A Poor Under-Rower

I know both how to be abased, and I know how to abound: every where and in all things I am instructed both to be full and to be hungry, both to abound and to suffer need. PHILIPPIANS 4:12

A parsonage in Oxfordshire. John Owen was born in 1616 at Stadhampton, a village a few miles south-east of Oxford, where his father, Henry Owen, was the minister. Henry was a Puritan, one of those clergy who stayed within the Church of England while longing to see it more thoroughly reformed. John was the second son, and at about twelve years of age he was sent up to Queen’s College, Oxford. He took his first degree at sixteen and his master’s degree in 1635. He studied with a ferocity that became a legend; he is said to have allowed himself only a few hours’ sleep a night for years, a habit he later regretted as having harmed his health.

A conscience that would not bend. In the 1630s Archbishop William Laud, as Chancellor of Oxford, was tightening the university’s statutes and ceremonies. Owen could not in conscience submit to the new requirements, and in 1637 he left the university rather than conform. It cost him his prospects of an academic career. He became a private chaplain and tutor in the households of gentry, and when the Civil War broke out and his employer took the King’s side, the young Owen, whose sympathies lay with Parliament, moved to London.

The unknown preacher. For all his learning, Owen spent these years under a heavy spiritual darkness. He believed the gospel and could not rest in it. The turning point, as he later told it to friends, came in London around 1642. He went to hear the famous preacher Edmund Calamy at St Mary Aldermanbury, but Calamy did not come, and a country minister whom nobody there knew went up into the pulpit instead. Owen stayed. The stranger preached on the words of Christ to His frightened disciples in the storm, Why are ye fearful, O ye of little faith? (Matthew 8:26). Under that plain sermon the burden lifted, and Owen came into the peace with God that he had long been seeking. He tried afterwards to find out who the preacher had been, and never could.

Why are ye fearful, O ye of little faith? MATTHEW 8:26

A country pastor. Owen’s first book, A Display of Arminianism, appeared in 1643, and it brought him the living of Fordham in Essex. In 1644 he married Mary Rooke. In 1646 he moved to the market town of Coggeshall, where large congregations came to hear him, and where his study of the New Testament led him away from the Presbyterian view of church government towards the Congregational, or Independent, view that each gathered church of believers is a true church under Christ. In the same years he wrote The Death of Death in the Death of Christ, published in 1647, his great defence of the particular redemption that he believed the cross secured.

Into the storm. Owen was now asked to preach before Parliament, and on 31 January 1649, the day after the execution of King Charles I, he preached before the House of Commons. Soon afterwards Oliver Cromwell heard him and took him as a chaplain on the army’s campaign in Ireland in 1649, and later in Scotland. Owen came back from Ireland pleading with Parliament that the country needed preachers of the gospel and not only soldiers. His admirers cannot pass over this lightly: he stood close to a government that had killed a king and fought a savage war, and he lent it his voice.

Oxford again. In 1651 Parliament made Owen Dean of Christ Church, and in 1652 Cromwell, as Chancellor, made him Vice-Chancellor of the University. Until 1657 he restored discipline to a university torn by war, preached regularly to the students, and protected scholars whose views differed from his own, including some who worshipped by the Prayer Book in private. It was to these young men, many of them Christians making no headway against habits they hated, that he preached the sermons which became The Mortification of Sin in Believers, published in 1656. Of Communion with God followed in 1657 and Of Temptation in 1658. In 1658 he was among the leaders of the Savoy Assembly, which drew up a declaration of faith and order for the Congregational churches.

Wherewithal shall a young man cleanse his way? by taking heed thereto according to thy word. PSALM 119:9

The tide goes out. Owen had opposed the plan to make Cromwell king, and after Cromwell’s death in 1658 he was caught up in the confused politics that brought down his son Richard. With the return of Charles II in 1660 he lost his deanery, and the Act of Uniformity in 1662 excluded him, with some two thousand others, from the ministry of the national Church. For the rest of his life he was a Nonconformist. He preached to gathered congregations in London at a time when such meetings were illegal, and in 1673 his church united with that of the late Joseph Caryl. He was invited to become minister of a church in Boston, in New England, and declined, choosing to stay with the persecuted churches at home. He wrote and wrote: Indwelling Sin in 1667, the great commentary on the Epistle to the Hebrews from 1668 onwards, the long work on the Holy Spirit in 1674, and a stream of pleas for liberty of conscience for Dissenters.

A friend to a tinker. One story from these years has become part of the legend. Owen valued the preaching of John Bunyan, the Bedford tinker who spent years in prison for preaching without a licence, and he is credibly said to have helped to secure Bunyan’s release. Tradition also reports that when King Charles II asked him why a learned man would go to hear an uneducated tinker preach, Owen answered that he would gladly exchange all his learning for the tinker’s power to touch the heart. The words come only by tradition.

A house of sorrows. The public career hid a private grief that is hard to take in. Mary Owen bore him eleven children, and according to his early biographers all but one died in infancy or childhood. The one daughter who grew up married unhappily, came home, and died of consumption. Mary herself died in 1676. The next year Owen married Dorothy D’Oyley, a widow, who cared for him through his last years of illness. His words on affliction and glory were paid for.

For our light affliction, which is but for a moment, worketh for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory. 2 CORINTHIANS 4:17

The long looked-for day. In his last years Owen’s health failed, and his writing turned more and more towards heaven. In 1681 he published The Grace and Duty of Being Spiritually Minded, begun during a serious illness, and he spent his final months on Meditations on the Glory of Christ. Days before his death he wrote to his old friend Charles Fleetwood that he was going to the One whom his soul had loved, or rather who had loved him with an everlasting love, and that though he was leaving the ship of the church in a storm, the great Pilot was still aboard, and the loss of one poor under-rower would not be missed. On the last morning a friend, William Payne, came to tell him that the book on the glory of Christ was at the printers. Owen is reported to have replied that he was glad of it, but that the long-looked-for day had come at last, when he would see that glory in another way than he had ever seen it, or could see it, in this world.

He died at Ealing on 24 August 1683, St Bartholomew’s Day, the anniversary of the day in 1662 on which he and his brethren had been put out of the Church. He was buried in Bunhill Fields, the burial ground of the London Dissenters, where Bunyan would be laid five years later. Through all of it he had been learning the two lessons he wrote about best: how deep sin runs, and how much deeper runs the love of God in Christ.

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Owen came to assurance through a sermon by a preacher whose name he never learned. Thank God for someone unknown or unremarked who has helped your faith, and if you can, tell them.

2. He left Oxford rather than act against his conscience, and returned years later to govern it. Is there a point where your conscience is being asked to bend? Pray for the courage to keep it.

3. Owen’s closeness to power in a violent time is a warning. Ask where your own loyalties to a party, a cause or a leader may be blunting your Christian judgement.

4. He buried nearly all his children and still wrote of the love of God with joy. Bring one grief you carry to God this week, honestly, and ask Him to meet you in it.

5. Read the story of the disciples in the storm in Matthew 8:23–27, and hear Christ’s question as addressed to you.

A PRAYER

Lord Jesus Christ, You rebuked the wind and the sea, and You rebuked Your disciples’ fear. Rebuke mine.

Thank You for Your servant John Owen, for the peace You gave him through a stranger’s sermon, and for the long faithfulness of his life through honour and loss.

Keep me from trusting in the favour of the powerful, and keep me faithful when faithfulness costs me something.

Teach me, as You taught him, that I am only a poor under-rower, and that You are the Pilot of the ship. Amen.