John Owen and the Civil War Apocalypse

Preaching, Prophecy and Politics

Martyn Calvin Cowan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351615563
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion, Politics & State

John Owen was one of the most significant figures in Reformed Orthodox theology during the Seventeenth Century, exerting considerable religious and political influence in the context of the British Civil War and Interregnum. Using Owen's sermons from this period as a window into the mind of a self-proclaimed prophet, this book studies how his apocalyptic interpretation of contemporary events led to him making public calls for radical political and cultural change.

Owen believed he was ministering at a unique moment in history, and so the historical context in which he writes must be equally considered alongside the theological lineage that he draws upon. Combining these elements, this book allows for a more nuanced interpretation of Owen's ministry that encompasses his lofty spiritual thought as well as his passionate concerns with more corporeal events.

This book represents part of a new historical turn in Owen Studies and will be of significant interest to scholars of theological history as well as Early Modern historians.

1
Owen’s prophetic worldview

To the modern reader, one of the most shocking aspects of Owen’s sermons is the prevalence of apocalyptic language usually issuing in vitriolic condemnation of the papal Antichrist. However, in post-Reformation England, such views of the Papacy were commonplace and not confined to a fanatical fringe. The English Protestant ‘apocalyptic tradition’ increasingly came to define history in apocalyptic terms, and the identification of the Pope with Antichrist had all but canonical status in significant parts of the Church of England.¹ Although there were some important exceptions, Owen was not altogether overstating his case when in 1662 he pronounced that ‘the greatest part of men amongst us do look upon [the Papacy] as the Antichrist foretold in the Scripture’.²

This identification depended on a particular view of the book of Revelation and a number of other biblical passages.³ Revelation was widely understood to tell the story of Western history through its description of the opening of a seven-sealed scroll, angels sounding seven trumpets and the pouring of seven vials containing the wrath of God. Not least through the influence of Joseph Mede (1586–1638), whom Owen described as ‘a Learned Person of this Nation’, a firm link was seen to exist between Revelation and the prophetic visions of the book of Daniel. A section from 2 Thessalonians 2 was also incorporated into this apocalyptic scheme, and Owen described it foretelling how, in ‘the western world’, ‘Satan and his agents, persecutors and seducers … almost extinguished’ the light of truth leaving the pre-Reformation church with only ‘the empty names of Church and Gospel’.⁴ Such a hermeneutical approach to these texts, described by modern biblical scholars as a form of historicism, provided Owen with a panoramic view of a sequence of prophecies which were being fulfilled in a timeline of specific political and ecclesiastical events.⁵ As his colleague Thomas Goodwin explained, Revelation contained a history ‘from John’s time to the world’s end’, an ‘exact chronology’ of the world’s ‘monarchies’, and calculating the time of the fall of the papacy and the approach of Christ’s kingdom was ‘the thing herein principally aimed at’.⁶

I. Owen’s eschatological framework

Owen was convinced that there was a link between the events described in these various apocalyptic narratives and specific political and ecclesiastical events in the present, which, when discovered, would unlock their significance. He assumed his hearers and readers would be familiar with such figures as the fourth ten-horned beast (Dan. 7:7), the little horn that subsequently appears (Dan. 7:8; 8:9), the man of sin and son of perdition (2 Thess. 2), the great red dragon and the two beasts (Rev. 12–13), the false prophet (Rev. 16:13), the whore of Babylon riding on the beast (Rev. 17) and above all, the dominating figure of the Antichrist (1 John 2:18). For Owen, images such as these were assigned to prominent figures in the sacred drama which, he believed, was being played out in the theatre of history, and each had some application to the contemporary Roman Catholic Church and the papacy.

i. A panorama of Western history dominated by the rise of Antichrist

In the book of Daniel, King Nebuchadnezzar had a dream of a giant statue: its head was gold, its arms and chest were silver, its belly was bronze, its legs iron and its feet were iron mixed with clay (Dan. 2). Owen believed that Daniel’s interpretation of the dream foretold a succession of four world empires, viz., Babylon, Medo-Persia, Greece and Rome. He believed that the statue’s two legs represented the partition of the Roman Empire into East and West, and its toes represented the subsequent division into ‘the ten-partite Empire of the West’. In a later vision, Daniel sees four beasts come up from the sea: the first like a lion, the second like a bear, the third like a leopard and the fourth had iron teeth and was more terrifying than the rest (Dan. 7:3–8). Again, this vision was assumed to correspond to the same four empires. As noted, Owen linked this vision to the book of Revelation, believing that Daniel’s fourth beast with ten horns anticipated the first beast of Revelation 13 with its seven heads and ten horns and which would reappear with the harlot described in Revelation 17.⁷ He explained that the ‘little horn’ on the fourth beast that uprooted three of the original horns referred ‘in the first place’ to ‘Antiochus the Illustrious’ (Antiochus Epiphanes IV, the adversary of the Jews in the Second Temple period). However, this ‘little horn’, which made war on the saints, was also ‘typical of the last persecution of the Christian church under Antichrist’.⁸

Owen rejected the two other main interpretative approaches to the eschatological material in scripture, namely preterism and futurism.⁹ The preterist view, which held that many of the prophecies of Revelation and Daniel had been fulfilled in the first century, became influential through the works of Hugo Grotius and the royalist Henry Hammond’s Paraphrase and Annotations on all the Books of the New Testament (1653).¹⁰ Owen was aware that some advocates of preterism endeavoured to break the important link that had been established between Daniel and the Apocalypse. For instance, he mentioned those who argued that the Kings of Syria and Egypt are the fourth Kingdom in Daniel and who consequently believed the prophecies of Daniel to have been fulfilled in Christ’s first advent.¹¹ A proponent of this view was the London schoolmaster Thomas Hayne, who, in his Christs Kingdom on Earth Opened According to the Scriptures (1645), denied that the fourth kingdom was the Roman Empire and located the fulfilment of Daniel’s visions firmly in the past.¹² Owen explicitly dismissed this view, believing instead that the history of Western Christianity had been dominated by this fourth Roman monarchy in its various manifestations.

The other hermeneutical approach that Owen rejected was futurism. It viewed the prophecies of the Apocalypse as awaiting their fulfilment in the three-and-a-half-year reign of a coming Antichrist. Owen refers to this when he says, ‘The Papists say, that antichrist shall be a Jew, of the tribe of Dan, and that he shall persuade the Jews that he is their Messiah; that by their help, and others joining with them, he shall conquer many nations, destroy Rome … and afterwards be destroyed himself by fire from heaven’.¹³ As Owen suggests, this was often held to be the dominant Roman Catholic position and was associated with Francisco Ribera (1537–91) and Robert Bellarmine (1542–1621).¹⁴

From references scattered through Owen’s works, it is possible to reconstruct his view of the history of the Roman Empire in its various manifestations, as he saw them, whether pagan or papal. Initially, he spoke of how the dragon (i.e. Satan) had used ‘the heathen power of the Roman Empire’ in order to persecute the early church. Despite this opposition, he believed that in a ‘few years’ after the time of Christ, the gospel had been preached to the ‘habitable parts of the earth’.¹⁵ Indeed, Owen believed that by the end of the second century ‘the sound of the Gospel went out into all the Nations’.¹⁶ Following the tradition of John Bale (1495–1563), John Foxe (1516–87) and William Camden (1551–1623), Owen believed that pagan Britain had been evangelised by Joseph of Arimathea, long before the papal emissary Augustine of Canterbury set foot in Kent at the end of the sixth century.¹⁷ Relying on sources as diverse as the first-century poet-historian Lucan’s account of the Druids in Pharsalia and Inigo Jones’s Stone-Heng (1655), Owen portrayed the prior religion of the ancient Britons as idolatrous and ‘feirce and barbarous’, even extending to human sacrifice.¹⁸ His indebtedness to Foxe is again shown by the two citations used as proof of how he believed the gospel quickly took root in English soil. First, Tertullian (c. 160–c. 204) claimed that the remote parts of Britain, as yet unsubdued by the Romans had already been made subject to Christ.¹⁹ Secondly, a homily by Origen (c. 185–c. 255) triumphantly proclaimed that the inhabitants of Britain had embraced the Christian faith.²⁰

Owen believed that, in time, religion declined and, citing the sixth-century British monk Gildas’s major work, De Excidio Britanniae, spoke of the ‘wickednes, oppression, and villany’ of the Britons.²¹ He argued that the church across the Roman Empire apostatised and that, as a consequence, the Empire crumbled under divine judgment (Rev. 6:12–17).²² Owen described this as being the first of ‘two most famous and remarkable changes of Government’ in Europe. The warring northern ‘barbarous Nations’ invaded and ‘shivered’ the Roman Empire of the West into pieces and conquered its territory. Owen believed that this turbulent period of conquest ended with ‘Rome it self sacked’ and ‘the Franches in Gall, the Saxons in England, the West Goths in Spaine, the East Goths and Longobards into Italy, and … the Almans in Germany’. In England, he claimed that the Saxons invaded in 469, ‘fattening the land with the blood of the Christian inhabitants’.²³

Within Owen’s apocalyptic chronology, the fracturing of the Roman Empire, which had p...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Conventions
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Owen’s prophetic worldview
• 2 The identification and interpretation of providentially significant events
• 3 The obligation to ‘improve’ these providential mercies
• 4 The magistrate’s response to providentially significant events
• 5 The obligations of the magistrate and the search for a church settlement
• 6 Warnings of judgment to a negligent nation
• Conclusion
• Select bibliography
• Index