A Word from Thielicke on Spurgeon

CJ Mahaney is a pal, but I've always had two problems with his ministry: First, he thinks basketball players are the greatest athletes.  As I told him this morning, I won't reply to that, for, as the Bible says, never answer a fool according to his folly.

Second, he think Spurgeon's sermons are great.  I debated this point with hime arly in the year.  Yes, CHS must have been a great preacher, but I find his written sermons hopeless -- the right doctrine invariably injected into the wrong text. 

But CJ's response was that the move from Christ to pastoral application in CHS is well worth studying and second to none in Christian tradition.  Dare I say it, I have revised my opinion.  I still think CHS's expositions are fanciful at best; but there is a raw pastoral power to what he does that serves at least as an example of something to emulate.

I was reminded of this last night, when browsing an old book by one of my favourite twentieth century theologian-preachers, Helmut Thielicke.  Thielicke was a Lutheran academic theologian and pastor who came gradually to more evangelical convictions in large part through reading Spurgeon and facing the problem of the vacuous nature of liberal theology when it came to addressing real life-and-death issues in the pastorate.  This was something he knew very much at first-hand.  For example, his sermons to his congregation during the Allied bombing of Hamburg, when every time he preached he knew it was his last chance to speak the gospel to some in his congregation, are peerless.  And yet it was the English baptist autodidact, Spurgeon, who gave this man his real pastoral fire and ammunition.  How?  By the example of his confidence in the simple, straightforward preaching of the Bible on issues of eternal import, and its application to the lives of ordinary men and women, boys and girls.

The book to which I refer is Thielicke's Encounter with Spurgeon, which consists of a lengthy intro by HT and then extracts from Spurgeon's writings and sermons.  Well worth reading though I suspect now only available second-hand.

So CJ, while I still think basketball is a travesty of a sport, I will concede the greatness of Spurgeon.  And I leave the last word to Thielicke:

`Our faithfulness to the fathers of the faith does not consist in our copying them but in our comprehending them.  And the communion of saints does not consist in the fact that all of us say the same thing in the same words, but rather that we all drink from the same spring.  notable among those who have also stood watch by this spring is Spurgeon....Sell all that you have (not least of all some of your stock of current sermonic literature) and buy Spurgeon.'