John Owen for the Modern World

John Owen for the Modern World January 14, 2016

Review of Owen on the Christian Life, by Matthew Barrett and Michael Haykin

John Owen was a terrible writer. Don’t get me wrong: I suspect he is the greatest of the Reformed theologians (so far, at any rate). In part, this is due to his habit of engaging his theological opponents by taking on their strongest arguments, rather than by setting up straw men and then declaring victory by easily knocking them over. Likewise, he is absolutely unhurried in dealing with theological matters. Owen is quite happy to spend a page articulating the meaning of a single word, a whole book exploring a single verse, or multiple volumes walking through one book of the Bible. But still, his prose is atrocious and his works are so dense as to be nearly unreadable by the layman. Even if American education weren’t in the middle of a slow collapse, Owen would be a challenge to read. Which is why works like Matthew Barrett and Michael Haykin’s Owen on the Christian Life are so useful and worthwhile.

Image Source: Crossway
Image Source: Crossway

While the prose of this book isn’t exceptional (I suspect that has more to do with Owen than with Barrett or Haykin), the hard work of the authors in mining Owen for our good is a great service to us all.

With all that said, I don’t know that I’d say this book is necessarily the place to start with Owen. By their own admission, Barrett and Haykin have not provided the first word on John Owen’s usefulness to the modern world. A book on Owen on the Christian life in broad strokes has already been written, and by no less a personage than Sinclair Ferguson. Rather than covering the same wide-ranging material that Ferguson has already examined, Barrett and Haykin focus instead on specific topics in Owen’s theology. Which is of course fine—the topics are interesting and worthy of our attention., But this kind of discrete topical study is not really the ideal approach for the new reader just beginning  to dive into the theology of a notoriously difficult thinker.

Still, the fact that this book takes on the secondary particulars of Owen’s thought doesn’t mean those particulars are unimportant to Owen’s time or to our own. Owen’s views on limited atonement, the relationship between church polity and government, killing sin, and predestination are just a few of the topics tackled by Barrett and Haykin, and they are as pressing today as they were four centuries ago.

Of these challenging subjects, I suspect the most useful—because most foreign—for modern Americans will be the section on church polity. For example, the authors direct us to Owen’s True Nature of a Gospel Church and Its Government and its four responsibilities of local church membership:

1. Mutual love to one’s fellow members to be exercised zealously and continuously.

2. Personal holiness and moral obedience to the commands of Scripture.

3. Usefulness toward one’s fellow members, toward other churches, and toward all men absolutely, as occasion and opportunity provide.

4. The performance of all those duties that the members of the church owe to one another according to their calling in the body of Christ. (pg 245)

The very act of thinking that there are any responsibilities placed on Christians with regard to the life of the local church, let alone difficult challenges like “holiness” or “usefulness”, is in itself revolutionary for modern Evangelicals. For the past fifty years, we have demanded that the local church tailor itself to us, rather than owning our role in the life of the body of Christ. The result has been a network of local churches across the country that are empty of substantive theology, unconcerned with holiness, and utterly unable to face the challenges of an increasingly hostile culture. Were Christians to ‘take up and read’ John Owen, we would have at least the beginnings of a corrective to this problem.

Dr. Coyle Neal is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Southwest Baptist University in Bolivar, Missouri. 


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