Charles Haddon Spurgeon, the Pastors’ College and the Downgrade Controversy

Extract

Charles Haddon Spurgeon (1834–92) began his pastoral ministry in a village Baptist chapel in Cambridgeshire but became a national voice in Victorian England through his ministry in London. The huge crowds his preaching attracted necessitated the building of the Metropolitan Tabernacle, at the Elephant and Castle, which accommodated over 5,000 people. ‘By common consent’, says David Bebbington, Spurgeon was ‘the greatest English-speaking preacher of the century’. Spurgeon, like other nineteenth-century ecclesiastical figures, was involved in theological controversies, including the ‘Downgrade Controversy’, in which, in typically robust style, he attacked theological liberalism. In August 1887, he trumpeted: ‘The Atonement is scouted, the inspiration of Scripture derided, the Holy Spirit degraded into an influence, the punishment of sin turned into a fiction, and the resurrection into a myth …’ The Downgrade controversy has not attracted nearly as much attention as debates provoked in the nineteenth century by Essays and Reviews (1860) and Lux Mundi (1889), perhaps because the latter affected Anglicanism rather than the Free Churches. But since as many people were attending Free Churches as Anglican churches, the issues raised in the Downgrade, as the most serious nineteenth-century Free Church dispute, are of considerable significance.