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Charles Spurgeon thought through his theology for himself. Taking over ideas he had not sifted and mastered was foreign to him. When Spurgeon reached unconventional conclusions, he did not shrink from implementing them, even when this was quite difficult.

Baptists had a long tradition of ordaining ministers, for example, but Spurgeon managed to get his church to omit this step—he never was ordained. He campaigned arduously to do without the customary title, Reverend, and he eventually succeeded in replacing it with Pastor.

Spurgeon considered his objections to ordination and the title Reverend as being scripturally based, a constant feature of his theology. As he put it, “I like to read my Bible so as never to have to blink when I approach a text. I like to have a theology which enables me to read [the Bible] right through from beginning to end, and to say, ‘I am as pleased with that text as I am with the other.’ ”

Next, Spurgeon’s theology was all the more radically biblical for being unsystematic. In the late 1850s he tried to dovetail biblical teaching on human responsibility with his doctrine of election. By 1860 he became convinced it couldn’t be done; something had to yield. Since both doctrines were woven into the fabric of his Bible, however, Spurgeon decided to not sacrifice either. Instead, he sacrificed the possibility of a thoroughly systematic theology.

Spurgeon expressed his approach in a forthright introduction to a sermon on election (no. 303):

“It has been my earnest endeavor ever since I have preached the Word, never to keep back a single doctrine which I believe to be taught of God. It is time that we had done with the old and rusty systems that have so long curbed the freeness of religious speech. The Arminian trembles to go an inch beyond Arminius or Wesley, and many a Calvinist refers to John Gill or John Calvin as any ultimate authority. It is time that the systems were broken up, and that there was sufficient grace in all our hearts to believe everything taught in God’s Word, whether it was taught by either of these men or not.… If God teaches it, it is enough. If it is not in the Word, away with it! Away with it! But if it be in the Word, agreeable or disagreeable, systematic or disorderly, I believe it.”

This was not a momentary conviction. Some years later Spurgeon said, “Angels may, perhaps, be systematic divines; for men it should be enough to follow the Word of God, let its teachings wind as they may.”

Finally, the basic, organizing principle of Spurgeon’s theology was not rational but spiritual. Some of his early published sermons, including Number 1 on the immutability of God, show a philosophical approach. But this disappeared by 1860 (along with his attempts to systematize his theology), leaving the field free for his profound spiritual experience to find deeper expression.

William Robertson Nicoll, an influential Nonconformist newspaper editor who knew Spurgeon’s sermons about as well as anyone, perceptively bracketed Spurgeon with John Bunyan as the two greatest evangelical mystics. Many of the finest passages in Spurgeon’s sermons draw on spiritual exploration into God’s mysteries that his theological mind was unable to map. Robertson Nicoll quoted a memorable example from an 1886 sermon on “The Three Hours’ Darkness”:

“This darkness tells us that the Passion is a great mystery into which we cannot pry. I try to explain it as a substitution, and I feel that where the language of Scripture is explicit, I may and must be explicit too. But yet I feel that the idea of substitution does not cover the whole of the matter, and that no human conception can completely grasp the whole of the dread mystery. It was wrought in darkness because the full, far-reaching meaning and result cannot be beheld of finite mind.

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