Charles Finney was one of the most important revivalists in nineteenth-century America. Born in 1792 and trained as a lawyer rather than a theologian, he became one of the defining figures of the Second Great Awakening and exercised enormous influence over the revival culture that spread across the United States in the decades before the Civil War. His preaching was practical and deliberately aimed at producing an immediate response. He believed revivals could be brought about through the proper use of means.
That conviction marked a significant break with the theological culture represented a century earlier by Jonathan Edwards.
Edwards had also lived through revival. He was one of the principal theologians of the First Great Awakening in the 1730s and 1740s, and no one could accuse him of wanting a cold or lifeless Christianity. But he treated religious experience as something that had to be examined, disciplined, and interpreted through Scripture and theology. His Religious Affections was written precisely because emotional intensity could not be accepted as proof that God was at work. People could cry, tremble, shout, experience overwhelming feelings, and still be wrong about what was happening to them.
For Edwards, the experience had to answer to the truth. Finney gradually reversed that order. In Lectures on Revivals of Religion, published in 1835, he complained of “vast ignorance in the Churches on the subject of revivals.” By ignorance he meant that Christians did not understand how revival could be produced. He believed that when the correct methods were employed, revival followed in a predictable manner.
William McLoughlin summarized the difference between the two men like this: “One saw God as the center of the universe, the other saw man. One believed that revivals were prayed down and the other that they were worked up.”
The older Protestant minister was expected to be a theologian. He studied Greek and Hebrew because Christianity rested upon texts written in Greek and Hebrew. He studied church history. He studied systematic theology because a doctrine taken from one passage had to make sense alongside everything else Scripture taught.
The educational institutions surrounding the First Great Awakening reflected that expectation. The Log College associated with William Tennent and the founding of the College of New Jersey, later Princeton, grew from a culture in which revival and scholarship were not enemies. Ministers were expected to know languages, theology, philosophy, the Reformers, and the older Christian tradition.
Finney’s world increasingly valued a different qualification: results.
His language about the Holy Spirit shows how far the shift went. He wrote that Christians could be guilty for not having the Spirit because “God has placed His Spirit at your disposal.” Revival therefore depended heavily upon whether Christians employed the proper means. If revival failed to occur, the explanation could be found in the minister, congregation, or method.
As a result, the minister who produces visible conversions begins to look more useful than the minister who can parse Greek verbs. The sermon becomes increasingly concerned with eliciting a response. Music, atmosphere, direct appeals, prolonged meetings, and psychological pressure acquire new importance because the human will becomes the object upon which the minister is working.
Finney’s famous “anxious bench,” where people under conviction were publicly separated and pressured toward decision, belonged to this world. So did the protracted revival meeting. The success of ministry became visible and countable. The minister was beginning to change from theologian into technician.
That shift created a religious culture in which formal theological formation was increasingly easier to bypass, and in which immediate experience and measurable results could carry authority that had once belonged to scholarship.
The Burned-Over Church
The region stretching across western and central New York became known as the Burned-Over District because revivalism swept across it so frequently during the first half of the nineteenth century that people joked there was no spiritual fuel left to burn. The region produced enormous religious energy. It also produced an extraordinary number of new religious movements.
William Miller, Joseph Smith, the early Adventist movement, and later Charles Taze Russell all emerged from or were deeply connected to the religious environment created in this period. Their doctrines differed enormously, but their founders were constructing massive theological systems without the kind of linguistic and historical formation that older Protestant churches had once considered essential.
William Miller was a farmer and Baptist lay preacher. By reading the King James Bible and calculating prophetic numbers in Daniel, he concluded that Christ would return around 1843 or 1844. Thousands eventually accepted the prediction. October 22, 1844, passed without the return of Christ and became remembered among his followers as the Great Disappointment.
Ellen G. White later helped transform the Millerite failure into a new theological system. When the expected event did not occur visibly on earth, 1844 was reinterpreted as a heavenly event associated with what became the Adventist doctrine of the Investigative Judgment.
Joseph Smith, with little formal education and no training in biblical languages, announced new revelation and produced new scripture in the language of the King James Bible. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints emerged from the same broader nineteenth-century American religious environment in which established theological authority had weakened and charismatic claims to revelation could flourish.
Charles Taze Russell, whose movement developed into the Jehovah’s Witnesses, likewise constructed a sweeping theological system without any serious theological training. His rejection of Christ’s full deity revived arguments Christians had fought over during the Arian controversy more than fifteen centuries earlier.
The point is not that a degree guarantees orthodoxy. Church history contains highly educated heretics. The problem is what disappears when serious theological formation ceases to function as a restraint.
By the twentieth century, American Protestantism had become extraordinarily successful at producing religious movements on a mass scale. Revival campaigns filled stadiums. Radio and television turned preachers into national figures. Megachurches emerged. Christian publishing became an industry. The United States produced some of the largest Protestant ministries in history.
Finney’s emphasis upon decision developed into a revival culture built around bringing individuals to an identifiable moment of commitment. Billy Sunday carried the mass revival into the early twentieth century. Billy Graham later perfected the crusade model on a scale Finney could never have imagined.
Clinging to measurable results eventually entered the ordinary church. The Church Growth Movement encouraged pastors to think deliberately about what attracted people, what retained them, and what produced numerical growth. The seeker-sensitive movement pushed this further by designing services around people who were uncomfortable with traditional churches.
Once that happens, the pastor’s professional formation changes. He needs leadership skills, communication skills, organizational skills, fundraising ability, marketing instincts, and the personality necessary to lead a large staff. Greek and Hebrew become useful but optional. Church history becomes specialized knowledge. Systematic theology can be delegated to seminaries while the successful pastor concentrates on growing the ministry.
Christian preaching increasingly moved toward therapy. Questions about sin, judgment, covenant, redemption, holiness, and the nature of God were displaced by questions about personal fulfillment, relationships, success, mental well-being, leadership, and finding purpose. The prosperity gospel represents the most shameless version of this development. God becomes the mechanism through which the believer obtains health and wealth. God exists largely to improve my life. Scripture becomes a source of practical lessons. The sermon becomes encouragement. The pastor becomes motivational speaker, therapist, and chief executive simultaneously.
Salam Almasry is a fellow at the Ideologiocal Defense Institue
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