I have gone back time and again to this compilation of John Owen’s three works on killing sin (Edited by Kelly M. Kapic and Justin Taylor: Of the Mortification of Sin in Believers, Of Temptation: The Nature and Power of It, Indwelling Sin) but was never able to completely and exhaustively finish the book. So to help me on this endeavor I will re-read the whole book and post choice excerpts such as this at the same time for the spiritual profit and growth of our readers, as you too war against sin that is without, and that which is within.

For this introductory post, I bring you Kelly M. Kapic’s assessment and summary of how John Owen talks about the great need of “engaging the whole person” in warring against sin.

Contemporary readers may at first glance struggle with Owen’s detailed parsing of human nature and sin, believing that his reflections are dated and irrelevant. However, upon closer examination the reader may begin to recognize that although Owen does not use current labels, he is dealing with very contemporary issues, such as depression, addiction, apathy, and lust.

One of Owen’s concerns was that some people reduced the struggle with sin to a problem centered on the physical body. They had taken the biblical language of the “body of sin” (Rom 6:6, ESV) and inappropriately treated it as a literal reference to physicality. This misunderstanding leads to what Owen considers the monastic “mistake”: believing that rigid regiments that yield greater physiological control will eventually diminish the sin that lies in a person.ⁱ For Owen, while the body is important, it is but the instrument for the real problem.

Using classic faculty-psychology categories of the mind, the will, and the affections, Owen consistently attempts to present a holistic perspective of the human person, and this informs his view of sin and sanctification.ⁱⁱ

Originally humanity was created without sin, and thus their mind rightly reflected on the Creator and his creation, their affections properly loved God, and their will followed after the good. However, with the fall these faculties became disordered. Even after believers are redeemed by God they will continue to struggle with the abiding vestiges of sin that disorient the faculties, a condition that remains throughout their earthly life.ⁱⁱⁱ

Sin moves by drawing the mind away from God, enticing the affections and twisting desires and paralyzing the will, thus stunting any real Christian growth.^iv One of the most frightening truths that Owen wants the believer to recognize is that “Your enemy is not only upon you . . . but is in you also.”^v

Part of understanding the battle against sin is seeing that the enemy, so to speak, is not only external, but internal, which is why Christians often have conflicting desires within them.^vi Most Christians seem unaware of or apathetic about the sin that remains in them, but whether they recognize it or not there is a “living coal continually in their houses,” which, if not properly attended to, will catch their home on fire.^vii

As the Scriptures often call attention to the “heart” or “soul” of a person, Owen argues that such references tend to be shorthand for the various faculties, and thus to deal with sin the whole person must be engaged.^viii Although Owen gives ample attention to each of the faculties, let us focus on the affections as a test case to show the nature of sin and temptation.

Far too often Christians working within the Reformed tradition have been guilty of confusing stoic ideals of emotional detachment with maturity in the Christian life. But this Reformed tradition, which Owen self-consciously grows out of, has at its best made significant space for the importance of the affections.

As early as the sixteenth century John Calvin, one of the great fathers of the Reformed tradition, saw this confusion and warned against it. Calvin chided those Christians who acted like “new stoics,” because they believed that groaning, weeping, sadness, and having deep concerns were signs of sinfulness.

According to Calvin such comments tend to grow from “idle men who, exercising themselves more in speculation than in action,” do not understand the pain of this world and the ravages of sin, which the Savior who wept and mourned knew so well.^ix

The goal of Calvin and of others after him, like Owen, was not the absence of affections, but rightly informed and directed affections.

Affections are a gift from God to all humanity. Far too often the faculties have been “gendered” in the church, for example, when people lump “rationality” with men and “emotions” with women. In addition to empirical evidence that easily contradicts such hastily drawn stereotypes, one should reject such schemas because all Christians are called to love God with their mind, will, and affections. Healthy affections are crucial to the life of faith, and numbing them cannot be the answer.

In Owen’s estimation, because the affections are so important to faithful obedience, Scripture often interchanges the language of heart and affections, for here is “the principal thing which God requires in our walking before him. . . . Save all other things and lose the heart, and all is lost—lost unto all eternity.”^x

The goal of the Christian life is not external conformity or mindless action, but a passionate love for God informed by the mind and embraced by the will. So the path forward is not to decrease one’s affections but rather to enlarge them and fill them with “heavenly things.”

Here one is not trying to escape the painful realities of this life but rather endeavoring to reframe one’s perspective of life around a much larger canvas that encompasses all of reality.

To respond to the distorting nature of sin you must set your affections on the beauty and glory of God, the loveliness of Christ, and the wonder of the gospel: “Were our affections filled, taken up, and possessed with these things . . . what access could sin, with its painted pleasures, with its sugared poisons, with its envenomed baits, have unto our souls?”^xi

Resisting sin, according to this Puritan divine, comes not by deadening your affections but by awakening them to God himself. Do not seek to empty your cup as a way to avoid sin, but rather seek to fill it up with the Spirit of life, so there is no longer room for sin.

—Kelly M. Kapic, Introduction; Life in the Midst of Battle: John Owen’s Approach to Sin, Temptation, and the Christian Life.

John Owen, Overcoming Sin and Temptation (Wheaton, Illinois: Crossway, 2006), p26-28

Read more of “Overcoming Sin and Temptation” here.

You can also purchase the book in paperback here, or read it in pdf here.

If you’ve found great help in John Owen’s Mortification of Sin I am persuaded that you would find the same in this work, if not more so. It is my hope and prayer that it would lead you ever close to the Lord Christ Jesus as you tread the Pilgrim’s life of holiness for the glory of God.

P.S. Kelly Kapic and Justin Taylor has done an awesome job in this. I’m sure you would appreciate it as much as I have.

Footnotes

1. Works, 6:7, 18. [↩]
2. For a discussion of Owen’s anthropology and his use of faculty psychology, see Kapic, Communion with God: The Divine and the Human in the Theology of John Owen, especially chapter 2. [↩]
3. Works, 6:165. [↩]
4. Works, 6:97, 167, 245, 252. [↩]
5. Works, 6:162. [↩]
6. Cf. Romans 7:7-25. Owen’s whole treatise Indwelling Sin builds off of this chapter, especially Romans 7:21. [↩]
7. Works, 6:166. [↩]
8. Works, 6:170. [↩]
9. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, 2 vols., The Library of Christian Classics (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1960), 1:709 (III.viii.9). [↩]
10. Works, 6:249. [↩]
11. Works, 6:250; cf. 6:188. [↩]