John Owen

John Owen was born in 1616 at Stadhampton, a village about five miles from Oxford, where his father was a Puritan vicar. He went up to Queen's College, Oxford, at twelve and took his master's degree at nineteen, studying so hard that he said in later life he would give back all that learning to have those hours of sleep again.

He left Oxford in 1637 rather than submit to Archbishop Laud's new statutes, and spent years as a private chaplain and tutor. He came to settled assurance in his mid-twenties through a sermon in a London church, preached by a man whose name he never learned.

The Civil War made him public. He pastored at Fordham and then Coggeshall in Essex, wrote against Arminianism, and preached before Parliament, including on January 31, 1649, the day after Charles I was beheaded, without once mentioning the execution. Cromwell took him to Ireland as chaplain in 1649 and to Scotland in 1650. In 1651 Owen was made Dean of Christ Church, Oxford, and in 1652 Vice-Chancellor of the whole university, which he ran for five years while preaching, writing, and rebuilding a school wrecked by war.

Then it all went. At the Restoration in 1660 he lost his posts. The Act of Uniformity of 1662 ejected him along with the rest of the nonconformists, and for the last twenty years of his life he was an illegal preacher, fined, watched, offered preferment if he would conform, and refusing it. He led an underground congregation in London and used what influence he still had on behalf of imprisoned believers. Told that he would gladly exchange all his learning for the tinker's gift in the pulpit, he meant John Bunyan.

He wrote an immense amount. The Death of Death in the Death of Christ (1647) is the classic defense of particular redemption. Of the Mortification of Sin in Believers (1656) is the book most people meet him through, with its famous demand: be killing sin, or it will be killing you. Then Of Communion with God, The Nature and Causes of Indwelling Sin, Pneumatologia on the Holy Spirit, The Glory of Christ written as he was dying, and a commentary on Hebrews that runs to seven volumes.

His prose is dense, even his admirers say so, but his own generation regarded him as the deepest theologian the English Puritans produced, and Spurgeon called him the prince of divines.

His private life was grief on repeat. He and his wife Mary had eleven children. Ten died in childhood. The one daughter who reached adulthood came home from an unhappy marriage and died of consumption. Mary died in 1676.

He died at Ealing on August 24, 1683, the twenty-first anniversary of the day the Act of Uniformity had put him out. Told that morning that his last book on the glory of Christ had reached the press, he said he was glad, but that he would shortly see that glory in another manner than he ever had in this world.

Sources: John Owen, Of the Mortification of Sin in Believers, The Death of Death in the Death of Christ, and The Glory of Christ; Andrew Thomson, Life of Dr. Owen, prefixed to the Goold edition of Owen's Works; Peter Toon, God's Statesman: The Life and Work of John Owen; C. H. Spurgeon, Commenting and Commentaries.