My soul is sick and agonized with such a state of things. The position of the Church is one of the greatest wonders of the world;—and yet we are gravely asking, why we do not have revivals of religion? Why has the Spirit of God forsaken us? and many are even glad to have revivals cease, and seem to be disposed to quell every thing down into a state of death-like apathy on every branch of reform ...
Is it possible, my dearly beloved brethren [sic], that we can remain blind to the tendencies of things—to the causes that are operating to produce alienation, division, distrust, to grieve away the Spirit, overthrow revivals, and cover the land with darkness and the shadow of death? Is it not time for us, brethren, to repent, to be candid and search out wherein we have been wrong and publicly and privately confess it ...
Your brother,
C.G. Finney
(Excerpted from Finney's letter, "The Pernicious Attitude of the Church on the Reforms of the Age," in Discovering an Evangelical Heritage, by Donald W. Dayton. Copyright 1976 by Donald W. Dayton. Used with permission from Harper & Row Publishers, Inc.)
In 1956 in the pages of The Christian Century, Reinhold Niebuhr issued a "Proposal to Billy Graham," who was then rising to his ascendancy as probably the greatest evangelist of our generation. Writing as the civil rights movement was gathering force to dominate the next decade, Niebuhr expressed the fear that Graham's "type of evangelism may seem to be irrelevant to the great moral issues of our day." While recognizing that Graham himself was personally somewhat enlightened on the issue of race, Niebuhr proposed to Graham that he go on to "incorporate the demand of love transcending racial boundaries into his evangelistic appeal."
In making this proposal to Graham, Niebuhr had in the back of his mind a concrete example from the 19th century. He had been reading The Anti-Slavery Impulse by Gilbert Barnes, one of the first books to seriously advance the thesis that behind the abolitionism of a century ago was the revival message of evangelist Charles G. Finney, often considered the initiator of the line of "modern revivalism" that produced Billy Graham. The difference that fascinated Niebuhr was the fact that "under the inspiration of the great Finney, the abolition of slavery was made central to the religious experience of repentance and conversion."
On one level Niebuhr's proposal to Graham was a shrewd use of the history of the revival tradition against itself. But on another level it was a very penetrating critique of recent evangelical experience, in which the understandings of sin, conversion, repentance, salvation, and the like have become so spiritualized that they have become a means of escape from the world rather than a way of engaging it. At least at this point, if not at others, the model of Finney needs to be lifted up and re-examined for clues to the revitalization of the evangelical experience in our own time.
Alas, however, the recovery of the "real Finney" is no easy task. One could easily begin to suspect a conspiracy to suppress Finney's influence when one realizes the extent to which history has been rewritten to obscure his significance. Even Christians often fail to realize the extent to which their understanding of history has been shaped by secular minds little inclined to look for religious roots of social change.
Too often the history of the 19th century has been written by those whose own liberation from religious shackles has inclined them to seek the roots of social change among the similarly "enlightened" figures of a century ago. The result has often been a telling of the struggle against slavery in terms of heroes drawn from the Unitarian and liberal traditions.
Gilbert Barnes attempted to overturn this picture. He argued instead that the anti-slavery impulse was rooted in the evangelical experience of the converts of the Second Great Awakening in the United States, the period dominated by the evangelism of Charles Finney. This fact alone should make us take a second look at Finney. When we do we find, in the words of U.S. historian Richard Hofstadter in Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, that Finney "must be reckoned among our great men." When we fully understand this period we will see one of the most marvelous illustrations of the power of the gospel at work in the world, and probably discover as well an important source of the more liberal social gospel movement, as Timothy Smith has argued in Revivalism and Social Reform.
Our impressions of Finney have suffered also from the influence of Christian historians. Much of evangelical and revivalist history has been written by advocates of the classically Calvinist theologies that Finney attacked in his own time for implicitly or explicitly supporting the status quo and undercutting the forces of reform and change. And even Finney's modern-day followers have issued expurgated editions of his works in which references to social reform have been eliminated, intentionally or unintentionally obscuring the extent to which Finney called for concrete repentance from the sins of his age.
Born in Connecticut in 1792, Charles Grandison Finney began a legal career in upstate New York. This was interrupted by his conversion, which was evoked by a study of the Bible initiated to understand the development of law. By the 1830s he was preaching to large crowds in the Eastern urban centers. In 1835 he issued his Lectures on Revivals of Religion and in the same year was invited to become professor of theology at the newly founded Oberlin College. While continuing his evangelistic work, Finney wrote works of theology as well as more popular guides to piety and the practice of evangelism before becoming president of the college in 1850.
Under Finney's teaching and administration, Oberlin became a center not only of the revival tradition but also of social reforms of all sorts. The faculty and students became a major force in "abolitionizing" the Northwest Territory (the Great Lakes area). Peace activism of all sorts spread out from the college. Women found a new role at Oberlin and were sent out on new paths into the Christian ministry; often they were leaders in the 19th-century feminist movement. In all of this activity Oberlin became one of the more remarkable Christian colleges and the model for many of the evangelical colleges of our time.
To contemporary Christians Finney may seem quaint. Though we may still have something to learn from Finney's commitment to "diet reform," few of us would wish to link the gospel call to repentance to a campaign against coffee, tea, and such condiments as pepper, which was believed to excite the passions. The campaign against the Masonic lodge does not seem as crucial as the struggle for justice and human rights. And Finney himself admitted that his early polemic against high Calvinism may have caused him to overstate human potential for change and to undervalue the work of the Holy Spirit.
But Finney did have insights that we still need to hear—insights of value to the whole church and not just those who find themselves in the immediate historical line of the evangelical tradition. One of the themes that I value most in Finney and many of his early followers is that they understood what we have come to call in recent years the "preferential option for the poor." We so identify this theme with modern liberation theologies that we forget that other Christians have also understood the Bible to teach God's special concern for the poor and oppressed—and that they too, in their own way, struggled to identify with the poor in conformity with this biblical theme.
In Finney's day this issue found expression in the struggle over pew rentals. In many churches, often under the pressure to be upwardly mobile, construction and maintenance costs were collected by renting out the pews. The prices varied like in a theater where the best seats cost the most. This meant that church seating often reflected social and economic class; the poor were relegated to the rear where the few, rugged free pews were located. Finney and his followers found this a direct contradiction to the gospel offered to all. They built "Free Churches" with no pew rentals and encouraged attenders to discard their "high fashions" which made the poor feel uncomfortable.
Finneyite Free Churches became a distinct branch of, for example, New York Presbyterianism, where they grouped themselves into a special Third Presbytery. Some evidence even suggests that these churches were the centers for the great reforms of the age. Associating with the poor apparently opened church members to other needs, from efforts to "rescue" the prostitutes to movements to free the slaves.
Some of Finney's rhetoric needs a certain demythologization for 20th-century audiences. His theology uses terms such as "moral government" and "disinterested benevolence," technical expressions that were highly debated issues within the Calvinist theology of his age. For our purposes we need primarily to recognize that Finney marks within that theological tradition a shift of emphasis from the wrath of God to the love of God.
The ultimate reality of God is "disinterested benevolence" in which God is always ready to love. Human sin is defined by contrast as basically selfishness. Conversion is not so much a religious experience as it is the turn to unselfishness and orientation to others that characterizes the Christian life. Christians are called to reflect the "disinterested benevolence" of God in their relationships. In Finney's own time this led to the founding of "benevolent societies" as expressions of Christian love. This concern so dominated the era that we speak of the "Benevolent Empire" of societies with interlocking directorates organized for the "doing good" to those of all conditions.
Today we can discern the flaws in understanding and paternalism of many of the "do-gooders" of the age, but the basic impulse was right and often superior to the tone set by many revivalists today. More recently we have been taught to conceive of Christian faith as less a way of love and more a matter of right belief. We have come to think of sin and guilt as issues of private negotiation with God. The Christian life is merchandised as the key to a spiritual high and the path to social adjustment instead of the call to loving engagement in the world that concretely challenges the forces of evil binding ourselves and others.
We will yet come to appreciate that in Finney's time sin and the call to repentance were understood in more historically concrete terms. For Finney repentance was not a private negotiation with God to determine the eternal destiny of one's soul, though it surely included those dimensions. Conversion for the followers of Finney meant renouncing such sins as slavery, often to the point of excluding slaveholders from celebration of the Lord's Supper.
For Finney "war, slavery, and licentiousness and such like evils and abominations, are necessarily regarded by the saint as great and sore evils, and he [sic] longs for their complete and final overthrow." To modern ears, chastened by wars that reveal the intransigence and power of evil, such sentiments sometimes appear overly optimistic and unrealistic. I, too, often find myself attracted by a greater realism, but I am then haunted by the fact that if such people had not believed that slavery could be overthrown, the institution might still exist.
I begin to wonder what forces might be unleashed in our world if our understandings of sin and evil were to become historically concrete—if we should again be able to name racism, prejudice, war, manipulation, and oppression for the sins that they are. What would happen if our decisions for Christ should become decisions against the forces of evil in our world? This fuller understanding of biblical conversion was Finney's vision, and it is one we need to recover.
Donald W. Dayton, author of Discovering an Evangelical Heritage, was a Sojourners contributing editor and taught theology and ethics at Northern Baptist Theological Seminary in Lombard, Illinois when this article appeared.
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