Owen says this, Do any of us find decays in grace prevailing in us?
Deadness, coldness, lukewarmness? Let us assure ourselves there is no better way for our healing and deliverance, yea, no other way but this way alone, namely the obtaining of a fresh view of the glory of Christ by faith and steady abiding therein. A name that is perhaps more familiar to you than some of the other Puritans that we've considered this week is John Owen and you just heard Michael Reeves read a portion of Owen. And even though John Owen's life was heavy, as he experienced depression and he buried all of his children, it was a life filled with Christ-centered gospel proclaiming teaching and preaching. And it's this man that you'll meet today on this Friday edition of Renewing Your Mind.
And remember, today is the final day for this week's resource offer, so give your gift while there's still time. Well, here's Michael Reeves on the life and ministry of John Owen. England, I confess, has never really been a great breeding ground for theologians.
Now, who knows why exactly? Maybe it's because the English are, well, we're a pragmatist people and so the theory we're suspicious of often. Maybe it's because possibly the best known British theologian ever was the Welshman Pelagius and it's hard to follow him. And so the prize of being Britain's greatest ever theologian may be relatively uncontested, but one of the hottest candidates for it almost certainly is John Owen, once dubbed Calvin of England. He was born, we've seen, in 1616 in the little village of Stadham. It's now called Stadhampton.
It's a couple of miles just south of Oxford. Age 12, he went as a student to Queen's College, Oxford. It's being 12, we tend to think of as the exceptional thing. That wasn't that exceptional at the time. What was surprising and exceptional was the manic intensity with which Owen drove himself to work. At this age, he allowed himself just four hours sleep a night, pushing himself to study hard, to learn faster. He did other things as well.
He played the flute, he loved throwing the javelin, long jumping, but he really loved hard work and that would actually wreck his health with the intensity with which he worked. About age 19, he received his MA, his Master of Arts, and he was ordained. But we've seen how at this point, High Church Oxford really wasn't a comfortable, easy place for someone with Owen's convictions to be. And so what he did is he took some household chaplaincy jobs.
This meant that in private homes, he could pastor and study unmolested by the authorities, who were rather intolerant of his views. Now, that sort of thing we've seen a bit of so far. What we haven't seen is this, what was going on inside Owen at this time. All this time, Owen was sinking deeper and deeper into depression. Now, he'd spent his life in Puritan circles and was deeply conscious of his sin, but he didn't know the assurance of salvation that some preached. In 1642, then, in the midst of this dark period for him, he moved to London and he went to go and hear one of the renowned preachers of the day, Edmund Calome at St. Mary's Church, Aldermanbury. Now, he went deliberately to go and hear this famous preacher, but Calome wasn't there that day and he got to hear an unknown preacher.
We don't know who it was. And so Owen's spiritual transformation happened much the same way as Charles Spurgeon's would later. An unknown preacher, we don't know who it was, preached and their lives are turned around. This unknown preacher took as his text, Matthew 8, 26. Why are ye fearful, O ye of little faith? That was just the text Owen needed.
And with that message, Owen felt that he, even though he was of little faith, felt an immediate assurance he had been born again of the Spirit and was a child of God. Now, around this time, this is the early 1640s, the Civil War had just broken out. And this was the civil war between the largely high church party of King Charles I and the predominantly Puritan forces of Parliament. It was in many ways a tragic civil war.
Families were torn apart. Brother would fight against brother in their convictions. One Puritan might fight against another Puritan because one Puritan might say, I need to be loyal to the king because that's the right thing to do.
And another might say, no, he's a bad king who must be disobeyed. So it was a time of great division, but it was fairly obvious to Owen which side he should be on, the side of Parliament. And for his book, A Display of Arminianism, Parliament awarded him the post of Vicar of Fordham, which is a little village just outside Colchester. And interestingly, Fordham is still an evangelical church today.
They've constructed a John Owen barn in his honor where they hold events now. And Fordham gave Owen lots to do. The previous vicar, senior pastor, had been an ardent high churchman.
And so they simply hadn't received any evangelical education. And so on top of his ordinary duties, what Owen did is he wrote two catechisms, lists of questions and answers, one for adults, one for children. And he used them to instruct and educate his people in the evangelical faith. And what with the time he still had left for writing, there was a bit of time left for him to write.
Those Fordham years were some of Owen's happiest ever. One other reason was in the Fordham years, he met and married Mary Rook. And Mary would be his wife for around 30 years or so. But while that was happy to meet and marry her, the marriage was in many sense a very tragic one. Mary would bear John eleven children and John would have to bury all of them.
Only one of them would make it to adulthood. And so just as we look at some of the reveling in Christ, the delight in God, the worshipping of God's glory and goodness, it was written all in a context of very real life and very real suffering. He's not a man, even though he's an academic, with his head in the clouds, divorced from reality. He was only there in Fordham for about three years. He then moved to nearby Coggeshall. And by now, Owen was starting to be recognized as a rising star. In 1646, he was asked to preach to Parliament.
And in Coggeshall, they liked having him. They were starting to enjoy evangelical preaching. And he began to attract about 2,000 people.
That's a big number for a small village in a fairly cut off part of the world. Two thousand were crowd into the church to hear him every Sunday. Then we've heard Oliver Cromwell heard him. Oliver Cromwell asked him to be one of his chaplains as he went through Ireland and then Scotland with his armies. And then Cromwell got him appointed as Vice Chancellor of Oxford University. And we've seen briefly how he used those years in the 1650s to transform Oxford. And he really did transform Oxford into a seminary to raise up a generation of young scholars and preachers educated in the gospel. And they were also golden years in his time in Oxford.
Oxford was transformed. It was very, very different to how things had been when he was a student. It did help that he earned something like 10 times the average wage of a pastor. And this just started to attract a bit of criticism because he wasn't flamboyant, really.
But in his preference for fine clothes over academic garb, his Spanish leather boots, that attracted some criticism. So there was one censor who was, of course, from Cambridge University who said of this Oxford man, Dr. Owen wears enough powder in his hair as would discharge eight cannons. And it was also complained that he was abandoning the local church. Now in 1657, Owen felt it right to hand on the post of Vice Chancellor. And from that moment, he drifted out of the national spotlight.
That was really the height of his fame. And his great patron, Oliver Cromwell, who had enabled it, died the following year. With the death of Cromwell, life would become ever more difficult.
The first stage of the difficulty was this. Cromwell had been a congregationalist like Owen, believing that each local church should be independent. But with the death of Cromwell, that position was becoming increasingly a minority position. And the Presbyterians were in the ascendancy at the time. And so Owen was increasingly being sidelined as a theologian for not being a Presbyterian. He and some others, like Goodwin, got together at the Savoy Palace in London and wrote out the Savoy Declaration of Faith and Order to try to—well, everyone at this time wanted to find out where they sat on issues of church government and so on. And so this Savoy Declaration was trying to say, here's what congregational theology is saying. It's not a theology to be worried about. He said, we've written this to clear ourselves of that scandal, which not only persons at home but of foreign parts have fixed on us, that congregationalism is the sink of all heresies and schisms. But this tide of Presbyterianism was irreversible, and Owen was left to a quiet retirement back in lovely Stadham.
Now, don't feel too sorry for him. He's an academic, remember? And academics are quite happy to be left alone in a bit of solitude. And there he used his time in Stadham to write. Tucked away in rural Oxfordshire, he managed to produce his monumental Latin treatise Theologumina Pantotoba, which was a monumental treatise in Latin. It's been translated into English under the title Biblical Theology, which doesn't really capture what it's about. A better translation would be something like Theological Statements of All Sorts. And it was really a grand—Owen loved grand projects.
It's the way his mind works. It was a grand history of theology from the time of Adam, looking at the growth of idolatry in the nations, the growth of true theology in Israel, right down to the practice of theology today. Then King Charles II returned, and things got even more difficult. And Owen then spent most of the rest of his life in London pastoring a church there in the city. And he used his time to write about congregationalism, how churches should be independent. And he pastored there. And he continued to write some of his major works of theology while they're in London. So his work on the Holy Spirit, his work on justification, the work on Christology. Christologia was written in those London years.
We're about to look at that. In 1675, Mary, who'd been his wife for just a little over 30 years now, died. We don't have a record of how Owen reacted to this, so we don't know. Within 18 months, he was remarried to Dorothy Doiley. He was 60 years old, though, now, and there were no children from this second marriage. Then six years later, the one daughter who'd made it to adulthood died, and a year after that, Owen fell terminally ill. And it was on the 24th of August, 1683, he died in what was then the quiet village of Ealing, just outside London. It's now a busy suburb of London.
It's not a quiet village at all. And he took a long time to die, his doctor said, because of the strength of his brain. Whatever exactly that meant to a 17th century doctor. What I want to do now is I want to start opening up Owen's head a bit. So we've seen the man and his life a little bit. We've got to know him a bit. What I want to do is step inside his brain and have a poke around, just try to get to know his thoughts and how he would pastor.
And so I'm going to introduce one work to you in this lecture, and we'll look at some more in the next one. The one work I want to introduce you to in this lecture is titled Christologia, or Christology, a work on the person of Christ. And it's a good work for us to look at now because Owen was a very Christ-centered theologian. Now, the point of Christologia, it was an argument written against Sassinianism.
This was the official reason for it anyway. His argument was against Sassinianism, which was a heresy that, among other things, denied the deity of Christ. And against the Sassinians, Owen wanted to argue this, that true faith is always faith in Christ.
But I said that was the formal reason why he wrote because there's a broader pastoral reason. He didn't just want to argue the point, true faith is faith in Christ. He wanted actually to build faith in Christ in his readers because true faith, he believed, could only come about when someone appreciated, apprehended Christ in his glory and love. And so he said, the great end of this description given to the person of Christ is that we may love him. That we may thereby be transformed into his image. And so in Christologia, Owen set out to fix his reader's eyes on Christ. That he might roll the truths about Christ around the minds of his readers, that their affections might be warmed to him.
He's very deliberate. He's specifically reaching through the minds of his readers, specifically to their affections. What they, it's not quite the same thing simply as emotions, he's reaching for their desires, their motivations. He said this, affections, affections were a very important topic of thought for the Puritans. Affections, he said, are in the soul as the helm is in the ship.
If the affections are laid on by a skillful hand, he can turn the whole vessel whichever way he wisheth. Do you see, he's saying reach for what people desire, what motivates them, what they treasure. And if you can get people to treasure Christ more than all things, then their whole life will be transformed. So Owen starts out by affirming he's going to be Christ-centered in this because, he said, Christ, not Peter, is the rock and promised cornerstone on which the church is built. Okay, that was a Roman Catholic claim, Peter is the rock. He's saying no, no, Christ is the cornerstone on which the church is built. For it is he who from eternity had been chosen by the Father to be the head over all and the savior of the elect. And Owen argues we must be Christ-centered. We said we can have no direct intuitive notions or apprehensions of the divine, only in Christ, the exact representation, the image of God, the bright radiance of the Father's glory. Only in him is God's inmost being shown to us. Therefore, he said, faith in Christ is the only means of the true knowledge of God.
Now, Owen is absolutely unrelenting on this point, and he really pushes it hard. He says it's entirely possible to have a knowledge of the scriptures themselves and still have no true knowledge of God, as the Jews would prove. That you can have a notional knowledge, this is John 539, John 540 territory, you diligently study the scriptures because you think that in them you have life, but you refuse to come to me to have life, said Jesus. And Owen's really picking that point up to say that you can have a notional knowledge of the scriptures and still those scriptures aren't taking you to Christ who reveals God to you, in which case you don't have a true knowledge of God. And Owen goes on to pile up proofs that it's only through Christ that God confers any benefit to us. And Owen is so strong on this, his affirmation that God only blesses through Christ, he's forced to deal with, can you see what the problem might be? The question of the Old Testament. And this question, did God bless people without Christ BC in the Old Testament?
Quite simply, says Owen, no, he did not. And he says, the faith of the saints under the Old Testament did principally respect the person of Christ, both who he was then as the Lord God of Israel and who he would be when he was to become the seed of the woman. He says, this has been the foundation of all acceptable religion in the world since the entrance of sin. Now there are some, he said, who deny that faith in Christ was required from the beginning or was necessary to the worship of God or justification, salvation, for whereas it must be granted that without faith it's impossible to please God, some suppose it is faith in God under some general notion of it without respect to Christ himself that is intended. And listen to the way he phrases it here. It's not my design to contend with any nor expressly to confute such ungrateful opinions, such pernicious errors.
I won't debate with them, though they are pernicious errors. But such this is which strikes at the very foundation of Christian religion for to say that they were blessed without Christ deprives us of all contribution of light and truth from the Old Testament, if effectively you have a different religion. Now, you could wonder, has Owen's Christ-centeredness got to extreme? Has the Son effectively replaced the Father and the Spirit?
Is it all just about the Son then? And Owen answers, and here I think is some of his genius on display, he answers, the very reason why we are called to so love Christ is because the Father loves him. And he said, all love in creation was introduced from this fountain, the Father's love for the Son, and all love that you see in creation was introduced to give a shadow and resemblance of that love that the Father has for the Son. So in other words, what he's saying is our love for the Son is an echo, an extension of the Father's love for the Son.
Right? And so to be lovingly devoted to the Son isn't to disregard the Father. In fact, here is a golden statement of Owen's. He said, herein consists the principal part of our renovation into God's image. Nothing renders us so like unto God as our love unto Jesus Christ. He's saying the Father has eternally been characterized by love for delight in his Son. If you would be like God, love Jesus Christ.
That's what he's like. And when you trust the Son, you then become like the Son because you become like what you trust. And so when you trust Christ, you become like the one the Father loves. We're conformed into the image of God by loving Christ and trusting him, you become God-like. The overall effect of reading this work of Owen's, it can be summed up simply. It's like an invitation.
Owen says this. Do any of us find decays in grace prevailing in us? Deadness, coldness, lukewarmness. Do any of us find a kind of spiritual stupidity and carelessness coming upon us? Do we find an unreadiness to the exercise of grace? Let us assure ourselves there is no better way for our healing and deliverance.
No other way but this way alone, namely, what's the relief? The obtaining of a fresh view of the glory of Christ by faith and steady abiding therein. Constant contemplation of Christ in his glory, putting forth its transforming power unto the revival of all grace is the only relief in this case. Spiritually cold?
Consider Christ in his glory. What a wonderful invitation from John Owen and antidote to coldness or lukewarmness. That was Michael Reeves concluding this week's taste of the Lord's work during the English Reformation and some of the men he used to bring reform. You're listening to Renewing Your Mind and it's so good to have you with us today.
Well, have your views of the Puritans changed this week? You can continue your study by requesting the complete 12-message series. Learn more about the history, meet other key figures and hear an additional message on John Owen. Give your gift of any amount at renewingyourmind.org or by calling us at 800 435 4343 and we'll send you the series on DVD and give you lifetime digital access to the messages and study guide. If your small group has never done a study on church history, this is a wonderful series to whet their appetite and see the value of learning what really is our family history. So make your donation today and request this series at renewingyourmind.org or by clicking the link in the podcast show notes.
But be quick as this offer ends at midnight. This week you've heard about the work of God in the lives of several Puritans. But what about God's work in your life? Well, join us next week as you'll hear messages from R.C. Sproul's series, Keeping in Step with the Spirit. That's beginning Monday here on Renewing Your Mind. .
