Spurgeon

Charles Haddon Spurgeon was the greatest preacher of the nineteenth century anywhere in the world. Building on earlier biographies, Ray Rhodes has explored a wide range of sources, including several drawn on for the first time, to depict all sides of a man who was also a doughty controversialist, a shaper of the Baptists, and a Victorian social phenomenon. With a strong sense of place, the author explains much about Spurgeon’s early years that has hitherto been neglected and acknowledges the weaknesses of his later years that were often rooted in painful illness. In a lively style, he reveals something of the humanity of a remarkable communicator of the gospel.

Simply put, this new biography on Charles Spurgeon by Ray Rhodes is a masterpiece! Spurgeon: The Man Beyond the Pulpit offers a fresh look at the 19th century’s premier preacher, including his family and early years, his brilliance and preaching gifts, his vast ministry across England and its global reach, his unswerving theological convictions, the influence of Spurgeon’s wife, Susannah, the doctrinal and denominational controversies, and Spurgeon’s own struggles and shortcomings as a man. Readers will be immensely blessed by this outstanding volume, whether this is the first book one has read on Spurgeon or whether this is one of several. Any attempt to rank the best books on Spurgeon will only lead to debate, argument, and disagreement, but this excellent and massive treatment by Ray Rhodes has to rank at or near the top. Lay readers, preachers, teachers, historians, and scholars will all agree that Spurgeon: The Man Beyond the Pulpit is an absolute treasure!

Charles Spurgeon is eminently worthy of study, and we live in a time when good books about the ‘Prince of Preachers’ are published regularly. One of the best is Spurgeon: The Man Beyond the Pulpit. While there are dozens of biographies of Spurgeon available, including some fine recent ones, none of them are as substantive or delve as much into Spurgeon’s personal life as Ray Rhodes’s wonderful biography. This book is both informative and edifying, and it will serve as the essential ‘big’ biography of Spurgeon for many years to come.

At last! This is the definitive Spurgeon biography for which I have been waiting for decades now! It is voluminously comprehensive yet immediately accessible, carefully researched but beautifully written, simultaneously incisive and inspiring. Having read dozens of Spurgeon biographies, profiles, and topical studies, I nevertheless discovered tantalizing new details in nearly every chapter. Highly recommended.

Ray Rhodes has closed in on 700 pages of digestible, vital, and attention-maintaining narrative on the life of Charles H. Spurgeon. The work in primary and secondary sources is massive and used for maximum effect in telling this story of one of the most remarkable men—to say nothing of his status as a preacher, polemicist, and evangelical activist—to live since the middle of the nineteenth century. Grandfather, grandmother, aunt, father, mother, siblings, much-beloved wife, and children are given appropriate attention as their influence is woven carefully into this variegated biographical tapestry. Rhodes’s sentences flow easily and with unwasted relevance in each part of the story. His attention to Spurgeon’s early life is not only charming but explains much about his convictions as well as temperament. Three chapters on the Downgrade Controversy give fullness of understanding, not only from Spurgeon’s perspective, but from the viewpoint of those whom he criticized and others who felt betrayed. The chapter on the aftermath is perhaps the most detailed discussion available of that tragic episode in Spurgeon’s life. His perennial sickness and his final days are described with relevance to his entire ministry. His response to the difficulties of those days manifested his unshakeable confidence in God’s truth, grace, and particular loving care of this uncompromising proclaimer of the “faith once for all delivered to the saints.”

Ray Rhodes has done the seemingly impossible by making Charles Spurgeon seem human without diminishing any of his titanic achievements. In Spurgeon: The Man Beyond the Pulpit the reader is pulled into a dramatic retelling of what we thought we already knew. Rhodes has made Spurgeon come alive. I can’t recommend this new biography highly enough.

Ray Rhodes writes of Spurgeon with understanding and affection. Genuine sympathy climbs up to real empathy. He has taken pains to walk where Spurgeon walked, to breathe his air. As a result, he does not just know about Spurgeon, but has begun to know him, to catch something of his spirit. He is therefore well-qualified to speak of Spurgeon the man, and he does so sensitively, warmly, candidly, and movingly. This biography gives more than the mere lines of a life—it paints the man beyond the pulpit with crisp contours and rich colours.