Spurgeon, Charles Haddon
SPURGEON, CHARLES HADDON (1834–1892), was an English Baptist popularly known as "the prince of preachers." The son and grandson of Congregationalist pastors, Spurgeon was converted in 1850 at a Primitive Methodist chapel and joined a Baptist church in 1851. At age sixteen, circumstances compelled him to preach unprepared in a cottage near Cambridge, England. Word of his oratorical skill and evangelical fervor spread. He was called to pastorates at Waterbeach (1852) and at New Park Street Chapel in London (1854). His preaching attracted such large crowds that it was necessary to rent public accommodations seating up to ten thousand people. In 1861 the Metropolitan Tabernacle was completed in London, and there Spurgeon ministered until his death. By age twenty-two he had become the most popular preacher of his day. He established several institutions, including orphanages and a pastors' college, the latter being the matrix for the founding of numerous churches and Sunday schools.
Although throughout his career Spurgeon preached to large audiences, his greatest immediate influence was through his weekly published sermons, numbering 3,561, which are estimated to have had more than a million regular readers. These sermons eventually amounted to sixty-three volumes, entitled New Park Street Pulpit (1855–1860) and Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit (1861–1917). By 1899 more than a hundred million copies of his sermons had been printed in twenty-three languages. Among his many works was the seven-volume The Treasury of David, a commentary on Psalms. He also edited a monthly magazine, The Sword and the Trowel, for twenty-seven years.
Spurgeon's preaching was massive in scope and narrow in doctrine. Staunchly Calvinistic, he was called by some "the last of the Puritans." From his earliest ministry until his death, he consistently maintained the gospel of grace without deference to increasingly influential high-church and liberal teachings. In 1864 his sermon against "baptismal regeneration" excited a hearty controversy that resulted in his withdrawing from the Evangelical Alliance. During the last decade of his life, Spurgeon fought against what he called the "downgrade movement," that is, the rise of higher criticism, liberalism, and rationalism within Baptist circles in England. So firmly were such views entrenched there that he withdrew from the Baptist Union in 1887, remaining independent but a Baptist until his death. Although he never sought controversy, he never shied from it. In his own words, "Controversy for the truth against the errors of the age is … the peculiar duty of the preacher."
Within the confines of a thoroughly evangelistic Calvinism, Spurgeon's works include such an enormous variety of topics congenial to the mainstream of orthodoxy that his writings, especially his sermons, have been valued by Christians of diverse creeds. While his influence, particularly in evangelical circles, continued through the first half of the twentieth century, in the 1960s interest in Spurgeon began to grow. All sixty-three volumes of his sermons have been reprinted, and more than 150 of his other writings are in print.
Bibliography
Spurgeon's Autobiography, Compiled from His Diary, Letters, and Records by His Wife, and His Private Secretary, 4 vols. (London, 1897–1900), has long been out of print. An abridged and supplemented edition has appeared in two volumes: vol. 1, The Early Years, 1834–1859 (London, 1962), and vol. 2, The Full Harvest, 1860–1892 (Edinburgh, 1973). The standard biography is G. H. Pike's The Life and Work of Charles Haddon Spurgeon, 6 vols. (London, 1894). For an appreciation of Spurgeon by a noted German theologian, see Helmut Thielicke's Encounter with Spurgeon (Philadelphia, 1963).
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