Life⤒🔗

Born in Stadhampton in 1616, the son of an Anglican minister with Puritan sympathies, John Owen matriculated at Oxford University and as a precocious and diligent student had graduated BA in 1632 when still in his mid-teens. He was ordained deacon in the Church of England in 1635 — the first step towards full ordination to the ministry. Following a fairly well-worn career path, he spent the next few years as a house chaplain to two families, first to Sir John Dormer in Ascott and then to John, Lord Lovelace in Berkshire. When the Civil War broke out in 1642, Lovelace supported the Royalist side. Owen moved to London.

Conversion and Assurance←⤒🔗

It was in London that a single sermon transformed John Owen’s life. Whether or not he was a genuine Christian before, he certainly was a believer enjoying the assurance of salvation as a result of it. He had gone with a relative to hear the great Edmund Calamy preach at Aldermanbury Chapel. Instead, a substitute preacher came into the pulpit and preached on Matthew 8:26. His identity is shrouded in mystery. But the sermon brought Owen peace and from time to time its text reappears in his written and spoken word, even on his deathbed commenting on the fact that he is leaving the ship of the church in a storm.

Ministry←⤒🔗

Owen then served as minister in Coggeshall and in Fordham in Essex. By this time he thought of himself as a Presbyterian in terms of church government. For a variety of reasons he wanted to think through some of the issues that divided Puritans and followed a pattern of approach he had developed for considering disputed matters. He read what he thought was probably the strongest work against his own view. (Would that everyone took this approach instead of setting up and knocking down “straw men”!) He read John Cotton’s book The Keyes of the Kingdom and realized he was really more of a Congregationalist. In effect, he probably became a kind of Congregationalist-Presbyterian in the sense that he held each church contained everything it needed to be the church of Christ — authority did not “come down” to the local congregation from a higher ecclesiastical authority. In any event, he had already begun to gather an ecclesiola in ecclesia — a genuinely evangelical and biblical community within the larger context of the parish church.

He soon became a published author and, in 1643, his first work, A Display of Arminianism, came from the press. His published works come to twenty-four large volumes of some six hundred pages each, and cover a variety of themes: Scripture, Trinity, Christology, the Holy Spirit, Christian living, the church, sacraments, as well as various polemical works.

Rise to Public Prominence←⤒🔗

In 1648, he preached to the Parliamentary Army at the Siege of Colchester, met Sir Henry Ireton (Cromwell’s son-in-law) and other officers, and was brought to prominence among the highest echelons of the New Model Army. Soon he was preaching before Parliament and met Oliver Cromwell, who invited him to serve as his chaplain and in various other capacities. Such was his rise to prominence that he was one of the two ministers who preached before Parliament the day following King Charles I’s execution in January 1649.

From 1651-1658, he served in Oxford first as Dean of Christ Church and then as Vice Chancellor of the entire University (in North American terminology, the Presi­dent). However, when Cromwell was offered the throne, Owen was one of the major influential voices seeking to dissuade him from accepting it, and this seems to have marked the end of his influence.

The Days of Spiritual Exile←⤒🔗

Following the failed protectorate of Cromwell’s son Richard, from the Restoration of the Monarchy in 1660 and the 1662 Great Ejection, until the Act of Toleration in 1689, Owen lived on the ecclesiastical and political margins, often finding hospitality for himself and his family in the homes of landed gentry who were Puritan sympathizers, and preaching to what were essentially private house churches — on occasion being arrested. Thereafter, he became pastor of a small church meeting in London which united with the congregation led by Dr. Joseph Caryl (1602-1673). He and Owen had known each other from at least 1662, when they both accompanied Cromwell army into Scotland.

Among the many things for which we can be grateful for Owen is the fact that he suggested to John Bunyan that he take the manuscript of Pilgrim’s Progress to his own publisher, Nathanael Ponder. Although Bunyan did not become rich (he left only £42.19 when he died), Ponder became so successful that he was known as “Bunyan Pon­der”! As is well known, when Charles II asked Owen why he listened to “yon tinker” (Bunyan), he replied that he would give all his learning to be able to preach like him.

Owen died in 1683 in full expectation of seeing Christ in His glory. As he lay dying, a friend came to tell him that his work on The Glory of Christ was proceeding through the press. He said “I am glad to hear it; but, O brother Payne! The long-wished-for day has come at last, in which I shall see that glory in another manner than I have ever done, or was capable of doing, in this world.”

His physicians attributed the length of time it took for him actually to pass from this world to the strength of his brain! He died on 24 August 1683, the anniversary of the Bartholomew’s Day massacre and also of the Great Ejection. In the view of many, he ranks as perhaps the greatest English theologian of all time.

Eleven days later Owen was buried in Bunhill Fields. The Inscription on his grave reads:

John Owen, D.D., born in the county of Oxford, the son of an eminent minister, but himself more eminent and worthy to be listed among the first divines of his age.

He was equipped in all kinds and in every aspect of human literature and enlisted all his knowledge in an orderly fashion to serve the interests of religion and to minister in the sanctuary of his God. In practical, polemical and casuistical theology he excelled others and was in everything equal only to himself.

The Arminian, Socinian and Popish errors (hydras whose foul breath and deadly poison contaminated the Church) he with more than herculean labour, repelled, conquered and destroyed. He explored to the depths the whole plan of redeeming grace, revealed and applied by the Holy Spirit and taught it to others having first felt its power himself as he had imbibed it from the Holy Scriptures and taken it to heart himself. He always cherished and experienced in great measure as superior to any earthly pursuits the blissful communion with God he so marvellously describes in his writings. Even when on the way to heaven his mind seemed so elevated that he almost grasped its full glory and joy.

Whenever his counsel was sought on cases of conscience his solutions were marked by the wisdom of an oracle. He was truly a scribe instructed in the mysteries of the kingdom of God.

In his personal life he held out to many, in his public preaching to more, and in his printed publications to all who were on their way to the heavenly Zion, the bright light of evangelical truth, guiding their steps to immortal glory. And while he was diffusing this divine light, with his own inward experience and before the eyes of his suffering friends, his earthly tabernacle gradually decayed until, at last, his deeply sanctified soul which longed for the full experience of God, left his body. He was in his earlier years a handsome man with a majestic presence. In later years, pressed down by constant illness, emaciated by frequent diseases, and most of all crushed under the weight of his intense and unremitting studies, his body became an inadequate dwelling place for the rigours of his exertions in the service of God. He left this world on a date darkened for the Church by the cruelties of men, yet a day of bliss for him because of the praise of his God, August 24^th, 1683, aged 67.