America’s two Great
Awakenings had a huge effect on Christian thinking. The intense revivalism of
nearly an entire century was a firepot for theological innovation, evolution and
diversion as much as anything, and we’re still feeling the effect of that today,
particularly with the ever-rising influence of modern-day Pentecostal
revivalism.
Charles G. Finney (1792-1875) was the
outstanding evangelist of the Second Great Awakening (ca. 1795-1930) and the
dominant theological figure. He came from within Presbyterianism but was
significantly influenced by Wesley's Plain
Account of Christian Perfection, which crystallised his belief in 'entire
sanctification' as a state of perfect trust in God and commitment to his will. But
for him, this state of perfect consecration to God was only the means to the
second blessing. The higher Christian state, attainable following conversion,
was a state of empowerment through the experience of Spirit-baptism.
Finney
was also immensely influenced by Nathaniel W. Taylor's form of Arminianism,
called New Haven Theology. New Haven theology was a late stage of the New
England theology that originated in the work of Jonathan Edwards to defend the
revival of the First Great Awakening (ca. 1735-43). Understanding New Haven
theology and its historical development is the key to understanding Finney’s
new revivalism.
Jonathan Edwards
In
the 1700s during the First Great Awakening, Jonathan Edwards (1703-58) rejuvenated
Augustinian theology and Calvinism to give spiritual legitimacy to the revival.
His theology dominated American Christianity for almost a century. Edwards is regarded as the classical
theologian of revival. He emphasised the sovereignty of God in revival and the
inability of people to produce revival. He also taught that genuine
Christianity was not revealed by the quality or intensity of religious
affections or experiences, but by a change of heart to love and seek God’s
pleasure. Emotions or wilful exertion could not produce or ‘cause’ the work of
God.
Along with George
Whitefield, he taught that salvation belonged entirely to God and that people
did not possess the natural ability to turn to Christ apart from the work of
the Holy Spirit. In
Original Sin (1758) he taught that
all mankind were present in Adam when he sinned. Consequently, all people share
his sinful character and guilt. Only God’s sovereign grace could cause them to
repent. The human “will” was not an independent faculty, but an expression of
basic motivation. Modern versions of “free will” only served to remove human
responsibility.
Through
Edwards, New England theology began with a focus on: the supremacy, sovereignty
and majesty of God; the morality of divine justice for a sovereign God; and the
problem of causation behind sin, including the problem of the freedom of the
human will. But Edward’s successors would not master his theological rigour,
and introduced subtle changes to his theology that would have a significant
affect over time. Eventually in the nineteenth-century, his protégé would
reverse many of his basic teachings.
David Hume
The
Enlightenment was at its climax in the eighteenth-century (the age of
‘reason’). David Hume (1711-1776) was a Scottish philosopher and one of the key
figures of the Enlightenment. He wrote Treatise
of Human Nature (1734-37) which was taken by orthodox Christianity as an
attack because it taught that all human knowledge is a product of experience.
Hume reasoned that actual reality cannot be known for certain, because human
knowledge cannot go beyond the appearance of probability, only having certainty
over the relationship between ideas, not between objects. The concept of
causality, cause and effect, was an assumption, an association made because of
the appearance of cause and effect. In Dialogues,
Hume denied the argument of natural theology. While not denying the existence
of God, he argued that God’s existence cannot be established from reason or
sense experience, and cannot be proved from causality.
Thomas Reid
Thomas
Reid (1710-96) was a moderate Presbyterian and was particularly disturbed by
Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature
(1739), which he saw as a denial of the reality of external objects, causation
and the unity of the mind. He attempted to overcome what he saw as a threat to
Christianity from Hume in his writings: Inquiry
into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense (1764), Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man
(1764) and Essays on the Active Powers of
Man (1785).
Scottish
Realism was the popular movement that he left behind him in the eighteenth and
nineteenth-century. It aimed to stem the infidelity of the Enlightenment and combat
the scepticism of David Hume with a philosophy of ‘common’ sense and natural
‘realism’, which taught a universal and innate human freedom and the power of
people to shape their own destinies. The “self-evident” principles of ‘common
experience’ were: the existence of external objects, causality and the
obligations of morals.
Scottish
Realism has been shown to have had an immensely influential effect on American
theology during the nineteenth-century. Among those influenced were the
children, grandchildren and protégé of Jonathan Edwards.
Timothy Dwight
Edward’s
own son, Jonathan Edwards Jn. (1745-1801) and his grandson, Timothy Dwight
(1752-1817) both deviated from Edwards. Dwight was a revivalist and a
theologian of the Second Great Awakening and was particularly influenced by
the eighteenth-century rationalist movement, himself contributing to Scottish
realism in America.
Both
tended to view sin as a summation of evil deeds rather than principally a wrong
state of being that produces evil deeds. Dwight had a greater view of human
ability, and in contrast to Edwards, emphasised the natural ability of people
to respond to the gospel. He also
endeavoured to emphasise the ‘reasonable’ nature of the Christian position by
giving it a rational defence in the context of the Enlightenment, rather than
emphasising the supremacy and majesty of God, as had Edwards.
But it was one of Dwight’s students that
changed the emphasis of New England theology most dramatically.
Nathaniel Taylor
Timothy
Dwight’s best student Nathaniel W. Taylor (1786-1858), who was profoundly
influenced by his revivalism, accepted Scottish realism, the humanistic
teaching of common sense realism that teaches that ‘reason’ provides proof of
the first principles of morality that make humans free moral agents. And
building on the foundation laid by Dwight, he contended that people inherently
possessed a natural power to be able to make free choices. He modified
Calvinism to make it compatible with the revivalism of the Second Great
awakening in the opening decades of the nineteenth century.
His
teaching on human nature famously stated that individuals always possessed a
“power to the contrary”. Following the lead of Jonathan Edwards Jn. and Timothy
Dwight, he taught that although everyone did in fact sin, this was not a result
of God’s predestination of human nature.
Going
completely against the teaching of Jonathan Edwards, he reversed many of the
original positions of New England theology, teaching that sin was actually the exercise of wilful actions against God, rather than an underlying condition
of existing by nature with a will in opposition to God.
In
order to make them compatible with the actual practices of the revivals of the
Second Great Awakening, Taylor altered almost every doctrine of the Reformation
and Calvinism, including revelation, human depravity, the sovereignty of God,
the atonement, and regeneration.
W.
A. Hoffecker has written about him:
“He
insisted that people are lost but denied that Adam’s sin was imputed to all
people and that everyone inherits a sinful nature that causes one to sin. Even
though a person sins, that person has the power to do otherwise, thus remaining
morally responsible. God made humans with a proper self-love, a natural desire
for happiness, which motivates all choice.
Taylor
also reinterpreted Calvin’s teaching on God’s sovereignty by calling God a
moral governor who rules, not by determining the destiny of all people through
election, but rather by establishing a moral universe and judging its
inhabitants. God promotes moral action by a system of means and ends in which
people can respond to ethical appeals for repentance.
He
opposed the legal view of the atonement that stressed Christ’s substitutionary
death on the cross in the place of sinners to satisfy God’s justice. Instead,
God as benevolent moral governor sent Christ to die so that his death could be
preached as a means to urge sinners to turn freely from their sin out of
self-love and be converted”. (Elwell, p. 1168).
In
direct opposition to Jonathan Edwards in the 1740s, Taylor undermined the
distinction between the Holy Spirit’s sovereign work of regeneration and human
repentance, and in so doing denied the absolute grace of God in salvation.
In
what is now called New Haven Theology, Taylor's form of Arminianism greatly
influenced a new revivalist and evangelist, Charles Finney, who would go even
further in bringing this new theology of revivalism to its maturity.
Charles Finney
Dramatically converted
in the middle of the revivalism of the American Holiness movement in 1821,
Charles G. Finney (1792-1875) became the leading evangelist and leader in the
movement. He is credited with establishing the modern forms and methods of
revivalism, indirectly inherited by Pentecostalism. He spent the last 40 years
of his life constructing a new theology of revival, casting into shadow the
classic work of Jonathan Edwards.
He was influenced
profoundly by Wesley’s theology, by the emphasis of the American Holiness
movement, and by New Haven Theology. Underpinning all of Finney’s doctrine was his
conviction from Wesley that the practice of Christian perfection was the
attainable duty of all Christians and his conviction from Taylor that God has
established natural means and ends in which people can and will respond to
ethical appeals for repentance.
Accordingly, Finney
taught that God had established the means by which humans could produce
revival. He believed that not only had individuals possessed the ability within
themselves to make a choice to follow Christ, but also that Christians
possessed the power within themselves to live holy lives.
He taught that the
result of God's help combined with strenuous human effort was blessing and
revival: "A revival is as naturally a result of the use of the appropriate
means as a crop is of the use of its means." In his Revival Lectures, Finney taught that God had revealed laws of revival in
Scripture: when the Church obeyed these laws, spiritual renewal followed. In direct contradiction to Edwards, Christians had the ability by means of complete commitment and
faith to bring the Holy Spirit's blessing.
He thus gave a central
role to human ability as a means to bring God's blessing and the Spirit's power,
creating revival by use of human means. Whereas Edward’s had
emphasised the sovereign grace of God in salvation, Finney emphasised human choice in conversion and went as far
as psychologising conversion. His Lectures
on Revivals of Religion (1854)
taught techniques for success.
He had expected revival
to overtake America and bring social, political and economic reform. But later
in his Letters on Revival (1845) he
revised this expectation, confessing to over-optimism. However he nonetheless
hoped that Oberlin theology (named after Oberlin College in Ohio where he was
professor since 1836), propagated also by the likes of Asa Mahan, would
generate a “new race of revival ministers” and in time ‘awaken’ Christians to
the attainable duty of walking in Christian perfection.
Oberlin theology
emphasised a second more robust and mature stage of Christian experience. While
different names were employed, Finney distinctly taught it as “baptism of the
Holy Ghost”, and differed from Wesley in requiring entire sanctification as the
means to obtaining this blessing, being a state of complete commitment to God’s
will rather than perfect sinlessness. He also came to believe that this state
should be reached by a process of steady growth, rather than by a dramatic
single ‘crisis’ event.
Oberlin theology had an
enormous effect on nineteenth-century evangelical belief. Finney’s pioneering
of his so-called ‘new measures’ in
revivalism and his active encouragement of concern for society and the role of
revival in reforming America meant that his theology not only had a dramatic
effect on the shape and direction of the Holiness movement towards the end of
the nineteenth-century, but also had a wider social impact on American
culture. It continued to have an influence well into the twentieth century directly through the Holiness movement, but indirectly it continues to have an
almost unquantifiable impact via its inheritance in the genetic makeup of
Pentecostalism.
Charles Finney's central
emphasis on human ability and his confidence in the effect of natural means to
change the world can ultimately be understood as an over-reaction to David
Hume's scepticism and rejection of causality. In an age of Enlightenment, when
Reason was the language of debate, and Philosophy had seemingly taken the
ground out from under Christianity by rejecting causality and confidence in
human ability, Thomas Reid reacted by asserting the power of people to shape their
world and their destiny. His approach to fighting reason with reason, and
philosophical innovation with theological revision set in place a
chain-reaction that would result in the evolution of a brand new modern revivalism:
from Timothy Dwight to Nathaniel Taylor, from Charles Finney to Pentecostalism;
and from the Pentecostal movement the “new race of revival ministers” continues to grow,
exemplified and amplified acutely in the model of ministry that was practised
by Leonard Ravenhill and Stephen Hill.
Today revivalism has long left behind Edward’s
insistence on total dependence on the sovereign and free grace of God and has
become a new form of Christian legalism. It insists on the central role of
human ability and free choice, and preaches a Christian duty of exercising
total commitment to his work that brings a new and unique power from God to
change our lives, our world and society.
In
the next post, we’ll look directly at Charles Finney’s Power from on High in order to understand Finney’s teaching and its
problems: The need for power; conditions of receiving power; the effect of
possessing power; power in prayer and power in preaching.
---
Brown,
Colin. Philosophy and the Christian Faith,
IVP, 1969.
Elwell,
W. A (Ed.) Evangelical Dictionary of
Theology, 2001, p. 1168
Hume,
David. A Treatise of Human Nature
(Book I), Collins Sons & Co, 1962.
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