CHARLES HADDON SPURGEON: WHAT CAN WE LEARN FROM HIM FOR TODAY?

In this article, the author gives an account of the life and theology of C.H. Spurgeon (1834-1892), the famous Reformed Baptist Minister, who preached in London in the second half of the nineteenth century. The account demonstrates that Spurgeon was not only the most renowned preacher of his day, most of whose sermons were published and are still read widely today but also an author who published many volumes. In addition to his work as preacher and writer, Spurgeon built children’s orphanages, started a theological college and assisted in many noble causes. As part of this benevolent work, his church contributed large sums to support poor relief. Having told Spurgeon’s story, the article then indicates six areas of Spurgeon’s life and ministry which are helpful for us today: his Passion for Souls; his Devotion to Prayer and Study; His attitude to the Bible & Expository Ministry; his Pastoral Ministry; His Practical Christianity; and His refusal to compromise on the truth of the gospel. KEYWORDS: Spurgeon, ministry, preach, Bible

Megachurch: An American Original (Almost)

Megachurches are not a new phenomenon; in fact, they have been around for a long time in some form. We trace their history back to the beginning of the Christian faith and describe their trajectory through key historical figures, examining how the Wesley brothers, Jonathan Edwards, George Whitefield, Charles Haddon Spurgeon, D. L. Moody, Charles Grandison Finney, Russell H. Conwell, and Aimee Semple McPherson produced and nurtured megachurch forms. We describe and argue that Christian churches, and megachurches in particular, are particularly potent in illumining American religious history, and that congregational studies reveal and explain core attributes of American social life.

Gender

Ministerial training throughout the nineteenth century was dogged by persistent uncertainties about what Dissenters wanted ministers to do: were they to be preachers or scholars, settled pastors or roving missionaries? Sects and denominations such as the Baptists and Congregationalists invested heavily in the professionalization of ministry, founding, building, and expanding ministerial training colleges whose pompous architecture often expressed their cultural ambitions. That was especially true for the Methodists who had often been wary of a learned ministry, while Presbyterians who had always nursed such a status built an impressive international network of colleges, centred on Princeton Seminary. Among both Methodists and Presbyterians, such institution building could be both bedevilled and eventually stimulated by secessions. Colleges were heavily implicated not just in the supply of domestic ministers but also in foreign mission. Even exceptions to this pattern such as the Quakers who claimed not to have dedicated ministers were tacitly professionalizing training by the end of the century. However, the investment in institutions did not prevent protracted disputes over how academic their training should be. Many very successful Dissenting entrepreneurs, such as Charles Haddon Spurgeon, Thomas Champness, William Booth, and Adoniram Judson Gordon, offered unpretentious vocational training, while in colonies such as Australia there were complaints from Congregationalists and others that the colleges were too high-flying for their requirements. The need to offer a liberal education, which came to include science, as well as systematic theological instruction put strain on the resources of the colleges, a strain that many resolved by farming out the former to secular universities. Many of the controversies generated by theological change among Dissenters centred on colleges because they were disputes about the teaching of biblical criticism and how to resolve the tension between free inquiry and the responsibilities of tutors and students to the wider denomination. Colleges were ill-equipped to accommodate theological change because their heads insisted that theology was a static discipline, central to which was the simple exegesis of Scripture. That generated tensions with their students and caused numerous teachers to be edged out of colleges for heresy, most notoriously Samuel Davidson from Lancashire Independent College and William Robertson Smith from the Aberdeen Free Church College. Nevertheless, even conservatives such as Moses Stuart at Andover had emphasized the importance of keeping one’s exegetical tools up to date, and it became progressively easier in most denominations for college teachers to enjoy intellectual liberty, much as Unitarians had always done. Yet the victory of free inquiry was never complete and pyrrhic in any event as from the end of the century the colleges could not arrest a slow decline in the morale and prospects of Dissenting ministers.

Congregationalists

The nineteenth century was a period of remarkable advance for the Baptists in the United Kingdom. The vigour of the Baptist movement was identified with the voluntary system and the influence of their leading pulpiteers, notably Charles Haddon Spurgeon. However, Baptists were often divided on the strictness of their Calvinism, the question of whether baptism as a believer was a prerequisite for participation in Communion, and issues connected with ministerial training. By the end of the century, some Baptists led by F.B. Meyer had recognized the ministry of women as deaconesses, if not as pastors. Both domestic and foreign mission were essential to Baptist activity. The Baptist Home Missionary Society assumed an important role here, while Spurgeon’s Pastors’ College became increasingly significant in supplying domestic evangelists. Meyer played an important role in the development, within Baptist life, of interdenominational evangelism, while the Baptist Missionary Society and its secretary Joseph Angus supplied the Protestant missionary movement with the resonant phrase ‘The World for Christ in our Generation’. In addition to conversionism, Baptists were also interested in campaigning against the repression of Protestants and other religious minorities on the Continent. Baptist activities were supported by institutions: the formation of the Baptist Union in 1813 serving Particular Baptists, as well as a range of interdenominational bodies such as the Evangelical Alliance. Not until 1891 did the Particular Baptists merge with the New Connexion of General Baptists, while theological controversy continued to pose fresh challenges to Baptist unity. Moderate evangelicals such as Joseph Angus who occupied a respectable if not commanding place in nineteenth-century biblical scholarship probably spoke for a majority of Baptists. Yet when in 1887 Charles Haddon Spurgeon alleged that Baptists were drifting into destructive theological liberalism, he provoked the ‘Downgrade Controversy’. In the end, a large-scale secession of Spurgeon’s followers was averted. In the area of spirituality, there was an emphasis on the agency of the Spirit in the church. Some later nineteenth-century Baptists were drawn towards the emphasis of the Keswick Convention on the power of prayer and the ‘rest of faith’. At the same time, Baptists became increasingly active in the cause of social reform. Undergirding Baptist involvement in the campaign to abolish slavery was the theological conviction—in William Knibb’s words—that God ‘views all nations as one flesh’. By the end of the century, through initiatives such as the Baptist Forward Movement, Baptists were championing a widening concern with home mission that involved addressing the need for medical care and housing in poor areas. Ministers such as John Clifford also took a leading role in shaping the ‘Nonconformist Conscience’ and Baptists supplied a number of leading Liberal MPs, most notably Sir Morton Peto. Their ambitions to make a difference in the world would peak in the later nineteenth and early twentieth century as their political influence gradually waned thereafter.

Spurgeon, Byron, and the Contingencies of Mediation

The popular Victorian preacher Charles Haddon Spurgeon referred to Byron almost forty times in his published works. Drawing on first-hand examination of Spurgeon’s library, this essay shows how Byron’s words were mediated to Spurgeon through a variety of anthologies, primers, and collections of sententiae, and how Spurgeon mediated them to others in turn through his sermons and writings. In the process, Byron’s writing was broken into fragments, placed in new contexts, spliced with other people’s words, misremembered, misattributed and rendered strange. The essay suggests that analysing this contingent process of mediation reveals alternative possibilities for the study of reception history.

Charles Haddon Spurgeon, the Pastors’ College and the Downgrade Controversy

Charles Haddon Spurgeon (1834–92) began his pastoral ministry in a village Baptist chapel in Cambridgeshire but became a national voice in Victorian England through his ministry in London. The huge crowds his preaching attracted necessitated the building of the Metropolitan Tabernacle, at the Elephant and Castle, which accommodated over 5,000 people. ‘By common consent’, says David Bebbington, Spurgeon was ‘the greatest English-speaking preacher of the century’. Spurgeon, like other nineteenth-century ecclesiastical figures, was involved in theological controversies, including the ‘Downgrade Controversy’, in which, in typically robust style, he attacked theological liberalism. In August 1887, he trumpeted: ‘The Atonement is scouted, the inspiration of Scripture derided, the Holy Spirit degraded into an influence, the punishment of sin turned into a fiction, and the resurrection into a myth …’ The Downgrade controversy has not attracted nearly as much attention as debates provoked in the nineteenth century by Essays and Reviews (1860) and Lux Mundi (1889), perhaps because the latter affected Anglicanism rather than the Free Churches. But since as many people were attending Free Churches as Anglican churches, the issues raised in the Downgrade, as the most serious nineteenth-century Free Church dispute, are of considerable significance.