Some years ago in a favourite antique shop I found this bust of Spurgeon. It is an original Victorian piece by John Adams Acton, dated 1878, when Spurgeon was at the zenith of his powers as a preacher, Nonconformist leader, and staunch defender of Reformed Calvinistic orthodoxy. I've never doubted either the genius or the incendiary spirituality of the most popular preacher in an age of celebrity preachers. His sermons still read as inspired and inspiring ruminations on the biblival texts. His love of the Bible and his total immersion in the text make him an exemplary Baptist. He spoke of soaking in the text as in the bath, until his body, deep dyed in the words of the Word, became bibline.
He sits there on my church history bookshelves as a reminder of the importance of preaching, the centrality of the biblical text, and also as a reminder of the Gospel as centred in the person of Jesus. Yes, I know Spurgeon was a thorough-going Calvinist, and that to him Arminian theology was like a high pollen count to hay fever victims. But when he expostulated on Jesus, (no other word really captures the lyrical, emotional, imaginative flights of his Gospel storytelling), he spoke of One who was quite simply his friend and Saviour, a crucified Lord and risen Companion, One in whom love and sacrifice gladly offered, pulls the rug from every pretention and excuse.
If speculation has any value, I'd speculate about what Spurgeon would now make of the way Jesus is preached today. He might even ask IF Jesus is preached today in any way that would make Jesus accessible, attractive, demanding, unignorable in the magical mystery melee of post-modern, post-Christian, post most things culture. Because Spurgeon knew how to connect with his own culturasl context. The sentiment and emotional appeal, the theatrical performances of extempore preaching, and the reasoned apologetic for a Saviour in an age where private guilt and public shame were powerful undertows, instilled in Spurgeon's preaching a magnetic core, pulling on the cultural longings of Victorian society.
Spurgeon was a man of his age, that's what made him a great preacher and a great man. But by the time he died the world had changed, and the theological climate was altogether more Acrtic for a theology more declarative than interrogative. He had been faithful in his time, as he saw it, and as he understood faithfulness to the Gospel and to Jesus. Even in his own lifetime he was becoming a man rooted in the past, drawing inspiration and strength from his beloved Puritans and Calvin.
His bust sits there, safely placed amongst my books on Puritanism, well away from modern authors and new theological thought forms that would seriously upset him. I think he would deplore hermeneutics; too much like evasion, dissimulation and intellectual mind games with the text! That wouldn't make him right, but it does point to a serious reminder for those of us charged with responsible biblical interpretation for and in our own age. To be faithful to truth doesn't mean a mind made up and closed to all further traffic; it does mean knowing where I stand, and why, and enough humility to confess my knowledge is partial, my judgements provisional, and my task of hearing and obeying the living Word of God a continuing discipline of listening. I treasure the words of another Evangelical statesman, John Stott:
"Life is a pilgrimage of learning, a voyage of discovery, in which our mistaken views are corrected, our distorted notions adjusted, our shallow opinions deepened, and some of our vast ignorance diminished. (Christian Mission and the Modern World, page 10)
Dialogue and humility, intellectual honesty and theological integrity, faithfulness to a tradition and refusal to close the mind to new and better ways of understanding and seeking truth – these are the characteristics of what that other old Victorian evangelical, Alexander Whyte, affirmed as the required stance of the hospitable hearted Evangelical. And it means this. If I live under an imperative to handle the Bible with reverence, respect and humility before God, then before God I am also required to follow where truth leads, to handle holy things with care, and therefore to tell my own presuppositions to quieten down so that the text can be heard above the din of my own opinions, conclusions, or even, God give grace, my certainties. Perhaps the most we can claim with certainty is that over a lifetime, by that same gentle, corrective grace of God, some of our vast ignorance is being diminished!
So Spurgeon looks across at my desk, from behind my shoulder. I honour both his memory and his work. He being dead yet speaketh as one of a great cloud of witnesses who give testimony to the power of the Bible to transform and convert, to sanctify and make new, to lift up heads and give strength to those who struggle and restore hope in those whose lives seem empty of life itself.
"God veiled the cross in darkness, and in darkness much of its deep meaning lies, not because God would not reveal it, but because we have not the capacity to discern it all..God only knows the love of God."
I love someone who can preach like that!
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