Introduction

O LORD, revive thy work in the midst of the years, in the midst of the years make known; in wrath remember mercy. HABAKKUK 3:2

Charles Grandison Finney was a country lawyer who turned into the most famous preacher in America. He had no college degree and almost no theological training. He was converted in a patch of woods one October morning in 1821, walked out of his law practice the next day, and spent the next half-century pleading the cause of Christ as he had once pleaded cases before a jury. Towns in upstate New York were turned upside down under his preaching. He built a tabernacle in New York City, taught theology in a forest clearing in Ohio, and became president of the college that grew up there. By the time he died in 1875 his Lectures on Revivals of Religion had been read on both sides of the Atlantic, and the way most evangelical churches thought about revival, invitation and decision had been changed for good.

He is also one of the most disputed figures in the history of the church. Some regard him as the greatest evangelist since Whitefield. Others regard him as the man who turned revival into a technique and grace into a human achievement. Both judgements have evidence behind them. This book tries to set out what he actually taught, in his own words where they can be quoted, and to weigh it fairly.

One thread through everything

Beneath all Finney’s teaching lies a single conviction: that God’s commands are to be obeyed, now, by the person who hears them. Finney could not bear the thought that anyone, church member or unbeliever, should sit still under the gospel and wait for something to happen to them. He opened his Lectures on Revivals of Religion with words that summed up his whole ministry: “Religion is the work of man. It is something for man to do.”

Everything else follows from this. A revival, he said, is simply a church returning to obedience. Prayer is to be definite, fervent and believing, because God has bound Himself by promises. The fulness of the Spirit is a command, and therefore within reach. The sinner is commanded to make a new heart, and therefore is able to do it. Preaching should be plain, direct and aimed at a verdict. Measures that bring people to decide are not to be despised because they are new. Christians are to aim at holiness without known sin, and to set their faces against the sins of their nation, including slavery. The question to keep asking as you read is his question: what does God require of me, and why am I not doing it?

Choose you this day whom ye will serve … but as for me and my house, we will serve the LORD. JOSHUA 24:15

Why he still matters

There are good reasons to read Finney. He refused to let anyone hide behind a doctrine. Many in his day used God’s sovereignty as a reason to do nothing, and told anxious sinners that they could not repent until God made them. Finney thought this cruel and unbiblical, and much of the time he was right.

He took prayer with terrible seriousness. His lectures on prayer are among the most searching ever written, and he always insisted that his revivals were carried by the hidden intercession of people whose names were never famous.

He expected the Holy Spirit to be present in power. His own conversion ended in what he called a mighty baptism of the Holy Ghost, and he never stopped believing that ministers without that anointing were trying to do the work of God without God.

And he held that faith must show itself in public righteousness. At a time when most American churches were silent about slavery, he excluded slaveholders from the Lord’s Table and helped build a college that took in Black students and women.

How this book is arranged

After a chapter on his life, nineteen short chapters set out his teaching. The first six follow the Lectures on Revivals: what a revival is, the breaking up of fallow ground, prevailing prayer, the spirit of prayer, the prayer of faith and the fulness of the Spirit. A chapter follows on power from on high. Then come three chapters on the doctrines at the centre of the storm: the sinner’s duty to make a new heart, Finney’s view of depravity and the will, and his account of the atonement. Five chapters take up the work of conversion — the directions he gave to sinners, repentance, soul-winning, preaching and the new measures — and one asks why revivals cease. Three more close the book: holiness, the law and the gospel, and the Christian’s obligation to reform.

Each chapter ends with application points and a prayer. Finney would have wanted it so. His own lectures nearly always ended by turning on the hearers and asking, in effect, Will you do it? Read a chapter a day, or one a week. Stop at the application points. Pray the prayer, or better, pray your own.

Where he must be read with care

This is not a book of hero-worship, and on Finney more than most it is necessary to say plainly where he must be weighed rather than simply received.

First, and most important, Finney rejected the historic Protestant teaching on original sin. He denied that the guilt of Adam’s sin is reckoned to his descendants, and he denied that we are born with a nature that is itself sinful; sin, for him, consisted only in voluntary choices. He taught that people are fully able to obey God, and that the Spirit’s work is not to give power but to persuade the unwilling. Many careful readers have judged that this leans strongly towards the teaching of Pelagius, which the church rejected long ago. Chapter eleven sets out what he taught and where it falls short of Scripture.

Second, he held what is called a governmental view of the atonement: that Christ’s death did not pay the penalty of sinners’ sins but upheld the honour of God’s law so that God could safely forgive. He rejected the imputation of Christ’s righteousness to the believer. Chapter twelve weighs this.

Third, his confidence that revival follows the right use of means, and his defence of measures designed to bring people to decide, opened the door to something he himself warned against: the engineered revival, in which technique does the work and emotional pressure is mistaken for the Spirit. The region where he laboured became known as the Burned-over District, and in the years after his revivals it produced not only lasting churches but a crop of sects, fads and disillusionment. Chapters seventeen and eighteen look at this honestly.

Fourth, his teaching on holiness at Oberlin, which held that Christians may live without known sin, has helped some and burdened others, and was criticised by friends as well as foes.

Why read him, then? Because on much that matters most he was right, and because the church has rarely had a more urgent voice calling it to obey what it already knows. The counsel of this book is the counsel of Scripture: Prove all things; hold fast that which is good (1 Thessalonians 5:21). Where Finney is faithful — on prayer, on repentance, on the Spirit, on the duty to respond to God now — receive it gladly and act on it. Where he presses beyond what is written, set it aside and lose nothing.

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Name one thing you know God requires of you that you have been waiting for Him to do instead. Write it down.

2. Choose a pace for this book — a chapter a day or a chapter a week — and decide now when you will read it.

3. Ask whether you have ever used a true doctrine, such as God’s sovereignty, as a reason for doing nothing.

4. Resolve to test everything in these pages against Scripture, especially where Finney departs from the teaching of the church.

5. Ask God to use this book to send you not to Finney but to Christ, and to obedience.

A PRAYER

Lord God, You have spoken, and I have heard, and too often I have done nothing. Forgive me for waiting when You were calling.

As I read about Your servant Charles Finney, give me the courage he had to take You at Your word, and the humility he sometimes lacked to receive what I cannot understand.

Keep me from admiring a preacher and missing his Master. Where he is faithful to Your Word, let me obey it; where he is not, give me discernment.

Revive Your work in my own heart first, and then in Your church. Amen.