Journal: Westminster Theological Journal
Volume: WTJ 79:2 (Fall 2017)
Article: Becoming John Owen: The Making Of An Evangelical Reputation
Author: Crawford Gribben

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Becoming John Owen:
The Making Of An Evangelical Reputation

Crawford Gribben

Crawford Gribben is a professor of history at Queen’s University Belfast.

Abstract

John Owen ended his life in defeat. He died doubting his legacy, and without an explanation of what he deemed to be God’s judgment upon his people. For all his fame, he had not been an especially popular writer, and few of his titles proved to be an immediate success. Owen’s work grew in popularity after his death. In the early eighteenth century, Owen was repackaged for new audiences that appropriated some of his convictions within the context of trans-Atlantic evangelicalism. Jonathan Edwards became one of Owen’s most active American readers, while the movement of reform among English Particular Baptists was identified as “Owenism.” English publishers tended to promote Owen’s devotional writing, while Scottish publishers tended to publish his ecclesiological texts, even as many copies of Owen’s work passed through several generations of owners. As Owen’s reputation was re-engineered, his work was championed among Methodists, Presbyterians, and, eventually, “Plymouth” Brethren, being co-opted in communities that held to principles he had critiqued. Owen was, for a while, almost ubiquitous within some cultures of Victorian evangelicalism, making an appearance in J. R. Herbert’s famous painting of The Assertion of Liberty of Conscience by the Independents at the Westminster Assembly of Divines (1844). His collected works were published in the 1860s. Their republication by the Banner of Truth provided for the recent revival of interest in Owen’s work, for the cottage industry of Owen scholarship, for his status in religious cultures of consumption, and, consequently, his standing as an evangelical.

John Owen died on August 24, 1683, believing that the cause to which he had dedicated his life had failed.1 After the restoration of Charles II, the gradual unwinding of the English revolution had been illustrated in the public torture of old republicans, the ejection of dissenters from the national church and their brutal persecution, and the formation of a new community of nonconformists that was quickly divided by disputes about the

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elemental doctrines of the Reformation. Twenty years after the end of the revolution, it seemed clear to Owen that the Puritan project of building godly congregations in Reformed communities was in ruins. He was increasingly worried that the “minds of professors” had “grown altogether indifferent as to the doctrine of God’s eternal election, the sovereign efficacy of grace in the conversion of...

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