The Down Grade

Beloved, when I gave all diligence to write unto you of the common salvation, it was needful for me to write unto you, and exhort you that ye should earnestly contend for the faith which was once delivered unto the saints. JUDE 1:3

The last great public struggle of Spurgeon’s life began in 1887 and was not over when he died. It divided him from the denomination in which he had served for more than thirty years, cost him many friendships, including some with men he had trained, and almost certainly hastened the decline of his health. It is known as the Down-Grade controversy, after the title of a series of articles in his magazine. No chapter in this book calls for more care, because it shows Spurgeon at his most courageous and at his most combative, and the two are not easily separated.

What alarmed him

In the 1880s a number of Nonconformist ministers in England, influenced by new ways of reading the Bible and by the general optimism of the age, were quietly setting aside doctrines that earlier generations had taken for granted. Some questioned the full inspiration of Scripture. Some spoke of the atonement as an example of love rather than a substitution for sinners. Some doubted that anyone would finally be lost. The phrase used for this movement was modern thought, and Spurgeon had been warning against it for years. In the communion address The Sin-Bearer he speaks of a teaching of modern thought that explains away the doctrine of substitution, and he answers it sharply: if we lose the cross, we have lost all.

For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine; but after their own lusts shall they heap to themselves teachers, having itching ears. 2 TIMOTHY 4:3

In 1887 The Sword and the Trowel published articles, some by a friend and some by Spurgeon himself, arguing that the churches were on a down grade: that the slide from evangelical truth was accelerating, and that ministers who had abandoned the gospel were being tolerated, even honoured, within the Baptist Union. Spurgeon pressed the Union to adopt a clear evangelical statement of faith. When it would not do so on his terms, he withdrew from it, in October 1887.

The cost

The response was bitter. In January 1888 the Council of the Baptist Union passed a vote of censure on him, on the ground that he had made charges without naming the men he accused. He had declined to name individuals publicly, which his friends thought honourable and his opponents thought unfair. The Union later adopted a doctrinal statement, but one loose enough to satisfy both sides of the dispute, and Spurgeon regarded it as worthless. Old friends parted from him. A good number of former students of his own college remained in the Union. He reconstituted the conference of his college’s former students on a clear doctrinal basis, and some would not join it.

At my first answer no man stood with me, but all men forsook me: I pray God that it may not be laid to their charge. 2 TIMOTHY 4:16

What it cost him inwardly can be glimpsed in the preface to the Cheque Book. He began those daily readings, he says, “when I was wading in the surf of controversy.” He speaks of bearing the Lord’s reproach outside the camp. And he says that the words of God to Jeremiah had become exceedingly sweet to him, because the prophet had to speak to those who would not hear. Jeremiah’s, he writes, “was the sorrow which comes of disappointed love, and resolute loyalty.” It is hard to read that sentence without hearing Spurgeon describing himself.

Why he fought

It would be easy to dismiss the Down Grade as an older man’s rearguard action against a changing world. That would be a mistake. Spurgeon was not defending a set of opinions for their own sake. He was defending the gospel he had preached for forty years — the inspiration of Scripture, the substitution of Christ, the need for new birth, the reality of judgement. If those went, he believed, there would be nothing left to offer the miserable boy under the gallery. In a reading in Morning by Morning he speaks of Christians standing outside the camp as witnesses for the truth, “loving Christ first, and his truth next, and Christ and his truth beyond all the world.” That order matters. Truth mattered to him because Christ mattered to him.

Buy the truth, and sell it not. PROVERBS 23:23

Many later observers have concluded that he read the direction of travel accurately. Much of English Nonconformity did move a long way from the gospel he preached in the generations after his death.

Where he may be questioned

And yet honesty requires more than that. Spurgeon was a fighter by temperament, and he had been one long before 1887. His sermon on baptismal regeneration in 1864 had set off a storm with evangelical clergy in the Church of England, many of whom were his allies in the gospel. In the Down-Grade controversy his language was often sweeping. He could give the impression that all who stayed in the Union were compromised, when many of them held exactly his beliefs and simply judged that the fight was best fought from within. His refusal to name the men he accused, whatever its motives, left his charges hard to answer and easy to resent. And the withdrawal, however principled, removed the strongest evangelical voice from the counsels of his denomination at the moment it was most needed.

But speaking the truth in love, may grow up into him in all things, which is the head, even Christ. EPHESIANS 4:15

The lesson for readers is not that Spurgeon was wrong to contend. Jude tells us to contend earnestly. It is that contending well is very hard, and that even a godly man with a just cause can wound brethren who deserved better. Truth and love are not rivals. But in the heat of controversy one is always tempted to let the first excuse the absence of the second.

His last word

His last address to the conference of his college, in 1891, later printed as The Greatest Fight in the World, did not rehearse the controversy. It spoke of the Word as the preacher’s armoury, the church as his army, and the Holy Spirit as his strength. He did not recant, and he did not gloat. He urged them to preach the old gospel and to rely on the old power. He had lost a great deal. He had not lost the thing he fought for.

I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith. 2 TIMOTHY 4:7

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Ask which truths you would be willing to lose friendships over. Ask also which lesser things you have treated as if they were such truths.

2. If you are in a disagreement with other Christians, examine your words. Could the people you are opposing recognise themselves fairly in what you say about them?

3. Read Jude slowly. Notice that it both commands contending and ends in mercy, building up and praying for others.

4. Pray for your own church and denomination, that it would hold fast to the gospel without becoming harsh.

5. If you have been wounded in a church conflict, bring it to Christ, who bore reproach outside the camp, and ask for grace not to become bitter.

A PRAYER

Lord Jesus, You are the truth, and You call me to contend for the faith once delivered to the saints.

Give me courage to stand when the gospel is at stake, and humility to know when it is not.

Keep me from harshness in the name of faithfulness, and from cowardice in the name of peace.

When I must go outside the camp, let it be for Your sake and bearing Your reproach, and let me go in love. Amen.