Charles Simeon's Works to Live Again?

UPDATE Logos have now posted a large number of scanned pages from Simeon’s Sermons. Go and read them, they will thrill your heart and I trust stir your desire to obtain these amazing volumes

Back in November last year, I discovered a biographical article by John Piper on Charles Simeon. The article made a great impact on me and so I made extensive quotes from it in a post entitled Piper Friday – Charles Simeon and John Wesley.

In the post I detail Simeon’s wonderful attitude at meeting the aging Wesley. Essentially he concluded that Wesley’s moderate Arminianism really wasn’t so far removed from his own moderate Calvinism.

The other day, perhaps inspired by Simeon, I was speaking with a new friend who asked about my Calvinism. I said something like this – look, if you can read Ephesians 1 and Romans 8 without crossing your fingers, you are Calvinistic enough for me!

Simeon was not against systematizing the Bible as such, but was against those systems taking precedence over a clear reading of the Scriptures. He firmly believed that by giving a proper weight to each passage of Scripture, a clear biblical system of theology would emerge. His sermon outlines were published as the massive, 21-volume, 12,000 page Horae Homileticae (originally published in 1832). Sadly this is currently out of print.

At the end of the post I said that I had started a personal campaign to persuade the good folks at Logos Bible Software to produce an electronic version of them and urged you to add your weight to that campaign. Well, the good news is that Logos have obtained a copy of all 21 volumes of this amazing resource and have it available on pre-pub. If you are interested in obtaining it please pop over there and place your order – there will need to be lots of orders for it to actually be produced since it is such a large resource.

Visit the Logos Bible Software pre-pub page on Charles Simeon.

The following list of people speaking approvingly of Simeon is impressive in its scope:

• John Piper says “[Horae Homileticae] is the best place to go for researching Simeon’s theology. You can find his views on almost every key text in the Bible . . . . What Simeon experienced in the word was remarkable. And it is so utterly different from the counsel that we receive today that it is worth looking at . . . .” His original article on Charles Simeon is also available.
• C. H. Spurgeon said “. . . we could not exclude them. They have been called ‘a valley of dry bones’: be a prophet and they will live.”
• Justin Taylor has linked to the prepub.
• Joe Carter linked to my article on Simeon.
• Mark Lauterbach believes Simeon has something to teach bloggers.
• David Wayne highlights Mark’s post approvingly.
• Over at The Resurgence, Simeon’s opposition to angry preaching is highlighted.
• Just this month the Pyromaniacs also highlighted the meeting between Wesley and Simeon.