John Owen on Pastoral Preaching

Justin Miller

• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781666733099, 9781666727401
• eBook ISBN: 9781666727418
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religious Biographies

John Owen was a scholar, pastor, dissenter, and faithful follower of Christ in a tumultuous time. He gave himself to the study of Scripture out of an abiding love for the glory of God amongst the people of Christ. John Owen's works have greatly influenced Western Christendom in the centuries that have passed, and his concern for the true church shines powerfully forth from his writings. The aim of the book is to examine John Owen's view of the biblical role of a pastor with regards to the ministry of preaching the word of God in the life of a local church. The goal is to understand and evaluate John Owen's thought, from Holy Scripture, with regards to pastoral preaching. This book seeks to unearth from John Owen's writings the various aspects that affect pastoral preaching, his understanding of a True Gospel Church, preaching as the priority for a pastor, and what exactly constituted faithful biblical preaching. Furthermore, this book will seek to make conclusions concerning John Owen's view of pastoral preaching and its faithfulness to Scripture.

Owen’s Understanding of the Priority of Pastoral Preaching

What is to be a pastor’s priority in pastoral ministry? Paul exhorts Timothy, as he awaits his sentence of death:

I solemnly charge you in the presence of God and of Christ Jesus, who is to judge the living and the dead, and by His appearing and His kingdom: preach the word; be ready in season and out of season; reprove, rebuke, exhort, with great patience and instruction. For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine; but wanting to have their ears tickled, they will accumulate for themselves teachers in accordance to their own desires, and will turn away their ears from the truth and will turn aside to myths. But you, be sober in all things, endure hardship, do the work of an evangelist, fulfill your ministry.67

Paul’s greatest concern in his parting words with his son in the faith, a pastor and elder, was that Timothy would be found faithful in all seasons to be preaching the word of God. That the people of God would be fed the truth of God rightly from Timothy’s clear and precise exposition of the Scripture. Why was this so important to Paul? The answer to that question is found in what Paul had said right before 2 Tim 4:1–5. In 2 Tim 3:16–17 Paul the apostle stated:

All Scripture is inspired by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for training in righteousness; so that the man of God may be adequate, equipped for every good work.”

Paul taught that the word of God alone gave the people of God the right knowledge of God, convicted them of their sin, called them to righteous living, and equipped them for every good work. The word of God per Paul was inspired by God. Did John Owen emphasize what we see Paul emphasize here with regards to the pastoral ministry of a man called to serve a local church?

Some modern scholarship would not necessarily answer yes to that question. Owen has been accused of addressing even in his sermons to the Leadenhall church a multitude of politically charged messages that stemmed from a faulty apocalyptic worldview. Crawford Gribben, in his book John Owen and English Puritanism, wrote, “For Owen would preach to his small congregation messages that he could not dare commit to print, messages that experimented with prognostication and the sometimes politically charged interpretation of providence.”68 Kelly Kapic wrote concerning Owen’s preaching in his role as a statesman:

Employing the “Israelite paradigm,” Owen took on a prophetic role in warning the nation and especially the leaders of the government. He made no simple equation between England and Israel, but the way Israel functioned served as a type or pattern to understand how God might be relating to England in his day. Similarly, Owen looked to the Old Testament stories, filled with assurances and threats, as the way in which to make sense of the current experiences of England.69

Kelly Kapic’s statement concerning Owen’s preaching is focused on his speaking to parliament and other officials as a statesman who saw the imperative for England to promote the reformed faith as a nation. Martyn Cowan wrote, referencing Owen’s sermon Faith’s Answer to Divine Reproofs:

Owen described how the “public minister of the church” may be spoken of “as a prophet” whose task was to explain God’s “special design” towards the church in the “calamities” and “devastation” brought upon church and nation.70

While no one would seem to deny Kapic and Cowan’s conclusions concerning Owen’s ministry as a statesman this does not necessarily prove that Owen took such prophetic preaching into the pulpit of his local church in his later years consistently. The idea examined by Cowan and Gribben is that a lot of political proclamation was incorporated in Owen’s sermons to the flock that gathered as two combined churches at Leadenhall. While it may genuinely be the case that his political views occasionally made its way into some of his sermons in an unhelpful manner, it does not prove that political providential ideology was Owen’s focus as a local church pastor. This proposal seems difficult to prove for we only have a few sermons that others transcribed, or he published which does not necessarily provide the evidence for such a claim that he was more concerned about being a political prophet than the salvation and growth in personal holiness of those entrusted to his care in his endeavors as a local church pastor. Gribben implicitly acknowledges this weakness in his statement that most of Owen’s sermons were not put to print.

Peter Toon, an early twentieth-century biographer of John Owen would not necessarily agree with Crawford Gribben and Martyn Cowan’s perspective. Peter Toon, in his book God’s Statesman, wrote:

Only a small proportion of the many sermons that Owen preached to the Congregational church in Leadenhall Street between 1673 and 1683 were ever printed. From these it is clear that he regarded his principal task as a preacher to be that of carefully expounding and explaining the nature of the biblical view of the Christian life and witness, exhorting his hearers zealously to obey and seek after God and to cultivate the grace of God in their hearts. He placed great stress not only upon sound doctrine but also upon actual experience of God in Christian worship and in the soul of believers.”71

In line with Peter Toon’s view John Owen, from his writings, did not see pastoral preaching as a platform primarily to express political ideals based in apocalyptic ideology. Owen wrote in True Nature of a Gospel Church:

The first and principal duty of a pastor is to feed the flock by diligent preaching of the Word. . . . This feeding is the essence of the office of pastor, as unto the exercise of it; so that he who doth not, or can to, or will not feed the flock is no pastor, whatever outward call or work he may have in the church...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Introduction to John Owen
• Owen’s Understanding of the Recipients of Pastoral Preaching—The Local Church
• Owen’s Understanding of the Priority of Pastoral Preaching
• Owen’s Understanding of Pastoral Preaching
• Conclusion: The Biblical Imperative of Pastoral Preaching
• Bibliography