"The most tremendous judgment of God in this world is the hardening of the hearts of men"
About this Quote
Owen aims his warning where Puritan theology always aims it: not at lightning bolts, but at the slow interior catastrophe that makes a person unresponsive to truth. Calling a hardened heart God’s “most tremendous judgment” flips popular expectations. Judgment isn’t only future-oriented or spectacular; it can look like emotional numbness in the present, a spiritual anesthesia that feels like normal life. The terror is precisely its ordinariness.
The line works because it treats moral perception as something that can be lost. “Hardening” suggests a process, not a switch: repetition of sin, refusal to repent, habitual self-justification until conscience becomes callused. Owen’s subtext is pastoral and polemical at once. He’s speaking to churchgoers who assume proximity to doctrine equals safety. In a culture saturated with sermons and self-examination, the greater danger isn’t ignorance but immunity: hearing warnings so often that they stop sounding like warnings.
Context matters: Owen writes in a 17th-century England defined by civil war, religious conflict, and the Puritan project of reforming both soul and society. That environment produces a theology obsessed with signs of grace and the dread of being “given over” (Romans 1; Pharaoh in Exodus) to one’s own desires. When Owen attributes hardening to God’s judgment, he’s not excusing human agency; he’s intensifying accountability. The punishment is that you keep choosing what you chose, with fewer internal brakes each time. It’s a doctrine designed to terrify the comfortable: the worst sentence is not pain, but the loss of the capacity to be moved.
The line works because it treats moral perception as something that can be lost. “Hardening” suggests a process, not a switch: repetition of sin, refusal to repent, habitual self-justification until conscience becomes callused. Owen’s subtext is pastoral and polemical at once. He’s speaking to churchgoers who assume proximity to doctrine equals safety. In a culture saturated with sermons and self-examination, the greater danger isn’t ignorance but immunity: hearing warnings so often that they stop sounding like warnings.
Context matters: Owen writes in a 17th-century England defined by civil war, religious conflict, and the Puritan project of reforming both soul and society. That environment produces a theology obsessed with signs of grace and the dread of being “given over” (Romans 1; Pharaoh in Exodus) to one’s own desires. When Owen attributes hardening to God’s judgment, he’s not excusing human agency; he’s intensifying accountability. The punishment is that you keep choosing what you chose, with fewer internal brakes each time. It’s a doctrine designed to terrify the comfortable: the worst sentence is not pain, but the loss of the capacity to be moved.
Quote Details
| Topic | God |
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