Doctoral Thesis, Stavanger, Norway, VID Specialized University, 2020), passim; Muller, PRRD, 1:355–59.
6. Richard A. Muller, Dictionary of Latin and Greek theological terms: drawn principally from Protestant scholastic theology (Baker Book House, 1985), 76–77; Cf. Owen, Works, 6:20.
7. Owen, 3:530; 6:20.
8. Owen, 6:20.
9. Owen, 9:23.

©Sam Hyeong Rae Jo. All Rights Reserved.

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Post authored by:

• Sam Hyeong Rae Jo

  

  Sam Hyeong Rae Jo (PhD, VU Amsterdam, 2023) is a pastor-theologian with a special interest in John Owen and the theology of the affections. He earned a BA in Theology from Moody Bible Institute, an MDiv and an MA in Historical Theology from Westminster Seminary California, and a PhD in Systematic Theology from Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. His work explores how the Spirit transforms the believer’s heart in union with Christ. He writes and speaks on Reformed theology, Christian spirituality, and human flourishing. Sam is married to Miran, and they live in Seoul, South Korea.

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