John Owen - The Mortification of Sin

J ohn Owens short book Mortification of Sin is excellent and a classic, but very difficult to read. Owen wrote it in 1656 and his English and writing style are far removed from our contemporary English. He also wasnt that great a writer to begin with. Reading Owen isnt quite like tackling Shakespeare, but hes still a heavy slog. I suspect this makes Mortification of Sin more admired than read, even though prominent pastors like John Piper and Tim Keller have touted it.

Two things inspired me to translate and adapt it into contemporary English. The first was an email thread from my mens group at the church I attended in Chicago. The topic was how to overcome sin. I suggested they read Mortification of Sin. The group leader replied with a private email gently telling me that it would be over the heads of 90% of the guys in the group because the language is too old and difficult.

The second was an article by linguist John McWhorter arguing that we should bite the bullet and translate Shakespeare into modern English because the language of Shakespeare is no longer the English we speak today. He observed that non-English speakers often have a better experience of Shakespeare precisely because they hear it in their own contemporary language. Why shouldnt English speakers get the same privilege?

Thus was born my idea to translate Mortification of Sin into contemporary English so that it can be more broadly read. I did this translation with three main goals:

1. To create a book that is above all useful in the essential duty of killing sin.
2. To write in clear and readable English understandable by most adults today.
3. To include as much of Owens original content as possible within the bounds of clarity and readability without dumbing it down.

What I did not try to do is to be rigorously scholarly, to fully preserve every nuance of wording or the voice of the original, or to produce a word for word-type translation. This is basically an idea for idea translation at the paragraph, and partially at the sentence, level. While doing that I updated Scripture quotations using the English Standard Version rather than the King James Version, though I retained some King James Version quotes where they more clearly make his point.

Owens organization and presentation of content arent the greatest, and I made some adjustments to make it clearer. Thats why I said this is an adaptation as well as a translation. Here are some examples of the adjustments I made to the content:

• I reordered the sections in Chapter 1 to line up with his bullet points, reordered the content at the end of Chapter 2, broke his original Chapter 11 into five separate chapters so that each of his main points became a chapter, and I re-outlined and re-numbered the entire book.
• Owen frequently uses repetition and long chains of adjectives to emphasize his points. I have sometimes reduced and simplified these.
• Like many Protestants in his day Owen had a very negative opinion of the Roman Catholic Church. I did not whitewash this by removing his negative comments, but I did remove a handful of gratuitous insults that did not contribute to the topic at hand.
• In a handful of other areas I did delete small amounts of content that interrupted the flow of the work.

Despite changes like these, I tried to leave his flow of thoughts as is in most cases so that this remains a translation and an adaptation of his book, not my book based on his research. Please note that I added all the footnotes. They are not original to Owens work.

While Owens book is now much more readable for the average person, I wont pretend its now light and breezy. This can still be challenging material. But I hope that it achieves my goal of making something thats both readable and practical for dealing with the sin in our lives so that Owens book doesnt just gather dust on peoples bookshelves.

I hope you find it useful.

Aaron M. Renn

May 2013 (Updated January 2019)