Historical Relevancy

Finney's revivals encouraged further measures as well, including an emphasis on healing and the "prayer of faith," requiring absolute trust on the part of the entire congregation, uniting in a common feeling of expectation. Finney complained that more orthodox prayers were a "mockery of God," since they lacked a sense of expectation and depended too much on divine sovereignty. "Rumors, dreams, and visions went hand in glove with religious excitement," Cross relates. "The revival engineers had to exercise increasing ingenuity to find even more sensational means to replace those worn out by overuse. In all of these ways the protracted meeting, though only a form within which the measures operated, helped the measures themselves grow even more intense, until the increasing zeal, boiled up inside of orthodoxy, overflowed into heresy."

Finney's revivals also produced a spirit of divisiveness. Ironically, this had been the standard criticism of orthodox churchmen and their commitment to creeds and confessions. And yet, nowhere was sectarian zeal more acutely realized than on the western frontier. Enthusiasm proved to be a more unstable guarantor of unity than theological conviction, as the former is inherently more subjective and individualistic than the latter. The result of fanaticism and "no creed but Christ" was that the sects most confident in the latter-day overthrow of church, tradition, creed and the alleged disunity that these created was that, as one wag reported, the churches were "split up into all kinds of Isms...[that] hardly any two Believe alike." Enthusiasm, not theology, emerged as the agent of discord. While Finney may have objected to a "paper pope" in the Westminster Standards, the nineteenth century created scores of living ones.

Nevertheless, New School presbyteries (and even some traditionally dominated by Old School men) increasingly accomodated themselves to the New Measures. In spite of its opposition to the measures, the Oneida Presbytery, for instance, invited him anyway. And why? "'God was with him,' and their hands were tied." Success seemed to seal divine approval, employing the reasoning of Gamaliel in Acts 5:38-39.

(Recounting of various currents of the 1800s):
What all of these accomodations share in common is not only a desire to make Christianity relevant, but a Pelagianizing tendency. If Warfield was correct in asserting that Pelagianism is the religion of universal heathenism and the religion of the natural man, these developments, from Taylor to Finney to the liberal evangelicals of the late nineteenth century, constitute a common drift toward the accomodation of Christianity to natural theology. Taylor and Finney had denied original sin, supernatural regeneration, a substitutionary atonement, justification by an imputed righteousness, and had substituted for this modernity's confidence in human potential, moral and social redemption, a moral influence and governmental concept of the atonement, and the collapse of justification into the notion of naturalistic perfectionism. But their theological descendents, aided by German pietists, would see the modern project to its ultimate destination in what we now regard as theological liberalism.

What must not be overlooked, however, is the fact that both fundamentalism and liberalism are heirs of this evangelical trend. The upheavals of the 1920's and '30's between fundamentalists and modernists must not obscure the fact that both were indebted to the legacy of Taylor and Finney.

Much as Beecher was offended by Finney's style, but eventually embraced the evangelist because of their common theological convictions, modern liberals and fundamentalists differed on substantial matters while they both nevertheless carried the Pelagian virus. This is why J. Gresham Machen found himself odd man out, not only in his own Presbyterian Church, but in the sea of fundamentalism, with its revivalistic, millennial, and moralistic orientation.

Even though it shares affinities with Enlightenment modernism (such as optimism concerning human nature, faith in progress, and an emphasis on morality), Marsden insists that fundamentalism is the true heir to the New Divinity: Just as New Haven was reacting against Unitarianism, fundamentalists were reacting against modernism, and everyone was reacting against Calvinism for different reasons. However, I would argue that both fundamentalism and modernism owed a debt to this "megashift." For different reasons, Taylor's sophisticated humanism fits with liberal sentiments, while Finney's Pelagianism paved the road for enthusiastic revivalism.

However, Finney was too self-confident and anti-intellectual to acknowledge his debt to Taylor, just as fundamentalism fails to see its inheritance from Enlightenment dogmas. If this is true, it comprises one of the strangest ironies in American religious history: Fundamentalism and Modernism are cousins with a common theological ancestor and a remarkably similar soteriological creed, aside from issues of biblical inerrancy and the historical veracity of Christian truth claims concerning Christ's person and work.

As one Presbyterian wrote: There is nothing about justification by faith in this creed. And that means that all the gains obtained in that great religious movement which we call the Reformation are cast out of the window....There is nothing about the atonement in the blood of Christ in the creed. There is nothing about sin and grace in this creed. So far as this creed tells us, there might be no such thing as sin in the world; and of course then no such thing as grace.... Are we ready to say in effect that we will not insist, in our evangelistic activities, on any mention of such things as salvation by faith only, dependence for salvation on the blood of Christ alone, the necessity for salvation of the regeneration of the Holy Spirit?

Lest Finney and his antebellum associates be regarded as an aberration in the history of evangelicalism, it is good to remember that the entire revivalistic tradition, from Finney to Billy Graham, whatever subtle differences may exist, was united in its general theological and practical distinctives.
Son of Lyman Beecher, Henry Ward Beecher (1813-87) was America's most prominent preacher and he preached a mixture of civil religion and Christianized Social Darwinism. He largely ignored the substance of his Calvinist upbringing to popularize a romantic view of God superintending a natural evolution toward ever greater heights of human unity, order, and freedom. He believed that the United States led the world as the pinnacle of human development.

The postmillennialism, Romanticism, idealism, and Pelagianism of the New Haven tradition fit perfectly with Social Darwinism's Hegelian eschatology. Departures from orthodoxy could be justified by the dogma of progress, since everyone embraced it. Those who opposed innovations in faith or practice were constantly having to defend themselves against the horrific charge of refusing to cooperate with the inevitable progress of history. Once the Puritan faith had centered on the supernatural; but Henry Ward Beecher makes religion seem a natural experience, 'something to be enjoyed' for everyday use, and here he was saying nothing that Finney had not declared earlier.

Wheaton College's first president, Jonathan Blanchard (b. 1811) was deeply committed to the perfectionistic principles of Charles Finney. In fact, in an address for Oberlin College in 1839, titled, "A Perfect State of Society," Blanchard declared that when the laws of God become the laws of the land, the kingdom of God will come to the earth. It is "not so much...the doctrines of Christ, as the form they will give society, when they have done their perfect work on mankind," he insisted, for "every true minister of Christ is a universal reformer, whose business it is, so far as possible, to reform all the evils which press on human concerns." Donald Dayton cites Blanchard's remark that what "John Baptist and the Saviour meant when they preached 'the kingdom of God' was 'a perfect state of society.'" A fierce abolitionist and temperance man, Blanchard was committed to the idea of the kingdom and the Gospel in very this-worldly terms and the theology of perfectionism created an enormous amount of zeal in social, moral, and political activism.

D. L. Moody (1837-1899), heir to Finney's anti-intellectual and anti-theological sentiments as well as an Arminian in conviction, would add, "Whenever you find a man who follows Christ, that man you will find a successful one." Under Moody's revivalistic ministry, the world of big business became the target group and Carnegie, Wanamaker, Dodge, and a host of other Wall Street names helped finance the campaigns. P. T. Barnum even produced the tents. According to Richard Hofstadter, revivalism "evolved a kind of crude pietistic pragmatism with a single essential tenet: their business was to save souls as quickly and as widely as possible. For this purpose, the elaborate theological equipment of an educated ministry was not only an unnecessary frill but in all probability a serious handicap; the only justification needed by the itinerant preacher for his limited stock of knowledge and ideas was that he got results, measurable in conversions. To this justification very little answer was possible." Moody declared, "It makes no difference how you get a man to God, provided you get him there."

In his classic study of perfectionism, Warfield explained the relationship of Finney to the evolution of the various "holiness" movements that were gaining ground in his day in Britain and America. In revivalism, the Word is substituted for the evangelist and there is an ex opere operato effect in his very person: "By a mere gaze, without a word spoken, Finney says he reduced a whole room-full of factory girls to hysteria. As the Lutheran says God in the word works a saving impression, Finney says God in the preacher works a saving impression.