On August 16, 1875, Charles Grandison Finney died. Few if any memorial services will be held on the centennial of his death. No major institution, denomination, or movement would be fully comfortable in honoring him. Finney is too Arminian for Calvinists, too Calvinistic for Arminians; too rationalistic for mystics, too pietistic for rationalists; too perfectionistic for Presbyterians or Lutherans, too limited in his view of Christian perfection for many followers of Wesley; too conservative for radicals, too innovative for traditionalists; too concerned with individual salvation for those who subscribe to the social gospel, and too committed to the social implications of the Gospel for fundamentalists. It is fitting that a magazine such as CHRISTIANITY TODAY, representing the broad scope of evangelical conviction, should seek to honor this man of God on the one hundredth-anniversary of his death.
Finney’s spiritual experience has become for many an ideal of Christian aspiration. His dramatic conversion to Christ in 1821, when he was twenty-nine (“I will accept it [salvation] today, or I will die in the attempt”), his subsequent baptism of the Holy Spirit (“… like a wave of electricity, going through and through me … waves and waves of liquid love … like the very breath of God”), his call to preach (“Deacon B—, I have a retainer from the Lord Jesus Christ to plead his cause, and cannot plead yours”), his entrance into a deeper life of holiness in 1843 (“I was enabled … to fall back in a deeper sense than I had ever done before upon the infinitely blessed and perfect will of God.… Holiness to the Lord seemed to be inscribed on all the exercises of my mind.… It seemed as if my soul was wedded to Christ.… The language of the Song of Solomon was as natural to me as my breath”), and his ability to prevail with God in prayer and with men in the pulpit were extraordinary.
Under the impact of Finney’s ministry great segments of the adolescent nation experienced profound spiritual renewal. The Rochester revival of 1830 was called by Lyman Beecher “the greatest work of God and the greatest revival of religion that the world has ever seen in so short a time.” We are told that Rochester’s jail was empty for years afterwards. As a direct result of Finney’s intermittent preaching in New York City in the early 1830s four new churches were organized in four years. Steps were being taken to organize two more when he left for Oberlin in 1835.
Finney, Charles Grandison (1792–1875). Born in Connecticut, reared in upstate New York. Taught school, then practiced law until his conversion in 1821. Became an itinerant evangelist and continued to conduct campaigns after moving to Oberlin College in Ohio in 1835, where he was professor of theology until his death. President of the college 1851–66.
In 1858 a great revival swept the nation. Finney was preaching in Boston at the time. By summer of 1858, if not the devil, at least the extreme Unitarian Theodore Parker had been prayed out of Boston, and in innumerable small villages in the surrounding area not a single unconverted person could be found! In smaller towns, such as Utica, Rome, and Auburn in New York State, it was not unusual for the majority of the adult population to be “hopefully converted” under Finney’s preaching.
As a youth Finney loved sports. Standing six feet two and weighing one hundred eighty-five at the age of twenty, this child of the forest could out-run, -jump, -row, -throw, -swim, or -wrestle every rival. Throughout his life he had an infectious sense of humor. In his maturity he manifested an unaffected, childlike spirit, and he liked nothing so well as romping with his children on the living-room floor. Alfred Vance Churchill, who grew up in Oberlin, could recall his father and Finney frequently returning from church together “arm in arm, or swinging hands like children.”
When his first wife died, this spiritual giant experienced periods of sorrow that nearly overwhelmed him. He even felt for a time that he would lose his sanity over the bereavement unless he could find rest in God.
Although he often fasted and prayed, Finney was not an ascetic. He appreciated artistic expression, particularly good music. He sang solos, directed a choir, played the bass viol, and refused to teach at Oberlin if there would be no professor of music on the first faculty. According to Albert Vance Churchill, Finney was thereby responsible for introducing the study of music to American higher education (“Midwest: Early Oberlin Personalities,” Northwest Ohio Quarterly, 1951, p. 224).
Historians dealing with Finney’s period commonly highlight the thought and activities of deists, Unitarians, and transcendentalists. However, the only genuinely popular religious movement in the years following the Revolution was orthodox Christianity in the form of a free-will, revivalistic, pietistic trinitarian evangelicalism. So predominant, in fact, did evangelical influence become that Brown University historian William McLoughlin has said:
The story of American Evangelicalism is the story of America itself in the years 1800 to 1900, for it was Evangelical religion which made Americans the most religious people in the world, molded them into a unified pietistic-perfectionist nation, and spurred them on to those heights of social reform, missionary endeavor, and imperialistic expansionism which constitute the moving forces of our history in that century [The American Evangelicals, 1800–1900, p. 1].
Nineteenth century evangelical Christianity was rooted in Scottish Common Sense philosophy and, in McLoughlin’s words, in “a new theological consensus on Arminian principles which prevailed between the Second Great Awakening and the rise of Modernism” (p. 1). A philosophy based upon the natural convictions of ordinary people was congenial to the mind of young America. It provided Christians with epistemological support for theistic metaphysics and was thus regarded as the handmaid of biblical revelation. But most important, it gave Arminian evangelicals from New Haven to Cane Ridge the conceptual tools for overthrowing Edwardsian determinism and establishing the freedom of the will.
The visible fruits of evangelical Christianity were phenomenal. The proportion of church members in America increased from one in fifteen in 1800 to one in seven in 1850. The college-founding movement, an almost exclusively evangelical enterprise, increased the number of permanent Christian liberal arts colleges from 25 in 1799 to 182 in 1861. Seventeen theological seminaries came into existence between 1807 and 1827. Voluntary associations were formed for all conceivable reform, benevolent, and evangelistic purposes. Abolitionism, women’s rights, coeducation of the sexes, health reform, peace movements, temperance, Sunday schools, and tract distribution all enjoyed the fervent sponsorship of evangelicals. Evangelical missionary endeavors helped to make the nineteenth century the age in which Christianity underwent its greatest geographical spread. And McLoughlin suggests that “both as motivation and as rationale evangelical religion lay behind the concept of rugged individualism in business enterprise, laissez faire in economic theory, constitutional democracy in political thought, the Protestant ethic in morality, and the millennial hope of white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant America to lead the world to its latter-day glory (p. 1).
What was it that transformed a set of philosophical and theological ideas into religious, social, moral, and political dynamite? The answer is—revival! Not revivalism, but genuine spiritual revival. Revival was the mighty energizing genius at the heart of American evangelicalism. Though often treated as peripheral, revival was a crucial determinant of American character and identity. Harvard professor Perry Miller won the Pulitzer Prize in history in 1966 for a book in which he tells us that “for the mass of American democracy the decades after 1800 were a continuing, even though intermittent, revival,” that method in promoting revival was “the dominant theme in America from 1800–1860,” that revivals “gave a special tone to the epoch; through them the youthful society sought for solidarity, for a discovery of its meaning,” and that “one can almost say that … the Revival … was a central mode of this culture’s search for national identity” (The Life of the Mind in America: From the Revolution to the Civil War, pp. 7, 14, 5, 6).
Because revival was so important, Miller writes that “not Thomas Jefferson, or Madison, or Monroe led America out of the eighteenth century,” but Charles Grandison Finney, the man “who incarnated the aspiration and the philosophy of the revival” (pp. 24, 9). Finney’s Memoirs, says Miller, “is a central narrative for American history,” and his Lectures on Revivals of Religion stands “as the key exposition of the movement, and so a major work in the history of the mind in America. Its study is imperative if one wishes to pursue the mental adventure of the country” (pp. 24, 9, 25). In Finney the prevailing philosophical, theological, religious, and moral movements in America between the Revolution and the Civil War came to a focus. The central ideas of these movements were synthesized in the crucible of his great Spirit-anointed, Bible-revering mind and heart and then poured forth into the stream of the nation’s consciousness with unexampled clarity and moral urgency. The message was carried through his sermons, his books, and periodicals such as the New York Evangelist and the Oberlin Evangelist, as well as through his converts, his students, and multitudes of others whose lives he touched.
At the heart of Finney’s message was the belief that God has done and is doing all he wisely and benevolently can do for the redemption of every person. In love and grace God has taken the initiative by giving us his Word, his Son, and the Holy Spirit. The primary, indeed the only, obstacle to be overcome in salvation is the sinner’s free volitional determination to please himself rather than to please God. The sinner refuses to obey God because the “choosing” part of him is held captive, albeit willingly, by the emotional or the “feeling” part, which lusts only after its own gratification. The Holy Spirit in full sympathy with the saving purposes of the Father and the Son is striving to bring every sinner to repentance and faith in Christ. This the Spirit does by presenting to the “knowing” or the “rational” part of the sinner his moral obligation to keep God’s law, his exceeding wickedness and guiltiness for refusing to obey God, the grace and mercy extended to him in the Gospel, and the sweet reasonableness of coming to Christ.
It is the task of the Christian witness or preacher, Finney believed, to cooperate with the Holy Spirit by pressing these same biblical truths home to the mind and conscience of the sinner. When the “outer” revelation of the Word of God matches the “inner” revelation of the Spirit, the sinner is ripened for conversion. The saving moment comes, however, only when the sinner yields to the truth, embraces Christ by faith as his Saviour, and consecrates himself to live only for the glory of God and the highest well-being of the universe. Finney rarely concluded a sermon without spelling out some of the spiritual, moral, social, and political implications of this consecration.
Finney understood Christian experience to be a matter of the submission of the will to the intellect, or to truth as apprehended by the intellect, rather than to the feelings. His own experience is illustrative. After a winter of searching the Scriptures fully on the subject of personal holiness, he says, “one morning … the thought occurred to me, what if, after all this divine teaching, my will is not carried, and this teaching affects me only in my sensibility? May it not be that my sensibility is affected by these revelations from reading the Bible, and that my heart is not really subdued by them?” (Memoirs, p. 374). After a few moments of acute distress, he found relief as he was “enabled to fall back upon the perfect will of God.”
This interpretation of Christian experience naturally affected Finney’s understanding of genuine revival and determined the approach he used in preaching. He sought to reach the will through the mind. He believed that a commitment rooted primarily in emotional excitement was simply a confirmation in sin because it increased the will’s bondage to feeling.
Consequently, Finney followed the pattern of the Apostle Paul in the synagogues of Asia Minor and reasoned with people. He treated his congregations as juries and presented them with evidence. Using the universally acknowledged axioms of common-sense philosophy in conjunction with biblical revelation, he sought to convince his hearers of sin, of righteousness, and of judgment to come, and then he unfolded God’s gracious extension of mercy through Christ.
Early in his ministry Finney appealed more to the emotions in order to attract attention to the Gospel, but as he matured he came to have “much more confidence in apparent conversions that occur where there is greater calmness of mind.” He held that “no effort should be made to produce excitement beyond what a lucid and powerful exposition of truth will produce” (Revival Fire, p. 16). An interesting analysis of his preaching appeared in 1859 in the pages of the Christian News of Glasgow, Scotland. After acknowledging that Finney, like many other revivalists, was endued with the power of the Holy Spirit, the writer went on to say:
We must consider the real nature of Mr. Finney’s power in promoting true revival. This does not lie in any mere impulse of earnestness, or of eloquence. For a revivalist, he is singularly free from everything which could possibly move the mere involuntary or blind feelings of the people.… Unless we regard the most quiet and natural manner, and the most simple language, as constituting a power, there is nothing about this truly great preacher’s mode of address that could influence men at all. It is in what he says, and not in the way in which he says it, nor much in the feeling he manifests, that his resistless power lies.… He knows nothing of a mere galvanizing of souls.… He addresses the understanding—reasons with men, speaks to the conscience and heart in logical truth, which it is impossible to gainsay—comes up to the will, when he has made the path of duty plain, beyond the possibility of mistake, and demands surrender for Jesus Christ.
With preaching like this, no wonder a University of Rochester student returned home discouraged after Finney’s opening night there in 1855: “I failed to detect in his method anything that promised to command the public attention.” However, the same student soon learned the results of such preaching: “The interest was extraordinary.… The city was taken possession of” (Modern Masters of Pulpit Discourse, 1905, p. 289).
Finney’s revivals were marked by their effectiveness at points of strategic influence. All the major cities of the northeastern United States as well as of England and Scotland felt the direct impact. Although the common people and rude frontiersmen heard him gladly and felt that he successfully explained to them what other people preached, the better educated were most responsive.
A roster of major figures whose lives he decisively influenced through speaking and writing would include such names as these: Albert Barnes (Presbyterian minister whose Notes on the Old and New Testaments has sold over two million copies); Jonathan and Charles Albert Blanchard and V. Raymond Edman (presidents of Wheaton College); Catherine Booth (great preacher and intellectual leader in the early Salvation Army); Jacob Dolson Cox (governor of Ohio, U. S. secretary of the interior, convert and son-in-law of C. G. Finney); David Livingstone; James Morison (biblical scholar, founder of The Evangelical Union in Scotland); Elizabeth Cady Stanton (first president of National Woman’s Suffrage Association); A. H. Strong (Baptist theologian); Theodore Weld (abolitionist orator); Daniel Whedon (the determinative Methodist theologian of the nineteenth century); Francis E. Willard (early leader of the then powerful Woman’s Christian Temperance Union); and George Williams (founder of the YMCA).
Three further contributions of Finney and of evangelicalism to American life come to mind, one cultural and two political. First, Richard Weaver has written that the chief defining and integrating factor in any culture is the view which it has of human nature. “Not only the character but also the degree of a culture is responsive to the prevailing image of man” (Visions of Order, p. 134). If this is so and if Miller is correct in his observations about the relation between revival and cultural identity in nineteenth-century America, then the evangelical view of man as created in the image of God, as consequently endowed with moral freedom and rational dignity, and as redeemable though fallen is highly significant.
Second, it may be that revival, by bringing the masses under the sway of God and of right reason and moral principle, rendered unnecessary a proliferation of civil laws. Alexis de Tocqueville wrote that “despotism may be able to do without faith, but freedom cannot. Religion is … needed … in democratic republics most of all. How could society escape destruction if, when political ties are relaxed, moral ties are not tightened?” (Democracy in America, 1966, p. 271). Through revival, widespread receptivity to the internal discipline of the Spirit tended to modify the need for imposed social control.
Third, one requisite of a non-totalitarian state is a pluralism of societal associations whose inner authority structures are at some points immune to federal interference. These act as a buffer zone between the individual and the authority of the state. Democracy seems to have an inherent tendency to erode such associations through ceaseless extension of the egalitarian principle, unless they are sustained by an inner vitality of their own. Evangelicalism spawned by a large number of these associations as well as greatly strengthening the inner life of such fundamental social units as family, school (especially Christian colleges), and church. The role played by Finney and the evangelicals in this nation’s heritage of freedom appears to be considerable.
I have said little of Oberlin, where Finney lived, preached, and taught theology for the greater part of forty years, or of his vast influence overseas, particularly in England and Scotland. I have also given little attention to the content and impact of his books, most of which are in print today. Perhaps enough has been said, though, for us to concur with the judgment of Columbia University’s Richard Hofstadter that “Finney … must be reckoned among our great men” (Anti-intellectualism in American Life, p. 92), and to echo the prayer inscribed on Finney’s gravestone in the Oberlin cemetery: “May the God of our fathers be with us as he was with them.”
