John Owen’s Defence of the Doctrine of the Perseverance of the Saints

Benedict Bird offers a detailed examination of one of John Owen’s works which has not so far been the subject of a thorough published analysis. The Doctrine of the Saints’ Perseverance (1654) was described by Owen’s nineteenth-century biographer as “undeniably … the most masterly vindication of the [doctrine] in the English tongue.” One reason why it has not received the attention that it deserved was because it needed to be read in conjunction with the similarly long and difficult work by John Goodwin, Redemption Redeemed (1651), in reply to which Owen was writing. Bird provides a full length historical and theological examination of both works, in which these major figures contest this vital and pastorally important doctrine that is much debated and disputed by Christians whose theologies range from Reformed, to Lutheran, to Arminian, to Roman Catholic. He demonstrates that Goodwin did not ‘reject Calvinism and convert to Arminianism in the late 1640s’ as previous biographers have claimed, and that the doctrine which Goodwin in fact rejected was very different from the Reformed doctrine that Owen espoused. For Owen, perseverance of true believers was certain, but not the product of divine compulsion.