Owen addresses tricky questions that were prominent in his own context. For example, he uses his definition of schism to settle a dilemma: if a church member wants to leave a congregation, what should the congregation do?

Schism is a scary, serious word. We often think of a schismatic as someone who has caused a split in a denomination over a hot topic issue or walked away from the church entirely, and these never include ourselves. But John Owen’s teaching on schism reminds us that schism can be much less dramatic than this and thus much easier to fall into without realizing it. Owen’s view on schism was controversial in his time and there may be good reasons to expand his definition to fit other behaviours, yet we should still include his narrower definition since it gets to the heart of the issue. 

 According to Owen, Scripture defines schism not as separation from the church at large (which he identifies as apostasy) but as “causeless differences and contentions” that are “contrary to” or “interrupt” the “exercise of love” within the church.[1] This means that “a schismatic,” or one who is guilty of the sin of schism, is a person who “raise[s], or entertain[s], or persist[s] in such differences.”[2] To show what schism is and is not, Owen explains what it means to preserve love in the church, which can be defined in three ways: the invisible church, the visible church, and the local church.

The invisible church are the elect, who receive the promises of Christ as a group an as individuals. This group is united to Christ by the Spirit, which creates the consequential union of faith and mutual love. Mutual love in the invisible church is expressed by individuals for one another, as well as for the body as a whole, “exerting itself in inexpressible variety according to the present state of the whole, its relation to Christ, to saints and angels, with the conditions and occasions of the members of it respectively.”[3]

[Editor’s note: This article is incomplete. The link (URL) to the original article is unavailable and has been removed.]