Even Calvinists Baptist Pastors Can Learn...

I like Swindoll as an addition to the list. I also think Spurgeon should be taken off the list. He was a great preacher, and a great argument that not all sermons have to be expository, but he was not an expositor. In his place, G. Campbell Morgan should be added.

 

I think a case could be made that Spurgeon was a "text expositor," though certainly not a "straight through" one. I would have a hard time locating very many of his sermons that were not accurate and thorough expositions of the text in front of him, and he usually placed the context up front.

 

Not to put too fine a point on it, but I have never listened to a pure expositor who was not at least a modified Calvinist. (I know that Adrian Rogers claimed to not be a Calvinist, but he held at least 3 points.)

 

That remark makes me ask the question -- Has there been a non-Calvinist preacher in the last 400 years who has had such devotion from most camps in Christianity as Charles H. Spurgeon has ?

 

Yes. Billy Graham.

 

He fell into disfavor with the Reformed and Fundamentalist camps way back in the 1950's . I don't think B.G. qualifies .

 

I think Calvinists would be surprised to find out how close the theology of many non-calvinist is to Calvinist theology. That is why so many non-calvinists read Spurgeon, Gill,Barnes, Pink, and all the others. We just learn to eat the cherries and spit out the pits.

 

Reformed and Fundamentalist camps are small subsets of what we would broadly call evangelicalism. Broad Evangelicalism still has great respect for Graham and would refer to him more often than they would refer to Spurgeon (that's my guess). Since broad evangelicalism is much larger than either fundamentalism or reformed; in fact, larger than the two combined, I think that it is safe to say that Graham has more wide respect among Christians than Spurgeon does.

Also, Graham has respect in broader Christianity beyond evangelicalism than Spurgoen has. In fact, beyond evangelicalism, people would probably have to think twice to remember who Spurgeon is.

I am not an apologist for Billy Graham as my background is in fundamentalism. I definitely think that Spurgeon is more influential among fundies and reformed than Graham is, but I don't think this is true in broader evangelicalism or broader Christianity.

 

I agree that Billy Graham is more known, but in terms of expositional preachers, he isn't even in the running. And that's no slam against Dr. Graham. He would never call himself an expositional preacher.

BTOP: I am glad to see Chuck Swindoll added to any list of great expositional preachers. For me, he is what expositional preaching is all about because his points blend what the text is saying along with application.

 

How about John Piper? I think I would put him above Swindol.

 

I think Lawson's list is exclusively 5-point calvinists. Swindoll would probably think of himself as a calvinist in some form, though not a 5-pointer. If you've ever heard Swindoll preach about Nebuchadnezzar you know that he definitely holds to God's sovereignty in no uncertain terms. How could you read that story or any of the book of Daniel and not?

 

Swindol's Calvinism (and mine)

I don't want to start a war of "pointers" here, but to quote Lewis Sperry Chafer (founder of DTS), speaking of the type of moderate (4-point) calvinism that Swindol holds (and R.T. Kendall would say that CALVIN held):

"The men who belong to this school of interpretation defend of all of the five points of Calvinism excepting one, namely, "Limited Atonement," or what has been termed "the weakest point in the Calvinistic system of doctrine." This form of moderate Calvinism is more the belief of Bible expositors that of theologians..."

I was originally a full five-pointer, but as I exposited text after text over the years, I came to the point where I simply could not defend limited atonement without doing severe damage to many texts.