John Owen on Perseverance & eternal security
No — the genuinely saved will certainly persevere
He lets them know that by their being apostates, they had proved themselves to have been but hypocrites; and therefore believers' dwelling in safety was no way prejudiced by their backsliding... That no sound persons may be shaken, because unhealthy ones are shattered, — that those may not tremble who are built on the rock, because those are cast down who are built on the sand, — is one part of my aim and intendment in handling this doctrine.
THE POSITION
The genuinely saved cannot finally fall, and Owen wrote a book of six hundred pages on it in 1654 against John Goodwin. He faces the apostasies of his own decade head-on rather than around them — "as many stars cast from heaven ... as ever in so short a space of time since the name of Christ was known upon the earth" — and resolves them by 1 John 2:19: the apostate is shown by his apostasy never to have been what he professed. The pastoral aim is stated as the point of the doctrine, not a side benefit.
19 They went out from us, but they did not belong to us. For if they had belonged to us, they would have remained with us. But their departure made it clear that none of them belonged to us.
15 OTHERS HOLD THIS
ABOUT THIS FIGURE
The most formidable English Puritan theologian: Dean of Christ Church and Vice-Chancellor of Oxford under Cromwell, later a nonconformist pastor in London. This entry rests on The Death of Death in the Death of Christ (1647), The Doctrine of Justification by Faith (1677), Pneumatologia and the Discourse of Spiritual Gifts (1674), and the Two Short Catechisms (1645), read in the Goold edition of the Works.
Cite this page
"John Owen on Perseverance & eternal security", Examined Doctrine, July 2026 edition, https://examineddoctrine.com/position/owen/perseverance (archived at https://examineddoctrine.com/editions/2026-07/position/owen/perseverance).