Spurgeon on evolution and the age of the earth
Here’s something that I suspect most people don’t know: Charles Spurgeon had no issues with the earth being very old and countless generations of beasts living and dying before mankind appeared. From a sermon on unconditional election, preached on September 2, 1855:
Can any man tell me when the beginning was? Years ago we thought the beginning of this world was when Adam came upon it. But we have discovered that thousands of years before that God was preparing chaotic matter to make it a fit abode for man, putting races of creatures upon it who might die and leave behind the marks of His handiwork and marvelous skill before He tried His hand on man.
Now Spurgeon was no friend of biological evolution. From a sermon preached on August 31, 1890:
If any of you shall live fifty years, you will see that the philosophy to today will be a football of contempt for the philosophy of that period. They will speak, amidst roars of laughter, of evolution; and the day will come, when there will not be a child but will look upon it as being the most foolish notion that ever crossed the human mind. I am not a prophet, nor the son of a prophet; but I know what has befallen many of the grand discoveries of the great philosophers of the past; and I expect that the same thing will happen again.
(See also this or this or this or this.) Even though he strongly opposed evolution, he evidently did not think that “death before the fall” is a problem for a correct understanding of the Bible and redemptive history.
Comments
Bro. David, Knowledgeable believers should not be surprised that many in the church during the 1800’s and the first half of the 1900’s believed in an old age for the earth and universe. Evolutionary teaching had been around for many decades before Charles Darwin’s “Origen of the Species” and the Gap Theory was taught in Scotland by Chalmers as early as the 1820’s (if not before). Much thinking and debating about the age of the earth went on over those 150 years and so many of God’s people and preachers embraced the new thinking while rejecting evolutionary philosophy. Many did so because they thought they had to do so and that an old earth and universe had been proven. But the modern creation revival has furnished God’s people with Biblical and scientific arguments that tell us we don’t have to believe in an old earth to be “scientific”. In other words, we don’t have to try to get science and the Bible to agree as they did in Spurgeon’s day. They already agree, even when the young earth view is believed. Thank you for your quotes of Spurgeon. He has been for the last 35 years my favorite “dead preacher” and I thoroughly enjoy his messages from so long ago. God bless.
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