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Podcast: The Life and Legacy of John Owen (Lee Gatiss)

April 08, 2024 by: Crossway

This article is part of the The Crossway Podcast series.

One of the Greatest Theologians in History

In this episode, Lee Gatiss walks us through the life and times of the prolific theologian John Owen, introducing us to the man, his works, and his legacy.

The Church, the Scriptures, and the Sacraments

The Church, the Scriptures, and the Sacraments

John Owen, Andrew M. Leslie

Volume 28 of The Complete Works of John Owen explores Owen’s work on topics including the integrity of Scripture, the nature and celebration of the sacraments, and practical church matters.

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Check out more episodes of The Crossway Podcast on Church History

Topics Addressed in This Interview:

01:17 - The Greatest among Puritan Theologians

Matt Tully
Lee, thank you so much for joining me today on The Crossway Podcast.

Lee Gatiss
It’s great to be here. Thanks for inviting me.

Matt Tully
Today we’re going to talk about John Owen, the theologian from the 1600s. Just as a way to introduce us to him and that topic, I want to read a quote from the late theologian J. I. Packer, who in his wonderful book, A Quest for Godliness, introduces readers to John Owen with these words. He writes, “Owen was the greatest among Puritan theologians for solidity, profundity, massiveness, and majesty in exhibiting from Scripture God’s ways with sinful mankind. There is no one to touch him.” Do you resonate with that sense that Packer has about Owen? Does that fit with your understanding of his importance?

Lee Gatiss
Most certainly. Yes. Especially when Jim Packer said that Owen is massive, because his works total somewhere in the region of 8 million words.

Matt Tully
So by massive you mean his works, not his person?

Lee Gatiss
Yeah, there’s a lot of him to read. And as a figure, he was a towering intellect and an extremely important person in the middle of the seventeenth century—one of the greatest theologians that England has ever produced, and a major player during Oliver Cromwell’s reign as Lord Protector of England, when we tried that brief and silly experiment of having a republic instead of a monarchy.

Matt Tully So if that’s true, if he really does loom that large in certainly British history but Christian history more broadly, speak to the person listening right now who’s kind of like, Yeah, maybe I think I’ve heard his name before, but I’ve certainly never read anything by him. Or maybe there’s people listening who are like, I have never heard that name. I’ve heard of Martin Luther. I’ve heard of John Calvin. I’ve heard of St. Augustine. But I’ve never heard of John Owen. So what do you make of that maybe relative obscurity that he suffers from, compared to some of those other great figures of church history, given how significant he sounds like he was?

Lee Gatiss
Well, that’s right. A lot of people haven’t heard of him. They may think it’s Jesse Owens or something like that, but it’s really John Owen. I think the reason for that may be something else that Jim Packer said about John Owen, which is that sometimes his works sound like the roughly dashed off translation of a piece of thinking done in Ciceronian Latin. Sometimes he’s not the easiest person to read. Some of his works are peppered liberally with Latin, Greek, and Hebrew all over the place. He was an academic theologian, so a lot of his work is not the easiest to read. And of all the Puritans, he isn’t the most down to earth in that sense. You’d want to read someone like John Flavel or Richard Sibbes or another great Puritan to get a great sense of the Puritans as down-to-earth preachers. Owen is a different kind of man; he’s more academic. He is known in academic circles, but he’s less well-known amongst a popular audience because some of his work is more ponderous and more difficult to understand. However, it’s not all like that. Some of his sermons, of course, are much more for a popular audience, usually. Some of them were addressed to university students at the University of Oxford, where he was the vice chancellor of the university. And they would be a little bit easier to get to grips with. And although he may be sometimes difficult to understand, the effort is vastly repaid as you understand what he’s saying because he’s a real theologian of the heart who can get to some of the heart issues that affect us in our discipleship as Christians. He understands the human heart. He understood his own heart and his own temptations, his own struggles with mortification, with depression, and so on. And so it vastly repays any effort you have to put in to understand him.

Matt Tully
I want to go back to something you said a minute ago. Did I hear you right that he published 8 million words across all of his works? Is that correct?

Lee Gatiss
Something like that. Yes. About 8 million words. His Hebrews commentary, which is one of his largest works, was published in four massive volumes in the 1660s, 1670s, and 1680s. That is 2 million words long. So 2 million words of commentary on one book of the Bible. Admittedly, it’s a big book, Hebrews, but it’s not that big. So his commentary on Hebrews is I think two or three times as big as the entire Bible, which is quite something, but that’s only a part of his work. That would account for nine volumes of our new Crossway series of John Owen, but that is a forty-volume series, so that’s only about a quarter of his output. So multiply that by four and you get about eight million words.

06:31 - Theological Legacy

Matt Tully
I wish people could see this. We’re talking right now over a video call, and you’re holding up this incredible copy of one of the volumes of this four-volume set, and it’s just the ultimate version of this old, beautiful, big book that you can kind of imagine in your mind from hundreds of years ago. When thinking about the books that he’s published, what was his first book? And then I’d love to hear what was his last book that he published before he died.

Lee Gatiss
That’s a great question. We think he may have written a book on the priesthood of Christ, which he mentions at some point, as being his earliest book, but we don’t have that anymore. There’s no book that we can find that was published on that. That material may well have made its way into some of the introductory comments that he makes on the book of Hebrews, interestingly, because priesthood of Christ is a theme in that.

Matt Tully
Yeah, it fits there.

Lee Gatiss
His first published work that we have is a book against Arminianism, the opposite of Calvinism, as we often say. It’s called A Display of Arminianism. Well, it’s actually got a Greek title, but it’s normally known by the English subtitle, A Display of Arminianism. And he was a Reformed theologian and wanted to write against what he saw as a downgrading of the gospel in the theological system known as Arminianism.

Matt Tully
Why did he title it with a Greek title? We that with other theologians from that era. The language of England at the time was certainly not Greek, so what was behind that?

Lee Gatiss
No, indeed it wasn’t. That’s true. One of his great works, which is a big Latin work, is called Theologoumena Pantodapa, which is a long Greek title, and then with a Latin subtitle. So we really need an English translation of that, which is on its way, I promise you. We’re doing that. It’s a scholarly tick, really. It’s showing off. It’s a flourish, a rhetorical flourish. It’s identifying himself as a scholarly academic theologian who knows what that means. And there’s a sort of knowing glance at the audience, at the potential readership: If you understand my Greek title, then of course you will appreciate my book.

Matt Tully
Yeah, it’s academic signaling there. What was his final book that he published before his death?

Lee Gatiss
He was working on the final volume of his Hebrews commentary, which was published posthumously just after he died. But I think the last book he was working on would probably have been his book on the glory of Christ, which is a wonderful thing to be pondering and thinking about as you’re on your deathbed, isn’t it? To think about the glory of Christ, who you are longing to see and who your soul is reaching out for as you die. And that was published, again, just posthumously after he died. But I think that’s what he was working on and thinking about as he took his final breaths in this world. The glory of Christ. And he is a very Christ-centered theologian. He has a number of works on Christ, on Christology, but also a wonderful theologian of the Holy Spirit. He wrote five volumes of material on the Holy Spirit and pneumatologia, which is unusual. Not many theologians have written quite so much on the doctrine of the Holy Spirit. So these are the great themes of his writing—the Trinity, the Holy Spirit, Christ, and the word of God.

Matt Tully
I want to dig into a little bit more of his personal life and what his day to day life might’ve been like. But before we go there, just one more comment about his kind of theological legacy. You mentioned that he’s known for his writings on the Trinity and the Holy Spirit and even just the striving for holiness as God’s people, as God’s children. When we think about his legacy theologically, how does he fit with other, again, maybe more prominent theologians, like a Luther or a Calvin? We view them, perhaps, as pivotal figures, where they helped to shape the trajectory of Christianity in really big, notable ways. They helped to spark, say, the Protestant Reformation, in the case of Luther. Does Owen have a legacy like that, or is his a little bit different or maybe less, in some ways, influential compared to those other guys?

Lee Gatiss
Owen isn’t a world changer in the way that Luther and Calvin were. There are very few world changes in human history. Someone like Marx or Aristotle could lay claim to that. They’ve changed the whole landscape of intellectual life and endeavor. Owen is not that. Owen was born in 1616, the year that Shakespeare died. If you think about it, that is ninety-nine years after the 95 theses of Luther. So he is a hundred years after the start of the Protestant Reformation, so he isn’t fighting those same battles of the early days. He is an academic institutionalizer, you might say, a synthesizer. He’s a brilliant synthesizer of material. He’s trying to defend Reformation insights into the glory of God, into justification by faith alone, salvation by grace alone, and Scripture alone—those solas of the Reformation, you might say. He is trying to encapsulate those, defend those, and pass those teachings on to several generations after the Reformation at a time when those doctrines are under increasing attack from increasingly sophisticated Roman Catholic and other opponents. And so Owen is trying to defend the fort that Calvin built, if you like. he’s not building the fort himself, but he’s trying to defend that same fort and developing academic (scholastic is the word sometimes used, but it just means academic)—he’s trying to develop the academic tools and defenses against those later attacks on the gospel. So that’s who he is and that’s how he fits in. That being said, there are some unique things about him, and he lived at a unique time, so he’s a very different figure to Luther and to Calvin.

12:51 - Owen as Husband and Father

Matt Tully
And we’ll get into some of those things, some of the uniquenesses of his time, in just a minute. But maybe before we get there, tell us a little bit about Owen the man, about Owen the husband and the father. Did he marry and have children?

Lee Gatiss
He did, yes. He married a lady called Mary, and they had 11 children. And I’m sure many of your listeners will also have huge numbers of children like that, but it’s more common in those days than it is today. They had quite a sad life really, because unfortunately only one of those children survived beyond infancy, so ten of them died in infancy. And actually, the eleventh child did also die before Owen. They had a really difficult marriage and a difficult life and then died. So he had to bury all eleven of his children. His wife also died, and he remarried after she died. He married a lady called Dorothy as his second wife. But yes, life wasn’t easy for them as a family.

Matt Tully
What do we know about how that impacted him? Did he write about those deaths of all of his children and his wife? Or do we not have a lot of insight into that side of him?

Lee Gatiss
He’s not terribly autobiographical, we might say. So he doesn’t ever seem to base his theological assertions on his own personal experience or try to gain credibility by talking about what’s happened to him. You do see some of this and you get an insight into some of the personal life of Owen by reading his letters. There are some letters that survive. He, as a pastor, wrote to a woman in the congregation that he was looking after who had lost a child. She’s grieving, Owen is trying to show her the comfort of the gospel, and he doesn’t talk about his own experience of losing ten children. However, he does say in that letter that if she was to throw herself on Christ and look for comfort to him, that Christ would be to her more than ten children. And you realize, if you know Owen’s life at that point, that that is actually an autobiographical comment, obliquely made. So unless you know him and who he is, you wouldn’t necessarily get that. But he’s talking about his own experience of knowing that Christ is a greater comfort in times of grief than we could ever imagine. So we get some insights like that.

Matt Tully
That’s just such an incredible little transparent moment, that having a little bit of that context helps you to see how truly autobiographical that actually was.

Lee Gatiss
There are some other times. I remember reading through the commentary on Hebrews, and I’m looking at the details of the Greek exegesis and trying to translate the Latin Hebrew as I go. And then suddenly, as he’s speaking about the tears of Christ in Hebrews chapter 5, he has a wonderful little comment, just suddenly, where he talks about himself. He says, very unexpected and out of character and out of place almost in the commentary, he says, I don’t know how other people cope, but I have often much ado to keep from longing after the shades of the grave. And that’s just an insight into the despondency and difficulty that he had psychologically at that time. And he wouldn’t have the language that we may have now, I guess, to express some of that. He doesn’t talk about depression or anything of that sort, but that is what is going on. I long for the shades of the grave and the rest of another world. He just drops that comment in because he understands the tears of Christ are also his tears in some way.

Matt Tully
Sometimes I think that can be one of the hardest things about studying history and even reading the words of historical figures is we can feel such a separation from them. And sometimes when they aren’t as forthcoming with those personal details like we’re used to being— we’re used to reading books today where there is a lot of authenticity, so to speak, to the writer sharing how they feel about things.

Lee Gatiss
Is that the American word for narcissism? I don’t know. You called it authenticity, but for some people it does come across as very individualistic. It’s not Owen’s style at all. He wouldn’t talk about himself in that sort of way.

Matt Tully
But I think sometimes the challenge, though, for us as modern readers is we can kind of forget that these men and women were real humans. They were just like us in so many ways. And when we read this tragedy that eleven of his children died before he did, we can kind of be tempted to think somehow it wasn’t as bad for him as it sounds like it would be if it were us. But I think it’s so helpful to get those little insights where we catch a glimpse. And obviously, other figures are more transparent with some of those things and we kind of see these were people just like us in in every way.

Lee Gatiss
There are some great vignettes that you can mention about Owen. When his academic career was cut short by the rise of Archbishop Laud, who is the big bogeyman amongst the Puritans. He’s the bad guy. We all go Boo! when we hear Archbishop Laud. Laud came in and enforced anti-Puritanism upon the University of Oxford. That cut Owen’s career short, and when that happened, his hopes were dashed so much. He was personally so engaged in that and so involved and connected that he hardly spoke to anybody for three whole months. But in his writing and in his preaching he thinks he is standing in a pulpit, he is addressing you with a word from God, so he’s not there to talk about himself. He’s not writing because he’s got something to say about himself. He thinks he’s teaching and preaching to you. And so he’s more going to be talking about Christ than talking about you. He’s trying to stay out of the way, in a sense, so that the message can come through him to you.

Matt Tully
And that’s where, like you said before, maybe that we should view that as a sign of his humility and the soberness with which he took his role as a teacher and a preacher. One more question about children. So I know that he wrote some books for children in particular. Can you tell us a little bit about those?

Lee Gatiss
After he wrote that book that I mentioned, his first book against Arminianism, the Parliament thought that was terrific and they gave him a job as a minister in a church in Essex called Fordham (Fordham Church in Essex). And while he was there as a Church of England parish clergyman, he decided that it’d be a good idea to teach the children. And to do that, he wrote some catechisms. And of course, we’re familiar with things like the Westminster Shorter Catechism. What is the chief end of man? The chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy him forever. We’re used to talking about the Heidelberg Catechism or the Westminster Catechism—these big corporate endeavors—but lots of ministers at the time wrote their own catechisms in order to teach the children in their parishes. And so Owen did the same, and a little primer on how to read and write and that sort of thing. So he was very much engaged in all the work of the parish, not just in being the celebrity preacher on a Sunday, but trying to teach the little ones as well.

20:20 - John Owen and John Bunyan

Matt Tully
Another interesting fact about Owen that I came across as I was preparing to talk to you today was that he actually played a role, maybe a significant role, in the publication of John Bunyan’s classic book, The Pilgrim’s Progress. Tell us a little bit about what happened there.

Lee Gatiss
Right. John Bunyan is in prison, of course, for illegal conventicles and praying in extemporary ways rather than by using the liturgy of the Church of England, which he wasn’t authorized to use anyway because he wasn’t ordained. So Bunyan’s in prison. But he’s a Puritan and he has similar convictions to Owen on some things. And Owen knows him. They’re familiar with each other. So when Owen’s publishing his commentary on Hebrews, the first volume of that in 1668, it’s published by Nathaniel Ponder, who is the bookseller and the publisher who puts that book together. And this was Ponder’s first book—the commentary on Hebrew—and it was quite a difficult book to put together, you can imagine. But Owen then says, Hey, you should publish another book, and let me introduce you to my friend John Bunyan. He’s a great writer. He’s definitely got a book in him. And so Nathaniel Ponder, who is Owens’ publisher and published this deep work of exegesis on Hebrews, Ponder publishes Pilgrim’s Progress and becomes known as Pilgrim Ponderbecause Pilgrim’s Progress is a runaway success.

Matt Tully
Was it a success right away? Was it a bestseller right out of the gate when it was published?

Lee Gatiss
Yeah, and it’s never been out of print, and it’s in hundreds of languages and millions of editions. That is one of the bestselling books of all time across all the centuries. So yes, and we have Owen to thank for that.

Matt Tully
Yeah, that’s incredible. I also read that Owen tried, unsuccessfully ultimately, but tried multiple times to actually help Bunyan get out of prison, because he was in prison for so many years. Why did he fail? Why was he not able to pull the strings necessary? Because Owen was a pretty influential, well-known figure at the time and theoretically had some political power, did he not?

Lee Gatiss
Well, the thing is we look back from our century and we look back to the seventeenth century and it looks like one large blob of seventeenth century. But actually, when you’re in the midst of it, it has mountain peaks and troughs and plateaus. The lay of the land at the time for Owen was different, depending on which year you were in. So he’s a rising star in the 1640s, and he’s at the height of his power and influence in the 1650s under Oliver Cromwell. He’s vice chancellor of the university, dean of a cathedral church and college in Oxford, and a well-known celebrity writer and leader. And then in 1662, he’s ejected from the church, with the restoration of the monarchy in 1660 and the new regime. He is ejected. He’s in the wastelands. He’s in the desert with no influence, really, and he’s in exile in that sense within his own country. And although he is still alive, he isn’t bumped off by the new regime in revenge or anything, he does have some access to the king as a leading non-conformist. He does go and see the king on a couple of occasions to speak to him. At one point the king said to him, Why do you knock around with this guy Bunyan? Isn’t he just like a tinker or something? What do you want to do with him? He’s not a great academic like you are. And Owen just said to him, Well, your majesty, I would gladly give up all my learning to be able to preach like John Bunyan.

Matt Tully
Oh, wow.

Lee Gatiss
And Owen did go before the king on occasions to say, Please can you not persecute the nonconformists quite so much? It didn’t always work because Owen wasn’t in power anymore. So although he had some access occasionally when it was allowed, he didn’t have the power that he may have wielded some years before.

Matt Tully
I also read, related to that, that Owen was perhaps surprisingly an advocate for religious toleration in a way that might resonate with us today in some ways but might have been a little bit out of step in some ways with his own day. Tell us more about his efforts to promote that kind of toleration.

Lee Gatiss
That’s a quite an interesting and unique sort of thing about Owen is that even when he is in power, so to speak—the chaplain to Oliver Cromwell, the preacher for the council of state, and he’s appearing in parliament to preach and so on—even then he is advocating for a form of toleration of others. So he’s not trying to make everybody in the country into a congregationalist, which is what he eventually decides he is. He begins as an ordained Anglican minister, ordained by a bishop, and he flirts with the idea of Presbyterianism, which many people do before they grow out of it. There’s a twinkle in my eye as I say that. But he flirts with Presbyterianism (some of my best friends are Presbyterians), but then he eventually decides, under the influence of an American writer John Cotton who’s English but living in America, that he will be a Congregationalist. But Owen doesn’t think that everybody has to be a Congregationalist, but that we should have a system whereby you can be tolerated under the umbrella of a Protestant Reformed settlement. And as long as you can sign up to certain basic things, that you should be allowed to be having your own churches and ministers and so on. And so that’s interesting. He’s wanting toleration even when he’s in charge. And he fights for that same sort of toleration when he’s not in charge, when he’s on the outside. He’s still trying to advocate for that sort of toleration. I think that has an influence on people like John Locke, who is very influential over the American Revolution, or the illegal Colonial rebellion of 1776 some years later.

Matt Tully
I guess that’s depending on your perspective.

Lee Gatiss
Precisely, yes. Exactly. “You’ll be back,” as George III says in the musical Hamilton, which is a scurrilous piece of American propaganda, but there we are. So I think Owen’s ideas of toleration under an umbrella of Reformed Protestantism are very influential in the future. Of course, he’s not tolerant of everything. He doesn’t want toleration for Roman Catholics because they are also a present military and political threat to the country. And of course, many Protestants and Reformed theologians at that time would have called Roman Catholicism evil. The Pope is the antichrist! they would have said. So there was no toleration for that. And equally, he didn’t want toleration for anti-Trinitarianism. That was an evil scourge that had to be eradicated and not allowed to function in the state. And the state ought to enforce that. The state ought to be telling people not to preach against justification by faith alone and not to be preaching against the Trinity. And that’s something the magistrate, the state, ought to be enforcing. So it’s interesting because he doesn’t believe in that modern American heresy of the separation of church and state either. The past is a different country. They do things differently there.

27:54 - What Were John Owen’s Blind Spots?

Matt Tully
Yeah. Absolutely. Taking a big step back, as you think about Owens—his life, his ministry as an academic, as a pastor, his preaching and theology—we’ve talked a lot about some of his strengths and his insights into things that we can learn from him even today. What would you say are some of his biggest blind spots, in your opinion, as you think back about his legacy?

Lee Gatiss
His biggest blind spots. Wow. Obviously, he should have remained an Anglican, which is what I am, so that’s obviously his biggest blind spot.

Matt Tully
That’s a pretty big one.

Lee Gatiss
He should have seen the superiority of the Anglican way. No, I don’t really believe that. That’s a really interesting question. He would have had trouble seeing the later ideas of toleration, for example, that we now hold to and the idea of the separation of church and state, which many hold to in the States and elsewhere. He just wouldn’t have seen that as a good idea. He couldn’t see how that would function and have a stable society. Maybe he was right. Do we have stable societies now? I don’t know. There were limits to his imagination in that sense. It’s such a good question. I’m not sure I can come up with a better answer than that right now, and it’ll be something I’m pondering late at night. I won’t be able to sleep tonight after that one, Matt. Thank you for asking me that.

29:10 - Why Read John Owen?

Matt Tully
That’s all right. That’s good. So then if you were to summarize, speaking to a listener today, a pastor today, or again, a layperson who does have a love for theology and a love for church history, if you had to summarize, why would you say Owen is worth investing maybe some effort in to read today?

Lee Gatiss
Because of the depth of his insights into the human heart and the human condition in some of his applied theology, particularly his works on mortification of sin, his works on indwelling sin, and his sermons applied to the human heart. There are some great insights there into how we function and how we ought to function. And also because of the profundity of his theological thinking. As I say, he’s not usually a unique and world-changing theologian. He’s synthesizing the best of the Protestant Reformed tradition, and defending that against increasingly sophisticated enemies. But he does sometimes come out with something that is just so good that you were dwelling on it for a long time. There are some really pithy comments, for instance, in one of his books on sin. He says, “Be killing sin, or it will be killing you.” And that’s so good. I’ve got it on a mug. I mean, you can drink your morning coffee and remember that. But at other times he’s dwelling deeply on the doctrine of the Trinity, for example. Because there are anti-Trinitarians around, he’s thought a lot about how to defend the truth of the Trinitarian gospel against those people. And so when he’s preaching on the Trinity, he does in one of his books called Communion with the Triune God he comes up with something that is very rare, which is a unique idea in the history of theology, which isn’t dodgy, because often if you hear something novel in theological circles, it’s usually heretical. But in this idea Owen says we have distinct communion with the Father, distinct communion with the Son, and distinct communion with the Spirit because they are three persons in one God. And so we have distinct communion relationship with each one. And he developed that from Scripture as to what our distinct relationship with each person is. And no one had really done that. No one had developed that thought. And he does it while constrained by Nicene orthodoxy, so he’s very careful in the way that he formulates those things within the Western Catholic tradition of Augustine and so on. But it is a new idea that is well worth dwelling on. Also, his exegesis of the book of Hebrews. I mean, it is long. And if you’re going to preach on Hebrews and use Owen as your commentary help, then maybe you want to choose small sections of the book and preach a verse or two at a time rather than whole chapters, because you give yourself a lot to read that way. But his commentary is at the cutting edge of the application of Hebraic Judaism works to the study of the New Testament in his day. No one was really reading all of the Hebraic sources and the works of the rabbis, medieval rabbis, and early first century Talmud, Mishnah, and so on and applying those to the study of the New Testament in the way that he was. Few people did that. John Lightfoot here in Cambridge was doing that with the Gospels; Owen does it with Hebrews in a way that is groundbreaking and almost unrepeated since.

Matt Tully
So he was a true academic in his time.

Lee Gatiss
Yes. Deep thinking, academic. He would have talked a lot in Latin because that was the language of the lecture hall at the time, so he’d be wandering around those hallowed hallways in Oxford, crossing the quads and speaking to his fellow students and academics in Latin, lecturing in Latin, writing in Latin. However, Owen sometimes in his English sounds like he is speaking Latin and just translating it simultaneously in his head into some form of English. But it is surprising that of all the works he wrote, only one or two volumes are in Latin. Most of it is English because he does have that idea that It should be in a language that’s understood by the people and we shouldn’t dress everything up in academic Latin. That being said, he could write at that level if he wanted to and for the academic community.

33:35 - What Would Owen Say about Divisions in the Church Today?

Matt Tully
Maybe a final question. I wonder if you could bring Owen into our modern day for a moment and give us a sense for maybe how he would have responded or thought about certain issues that are important to us today. And so the main one I think of is just the denominational divisions that we see around us. It seems like it’s almost a truism to say that the evangelical church, both in the US and abroad, but particularly in Europe maybe more than other places, there is this fracturing happening where we can see more and more divisions—less of them theological in nature, perhaps, but political at times or related to social issues and concerns. If Owen were alive today, what do you think he would make of or what would he think of the denominational and the ecclesiastical divisions in the church today?

Lee Gatiss
He would lament those, as we do (I hope), because unity in the gospel, in the truth, is so important in the Bible. Because it’s important to God. The Holy Spirit is a spirit of unity. He was trying to build the church as a dwelling place for God in unity in Christ and that everything is under Christ. And we ought to maintain that unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace. So he would lament the fracturing of the church and the doctrinal downgrading of the church. The lack of concern for doctrine in many parts of the church would be a huge concern to him because it isn’t just about our inner feelings, the inner light that we might have. I feel God is like this. I feel God is like that. There is a truth, a deposit of divine revelation that we have. And so he would lament the neglect of that in large swathes of the church. And he would want to work for an evangelical unity in truth. So I think that’s how he would respond to that. I think he’d be shocked by where we are as societies in the way that revisionist social ethics and cultural norms have changed so dramatically with the decline of Christianity throughout the West. That would be deeply, deeply shocking to him. Although the Puritans were trying to reform the society that they were in, it was an ongoing thing, and he’d be appalled at the way we failed to engage and failed to try to change our societies and our churches in that regard. So yeah, obviously he would be orthodox, Protestant, Reformed, traditional, biblical in terms of the modern ethical issues. So if we think about abortion or same sex marriage and things like that, he would very much stand with those who are conservative or traditional or biblical—whatever words you want to use to describe that—and no doubt would write hefty tomes against why the other side were wrong on those issues. He would be amused, I’m sure, to know that he was on the same side as the Roman Catholic Church on some of those ethical issues of the day.

36:41 - What Would Owen Say about Political Polarization Today?

Matt Tully
What about the broader political landscape that we’re in—in our country in particular but also in Great Britain and elsewhere in Europe— where we also see political polarization increasing. And sometimes we can kind of say we live in the most polarized times in the history of the world or in the history of our country. How would he respond to something like that? What perspective could he bring to that?

Lee Gatiss
He would say, Are you in the middle of a civil war? Because you’re not. And he was. He literally was living in a time of civil war. And he went to war with Oliver Cromwell, the great general. He saw the battlefield. He was there with Cromwell when he fought the Scots and the Irish, trying to bring the Celtic fringe to heel. He was there and he knew people in the army. His brother was in the army. He was used to a time of turmoil and polarization and instability. In the 1660s, when he’s on the outside and not in power, he was watched by the authorities. They came to his church to listen to his sermons. At one point he was caught in the street by informers and only just had managed to escape. The authorities, the FBI of the day, raided his house at one point, and they didn’t find lots of secret documents that he shouldn’t have had and classified things he should have given back. No, they found that he had six boxes of pistols. Six boxes of pistols, because, clearly, he felt that this is such an unstable time, I need to keep hold of a bit of a personal private arsenal. Now, I know that if you live in Texas, six boxes of pistols is paltry and not really very much. But for most people, that’s quite a lot. And it just shows, as a little vignette there, that he’s living in very unstable times. He could well have lost his head or been burned at the stake or something in his day, and we don’t tend to do that nowadays, except on Twitter.

Matt Tully
Do we know what he was planning to do with all those guns? Was there any indication? Was he part of some uprising or was it all just personal security or something?

Lee Gatiss
There have been suggestions that he was involved in certain plots throughout that period after the restoration of the monarchy. He was very close to some people in the army, some former commanders in the Republic army, and so he may have just been looking after the guns for a friend, as they say.

Matt Tully
That’s super suspicious.

Lee Gatiss
We look back and we can see that the restoration of the monarchy did take. It held. But he didn’t know that. You don’t know in the middle of the 1660s, where there’s military defeat at the hands of the Dutch, the comets that are in the sky, the great fire, the plague—all these may have been portents of great upheaval and the shaking of the nations that he thought was still happening, and we may get another civil war. So he didn’t know that. So it’s personal insurance in that sense, but also his close ties to parts of the military—the Cromwellian military—probably account for the fact that he had a little stash of weapons, just in case.

Matt Tully
Thank you so much, Lee, for introducing us to Owen, a fascinating figure, maybe more fascinating, more intriguing than we even would have expected coming into this. But we appreciate you taking the time to do that and are so excited about this forty volume set of Owen’s complete works that you and many others are helping to produce with Crossway.

Lee Gatiss
Nice to chat to you today, Matt. Thank you.

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