How many "Reformed" understandings of the covenant of grace are there?

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In other words, we view Owen as being more consistent in his overall inconsistency on this point.

I think it is also important to add that Owen was Independent, not Presbyterian. Therefore in a key sense he has something in common with a Reformed Baptist view of the church.
 
Thank you very much for this Paul. I appreciate the sharpening.

I really don't understand your line by line reply to Prufrock. Your replies seem to be a case in point that simply interacting with Owen's Hebrews commentary provides a distorted picture of the whole. Where Paul is careful to note to the reader the difficulty of gleaning the overall understanding from quotes over a vast corpus, you simply quote Owen (and bold portions you have chosen) as if to note: "No, really, you can just quote Owen in Hebrews and understand what he thought about the CoG." If your purpose if different then I don't get it. Most puzzling to me is when you "thumbs down" Paul as if to say: "No, really Paul, you don't understand what Owen is saying and let me provide this quote from his Hebrew's commentary."

Furthermore, a quote from Nehemiah Coxe only proves to me that men could misunderstand Owen in his own day just as they do today.
One thing we might all want to keep in mind is that there is no need to fight over who gets Owen.
I don't think anyone is "fighting" over Owen so much as trying to understand what he means by the use of his terms. This thread is about the views of the CoG. I think what is happening, even within PB Federal theology, is often an appeal to the past to demonstrate that certain views of Federal theology have been within the stream of "orthodoxy" on the subject. I think Paul does a good job of demonstrating how easy it is to abuse a source when you don't take a very complex thinker's whole thought process into consideration. The same is done with Calvin all the time. In the end, we ought to appeal to Scripture but appeals to authority sometimes carry some rhetorical or evidentiary weight if they are trustworthy.

Incidentally, as brilliant as Owen is, I would obviously agree with many that he is terribly confusing. If, at the end of the day, only "scholars" can really get at your thinking on a subject (and even with that they end up disagreeing) then I don't know how ultimately useful that thinking is to those of us who have a good working knowledge of theology but that use is more toward Church life. As a quick example, I would never be able to use these arguments on the floor of Presbytery or even a Credentialing committee meeting because the discussion is so technical and the arguments are so involved that only a very small minority of people could follow the argument in a large context.
 
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