Owen completed his series on preparing for death with theological reflection. He recognized that “ever since it had a being,” the soul had never had to experience life without the body to which it was attached.¹⁷He understood that an injury to the body, and especially serious and disabling head injuries, could have consequences for the “powers and faculties” of the soul.¹⁸He also understood how unique was the human apprehension about death.

Death Brings Light to Reality

Owen was no stranger to death. He buried his first three children in the 1640s and three more in the following decade. As an adult, he had never been robustly healthy, and in March 1656, reports circulated that he was “neare death.”¹ In the early 1660s, he must have been horrified by the spectacles of death and dismemberment as the Restoration government pursued and punished those it deemed particularly responsible for the trial and execution of Charles I.

Even if Owen’s handwriting remained fairly steady across the second half of his life, the contrast between the portrait created when Owen was vice-chancellor of the University of Oxford, sometime in the 1650s, and that created by Robert Walker in 1668 offers some evidence of his shrinking and much-diminished appearance. In the sermons that his listeners recorded in the 1660s and 1670s, his preaching was urgent, because he believed that life was short: “I speak to dying men, that know not how soon they may die. God advise my own heart of this thing, that I should labour and watch, that death might not find me out of the view of spiritual things.”²

Owen understood death as an experience that often clarified the existence and achievements of spiritual life. He recognized that the evidences of spiritual life were often ambiguous and that “there are no professors but in distresses & on their death beds will applie to themselves . . . the promises of ye consoler of the spirit,” even though these promises belong only to true believers.³ Death often brought to light reality. When individuals were thrown onto their last resources, they showed where their true hopes lay.

Owen remembered encouraging accounts of “young people who at their death have made a worke apparent in them from their infancy which was not before observed.”⁴But the most encouraging accounts of death were those that held absolutely no ambiguity about the individual’s experience of grace. No sight compared with that of a “poore dying [saint’s] triumph over sinne & hell,” Owen suggested; it was a “spectacle” that all believers would “desire above all but to see.”⁵After all, for the Christian, with weak faith or strong, death was a “blessed thing,” the “entrance into perfect joy.”⁶

Joy Deferred

Owen’s experience of joy seemed to be deferred. Around 1670, in addition to his political and pastoral concerns, he was beginning to feel old. He reported “daily warnings from my age, being now about fifty four[,] and many infirmities to be preparing for my dissolution.”⁷ In 1674, drawing on his experience of the deaths of nearly all his children, Owen counseled a grieving mother and a member of his congregation, Lady Elizabeth Hartopp, “Your dear infante is in the eternal enjoyment of the fruits of all our prayers; for the covenant of God is ordered in all things and sure.” Reflecting on his own experience, perhaps, or thinking of Elkanah’s advice to Hannah (1 Sam. 1:8), he insisted that “God in Christ will be better to you than ten children.”⁷

In another undated letter, he wrote to the wife of Edward Polhill, for whose book The Divine Will Considered in Its Eternal Decrees (1673) Owen had contributed a preface. His counsel to Mrs. Polhill made no reference to the stern predestinarian theology of her husband’s writing, nor to his qualified recommendation of her husband’s views of the extent and intent of the atonement.⁸“Christ is your Pilott,” he argued, returning to the nautical imagery that appears so frequently in his publications. “Sorrow not too much for the dead,” he advised. The departed child had “entered into rest, and is taken away from the evill to come. Take heed lest, by too much grief, you too much grieve the Holy Spirit, who is infinitely more to us than all natural relations.” Owen was at his warmest when writing to grieving mothers. He assured Mrs. Polhill that “you are in my heart continually, which is nothing; but it helps to persuade me that you are in the heart of Christ, which is all.”⁹

Read More