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Posts by Tom Chantry, Pastor, Christ Reformed Baptist Church Milwaukee
Encountering Charles Finney
Perhaps no name is more controversial in the evangelical world than that of Charles Grandison Finney. Finney, the early American revivalist whose name and methods are so closely identified with the Second Great Awakening, is a hero to many and a villain to others.
In the early days of the Nineteenth Century a new spiritual movement broke out among the churches of the new Republic. It was quickly identified with the revival of a half century earlier; thus the name, "The Second Awakening." This spiritual revival was distinguished from the first in two ways. First, it lasted much longer, and evangelists like Finney could make a long career of preaching to large gatherings amidst great excitement. Second, it was a movement distinguished by novel practices. Finney popularized methods of isolating the lost within the audience and applying considerable pressure to encourage them to make a public statement of faith. His methods are still with us today in the Altar Calls of evangelicalism.
Finney published a book entitled Lectures on Revival
which set the tone both for the Awakening and also for the future of the American church. He was answered by various ministers of a more traditional bent. Then and later much attention was paid to the methods of Finney and the question of whether or not they are biblically acceptable. Less was paid to Finney's doctrine, a lack which is beginning to be addressed.
which set the tone both for the Awakening and also for the future of the American church. He was answered by various ministers of a more traditional bent. Then and later much attention was paid to the methods of Finney and the question of whether or not they are biblically acceptable. Less was paid to Finney's doctrine, a lack which is beginning to be addressed.
My first encounter with Charles Finney was of a rather different sort. I grew up in churches which had rejected his methods. In my life I have observed a total of two altar calls. The debate over revivalist practices had been settled in my church years before I was born. As a result, I have never read Lectures on Revival. I have, however, read Finney. As a result of my reading I must say I am stunned at the place which he holds in the pantheon of American evangelists stretching from Whitefield to Graham. I have spoken with several Christians and even pastors who would be sickened if they knew what I know of Finney, yet they consider him one of the great heroes of the faith.
The difference is that I have read Finney'sSystematic Theology, and having read, I am fairly certain that I know what he believed. He was no evangelical. In fact, even if one were to stretch the most generously inclusive definition it would be extraordinarily difficult to apply the word "Christian" to him.
Reading Charles Finney
My encounter with Finney occurred during my senior year in seminary. During that year I took a required course in the history of the modern church. Led by our president, Dr. W. Robert Godfrey, we traversed the landscape of the Protestant church from the period immediately following the Reformation down to the present age. During the semester we discussed the rise of Puritanism, Pietism, Revivalism, Dispensationalism, Modernism, Progressivism, Pentacostalism, Fundamentalism and Evangelicalism, and of course Barthianism. Throughout we focused on the interaction of these various traditions with classical Reformed thinkers in the various ages, as one would expect at one of the Westminster
Finney's Systematic Theology was one of the more surprising books on the reading list. We were expected to read quite a few sections of this volume in advance of the lecture. It was a logistically challenging assignment. Few Westminster
When my turn came, I began reading with considerable apathy, continued with growing interest, and concluded with horror. I was so disturbed by what I had read that I continued well beyond the assigned section. I read more than half of the book and skimmed the rest. Throughout my reading one thought recurred: "What has gotten into Dr. Godfrey? Why are we reading this? There must be some better representation of Nineteenth Century evangelical thought!"
At last the class arrived at "Finney Day." The lecture opened with a simple question, "What did you think?" For several minutes Finney's legacy was bombarded with the most severe criticism at our disposal. Finally someone asked what I had wondered: "Why did we read this?" Godfrey laughed and replied, "The first few years I taught this class, no matter how hard I tried to give Finney a fair treatment, someone would accuse me of vilifying him. With Finney a fair treatment is vilification, but always there were students who could not believe that he was as bad as my presentation. So now I just assign the reading and let you do the vilification."
And vilify we did. The consensus of the class was in line with the consensus of Reformed thinking in Finney's day: if what we had just read could be called "Christian Theology," then the church had sinned grievously in its expulsion of Pelagius. There is nothing noteworthy to distinguish the one from the other. And if Finney believed what he wrote, then he was no Christian.
Evaluating Finney
I am well aware of how such a scene sounds: Reformed seminary students gleefully eviscerating one of the heroes of the evangelical faith. Two years earlier a classmate of mine had complained to me about the way older students were talking about Charles Finney. He thought it was unseemly of them to openly say that one of the greatest evangelists in history could not have been a Christian. It certainly sounded that way to me, yet there I was a few years later joining the chorus of condemnation. I can only tell you that there was no glee in that classroom. We were instead shocked and deeply offended by what we had read. What was it about Finney's doctrine which so angered us?
Finney's theological lectures begin with a discussion of god as the moral governor of the universe. He continues with this description for many lectures. "Moral Government" is not only the primary aspect of god's character but is the key to all Finney's doctrinal thought. He believed in a god who simply established moral rules and demanded that his creatures obey them. To be saved, a person must bring his actions into conformity with the moral expectations of god. Salvation appears to be by works, through obedience, lest god should boast. There is little there to resemble the Lord Jehovah. There is nothing of His grace, His mercy, and certainly not of His covenant goodness to His people.
By no stretch of the imagination could Finney's Systematic Theology be considered a Christian book, for Christ is as absent from its pages as is God. Finney's christ is the son of god who became man to show us the way to heaven. There is no actual lecture on christ, so the reader might be understandably confused as to exactly what Finney taught about his nature. There are, however, two lectures on the atonement. Most of the material there is a refutation of the Christian doctrine of atonement, which Finney mischaracterizes as a "commercial transaction."
In place of this transaction Finney presents a theory of the atonement which he calls the satisfaction of public justice. The idea is that god was so mad at the world that he could not even consider the good works of men until some public gesture had been undertaken to satisfy his need to be just in public. Finney's god therefore allows christ to be crucified to satisfy what seems to be a rather petty, juvenile need to appear tough. Once christ had died god could look upon the deeds of men and evaluate them according to their conformity to his moral governance.
We live, therefore, in the age of grace, which to Finney means that god doesn't automatically send everyone to hell in a fit of generalized anger. Instead the opportunity exists for men to earn the favor of god through righteous living. Every person must face a crisis in life in which he makes a determination to live according to the moral governance of god. Those who manage to stick to it until they die are saved; all others are damned.
This is not Arminianism. John Wesley would have had no fellowship with anyone who taught such anti-biblical nonsense. The ancient church had the sense to excommunicate Pelagius when he said the same things. To put it another way, my class's conclusions about Finney had less to do with our being Reformed than it did with our being literate.
Doctrine and Practice
No theologian better illustrates the maxim that doctrine determines practice than Charles Finney. Believing what he did about salvation, he had no choice but to develop a preaching style intended to convince men to make the decision to obey. Believing in a god who is all justice with no mercy, he could not accomplish this by means of good news, but only through the creation of abject fear. Having no sense at all of the God who acts in the saving of men, he himself labored under that same fear. If he failed to accomplish the saving of souls men would burn. His practice was simple: produce decisions by any means and at any cost.
Lectures on Revival is thus a natural outgrowth of Finney's doctrinal prejudices. His lectures are not about the God who brings revival but how an evangelist can produce the largest number of decisions. He was the originator of the altar call - the strange practice of verbal arm-twisting by which a preacher demands that his listeners perform a series of actions which end in their coming to the front of the church as a demonstration of their conversion. Finney's use of this method, though first, was easily the most insidious in history. He encouraged those who wanted him to pray for them to come and sit in a special section. There they would be subjected to his strongest appeals until they were manipulated into a public confession of sin and commitment to obedience.
Finney must have been a mesmerizing speaker; his preaching produced grand results. Sadly, we must conclude that few if any of his "converts" knew the Lord; any who did must have met Him elsewhere. For while Finney was an expert on the production of crisis decisions, he did not know the Savior and could not proclaim His grace to sinners.
Charles Finney’s Stepchildren
As I wrote last week, Charles Finney was no Christian. His theology was sub-Christian heresy, a fact clearly demonstrated by his own doctrinal lectures. The message Finney preached was one of pure legal obligation to God. He did not preach this as a precursor to the glorious gospel of grace, but as a road map to a paradise obtained through obedience. There was no good news in his preaching - only terror.
Furthermore, the methodology which Finney developed and popularized was a natural extension of his doctrine. He truly believed that any man could save himself through righteousness, but that to embark upon that life a sinner must make a crisis-generated decision to follow God's rules. Finney was an expert at producing that crisis. He invented the altar call as a means of creating escalating pressure on his hearers until they were driven to make the decision which would save them from hellfire.
Finney produced seemingly impressive results; great numbers came forward and made a religious profession under his ministry. His success, though, was a mirage. Finney himself had to acknowledge two facts by the end of his career. One was that the people in the region of western New York
He had no explanation for this, but to true Christians the answer should be obvious. Human effort toward self reform is always an unsustainable program. No amount of dedication can turn a sinner into a saint. Only the atoning blood of the Lamb of God can wash away sin, and Finney denied that atonement. Only the enlivening influence of the Spirit can work a real transformation in sinful men, but Finney sought to produce life from another source. His ministry was bound to be a failure if ever it was examined closely.
Mythologizing Finney
Why, then, is Finney such a hero in the evangelical church?
During the heyday of the Second Great Awakening Finney's chimerical successes made for wonderful theater. Other evangelists longed for the reputation enjoyed by Finney, and many began to follow in his methodological footsteps. Finney's Lectures on Revival only accelerated this process. Some of those who grasped at the promise of revival offered by Finney were genuine Christian evangelists. They still preached a gospel of saving grace, but they sought to draw men to it through tactics devised by their day's great denier of the power of that gospel.
These evangelists were the organizers of the camp meetings and Bible conferences which swept the nation. Today when we hear of established churches which opposed the revivalists it is suggested that they were motivated by a cold orthodoxy and a concern for their own financial position. In fact, many churches were deeply concerned about the implications of the self-generated conversion which was implied by Finney's methods. Nevertheless the revivalist evangelists pressed forward, and in so doing they changed the face of Christianity in America
Finney began to be seen as the face of the new Evangelicalism. There was, however, a problem: Finney's doctrinal lectures were still in print. Thankfully for Finney's evangelical disciples, people who were converted in a camp-meeting altar call were no more likely to sit down and read a book on systematic theology then are those who are converted in similar settings today. Few Christians learned Finney's doctrine; it was enough that he was a successful evangelist who influenced many other successful evangelists.
In time efforts were made to sanitize the history of Charles Finney. New versions of his theology were printed in which the most damning passages were omitted. Most evangelicals do not know what Finney taught, and outright lies about his doctrinal stance are rampant. I was more amused than disappointed to find this in the Charles Finney Wikipedia entry: "However, Finney affirmed salvation by grace through faith alone, not by works or by obedience." (The reference for that particular bit of disinformation is a lecture in which Finney affirms that justification is by faith alone, but only after defining "justification" and "faith" differently than every theologian who preceded him in history. The lecture's title is "Justification by Faith"; Finney knew nothing of the distinction between "by faith" and "through faith.")
So, the battle over Finney's legacy continues. He himself might have been amused to know that his reputation would be vigorously defended by Christians who believe in the very gospel which he so forcefully rejected. Who really owns Finney?
Finney's Abundant Family
Finney was certainly an innovator, and as such he has spawned many offspring. Who exactly are they?
Finney's truest children are to be found wherever a gospel of works is preached. I do not mean that every church which urges moral behavior is Finneyite - we must have a clearer sense of the relationship of law and gospel than that. However, wherever false teachers urge men to make themselves right with God through their own obedience - there Finney's true legacy survives. The most Finneyish places are the perpetually-emerging cults in which personal holiness is the key to heaven and in which great psychological pressure is exerted in order to keep the members in line. These false teachers are Finney's favorite sons - the delight of his heart and the apple of his eye.
He also has children who have grown a bit rambunctious and have put their own spin on his teaching. They have promoted "second works of grace" by which one enters a higher plane of spiritual existence through a crisis experience. Like their father, when they say "work of grace" they mean "work which you yourself must perform." Finney may wonder why these children speak of a second work, but at least they have mastered his technique of generating the crisis. Among them a few will receive an extra paternal pat on the head: those who have learned to offer great material blessing in this life to those who follow their teaching. The health-and-wealth gospel epitomizes Finneyism. What better psychological pressure can there be? Offer people the wealth and power of this world, but tell them they must make a decision to follow God in order to have it. Conversions are sure to follow!
The same is true of every former-evangelical and pseudo-evangelical who finds himself just the slightest bit offended at the gospel of grace and desires to re-define it according to human works. Perhaps even N.T. Wright himself would have no difficulty at all with justification by faith alone if he were permitted to redefine both "justification" and "faith" in Finney's terms.
Red-Headed Step-Children
Finney's is a large family; he has children in many places. But that is not all; he also has stepchildren. They are not truly of his family; genetically they belong to someone else. Yet they live in his house, they learn from his example, and they suffer under his discipline. They exert themselves mightily in an attempt to live up to the high standards of his household - standards by which every child is expected to produce a high conversion-count. All the while they do not realize that they do not actually belong; they have another Father from whose household they have been forcibly removed.
I refer, of course, to the genuine Christian ministers who have been crippled by the propagation of Finneyite methodology. These pastors don't belong in Finney's household at all. Their spiritual DNA is derived from the Christ of the Bible. They truly believe in salvation by grace alone through faith alone. They shouldn't have any sympathy for their step-father's coercive methods. Sadly they have never lived anywhere but in his house. They think that what they have experienced there is genuine Christianity at its best.
Consequently they are engaged in a hopeless battle to merge Finney's methodology with the true gospel. They preach a gospel of free and sovereign grace, but adorn it with that strange, manipulative invention known as the "altar call." They teach that only God can save a hopeless sinner, but they work with furious energy to attempt to produce a convert. They tell men that salvation is about freedom from the guilt of sin, but they labor to make their congregations feel guilty. After all, this is what will produce the greatest number of decisions, and perhaps Dad will be proud of them at the end of the day.
Of course they fail. They know just a bit too much about true conversion, and sooner or later they start realizing that many of the "converts" they have won don't act very converted. If they begin to have doubts, they had best suppress them. Just like the proverbial abusive stepparents in the fairy tales, Finney will knock them to the ground if they complain. The problem must be that they themselves are ineffectual evangelists.
So they slog on, hoping to become more effective, and not realizing that they are holding themselves up to the ungodly standards of a man with whom they share nothing of any substance. Finney may have been very effective at producing decisions to live righteously, but those who want to see a true work of God in the soul must learn instead to pray. There is no form of manipulation which can produce true godliness in the hearts of any congregation. The fear of hell won't do it; neither will the promise of heaven-on-earth. Only the movement of the One who blows where He wills can change the heart of any sinner, just as only the blood of the sinless One who died for sin can cover make any sinner righteous in God's eyes.
Those who believe in the atonement of Jesus Christ should also believe in the saving work of the Holy Spirit. The pastors who preach the one ought to preach the other. They ought to abandon the manipulative methods of their stepfather's home: methods which were initially based upon the premise that Jesus cannot save and which still communicate the message that the Spirit is insufficient to draw men to Christ.
