The Blessing of Abraham | Christian History

TIMOTHY L. SMITH [Historians of American religion have been indebted to Timothy L. Smith since his important book, Revivalism and Reform in 19th Century America (Abington). Dr. Smith is professor of History at Johns Hopkins University and Director of Johns Hopkins' Program in American Religious History. His most recent book is Whitefield & Wesley on the New Birth (Zondervan, 1986).] | posted 10/01/1988 12:00AM

Finney’s Perfectionist teaching not only shook the establishment in his day, but it added fuel to the growing fires of the Holiness Movement.

Reformed historians in America generally believe that Calvinism Stabilizes biblical orthodoxy while Arminianism in all its forms, especially the Wesleyan one, tends toward modernism. This may be partly true for the twentieth century. During the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, however, the career of Charles G. Finney demonstrates that Puritan theology was the one on the move. Many scholars, including my own research associate Thomas Umbel, are now discovering that New England religious thought was rapidly pulling away from Calvinism during the early national period, when Methodism was spreading through that section.

Others have concluded that revivalists like George Whitefield, who helped set in motion the Boston phase of the awakening that preceded the American Revolution, were “practical Arminians,” even though they were or became theoretical Calvinists. While enrolled in an academy at Litchfield, Connecticut, the youthful Finney’s attention to the preaching of Peter Starr, Lyman Beecher’s predecessor in the pastorate there, did not persuade him to believe in either predestination or imputed righteousness. The Presbyterian committee that examined Finney and licensed him to preach in 1824 was so lenient toward his rejection of major Calvinist points that many of them seem likely to have been Congregationalist migrants from New England. Certainly they shared the growing accommodation of Yankee Puritans to universal redemption, free will, and the conviction that all persons were equal before temporal laws because divine grace had made them equal heirs to eternal hopes.

Twentieth century historians of Finney, however, still play down his doctrine of Christian perfection, or entire sanctification, as he called it. I think this is partly because secular scholars have paid chief attention to his early preaching, few going past his Lectures on Revival, and fewer still considering the Lectures to Professing Christians that Finney published after two years in the pastorate of Broadway Tabernacle in New York City.

That second volume of his lectures marked a turning point in Finney’s attitude toward the Methodist belief that all Christians should seek a “second blessing,” called heart purity or perfect love. He spelled out his new view of the sanctification believers needed in lectures seventeen through twenty-four. Most students have not understood this; they have not read his lectures printed fortnightly in the first two years’ issues of the The Oberlin Evangelist, in December 1839, after Finney had become Professor of Theology at Oberlin College and Seminary. Others have not understood it because they were personally inclined toward Calvinism and were, therefore, fascinated by the Pelagianism—the notion of salvation by good works—that seemed to lie just beneath the surface of Finney’s earliest sermons, especially the one entitled Sinners Bound to Change Their Own Hearts.

Beginning in 1836, therefore, and with a conviction and clarity that increased until his death 40 years later, Finney’s central preoccupation was Christ’s promise to sanctify fully those who through regenerating grace had begun to love and obey him. To see this, let’s look at Finney’s major writings from 1836 on.

In 1837, Finney began teaching at Oberlin College for half of each year and pastoring at Broadway Tabernacle in New York City for the other half. Oberlin president Asa Mahan, a graduate of Andover Seminary in Massachusetts and a famous abolitionist evangelist, and Lewis Tappan, a wealthy importer and a member of Finney’s New York congregation, had recruited him. Mahan and Finney agreed upon the need of Christians for an experience of grace that would empower them to walk before God in righteousness. Later, they both recounted many times how, during a revival season in 1839, a student rose to ask whether a Christian might “expect to attain sanctification in the present life.” President Mahan instantly answered “yes,” and in the next few days sought and found what he believed was this blessing.