Owen's Communion with God in Modern English
John Owen has a second book on the Puritan Rewrites page. Alongside The Mortification of Sin there is now Communion with God, complete in all three parts.
Owen published it in 1657, and it is one of the finest Puritan books on what it is like to know God personally. It is not a book about the Trinity as a puzzle to be solved. It is about how a believer actually walks with the Father, with the Son and with the Holy Spirit, each in his own way.
What Owen means by "communion"
Owen uses the word in a particular sense. It does not mean a feeling, and it does not mean the Lord's Supper. It means a two-way exchange between persons who love one another: one gives, and the other receives and gives something back. God gives himself to us, and we return to him the love and trust he asks for. His text is 2 Corinthians 13:14, "the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit", and the book follows it: the Father in love, the Son in grace, and the Spirit in comfort.
Part One: The Father
This is the shortest part and, I think, the most surprising. Many Christians are sure that Christ loves them, but they quietly think of the Father as stern, someone who had to be talked round. Owen will not have it. Jesus told his disciples, "the Father himself loves you" (John 16:27, ESV), and Owen presses the point home:
"Do not think that I must win the Father's love for you. The Father himself loves you. ... Settle it, and live in it, and stop worrying about it."
He says that most believers live below this love, "in the stormy and cloudy region of hopes and fears, while all up there is calm and quiet."
Part Two: The Son
This is by far the longest part, about five times the length of the first. If you want to know why the Puritans spoke about Jesus the way they did, this is where to look. Owen describes Christ as the husband of his people, and he shows how the two delight in one another, often drawing on the Song of Songs. Then he turns to what Christ purchased for us: our acceptance with God, our holiness, and our privileges as God's children. If you only read one stretch, read chapters 3 to 5.
Part Three: The Holy Spirit
Christ told his friends that it was good for them that he was going away, because otherwise the Spirit would not come. Owen takes that seriously. He asks what the Spirit actually does for you, what it means to have a Comforter, and how to live in fellowship with the Spirit himself, not grieving, quenching or resisting him.
What I have done
As with the rest of the series, Owen's order and argument are kept. His sentences are shorter, and his Greek and Hebrew word studies and long runs of references are trimmed to what the argument needs. Where he speaks to the reader to urge or comfort, he speaks to you directly. All Scripture is from the ESV, with an editor's note wherever his point depends on a different reading. His later defence of the book against a critic, which was added after the three parts, is not included.
Reading it and listening to it
The whole book is about 93,000 words. You can read it online, or download it as a PDF or, for the first time in this series, as an EPUB for an e-reader. There is also a full audiobook of about eight and a half hours, with every chapter in the list, and the text follows along on the page as it plays. The voice is computer-generated, but it reads clearly.