John Owen's Theological Spirituality: Navigating Perceived

Chapter 3 John Owen’s Theological Spirituality: Navigating Perceived Threats in a Changing World Kelly M. Kapic 1 Avoiding Extremes: Rationalism, Enthusiasm, and Superstition One of the reasons that many people continue to find John Owen’s observa- tions to be helpful and compelling—even four centuries after his birth—is that his concerns were multi-dimensional. He was consistently concerned with at least three threats to vibrant Christian living. No single problem edged out everything else. ‘Superstition,’ as Owen saw it, was a menace left over from the medieval Roman Catholic Church: in his estimation, empty rituals and fear-inducing practices suffocated genuine spirituality. But more recently, the opposite threats of rationalism and ‘enthusiasm’ had arisen, and he saw each as deeply troubling. Neither could simply be dismissed: each had taken some important truth and then misunderstood or misapplied it. Reason and personal experi- ence of the divine are both important, and Owen considered both to be gifts of God, but improperly elevated versions of them distort healthy Christian spirituality. Owen’s responses to these dangers help us understand how he relates to the growth of Modernity. 1.1 The Rise of the Rationalist When speaking of the rise the Enlightenment or even Modernity, one of the first words that normally surfaces is ‘reason.’ Thomas Paine’s The Age of Reason (1794), which addressed his concerns about corruption in the Church, shows that a massive shift had taken place in what he and his culture took for grant- ed: he dismissed the supernatural and found reason alone to be authoritative. These ideas were already circulating in John Toland’s Christianity Not Mysteri- ous in 1696, a controversial book arguing for a non-superstitious reading of the Bible. According to Toland, all the “mysterious” elements of early Christianity were not part of the original Gospels, but inventions of early Christian sects. What people need, he wrote, is a rational reading of the biblical texts so that they can appreciate the true core of Christianity, which is fundamentally mor- alistic and not mysterious. As we will see, Owen’s responses to the growing © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/9789004391345_004 56 Kapic rationalism of his day demonstrate how he is situated in the middle of this movement from pre-modernity to modernity.1 The rise of rationalism happened within Christendom. Even in the six- teenth century some tried to make reason, rather than revelation or tradition or some other authority, to be the final arbiter of truth. Laelius (1526–1562) and the more infamous Faustus Socinus (1539–1604) were the most obvious examples.2 Spreading from Italy to Poland, ideas linked with Socinianism eventually arrived in England when the Racovian Catechism (1605) was trans- lated into English and printed there in 1652. John Biddle was assumed to be the translator and force behind this publication. Biddle and the Socinian view he represents were seen by Owen (and even Parliament!) as a massive threat to orthodox Christianity. A brilliant scholar with impressive intellectual skills (it is claimed he had memorized almost the entire NT in Greek), Biddle applied rationalistic presuppositions to his reading of the Bible, thus stripping it of all supernatural claims and promises.3 Out went the Trinity, out went the Spirit’s personal sanctifying work in the life of a believer. All of that was replaced by mental energy and moral will-power. Although some readers with only a passing knowledge of Owen loosely label him (and other Puritans) “rationalistic,”4 this misapprehension confuses those (like Owen) who use reason extensively and well with those who claim that there is such a thing as neutral or disinterested reason that should serve as the final arbiter of truth. The irony of rationalism is that it is not self-critical. Owen saw that the So- cinians uncritically elevated their own presuppositions and then used reason to undermine historic Christianity and true experiential faith. By presupposing 1 One of the best accounts of this story can be found in Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007). 2 For background, begin with Susan Mortimer, Reason and Religion in the English Revolu- tion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010) and then turn to the older studies by Herbert J. McLachlan, Socinianism in Seventeenth Century England (Oxford: Oxford Uni- versity Press, 1951); Earl M. Wilbur, History of Unitarianism, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1945–1952), George J. Williams, The Polish Brethren, 2 vols. (Chico: Scholars Press, 1980). For the relationship between “Socinians” and “Arminians,” see Martin Mulsow and Jan Rohls, eds., Socinianism and Arminianism: Antitrinitarians, Calvinists and Cultural Exchange in Seventeenth-Century Europe (Leiden: Brill, 2005), esp. 49–80 and Tim Cooper, John Owen, Richard Baxter and the Formation of Nonconformity (Surrey: Ashgate, 2011), esp. 55–74. 3 Paul C. H. Lim shows how the fusion between Biblicism and rationalism produced an emer- gence of anti-Trinitarian work by the end of the seventeenth century: Mystery Unveiled: The Crisis of the Trinity in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). 4 Alan Clifford inappropriately applies this label to Owen, in Atonement and Justification: English Evangelical Theology 1640–1790: An Evaluation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 43..

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