John Owen, Puritan Pacesetter

King Charles II of England, so we are told, once turned to one of the most learned men he knew and asked why any intelligent man should waste his time listening to the sermons of the uneducated tinker John Bunyan. “Could I possess the tinker’s abilities for preaching, please your majesty,” replied the scholar, “I would gladly relinquish all my learning.” The scholar’s name was John Owen, and this small story—apocryphal or not—reveals a good deal of the man’s Christian character.

Unfortunately, historians have obliged Owen’s humility by almost completely neglecting to mention him in their annals. This makes it something of a surprise to find his Puritan colleagues hailing Owen as “the Calvin of England” and “the Atlas and Patriarch” of Puritanism. And before the skeptics among us move to write off such praise to the Puritan penchant for overstatement, we should note that in our own time—some three hundred years after Owen’s death—Roger Nicole has called Owen “the greatest divine who ever wrote in English.” Historian Geoffrey Nuttall at the University of London flatly declared that no study of seventeenth-century England could be complete without Owen, while J. I. Packer observed that Owen “lived in an age of giants, and I think he overtops them all.”

The “age of giants” was the golden age of Puritan theology, from 1600 to 1688, and the high summer of Puritan political triumph under the rule of the Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell. Owen lived his life in the forefront of these times, not because he especially desired fame, but because a broad expanse of mind like Owen’s is always in demand in times of turmoil. At various stages, Owen was Cromwell’s personal chaplain, the vice-chancellor of Oxford University, and the acknowledged leader of the Puritan clergy. But above all, the face that stares out at us from the Hulton Library’s portrait was a study in itself of the Puritan ideal described in a sixteenth-century work: “the Ambassador of the most high king unto his people, and a skilful Shepherd to feed God’s flock with the wholesome food of his word.”

Regrettably, today we remember little of Owen as the scholar—whose library contained 1,418 Latin treatises, 32 volumes of classical manuscripts, and 1,454 other books in English from every major theological and classical author—or as the preacher whose sermons seized and convicted equally his country congregations and the House of Commons. Indeed, for all his stature Owen remains the most curiously elusive of all the Puritan leaders.

Owen himself did not help matters at all, especially when he burned his diaries. But he was too much the public man to have escaped notice entirely. Born in 1616, the year of William Shakespeare’s death, John Owen grew up listening to the seams of English life being slowly ripped apart by the furious pulling of Puritan against royalist. Owen’s father, an outspoken Puritan minister, arranged to have his son entered at Queen’s College, Oxford, at the tender age of twelve. A life of study seems to have suited the boy well; he worked hard, governed by an ambition that permitted him only four hours of sleep in a night. Under normal circumstances he ought to have expected a tranquil academic career.

The circumstances, however, were anything but normal. Archbishop William Laud, appointed by King Charles I to suppress the Puritans, had begun a bitter purge of the churches and universities. Eventually, in 1637, the twenty-one-year-old Owen had no choice but to leave Oxford and to become, along with many other nonconformist (i.e., not conforming to the established church) Puritans, a private chaplain in the home of a sympathetic nobleman.

The outbreak of civil war between King Charles and the Puritan parliament in 1642 found Owen in London. The establishment of a Puritan government gave him the opportunity to accept a pastorate at Fordham, in Essex, and then to become minister to an influential congregation at Coggeshall. It also brought him invitations to preach before the assembled parliament on the monthly “fast-days” in St. Margaret’s Chapel, Westminster, and it was after one of these sermons that Owen met Oliver Cromwell, then lord general of the parliamentary armies. Cromwell had as keen an insight into a man’s abilities as he did into cavalry tactics, and the young preacher seems to have made an immediate impression. The general stepped up and told Owen, “Sir, you are the man I must be acquainted with,” and insisted on trooping Owen off to the wars with him as a personal chaplain. In time, Owen became one of Cromwell’s chief advisors, especially in national church affairs, and later, as lord protector of England, Cromwell appointed Owen to the oversight of Oxford as vice-chancellor of the university.

Owen’s appointment was more than a mere reward for political faithfulness. Oxford had been the royalist capital, and the university had impoverished itself in support of the king; the civil wars had dispersed the faculty, and the students had been recruited into the king’s army, so that the only thing which Oxford was likely to be rich in was an intense dislike of Puritans in general and the new Puritan vice-chancellor in particular. Nonetheless, in seven years Owen had reassembled the faculty, put the university back on its financial feet, and restored its academic prestige. Owen’s students were his best testimony: Sir Christopher Wren, John Locke, William Penn, Philip Henry, and Joseph Alleine, among others.

As long as Cromwell lived, the Puritan Protectorate lived also; but when Cromwell died in 1658, the Protectorate collapsed, and the Puritan summer faded quickly into bleak autumn. Charles II was returned from exile to his father’s throne, and the restored royalist government promptly began settling old scores by wrenching the Puritan ministers out of their pulpits. Owen was forced to leave Oxford and was threatened with arrest, although, unlike others, he was shielded from actual imprisonment by powerful friends.

At best, it was a precarious existence, and Owen was more than once tempted by the promise of a haven in America when the Puritans of Massachusetts Bay offered him the presidency of Harvard and, later, the pulpit of a Boston church. Some accounts claim that Charles II, who developed an unusual friendship with Owen and often gave him money to distribute to ejected Puritan ministers, offered Owen a bishop’s miter if Owen would conform to the Church of England. But Owen knew where he was needed. He remained in England and remained a nonconformist, holding together his persecuted colleagues as the acknowledged spokesman of nonconformity until his death.

It was also acknowledged, even by Owen’s enemies, that the Massachusetts offers were not idly made, for Owen’s ministry and preaching were of a stature that demanded notice. Scholar though he was, Owen was thoroughly convinced of the primacy of biblical preaching over theological logic-chopping. His first orders for Oxford were to prod idle chaplains and students into filling vacant pulpits in neighboring churches and to require regular reports on their sermons.

The printed versions of Owen’s own sermons make hard reading. Such was the force of Owen’s intellect that the ideas quick-marched out of his head without the intervals necessary to form them into neat companies and platoons. Even at a distance of three hundred years, Owen’s intellect remains dazzling. He was only twenty-six when his first major book had brought him renown in London, and within five years Parliament was commissioning him to write theological pamphlets for national use. Owen was that rare thing, the preacher who could be scholarly without being pedantic.

Owen was a Calvinist, if we mean by this that he conceived of the world in much the same terms as did John Calvin. Therefore, his writings were often forthrightly Reformed, something that is probably nowhere more evident than in the most prized of his works, The Death of Death in the Death of Christ (1647). It is a formidable—and I should say the classic—Reformed statement of the doctrine of the Atonement, and Owen characteristically alternates between fearsome citadels of logic and bright sallies of wit. I have heard any number of Reformed preachers on the subject still using, in some form or other, the same headings and arguments that Owen set forth three hundred years ago.

On the other hand, Owen had sworn no inviolable allegiance to Calvin, and he refused to be limited to rehashing the Institutes. In the preface to his work on the Holy Spirit, Owen confessed, “I know not of any who ever went before me in this design of representing the whole economy of the Holy Spirit,” and thus having bid farewell to tradition, he proceeded to turn out what Charles Ryrie of Dallas Seminary has described as a work that has never been superseded.

The scope of Owen’s subject was not the only departure from tradition that he felt constrained to apologize for: “Probably some will think that our discourses are carried to an unnecessary and inconvenient length by that intermixture of practical applications which runs along in them all.” None of this, of course, disturbs our century in the least; in fact, it is exactly his recognition that the regenerating work of the Spirit ought to bear tangible, practical fruit that keeps Owen from losing us to the seventeenth century’s love of metaphysical labyrinths.

In many ways, Owen’s stress on “practical applications” tells us as much about Owen as it does about the Holy Spirit; Owen’s chief interest was not in turning out tight little works of specialized scholarship but in pursuing personal holiness. Charles Bridges wrote that Owen excelled in “skilful anatomy of the self-deceitfulness of the heart, and a detailed and wise treatment of the Christian’s heart.” In short, Owen might be called a typical English Puritan, bored with too intricate theological theories and unrivaled in awakening conviction. At Oxford, he and Thomas Goodwin set up what might be regarded as the forerunner of the modern campus counseling center, which the undergraduates promptly labeled “the scruple shop.” Owen began mortifying exalted academic spirits, not with rationalism but with “first, a due consideration of God, and then of themselves.” And all this, though excellent theology, never strikes us as being merely academic:

They know nothing of the life and power of the gospel, nothing of the reality of the grace of God, nor do they believe aright one article of the Christian faith, whose hearts are not sensible of the love of Christ.… I had rather choose my eternal lot and portion with the meanest believer who, being effectually sensible of the love of Christ, spends his days in mourning that he can love him no more than he finds himself [able] to do [“A Declaration of the Glorious Mystery of the Person of Christ,” in The Works of John Owen, ed. by W. H. Goold, Banner of Truth Trust, 1972, I, 166].

Although Owen derided the “horrible self-macerations” of the monastics as falling “upon the natural man instead of the corrupt old man,” he insisted that relentless self-examination was the only possible way to be aware of the attacks of sin. “Let not that man think he makes any progress in holiness who walks not over the bellies of his lusts,” he wrote in “On the Mortification of Sin in Believers.” “He who doth not kill sin in his way takes no steps towards his journey’s end.”

Convinced as he was of the imperfection of any work that human depravity laid a hand to making, Owen was more prepared to tolerate dissent and disagreement than history books have generally made the Puritans out to be. At Oxford, he personally intervened to save a royalist professor from dismissal; in 1669, he censured his Puritan brethren in Boston for suppressing a Baptist congregation, stiffly reminding them that the Baptists were also fellow Christians, and that Puritans who complained of persecution in England had no right to become persecutors themselves in Massachusetts Bay.

Owen died on August 24, 1683, and was buried in Bunhill Fields, the celebrated graveyard of English non-conformists that would in a few years receive the remains of John Milton and John Bunyan as well. Andrew Thomson recorded that Owen’s funeral procession included “sixty noblemen and many others in mourning coaches and on horseback.” There is at his grave today a long, pompous epitaph in flowery Latin that exhaustively lists Owen’s virtues and accomplishments. It probably would have embarrassed him beyond words had he seen it. The words I think Owen would have been truly pleased with were, instead, uttered by his assistant, David Clarkson:

We have had a light in this candlestick which did not only enlighten the room, but gave light to others far and near. Holiness gave a divine lustre to his other accomplishments; it stirred in his whole course and diffused throughout his whole being [quoted in Andrew Thomson’s “Life of Dr. Owen,” The Works of John Owen, I, civ].

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