Thursday, May 25, 2017

Charles Spurgeon's Eschatology

On page 54 of Marvin Rosenthal's book The Pre-Wrath Rapture of the Church, he cites a list of past "godly believers" who didn't hold to pretribulationism. Among those he mentions are John Knox, the Wesleys, Matthew Henry, John Calvin, John Newton, Charles Spurgeon and a bunch of others.

Of course most of these godly believers weren't even premillennial, as Rosenthal is. None of them were prewrath rapturists either. Despite this, apparently Robert Van Kampen tried to enlist Spurgeon's thinking as somewhat in line with his view. Spurgeon was premillennial and posttribulational. However, he was also a Covenant Theologian and held to some Historicist thinking.

Dennis Swanson comments on Spurgeon's eschatology in the following article. I agree with some of Swanson's criticisms of Van Kampen here:
In the discussion of the various aspects of systematic theology, perhaps none has seen more ink spilt in the last 100 years than eschatology. Those who have "specialized" in this field are well-known and equally well- published; however, when the discussion of eschatology comes up, the name of one of the most published Christians in the history of the church1, Charles Haddon Spurgeon (1834-1892), is seldom mentioned. There are, of course, many reasons for this, not the least of which was Spurgeon's own lack of emphasis on the subject in his own ministry, as was common in his day...keep reading

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