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“I want to be frank with you, Mr. Moody,” one of his listeners once told him. “I want you to know that I do not believe in your theology.”

“My theology!” Moody exclaimed. “I didn’t know that I had any. I wish you would tell me what my theology is.”

Was Moody serious? Did he not have a theology?

Obviously, D.L. Moody was not a professional theologian, not even an ordained minister. He was a lay evangelist who preferred to be called, simply, Mr. Moody. But he was quite aware that theology was implicit in his preaching. While Moody tended to sit loose to the finer details of theological debate, he had no doubt that what one believed was important.

Near the end of his life Moody told a reporter for the Detroit Journal, “Some people in Minneapolis the other day declared that Moody’s theology is thirty years old. Well, if I was sure it wasn’t six thousand years old, I’d pitch it into the Mississippi. I believe that sin is the same today as then and that its remedy is the same. I’m an Abelite. If I could go back behind Abel for my theology, I’d do it, but I can’t.”

Moody had no formal theological training and only the doubtful equivalent of a fourth- or fifth-grade education. Although he said he read the works of the great Baptist preacher Charles Haddon Spurgeon, Moody did not read widely. What he learned from others he learned in conversation. Moody would typically ask ministers for their best thought for the day or ply them with questions about the Bible and doctrine. On one such occasion, Henry Moorhouse, the well-known British Bible teacher known as the Boy Preacher, advised, “If you will stop preaching your own words and preach God’s Word, he will make you a power for good.”

From that point on, Moody determined to be a preacher of the Word. He avidly read the Bible and mastered its factual content. Many of his sermons consisted of the biblical narratives retold in the vernacular of the common people who attended his meetings. The key themes of his sermons were the themes he found in the Bible. If it was not in the Bible, it was not worth believing. But if it was in the Bible, there could be no question about believing it.

When preaching on heaven, for example, Moody introduced his sermon with a question. “On this important matter how are we to gain reliable in formation? Simply by Scripture. Here then is our guidebook, our textbook—the Word. If I utter a syllable that is not justified by the Scriptures, don’t believe me. The Bible is the only rule. Walk by it and it alone.”

Reflecting at least an awareness of developing liberalism in the churches, he warned of any minister who used a “penknife on the Bible, clipping out this and that part because it contains the supernatural or something he cannot understand.” Moody had no use for the so-called higher criticism of the Bible. He told a reporter, “You want to know what I think of the effect of higher criticism upon the Bible and upon Christians? Frankly, I don’t know anything about the higher critics of late. I haven’t seen ’em. I’ve been six months in the wilderness of Judea calling upon people to repent.” Moody had no patience with anything that would undercut the source of Christian belief—the Bible—because that source contains the very heart of Christian belief—the gospel.

Three great Bible truths were central to all of Moody’s preaching. W. H. Daniels, compiler of a book of Moody’s sermons, reported that Moody customarily spoke on the “three Rs” of the Bible and that his evangelistic campaigns were structured around these. Indeed, so far as Daniels could see, Moody did not engage in theological speculation beyond the three doctrines.

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