343. Details to Crossway’s Complete Works of John Owen (Beeke)
Lee Gatiss
2.05
9 August 2023
18 October 2025
#reformedtheology #reformed
One of the most exciting and promising developments in upcoming Owen studies is a massive new project by Crossway: The Complete Works of John Owen. Given that this was last attempted in the middle of the nineteenth century, this is good news indeed. Aiming for a fairly broad audience, the project's editors hope that its volumes will prove useful both to the church and academy. Following roughly the basic framework of two earlier, freshly edited volumes of Owen's work, this series proposes both to make the volumes more accessible (especially to an American audience) and to improve their usefulness to scholars. While academics might have wished for a more critical edition and may not appreciate every change, the new Works will be a great improvement over Goold. The new editions will avoid paraphrasing Owen, but will make his work more accessible by adding the following features: checking and correcting the treatises according to the best original editions available; regularizing Owen's Scriptural citations; changing older verb forms to their modern equivalents (e.g. 'seeth' becomes 'sees'); dividing extremely long paragraphs; providing definitions of archaic words; and Americanizing English word forms (e.g. 'colour' becomes ‘color’). In a further effort to help modern readers and non-specialists, the following helps will also be added: outlines of the original works; headings throughout that aim to make Owen's order in the treatises more apparent; translations of Latin, Greek and Hebrew terms and texts; explanatory footnotes of people and works that Owen mentions as well as providing references to material that he quotes; with lengthy introductions placing the work in its historical and theological context for modern readers. Lee Gatiss and Shawn Wright are serving as the general editors overseeing the massive project. They have a team of fourteen other editors who are working on individual volumes (or multiple volumes). The complete project should run to thirty-eight volumes [it has been changed to 40 volumes]. In addition to the material in the original Goold edition and the Hebrews commentary, this series will include almost everything else by Owen that is known to be extant, including new English translations of his Latin works, introductions that he prepared for other books, his correspondence and material related to the Savoy Declaration. The goal is for these volumes to start rolling off the press in 2022. Such a massive project put together by a publishing house that primarily targets pastoral and lay readers means that Owen's reception in the non-academic world will only increase for decades to come.
— Kelly Kapic, T&T, 514.
Get off the Netflix binge watching and read some sound theology.