 |
| Old Snake Eyes, Charles Finney Evangelical Prototype of Revivalist Anabaptists, Baptacostals, and "Americana," divested of historic confessions and liturgies. America, here's your hero! |
Charles Grandison Finney (1792-1875)
Our English friend, Church Campanologist (CC), attempts to assess “Americana,” or, as we say, “Religio Americanorum.” Here’s CC at: http://churchmousec.wordpress.com/2012/05/16/americana-michael-horton-on-the-legacy-of-charles-finney/#comment-8291.
Americana: Michael Horton on the legacy of Charles Finney
Until a few years ago, the name Charles Grandison
Finney meant nothing to me. However, many American Protestants will have been
unknowingly influenced by his 19th century Pelagianism.
In 1995, Dr Michael Horton examined the long shadow
of Finneyism on the American Church in ‘The Legacy of Charles
Finney’, written for Modern Reformation magazine. Horton is
the J. Gresham Machen professor of apologetics and systematic theology at
Westminster Seminary California (Escondido, California), a host of the White
Horse Inn broadcasts and editor-in-chief of Modern Reformation
magazine. He is author of many books, including The Gospel-Driven Life,
Christless Christianity, People and Place, Putting
Amazing Back Into Grace, The Christian Faith, and For
Calvinism.
Horton’s essay is lengthy and absorbing reading for
anyone seeking a better understanding of Protestant denominations in America.
Charles Finney has influenced fundamentalist preachers as well as social gospel
ministries. Horton explains how Finney’s man-centred, emotional and
experiential focus works. Excerpts follow, emphases mine:
… Finney’s moralistic impulse envisioned a church that
was in large measure an agency of personal and social reform rather
than the institution in which the means of grace, Word and Sacrament, are made
available to believers who then take the Gospel to the world … Evangelists pitched their
American gospel in terms of its practical usefulness to the individual and the
nation.
That is why Finney is so popular. He is the tallest
marker in the shift from Reformation orthodoxy, evident in the Great Awakening
(under Edwards and Whitefield) to Arminian (indeed, even Pelagian) revivalism,
evident from the Second Great Awakening to the present. To demonstrate the debt of
modern evangelicalism to Finney, we must first notice his theological
departures. From these departures, Finney became the father
of the antecedents to some of today’s greatest challenges within evangelical
churches, namely, the church growth movement, Pentecostalism and political
revivalism.
Who is Finney?
Reacting against the pervasive Calvinism of the Great Awakening, the
successors of that great movement of God’s Spirit turned from God to humans,
from the preaching of objective content (namely, Christ and him crucified) to the emphasis on getting
a person to “make a decision.”
Charles Finney (1792-1875) ministered in the wake of
the “Second Awakening,” as it has been called. A Presbyterian lawyer, Finney
one day experienced “a mighty baptism of the Holy Ghost” which “like a wave of
electricity going through and through me … seemed to come in waves of liquid
love” … Refusing
to attend Princeton Seminary (or any seminary, for that matter),
Finney began
conducting revivals in upstate New York. One of his most
popular sermons was “Sinners Bound to Change Their Own Hearts.”
Finney’s one question for any given teaching was,
“Is it fit to convert sinners with?” One result of Finney’s revivalism was the division
of Presbyterians in Philadelphia and New York into Arminian and
Calvinistic factions. His “New Measures” included the “anxious bench”
(precursor to today’s altar call), emotional tactics that led to fainting and
weeping, and other “excitements,” as Finney and his followers
called them …
What’s So Wrong with Finney’s Theology?
No comments:
Post a Comment