Part I

By Phillip R. Johnson
Director of Word of Grace.
Copyright 1999 . ⁽¹⁾

It is ironic that Charles Grandison Finney has become a poster boy for so many modern evangelicals. His theology was far from evangelical. As a Christian leader, he was hardly the model of humility or spirituality. Even Finney's autobiography paints a questionable character. In his own retelling of his life's story, Finney comes across as stubborn, arrogant-and sometimes even a bit devious.

Playing with Fraud from the Outset

Finney's ministry was founded on duplicity from the beginning. He obtained his license to preach as a Presbyterian minister by professing adherence to The Westminster Confession of Faith.. But he later admitted that he was almost totally ignorant of what the document taught. Here, in Finney's own words, is a description of what occurred when he went before the council whose task it was to determine if he was spiritually and doctrinally sound:

Unexpectedly to myself they asked if I received the Confession of Faith of the Presbyterian church. I had not examined it;-that is, the large work containing the Catechisms and Presbyterian Confession. This had made no part of my study. I replied that I received it for substance of doctrine, so far as I understood it. But I spoke in a way that plainly implied, I think, that I did not pretend to know much about it. However, I answered honestly, as I understood it at the time. ⁽²⁾

Rather than plainly admitting he was utterly ignorant of denomination's doctrinal standards, he says he "spoke in a way" that implied ("I think") that he did not know "much" about those documents. The truth is that he had never even examined the Confession of Faith and knew nothing at all about it. He was woefully unprepared for ordination, and he had no business seeking a license to preach under the presbytery's auspices. "I was not aware that the rules of the presbytery required them to ask a candidate if he accepted the Presbyterian Confession of faith," Finney wrote. "Hence I never read it" [Memoirs, 60.] So when he told his ordination council that he received the Confession "for substance of doctrine," nothing could have been further from the truth! Nonetheless, the council naively (and all too willingly) took Finney at his word and licensed him to preach.

Finney's credibility is further marred by the fact that when he later read the Westminster Standards and realized he disagreed on almost every crucial point, he did not resign the commission he had received under false pretenses. Instead, he accepted the platform he had duped those men into giving him, then used it for the rest of his life to attack their doctrinal convictions.

As soon as I learned what were the unambiguous teachings of the Confession of faith upon these points, I did not hesitate at all on all suitable occasions to declare my dissent from them…I repudiated and exposed them. Wherever I found that any class of persons were hidden behind these dogmas, I did not hesitate to demolish them, to the best of my ability. [Memoirs, 60]

The fact that Finney had obtained his own preaching credentials by professing adherence to the Confession did not faze him at all. "When I came to read the Confession of Faith, and saw the passages that were quoted to sustain these peculiar positions, I was absolutely ashamed of it," he frankly stated. "I could not feel any respect for a document that would undertake to impose on mankind such dogmas as those" [Memoirs, 61].

Baggage from the Years of Unbelief

Finney's disagreements with his denomination's doctrinal standards clearly were not opinions he formed after his examination by the council. By his own admission, he had consciously rejected the basic theological framework of the Presbyterian confession long before he stood before those men. He writes of doctrinal debates he had provoked with his pastor, George W. Gale: "I could not receive his views on the subject of atonement, regeneration, faith, repentance, the slavery of the Will, or any of their kindred doctrines" [Memoirs, 46]. Even prior to his conversion, Finney had raised many of the very same issues and objected strongly to Gale's teaching on such points. He wrote:

I now think that I sometimes criticized his sermons unmercifully. I raised such objections against his positions as forced themselves upon my attention….What did he mean by repentance? Was it a mere feeling of sorrow for sin? Was it altogether a passive state of mind? Or did it involve a voluntary element? If it was a change of mind, in what respect was it a change of mind? What did he mean by the term regeneration? What did such language mean when spoken of as a spiritual change? What did he mean by faith? Was it merely a conviction, or persuasion, that the things stated in the Gospel were true? [Memoirs, 10-12.]

Finney's "conversion" does not seem to have altered his skepticism about his denomination's stance on any of these critical evangelical doctrines. After his experiential crisis, those were the very issues on which he dissented from the Presbyterian Confession, only now with more vigor than ever. The intense emotional experience Finney regarded as his new birth seems merely to have confirmed his feeling that he was right about Christianity and Scripture, and that most of the leaders of his denomination were either stupid or deluded.

In fact, in his own account of his conversion and theological "training," Finney comes across as utterly unteachable. He meticulously recounts the issues on which he and Pastor Gale disagreed. They are for the most part the same points Finney says he objected to before his conversion. Never once does Finney acknowledge conceding any point to Gale (or to anyone else, for that matter). He obviously believed that his intuitive grasp of spiritual truth, combined with his legal training, automatically made him more doctrinally adept than all the seminary trained Presbyterian preachers combined. He consistently portrays church leaders who adhered to the Confession of Faith as dupes and dullards. He was convinced they had nothing to teach him, and from the point of his conversion on, he casts himself in the superior role, as a reformer of their outdated and indefensible doctrines. He writes:

The fact is that Brother Gale's education for the ministry had been entirely defective. He had imbibed a set of opinions, both theological and practical, that were a strait jacket to him. He could accomplish very little or nothing if he carried out his own principles. I had the use of his library, and ransacked it thoroughly on all the questions of theology which came up for examination; and the more I examined the books, the more I was dissatisfied. [Memoirs, 55]

Now convinced that his tutor (Pastor Gale) and all Reformed and Puritan books in Gale's library were utterly worthless, Finney set out to devise a theological system more to his own liking.

At first, being no theologian, my attitude in respect to [Gale's] peculiar views was rather that of negation or denial, than that of opposing any positive view to his. I said, "Your positions are not proved." I often said, "They are insusceptible of proof." So I thought then, and so I think now…I had nowhere to go but directly to the Bible, and to the philosophy or workings of my own mind as they were revealed in consciousness. My views took on a positive type but slowly. I at first found myself unable to receive his peculiar views; and secondly, gradually formed views of my own in opposition to them, which appeared to me to be unequivocally taught in the Bible. [Memoirs, 55, emphasis added.]

In other words, Finney's earliest opinions on "the subject[s] of atonement, regeneration, faith, repentance, the slavery of the will [and] kindred doctrines" became baggage he dragged along into his own peculiar systematic theology. Having objected to Pastor Gale's doctrinal stance on these issues since before his conversion, and especially now that Finney realized these ideas came from the Confession itself, he grew to despise "Old School" doctrinal standards. He was not about to study books that defended such doctrines.

Without any "positive view" of his own (other than his obvious contempt for Reformed doctrine), he was content for a while to rebuff Gale's tutoring with "negation or denial." But Finney soon realized he needed something more than denial to answer the doctrines of the Presbyterian Confession. So he set to work scouring the pages of Scripture in search of arguments against the doctrines he despised, while devising new doctrines more suited to "the philosophy or workings of [his] own mind." Ideas Finney had toyed with since his pre-conversion days thus became the heart of the theology he espoused until the end of his life. In other words, as a new "convert," Finney simply devised a theology that fit his already established prejudices.

In his Memoirs, his Lectures on Revival, and his Systematic Theology, what comes through, frankly, is not a man with a high regard for Scripture, but a man with an inflated view of himself. Where Scripture does not suit him, Finney resorts to sophistry to explain it away. Whole sections of his Systematic Theology contain paragraph after paragraph of philosophizing and moralizing, sometimes without a single reference to Scripture for many pages.⁽³⁾

Finney vs Hyper-Calvinism

Finney is often portrayed as a moderate who fought against hyper-Calvinism influences. It's true that hyper-Calvinism (a corruption of Calvinistic doctrine that nullifies or minimizes human responsibility) was on the rise in New England, and Finney had probably been exposed to it. In fact, it is fair to say that hyper-Calvinism had a major hand in creating the cold spiritual climate in which Finney's errors flourished. The popular reception of Finney's teaching was certainly in large part an overreaction against the errors of hyper-Calvinism.

Finney regarded his own theology as a necessary antidote to hyper-Calvinism. He wrote:

I have everywhere found that the peculiarities of hyper-Calvinism have been the stumbling block both of the church and of the world. A nature sinful in itself, a total inability to accept Christ and to obey God, condemnation to eternal death for the sin of Adam and for a sinful nature, - and all the kindred and resultant dogmas of that peculiar school, have been the stumbling block of believers and the ruin of sinners. [ Memoirs , 444].

But Finney was too much of a novice to distinguish between biblical, orthodox Calvinism and hyper-Calvinism. He lumped them together and ended up rejecting much sound doctrine along with what he thought was "hyper-Calvinism." Far from being a "moderate," Finney answered hyper-Calvinism by shifting to the opposite extreme, i.e., Pelagianism.

Notice that under the guise of condemning "hyper-Calvinism," Finney expressly attacked the idea that people are fallen and depraved because of a sinful nature inherited from Adam. That is the doctrine of original sin, not a hyper-Calvinism dogma, but a standard tenet of Christian doctrine - and recognized as such by all mainstream Christians since the Pelagian heresy of the Fifth Century. Note, too, that Finney rejected the idea that sinners are totally unable to please God ( contra Rom. 8:7-8). Again, total inability is no hyper-Calvinist notion, but a biblical truth affirmed by all Christians in the Reformed tradition.

Many of the doctrines Finney rejected were central to the gospel itself. ⁽⁴⁾ He jettisoned several essential aspects of Protestant and Reformed doctrine related to "the atonement, regeneration, faith, repentance, the slavery of the will." Many of the doctrines he argued most vehemently against are, in fact, core biblical truths. In other words, it was not merely hyper-Calvinism or even simple Calvinism, that Finney rejected, but the biblical essentials of fide and gratia (justification by faith alone through grace alone). In effect, Finney also abandoned scriptura (the authority and sufficiency of Scripture), as shown by his constant appeal to rationalism in support of his new theology. The movement he led therefore represents the wholesale abandonment of historic Protestant principles.

Footnotes:

1. Phillip R. Johnson is Director of Word of Grace and creator of the popular Spurgeon Archives theological web site at www.Spurgeon.org. This article is used by his permission.

2. Charles Finney, The Memoirs of Charles Finney: The Complete Restored Text (Grand Rapids: Academie, 1989), pp. 53-54. Despite his Clintonesque that he "answered honestly," it is clear that Finney deliberately misled his examiners. His ability to parse legal terms would have served him well had he been a politician in the late Twentieth Century. But he betrays an appalling brashness for a clergyman in his own era.

3. See, for example, Lecture 16, "Moral Depravity," Finney rambles on about "physical" vs. "moral" depravity for several pages (nearly 5 in the Bethany edition) before he ever cites a single verse of Scripture. All his polemic about "physical depravity" is wasted anyway, because not one of Finney's theological opponents ever argued that human depravity is a physical issue. Again, in the whole of Lecture 10 ("What Constitutes Disobedience to Moral Law?") Finney cites snippets of only two verses of Scripture - a total of eleven words quoted from the Bible in the entire lecture. Many - perhaps most - pages contain no Scripture references at all. By contrast, the typical evangelical systematic theology textbook contains dozens of references per page. The whole point of "systematic theology" is to start with Scripture and systematize a point-by-point comprehensive theology. A sound systematic theology is therefore biblical to begin with. By contrast, Finney constructed a philosophical system based on legal and logical arguments and relying more on his own instinct and speculation than he did on the Bible.

4. Remember his comments about his own pastor's views: "I could not receive his views on the subject of atonement, regeneration, faith, repentance, the slavery of the will, or any of their kindred doctrines." Again, not one of the issues he lists deals with any error that arises out of hyper-Calvinism. Instead, what Finney was rejecting were basic biblical doctrines and long-standing tenets of Christian orthodoxy.