Dr. Nathan Busenitz · The Master's Seminary · 75 minutes
Lecture by Dr. Nathan Busenitz, from The Master's Seminary's public channel. Study notes below from Medina Community Church.
The first half of this lecture examines Charles Finney's theology at close range, and it is more serious than a matter of technique: Finney denied total inability, redefined the atonement, and made forgiveness rest on the sinner's own act. His critics called it an ancient heresy in new dress, and even by his own count the glory departed from his revivals within a few years. The second half is a rapid review of everything from Cranmer to the camp meetings, the single best preparation for this course's second exam, and this page's quiz leans into it.
The recap sharpens the contrast: the first Awakening measured conversion by the fruit of a changed life, tested by the pattern of 1 John; the second began the same way and was then, in the lecture's word, hijacked by men who believed they had found a formula for revival. The credibility earned by true revival was spent underwriting the new measures.
Finney openly denied the total inability of sinners: God has no right to command, he argued, unless we have power to obey, and he rejected what he called Calvinistic views of atonement, regeneration, faith, repentance, and the slavery of the will. Gardiner Spring, sixty years a New York pastor, summarized the teaching: people were told that resolving to become Christians is itself the religion of the gospel, and named its principal advocate, the Rev. Charles Finney, a purveyor of Pelagian errors.
Murray's exposition cuts deepest here: for Finney, Christ's death was no payment of debt for those whose sins he bore but a display satisfying public justice, making it safe for God to forgive. The atonement itself, Finney wrote, secures the salvation of no one; the act that secures forgiveness is man's repentance, not Christ's cross. Imputation is denied. The lecture pauses to make sure the weight of that departure lands.
Nathaniel Taylor at Yale, seeking to defend orthodoxy from Unitarian attack, conceded the attackers' premise: sin and guilt attach only to voluntary choices, so only the will, not the nature, needs changing. His New Haven divinity was Calvinism restated into Arminianism, and Finney adopted it as the doctrinal engine of the new measures. Old school and new school Presbyterianism split over exactly this.
Archibald Alexander, first professor of the new Princeton Seminary, answered that what innovators hail as discovery is usually an ancient heresy in new clothes, here, Pelagius redivivus: man possessing every ability required, the consent of the will all that is needed. Princeton Seminary, founded in 1812, became the century's bastion against this stream, the line running through Hodge and Warfield.
Finney claimed his measures guaranteed results, and when critics objected, the answer was the numbers: God must be sealing the methods. The lecture presses the fallacy, false religions grow rapidly too, and traces the same defense through modern movements: once visible results become the authority, pragmatism owns the church. The believer's only safe authority is the word of God, against results and against experience alike.
Even by his own standard Finney failed: lecturing in 1835 he conceded that since 1831 the glory had been departing and revivals had grown less frequent and less powerful. Murray lists four reasons the new measures spread anyway: numeric success trumped biblical defense, novelty excited, true revival lent them credibility, and the successes got more press than the damage. Calvin Colton's 1832 claim that a new, man-originated kind of revival had been discovered marks the moment the old definition, a sovereign and large giving of the Spirit, was abandoned. The regions so evangelized hardened into the burnt-over district.
Cranmer and the Book of Common Prayer; Bloody Mary's three hundred; Elizabeth's settlement and the 1559 Act of Supremacy naming her supreme governor; James I, Hampton Court in 1604, and the King James Bible of 1611 under Bancroft's oversight; Charles I, Laud, the Great Migration, Civil War, and Cromwell's protectorate; the Restoration, the 1662 Act of Uniformity and the Great Ejection of some twenty-four hundred pastors; James II and the Glorious Revolution of 1688 bringing William and Mary. Know the separatists and dissenters from the later nonconformists, the 1593 act against the Puritans, and the Millenary Petition.
John Smyth, influenced by Anabaptists in the Netherlands around 1609, began the English Baptists; particular Baptists held particular redemption, general Baptists were Arminian, and Roger Williams planted America's first Baptist church at Providence. Plymouth 1620 under the Mayflower Compact, Carver then Bradford governing; Winthrop's Massachusetts Bay from 1630; Harvard founded 1636, its famous statue known on campus as the statue of three lies, wrong face, wrong founder, wrong date, beneath the motto Veritas.
Beza and reformed scholasticism; Arminius of Leiden and the Remonstrants; Dort in 1619 and the five points; supralapsarianism placing the decree to elect logically before the decree to create, infralapsarianism after; Francis Turretin's Latin systematic theology, Princeton's textbook until Hodge wrote in English. Chemnitz and the 1580 Book of Concord; Lutheran orthodoxy and Pietism; the Thirty Years War beginning in 1618; Arndt the forefather, Spener's Pia Desideria, Francke and the University of Halle, then Zinzendorf's more mystical second wave and the Moravians, the link to Wesley's conversion; Descartes and the rationalist turn.
Stoddard and the Halfway Covenant; Edwards, Northampton, Enfield, Stockbridge, and the three great works, Religious Affections, Freedom of the Will, and the Distinguishing Marks; Whitefield's thirteen crossings; the Wesleys, Scougal's book, Sophy Hopkey and Mary Vazeille; Gilbert Tennent's sermon The Danger of an Unconverted Ministry aimed at old light critics; Brainerd; Yale 1702 and the new lights' college at Princeton, with Samuel Davies and then Witherspoon among Edwards' successors.
Witherspoon's campus revival converting McMillan, apostle of the West; Princeton Seminary under Archibald Alexander with Ashbel Green; Charles Hodge ahead; McGready's Kentucky camp meetings; Asbury's three hundred thousand miles; Cartwright the pugilistic Methodist; and the New England resistance, Nettleton and Spring holding the line against Finney while Lyman Beecher eventually crossed over to join him; Nathaniel Taylor supplying the theology. The lecture points students to Phil Johnson's essay on Finney and the parallel appendix in Ashamed of the Gospel for fuller assessment.
Tap an answer. A wrong guess points you back to the outline; when all fourteen are right, the lecture is marked complete on this device.
1. Finney argued that God has no right to command unless
2. On the atonement, Finney taught that
3. Gardiner Spring and Archibald Alexander identified Finney's system as
4. Nathaniel Taylor's New Haven theology held that
5. When critics challenged the new measures, their defenders appealed chiefly to
6. By Finney's own admission in 1835,
7. The 1662 Act of Uniformity produced
8. The Glorious Revolution of 1688 replaced James II with
9. Particular Baptists differed from general Baptists in holding
10. Harvard's John Harvard statue is called the statue of three lies because
11. Supralapsarianism holds that, in the logical order of the decrees, God's decree to elect
12. Before Hodge wrote in English, Princeton's standard systematic theology was
13. Gilbert Tennent's famous Awakening sermon was titled
14. Of the New England ministers who first opposed Finney's new measures,
All fourteen correct. Lecture 21 is complete.
Finney's defenders answered every biblical objection with numbers. Where does that same argument appear today, and how would you answer it pastorally rather than cynically?
Taylor revised doctrine to defend the faith from its critics and ended up conceding the critics' premise. When does apologetic accommodation cross into surrender?
Looking over the whole review, from Cranmer to the camp meetings, which single figure or event do you most want to remember, and why?
The lecture points to Iain Murray's Revival and Revivalism, Phil Johnson's essay A Wolf in Sheep's Clothing on Finney, and the related appendix in Ashamed of the Gospel for a fuller assessment of Finney's legacy.