Depravity and the Will

Behold, I was shapen in iniquity; and in sin did my mother conceive me. PSALM 51:5

This is the hardest chapter in the book, and the most necessary. Finney’s preaching drew its force from a particular view of human nature, and that view departed, knowingly and deliberately, from the teaching of the Reformers and of the great confessions of the church. He said so himself. Anyone who reads Finney with profit needs to understand what he rejected, why he rejected it, and why most careful readers since have concluded that he went badly wrong.

The quarrel at Adams

The story begins in the study of George Gale, the Princeton-trained pastor who supervised Finney’s theological training. In his Memoirs Finney set out Gale’s position as he understood it, and it was the strict Calvinism of the day. The guilt of Adam’s first sin is imputed to all his descendants. All receive from Adam, by natural generation, a nature wholly sinful in every faculty, so that they cannot perform any act acceptable to God. They are condemned for Adam’s sin, for their sinful nature and for their own transgressions. Regeneration must therefore be a change of nature, wrought directly by the Spirit on the substance of the soul, in which the sinner is passive.

Finney would have none of it. “I could not receive that theological fiction of imputation,” he wrote. He thought it unreasonable that anyone should be guilty for another’s act or for a nature he did not choose. And he saw what it did in the pulpit. Gale, he said, could never preach repentance without leaving the impression that his people could not repent, nor call them to believe without telling them that faith was impossible until their nature was changed. His orthodoxy, Finney wrote, was a perfect snare to himself and his hearers.

What Finney put in its place

It is important to be accurate. Finney did not deny that all people are sinners. Among the doctrines he said he preached everywhere was “The total moral, voluntary depravity of unregenerate man.” Everyone sins, and every unconverted person is wholly given over to selfishness. But the depravity is moral and voluntary: it consists in choices, not in nature.

For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God. ROMANS 3:23

Where then does this universal selfishness come from? In Sinners Bound to Change Their Own Hearts Finney answered that the sinful preference is not created in the child. It arises from temptation to selfishness in the circumstances into which every child is born, as its appetites clamour for gratification before its reason is formed. “Sinners make their own wicked hearts,” he wrote. In a later lecture, Growth in Grace, he allowed that the feelings and appetites of human beings are in a fallen, disordered state, which he called a physical depravity of the sensibility; but because it is involuntary, he held that it carries no guilt. Sin, strictly, is only the will’s consent.

It follows that Adam at his creation had no moral character until he chose; that infants, before they choose, are not guilty; that the new birth is a change of the will’s supreme choice, not of nature; and that the Spirit’s work is to persuade, not to create. It also follows that the imputation of Christ’s righteousness to the believer, the other side of Gale’s scheme, was likewise a fiction to Finney. And among the doctrines he listed as his own was “persistence in holiness as a condition of salvation.”

Why this matters

Finney’s critics were not merely defending a system. They believed Scripture teaches what he denied.

It teaches that sin is not only in what we do but in what we are. David confessed not only his acts but that he was shapen in iniquity. Jesus said that out of the heart proceed evil thoughts; the actions spring from a corrupt source. Paul said we were by nature the children of wrath (Ephesians 2:3). The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked (Jeremiah 17:9).

For from within, out of the heart of men, proceed evil thoughts, adulteries, fornications, murders. MARK 7:21

It teaches, too, that Adam’s sin had consequences for the whole race that are more than bad example. In Romans 5, Paul sets Adam and Christ side by side as two heads. By one man’s disobedience many were made sinners; by the obedience of one shall many be made righteous. If we deny that we were made sinners in the first Adam, it is hard to see how we are made righteous in the last.

For as by one man’s disobedience many were made sinners, so by the obedience of one shall many be made righteous. ROMANS 5:19

This is the heart of the matter. The Reformers did not insist on imputation out of love for difficult ideas. They insisted on it because the gospel depends on it. The believer is justified not because his own will has turned, but because Christ’s righteousness is counted as his. When Finney called imputation a fiction, he weakened the ground on which a sinner stands before God, and made his standing depend, in the end, on his own persistence in holiness. Many who sat under that teaching found it more a burden than a gospel.

The charge of Pelagianism

Finney’s critics often called his theology Pelagian, after the fifth-century monk who taught that human beings are born without inherited corruption and can obey God if they will. Charles Hodge of Princeton wrote a long review of Finney’s Systematic Theology from that standpoint, and Finney replied. The charge needs care. Finney affirmed that all people in fact sin, that none will turn without the Spirit, and that salvation is through Christ’s atonement, and he would have been indignant at being classed with Pelagius. But on the questions of original sin, human ability and the nature of grace he stood much closer to Pelagius than to Augustine, and many sound judges have concluded that his system leans decidedly in that direction.

What to do with this

What then should a reader do with Finney here?

First, take his warning. There is a way of teaching human inability that makes sinners comfortable and preachers timid, and Finney saw it clearly. Scripture never lets anyone off the hook because of the corruption of his nature. The sinner is responsible, and must be told so.

Second, refuse his remedy. The answer to a distorted doctrine of original sin is not to deny original sin, but to teach it as Scripture does: that we are born corrupt and guilty, that we freely and wholeheartedly sin, that we are wholly responsible, and that only a sovereign work of grace can make us new.

Who can bring a clean thing out of an unclean? not one. JOB 14:4

Third, read the rest of Finney with this in mind. His practical counsel on prayer, repentance and holiness is often wiser than his theory. But where his theory drives his practice — in his confidence about decisions, his view of the Spirit’s work, and his teaching on sanctification — weigh it carefully.

But God, who is rich in mercy, for his great love wherewith he loved us, even when we were dead in sins, hath quickened us together with Christ. EPHESIANS 2:4–5

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Read Romans 5:12–21 slowly. Note every place where Paul links what Adam did with what Christ did.

2. Ask whether you think of your sin only as things you do, or also as a corruption you need to be rescued from.

3. Consider where your confidence before God rests: on your own continued faithfulness, or on Christ’s righteousness counted as yours.

4. If you teach, ask whether your doctrine of sin ever becomes an excuse. Press responsibility and grace together.

5. Give thanks that God quickened you when you were dead, and not merely when you were willing.

A PRAYER

Holy Father, I was shapen in iniquity, and I have added to it by my own choices. I have no righteousness of my own to plead.

Thank You that as by one man’s disobedience many were made sinners, so by the obedience of One many are made righteous.

Keep me from excusing myself because of my nature, and from trusting myself because of my will. Teach me to rest wholly on Christ.

You made me alive when I was dead. Let me never forget it, and let me live to Your praise. Amen.