8. Argument 7. Practices whereby we condemn suffering saints unnecessarily are unlawful.
Argument 7. Practices whereby we condemn suffering saints unnecessarily are unlawful.
A rgument 7 Owen:
Argument 7: That practice whereby we condemn the suffering saints of the present age, rendering them false witnesses of God and the only blamable cause of their own sufferings, is not to be approved. But such is this practice; and where this is done on a pretense of liberty, without any plea of necessary duty on our part, it is utterly unlawful.
Baxter:
§23. To your seventh argument: The major means either saints that suffer for well-doing or for ill-doing. If the Anabaptists should be suffering-saints,
I would be none of those that they suffer by, but yet I would not be for Anabaptistry for fear of condemning them as the cause of their own suffering. By that rule I must own every error or sin that any saint suffers for.
2. The truth bids me say more than I am willing to confute this error. I have heard army-officers say that they believed abundance of the ten
thousand Scots killed at Dunbar [Scotland, 1650] were godly men: and yet you were one that publicly, in pulpit and print, accused them 1 and did not justify their cause for being saints. Do you think none of the ministers in England were saints that refused the Engagement [1649] and were sequestered for that and not keeping fasts and thanksgivings for blood? 2
Are you sure that Christopher Love (beheaded) 3 was no saint? Or did you therefore own their causes?
To your minor: It is a gross mistake to say that going to the liturgy makes the refusers "the only blamable cause of their own sufferings." What! are you one that acquit all their prosecutors if it be but proved that the refusers are mistaken? Who could have suspected this? What if presbyterians,
Anabaptists and such others err (as you believe they do)? If any would therefore silence, imprison, banish or hang them, dare you justify it and say that the dissenters are the only blamable cause of their own sufferings? Sure you consider not what you wrote: You thought not so.
2. But are there no saints that go to Common-Prayer? Why do not you distinguish saints? I hope there are many times more saints (and wiser) that separate not [from Common-Prayer] than that do so: And are not you as faulty for saying they sin, as they for saying, "You sin," if their cause be true? This sounds as too much of a sect.
3. The truth is, repentance is so hard a work that I see both extremes fly from it on a proud pretense of constancy and that they may not confess that they have erred. It was the grand argument that bore down me and others when we pleaded with some bishops to have prevented our divisions by some alterations, "Oh then it will be thought that we erred and gave cause for old complaints." And now we must none of us hold communion with the parish-churches lest some saints that separate should be rendered false
witnesses of God and blamable. But were not the old nonconformists and conformists as real saints as the old Separatists, and a thousand for one?
And do not you now make them all as false witnesses?
If really you have fathered any love-killing, dividing error on God, repent of it and do not justify it for fear of being thought blamable. This is it that keeps England in confusion and threatens worse: Neither of the extremes that have caused our calamities are humbled, nor can endure a motion to repent; but overturners justify their former and their present love-destroying ways. The Lord give England repentance unto life: and the Lord help me to see all my errors and to repent the more because I see that proud nature is so much against it.
And you mistake if you think that we plead only liberty for this communion. It is duty that we plead: but not duty to all persons, nor all times, as if the case of all were the same.
We have not the happiness of innocency: repentance is next to it. When we confess our sins we vindicate Christ and religion, which are against them. When we justify them, we falsely honor ourselves and lay all on Christ, as if he would justify that which He abhors and died for. God will yet more shame us if we will shame his cause instead of taking shame to ourselves. Impenitence is more dangerous than any sin which we should repent of. Carnal policy will be angry with me for mentioning the old faults which adversaries sufficiently reproach us with.
(And I must say that God in his time will justify the generality of the sober godly people of England from the false accusation of those malignants and papists who charge them with all the guilt of the sins of a few sectaries got into an army, even the subversion of Church-order and civil power, when it could not be done but by a conquest and oppression of
these religious people first, both parliaments, ministers and their flocks; in comparison of whom, the army separatists [whom Owen was sympathetic with] were inconsiderable for number. They [such army separatists] that would destroy thousands of faithful subjects as guilty of that which they opposed, till they were conquered and suffered for opposing, do but show their own iniquity.) But yet God never taught men that way of policy: repentance, and not impenitence or self-justification, is the way to take off men's reproach. God permits them to do it because we do it not. To confess our own sins is no extenuation of the wickedness of any malignant persecutors or debauched men. What they truly upbraid us with in malice, let us openly lament in serious penitence, and not stand to a sinful dividing principle and cause lest the saints be blamed that have fathered it on God. This learned author has done otherwise himself, and so has the party now opposed.
He and I knew the man who was pastor to the commanders of the army when they pulled down and set up, and again pulled down, till they had turned their armed bulwark into atoms; and when he saw what they had done, said, "I wonder the people do not cast stones at us as we go along the streets." Was not this a blaming of his flock [his own Separatist people]? He knew how oft the addresses of the Separatists to the several suddenlyerected-sovereignties did change their minds and cry peccavimus [we sin] by their new addresses for the old: And why may we not blame them that blamed themselves for fathering their mistakes on God.
1. The https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Dunbar_(1650) was triggered by Scotland accepting
Charles II as king of Britain and raising troops to support him, after the execution of his father,
Charles I by the Rump English parliament. Cromwell, the new de facto English leader, invaded
Scotland and gained a decisive victory at Dunbar. Owen had been sympathetic with the context and proceedings of the Rump parliament executing Charles I, preaching a sermon to that parliament the day after. He later served as an aid and chaplain to Cromwell.
2. Owen was likely for this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engagement_controversy (to be distinguished from that of 1647) which sought express allegiance to Cromwell's government contra the old royal regime.
3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Love (1618-1651) was a presbyterian minister who plotted to restore Charles II to the English throne. He was executed by the government aligned with Cromwell (who was an Independent, like Owen, as far as Church government).