Some problems with Puritan John Owen's "Spiritual-Mindedness"

This is to be a half-baked post I must admit -- at least the first part of it is. It's about an impression I've been having that I haven't studied out enough to understand well so I have to give my impression provisionally. But it is a strong impression.

When I read John Owen or some of the other Puritans, Jonathan Edwards too at times, although I'm impressed with their thoroughness and sincerity and their personal experience of what they are writing about as well, I nevertheless sometimes end up feeling so hopelessly unsavable in the light of their writings I nearly lose heart. I've had this experience many times over the years, to the extent of believing I'm not saved and trying to learn how to get saved if I'm not. I'm still vulnerable to this doubt despite the fact that I have many reasons to be sure I am saved. If I am not saved all I can do is hope that the Lord will come in revival and save me. There are always some in any revival who have been Christians all or most of their lives who discover in revival that they have never been saved and get saved then.

If I AM saved, as I most likely am, then these doubts are being laid on me from an external source, and there does seem to be plenty of it in the Puritan writers. You could think from reading Owen (say, his Spiritual-Mindedness) that if you ever act from the flesh, from pride or selfish motives, that is proof that you are not spiritually-minded and therefore unregenerate / unsaved. Sometimes the effect of reading him or similar writings is so dispiriting I get into such a gloomy state of anxiety I'm useless for some time.

This last time I put it down and went back to the "higher life" people. They seem to more clearly recognize that Christians continue to struggle with the flesh, and in fact much of their writing aims to teach how to put oneself under the ministry of the Holy Spirit to experience conviction and victory over the flesh and sins.

It was a joy and a relief to me after reading some in Owen to read in one of the hymns by the "mystic" Gerhard Tersteegen these lines:

Tell me, O God! If aught there be
Of self, that wills not Thy control;
Reveal whate'er impurity
May still be lurking in my soul!
To reach Thy rest and share Thy throne,
Mine eye must look to Thee alone.

O Love, Thy sovereign aid impart,
To save me from low-thoughted care;
Chase this self-will from all my heart,
From all its hidden mazes there;
Make me Thy duteous child, that I
Ceaseless may, 'Abba Father' cry.

Even someone who had spent most of his life in seclusion in the presence of God knows he still has unmortified self-will in his deceitful heart.

When you DO put yourself under the watchful eye of the Lord, it's amazing how many little sins He points out, some things you were vaguely aware of, some you had no clue about, and when He points them out it's remarkable that you actually do have the power to put them out of your life, if not always for love of Him certainly for righteous fear of Him, for fear of the pain of conscience. THAT is more spiritual-mindedness than some standard that eliminates all sinful and fleshly life in the soul as qualification for being saved.

We're rotten to the core, after all, by nature. How on earth can we become as perfectly spiritually-minded as Owen seems to require of us?

In a way I know I'm being unfair to him. I did read ahead some (I'd already read this book -- pencil markings attest to that although I hardly remember it), and find him dealing with the fact of continuing sin in the believer. Nevertheless, somehow he manages to give the impression earlier on that sin -- real sin -- only pertains to the unregenerate. I'm going to have to read this book again more thoroughly someday and see if my impression remains.

BUT OWEN TRULY DOES MISS WHAT SPIRITUALITY IS REALLY ALL ABOUT:
I did note some comments he made in the early part of the book that strike me as quite odd. The scripture where Jesus says those who believe on Him will become sources of living water, which is taken by the "higher life" people as promise of Holy Spirit power for witness and work, rightly it seems to me, is described by Owen (pp 11-12) as a fountain "bubbling up for our spiritual refreshment," the source of the spiritual thoughts he is discussing.

But Jesus isn't just promising us something for our refreshment and spiritual thoughts, Jesus is promising LIFE through the Spirit flowing from the inner being of believers outward to the dead world -- something that is demonstrable in those who have a great measure of that power -- not mere spiritual refreshment of the individual. Jesus is saying all life, all true conversion, all spiritual reality, comes from the Spirit Himself, and the Spirit is given by Jesus to flow from the innermost parts of believers. "The flesh profits nothing," Life comes only through the Spirit. The flesh is dead and can only propagate death, but the Spirit is life everlasting. Really the whole mission of the Christian life. Not just refreshing spiritual thoughts.

That's a problem with Owen. I believe he and the Puritans did have the Holy Spirit and wrote a great deal of important truth but I believe they miss the boat on some of the most important issues, THE most important issue in fact in this case.

He continues to show this spiritual obtuseness -- that is what it is -- when he says a few pages later (p.17) that "spiritual gifts are nothing more than a spiritual use of natural faculties." Anyone who has learned to sense the Spirit within even once in a while should know how wrong this is, but even the description of the spiritual gifts in the Bible should make it plain this is no matter of natural faculties at all. He has reduced the word "spiritual" to a carnal principle. The gift of tongues was certainly straight from the Spirit, no natural faculty could produce a foreign tongue in a person unfamiliar with it. The gift of healing certainly comes from the Spirit, no human faculty, and there's also a gift of miracles -- what human faculty could be made to produce a miracle? The gift of prophecy likewise comes straight from God, God's own speaking within the human spirit. To reduce it to mere learned exegesis of the Bible as some do is, again, to reduce the spiritual to the carnal. The Puritans do tend to be heavy on the intellectual side of things.

Likewise he reduces the concept of being "filled with the Spirit" to a MIND FILLED with spiritual thoughts under the influence of the Spirit." (p. 35) No, no, no, no, no. The Spirit is a living reality with Whom we CAN be truly filled -- He regenerates the human spirit and fills it, not the MIND but the spirit -- a reservoir of spiritual power that MAY then inform and transform the mind and emotions and all the rest but often doesn't as fully as should be the case because Christians are so badly taught about these things. The presence of the Spirit is something you can EXPERIENCE too, something decidedly separate from the mind and the soul in general. He is a spiritual power within born-again believers that is the bearer of LIFE, no mere propagator of "spiritual thoughts."

This is what the "higher life" people know that many of the other branches of the Church for the most part don't know -- Puritan, Reformed, Fundamentalist, and many others -- and this is a tragedy for the Church as the Holy Spirit is the WHOLE POINT OF THE CHRISTIAN LIFE.