Lectures on Revivals of Religion

It is Charles Finney's famous series of lectures on revival — what a revival of religion is, when it may be expected, and how it may be promoted. Drawing on his own experience as an evangelist, Finney deals searchingly with prevailing prayer, the spirit of prayer, being filled with the Spirit, and the means he believed God uses to bring about seasons of spiritual awakening.

Charles Grandison Finney was a nineteenth-century American revivalist and, later, a college president and theologian, one of the most influential and controversial figures of the Second Great Awakening. His revival campaigns drew great crowds, and these lectures, delivered and published in the 1830s, set out his understanding of how revivals come about.

Finney famously argued that a revival is not a miracle in the sense of being wholly outside the reach of means, but the right use of appropriate means under God — that if the church will meet the conditions, especially in prayer and repentance, revival may be expected. This emphasis on means and conditions was both influential and much debated.

Because Finney's stress on human means and conditions in producing revival struck some as diminishing the sovereign, gracious work of God, and his theology on other points was disputed. Yet even critics have recognized the power of his call to prayer and holiness, and the lectures have shaped how many Christians think about seeking revival ever since.

That prevailing prayer and the spirit of prayer are central to revival — that God works in answer to the earnest, believing, persevering prayer of his people. Finney devotes searching attention to what such prayer is and what hinders it, treating a praying church as the great human condition God honours in sending times of awakening.

No — while it reflects its nineteenth-century setting and Finney's particular views, its searching treatment of prayer, repentance, and wholehearted seeking after God still challenges readers today. Many have found it a stirring call to examine the church's coldness and to pray earnestly for revival, whatever they make of Finney's theology of means.

Anyone interested in the history of revival and American religion, and any Christian burdened for spiritual awakening. It is essential for understanding the Second Great Awakening and Finney's influence, and it works as a bracing, if debated, summons to the prayer and seriousness that Finney believed revival requires.

At the beginning, with Finney's account of what a revival is and when it may be expected, since the later lectures build on that foundation. Delivered originally as lectures, the chapters read as direct addresses, so the book can be taken up in sequence and read as the earnest, practical appeals to the church that Finney meant them to be.