Dublin Castle
In this post I am interested in the mind of John Owen during the time when he was part of Oliver Cromwell’s ‘leadership team’ as one of Cromwell’s chaplains,
travelling with it as military strategy determined, to Ireland, and then to
Scotland and so on. The period ends with his published sermon of 1656.
As Dean of Christ Church (1651) and in the next year as Vice-Chancellor
of the University of Oxford, Owen would travel to Westminster to preach to the Commons. He owed these positions to Cromwell. He had preached to the Commons
earlier, indeed he had first come to Cromwell’s notice through a sermon
preached there. Such sermons were published at the command of the House.
Parallel with these duties Owen was also continuing the series of
theological writings for which he is best known today. By the time he became
part of Cromwell’s team he had put out A
Display of Arminianism (1642) a critique of Arminian theolog.This
shortish book, was in effect a defence
of the ‘Five Points’ of the Synod of Dordt. Owen was 24. This was followed by Salus Electorum, better known to us as
the Death of Death (1647), dedicated
to the Earl of Warwick.
In these books Owen took for granted what was (and is) a central aspect
of the Reformed faith, the distinction between God’s secret decrees and his
revealed will. In Chapter V of A Display of Arminianism, ‘Whether the will and purpose of God may be
resisted, and he be frustrate of his intentions’ Owen says that the secret will
of God
is his eternal, unchangeable purpose concerning all things which he hath made, to be brought by certain means to their appointed ends….[the] eternal, constant, immutable will of God, whose order can neither be broken nor its law transgressed, so long as with him there is neither change nor shadow of turning. (X. 45. Volume and page references are to Goold) )
By contrast
The revealed will of God containeth not his purpose and decree, but our duty, - not what he will do according to his good pleasure, but what we should do if we will please him, and this, consisting in his word, his precepts and promises, belongeth to us and our children, that we may do the will of God.(X. 45)
Similarly in The Death of Death, he makes an application of the distinction to the duty and care of ministers
of the gospel.
We must exactly distinguish between man’s duty and God’s purpose, there being no connection between them. The purpose and decree of God is not the rule of our duty; neither is the performance of our duty in doing what we are commanded any declaration of what is God’s purpose to do, or his decree that it should be done…A minister is not to make inquiry after, nor to trouble himself, those secrets of the eternal mind of God, namely, - whom he purposeth to save, and whom he hath sent Christ to die for in particular. (299-300)
So this is one mind of Owen,
that of a budding seventeenth-century Orthodox puritan theologian.
II
We turn now to the evidence of the operation of Owen’s other mind; his
own preaching as seen in the sermons preached before Parliament.. Of the 11 or
so of Owen’s Commons sermons republished in Goold’s edition of Owen’s Works, which are presumably all of them, I select
two. The first from Hebrews 12.27, entitled ‘The Shaking and Translating of Heaven and Earth’
was published in May 1649, having been preached for the Commons and ‘the residue
of men that wait for the appearance of the Lord Jesus’. The second sermon, 'The Steadfastness of the Promises', was on Abraham who ‘staggered not at the promise of God through unbelief’. There is some doubt as to when this was preached. If 1649, before Ireland, in 1650 after. I am assuming 1650. Now part of the inner circle, Owen preached as Cromwell returned from Ireland. Owen’s purpose, according to this address, was to encourage Parliament ‘to give glory to God, by steadfastness in believing, committing all your ways to him, with patience in well-doing, to the contempt of the most varnished appearances of carnal policy’. With Cromwell in Ireland, Owen had seen the ‘conquering sword of the Protector’ at first hand, had lived for some months in Dublin Castle (from where he signed off The Death of Christ) preached regularly in that city, and seen, he tells us, the needs of the people and their hunger for the gospel.
III
So there is Owen the theological writer and Owen the Commons preacher.
The style of the sermons is different from that of his books, naturally. The
sermons are biblical expositions based on a thorough exegesis of the chosen
passage, and then with a ‘spiritual’ application, that is, (I take it) a
general application to the Christian, and then usually 9as regards Commons sermons) a ‘temporal’ application to the
events that were going on, the Civil War.
I shall try to justify the claim that Owen exhibits a mind in
the preaching that is contradictory to or at least discordant with one important
theological particular with his position in his first two books. I shall now
try to establish this by looking briefly at his way of thinking about the will
of God in these sermons.
The interest for us is in the applications to ‘temporals’, to what is before the House of Commons, the
conduct of the war. What do these events mean? What
is going on? To start with, these further applications still fall under the
meaning of the text. If in spirituals, ‘staggering’ is unbelief to be avoided and
not unbelief to be cultivated, so the same text with the same meaning applies
to temporals. Owen believed that the army’s feats are an expression of faith, but in the same way
a prey to unbelief. In its application to temporals Owen supplements
his appeal to his text with material from the Old Testament prophets, to the
future of Israel and then their fulfilment in the Messianic age. So it comes
about, Owen thinks, that England, purged of popery, and of tyrannical monarchs, is the vanguard
of God’s purposes for the culmination of these Messianic hopes. It is papistry
that brought Ireland to spiritual darkness. Without a great deal of argument,
but with a hurried parade of texts and fragments of texts from the prophets, Owen confidently shows that he takes it for
granted that this is so. His concern is that, knowing this, the Commons should not waver, nor rely on political chicanery. His stay
in Dublin has brought him face to face with instances of need and of hunger and
thirst for the gospel, and they will deliver Ireland and establish gospel
ministries in it if they do not falter, staggering in unbelief.
So we see Owen extending his understanding of
the 'revealed things' to England by the way he uses this this prophetic material . He argues
that these OT texts straightforwardly refer to England and to other such
nations, though Owen does not mention any other, but he mentions past movements of reform
that have been snuffed out by papal tyranny. So ‘nation’ in such OT prophets
means - refers to - nations of the 17th century and onward, especially England, whose domestic and
foreign policy is governed by Christian motives to extend Christ’s kingdom and
to govern affairs non-tyrannically. He and his fellows are seeing the fulfilment
of these prophecies in the English wars, and particularly in the overthrow of
Papacy in Ireland, and the defeat of the Scottish Covenanters in Ireland too.
Isn’t this surprising? Might we not have
expected Owen the Independent (as he by now had become) to go in the other
direction and interpret the ‘nations’ via
Peter’s description of the congregations of the early church as constituting
a nation, that in the NT these words are to be understood in a metaphorical or extended
sense? He is totally silent on this side
of things. So, OT in hand, Owen believes himself to offer the Commons a kind of
prophetic encouragement, a picture of God's revealed will of England, to renew its resolve for the work in hand, to fill in
public details of what would conventionally have been regarded as among the secret
things which belong unto the Lord our God.
For a few years, or perhaps only for a
few months, Owen thought he had received the key
to God’s providence, his will for England and Ireland. He says in one place ‘Of the speedy accomplishment of all this
I no way doubt.’ (VIII 268-9)
In the sermon on staggering Owen also refers
to the revealed and secret will of God distinction, making the point that the
promises of God ‘are not declarations of his secret purposes and intentions’
(227). Nevertheless ‘the promises of God do signify of his purposes, that the believer
of them shall be the enjoyer of them’ …’The experience which we have of the
mighty workings of God for the accomplishment of all his purposes gives light
unto this thing.’(229) ’Look upon the affair of Ireland. The engagement of the
great God of revenges against murder and treachery, the interest of the Lord
Christ and his kingdom against the man of sin, furnished the undertakers with
manifold promises to carry them out to a desired, a blessed end. Take now a
brief view of some mountains of opposition that lie in the way against any
success un that place; and hear the Lord saying to every one of them, ‘Who art
thou, O great mountain? Before my people thou be made a plain.’ (Zech. iv.7). Here he does resort to analogy, but within the
framework of a literal understanding of the OT texts, and of their application to then-current events.
The Lord has promised that Ireland will be delivered, and delivered it shall be!
What happened to Owen’s theology can be
explained in two phases. In the first phase
his understanding of the accepted Reformed understanding of the secret
will and revealed will distinction changed shape during the Commons sermons. As
we saw earlier the distinction, as Owen understood this, is between what God
decrees, reserved to himself, and what he requires, his revelation. Owen
extended the revealed will, the promises, from ‘generals’ to include the
particular contemporary and future events in the British Isles about which he
preached to the House of Commons, going beyond what he had said were secrets to
include the unfolding events of the Civil war and their significance, and in
particular to the military operations in Ireland. He daringly attributed to what he said of these the character
of God’s revealed purposes, long prophesied, in turn giving rise to Christian
precepts.
It is likely that his relative youth, sudden promotion to
Cromwell’s side, and the way of thinking exhibited in his sermons, had turned
his mind. He believed he was in the cockpit of the unfolding of God’s plan for
England, foretold by the prophets, and that he was their mouthpiece. The outcome was assured.
In the second phase, no doubt to his own
horror and chagrin, events do not turn out as Owen was certain they would,
though he never concedes as much in his Commons sermons, except perhaps in the silences
in the last one, preached in 1659 following the death of His Highness the Lord
Protector.
In his last Commons sermon, following Crowell's death, England is
still, according to Owen, ‘a brand plucked out of the fire’. The preacher is no long giving prophetic directions
for the nation, but consolation to a remnant, of their temporal and spiritual
preservation (VIII 458) like Israel in the wilderness. In the course of the sermon
he couples godliness with prosperity, and setbacks with a loss of godliness and
a popular contempt for it. ‘It was not by prudence of councils, or strength of
armies above that of our enemies, that we prevailed; but faith and
prayer.’ (465) There is still hope if we have Christ in our hearts, and an
opposition to profaneness (467). Those who have Christ are to be encouraged,
even though there are differences among them. The sermon, a very short one,
closes on this note. Owen seems to be losing faith in his ability to read the
mind of God.
IV
Times changed. The last sermon of the Commonwealth period preached before the
Commons was in 1659. Charles II was restored as Monarch in 1660, the Act of
Uniformity passed in 1662, and John Owen, though not ejected, since he did not have
a church living, became, along with thousands of others, a Dissenter. He was at this
time 44. Owen’s time at the top table had come to an end.
V
Then followed the flow of books on which
his fame chiefly rests. In none of them as far as I can see did he revisit those
prophetic passages that he excitedly preached on before the Commons. Nor is
there in these books any autobiographical reflections in which he admits to being
self-deceived about the actings of the Lord in providence during the War. And
perhaps to being knocked off balance by his sudden and unexpected promotion to
Oliver’s side. (I say nothing here about alleged events in Owen's life at this period suggesting that he had not quite lost his taste for the high life or the hope of regaining it.) Not for the first or last
time did the Lord shock his people by bringing about what they did not expect.
These omissions in Owen’s oeuvres are
to readers of the later Owen a great pity, given that for him as much for as
any other Puritan, the world had turned upside down, to use Christopher Hill’s
words. More, perhaps, the world turned full circle, and Owen was again on the
margins of affairs, as he was in his early years of ministry in Essex, despite
his not very successful attempts with others (including with his erstwhile combatant
Richard Baxter), to have Dissent unified and recognized, as the laws against dissenters were gradually relaxed. It would be fascinating to learn
more about what, in his heart of hearts, he made of all this.
Among Owen’s
later works were the erudite, magisterial expositions of experimental
Calvinism, of the chief doctrines of the Reformed faith on which Owen's reputation as a theologian largely rests. At work on these he
was on safer ground than when he was composing sermons which claim to identify
the unchangeable purpose of God with certain contemporary political and
military events. What had happened? His mind
had understandably been knocked sideways first by the sudden promotion of becoming a
member of the Lord Protector’s inner circle, and then a few years later knocked
again by the death of Oliver, the rising clamour for the restoration of the monarchy, and by the
Restoration itself and its consequences. In other respects, chastened and
wiser, his mind seems to have recovered its earlier self.
