Thanks for stopping by. I'm a professor of history at Queen's University Belfast, and I write about history, culture and religion in early modern Britain, where I have special interests in John Owen and J. N. Darby, and in the modern United States of America, where I am mainly interested in evangelicals. When I'm not…
A thought experiment, once more on the question of whether Owen made a "distinctive and enduring contribution to English or Reformed theology.” One way to test whether Owen's contribution was "distinctive and enduring" is to ask which kind of church he would attend next Sunday. Maybe the easiest way to form that experiment is to…
From A vindication of the late reverend and learned John Owen D. D. (1684), pp. 37-38.
I've been prompted to think more about the future of Owen studies after reading Ryan McGraw's second thoughts on my John Owen and English Puritanism: Experiences of defeat (2016). Ryan belongs to that tiny band of Owen scholars who have published more than one book on their subject. Not many Owen scholars can match Ryan's knowledge of…
Scholars have associated Calvinism with print and literary cultures, with republican, liberal, and participatory political cultures, with cultures of violence and vandalism, enlightened cultures, cultures of social discipline, secular cultures, and with the emergence of capitalism. Reflecting on these arguments, the essays in this volume recognize that Reformed Protestantism did not develop as a uniform…
From Crawford Gribben, "The experience of dissent: John Owen and Congregational life in revolutionary and Restoration England", in Michael Davies, Anne Dunan-Page, and Joel Halcomb (eds), Church life: Pastors, congregations, and the experience of dissent in seventeenth-century England (Oxford University Press, 2019), pp. 119-35. ‘Christ hath instituted a beautiful order in his church, if it were…
From my article in the October 2018 issue of History Today: By the early months of 1658, the young English republic was in crisis. Nine years earlier, after a decade of civil war and three years of famine, leaders in the New Model Army had, as the poet Andrew Marvell later put it, ruined ‘the great…
Why pursue PhD work on John Owen in Belfast? Relevant supervisors: Crawford Gribben (Queen's University Belfast) and Martyn Cowan (Union Theological College) have both published books on Owen. Relevant archives: Alongside first editions of works by Baxter, Hobbes, Milton etc., Queen's Special Collections unit has copies of such items as The doctrine of the saints perseverance…
“I have no inclination to be dissolved at the end,” he admitted, “but only as the means for another end, that without it I cannot be with Christ” (Works, 9:349).
Readers of John Owen have gained an extraordinarily important new resource in volume two of The Works of Lucy Hutchinson, edited by Elizabeth Clarke, David Norbrook and Jane Stevenson, with textual introductions by Jonathan Gibson and editorial assistance from Mark Burden and Alice Eardley (Oxford University Press, 2018). Hutchinson was, of course, one of the most…
