An Introduction to John Owen E-Book

Crawford Gribben

• Herausgeber: Crossway
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 248

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

Over 3 centuries since his passing, Puritan John Owen continues to impact readers through his writings. With over 8 million words published in 80 titles, his topics were as diverse as they were many, ranging from theological works to sociopolitical topics such as the proper nurture and education of children. An Introduction to John Owen by Crawford Gribben is a theological survey of these works, inviting readers to experience anew the grace of God as they go through the Christian life. For Owen, spiritual life was about increasing in grace and goodness, in fellowship with each member of the Trinity. This exploration captures the vision of the Christian life that Owen wished for his readers to have and distills it into an accessible companion volume.

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“In the relatively brief compass of this fresh approach to the core intellectual ideas of John Owen, Crawford Gribben has written what amounts to a must-read work about the mentalité of this theological colossus. A fabulous achievement!”

Michael A. G. Haykin, Chair and Professor of Church History, The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary

“Studying John Owen’s life and theology is like visiting a vast food buffet—delicious but overwhelming, resulting in satisfaction but also a sense that one missed quite a lot. Crawford Gribben serves up a sampler plate with an engaging blend of biography and doctrine flavored with the pervasive sauce of Owen’s view of godliness and spiced with Gribben’s own interpretation of Owen’s story. This book is a helpful introduction to one of the greatest theologians our world has known and a healthy enticement to feed on Owen’s writings for a lifetime.”

Joel R. Beeke, President, Puritan Reformed Theological Seminary; author, Reformed Preaching; coauthor, Reformed Systematic Theology

“Crawford Gribben draws on expertise gathered over years of work on John Owen to paint a picture that is both deeply scholarly and extremely readable. Looking at different stages of human life through the prism of Owen’s personal experience and theological writings, the book gives a striking new perspective on this significant Reformed theologian. It’s an excellent introduction to Owen.”

Susan Hardman Moore, Professor of Early Modern Religion, School of Divinity, University of Edinburgh; author, Pilgrims: New World Settlers and the Call of Home

“John Owen is one of the most remarkable figures to emerge out of seventeenth-century England. His writings span a wide range of topics, from Trinitarian theology and religious toleration to educational reform and personal piety. While recent scholarship has helped us reevaluate Owen in significant ways, a one-dimensional portrait of the Puritan often emerges, whether as a timeless theologian or as an outdated historical figure. Crawford Gribben’s book excels at situating Owen’s theology in the times in which he wrote. The result is not only a stimulating exercise in biographical theology but also a compelling vision of the Christian life. For those wanting to get to know Owen the man as well as Owen the theologian, this book is the best place to start.”

John W. Tweeddale, Academic Dean and Professor of Theology, Reformation Bible College; author, John Owen and Hebrews

“This is a beautifully written book. It is accessible and uplifting, blending the highest scholarship with deep devotion. Gribben presents John Owen in a fresh new light. It has something for those who are new to Owen as well as for those who have read him for a lifetime. Gribben’s introduction is an essential, life-giving guide to a great man whose influence is still with us.”

Tim Cooper, Associate Professor of Church History, University of Otago, New Zealand; author, John Owen, Richard Baxter, and the Formation of Nonconformity

An Introduction to John Owen

An Introduction to

John Owen

A Christian Vision for Every Stage of Life

Crawford Gribben

An Introduction to John Owen: A Christian Vision for Every Stage of Life

Copyright © 2020 by Crawford Gribben

Published by Crossway1300 Crescent StreetWheaton, Illinois 60187

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher, except as provided for by USA copyright law. Crossway® is a registered trademark in the United States of America.

This book quotes from manuscript material in the possession of the Bodleian Library, Inspire Nottinghamshire Archives, and Dr. Williams’s Library. Used by permission.

Portions of this book are drawn from Crawford Gribben, “John Owen (1616–1683): Four Centuries of Influence,” Reformation Today 273 (September–October 2016): 10–18. Used by permission of Reformation Today.

Cover design: Jordan Eskovitz

Cover image: Portrait by John Greenhill, National Portrait Gallery, London.

First printing 2020

Printed in the United States of America

Scripture quotations are from the King James Version (KJV) of the Bible.

Trade paperback ISBN: 978-1-4335-6965-4 ePub ISBN: 978-1-4335-6968-5 PDF ISBN: 978-1-4335-6966-1 Mobipocket ISBN: 978-1-4335-6967-8

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Gribben, Crawford, author.

Title: An introduction to John Owen : a Christian vision for every stage of life / Crawford Gribben.

Description: Wheaton, Illinois : Crossway, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and indexes.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019032178 (print) | LCCN 2019032179 (ebook) | ISBN 9781433569654 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9781433569661 (pdf) | ISBN 9781433569678 (mobi) | ISBN 9781433569685 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: Owen, John, 1616–1683. | Spiritual life—Christianity. | Grace (Theology)

Classification: LCC BX5207.O88 G748 2020 (print) | LCC BX5207.O88 (ebook) | DDC 230/.59092—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019032178

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019032179

Crossway is a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers.

2022-01-18 09:31:24 AM

For Pauline, Daniel, Honor, Finn, and Samuel

Contents

Maps

Preface

Time Line

Bibliographic Note

Introduction

1  Childhood

2  Youth

3  Middle Age

4  Death and Eternal Life

Conclusion

Appendix

Prayers for Children from John Owen, The Primer (1652)

Bibliography

General Index

Scripture Index

Preface

John Owen (1616–1683) was the greatest—and certainly the most formidable—of English Protestant theologians. This book is an introduction to his work, but it is not an attempt at theological weight lifting. Instead, it is about Owen’s description of the spiritual lives of his ideal readers. Its driving force is not Owen’s biography, which I reconstructed in John Owen and English Puritanism: Experiences of Defeat (2016). Instead, it sets out to discover the kind of life he hoped his readers would experience. For Owen, spiritual life was about increasing in grace and goodness, in fellowship with each person of the Trinity, in the local and visible, catholic and invisible fellowship of the church, in the context of an often hostile world. Divine grace was always experienced in a social, cultural, and political context and made a contribution to it. The good life would be enabled by divine grace and would extend that grace to others.

I owe the idea for this approach to Carey Newman, who suggested to me that an introduction to Owen should do more than work through his responses to major debates in the Reformed tradition. After all, there already exists a great deal of historical-theological work in this field, and readers can find in the bibliography major expositions of most of the central themes in Owen’s work. Much of this work is extremely valuable in understanding Owen’s achievements. But this book sets out to do something new. If my work John Owen and English Puritanism was an exercise in theological biography, the present project might be regarded as an exercise in biographical theology. It considers the kind of Christian life that Owen wanted to promote, showing some of the unexpected ways in which he articulated his famously high Calvinism and how he expected it to play out in the lives of those he influenced. Its chapters discuss some of the best-known and least-known of Owen’s works, which I have chosen to focus on as works that treat especially his concerns about the distinctive challenges of successive stages of the Christian life. From infancy to death—and beyond—Owen described the spiritual life as being sustained by and sustaining others in grace.

This book builds on, and occasionally modifies, more than two decades of reading and writing about Owen and his contexts. I first encountered Owen’s works in the mid-1990s, during my doctoral studies, under the guidance of Michael Bath of the University of Strathclyde and Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin of Trinity College Dublin. I have since published a biography of Owen, as well as a number of articles and chapters on his significance, and I’ve updated the conclusions of several of those works here. In the intervening years, my thinking about Owen has been stimulated by John Coffey, Tim Cooper, Sinclair Ferguson, Michael Haykin, and John Tweeddale, while my reading of early modern literature, history, and theology has been guided and informed by colleagues including Matt Bingham, Ian Campbell, Chris Caughey, R. Scott Clark, Martyn Cowan, Scott Dixon, Darryl Hart, Ariel Hessayon, Andrew Holmes, Neil Keeble, Richard Muller, Graeme Murdock, Amanda Piesse, Murray Pittock, Ian Campbell Ross, Nigel Smith, Scott Spurlock, Mark Sweetnam, and Joe Webster. I am grateful to Michael Haykin to reuse material that I initially published in an issue of Reformation Today, which he edited, and to the Bodleian Library, Inspire Nottinghamshire Archives, and Dr. Williams’s Library for permission to quote from manuscript material in their possession. Most important, my reading of Owen’s work has been something I have shared with members of my family, who are “heirs together of the grace of life” and to whom this book is dedicated.

Owen understood that the “praise of God’s grace . . . ought to be the end of all our Writing and Reading in this world.”1 This book describes Owen’s suggestions as to how that grace should flow through the Christian life, from birth to the beatific vision, as the gift of the one who is the source, guide, and goal of all things: Mar is uaidh agus is tríd agus is chuige atá gach ní dá bhfuil ann. Moladh go deo leis (Rom. 11:36).

Crawford Gribben

Tulaigh na Mullán, December 2019

1. John Owen, “Dr. Owen to the Reader,” in Henry Scudder, The Christians Daily Walk (London, 1674), sig. A2v.

Time Line

1616

Owen is born in Stadhampton, Oxfordshire.

1626

Owen enters Edward Sylvester’s school, Oxford.

1628

Owen enters the Queen’s College, Oxford.

1632

Owen graduates with a bachelor of arts and is ordained as a deacon by John Bancroft, bishop of Oxford.

1635

Owen graduates with a master of arts.

1637

Owen leaves Oxford without clear prospects for employment.

1638

Owen is ordained as a priest by John Bancroft, bishop of Oxford.

1641–1642

Owen acts as chaplain for Sir Robert Dormer of Ascot and John, Lord Lovelace of Hurley.

1642

With the outbreak of civil war, Owen leaves the Lovelace household, takes lodgings near Smithfield, London, and gains assurance of salvation under the preaching of an unknown minister.

1643

Owen publishes his first book, A Display of Arminianism, becomes minister of Fordham, Essex, and marries Mary Rooke.

1644

Owen’s first son, John, is born.

1645

Owen publishes his two catechisms.

1646

Owen becomes minister of Coggeshall, Essex, and preaches to the House of Commons for the first time at the conclusion of the First Civil War.

1647

Owen’s daughters Mary and Elizah die.

1648

Owen’s son Thomas dies. The Second Civil War erupts, and Owen’s attendance at and preaching after the siege of Colchester brings him to the attention of Thomas, Lord Fairfax; into the orbit of the army; and ultimately to the attention of Oliver Cromwell. Owen publishes The Death of Death in the Death of Christ.

1649

After the trial and execution of Charles I, England becomes a republic. Owen preaches to members of Parliament (MPs) on the day after the regicide and comes to national attention. Owen’s only surviving child, John, dies. Owen meets Oliver Cromwell and joins his invasion of Ireland; he spends the autumn preaching and writing in Dublin, while the army subjugates the island in a series of controversial actions, and for the first time he notes that his ministry has been attended by conversions.

1650

Owen returns home to the birth of a daughter, Mary, who is by then his only living child, and almost immediately joins Cromwell’s summer invasion of Scotland; he preaches in Berwick and debates with Presbyterians in Glasgow.

1651

Owen’s daughter Elizabeth is born, and Owen is appointed as dean of Christ Church, University of Oxford.

1652

Owen preaches at the state funeral of Henry Ireton, Cromwell’s son-in-law. He chairs the committee that reports on the errors of the Racovian Catechism and begins to define the theological boundaries of a national religious settlement in The Humble Proposals; he publishes The Primer and is appointed vice-chancellor of the University of Oxford.

1653

Owen’s regular preaching in Oxford is recorded by students, including Thomas Aldersey.

1654

Owen becomes a “trier” and adjudicates which preachers should be supported by the state. He is noted as being out of sympathy with the increasingly conservative direction of the government of the republic; is elected as an MP to the first Protectoral Parliament, where he is associated with republican critics of the Cromwellian regime; but is almost immediately forced to resign his seat on account of his being ordained. Owen publishes The Doctrine of the Saints’ Perseverance.

1655

Owen raises forces in Oxford to combat a royalist rising, publishes his anti-Socinian polemic Vindiciae Evangelicae, and takes part in discussion about the readmittance of the Jews.

1656

Two of Owen’s sons, whose names are not recorded, die. Owen publishes Of the Mortification of Sin in Believers.

1657

Owen publishes Of Communion with God. Reflecting his increasing concern about the direction of government, he writes a statement on behalf of republican army officers to oppose the proposition that Cromwell should be offered the crown. Owen’s term as vice-chancellor of the University of Oxford is not renewed, though his leadership of Christ Church continues.

1658

Owen publishes Of Temptation, several books on schism, and discussions of the nature of Scripture. Oliver Cromwell dies, and his son Richard succeeds him as Lord Protector. Owen and other Independents revise the Westminster Confession as a national statement of faith that becomes known as the Savoy Declaration. Owen walks in the procession attending Cromwell’s funeral alongside other civil servants, including John Milton, Andrew Marvell, and John Dryden.

1659

Owen preaches his last sermon to MPs and gathers a congregation at Wallingford House, London, from which he coordinates responses of army republicans to increasing political chaos and fears of renewed civil war. Owen corresponds with George Monck, commander of the army in Scotland, who is marching south, about his intentions regarding the political settlement, but Monck plays for time while also communicating with the exiled king.

1660

Owen leaves Christ Church and returns to Stadhampton, where he gathers a church in his home. Monck’s march south provokes panic in London, which is followed by desertions from the army in England, and so enables the return and restoration of Charles II. Owen is not listed among those to suffer exemplary punishment for their participation in the revolution, but some of his political and religious colleagues experience public deaths of extraordinary cruelty, following which their dismembered corpses are displayed around London.

1661

Uncertain of how to understand the sudden reversal of his hopes, Owen publishes Theologoumena Pantodapa and turns away from scholastic theology.

1662

After the Act of Uniformity, around 2,500 ministers leave the national church to become dissenters and to suffer under a series of laws that become known as the Clarendon Code. Trying to evade arrest, not always successfully, Owen and his wife live apart from their surviving children in the homes of several well-connected patrons. Owen publishes Animadversions on a Treatise Intituled Fiat Lux, which seems to reverse some of his previous commitments, and A Discourse concerning Liturgies, which restates them.

1664

Owen’s daughter Judith dies. Owen gathers a church in the home of the Fleetwood family, in Stoke Newington, where Sir John Hartopp begins to take notes on his preaching.

1665–1666

The Great Plague, a major outbreak of the bubonic plague, kills around 25 percent of the population of London. Owen’s son Matthew dies.

1666

The Great Fire of London devastates the housing of tens of thousands of the capital’s inhabitants. Owen, like other dissenters, discerns God’s providential judgment on his persecutors.

1667

Owen publishes pamphlets arguing for political liberties for dissenters and A Brief Instruction in the Worship of God.

1668

Owen publishes the first of several volumes of his commentary on Hebrews.

1669

Owen publishes his commentary on Psalm 130.

1672

Charles II issues a Declaration of Indulgence, which offers greater liberties to Protestant dissenters and Catholics but which is extremely controversial among supporters of the Church of England.

1673

Parliament forces Charles to withdraw the indulgence and imposes the first Test Act, which requires those taking part in public life to attend Communion in an Anglican church. Owen’s small congregation, based around the Fleetwood family, joins with the much larger congregation that had been led by Joseph Caryl, who had recently died, and they gather in their premises on Leadenhall Street, London. Lucy Hutchinson and Sir John Hartopp take notes on Owen’s preaching.

1674

Owen publishes A Discourse concerning the Holy Spirit.

1676

Owen publishes The Nature of Apostasy.

1677

Owen’s first wife, Mary, dies. Owen publishes The Doctrine of Justification, helps secure the release from prison of John Bunyan, and marries Dorothy D’Oyley, a member of his congregation.

1681

Owen publishes The Grace and Duty of Being Spiritually Minded.

1682

Owen’s last surviving child, Mary (b. 1650), dies.

1683

Owen declines in health, dies, and is buried in Bunhill Fields, London.

Bibliographic Note

The Works of John Owen, edited by William H. Goold, 24 volumes (Edinburgh: Johnstone and Hunter, 1850–1855), remains the standard edition of Owen’s works. It has been almost entirely reprinted in facsimile as The Works of John Owen, edited by William H. Goold (1850–1855; repr., Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 1965–1968), but the reprint edition does not contain Goold’s volume 17, and it reorganizes the content of his volume 16. Nevertheless, throughout this book, I refer to the edition of The Works of John Owen that is kept in print by the Banner of Truth, which is the most widely available edition of Owen’s works.

Introduction

By any account, John Owen (1616–1683) was extraordinary.1 Not only was he one of the most learned, insightful, and influential English Puritan theologians, he was also one of the most important, and certainly one of the most voluminous, seventeenth-century writers. His eight million words were published in eighty separate titles and ranged from a short Latin poem in praise of Oliver Cromwell to the longest and one of the most technically demanding commentaries that has ever been published on the New Testament epistle to the Hebrews. Best known for his defense of high Calvinism, Owen wrote extensively in favor of religious toleration. Often regarded as a scholastic theologian, Owen cited classical writers, Geoffrey Chaucer, and Dante Alighieri to make theological points, while amassing one of the largest and most diverse private libraries of the seventeenth century and knowing and collecting the works of its best-known poets. While often ambitious to make his own mark, he facilitated the literary careers of other writers, including Andrew Marvell and John Bunyan. Austere and sometimes distant, he surrounded himself with friends and rivals of the quality of John Milton and Lucy Hutchinson. Sustaining long-term literary feuds with fellow Puritans like Richard Baxter, he was able to cultivate supportive relationships with former political enemies, including the Earl of Oxford and perhaps even Charles II and James, Duke of York. And he developed the ideas from which his erstwhile student John Locke would fashion the classical liberalism that lies at the heart of modern democratic culture.

These achievements were significant, but they were achieved alongside Owen’s day job. In the 1640s, while England was engaged in two civil wars, he worked as a parish minister in Essex and established himself as a preacher of national importance. In the 1650s, during the short-lived English republic, he undertook a series of senior administrative positions in the University of Oxford while serving on a government committee that was tasked with creating a new national church. In the early 1660s, while many of his friends were hung, drawn, and quartered as victims of the restored administration of Charles II, he worked hard to evade persecution and to build bridges with former enemies. And from the later 1660s until his death, as hostility toward religious dissenters began to dissipate, he settled down to look after small Independent congregations, while intervening in the theological disputes that, he feared, were undermining the health of the dissenting churches at a time when God’s judgment was being poured out on the nation and the future of English Protestantism was imperiled.

As these achievements suggest, Owen must have been one of the most productive inhabitants of early modern England. He certainly considered how to make his work efficient. In his writing, he took shortcuts, recycled material between separately published titles, lifted primary sources from recently published anthologies of quotations, and employed a research assistant, Henry Stubbe, on at least one occasion.2 But his approach to time management was resolutely theological. He encouraged Christians to think carefully about their use of time. He was confident that “God gives us enough time for all that he requires of us” and that believers should balance what has to be completed against the time available to complete it.3 He recognized the danger of overwork as well as the danger of underachievement: “Many men . . . trifle away their time and their souls, sowing the wind of empty hopes.”4 Most Puritans, encouraged by preachers who feared their listeners were never doing enough, faced the opposite temptation. Owen promoted balance. He understood that not all work was good work and that an overbusy life could encroach on the privilege of walking with God. He advised those Christians who struggled with competing responsibilities that “it is more tolerable that our duties of holiness and regard to God should intrench on the duties of our callings and employments in this world” than vice versa.5 For God never calls us to “take more upon us than we have time well to perform it in.”6 It was grace, rather than activity, that sustained the busyness of true spirituality: “You may take this measure with you in all your duties;—if they increase to a reverence of God, they are from grace; if they do not, they are from gifts, and no way sanctify the soul wherein they are.”7 Owen was extraordinary, but he called on his readers to be extraordinary too, for he was sure that the God who “gives us enough time for all that he requires” would weave the providence that would enable his readers’ spiritual lives.

Yet for all his success, Owen’s life was marked by sustained tragedy. He endured long periods of ill health and in the mid-1650s was thought to be on his deathbed. He was bereaved of each of his ten children, from 1647 to 1682, and of his first wife, in 1677. His second marriage, to a wealthy widow who was a member of his small congregation, may not always have been happy. For over two decades, after 1660, he pursued his ministry on the margins of the law. Owen’s life was characterized by his experience of defeat. It was, in many ways, the perfect context for his consideration of the spiritual life as a life sustained by grace.

Owen’s Life

Owen was born sometime in 1616 to a family living in the tiny village of Stadhampton, in Oxfordshire. The family was not especially wealthy, and neither were they especially rigorous in their religious views, despite the fact that Owen’s father was a clergyman of the established church. Late in life, Owen described his father as “a Nonconformist all his days, and a painful labourer in the vineyard of the Lord,” but it is not clear that his father was committed to any program of reform within the English church in the 1610s and 1620s.8 Owen’s father was not among those Puritans whose dissatisfaction with the Church of England drove them into exile in the Netherlands or the New World, for he remained within the ecclesiastical establishment, apparently neglecting to fulfill some aspects of his liturgical duties, as was common among the party of conforming Puritans, whose hopes for further reformation had ended shortly after the accession of James I. Owen’s description of his father may reflect the kindness of a dimmed memory, a filial piety that wanted to distinguish him from those elements of the liturgical practice of the established church that Owen, throughout his life, found most objectionable. Rather than being the heir of a radical tradition, therefore, Owen grew up in a religious community that had worked hard for the reformation of the Church of England and had failed. He remembered, as a boy, being told defamatory stories about “Brownists and Puritans,” which he later found out to be false.9 Owen grew up knowing the bitter reality of defeat.

Owen’s sense of the marginal status of the religious community to which he belonged would have been confirmed during his university studies in the Queen’s College, Oxford, which he commenced at the age of twelve, in 1628. This was not an especially young age at which to begin university education in the early seventeenth century—and in fact, the English universities were admitting a higher proportion of young men than in many other periods. But this expansion of university education came alongside the introduction of a number of controversial structural changes that made Owen’s college days tumultuous. During the late 1620s and 1630s, the Queen’s College, with the rest of the university, passed through a religious revolution, as the Reformed theological consensus that had dominated theological discussion for several decades was replaced by a new theological system, which seemed to its critics to mimic Catholic styles of worship and which questioned elemental components of English Protestant identity. Within Queen’s, the debate provoked threats of violence, with one academic threatening to stab the provost, who was driving forward the controversial liturgical changes. The death threat was a sign of things to come, for England was shortly to enter a long civil war, in which religious ideas would be used to justify horrific levels of violence. Diaries from the period illustrate both the excitement of undergraduate life within the college and the growing pressures for teaching fellows to find ways to shoehorn their old religious principles into the new liturgical mold.

Some of the college community could not accommodate their consciences to the new rules. At the age of twenty-one, nine years after his admission to the Queen’s College, Owen had graduated with his bachelor of arts and master of arts degrees and was likely a junior member of the teaching faculty. His hard study had earned him a place among the postgraduate students, and he may have been working toward his bachelor of divinity. But after years of preparation for an academic or clerical career, Owen felt that he had to leave Oxford. He could not support the religious innovations that were being pushed through Queen’s with the support of the provost and through the university with the support of the vice-chancellor. The new and fashionable Arminianism ran entirely counter to a number of his convictions. Choosing conscience over career, Owen left the university in 1637.

It is not clear where or how Owen spent the next few years of his life. In the few surviving glimpses of his life during this period, Owen seems to have made erratic and unpredictable decisions. In 1638, within a year of abandoning his academic career, he sought ordination as a priest at the hands of the bishop of Oxford, one of the chief supporters of the Arminian innovations, at an age younger than that permitted by the canons.10He then found employment as a chaplain in the home of Sir Robert Dormer, a suspected Catholic whose riotous recreational activities suggested no sympathy for Puritan views. By 1642, Owen had accepted another position as a household chaplain, this time in the home of Sir John Lovelace. Throughout this period, Owen appears to have been suffering from depression. It is possible that his move to the Lovelace household occurred around the same time that his father and elder brother took up new pastoral charges in the vicinity—though as a cause or consequence of Owen’s movements, we cannot tell. As so often in accounts of Owen’s life, we are left to balance possibilities. But it is possible that members of the family, which appears to have been close-knit, were deliberately regrouping to support their brother in his discouragement and, possibly, fear.

For fear was in the air. In the summer of 1642, England drifted into its First Civil War. That same summer, Owen officiated as household chaplain to a young married couple whose cousin, Richard Lovelace, would become one of the most eminent literary figures within the emerging party of royalists. Dormer and Lovelace, both of whom had employed Owen, declared in favor of the king. Owen, who did not need to express any political preference, decided in favor of Parliament. Having abandoned the university and his first employer, he now left the Lovelace household and the path into pastoral work it represented, and he traveled to London, without obvious prospects and almost entirely without friends. In the capital, one of the largest and most international cities in Europe, Owen found lodgings in Smithfield, a cheap and unpleasant place to live, close to the red-light district and to the place where one century before so many Protestant leaders had been martyred.

It was in this unpromising situation that Owen found his purpose in life. As censorship collapsed, Owen began to write, developing a manuscript on the priesthood of Christ that he never published. More important, he experienced a protracted