An Introduction to John Owen (book)
by Crawford Gribben
Few puritans have suffered as much as John Owen has suffered at the hands of his admirers. Ask almost anyone in Reformed circles about the greatest seventeenth-century protestant theologian, and they will tell you about his books – all bound in green, and all lined up on a high shelf, where they can be properly reverenced but need never be disturbed. Owen’s books have come to function like a talisman. His works have become an icon of theological solidity. It’s probably true that most people who invest in the handsome volumes that continue to be published by the Banner of Truth do so to make a point not about what they do read, but about what they hope other people will believe that they read. At best, those brave enough to crack open these formidable volumes will dip into one of Owen’s classics – Of communion with God, for example, or some of his works on sanctification. But the rest of the green volumes – or indeed the seven volumes of his extraordinary commentary on Hebrews – remain largely untouched. From the seventeenth century to the twenty-first, Owen’s works have been collected by individuals who want to identify with the greatest of puritan theologians without learning directly from him. The Works of John Owen function like a badge – a very big and quite expensive badge that reads: “I am very Reformed.”
This situation is sad – but it’s also quite amusing.
It’s sad because our tendency to collect rather than read the works of Owen points to the ways in which we have allowed our faith to be commodified. Owen matters as a display. In other words, what matters is not what I believe, but what my book-buying habits show that I believe. It’s very easy to become the kind of person who collects the works of puritan writers to show that we are more serious about theology than are the people in the next-door pew. And this problem isn’t new. It’s striking to consult first editions of Owen’s works in university special collections and to see how few of these books have ever been opened. Owen has always had far more buyers than readers.
But the situation is also quite amusing. For Owen can only function as a badge of Reformed orthodoxy as long as no-one reads him. Owen didn’t simply inherit a body of divinity that he defended tooth and nail throughout his eight million published words. Throughout his long life, Owen was a student of the Bible, as well as of the rabbinical, patristic, medieval, Catholic, Lutheran and Reformed traditions. He read the Bible through life experiences that included a revolution and its horrific aftermath, as an advisor to a head of state and as a persecuted minister living on the run, as someone who could both praise the piety of the king and be arrested on suspicion of plotting his assassination. Owen’s constant reading and his constantly changing circumstances forced him to ask new questions of Scripture – and, in some very important ways, to change his mind on such matters as the meaning and necessity of ordination, the meaning and effect of baptism, the frequency of the Lord’s Supper, the proper government of the church, the return of the Jews to the promised land and the timing of the millennium, as well as the need for confessions of faith, the ideal form of national government, and the question of whether smaller religious movements should be tolerated. Owen had many changes of mind – and at several points in his life he was less “Reformed” than are his modern admirers. Owen is always surprising.
So why should we read Owen?
We should read Owen because the myths are true – because Owen is without doubt the greatest of the puritan theologians. This means something intellectually: even as he changes his position on important matters, Owen mines Scripture and the confessional and exegetical tradition in a way that is almost unknown among modern writers. But this also means something spiritually: for all of his failures, and even in his occasional mistakes, there is a depth and weightiness in Owen’s description of the Christian life that, as far as I can see, is unmatched by any modern writer. Owen was a better theologian that any modern writer that I have read. But Owen knew that theological expertise was not an end in itself. He explained that the goal of our studies should be “such a walking with God … that we may come to the enjoyment of him hereafter,” for “there is a wide difference between understanding the doctrine of Scripture as in the letter, and a true knowing the mind of Christ.” Owen understood that knowing theology – even knowing the Bible – is not the same as knowing Jesus Christ. Have we missed the forest for the trees?
But we should also read Owen because the myths aren’t true. Theological egg-heads like to use Owen to promote the idea that progress in doctrine is only for an intellectual elite – people who have the time, money and brains to work through long and complex books refuting heresies that were obscure even in the seventeenth century. You can see that in the theological huffing and puffing that sometimes goes on at the big conferences. But this makes a nonsense of Owen’s work. With very few exceptions, Owen didn’t write books for intellectuals. He wrote almost all of his books in English because his goal was to encourage ordinary Christians, not to impress the biggest brains in protestant Europe. Owen was not a cold rationalist, a theological architect who merely drew lines between different sets of ideas. Owen was a spiritual writer, who could plumb the depth of a theological argument only to explode the idea that theology itself is sufficient, who could reveal unnoticed connections between passages of Scripture only to warn us that Bible-reading must be led by and depend upon the Holy Spirit or it will do real harm to our souls. Owen was not just the greatest of the puritan theologians – he understood how dangerous that knowledge could be. Owen wrote for the mind – and for the heart.
Ordinary Christians have always responded to Owen’s devotional warmth. In 1779, the wife of an Anglican rector read a copy of The nature, power, deceit, and prevalency of the remainders of indwelling sin in believers, and noted in her diary that “I hope to read it often, that I may transcribe it on my memory and note the many useful remarks contained in it.” Jim Elliot was thinking about Owen before he set off on his journey to Ecuador – and his martyrdom. And now, more than ever before, readers are turning to Owen. Over the last few months, I’ve connected with groups of Owen readers from all over the world, in online reading groups organised everywhere from south-east Asia to North America, and with members whose backgrounds range from Reformed Presbyterian to Plymouth Brethren. For all of their differences – cultural, geographical, and even theological – these readers are turning to Owen to understand their hunger for God and his word, and to learn “such a walking with God … that we may come to the enjoyment of him hereafter.”
And that’s why we need to read Owen too.
Listen as Michael and Darren sit down with Crawford Gribben to talk about his new book.
An Introduction to John Owen (Cross 2020) by Crawford Griben
Crawford Gribben, who teaches history at Queen’s University Belfast, is the author of John Owen and English puritanism: Experiences of defeat (Oxford University Press, 2016) and An introduction to John Owen (Crossway, 2020). You can read the first couple of chapters of An introduction to John Owen here.
