Spurgeon and the Baptists

In the late nineteenth century, the celebrated pastor and preacher C.H. Spurgeon (1834-1892) was involved in the so-called Down Grade Controversy, in which he and a few like-minded Christians protested against the erosion of evangelical orthodoxy among British Baptists. Spurgeon opposed the leaders of the Baptist Union, and eventually he felt obliged to withdraw from the Union (in October 1887). A few months later, the Union passed a vote of censure against Spurgeon.

Some might see the whole controversy as water under the bridge, something not worth studying or even discussing. But similar things are happening today within Christian evangelicalism and on its borders.

During the controversy, Spurgeon summed up the views of his opponents as follows:

1. Denial of the verbal inspiration (that is, inerrancy) of Scripture.

2. Denial of eternal punishment and the affirmation of universalism.

3. Denial of the Trinity, mainly in terms of the rejection of the personality of the Holy Spirit.

4. A tendency to undermine the deity of Christ and original sin.

5. Denial that Christ's atonement has a substitutionary and propitiatory character.

6. Denial of the historicity of the Genesis creation account in favor of evolution.

7. The unhealthy influence of Higher Criticism on Biblical scholarship, particularly as it relates to the Old Testament.

Many of these issues are still actively debated today.

Here (in the form of an Acrobat/PDF document) is an interesting account of the Down Grade Controversy by Dennis M. Swanson.