Charles Grandison Finney

Charles Grandison Finney
2nd President of Oberlin College
In office
1851 (1851) – 1866 (1866)
Preceded by Asa Mahan
Succeeded by James Fairchild
Personal details
Born (1792-08-29)August 29, 1792
Warren, Connecticut, U.S.
Died August 16, 1875(1875-08-16) (aged 82)
Oberlin, Ohio, U.S.
Spouse(s) Lydia Root Andrews (m. 1824)
Elizabeth Ford Atkinson (m. 1848)
Rebecca Allen Rayl (m. 1865)
Profession Presbyterian minister; evangelist; revivalist; author

Charles Grandison Finney (August 29, 1792 – August 16, 1875) was an American Presbyterian minister and leader in the Second Great Awakening in the United States. He has been called The Father of Modern Revivalism.[1] Finney was best known as an innovative revivalist during the period 1825–1835 in upstate New York and Manhattan, an opponent of Old School Presbyterian theology, an advocate of Christian perfectionism, and a religious writer.

Together with several other evangelical leaders, his religious views led him to promote social reforms, such as abolition of slavery and equal education for women and African Americans. From 1835 he taught at Oberlin College of Ohio, which accepted all genders and races. He served as its second president from 1851 to 1866, during which its faculty and students were activists for abolition, the Underground Railroad, and universal education.

Biography

Early life

Born in Warren, Connecticut, in 1792,[2] Finney was the youngest of nine children. The son of farmers who moved to the upstate frontier of Jefferson County, New York after the American Revolutionary War, Finney never attended college. His leadership abilities, musical skill, six-foot three-inch stature, and piercing eyes gained him recognition in his community.[3] He and his family attended the Baptist church in Henderson, New York, where the preacher led emotional, revival-style meetings. Both the Baptists and Methodists displayed fervor through the early nineteenth century.[4] He "read the law", studying as an apprentice to become a lawyer, but after a dramatic conversion experience and baptism into the Holy Spirit in Adams, he gave up legal practice to preach the gospel.[5][6]

In 1821, Finney started studies at age 29 under George Washington Gale, to become a licensed minister in the Presbyterian Church. He had many misgivings about the fundamental doctrines taught in that denomination.[7] He moved to New York City in 1832, where he was minister of the Chatham Street Chapel and introduced some of the revivalist fervor of upstate to his urban congregations.[4] He later founded and preached at the Broadway Tabernacle. In 1835, he became the professor of systematic theology at the newly formed Oberlin College in Oberlin, Ohio.[8]

Revivals

Finney was active as a revivalist from 1825 to 1835, in Jefferson County and for a few years in Manhattan. In 1830-31, he led a revival in Rochester, New York that has been noted as inspiring other revivals of the Second Great Awakening.[9] A leading pastor in New York who was converted in the Rochester meetings gave the following account of the effects of Finney's meetings in that city: "The whole community was stirred. Religion was the topic of conversation in the house, in the shop, in the office and on the street. The only theater in the city was converted into a livery stable; the only circus into a soap and candle factory. Grog shops were closed; the Sabbath was honored; the sanctuaries were thronged with happy worshippers; a new impulse was given to every philanthropic enterprise; the fountains of benevolence were opened, and men lived to good."[10]

He was known for his innovations in preaching and the conduct of religious meetings, which often impacted entire communities. These included having women pray out loud in public meetings of mixed sexes; development of the "anxious seat", a place where those considering becoming Christians could sit to receive prayer; and public censure of individuals by name in sermons and prayers.[11] He was also known for his extemporaneous preaching.

Antislavery work and Oberlin College presidency

In addition to becoming a popular Christian evangelist, Finney was involved with social reforms, particularly the abolitionist movement. The movement was strongly supported by the Northern and Midwestern Baptists and Methodists with Finney frequently denouncing slavery from the pulpit.

In 1835, he moved to the free state of Ohio, where he became a professor at Oberlin College. After more than a decade, he was selected as its second president, serving from 1851 to 1866. (He had already served as acting President in 1849.)[12] Oberlin was the first American college to accept women and blacks as students in addition to white men. From its early years, its faculty and students were active in the abolitionist movement. They participated together with people of the town in biracial efforts to help fugitive slaves on the Underground Railroad, as well as to resist the Fugitive Slave Act.[13] Many slaves escaped to Ohio across the Ohio River from Kentucky, making the state a critical area for their passage to freedom.

Personal life

Finney was twice a widower and married three times. In 1824, he married Lydia Root Andrews (1804–1847) while living in Jefferson County. They had six children together. In 1848, a year after Lydia's death, he married Elizabeth Ford Atkinson (1799–1863) in Ohio. In 1865 he married Rebecca Allen Rayl (1824–1907), also in Ohio. Each of Finney's three wives accompanied him on his revival tours and joined him in his evangelistic efforts.

Finney's great-grandson, also named Charles Grandison Finney, became a famous author.

Theology

As a young man Finney was a third-degree Master Mason, but after his conversion, he dropped the group as antithetical to Christianity. He was active in Anti-Masonic movements.[14]

Finney was a primary influence on the "revival" style of evangelism which emerged in the 19th century. Though coming from a Calvinistic background, Finney rejected tenets of "Old Divinity" Calvinism, which he felt were unbiblical and counter to evangelism and Christian mission.

Finney's theology is difficult to classify. In his masterwork, Religious Revivals, he emphasizes the involvement of a person's will in salvation.[15] He did not make clear whether he believed the will was free to repent or not repent, or whether he viewed God as inclining the will irresistibly. (The latter is part of Calvinist doctrine, in which the will of an elect individual is changed by God so that he or she desires to repent, thus repenting with his or her will and not against it, but the individual is not free in whether to choose repentance as the choice must be what the will is inclined toward.) Finney, like most Protestants, affirmed salvation by grace through faith alone, not by works or by obedience.[16][17] Finney affirmed that works were the evidence of faith. Acts of unrepentant sin were signs that a person had not received salvation.

Writing in his Systematic Theology, Finney states: "I have felt greater hesitancy in forming and expressing my views upon this Perseverance of the saints, than upon almost any other question in theology."[18]

Quoting Finney: "The impression of many seems to be, that grace will pardon what it cannot prevent; in other words, that if the grace of the Gospel fails to save people from the commission of sin in this life; it will nevertheless pardon them and save them in sin, if it cannot save them from sin. Now, really, I understand the Gospel as teaching that men are saved from sin first, and as a consequence, from hell; and not that they are saved from hell while they are not saved from sin. Christ sanctifies when he saves. And this is the very first element or idea of salvation, saving from sin. 'Thou shall call his name Jesus," said the angel, 'for he shall save his people from their sins.' 'Having raised up his Son Jesus,' says the apostle, 'he hath sent him to bless you in turning every one of you from his iniquities.' Let no one expect to saved from hell, unless the grace of the Gospel saves him first from sin.' " –Charles Finney[19]

Finney's understanding of substitutionary atonement was that it satisfied "public justice" and that it opened the way for God to pardon people of their sins. This was part of the theology of the so-called New Divinity, which was popular at that time period. In this view, Christ's death satisfied public justice rather than retributive justice. As Finney wrote, it was not a "commercial transaction." This view of the atonement is typically known as the governmental view or government view.

Benjamin Warfield, a Calvinist professor of theology at Princeton Theological Seminary claimed that "God might be eliminated from it [Finney's theology] entirely without essentially changing its character."[20] Albert Baldwin Dod, a colleague of Warfield's and another "Old School" Presbyterian,[21] reviewed Finney's 1835 book Lectures on Revivals of Religion.[22] He rejected it as theologically unsound.[23] Dod was a defender of Old School Calvinist orthodoxy (see Princeton Theology) and was especially critical of Finney's view of the doctrine of total depravity.[24] Old School Princeton Theologians as Dod prosecuted even "Conservative" evangelicals as Lyman Beecher who was twice acquitted by the general First Presbyterian synod.[25]

In Charles W. Chesnutt's short story "The Passing of Grandison" (1899), published in the collection The Wife of His Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line, the enslaved hero is named "Grandison", likely an allusion to the well-known abolitionist.[26]

References

Notes

  1. ↑ Hankins, Barry (2004), The Second Great Awakening and the Transcendentalists, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, p. 137, ISBN 0-313-31848-4 .
  2. ↑ Charles Grandison Finney-born place, Ohio History Central, retrieved October 2008 Check date values in: |accessdate= (help) .
  3. ↑ "I. Birth and Early Education", Memoirs of Charles G. Finney, Gospel truth, 1868 .
  4. 1 2 Perciaccante, Marianne (2005), Calling Down Fire: Charles Grandison Finney and Revivalism in Jefferson County, New York, 1800–1841, pp. 2–4 .
  5. ↑ "III. Beginning of His Work", Memoirs, Gospel truth, 1868 .
  6. ↑ "III. Beginning of His Work", Memoirs, Gospel truth, 1868 .
  7. ↑ "IV. His Doctrinal Education and Other Experiences at Adams", Memoirs, Gospel truth, 1868 .
  8. ↑ Hyatt, Eddie (2002), 2000 Years Of Charismatic Christianity, Lake Mary, FL: Charisma House, p. 126, ISBN 978-0-88419-872-7 .
  9. ↑ William, Cossen. "Charle's Finney's Rochester Revival". Retrieved 27 March 2017.
  10. ↑ Hyatt, 126
  11. ↑ The various types of new measures are identified mostly by sources critical of Finney, such as Bennet, Tyler (1996), Bonar, Andrew, ed., Asahel Nettleton: Life and Labors, Edinburgh: Banner of Truth Trust, pp. 342–55 ; Letters of Rev. Dr. [Lyman] Beecher and the Rev. Mr. Nettleton on the New Measures in Conducting Revivals of Religion with a Review of a Sermon by Novanglus, New York: G&C Carvill, 1828, pp. 83–96 ; and Hodge, Charles (July 1833), "Dangerous Innovations", Biblical Repertory and Theological Review, 5 (3), University of Michigan, pp. 328–33, retrieved March 2008 Check date values in: |accessdate= (help) .
  12. ↑ "Presidents of Oberlin College". Oberlin College Archives. Oberlin College. Archived from the original on 21 October 2013. Retrieved 21 October 2013.
  13. ↑ Charles E. Hambrick-Stowe, Charles G. Finney and the Spirit of American Evangelicalism (1996) p 199
  14. ↑ Charles E. Hambrick-Stowe, Charles G. Finney and the Spirit of American Evangelicalism (1996), p. 112
  15. ↑ "Charles Grandison Finney", Electronic Oberlin Group, Oberlin College
  16. ↑ "JUSTIFICATION BY FAITH by Charles G. Finney". www.charlesgfinney.com.
  17. ↑ Charles G. Finney, "Letters to Professing Christians Lecture VI: Sanctification By Faith", 1837.
  18. ↑ "Finney's Systematic Theology--1851 Edition--Lecture LXXIX". www.charlesgfinney.com.
  19. ↑ "An OnLine site for the Complete WORKS of CHARLES G. FINNEY". www.gospeltruth.net.
  20. ↑ B. B. Warfield, Perfectionism (2 vols.; New York: Oxford, 1931) 2. 193.
  21. ↑ Old School–New School Controversy
  22. ↑ "On Revivals of Religion" Archived July 20, 2011, at the Wayback Machine.. Biblical Repertory and Theological Review Vol. 7 No. 4 (1835) p.626-674
  23. ↑ Charles E. Hambrick-Stowe, Charles G. Finney and the Spirit of American Evangelicalism, William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1996. ISBN 0-8028-0129-3, p.159
  24. ↑ Rev. Albert B. Dod, D.D., "On Revivals of Religion", in Essays, Theological and Miscellaneous, Reprinted from the Princeton Review, Wiley and Putnam (1847) pp.76-151
  25. ↑ Lyman Beecher
  26. ↑ Cutter, Martha J. "Passing as Narrative and Textual Strategy in Charles Chesnutt's 'The Passing of Grandison'", Passing in the Works of Charles W. Chesnutt, Eds. Wright, Susan Prothro, and Ernestine Pickens Glass. Jackson, MS: Mississippi UP, 2010, p. 43. ISBN 978-1-60473-416-4.

Bibliography

  • Essig, James David. "The Lord's Free Man: Charles G. Finney and His Abolitionism," Civil War History, March 1978, Vol. 24 Issue 1, pp 25–45
  • Guelzo, Allen C. "An heir or a rebel? Charles Grandison Finney and the New England theology," Journal of the Early Republic, Spring 1997, Vol. 17 Issue 1, pp 60–94
  • Hambrick-Stowe, Charles E. Charles G. Finney and the Spirit of American Evangelicalism (1996), a major scholarly biography
  • Hardman, Keith J. Charles Grandison Finney, 1792-1875: Revivalist and Reformer (1987), a major scholarly biography
  • Johnson, James E. "Charles G. Finney and a Theology of Revivalism," Church History, September 1969, Vol. 38 Issue 3, pp 338–358 in JSTOR
  • Perciaccante, Marianne. Calling Down Fire: Charles Grandison Finney and Revivalism in Jefferson County, New York, 1800-1840 (2005)
  • The Theology of C. G. Finney explained and defended
  • "The COMPLETE WORKS of CHARLES G. FINNEY", collected by Gospel Truth Ministries
  • A biography of Charles Finney by G. Frederick Wright (Holiness perspective; supportive)
  • A Vindication of the Methods and Results of Charles Finney's Ministry (Revivalist perspective; supportive; answers many traditional Old School Calvinist critiques)
  • Charles Grandison Finney: New York Revivalism in the 1820-1830s by John H. Martin, Crooked Lake Review
  • Articles on Finney (conservative Calvinist perspective; critical)
  • How Charles Finney's Theology Ravaged the Evangelical Movement (conservative Calvinist perspective; critical)
  • "The Legacy of Charles Finney" by Dr. Michael S. Horton (conservative perspective; critical)
  • The Oberlin Heritage Center-Local history museum and historical society of Oberlin, OH, where Finney lived and worked for decades.
  • Finney's Lectures on Theology by Charles Hodge (conservative Calvinist perspective; critical)
  • The Church in Crisis A critical look at Finney's revivalist methods and their impact on the modern church in America
  •  "Oberlin Theology". Encyclopedia Americana. 1920.
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