Faith & Spirit Quote by John Owen

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.