ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the role of Charles Haddon Spurgeon as an emergent Evangelical voice during the 1850s. His personal ‘salvation’ testimony will be scrutinised in the wider context of 1850s Protestant England. One of his sermons will be read as an important example of crisis literature. For him and his co-religionists contemporary narratives had to conform to a specific tradition of conversion: they must be self-abasing, emphasising grace and election, sole gratitude to God, and explicitly acknowledge the necessity of substitutionary atonement. His narratives of conversion are, therefore, simultaneously an act of interpretation and persuasion, transforming private experience into public discourse. His own ‘redemption history’ is shaped by the paradigm narratives of Puritan tradition, most explicitly those of Bunyan and Wesley. Biblical authority was as vital for Spurgeon as autobiographer as it was fundamental to his role as preacher.
