Charles Finney was born in 1792 in Connecticut but lived most of his childhood in Oneida County, New York. His parents were not Christians, and Finney grew up largely ignorant of Christian doctrine. He remembered no preaching or gospel witness in that part of New York (which he called “a wilderness”) — though the historical records indicate there was at least one strong evangelical church in the community.

The religion Finney remembered as a child was, he said later, “of a type not at all calculated to arrest my attention.” He described the only preacher he remembered from his youth:

His reading was altogether unimpassioned and monotonous; and although the people attended very closely and reverentially to his reading, yet, I must confess, it was to me not much like preaching.

Finney characterized the pastor’s content as “a dry discussion of doctrine,” then added, “and this was really quite as good preaching as I had ever listened to in any place. But any one can judge whether such preaching was calculated to instruct or interest a young man who neither knew nor cared anything about religion.”

Finney decided to study law and took an apprenticeship in Adams, New York, where for the first time he became actively involved in a church. The local Presbyterian pastor, George W. Gale, a young man about two years Finney’s senior, took an interest in the law student. Gale made Finney choir director in the church, and began to visit him in the law office to converse about spiritual matters.

Then Finney began to notice references to the Bible in his elementary law textbooks, so he acquired a Bible and began to study it. But again, Finney says, the preaching was a stumbling-block to him. “[Gale] seemed to take it for granted that his hearers were theologians, and therefore that he might assume all the great and fundamental doctrines of the Gospel. But I must say that I was rather perplexed than edified by his preaching.”

Finney pressed the young pastor with doctrinal questions during their conversations in the law office: “What did he mean by repentance? Was it a mere feeling or sorrow for sin? Was it altogether a passive state of mind, or did it involve a voluntary element? If it was a change of mind, in what respect was it a change of mind?” and so on. One gets the impression from the nature of Finney’s inquiries that Gale’s preaching could not have been as thoroughly tedious as Finney later portrayed it. The evidence suggests Pastor Gale’s ministry was having the desired effect on Finney.

Indeed, while Finney was in Adams, he was spectacularly converted. Ironically, though Finney’s conversion was dramatic, overwhelming, and revolutionary, he never came to understand that conversion is wholly a work of God. . . .

It was, I believe, extremely unfortunate that Finney chose to pursue a preaching ministry immediately after his conversion. Devoid of any solid Christian influence in his early life, he was almost completely ignorant of the Scriptures and of theology. Finney had a brilliant mind, however, and had always been able to hold his own in a theological debate — even with a trained man like Pastor Gale. His legal training had conditioned Finney to think logically, but it had also saddled him with a world of wrong presuppositions. Finney’s notions of justice, guilt, righteousness, transgression, forgiveness, responsibility, sovereignty, and a host of other terms were drawn from his legal studies, not from Scripture.

Wherever Finney preached, people responded enthusiastically. Immediately evidences of revival seemed to follow his wake. As his reputation spread, so did his influence. Finney boldly challenged conventional doctrine and persuasively championed his own rather novel set of doctrines, that had little or nothing to do with scriptural doctrine. . . .

It must be noted that when Finney came on the scene many churches had drifted from true orthodoxy to a cold hyper-Calvinism. . . . In rejecting hyper-Calvinist tendencies, Finney swung wildly to the opposite extreme. “There is nothing in religion beyond the ordinary powers of nature,” he wrote. “A revival is not a miracle, nor dependent on a miracle, in any sense. It is a purely philosophical result of the right use of the constituted means – as much so as any other effect produced by the application of means. . . . A revival is as naturally a result of the use of means as a crop is of the use of its appropriate means.” . . .

Finney’s influence on the American evangelical movement was profound. He was the first to ask converts to “come forward” in evangelistic meetings to indicate their acceptance of Christ. He is the one who first applied the term “revival” to evangelistic campaigns. It was Finney who popularized the after-meeting for inquirers seeking salvation. He also left his mark on the American preaching style, encouraging young preachers to be extemporaneous, anecdotal, more conversational and less doctrinal than preachers traditionally have been. All of those ideas – pretty much standard fare in evangelicalism today – were part of the “new measures” Finney introduced. . . .

Before long, however, the excitement and fervor of the supposed “revival” gave way to hardened unbelief and widespread agnosticism. The “burned-over district” was scorched again and became harder than ever. In fact, since Finney’s time that part of the country has never experienced another revival.

One of the workers who labored alongside Finney in the revivals wrote to him in 1834:

Let us look over the fields where you and others and myself have labored as revival ministers, and what is now their moral state? What was their state when three months after we left them? I have visited and revisited many of these fields, and groaned in spirit to see the sad, frigid, carnal, contentious state into which the churches had fallen – and fallen very soon after our first departure from among them.

Later assessing his own evangelistic career, Finney wrote, “I was often instrumental in bringing Christians under great conviction, and into a state of temporary repentance and faith. . . . [But] falling short of urging them up to a point, where they would become so acquainted with Christ as to abide in Him, they would of course soon relapse into their former state.”

When: Tue Apr 21 – Thu Apr 23, 2009
Where: Donald E. Stephens Convention Center, Rosemont, IL
Speakers: Bryan Chapell, DA Carson, John Piper, K Edward Copeland, Ligon Duncan, Mark Dricoll, Phil Ryken, Tim Keller, Ajith Fernando
Website: Entrusted with the Gospel: Living the Vision of Second Timothy

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