The third reason given by Murray for Spurgeon’s rejection of Hyper-Calvinism was the denial of human responsibility.
Spurgeon regarded an emphasis on man’s free-agency as absolutely essential to true evangelism. Because Scripture teaches that conversion is the work of God, Hyper-Calvinism fears to appeal for human action lest it interferes with God. But Scripture also presents conversion as the work of man and recognizes no inconsistency in calling upon men to be reconciled to God. Because it does not recognize this, Hyper-Calvinism fails to tell the unconverted that it is heir fault alone if they remain unsaved under the gospel and that their damnation will be their own work. Not only is faith in Christ a duty, but as Spurgeon often showed from Scripture, a refusal to believe on Christ will be found at last o be a greater offence than the iniquities of Sodom and Gomorrah. ‘Is it not the very summit of arrogance and the height of pride for a son of Adam to say, even in his heart, “God, I doubt thy grace; God, I doubt Thy love; God, I doubt Thy power”? I feel that, could we roll all sins into one mass, — could we take murder, blasphemy, lust, adultery, fornication, and everything that is vile, and unite them all into one vast globe of black corruption, — they would not even then equal the sin of unbelief.’’
In his autobiography Spurgeon reports how in his early days, before he came to London, he found himself with some ministers and others of Hyper-Calvinistic views ‘who were disputing whether it was a sin in men that they did not believe the gospel.’ The shock he felt on that occasion was to remain with him all his days: ‘Whilst they were discussing, I said, “Gentlemen, am I in the presence of Christians? Are you believers in the Bible or are you not?” They said, “We are Christians, of course.” “Then,” said I, “does not the Scripture say, ‘of sin, because they believe not on Me?’ And is it not the damning sin of men, that they do not believe on Christ?”’
Spurgeon used this incident in the second sermon of the first volume of the New Park Street Pulpit, entitled ‘The Sin of Unbelief, and, as we have seen, much of the contention of Hyper-Calvinism against his preaching concerned this point. ‘I hold,’ he says, ‘as firmly as any man living, that repentance and conversion are the work of the Holy Spirit, but I would sooner lose this hand, and both, than I would give up preaching that it is the duty of men to repent and believe and that it is the duty of Christian ministers to say to them, “Repent and be converted, that your sins may be blotted out.”’
Spurgeon frequently spoke against Hyper-Calvinism in his sermons. He did so at some length in an ‘Exposition of the Doctrines of Grace’ at the time of the opening of the Metropolitan Tabernacle in 1861 when he forcefully repudiated any idea of fatalism and insisted, ‘If he be lost, damnation is all of man; but, if he be saved, still salvation is all of God.’ God did not make men to be damned but, as Spurgeon showed from the Westminster Assembly’s Larger Catechism, wrath is only inflicted on men on account of sin: ‘This is no more than what the Methodist and all other Evangelical bodies acknowledge — that where men perish it is in consequence of their sin.’
In his Preface to the Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit for 1863 he made what was possibly the last of his open appeals to those whom he describes as ‘led captive by ultra-calvinistic theories’, calling upon them to ‘preach the whole gospel, instead of a part’: ‘Divine sovereignty is a great and indisputable fact, but human responsibility is quite as indisputable . . . Faith is God’s gift, but it is also the act of renewed manhood. Damnation is the result of justice, not of arbitrary predestination. O that the time were come when seeming opposites would be received, because faith knows that they are portions of one harmonious whole. Would that an enlarged view of the dispensations of God to man would permit men to be faithful to the human race, and at the same time true to the Sovereign Lord of all.’—Iain Murray, Spurgeon v. Hyper-Calvinism (Banner of Truth, 2002), 84–87.
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