Thielicke on Spurgeon: “He tells us that the sun is shining.”

The Eerdmans edition of Charles Spurgeon’s The Soul Winner includes a forward by Helmut Thielicke (1908-1986), a German Lutheran theologian and author of The Evangelical Faith in three volumes.

Thielicke begins by lamenting that few people will read widely and step across the “firmly delineated boundaries” separating the theological camps of fundamentalists, liberals, pietists, and so forth. There are “few intellectual and spiritual adventurers” (5). Fifty years later, I can assure you that nothing has changed. Thielicke acknowledges that his own “dogmatic system” is different from Spurgeon’s, but he is hopeful that Spurgeon’s work will bring a “breath of spring air” and “inner quickening” in our denominations. Thielicke is rather gushing in his enthusiasm for Spurgeon:

I can see that fresh and unpolluted water springs forth in Spurgeon’s preaching. This impression is so strong that it is a secondary question by what theology the source is enclosed, or what system of piping…

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