The Sin of the Church

Is not this the fast that I have chosen? to loose the bands of wickedness, to undo the heavy burdens, and to let the oppressed go free, and that ye break every yoke? ISAIAH 58:6

Finney is remembered as a revivalist, but he never thought revival could be separated from righteousness in public life. A church that was truly revived, he believed, would set its face against the sins of its nation, and a church that refused to do so would grieve the Spirit and lose its revival. Nowhere did this conviction show more clearly than in his stand against slavery. When most American churches were silent or compromised, Finney barred slaveholders from the Lord’s Table and spent forty years at a college that took in Black students and sheltered fugitives. This chapter sets out what he taught about the Christian’s obligation to reform.

No neutral ground

In his lecture on the hindrances to revival, Finney argued that revivals are hindered when ministers and churches take wrong ground on any question involving human rights. He took slavery as his chief example. There was a time, he said, when a Christian might be ignorant of its sinfulness. John Newton had continued in the slave trade after his conversion, because the evil of it had not yet dawned on him. But once the light has come, no one can remain neutral. “Christians can no more take neutral ground on this subject,” he said, than they can on the keeping of the Sabbath. “It is a great national sin. It is a sin of the church.”

Open thy mouth, judge righteously, and plead the cause of the poor and needy. PROVERBS 31:9

He went further. The churches, by their silence, and by allowing slaveholders to remain in good standing, had given the institution their blessing. It was the fact that ministers and church members held slaves that sanctified the whole abomination in the eyes of the world. “The fact is that slavery is, pre-eminently, the sin of the church.”

Closing the table

Finney did not only speak; he acted. His New York church, he told his hearers, had taken the same ground on slavery as on strong drink: it had excluded slaveholders and all concerned in the traffic from its communion. Some had called this uncharitable. Finney answered with a clear distinction. Where he had no authority, if the table of Christ was spread, he would sit down to it in obedience to Christ, whoever else was there. “Where I have authority, I exclude slaveholders from the communion, and I always will as long as I live.”

I wrote unto you in an epistle not to company with fornicators: yet not altogether with the fornicators of this world, or with the covetous, or extortioners … for then must ye needs go out of the world. 1 CORINTHIANS 5:9–10

He was careful not to condemn every slaveholding professor as a hypocrite. But while they continued in that sin, he said, the cause of Christ and of humanity required that they should not be recognised as Christians in good standing, lest the church become a partaker of other men’s sins.

The spirit of reform

Finney’s counsel on how to take this ground is as instructive as the ground itself. Avoid a bad spirit, he said. Angry controversy harms religion and harms the slaves themselves. Avoid a censorious spirit on both sides; impeaching one another’s motives grieves the Spirit. Let Christians lay aside prejudice and inform themselves. Let temperate, judicious writings circulate. Then let the church, meekly but firmly, take its stand and express its abhorrence of the sin — and having done so, be at peace and attend to the salvation of souls. He did not want slavery to become the all-absorbing topic of every conversation. He wanted it settled.

Learn to do well; seek judgment, relieve the oppressed, judge the fatherless, plead for the widow. ISAIAH 1:17

He applied the same principles elsewhere. Temperance, he thought, was a reform no Christian could stand aloof from. The Sabbath must be kept. Missions must be supported. And he told his hearers that politics were part of religion in a country like theirs. He did not want a Christian political party, he said; he wanted Christians to vote for honest men regardless of party, and to refuse their support to any candidate known to be a knave, an adulterer or a drunkard.

Oberlin

At Oberlin these convictions took concrete form. Finney made it a condition of his coming that the college admit students without regard to colour. It became one of the first colleges in America to educate Black and white students together, and it admitted women to its collegiate course. The surrounding country was hostile; the state legislature sought pretexts to revoke its charter. In his Memoirs Finney recalled that Oberlin became a station on the underground railroad, where escaping slaves on their way to Canada would shelter for a day or two, and that when slave-catchers came after them they found no sympathy among the people — which, he said, turned the feeling of the surrounding towns in Oberlin’s favour.

Remember them that are in bonds, as bound with them. HEBREWS 13:3

Where care is needed

Finney’s witness against slavery is one of the most admirable things about him, and it needs little qualification. But a few observations are fair.

His hopes were too simple. He told his hearers that if the churches of all denominations would pronounce slavery sin and clear their communions, then in three years there would not be a shackled slave in the land. It did not happen. When he revised the lectures in 1868, he added a sober note: the church had been too late in its testimony to avoid the war. His optimism, like his confidence in revival, reflected a belief that the right means rightly used would transform the nation and hasten the millennium. Scripture calls us to work for justice without promising that we will see it complete before Christ returns.

He was also more cautious than the radical abolitionists wished. He warned the editor of the New York Evangelist not to go too fast on the question, lest he destroy his paper, and he insisted that reform must not displace the salvation of souls. Some saw this as wisdom, others as timidity. Christians today will weigh it differently. What is clear is that he held revival and reform together, and refused to let either swallow the other.

Finally, his temperance teaching, which he placed alongside slavery, rested partly on his conviction that any use of alcohol was only injurious. Christians may reach different judgments on that particular question. The principle beneath it — that the church cannot be neutral when its members profit from the ruin of others — stands.

He hath shewed thee, O man, what is good; and what doth the LORD require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God? MICAH 6:8

Faith that works

Finney’s great conviction was that faith must be obeyed, and obedience cannot stop at the church door. A revival that left slavery untouched would not, in his eyes, have been a revival at all.

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Ask what injustice in your own society your church is tempted to stay silent about. Pray about it this week.

2. Inform yourself carefully on one such question, laying aside prejudice, as Finney urged.

3. When you speak about it, watch your spirit. Avoid censoriousness and impugning motives, without softening the truth.

4. Consider whether you profit, directly or indirectly, from the harm of others. What would repentance and restitution look like?

5. Pray for the persecuted and the oppressed by name, as if bound with them.

A PRAYER

Lord God, You loose the bands of wickedness and let the oppressed go free. Forgive Your church for the times it has been silent, and forgive me.

Give me courage to stand where You stand, and humility to do it without bitterness.

Keep me from making reform my gospel, and from making the gospel an excuse for indifference.

Teach me to do justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with You, until the day when every yoke is broken. Amen.