Session 7: Greatheart at War: The Controversies of Charles Spurgeon

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All right, back to Spurgeon. In the last session we talked about the controversy that followed

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Spurgeon and all of that. I hope you understand from that, that Charles Spurgeon was not always perceived as the most beloved and lovable Baptist preacher of all times.

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And even in his own lifetime, lots of other Baptists despised him.

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And at the end of his life, the sentiment against Spurgeon in the Baptist Union was so strong, the

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English Baptist Union more or less forced him out. People often say, well, he got kicked out of the

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Baptist Union. The truth is he resigned, but the Baptist Union breathed a sigh of relief when he left.

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They didn't want him. They didn't want his influence. He was formerly censured by them over false charges actually.

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And it was generally perceived among younger Baptists, as I said, I think earlier,

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I hinted at this. He was thought of as a stodgy, stubborn man whose age and illness made him cranky and cantankerous.

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And they saw him as a totally negative influence. That of course was a totally unfair and inaccurate assessment of Spurgeon.

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But he had the misfortune of being at the peak of his ministry and influence during a time of what, as I said, was relentless spiritual decline, perhaps the worst apostasy that had happened in evangelicalism as a whole since the

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Protestant Reformation. And Spurgeon was not one to keep silent when he saw churches all around him giving up eternal truth for passing fads and novel doctrines.

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And so he spoke up and he was ignored. And then he spoke up again with more volume and greater urgency and he was hated for it.

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And I hope you understand from what I said in the last hour that conflict, especially conflict with other

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Christians was not something he relished. He was not a willing controversialist.

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He wasn't the type of personality who enjoyed disputes or took pleasure in nonstop combat.

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He despised quarrels and controversy and yet he was embroiled in more than one kind of conflict or another for most of his ministry.

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And if your knowledge of Spurgeon is only superficial, you might not realize that about him because today it does seem like, doesn't it, that Spurgeon is just universally beloved.

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He's portrayed as this avuncular superstar who everybody loves and everybody wants to claim so that he is quoted and claimed by Arminians and Calvinists alike.

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He is claimed by both charismatics and non -charismatics. He is the closest thing Baptists have to a patron saint.

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And it doesn't matter what flavor of Baptists you're talking about. Practically everyone from the strictest hyper -fundamentalist groups to so -called moderate

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Baptists who are willing to compromise on everything, pretty much every one of them is strict and particular

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Baptists. And the pragmatists alike, Rick Warren and his type, people of all theological persuasions, will tell you that they love

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Spurgeon. And it's not just Baptists. One of the most interesting books about Spurgeon was written by a

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Lutheran, Helmut Thalicke. He was a famous German Lutheran Neo -Orthodox theologian in the middle of the 20th century when

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Neo -Orthodoxy was a poisonous force particularly coming from Germany. And this was

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Thalicke's background, but his book, written and published in English, is called

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Encounter with Spurgeon. And some of it is quite good, especially if you bear in mind that Thalicke is

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German and Lutheran and Neo -Orthodox. And he writes from that perspective. And in fact, listen to Helmut Thalicke.

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This is from a totally different context. So you get an idea of where his theology is. In his book called

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The Evangelical Faith, Thalicke said this, to do theology is to actualize

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Christian truth, to understand it afresh. Theology has nothing to do with timeless truth.

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That is a more or less typical Neo -Orthodox perspective. And Thalicke said that doing theology is actually about, his word was actualizing

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Christianity. So what he means to say is it's not about affirming or making sense of truth in any propositional form, but doing theology is about understanding religion afresh, he says, recontextualizing the faith in a new way for every new generation.

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And notice that he expressly says, it has nothing to do with timeless truth.

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Those are his very words. And yet, Thalicke wrote this entire book saying how much he admired

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Spurgeon for doing theology in precisely the way Thalicke said theology is not supposed to be done.

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So listen to the opening paragraphs of Helmut Thalicke's book, Encounter with Spurgeon.

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He writes, in the midst of the theologically discredited 19th century, there was a preacher who had at least 6 ,000 people in his congregation every

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Sunday, whose sermons for many years were cabled to New York every Monday and reprinted in the leading newspapers of the country, and who occupied the same pulpit for almost 40 years without any diminishment in the flowing abundance of his preaching, without ever repeating himself or preaching himself dry.

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The fire he thus kindled and turned into a beacon that shone across the seas and down through the generations was no mere brush fire of sensationalism.

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It was an inexhaustible blaze that glowed and burned on solid hearths and was fed by the wells of the eternal word.

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Here was the miracle of a bush that burned with fire and yet was not consumed. In no way was he like the managers of a modern evangelistic campaign who manipulate souls with all the techniques of mass suggestion, acting like salvation engineers.

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Charles Haddon Spurgeon was still unaware of the wiles of propaganda. He worked only through the power of the word which created its own hearers and changed souls.

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Now, this was not his word, the product of his own rhetorical skills. It was rather a word which he himself had merely heard.

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He put himself at its disposal as a mere echo. His message never ran dry because he was never anything but a recipient.

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That's an interesting testimony, isn't it? And I agree with every word of it. Thaleky goes on to say this, it would be well for a time like ours to learn from this man.

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Now, Thaleky himself would have been, might have been a more reliable and more edifying professor of theology if he had taken his own counsel to heart and learned at Spurgeon's feet how to deal with the word of God and especially how to do theology.

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I think Thaleky had a romanticized view of Spurgeon. Remember that he was a

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German neo -Orthodox theologian and a preacher with a low view of scripture and a loose view of truth.

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And the reality is that he would have absolutely hated Spurgeon if they had been contemporaries. Thaleky would have been at the forefront of those critics of Spurgeon.

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But people generally tend to lionize the spiritual heroes of the past even though they scorn the courage and the steadfastness that makes men like Spurgeon great.

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Same thing Jesus said to the Pharisees of his day. He said, you build the tombs of the prophets and decorate the monuments of the righteous.

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If we had lived in the days of our fathers, we would not have taken part in them with shedding the blood of the prophets.

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But in reality, they would have hated those prophets just like their ancestors did.

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So Spurgeon actually noticed this same phenomenon in his era and he mentioned it in one of his sermons in 1988.

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This was near the beginning of the downgrade controversy. Spurgeon said this. We must defend the faith.

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For what would have become of us if our fathers had not maintained it? If confessors, reformers, martyrs, and covenanters had been recreant, that is unfaithful, to the name and faith of Jesus, where would have been the churches of today?

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Must we not play the man as they did? If we do not, are we not censuring our fathers?

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Spurgeon says, it's very pretty, is it not, to read of Luther and his brave deeds? Of course, everybody admires

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Luther. Yes, yes, but you do not want anyone else to do the same thing today.

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When you go to the zoological gardens, you admire the bear, but how would you like a bear at home?

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Or a bear wandering loose about the street? You tell me, that would be unbearable.

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And no doubt you're right. So he says, we admire a man who is firm in the faith, say 400 years ago, because the past ages are sort of a bear pit or an iron cage for him, but such a man today is a nuisance and must be put down.

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Call him a narrow -minded bigot, or give him a worse name if you can think of one, and yet imagine that in those days past,

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Luther, Zwingli, Calvin, and their compeers had said, the world is out of order, but if we try to set it right, we'll only make a great row and get ourselves into disgrace, so let's go to our chambers and put on our night caps and sleep over the bad times, and maybe when we wake up, things will have grown better.

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Spurgeon says, that kind of conduct on their part would have entailed upon us a heritage of error.

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Age after age would have gone down into the infernal deeps, and the pestiferous bogs of error would have swallowed all.

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Those men loved the faith and the name of Jesus too well to see them trampled on. Note what we owe them, and let us pay to our sons the debt we owe to our fathers.

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That's a great passage, isn't it? He preached that in a sermon at the height of the downgrade controversy when he was being treated as one of the most despised religious leaders in the country.

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Spurgeon had nothing but scorn for ministers who were not willing to fight, not willing to earnestly contend for the faith when some cardinal point of gospel truth was at stake, and here we are today.

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We don't mind reading about Spurgeon's courage and his foresight in the downgrade controversy.

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We just don't want anybody else to exercise that kind of discernment today. It's as if the great preponderance of Christians today purposely ignore or downplay the fact that Spurgeon was a controversialist, and almost everyone today wants to claim

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Spurgeon. Ian Murray noticed this trend more than half a century ago, and that's why he wrote The Forgotten Spurgeon, to remind us of Spurgeon's controversial courage and his steadfastness.

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21st century historians, 20th century historians and biographers, the early part of the century had turned

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Spurgeon into a big lovable teddy bear who is perfectly safe and always devotional and doctrinally nondescript.

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His Calvinism had been edited out, all the controversies had been ignored, and he was painted as a sort of ecumenically broad, after all, he could embrace

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D .L. Moody of all people. But in reality, Spurgeon was not at all like that.

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He was a convinced doctrinaire Calvinist. He was an outspoken critic of everything novel or superficial in theology.

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He was often despised and ridiculed as a doctrinal dinosaur. He was engaged in one controversy or another, as we've seen, for practically the whole of his ministry.

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And in the face of modernism and broad church ecumenism, he became a religious separatist.

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In short, Spurgeon embodied everything neo -orthodoxy rejects about historic evangelical orthodoxy.

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He was the living emblem of everything that today's stylish evangelicals despise about historic fundamentalism.

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In fact, he was a fundamentalist. I'm not afraid to say that. Spurgeon was a fundamentalist by today's definition.

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In his time, he was a strong and vocal defender of practically every doctrine that postmodernist and emergent

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Christians and now stylish evangelicals have ever tried to challenge. And he believed the offense of the cross needs to be declared openly and in public, paraded in public, not downplayed for the sake of people who might be offended by the truth of the gospel.

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He said, put it out there. And he was commonly criticized for being behind the times in his own era, in a generation that was enthralled with modern ideas and the scientific method,

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Spurgeon stubbornly clung to the doctrine of the Puritans. And in those

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Victorian years when Dickens novels were popular bestsellers, he preferred to read from the church fathers.

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And in a day when the most popular attractions in London were stage plays, the first run productions of Gilbert and Sullivan operettas, which frankly are mostly

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G rated by today's standards, Spurgeon decried the theater because he said it's worldly and it's trivial.

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It's no place for serious Christians. And he absolutely hated the superficial, stylish, worldly religion.

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We'll talk about that more in our final hour. But he was hated and deeply and angrily despised by the

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Christians of that era who were so desperate to stay in step with whatever is stylish. A few years ago, the

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Banner of Truth magazine published an article that I have kept linked on the front page of my

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Spurgeon webpages ever since. It's titled, Are You Sure You Like Spurgeon? It's written by Alan Maben.

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Maben points out that Spurgeon's doctrinal stance would set him firmly against practically everything that makes contemporary

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American evangelicalism distinctive. Almost every fashionable religious trend or new perspective that you will ever see touted as wonderful and revolutionary on the pages of Christianity Today magazine, every one of them is an idea that Spurgeon would have steadfastly opposed.

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Many of the pragmatic notions that drive popular modernists are the same ideas that Spurgeon did oppose when the original modernists proposed those ideas.

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I'm confident Spurgeon would oppose them today just the same, even though they've been relabeled and now they're called postmodern.

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And my goal in this hour is to give you a little glimpse of the real Spurgeon, the true and unvarnished man.

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Although he was criticized as outdated and derided as a theological fossil in his own time,

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Spurgeon does still speak to our age, speaks maybe more eloquently than any other living voice.

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Ironically, the men who were perceived as stylish and forward thinking in Spurgeon's era, those are the ones who appear to us to be outmoded and mostly forgotten today.

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We remember only a few of them because they were products of their time and now they are outdated.

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Joseph Parker, for example, we'll talk about him at length in our final session, but he savagely criticized

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Spurgeon, even at Spurgeon's death. He was cruel to Spurgeon in the eulogy that he wrote.

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I'll read parts of it to you later. The average pastor in late Victorian England firmly believed that Parker's style and methodology was what they needed to emulate if they were going to remain relevant.

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If they were gonna win the next generation, they had to be like Parker and not like Spurgeon. Spurgeon was old and he was old -fashioned in almost every way that is unfashionable.

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But you try this for yourself. Read a few Spurgeon sermons and then try to read a few of Parker's sermons.

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They're online. You can read what Parker preached. Parker is the one who, as you read him today, he sounds quaint and old -fashioned because he was a product of his times.

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He's the one who really doesn't resonate with the current generation, but Spurgeon still speaks as powerfully as ever.

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All of his works are still in print, still influential. Even the battles Spurgeon fought are still relevant to us.

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And practically all of his controversial writings are as timely today as they were at the time when they were written, which suggests to me that Spurgeon chose his fights pretty well because everything he wrote in a controversy still speaks to us today.

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In fact, in some ways, more relevant to us today than they were when they were written. For a decade, as I said earlier,

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I used to post examples, excerpts from Spurgeon's sermons every

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Sunday on my blog, mainly chosen to illustrate this phenomenon at the height of the emerging church movement, for example.

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Spurgeon had solid answers for everything that Brian McLaren and Doug Padgett and the emergent neoliberals were saying.

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He also answered the pragmatism of Bill Hybels and Rick Warren. He answered the swaggering foul -mouth style of Mark Driscoll and James MacDonald.

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And he has answers for every deviant theology today. Consider, for example, the attacks that have been going on now for 20 years, actually much longer than that, but stylish, very stylish for the last 20 years, attacks on the doctrine of substitutionary atonement and the idea of penal satisfaction, the idea that Christ bore our sins and paid the price for them.

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Among postmodern evangelicals today, there is a widespread distaste for this idea and a desire to tone it down or ignore it, the idea that God punished

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Christ for the sins of believers. Because how do you explain why a loving

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God would do that? Why couldn't God just simply forgive without exacting some kind of blood atonement?

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The principle of propitiation makes God sound vindictive and harsh, we're told.

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So who needs that? Let's overlook it. And in fact, a few years ago, Steve Chalk, who is a well -known evangelical leader and media figure in England, wrote a book in which he compared the idea of penal substitution to divine child abuse.

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That's what he called it. N .T. Wright endorsed that book. And in America, Brian McLaren echoed the same idea, that very same line about child abuse in one of his books.

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And suddenly, substitutionary atonement was on the table for discussion again. And sadly, most

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Christian leaders in our generation have been totally unprepared or unwilling to defend the doctrine of substitutionary atonement.

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And the idea had not been, frankly, explicit in most evangelical teaching for several decades.

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And so lots of young evangelicals seemed prepared to do away with it. Let's just get rid of this idea of penal substitution.

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Rob Bell staged a show with a big altar as a prop and went around the country attacking the idea that Christ's sacrifice had anything to do with satisfying the wrath of God against sin.

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And it was very popular. Well, it turns out, Spurgeon had a lot to say about that in his day, because the modernists of the

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Victorian era were just as keen to sanitize the gospel and do away with the doctrine of atonement, same way today's postmodernists have been.

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So listen to what Spurgeon had to say about this issue. He said this, quote, I will not foul my mouth with the unworthy phrases which have been used in reference to the substitutionary work of our

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Lord Jesus Christ, but it is a sore grief of heart to note how these evil things are tolerated by men whom we respect.

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I would like to rise from my bed during the last five minutes of my life to bear witness to the divine sacrifice and the sin atoning blood.

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I would then repeat those words which speak the truth of substitution most positively, even should

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I shock my hearers, for how could I regret that? As in heaven, my first words will be to ascribe my salvation to my master's blood, my last act on earth should be to shock his enemies by a testimony to the same fact.

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I love that. Spurgeon believed that biblical clarity and accuracy are far more important in the proclamation of truth than the question of whether someone might be offended by this truth or not.

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Besides, he was convinced that the whole essence of the gospel is contained in the doctrine of the atonement, the principle of substitution.

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And so he spelled it out plainly. He said, quote, the doctrine of Holy Scripture is this, that inasmuch as a man could not keep

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God's law, having fallen in Adam, Christ came and fulfilled the law on behalf of his people, and that inasmuch as man had already broken the divine law and it incurred the penalty of the wrath of God, Christ came and suffered in the room, place, and stead of his loved ones, so that by his enduring the full vials of God's wrath, they might be emptied out and not a drop might ever fall on the heads of his blood -bought people.

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You'll find as you read the words of Spurgeon that all of his sermons contain key points of controversy all the way through his ministry from the start to the finish.

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As I keep saying, he was a reluctant controversialist. I don't think he had any expectation that wave after wave of controversy would assault him from the time he first accepted the call to be pastor in London till the end of his life, that he would be constantly embroiled in controversy, but as we've seen, this was a profound and historic prestigious pulpit, and the church was already ancient by evangelical standards when

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Spurgeon came to London. By then, people had forgotten that John Ripon was only 20 years old when he became senior pastor in 1773.

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A lot of people feared that Spurgeon was too young when he took the mantle of Benjamin Keech and John Gill and John Ripon, but as we've seen, he was an amazingly gifted preacher.

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Even at that age, both fame and infamy immediately overwhelmed him in London, and in February of 1855, when

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Spurgeon had been pastor for less than a year, they had to move the services out of the

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Park Street Church while they enlarged it and rebuilt it, and that only lasted for a short time, and during that time, they moved to Exeter Hall.

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I mentioned it earlier. I said we'd come back to it. Exeter Hall was a famous evangelical auditorium in the

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Strand. The Strand is that elegant street in central London that runs parallel to the river from Trafalgar Square to Fleet Street.

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If you're familiar with London today, Exeter Hall stood on a site that is today occupied by the

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Strand Palace Hotel. It's right across the street from the entrance to the Savoy Hotel, which ironically is where all the

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Gilbert and Sullivan operettas were premiered, and Exeter Hall was there. It had this large, very ostentatious auditorium.

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I don't think Spurgeon himself was very fond of it. It was an old place with notorious acoustical problems, but it was the best venue in central

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London for Spurgeon to have his ministry. It was easily acceptable by public transport.

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It was the headquarters of the YMCA in the United Kingdom, and it was well known as, this was the hub of evangelical activity in all of London, and in fact, no less than John Henry Newman, Cardinal Newman, who was the infamous

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Anglican -turned -Catholic who had become a cardinal in the Catholic Church.

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He wrote a sarcastic diatribe against Exeter Hall in 1838, almost two decades before Spurgeon ever preached there, and Newman hated this place because, to him, it symbolized the large -scale growth and popularity of the

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Protestant evangelicalism in England, and Newman deplored that. He thought England should return to Roman Catholicism, and so he ridiculed the evangelical movement as artificial and superficial and ugly, and to him,

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Exeter Hall symbolized all of that. It was artificial, superficial, and ugly, and let's face it, in Newman's time, evangelicalism was already flirting with intellectualism, shallowness, pragmatism, and a bunch of cheesy evangelistic revivalistic tactics.

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Those same tactics have come to full flower in our age. Some major changes had taken place in British evangelicalism during the...

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Sorry. Something in the air here, because I never cough when

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I preach. I have no freedom. Yeah. Yeah.

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Yeah. Yeah. Californians can't take much of that, you know? We're not used to it. Yeah. So anyway, there had been some major changes in British evangelicalism during the first half of the 19th century, and most of them were not good.

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The days of... Sorry. Should I get over this and then start up again?

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Hang on. The days of Benjamin Keech were long gone when you had nonconformists commonly placed in stocks or held up for public ridicule, looked upon like society's outcasts.

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Evangelicalism had steadily, but gradually, become more and more genteel, and it was very popular among the upper and middle classes.

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So there was a strong move underway already to make the evangelical message seem more refined and more respectable.

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England has always had strong class distinctions, and 19th century evangelicals desperately wanted to seem like they were socially well -bred.

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Exeter Hall was obviously in the middle of the strand. Again, if you know

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England, this is a prestigious place, an impressive location, and so it symbolized this move for evangelicals to move up in class, and so this was a convenient sort of brick -and -mortar symbol for Cardinal Newman to attack because it represented everything that he hated about evangelicalism, both good and bad, and on top of that,

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Exeter Hall had been a hotbed of opposition to what's known as the

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Tractarian Movement, or sometimes called the Oxford Movement, and Newman's leadership in that movement was a move to bring

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Protestants back into Roman Catholicism. That was what first brought

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Cardinal Newman into public prominence. He began his ministry actually professing to be an evangelical and a

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Calvinist, and then he turned against what he had always proclaimed, and in that article that he wrote about Exeter Hall, 1938, he published, it was published in a periodical called

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The British Critic. Newman quoted from a quaint book titled Random Recollections of Exeter Hall.

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It was written by an anonymous author who identified himself only as one of the Protestant Party, and Newman quotes that, and he says, is this a joke or earnest?

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So you can hear the tone of his contempt, and Newman quotes this book's description of Exeter Hall, which is detailed enough that I wanna read it to you to give you a sense of this vast size of this auditorium where Spurgeon frequently preached to his congregation.

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It was their temporary meeting place while their church was being rebuilt. So here is this, remember as I read this, that this is the main auditorium where Spurgeon preached for at least five years, and to give you a comparison of the size, our auditorium, some of you have been to the auditorium at Grace Church, it seats fewer than 3 ,000, okay?

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But about, I think when we give the capacity, we usually say 3 ,000, really would be overflowing with 3 ,000 people, but that's the size of our building, and if you've seen it, you have an idea of what size that is.

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Here's the description of Exeter Hall. The large room of Exeter Hall was built to contain 4 ,000 persons with a splendid range of raised seats to the left of the platform, a spacious area in front of it, and it will accommodate, the area in front of the platform itself will accommodate 500 persons to the right.

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At the back of the platform were formerly two sunk galleries like the side boxes of a theater which were opened or closed at pleasure by means of movable planks which may be put aside during the progress of a meeting.

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They're now thrown completely open. The platform itself is elevated about six feet above the floor of the area or central seats, and it's finished in front by a handsome iron rail, so this is the iron rail that goes around the pulpit area.

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The large ornamental bars of which placed about one foot from each other are connected at top by a thick mahogany spar.

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In the center of its front row stands the chair which in form much resembles that of King Edward the

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Confessor, so it's like a throne. King Edward the Confessor, his throne is in Westminster Abbey.

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It is of handsomely carved mahogany with massive open elbows and it's cushioned in the seat and in the back with purple leather.

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Its dimensions are very large and any gentleman of small or even of moderate size who may preside can never be said to fill it.

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Very few chairman appear to advantage there. Some seem lost in it. Others at a loss how to occupy it, where to sit in it, whether backwards or forwards, upright or lounging, to the right or to the left.

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So this is a comical view, right? You've got this massive throne that no matter how big the guy is who sits on it, he looks like a little kid.

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It's funny. And by the way, this book that Cardinal Newman is quoting from and I'm reading from, you can read for yourself at Google Books.

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I looked it up and it goes on to say this. The confirmation of the hall is not favorable to the larger class of human voices.

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And there are but few speakers who can make themselves well heard throughout the room.

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The generality speak too low or they have little power of lungs to be heard beyond the center of the area while others who almost deafen the sitters near them are equally unintelligible to those at a distance from the echo of the place itself.

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Thus the gentle speeches of Lord Chichester and the thundering oratory of Dr.

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Duff are nearly all alike pantomime to the occupants of the raised seats though from diametrically opposite causes for the doctor speaks just as much too loud as their

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Lordship's voices are too low. So he's saying, if you sit in the back, no matter whether the guy has a loud voice or a soft one, you're not gonna be able to hear him.

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There was a massive pipe organ and a vast choir loft behind the speaker and engravings of that time show the choir loft full of about 200 listeners while Spurgeon was speaking.

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I'll show you a picture of it later. I didn't have time to coordinate it with this thing. But Spurgeon evidently managed to make himself heard and understood in this vast room and he did it without any amplification.

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And I've never read any suggestion otherwise that it was hard for him to be heard in there. But Spurgeon's popularity with the crowds who came to hear him was counterbalanced by the hostility that he received in the press from ministers in the

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Anglican church, from the sophisticated hordes of London's theater society,

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England's literary elite and the academic snobs. And so Spurgeon was constantly under attack from people who caricatured him, who falsely accused him, who berated him for his steadfast commitment to biblical truth in a time when it was becoming fashionable to discount scripture in favor of modern learning.

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And it was the era of Darwin and the rise of modernism and Spurgeon's influence and popularity among the working class of Britain couldn't, simply couldn't, turn back the drift of culture as a whole.

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So this progressed throughout his entire ministry. What I've described to you in Exeter Hall and the criticism

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Spurgeon got in newspapers and all that was within the first decade of his ministry in London, the drift of London society towards more and more highbrow academic ideas and less and less religion, more and more secularized material, that continued despite Spurgeon's popularity, despite the thousands who were converted under his ministry, society as a whole continued to dwindle.

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And the rest of the church, or let's say much of the evangelical movement, attempted to follow the drift of culture rather than watching the effectiveness of Spurgeon's ministry and simply doing what they were called to do and doing what he was faithful to do.

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So that at the end of his ministry in the year 1887, he wrote or he published, let's say, an article that was actually written by a friend of his in The Sword and the

35:51

Trowel that unleashed this controversy that lasted for the remainder of his life across four and a half, maybe five years, called the

36:01

Downgrade Controversy. And I wanna just survey that with you and then I'll show you some more things on the overhead and we'll talk about it.

36:08

I have to say that because of time constraints, I feel bad skipping over a number of very important facts and events that played a role in the shaping of who

36:19

Spurgeon was. We barely talked about the Surrey Gardens Music Hall disaster where people were trampled when someone yelled fire in there the first time

36:29

Spurgeon ever preached there. That frankly was a serious trauma for him that almost ended his ministry almost at the outset.

36:38

There was Spurgeon's battle with depression which I know many of you want to hear more about but honestly, there hasn't been much written about it.

36:45

So other than a few things here and there that Spurgeon said about it, it's pretty hard to find material about that.

36:51

His bout with illness, I told you he had gout which is like a surplus of uric acid in your bloodstream and so it causes your joints to swell and hurt and trust me, it's terrible.

37:05

I have it, not as bad as Spurgeon did. And he also had Bright's disease which you can look up and find out for yourself.

37:14

We haven't talked much about his role as a father but just to say what I said,

37:19

I think he was a good father. We haven't talked a lot about his political stance or his wife's health issues.

37:26

These are all things that shaped his mind and mentality and his attitude and then the many institutions that he founded, the pastor's college, the orphanage.

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These institutions still exist today although unlike the tabernacle itself, the pastor's college has drifted.

37:43

I would classify it today as neo -orthodox and fairly strongly charismatic.

37:50

There's the orphanage which now is not called an orphanage, it's a social aid center but it's still called,

37:57

I think Spurgeon's Homes or something like that, still named after him. We haven't talked much about the management of his wealth and fame or really the big thing, the building of the

38:07

Metropolitan Tabernacle and how that all came about. So if I ever do come back, we'll cover all of those things but I want to skip to the end of his life and the story of the controversy that basically ended his life, namely the downgrade controversy which more or less began in 1887 and then continued through the final five years of Spurgeon's life.

38:27

This was merely one final recapitulation of the pounding theme that had reverberated through Spurgeon's life from the time he began his ministry in London until really the day he died.

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And like I said earlier, all of the previous controversies were more or less packed into this one.

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This arose in March of 1887. Spurgeon published the first of two articles, a series of two articles that he published one month in March and then in the following month, what would that be,

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March, April. I have to say it in my head. Two articles that were published anonymously but the actual author was

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Robert Schindler, Spurgeon's close friend, a fellow Baptist pastor.

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Schindler and Spurgeon had talked about the drift of the Baptist Union and how more and more ministers were coming into the

39:28

Baptist Union with questionable ideas and unbiblical ministry philosophies and so that the entire organization was beginning to drift because it had no doctrinal statement and there were really no standards or any sort of accountability that would hold people to a biblical confession of faith and so there was a wide variety of drifting churches and Robert Schindler wrote these articles to sort of chronicle the history of apostasy from the time of the

40:04

Protestant Reformation and down to their time. He wrote the articles with input from Spurgeon.

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Spurgeon footnoted the first article with a personal endorsement. His footnote said, earnest attention is requested for this paper.

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We are going downhill at breakneck speed and that was the name of the downgrade.

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Schindler was saying heresy is like an off -ramp that leads to a downgrade that is so steep and so,

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I don't know, compelling that once you get on it, you can't get off and once you get on the downgrade, you are headed for absolute spiritual disaster and there's almost no way to get off it once you get on and so he was warning against this theological downgrade and proving his point by showing the pattern of church history, how again and again, some of the same errors kept coming up so that in the time of the

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Reformation, the heresy was called Socinianism which was named after its two proponents, a nephew and an uncle who had some very strange anti -Trinitarian ideas and anti -biblical ideas and they were thinking of themselves as part of the

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Protestant Reformation so they were rejecting Catholic ideas and in the end, they ended up pretty much rejecting everything

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Catholic including biblical Catholicity. They rejected almost every conceivable tenet that makes

41:39

Christianity distinctive and wanted to boil religion down to a moral code. Does that sound familiar?

41:46

It's the same as liberalism. It's the same as deism. It's the same as the emergent church view.

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I mean, it is the same heresy that keeps resurfacing and Schindler pointed this out that it was called

41:59

Socinianism but then it was deism. Then it was Unitarianism. Now it's modernism and our

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Baptist churches are absorbing it, he said. And it was a very strong warning.

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He indicted the Baptist Union without naming anyone or pointing out anything specific.

42:20

I think in an attempt to be kind, right? Not to embarrass anybody personally but that became the point that they seized and said to Spurgeon, look, if you're not gonna name names, if you're not gonna point out specific people, then you can't make, these are false charges.

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You need to repent of bearing false witness against the whole Baptist Union. And Spurgeon said, these are issues that are well known.

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It's no need for me to get into personal fights with the individuals who promote them. But even the president of the

42:50

Baptist Union had private conversations with Spurgeon and Spurgeon thought he agreed with him because he had agreed with him privately.

42:58

But in public, he didn't want to acknowledge that there was poisonous doctrine in the

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Baptist Union. And so I'm watching the clock here. I'm gonna shorten this as much as I can. Basically to telescope the whole thing into a very short time, over time, this conflict dragged out and dragged out and they kept accusing

43:17

Spurgeon of making false charges and sounding a false alarm. And in the end, they publicly and ceremoniously passed a censure against him in the

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Baptist Union meeting. And when Spurgeon heard that, he withdrew from the union. And that was the end of the matter as far as the controversy was concerned.

43:40

Spurgeon died a short time later. The Baptist Union went on and continued to dabble in Sassanian ideas.

43:49

History vindicated Spurgeon because modernism, of course, became a force not only in England, but in America as well.

43:58

Modernism infiltrated and poisoned and ultimately killed all of the major mainstream denominations.

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And so history has totally vindicated Spurgeon. There are very few people who look at the downgrade controversy today and say

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Spurgeon is wrong. And my advice is if you find someone who writes about it and says, yeah,

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Spurgeon was wrong, he should have handled it differently, steer away from that person because I think there are people who have an agenda still to argue that it's more important to be cordial and friendly than it is to defend the faith.

44:32

And that was the problem then. And as a result, modernism ran roughshod over the

44:39

Baptist Union in England. Baptist churches in England, for the most part, other than those that are independent of the union,

44:46

Baptist churches in England have been a mixed mess of everything from the rankest kind of Socinianism to charismatic nonsense and all of that.

44:56

The Metropolitan Tabernacle continued to thrive. Even after Spurgeon died, there were a few rocky places where, for example, the first pastor who took the pulpit thereafter,

45:08

Spurgeon, was an American guy who was more of an Arminian. And obviously that unleashed a few problems, but Spurgeon's son then became the pastor.

45:16

And the church has, it's had its rocky points and actually burned down once and been bombed another time, but rebuilt, and it's still a thriving congregation today.

45:28

And I think a powerful symbol of God's faithfulness that stands right there in central

45:34

London. And I think God has blessed Spurgeon and given him the sort of fame and reputation that he has as a symbol of how important that kind of steadfast faithfulness and courage is.

45:49

We all need to emulate it. Now, if you don't mind, I'm gonna work through these

45:55

PowerPoint things because there are some things we've talked about and things I've put up here that I wanted to talk to you about, but I didn't have time to coordinate them all.

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So I just put them all in one PowerPoint thing and I'll talk you through this. These are some random facts and figures.

46:12

I love this quote from Spurgeon on Romans 7. Romans 7, you know, is one of the contested places in the

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New Testament. Is this Paul writing about his experience as a Christian or is he talking about his experience prior to his salvation?

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Spurgeon takes the right view on this and says, no, this is the apostle

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Paul as a mature apostle describing what the conflict with sin feels like, and Spurgeon acknowledged, we all feel this.

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This is the common experience of all Christians. Now he says, humble Christians often are the dupes of a very foolish error.

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They look up to certain advanced saints and able ministers and they say, surely such men as these do not suffer as I do.

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They don't contend with the same evil passions which vex and trouble me. If they knew the hearts of those men, if they could read their inward conflicts, they would soon discover that the nearer a man lives to God, the more intensely he has to mourn over his own evil heart and the more his master honors him in his service, the more also doth the evil of the flesh vex and tease him day by day.

47:20

That is actually not talking specifically about Romans 7 here. This was in a context of a message he gave on that text, but that I think is one of the best comments

47:31

I've ever heard on the question of whether Romans 7 describes a Christian or not. Okay, just a few amazing facts.

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By the way, this is a photograph of Spurgeon that's my favorite and it was black and white so I colorized it.

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So I added all the color there. If you want a copy of that that's printable in eight by 10 and frameable, email me and I'll send it to you.

47:56

This is the tomb of John Bunyan. It's in Bunhill Fields and because Spurgeon loved

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Bunyan so much and Pilgrim's Progress, when Bunyan's original tomb had fallen into such disrepair during the

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Victorian era, they took up a offering to rebuild the tomb and this is the rebuilt tomb.

48:17

Spurgeon preached at this tomb at the inauguration of it, the unveiling of it.

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And the message that is available online is the most interesting message.

48:30

But Bunyan, in answer to one of the questions that was asked earlier, Bunyan was one of his favorite historical characters.

48:38

This is what the Metropolitan Tabernacle looks like today. I hope I have a picture of it from Spurgeon's era but those are the same columns and the same portico and some of the same windows, although some of those windows have been added and it's been a little bit widened but it's the same basic look, this white stone in a

48:59

Greek look and it was unusual in those days to have a church built on Greek architecture rather than standard sort of church with a steeple kind of thing.

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But Spurgeon said, look, most of the New Testament is written in Greek so I wanna build the church with a Greek style.

49:16

The original plans for it called for these four towers on the corners of it but thankfully they didn't put those up.

49:24

I've seen a drawing of what it was supposed to look like and it didn't look as good as this looks. We sort of imitated it when we built the

49:33

Grace to You office. We put a portico like that on the front of it sort of in homage to Spurgeon.

49:40

That's just another view of it. Those signs give an emboldened version of the gospel message to bypassers.

49:51

This was Spurgeon preaching in it. Remember I told you that a pulpit is an area with a rail around it.

49:57

That's what it looked like and the thing that he held his notes and Bible on, he called, he referred to it as the sacred desk.

50:05

It's more of a desk than it is a lectern and the desk he used towards the end of his life still exists.

50:13

It's in the pastor's office there at the Metropolitan Tabernacle. But this is what, this is a drawing of what

50:20

Spurgeon looked like when he was preaching. This is his office at home. I love that it's messy.

50:28

I love that all his books aren't properly shelved because my office looks pretty much like that, maybe a little more messy.

50:37

This is a drawing from a photograph, different angle, and that is Spurgeon with his secretary

50:44

Joseph Harold as they're working on material at that big table. I just, I love again how crowded with stuff this is.

50:55

Here's a photograph of the actual room, the study at Westwood where the sermons were prepared, where the proofs were usually corrected.

51:04

The previous picture where he's there with Harold, they were going over a sermon on Monday morning and making corrections.

51:11

And I want you to notice the life -size bust up there. That is a bust of Spurgeon himself.

51:19

And there's an interesting story behind it. He made that, or he had it made. Someone made it, requested him to do it when he was fairly young.

51:28

And it is not just a carving of what he looked like. It was a life mask.

51:34

In other words, they covered his face with clay, let it dry, and then poured plaster or something to make this bust.

51:44

And in order to do that, they had to stick two straws up his nose so he could breathe. And he hated it.

51:50

And he said he would never do it again. In fact, there's the bust. Today, it's just outside the pastor's office at the

52:00

Metropolitan Tabernacle. I keep telling you, he's not an attractive man. This was before he had a beard.

52:08

Otherwise, the clay would have stuck in it. Again, he said he would never do anything like that again.

52:16

He didn't. And again, I told you, he's not a particularly handsome man. This is the earliest known portrait of him.

52:27

So this would be from a photograph that was taken of him. I think the original photograph is lost, but you get the idea of what he looked like when he came to be the pastor in London.

52:39

He looks like a little boy because he basically was. We talked about his smoking.

52:45

This is what they call a tobacco card. It was like a baseball card, collectible.

52:51

They featured different people on the tobacco cards. And this is the front and the back of a card that was made by Players Cigarettes, a collectible card of Spurgeon.

53:05

It has this quote on him where he says, when I have found intense pain relieved and a weary brain soothed and calm, refreshing sleep obtained by a cigar,

53:14

I have felt grateful to God and have blessed his name. John Player and Sons Limited Castle Tobacco Factory.

53:21

Occasionally, you'll hear stories from people who say, Spurgeon saw an ad like this in a shop window and was so ashamed that tobacco companies were using his image that he quit smoking.

53:31

He didn't quit smoking. And we have time, we'll talk about that later. I have a whole webpage devoted to Spurgeon's smoking and his cigar.

53:40

I actually have a picture there that was sent to me by his great grandson of his cigar case and a half -smoked cigar that he was smoking when he died.

53:50

So we'll show it to you later if we get a chance. These are just pictures of Spurgeon in his favorite pose.

53:59

He loved to, he would pose like that. If you ask him to act like you're preaching so we can take a photograph, he'd stick that finger in the air.

54:08

So I think it's kind of clever. And that's a more formal photograph

54:16

See, I thought there'd be a date on it, but I don't remember.

54:21

This would have to be, though, within the first two or three years of his ministry in London. They made these cards.

54:28

Again, these aren't really collectibles. These were more like postcards. You'd buy them and you could write on the back and send them to people or whatever.

54:37

This is a series of illustrations that show Spurgeon as he aged.

54:42

The first one, he was 21 years old. The second one, he's 30 years old. He, see, gained weight. I relate to him on that as well.

54:51

The next one, age 36. He grew his beard somewhere between 30 and 36. And then age 54, he is clearly an old man.

55:00

That may be my last. Oh, no. This is Spurgeon with his publisher,

55:08

Joseph Passmore. This is an actual photograph. Passmore and Alabaster were the names of the two men who actually got the idea to publish

55:19

Spurgeon's sermons. And that, because of the wild success of his sermons,

55:25

Passmore and Alabaster grew into one of the most important publishing companies in Britain.

55:31

And this is a picture of both Passmore and Alabaster. I'm not sure which one is which.

55:37

But the guy on the far right here is Spurgeon. He doesn't look himself there too much.

55:44

That's the only picture I've seen where his hair is kind of parted in the middle like that. But that is a typical pose for Spurgeon.

55:51

He would rest with his hand like that. You'll see a lot of portraits with him like that. This is what he looked like preaching at Exeter Hall.

55:59

So from the description I gave you, you get it, that there's this massive choir loft that seated

56:05

I don't know how many people. The bay down in the front that it said, the description I read said it seats 500 people.

56:12

And then the auditorium goes all the way back, thousands more, and then the big organ in the middle.

56:19

And there's Spurgeon. I've kind of made him a different color so he stands out with his finger in the air preaching a sermon.

56:28

And you can see just from the scope of that audience how difficult it would be to hear him speak.

56:34

I don't see a soundboard there either. So I don't know, but he had to make his voice heard throughout that room.

56:41

That would be an exhausting thing to do. This is one of the cartoons that was published of him.

56:50

This is a more friendly one. It's not an unfriendly one, but it makes him look a little silly. The idea here was

56:57

Catchemalivo, that was a brand name for flypaper.

57:03

So he's wearing a hat made of flypaper catching lost souls. So that was how the newspaper saw him, as an evangelistic preacher who just, you know, caught lost souls like flypaper.

57:18

Then this was a cartoon he actually liked. It was titled Brimstone and Treacle.

57:24

Brimstone and Treacle, I think didn't Sting do a movie by that title a few years ago or something?

57:30

Anyway, Brimstone and Treacle is a brand name for some medicine that you took for,

57:37

I don't know, digestive problems or something. Brimstone and Treacle. Brimstone is sulfur and treacle is like sugary syrup.

57:46

So it was a mixture of sulfur with sugary syrup that you would drink for coughing or whatever.

57:53

I should have had some today. And so they took the idea of Brimstone and Treacle and Spurgeon is the one preaching

58:01

Brimstone and the Anglican guy is just giving out treacle, the sugary, nasty stuff.

58:09

Spurgeon liked this comparison, by the way. He thought, fine, I'll preach Brimstone and it's better than the treacle.

58:17

And then this was a cartoon that, again, contrasted Spurgeon, the young guy on the steam engine with the old style pastor asleep on a coach, traveling slowly.

58:35

And Spurgeon also liked this one. The Anglican pastor on the right casts the shadow of an old woman and his shadow is supposed to look like a lion.

58:45

So it's the young lion of the pulpit, the funny old woman of the pulpit. Again, these were complimentary or more or less complimentary cartoons, making

58:53

Spurgeon out to be at least more profitable than the insipid preaching of the

58:59

Anglican church. That's a picture of Spurgeon and his wife for their wedding.

59:06

She looks attractive, he looks kind of dumb. I mean, if that's all you ever saw of him, you'd think, he's kind of dopey looking.

59:17

But there are more pictures of them. They're all grainy like this, which is too bad. But they took regular photographs in their garden with him gazing at her.

59:27

I think that's cute. He's always gazing at her like this. That is the

59:32

Surrey Garden Music Hall. That's an artist's rendering of it. It doesn't exist anymore, but that is where this building full of 10 ,000 people, someone shouted fire.

59:43

You can imagine what a disaster that was. And the newspapers wrote about it for weeks, really, and lots of them blamed

59:51

Spurgeon. They said it was his fault, because if he wasn't so conceited and narcissistic as to want to preach to crowds of 10 ,000, then this wouldn't have never happened.

01:00:04

So he bore that criticism, and it added to his depression. This is the interior of the

01:00:11

Surrey Garden Music Hall. So again, you just imagine, if you've got people stationed four or five places around yelling all at once, fire, the galleries are falling, it would definitely create a panic.

01:00:26

It's amazing to me that he ever went back there to preach again, but he did. This is the poem

01:00:32

I already read to you from the rivulet. Our heart is like a little pool left by the ebbing sea.

01:00:39

This is verse two, which I didn't read. And see what verdure exquisite within it hidden grows.

01:00:46

We never should have had the sight, but for this brief repose. So again, it's all about meditating and being quiet, but there's no substance to it.

01:00:56

There's nothing distinctively Christian about this, and this was some of the criticism aimed at the rivulet that a

01:01:03

Buddhist would love this hymn, maybe more than a Christian would. Okay, I didn't read this part.

01:01:13

This was Spurgeon's comment on the rivulet. There's scarcely an old woman in our churches who would not imitate that ancient dame in Scotland who hurled her stool at the minister's head should any of us venture to mount our pulpits and exclaim, let us commence the present service by singing the 34th hymn of the rivulet.

01:01:30

And then he quotes one of the hymns. The thing he's talking about there is there was a woman named Jenny Geddes in John Knox's time in Scotland who out of anger at the popish sermon that was being preached from,

01:01:47

I think it was in St. Giles Cathedral in Edinburgh, she had a little three -legged stool that she was sitting on to listen to the sermon, and she was so angry that she picked up the stool and threw it at the preacher.

01:02:00

And it was a famous moment in Reformation history. It really helped to mobilize

01:02:05

Scotland against this sort of insipid preaching. And Doug Wilson, who some of you know, named his music group something about Jenny Geddes.

01:02:20

I forget what it is. Jenny Geddes Band or something. The Jenny Geddes Band. So look her up, though.

01:02:25

She's an interesting character, an old woman. Jenny Geddes, G -E -D -D -E -S. Spurgeon is referring to her here and saying if anybody had wanted to sing out of the rivulet, she would have heaved her stool at them.

01:02:45

I don't know what this is. But this would have been early in Spurgeon's time in London, probably the third year, maybe fourth year that he was in London, where he says, we live in very singular times now.

01:03:00

The professing church has been flattering itself, notwithstanding all our divisions with regard to doctrine. We were all right in the main.

01:03:07

In other words, we're okay, there's nothing bad. A false and spurious liberality has been growing up, which has covered us all, so that we have dreamed that all who bore the name of ministers were indeed

01:03:18

God's servants, that all who occupied pulpits, whatever denomination they might be, were entitled to our respect as being the stewards of the mystery of Christ.

01:03:27

But lately, the weeds upon the surface of the stagnant pool have been a little stirred, and we've been enabled to look down into the depths.

01:03:35

This is a day of strife, a day of division, a time of war and fighting between professing Christians.

01:03:41

God be thanked for it. Far better that it should be so than that the false calm shall any longer exert its fatal spell over us.

01:03:49

Again, I think I put this in there because it demonstrates early in Spurgeon's ministry, he had the same resolve, the same willingness to fight, the same sense that, look, fighting for sound doctrine is more important than trying to keep the peace in the midst of heresy.

01:04:06

And he said so in no uncertain terms before he ever got to be the age 25, even.

01:04:14

All right, we're gonna talk about Joseph Parker in the next session. Just so you get the idea, this is the church where he preached, just so you know.

01:04:23

It was the second, he was the second most famous preacher in London. This was the second most largest congregation.

01:04:31

It's maybe two miles from Spurgeon's Tabernacle. It's on the north side in the theater district, which is important when you hear about Joseph Parker.

01:04:39

We'll get to that later, but just so you have that idea in your mind, that's where Joseph Parker preached. And I'll stop with that.

01:04:46

Am I way over time? Okay. All right, and we'll be back here in 10 minutes.