Lectures on Revivals of Religion by Charles Grandison Finney

First published: 1835

Edition(s) used:Lectures on Revivals of Religion, edited by William G. McLoughlin. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1960

Genre(s): Nonfiction

Subgenre(s): Didactic treatise; instructional manual

Core issue(s): Awakening; conversion; faith

Overview

The foremost revivalist of the nineteenth century, Charles Grandison Finney was born in Connecticut and reared in upstate New York. While studying law, he underwent a religious conversion and began to study for the ministry. Ordained a Presbyterian, he conducted numerous revivals in upstate New York and in New England before becoming a Congregationalist and president of Oberlin College in Ohio, the first coeducational college. His New Measures revivalism revolutionized American religion during the Second Great Awakening.

Jonathan Edwards described the beginning of the First Great Awakening in a book titled A Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God in the Conversion of Many Hundred Souls in Northampton (1737). For Edwards, a revival was a surprise, a miracle. The Puritans believed that conversion came only to the elect; all that one could do was wait to see if one would be a recipient of God’s grace.

Finney saw things differently. “Religion is something to do, not something to wait for,” he says. He himself had a sudden conversion on October 10, 1821, and he approached the ministry as he had the study of law. He approached a congregation as he would a jury; he laid out the facts and told them the choice of whether to accept God was theirs, now. He advises a minister to “preach just as he would talk, if he wishes to be fully understood. . . . The minister ought to do as the lawyer does when he wants to make a jury understand him perfectly. He uses a style perfectly colloquial.” After all, Finney writes, “human agency is just as indispensable to a revival as divine agency.”

After a very successful career holding revivals in upstate New York and then in all of the major cities of the East Coast, Finney became pastor of Chatham Chapel in New York City in 1832. The first of these twenty-two Friday-night lectures on “Revivals of Religion” was published in the New York Evangelist on December 6, 1834. They were collected in book form in May, 1835.

Finney begins by arguing that “Religion is the work of man. It is something for man to do.” A revival is not a miracle but “the result of the right use of the appropriate means.” For Finney the appropriate means were his “new measures”: protracted meetings, the anxious bench, the anxious meeting, colloquial preaching, praying for people by name, and most controversial of all, allowing women to pray in mixed assemblies.

Finney began with a strong belief in free will. Because God has commanded us to repent of our sins, that “is the highest possible evidence that we can do it . . . equivalent to an oath that we can do it. He has no right to command, unless we have power to obey.” Thus “conversion consists in the right employment of the sinner’s own agency.” In conversion the sinner apprehends the truth and wills to obey it, then turns from selfishness to benevolence, from willing his or her own self-gratification to willing the highest good for all.

Finney said that he believed in total depravity, but it certainly was not the traditional Calvinist interpretation. He defined it not as a “disease” of transmitted guilt, nor any constitutional inability to obey God, nor any inherited fault that predisposed all to sinful choices. He believed that infants possess the original nature of Adam, but that they sin because the temptations to selfishness are so great in the world. Infants, he said, are neither sinful nor holy until they become moral agents and disobey the moral law of God.

One of Finney’s most famous sermons was titled “Sinners Bound to Change Their Own Hearts.” As he says in the Lectures on Revivals of Religion, the sinners’ “cannot” consists in their unwillingness and not in their inability. “We, as moral agents, have the power to obey God, and are perfectly bound to obey, and the reason we do not is, that we are unwilling.” A sinner’s problem is not hardness of heart but stubbornness of will: “It is not a question of feeling but of willing and acting . . . WILLING to obey Christ is to be a Christian.”

Finney evaluated his ministry and that of others on one basis: success. One lecture is titled “A Wise Minister Will Be Successful” and his text is Proverbs 11:30—“he that winneth souls is wise.” He noted that most churches were sleepy and cold at heart; many ministers did not even know it, let alone know how to wake them up, nor set them to work once they were awake. Revivalists have often been charged with psychologically manipulating their audiences. Finney believed that a good minister should understand “the laws of the mind” and put them to good use. Not seminary trained himself, Finney often criticized more educated ministers. In Lectures on Revivals of Religion he asks, “When young men come out from the seminaries, are they fit to go into a revival?” The obvious answer is no. He declares that there is a “grand defect in educating ministers.” Some he had seen “could not manage a prayer meeting, so as to make it profitable or interesting.” He believed that ministers should be those who had experienced a religious conversion themselves and felt called to the ministry. That experience and call were validated by the effectiveness of their ministry, that is, by the number of sinners they won to Christ.

Throughout the book Finney uses a number of illustrations from his own career. Often it is the story of a layperson who heard the call of revival and the minister who lacked faith. Women figure prominently in these examples, contrary to the social conventions of his day.

After defining what a revival is, suggesting how to promote it, giving instructions in how to pray for revival, and showing how ministers and churches can win sinners to Christ, Finney lectures on what hinders revivals. Because God is dependent on the use of human means, people can hinder revival. If a church believes a revival is going to stop, it will. Or if Christians become mechanical in their promotion of revival or stop working at it, revival will cease. Finney’s meetings were usually inclusive, so he warns denominations against putting their own specific interests forward. Revivals are also hindered by failure to give God the credit or to remember one’s dependence on the Holy Spirit.

Finney was the first to include temperance as an integral part of his revival preaching. He lists “resistance to the Temperance Reformation” as a specific hindrance to revival, and even though it was very controversial, he declared that “revivals are hindered when ministers and churches take wrong ground in regard to any question involving human rights.” He specifically names the issue of slavery. He cites the example of John Newton (1721-1807), who worked on slave ships but became opposed to slavery after God convicted him of its evil. As Finney says, “it is a subject upon which [Christians] cannot be silent without guilt.” The New York Anti-Slavery Society had been formed in the Chatham Street Chapel on October 2, 1833; the American Anti-Slavery Society grew from that and often held its conventions there. He urged churches to “take right ground in regard to politics” and “on the subject of slavery.” Both those who sell liquor and those who hold slaves should be barred from the church.

Finney gives directions for dealing with sinners. Basically they should be told to repent, believe the gospel, give their hearts to God, submit to God, and choose whom they will serve. “All they have to do is to accept salvation”; they do not have to make themselves better. Nor do they have to suffer for a long time under conviction to atone for their sins or wait for different feelings.

Finney concludes by noting that “there is no such thing as standing still in religion.” One either grows in grace or one is in declension. Later he began to teach a type of sanctification that was labeled “Oberlin Perfectionism” because he believed that people needed to be encouraged to continue growing in the Christian life.

Christian Themes

Finney, who underwent a personal conversion before becoming a revivalist, believed that religion is the result of human effort, that people could come to God rather than waiting to see if they were among the elect. This belief was evident in his writings and in his life’s works. As he says in Lectures on Revivals of Religion, “The object of the ministry is to get all the people to feel that the devil has no right to rule this world, but that they ought to give themselves to God, and vote in the Lord Jesus Christ as the governor of the universe.”

Because Finney believed that it was possible to use the ministry to bring people to God, he described a revival as the right use of the proper means, and he describes the method of creating a revival in his lectures. He measured the propriety of his new measures to bring about conversion by their success. He says that “when the blessing evidently follows the introduction of the measure itself, the proof is unanswerable, that the measure is wise.” If God blesses a measure with the salvation of souls, then it must be sanctioned by God. To criticize it is to think oneself wiser than God.

Conversion, Finney argued, is not something to wait on God to do, but something for us to do. We have been given free will, and we are free moral agents. To say that human beings do not have a free will, are not able to respond to the Gospel “slanders God . . . charging him with infinite tyranny, in commanding men to do that which they have no power to do.” If we are unsaved it is because we are unwilling, not because we are unable to be saved. His strong vision of what people, including women, could do led him to conclude that when a person is truly willing to be a Christian and chooses to be a Christian, that person is a Christian.

Sources for Further Study

Cross, Whitney R. The Burned-Over District: The Social and Intellectual History of Enthusiastic Religion in Western New York, 1800-1850. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2006. Details the milieu in which Finney’s revivals took place and outlines their impact.

Dayton, Donald. Discovering an Evangelical Heritage. New York: Harper & Row, 1976. A series of essays analyzing Finney and his compatriots.

Finney, Charles Grandison. The Autobiography of Charles G. Finney: The Life Story of America’s Greatest Evangelist, in His Own Words. Condensed and edited by Helen Wessel. Minneapolis, Minn.: Bethany House, 2006. Finney’s own account of his life, also published as Memoirs.

Finney, Charles Grandison. Reflections on Revival. Compiled by Donald Dayton. Minneapolis: Bethany Fellowship, 1979. A full reprint of his Letters on Revivals. Outlines his social views.

Finney, Charles Grandison. Revivals, Awakenings, and Reform. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978. The best analysis of how revivalism fits into the American story and social history in general.

McLoughlin, William Gerald. Modern Revivalism: Charles Grandison Finney to Billy Graham. New York: Ronald Press, 1959. Good, although dated, analysis of revivalism with major emphasis on Finney.

Perciaccante, Marianne. Calling Down Fire: Charles Grandison Finney and Revivalism in Jefferson County, New York, 1800-1840. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003. Uses Finney as a prime example of how revivalism succeeded, analyzing the development of reform movements. Includes a bibliography and index.

Smith, Timothy L. Revivalism and Social Reform: American Protestantism on the Eve of the Civil War. 1957. With a new afterword by the author. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980. The classic treatment of the Second Great Awakening and Finney’s role in it.