Charles Finney

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The church didn't like his style of Christianity.

CHARLES FINNEY REVIVAL SERMONS.
Charles Finney 1792-1875

American evangelist and educator. Charles Finney was born at Warren, Connecticut, but two years later his family moved to upstate New York, where he received his early education in frontier schools. As a young man, he studied law and set up practice at Adams, New York.

While reading Blackstone's Commentaries on Law, Charles Finney noted continuous references to the Holy Scriptures. Blackstone repeatedly mentioned the Bible as the highest authority. This moved Finney to buy a Bible, and he soon was reading it more than law.

The Word of God brought deep conviction to Finney's soul, and on October 10, 1821, out in the woods, he was converted to Christ. He immediately began witnessing for Christ, and before long was conducting revival meetings. Finney used the apostolic practices of the New Testament and was soon filling the largest buildings available and keeping them filled.

The highlight of Charles Finney's evangelistic ministry was the "nine mighty years" of 1824 to 1832, during which he conducted powerful revival meetings all over the eastern cities of Goureneur, Rome, Utica, Auburn, Troy, Wilmington, Philadelphia, Boston, and New York. During his meeting in Rochester, New York, "the place was shaken to its foundations." Twelve hundred people united with the churches of Rochester Presbytery. All the leading lawyers, physicians, and businessmen were saved. Forty of the converts entered the ministry, and the whole character of the town was changed. As a result of that meeting, revivals broke out in 1,500 other towns and villages.

Charles Finney was finally forced to discontinue his evangelistic ministry due to bad health, and, after many years as a revival preaching pastor in New York City, he became president of Oberlin College, where he lectured until his death.

Over 500,000 people responded to his public invitations to receive Christ. Finney was personal, homespun, dramatic, and forceful, and his revival lectures are still studied by Bible-believing preachers, teachers, and evangelists.

Under his ministry more than 80 percent of his converts stayed true to God even after 20 years. I can not think of any other evangelist that even comes close to this success. There must be something special about this man and his message.

CHARLES FINNEY REVIVAL SERMONS

 

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When the leaders of the Church Growth Movement claim that theology gets in the way of growth and insist that it does not matter what a particular church believes: growth is a matter of following the proper principles, they are displaying their debt to Finney.

When leaders of the Vineyard movement praise this sub-Christian enterprise and the barking, roaring, screaming, laughing, and other strange phenomena on the basis that "it works" and one must judge its truth by its fruit, they are following Finney as well as the father of American pragmatism, William James, who declared that truth must be judged on the basis of "its cash-value in experiential terms."

Thus, in Finney’s theology, God is not sovereign, man is not a sinner by nature, the atonement is not a true payment for sin, justification by imputation is insulting to reason and morality, the new birth is simply the effect of successful techniques, and revival is a natural result of clever campaigns. In his fresh introduction to the bicentennial edition of Finney’s Systematic Theology, Harry Conn commends Finney’s pragmatism: "Many servants of our Lord should be diligently searching for a gospel that ‘works’, and I am happy to state they can find it in this volume."

As Whitney R. Cross has carefully documented, the stretch of territory in which Finney’s revivals were most frequent was also the cradle of the perfectionistic cults that plagued that century. A gospel that "works" for zealous perfectionists one moment merely creates tomorrow’s disillusioned and spent supersaints. Needless to say, Finney’s message is radically different from the evangelical faith, as is the basic orientation of the movements we see around us today that bear his imprint such as: revivalism (or its modern label. the Church Growth Movement), or Pentecostal perfectionism and emotionalism, or political triumphalism based on the ideal of "Christian America," or the anti-intellectual, and antidoctrinal tendencies of many American evangelicals and fundamentalists.

Not only did the revivalist abandon the doctrine of justification, making him a renegade against evangelical Christianity; he repudiated doctrines, such as original sin and the substitutionary atonement, that have been embraced by Roman Catholics and Protestants alike. Therefore, Finney is not merely an Arminian’, but a Pelagian. He is not only an enemy of evangelical Protestantism, but of historic Christianity of the broadest sort.

Of one thing Finney was absolutely correct: The Gospel held by the Reformers whom he attacked directly, and indeed held by the whole company of evangelicals, is "another gospel" in distinction from the one proclaimed by Charles Finney. The question of our moment is, With which gospel will we side?
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