ACTS BIBLE
The Remnant Church, Since Acts — class 10 of 13 · C. H. Spurgeon, A Defense of Calvinism
The eighteenth-century awakenings had pressed a question on church members: have you been born again? Jonathan Edwards and George Whitefield preached a salvation that God gives, rather than a religious standing inherited from family or country.1
During the nineteenth century, railways, steamships, expanding cities, and mass printing changed how people worked and how ideas traveled.2 Missionaries used those means to carry Scripture across languages and oceans. The same presses carried disputes about the new birth, Christ's death, and the authority of the Bible.3456
The question was more than whether Christianity would spread. What would people hear under Christ's name? A sinner's need has not changed with the means of communication. Sin requires forgiveness, and the dead need life. Christ lived the perfect life sinners could not live, died for their sins, and rose again. Salvation is God's work from start to finish; those who receive it have reason to speak of Him.
Adoniram Judson finished translating the Bible into Burmese in 1834. Charles Finney published his revival lectures in 1835, arguing that revival followed the right use of means. Hudson Taylor founded the China Inland Mission in 1865 to reach inland China.347
Horace Bushnell's The Vicarious Sacrifice appeared in 1866. He explained Christ's saving work through the moral power of self-giving love. A. A. Hodge and B. B. Warfield answered disputes over biblical inspiration in 1881. In 1887 Spurgeon withdrew from the Baptist Union during the controversy called the Downgrade.568
Those dates place missionary expansion beside disagreement about the message being preached. Finney, Bushnell, and the biblical critics did not make one identical claim. One dispute concerned the source of new life, another the work of the cross, and another the authority of Scripture.
Jesus commanded His disciples to make disciples of all nations, baptizing them and teaching them to obey His commands (Matthew 28:18-20). William Carey's Enquiry of 1792 argued that Christians remained responsible to use means for this work. Judson's translation and Taylor's inland mission belonged to the growth of Protestant missions that followed.937
The people receiving the message also became teachers and leaders. Samuel Ajayi Crowther, an African Anglican bishop, described the Niger Mission in his 1872 report. Its introduction identifies African teachers, catechists, deacons, and priests under an African bishop. Crowther describes support for schoolmasters, local-language work, and the mission at Bonny, begun in 1865.10 African Christians were doing the work, not merely appearing in European accounts as converts.
Missionaries and their churches differed over baptism, church government, and the doctrines of grace. Their work cannot all be described as the export of Spurgeon's theology. Translation, teaching, and the planting of congregations need to be examined in their own settings.11
Deuteronomy 7:6-9 addresses Israel's election (God's deliberate choice of who will be saved (class 2 unpacks the word)) and God's covenant faithfulness. Israel's size did not explain His love. The passage does not make a mission society another Israel; it removes grounds for boasting in the chosen people's strength. The command to carry the gospel to the nations comes from Christ in Matthew 28.
Missions often traveled within the reach of European trade and political power. The introduction to Crowther's report names trading ships, British gunboats, and a British consul who supported both commerce and the mission. It also records negotiations with King Masaba, whose protection the settlement sought.10 Missionary work took place among rulers, traders, and local communities with purposes of their own.
The gospel gives no permission to compel conversion or treat neighbors as expendable. Every person bears God's image (Genesis 1:26-27); love of neighbor binds the missionary too. Good teaching does not excuse abuse, and condemning abuse does not require denying that people heard and believed the gospel.
Crowther's report also prevents the opposite simplification: African Christians were directing mission work and teaching their neighbors. Their agency disappears when the whole movement is reduced to European control.10 Neither missionary success nor imperial entanglement settles the truth of a doctrine. Particular actions must be judged, the people harmed must be heard, and the message must be tested by Scripture.
Can a church expect revival if it uses the right methods? Finney's Lectures on Revivals of Religion made that expectation central in 1835. He urged churches to act rather than wait, and treated revival as the result of rightly used means. His account of regeneration located the new birth in a sinner's change of ultimate choice.412
Preaching, prayer, and an urgent invitation to believe are commanded responsibilities. The dispute concerns what gives a sinner life. Persuasion can address the mind and a meeting can gather people; neither can make the Spirit's work a result the organizer controls. Jesus describes the new birth as the work of the Spirit (John 3:3-8). Paul describes sinners made alive by grace (Ephesians 2:1-10).
A person walking forward or speaking a prayer has made an outward response. That action alone does not establish what the person believes about salvation, nor does a count of responses establish new birth. The question is whether trust rests in Christ or in a decision treated as the ground of acceptance.
Spurgeon placed the cause of his salvation in God's will. In A Defence of Calvinism, he wrote:13
“I cannot understand the reason why I am saved, except upon the ground that God would have it so.”13
The sentence comes from the opening paragraph after the chapter's epigraph, in chapter XVI of his Autobiography, volume I.13 The doctrinal claim concerns God's choice, not the virtue of a label.
“All that the Father giveth me shall come to me” (John 6:37). The same verse promises that Christ will not cast out the one who comes. God's giving and the sinner's coming belong together. Romans 8:1-11 places freedom from condemnation in Christ and life in the Spirit. Assurance rests in His work, not in the strength of a remembered experience.
What reason does Spurgeon give for his salvation, and how does that agree with John 6:37? Scripture, rather than his reputation, must establish whether his claim is true.
How can the suffering of an innocent person put another person's guilt right? Bushnell objected to accounts of the cross that made punishment transferable. In The Vicarious Sacrifice (1866), he presented Christ's suffering as the expression of love that enters another's need and changes the sinner.5 The cross remained central to his argument; what changed was the account of what it accomplished.
Christ's love does move people. The question is whether that effect exhausts His saving work. Isaiah 53:4-12 describes the servant bearing iniquity and being made an offering for sin. Hebrews 10:10-14 connects the believer's standing before God to Christ's accomplished offering. The cross changes hearts because Christ dealt with the guilt that separated sinners from God.
Christ lived the perfect life sinners could not live, bore their sins in His death, and rose again. His death fully paid the debt for sin; nothing remains for the sinner to add. Repentance and faith receive His mercy. They do not finish His obedience or supply the missing part of His sacrifice.
Christians also fought slavery, founded schools, and relieved poverty. The Clapham evangelicals joined reform to their Christian commitments.14 Such work does not by itself indicate doctrinal decline. The error is making moral improvement the substance of salvation, or measuring the truth of preaching by its social usefulness. Love of neighbor is a fruit of faith; it cannot bear the guilt of the neighbor who needs a Savior.
Questions about a biblical book's author, date, and sources are not all the same as denying that God has spoken. In their 1881 article Inspiration, A. A. Hodge and B. B. Warfield allowed inquiry into those matters within the truthfulness of Scripture and the teaching of Christ and the apostles.6
The disagreement concerns the authority governing that inquiry. A method that rules out revelation or miracle before examining testimony has already excluded something the Bible claims. But a proposed date or source theory is not refuted merely because scholars later revise it. Its evidence and assumptions have to be examined.
“All scripture is given by inspiration of God” (2 Timothy 3:16). The Bible is our final authority; when tradition contradicts it, the Bible wins. This conviction requires careful reading: checking a translation, considering context, and distinguishing what a passage says from what a favored teacher has inferred.
Princeton's defense and Spurgeon's preaching addressed related pressures in different settings. In the Downgrade controversy, Spurgeon warned of departures from historic Christian teaching and withdrew from the Baptist Union in 1887; the Union censured him in January 1888.8 The institutional disagreement should not be turned into a claim that every Baptist minister had abandoned the gospel. Particular teachings, and the willingness of a fellowship to tolerate them, were at issue.
The gospel must go out. Christ commands His people to make disciples, and God's choice gives no permission to withhold the invitation. Translating, explaining, praying, and caring for neighbors are work believers can do without pretending they can produce the new birth.
The gospel that goes out must remain the gospel. An invitation must lead to Christ, whose work is finished. Mercy toward a neighbor must accompany that witness. Neither successful methods nor a respected institution can replace Scripture as final authority.
In 1 Corinthians 1:26-31, God chooses people who have no standing on which to boast, and Christ is their righteousness, sanctification, and redemption. The labor belongs to believers; the saving power and the glory belong to God. That is reason to speak to the neighbor, pray for the hearer, and trust the Savior.
Next class: the modernist conflict, Machen at Princeton, and the dispute over whether Christianity could retain its identity after its central doctrines were denied.