Daily Inspiration Quote by John Owen

Certainty collapses here like a scaffold kicked out from under a proud intellect. Owen stages a small humiliation: the scholar-theologian, trained to systematize God, admits that learning doesn’t stack neatly into mastery. It multiplies what you can’t finish, can’t prove, can’t hold. The line works because it isn’t anti-knowledge; it’s anti-pretension. He isn’t praising ignorance. He’s exposing the spiritual danger of thinking that more information equals more authority.

Owen writes as a 17th-century Puritan with a front-row seat to theological trench warfare: civil war, sectarian conflict, and a culture that treated doctrine as both salvation and weapon. In that world, to “know” wasn’t just to understand but to belong, to rank, to rule. His confession deflates that economy. The more he learns, the less he can claim the kind of knowing that makes other people small.

The subtext is pastoral as much as intellectual: God is not an object to be possessed by a mind. Real study should lead to reverence, not swagger. The paradox (“the more I know... the less”) echoes an older Christian tradition of learned ignorance, a way of saying that the divine is encountered at the edge of language. Owen’s rhetorical stumble - the repeated “know” like a mind catching itself mid-brag - enacts the point. The sentence performs humility in real time, turning theological expertise into a discipline of self-distrust.