Theologian · Modern
Charles Spurgeon
1834–1892 · Reformed Baptist; Puritan evangelicalism
A Baptist minister and vigorous anti-Catholic controversialist, who nonetheless read Catholic authors from St. Bernard to Thomas à Kempis and told his students to plunder their devotion.
Converted at fifteen in a Primitive Methodist chapel and a London pastor from the age of nineteen, Spurgeon preached for nearly forty years to crowds of thousands at New Park Street and the Metropolitan Tabernacle, and his printed sermons sold by the million across the English-speaking world. A Calvinistic Baptist who held the Puritan doctrines of grace and preached them with an evangelist's free offer, he founded a pastors' college and an orphanage, and in the Downgrade Controversy (1887) left the Baptist Union over the inroads of liberal criticism. His ‘Baptismal Regeneration’ sermon (1864) attacked the Prayer Book's doctrine, and he treated the papacy as Antichrist. Lectures to My Students, The Treasury of David on the Psalms, All of Grace and the devotional Morning and Evening remain in print.
Why he matters: He is the model of the evangelical preacher, and the free-church evangelicalism he shaped is the Protestantism most English-speaking Catholics now meet; his sermons on the cross, assurance and suffering are read by Catholics, and his place in the line of Bunyan and the Puritans is why Evangelicals and Catholics Together (1994) had to begin with justification.
Where to be careful
He rejected infant baptism and any sacramental efficacy (Trent, Session 7), justification by anything but imputed righteousness (Session 6), the Church's hierarchy and the papacy, and the veneration of images and saints; his reading of the Pope as Antichrist admits no Catholic reply but patience. Common ground: the sovereignty of grace, the centrality of the Cross, the plain preaching of Scripture, and works of mercy for the orphan and the poor.
Reading
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Lectures to My StudentsCharles Spurgeon · His homiletics; ‘The Minister's Fainting Fits’ on depression in the pulpit.
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All of GraceCharles Spurgeon · His evangelistic statement of salvation by grace alone.
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Evangelical Is Not EnoughThomas Howard · A Catholic convert from free-church evangelicalism on what Spurgeon's tradition lacks and keeps.
Documented positions
Where this thinker stands on each dispute the test covers.