Few people trade the courtroom for the pulpit overnight. Charles Finney did exactly that: he was a promising lawyer in upstate New York when, in October 1821, a conversion experience in the woods changed the course of his life, and with it, the face of American revivalism.
Born in 1792 in Warren, Connecticut, Finney grew up in a family that moved early on to western New York, a region that would become known as the burned over district for the revivals that swept through it. He studied law in a lawyer’s office in Adams, New York, and went on to practice the profession.
On October 10, 1821, after months of reading the Bible because of references to Mosaic law in his legal studies, Finney experienced a conversion he described as decisive. The next morning, he turned away a client, saying he now pleaded the cause of Christ, not civil cases.
Licensed as a Presbyterian minister in 1824, Finney brought to the pulpit the same direct language he had used before juries. He introduced methods that became known as the new measures: daily meetings, the anxious bench for those seeking conversion, and public prayer by women in mixed congregations.
These practices sparked fierce resistance. Conservative Presbyterian theologians, such as Charles Hodge of Princeton, accused his theology of emptying out the doctrine of sovereign grace and edging toward Pelagianism, since he taught that full sanctification lay within reach of human will. The controversy divided Presbyterian churches for decades.
Between 1830 and 1831, he led one of the greatest revivals of the Second Great Awakening, in Rochester, New York, with thousands of conversions reported. In 1832, he became pastor of the Chatham Street Chapel in New York and began excluding slaveholders and slave traders from the Lord’s Supper.
In 1835, he accepted the chair of theology at the Oberlin Collegiate Institute, founded two years earlier, making his acceptance conditional on the admission of Black students and freedom of expression at the institution. He was the second president of Oberlin College, from 1851 to 1866, training generations of preachers and social reformers.
By the time he was at Oberlin, Finney had gone beyond the new measures of preaching: he went so far as to deny the traditional doctrine of original sin and the penal substitutionary explanation of Christ’s atonement, and formulated, alongside President Asa Mahan, a doctrine of Christian perfection according to which believers could attain complete sanctification in this life. The proposal arose, in part, as a response to the number of converts from his revivals who later fell away from the faith, but the so called Oberlin perfectionism was seen, then and now, by many evangelicals and Reformed theologians as a departure from historic orthodoxy.
Finney’s legacy crosses denominational lines: the public call to repentance, now common in evangelical services, traces back in large part to his new measures. His conviction that revival requires human means used with faith continues to inspire those working for the conversion of the nations, even though his theological formulations remain a matter of debate among evangelicals themselves.
