An Endless Waffle on the Holy Ghost
Initially I though that this was a book that was written by Charles Spurgeon but since it was published in 2000 and no matter how hard I try I cannot find an original publication date I suspect that this is more a collection of his writings on the Holy Spirit than a particular book that he has written. To me this is not surprising because Spurgeon tends to waffle on a lot, and I felt that this book was little more than a very long waffle on the Holy Spirit.
I can't say that I was really all that encouraged by this particular book, I am sure others are or will be, but for me I wasn't, namely because Spurgeon's writing is not succinct nor does it actually move anywhere, and bringing a collection of his writings into a book helps even less because you cannot see where he is heading. Sometimes I even wonder whether Spurgeon actually studied theology, or whether he simply rambled on without even thinking about what he was saying.
Look, I'm not necessarily going to say that it is a bad thing, and Spurgeon did a lot with regards to helping the poor, but when the editor suggests that Spurgeon preached his first sermon at the age of 16 one wonders if there was any real experience behind that. Okay, there are probably a lot of 16 year olds out there that preach sermons, however they do tend to be young and they do tend to not have the understanding or the experience to really know what they are saying. In fact I suspect that most sixteen year olds that are preaching sermons to their friends are probably coming from a very fundamentalist background.
Spurgeon himself was a fundamentalist, though this was before the actual fundamentalist church came into existence (which was around the early 20th century after the publication of a book call, I believe, 'Christian Fundamentals'). However, from reading some of his writings in this book one can see that there is such a streak in him. For instance, in the chapter entitled 'Grieving the Holy Spirit' he talks about how you know that you have upset the Holy Spirit when you have trouble reading the Bible and that you have trouble understanding sermons. Me, that is a normal part of life, and Christians struggle through those periods quite a lot. To think that because you are dozing off in Church or not learning anything from the Bible, or finding it hard to participate in Bible study should not make you think that you have some unrepented sin in your life. We are all sinners, and we all have sins that we try to cover up, and if the Holy Spirit left us because of that then there would be no Christians. If you want to know what happens when the Holy Spirit leaves you, or what causes the Holy Spirit to leave you, then you can look no further than King Saul (and I wonder if Spurgeon properly exegeted his Bible before writing that).
Then there are his comments about the Anglo-Catholic church. Granted, there may problems with that particular denomination, but aren't there problems with all denominations. If you show me a church that has no problems then I will show you a fantasy. All churches have their problems, just like all humans have their problems. The question comes down to whether the church, just like the human, is trying to work those problems out of their system. The same goes with tradition and ritual – there is nothing wrong with tradition or ritual as long as it is used in its right context. If you believe that you get to heaven because of ritual and tradition, then you have another problem because the Bible is clear that there is nothing that you can do to get to heaven, it has more to do with what has already been done for you.
