The beauty of Charles Spurgeon

I’ll admit it: until I picked up this book of Charles Spurgeon’s early sermon notes, I didn’t know much about the evangelical preacher other than that he was . . . well, an evangelical preacher. I’m okay with preachers, but the term evangelical has some recent baggage that’s hard for me to shake off. “I’m not that kind of Christian,” I find myself saying repeatedly. At the same time, I take seriously the warning my pastor offered in a recent sermon: Autocracy thrives on groups of people defining themselves against one another.

So I laid aside my presuppositions about Spurgeon (and evangelicals) and picked up this book of his sermon outlines from 1851 to 1854, which were discovered in 2011 and are now in print for the first time. I was immediately struck by the book’s weight and beauty. The pages are thick and glossy. Spurgeon fans and scholars will appreciate the clear full-color facsimiles of journal pages, color-coded typed versions of the text, and copious footnotes commenting on everything from variations in handwriting to smudges on the page. This volume, compiled and edited by theologian Christian T. George, is the first of 12. I found myself daydreaming about how beautiful the entire set would look on a pastor’s desk or a scholar’s shelf.

The book is also theologically solid. Most of the pages contain outlines rather than full sermons, but these outlines and George’s accompanying notes demonstrate that theological solidity can rest upon a foundation of fragments and short phrases. On 1 John 3:1, Spurgeon describes humans as “Insignificant. Worthless. Rebellious. Depraved.” He then describes God’s conferring of love: “By Jesus Christ’s death. Here is wonder.” Elaborating the doctrine of election in a sermon on Ephesians 1:4, Spurgeon writes these notes under the heading “Election is eternal and absolute”: