We’re little more than half-way through the year, and already 2023 is shaping up to be a great year for those of us interested in the life and work of John Owen. It’s only August, and already the Owen corpus has been presented with new texts and situated in new contexts.
The most important of this year’s publications might be Zachary McCulley’s article on his discovery of a manuscript of notes on Owen’s sermons in the library of Yale University. The article that describes this find has appeared online and will be published in The Seventeenth Century. McCulley’s discovery provides the first “new” Owen texts since Goold published his heavily edited and oddly incomplete edition of the notes collected by Hartopp and Asty, now held in manuscript in Dr Williams’s Library and New College Edinburgh. So the appearance of this article is really an event. These eight new sermon texts are incorporated in a commonplace book that contains a wide variety of more and less godly material, including portrait sketches. In describing and analysing this commonplace book, McCulley’s work offers important new insights into the cultures of sermon collecting. In addition, McCulley mentions that he is working with Martyn Cowan and myself in preparing a critical text of all of the hitherto unpublished notes on Owen’s preaching post 1660 – an edition that is contracted to Oxford University Press.
Simon Hitchings has opened up some important new lines of enquiry in an article on Owen’s patristic sources that appeared in Studies in Puritanism and Piety. “John Owen’s use of Athanasius: Finding the pedigree of puritan theology in the early Church Fathers” does what it says on the tin. Owen situated his theological and exegetical work within the tradition of the church: his “pledge to sola Scriptura was not a reliance on nuda Scriptura in the context of exposition and debate” (page 90). Hitchings shows that Owen’s work was that of conservation – an historical attitude that demonstrated his conviction that puritanism was fundamentally catholic.
But that is not to say that Owen was not afraid to advance novel ideas. In Evangelical Quarterly 94 (2023), pp. 1-25, Philip Church has published a striking account of “the growth and decline of the relapse theory for the setting of Hebrews.” The article refers to the interpretation of Hebrews, now commonplace, that suggests that the epistle was written to Christians who were being tempted to revert to the religious life of Judaism. This interpretation begs lots of questions, of course, not least as to the extent that these religious movements existed in a discrete fashion before their “partings of the ways.” Although Church’s article moves very quickly across the centuries, he observes that the “first explicit reference to the relapse theory” may be found in Owen’s commentary on Hebrews (page 11) – a suggestion that future work on the history of exegesis might want to test as part of the effort to estimate Owen’s influence outside the domain of theology per se. It’s great to see that Evangelical Quarterly, now published by Brill, is being edited by Owen scholar Richard Snoddy.
Owen has also been providing context for discussions of other themes. S.J. Tunnicliffe’s study of “The Church of England and her Presbyterian curates, 1662-1672,” which appeared in the Journal of Ecclesiastical History, offers a new account of the divisions among Presbyterians in the decade following the act of uniformity, in which Owen appears as an important conversation partner. Meanwhile Stewart Ferguson, in his Midland History article on “Local magistracy and the rule of the major generals: Robert Beake, Coventry’s godly mayor, 1655-6,” notes a diary entry that records Owen’s visit to the city to take part in the ordination of Thomas Basket.
Of course the most substantial contribution to Owen studies comes in the form of another volume in the Crossway edition. This text of Apostasy from the Gospel is the third volume to appear in an impressive series. It’s edited by Joel Beeke, who provides a brilliant introduction. Highly recommended.
Finally, something to watch out for: Ty Kieser’s Theandric and Triune: John Owen and Christological agency, a monograph from the theologian who has done most in the last couple of years to challenge widely held assumptions in Owen studies, forthcoming in 2024 but available for pre-order on the T&T Clark website. I’ve already described Kieser’s last couple of articles as some of the most important in the field, and this book will confirm that view. Following in the wake of John Webster, Kieser will use Owen constructively and to address modern questions in dogmatics.
Crawford Gribben 