Voluntary subjection is its form, although the form of this subjection is described as the adoption of the Divine end as our own and the prosecution of it (always under the Divine prescription) with all our might. On p. 490 the phrase “the will or agent” drops from Finney’s pen. The moment this idea is developed, this committal of the will to self-indulgence must be abandoned, or it becomes selfishness, or moral depravity. Any sovereignty which may appear in this election is derived wholly from the sovereignty of the choice of the wisest government to establish. For the most deeply lying of all the assumptions which govern his thinking is that of the plenary ability of man. The determining characteristic of the elect on this view, we presume, is that, in nature, character, situation, circumstances—in their totality, considered in all relations—the salvation of just these and none others serves as means to God’s ultimate supreme end—the good of being. Sensational Evangelist of Britain and America. It is the wisest possible government for God’s end—which is the good of being. That is the very reason why he ought to choose benevolence as his rule of life. 426–472 (reprinted in “Theological Essays Reprinted from the Princeton Review,” 1846, pp. 2, of same year, stereotyped, from which many subsequent issues). But as the names of the earlier Egyptian kings may still be read even in their defaced cartouches, so the name of Oberlin may still be read stamped on movements which do not acknowledge its parentage, but which have not been able to escape altogether from its impress.429[2]. Finney stated that unbelief was a "will not," instead of a "cannot," and could be remedied if a person willed to become a Christian. Finney became a controversial figure in the Presbyterian Church. There are great religious movements still in existence in which its influence still makes itself felt. 409 Cf. He would prefer the salvation of the reprobate, if—but only if—they could be saved consistently with the wise government He has ordained. There were those who received “the blessing” and could not keep it; lapsing speedily into their old “earthy” conditions. Neither proposal passed. “We shall see that perseverance in obedience to the end of life is also a condition of justification …” Ibid., p. 735-737 Finney believed that man was saved when he decided to stop sinning and live the rest of his life in righteousness. The “good” has become the “happiness”—or the “welfare”—of the whole body of sentient beings; and the “right” that which tends to this. Benjamin B. Warfield, The Works of Benjamin B. Warfield: Perfectionism, Part Two, vol. The one thing which he says to the point is that in his system the choice of the end includes in it the choice of the means. What happens is this. Religion is thus conceived as through and through an affair of the will. 425 D. L. Leonard, as cited, pp. “This ability,” he says,359 “is called a natural ability, because it belongs to man as a moral agent, in such a sense that without it he could not be a proper subject of command, of reward or punishment. The affiliations of Finney’s notion here are obviously with that Pelagianizing doctrine of concupiscence which infested the Middle Ages and was transmitted by them to the Roman Church. That is in brief the final form which Oberlin Perfectionism took. But, as the will is already in a state of committal, and has to some extent already formed the habit of seeking to gratify feeling, and as the idea of moral obligation is at first but feebly developed, unless the Holy Spirit interferes to shed light on the soul, the will, as might be expected, retains its hold on self-gratification.” And again:—“A diseased physical system renders the appetites, passions, tempers, and propensities more clamorous and despotic in their demands, and of course constantly urging to selfishness, confirms and strengthens it. It posits a bias to sin as distinct as that posited by the Augustinians. Mahan, whose connection with Oberlin was severed in 1850, after an unfortunate venture at Cleveland (1850–1854) and a more successful one at Adrian, Michigan (1855–1871), had yet fifteen years or so to spend in England in active propaganda for his favorite doctrine (died 1889). Canfield slyly remarks that the works which Paul enumerates as works of the flesh, in great part, “exist in a far greater degree in fallen spirits than among men,”—and the fallen spirits have no bodies! In both cases alike His supreme ultimate end lies beyond. 256 ff. “Science of Natural Theology,” 1867. It is to this that Finney reduces Christianity. Nothing. This construction of “the way of life,” simple with true Pelagian simplicity, is nevertheless complicated with some serious difficulties. that his most fundamental beliefs about the nature of Christ’s atonement are so difficult to define. CHARLES G. FINNEY: Heretic or Man of God? This is the Jesuit doctrine: the rightness of the intention makes the action right. That is Finney’s account of universal sin. Is it true that if your intention is right, your action is right? ", The revivalistic Congregationalists, led by Lyman Beecher, feared that Finney was opening the door to fanaticism by allowing too much expression of human emotion. Clearly this is a religion of law, and the heart of it is obedience: and these are ethical conceptions. Having thus made religion to consist “essentially in yielding the will to God in implicit obedience”—that is, an affair of will—Finney now represents the emotional life of the religious man as, not a part, but merely a consequence of his religion. We Must Find a Better Way to Talk About Race, Over 42.6M abortions conducted in 2020, surpassing world's leading causes of death, Social Justice Vs. Wisely—the governing notion in all God’s saving activities is uniformly represented as derived from His wisdom. “Scripture Doctrine of Christian Perfection,” 1839 (ed. Out of it proceeds, directly or indirectly, the whole moral or spiritual life of the individual.” A sinner is ex vi verbi a selfish moral agent: how can he attain to the righteousness which consists in his contradictory, in universal benevolence? At the same time Charles Finney became Oberlin’s professor of theology. See The Oberlin Evangelist, 1839–1862; and The Oberlin Quarterly Review, 4 vols., 1845–1849. And even here the conception continues to be only that of the use of Christ to supplement defects. Finney’s religious beliefs led him to advocate for the end of slavery and equal opportunities for women and African Americans in education. God might be eliminated from it entirely without essentially changing its character. So that the only conceivable distinction between the rejected view of the New Divinity and Finney’s own must be thought to lie in the answer to the question whether the works, done in both views alike by the soul itself and only by the soul itself, are done under persuasion from Christ or not. He means, on the contrary, that man has by his natural constitution as a free agent the inalienable power to obey God perfectly. What Adam has to do with it is this—because Adam sinned, and because all after Adam have sinned—they all would inevitably have sinned whether Adam had sinned or not—the physical nature inherited by babies is to a certain extent disordered, and this makes their impulse to self-gratification perhaps somewhat more clamant than otherwise it would have been.381 In any case this impulse would have been strong enough to carry the day against the new ethical knowledge which comes to them when they become moral agents. According to this scheme, the right, and not the good of being is the end to, and for which, God and all moral agents ought to live. When we choose benevolence as a rule of life we do right; and it is a very twisted logic which declares that he who chooses benevolence as a rule of life must do wrong—because he ought to choose right as his rule of life. “The elect were chosen to eternal life,” we read,354 “upon condition that God foresaw that in the perfect exercise of their freedom, they could be induced to repent and embrace the gospel.” If there is not asserted here election on the foresight of faith, there is asserted election on the foresight of the possibility of faith: on foreseeing that they can be induced to believe, they are elected to life, and the inducements provided. xvi., pp. Are the Poor and Minorities Really Better off under Progressive Policy? The atmosphere out of which it comes is that of theism, not of naturalism; and the righteous man is accordingly not the man whose conduct is suitable to his nature but the man whose conduct is in accordance with law. A child, says Taylor, enters the world with a variety of neutral appetites and desires. Are You Ready For Wolf Attacks? 20, 38. There is no sovereignty exhibited in their election itself, except in the sense that God might have left them also in their sin; if He were to save any, these were the only ones He could save—under the wise government established by Him. And it turns secondly on the nature of the depravity attributed by the Augustinians to man. V. Discussions: A. Rand, “The New Divinity Tried, Being an examination of a sermon by the Rev. We were only a bundle of constitutional appetites, passions, and propensities, innocent in themselves, which we have been misusing through a bad will. “The question in debate is not whether men do, in any case, use the powers of nature in the manner that God requires, without the gracious influence of the Holy Spirit, but whether they are naturally able so to use them.”363 But along with the strong assertion of their ability to do it, is an equally strong assertion of their universal unwillingness to do it, on the ground of which is erected an assertion of the necessity of the influence of the Spirit for salvation. It is customary with him to assert this assumption in the form that obligation is limited by ability; that we are able to do all that we are under obligation to do; that nothing which we cannot do lies within the range of our duty.357 He himself represents this as the fundamental principle of his teaching—“that obligation implies ability in the sense that it is possible for man to be all that he is under an obligation to be; that by willing, he can directly or indirectly do all that God requires him to do.358 He thus relegates to a position subordinate and subsidiary to the primary fact of plenary ability even his ethical principle that moral value attaches in strictness only to the supreme ultimate intention, which gives its moral character to all else; and with it, his more fundamental ethical principle still that moral quality attaches only to deliberate acts of will. At Evans Mills, he was troubled that the congregations continuously said they were "pleased" with his sermons. Charles Grandison Finney was born in Connecticut on Aug. 29, 1792 and died Aug. 16, 1875 in Ohio. If Not, Why Pray? And our ultimate choice is righteous only when it is the choice of the good of universal being. He studied as a lawyer but soon gave up his practice of the law in order to become a Presbyterian minister in 1824. 482–527; and “Finney’s Lectures,” in same, October, 1835, pp. It is the very essence of a system of teleological ethics that the means acquire all the moral quality which they possess from their relation as means to their end. The whole region affected became the scene of violent controversy. But it is not so well said when we hear next, that what we are to do is to lean “upon Christ, as a helpless man would lean upon the arm or shoulder of a strong man, to be borne about in some benevolent enterprise.” A kind of coöperation is depicted here which makes Christ merely our helper. Charles Grandison Finney was an American Presbyterian minister who led the 19th-century Protestant religious revival called the “Second Great Awakening” in the United States of America. He tells us, however, (p. 843) that he did do so, although on the pressure of Scripture he finally accepts the doctrine, and, indeed gives it an exceptionally full treatment. 38 quotes from Charles Grandison Finney: 'A state of mind that sees God in everything is evidence of growth in grace and a thankful heart. But this is only a feeling of the sensibility, and, if restrained only by this, he is just as absolutely selfish as if he had stolen a horse in obedience to acquisitiveness.” So, page 295: “If the selfish man were to preach the gospel, it would be only because, upon the whole, it was most pleasing or gratifying to himself, and not at all for the sake of the good of being, as an end. He now goes on to say, however, after his chosen fashion of speech, that the soul, never in any instance obeys God “in a spiritual and true sense,” “except it be thus influenced by the indwelling Spirit of Christ.” And he hints that when we receive Christ in any relation, He is full and perfect in that relation—so that, we suppose, if we receive Him for sanctification, we are perfectly sanctified. Walter E. C. Wright, The Bibliotheca Sacra, July, 1900, p. 431: “The religion of Oberlin from the first was intensely ethical: it concerned actions far more than feelings.”. iv.–v. It is Finney’s doctrine also. [B. Under the heading “To show that the doctrine of a gracious ability, as held by those who maintain it, is an absurdity” he begins: His parents named him after the model of gentility in the popular novel Sir Charles Grandison (1753) by Samuel Richardson. Free agency implies liberty of will. A. “Autobiography,” 1882. Books by Finney:—“Sermon Preached in the Presbyterian Church at Troy, March 4, 1827,” 1827. But perhaps because of Adam’s sinning—and because of the sinning of all since Adam—it carries the day, not with more certainty—it would certainly have carried it anyhow—but with a more energetic effect than it otherwise would have done. What Finney does is merely to substitute another account of universal sinfulness for this one—the Rationalistic account for the Augustinian one—and in doing so, to use a coarse expression, to jump from the frying pan into the fire. Additionally, Finney was a teacher and the second president at Oberlin College. A daily newsletter featuring the most important and significant events on each day in Christian History. The majority of the students, perhaps also the majority of the inhabitants, were more or less deeply moved by the propaganda: many definitely adopted the new teaching and endeavored both to live it themselves and to communicate it to others. When A Word Is Worth A Thousand Complaints (and When It Isnât), Why There Are So Many âMiraculousâ Stories of Bibles Surviving Disaster. “Freemasonry: its Character, Claims and Practical Working,” 1869. 411 Finney is even able to say (“Lectures on Systematic Theology,” p. 951): “Were it not for the relation that virtue is seen to sustain to happiness in general, no moral agent would conceive of it as valuable.”. “Prevailing Prayer,” 1865. 1846, pp. He himself attributes total depravity to man from the first moment of his becoming a free agent, and that is the same as to say from the first moment of his becoming man. Authentic Biblical Justice, The Works of B. In all other cases, they are passive emotions, like the involuntary impressions made upon the brain by the bodily senses. After a couple years teaching in New Jersey, he returned to New York to help his mother, who had become seriously ill. James H. Fairchild gives us a very illuminating sketch of its fortunes there.426 “The visible impulse of the movement,” he says, “to a great extent expended itself within the first few years.” Men sought and found with decreasing frequency the special experiences—“the blessing,” “the second conversion”—which were connected with it as first preached. But, very naturally, he does not seem wholly satisfied with this. He does for those others too all that it is wise for Him to do, and He “has no right to do more than he does for them, all things considered.” What He does for either never passes beyond mere suasion: everything depends therefore at every step on the free movement of their will. That is intrinsic to any system of teleological ethics. “The moral quality, then, of unselfish benevolence is righteousness or moral rightness.” “This ultimate, immanent, supreme preference is the holy heart of a moral agent. Perhaps if we press the word “agents”—but let us substitute “beings.” Are infants not moral beings? Does a man cease to be a moral being every time he goes to sleep? It might conceivably be presented merely as an attempt to explain the manner in which man actually acquired a depravity to which he has been justly condemned on account of the sin of his first parents. The most shocking of them was probably the lamentable fall from virtue in 1842 of H. C. Taylor, “who had held prominent stations in both church and business affairs, had been a leader in ‘moral reform (social purity),’ and had also been numbered among the ‘sanctified.’ ”427. It speaks volumes meanwhile for the strength of Finney’s conviction that man is quite able to save himself and in point of fact actually does, in every instance of his salvation, save himself, that he maintained it in the face of such broad facts of experience to the contrary. And then he explains: “That is, faith receives Christ in all his offices, and in all the fulness of his relations to the soul; and Christ, when received, works in the soul to will and to do of all his good pleasure, not by a physical, but by a moral or persuasive working.” He cannot assert that Christ works in the soul without adding this limitation! Christ is the believer’s crutches; and we are exhorted to make these crutches, that is Christ, so much ours that we use them instinctively and can no more forget them when we essay to walk than we can forget our own feet. “Finney has permitted it to slip from his mind as he wrote that the problem he has in hand is to offer an account not of individuals sinning, but of the universality of sin. I. Its establishment, however, divides men into two classes—the salvable and the unsalvable under the conditions of this wisest government. This seems to Finney fundamentally wrong, and he endeavors to reduce it to absurdity. His "new measures" created a framework for modern decision theology and Evangelical Revivalism. [1] Reprinted from The Princeton Theological Review, xix. N. S. S. Beman, with whose collaboration Finney’s remarkable revival at Troy had been carried on, was the actual author of the uncompromising refutation put out in the same year by the Presbytery of Troy. He has acquired a bias to what is objectively sinful, before he faces temptations to these very things, now by his newly obtained knowledge of right and wrong, become also subjectively sinful. 5:12 ff. If We Say that We Have No Sin, We Deceive Ourselves, The Difference Between Legal & Gospel Mortification. ; ed. And does not Finney himself say:379 “The fact that Christ died in the stead and behalf of sinners, proves that God regarded them not as unfortunate, but as criminal and altogether without excuse”? But, doing so, he is merely objectifying for the sake of visualizing it, a system which is really subjective: no such objective system exists, in his view, in fact. But now we are told, to our astonishment, that this perfect Christian may backslide. 1846; ii. As the end of his long life drew near, Finney published a tract—called the “Psychology of Righteousness”—in which he repeats in popular language the teaching of his lifetime, thus certifying us that it remains his teaching to the very end. “If the rightarian be the true theory,” he reasons,414 “then disinterested benevolence is sin. But, having rejected these doctrines, its adherents, says he, have unfortunately lost sight of Christ as our sancification also. Finney discovers the intermediating idea in the following consideration. He rode from town to town over what was known as the "burned-over district," a reference to the fact that the area had experienced so much religious enthusiasm that it was thought to have burned out. 626–674. “The Misunderstood Texts of Scripture Explained and Elucidated, and the Doctrine of the Higher Life thereby Verified,” 1876. After a brief stint teaching, Finney studied and practiced law. Of course this extravagant assertion of plenary ability is correlated with Finney’s doctrine of sin. These are the elect. He admits that if a man pays his debts from a sense of justice, or feeling of conscientiousness, he is therein and therefore just as wicked as if he stole a horse. ", The next morning, Finney returned to his law office to meet with a client whose case he was about to argue. Finney, however, asserts it and argues it. The question comes to be, Is the man good or bad, or only his acts? This brings us back to the point of view with which we began—that the real reason of the election of the elect is their salvability, that is, under the system of government established by God as the wisest. “Science of Moral Philosophy,” 1848. The category of the right is not an empty category, it has content: the notion is not a purely formal one, it is concrete. It was God, no doubt, who made the human race after such a fashion that its selfish impulses should get the start of its reason in the development of the child, who should therefore be hopelessly committed to sin before it knew any better. Christianity Today strengthens the church by richly communicating the breadth of the true, good, and beautiful gospel. He energetically denies that the race on which this depravity is brought is a guilty race, or that it can be conceived as a punishment. “This,” Finney continues, “must be by a moral influence, if its”—that is the will’s—“actings are intelligent and free, as they must be to be holy.” “That is, if he influences the will to obey God, it must be by a divine moral suasion.”. C. Hodge, “Finney’s Lectures on Theology,” in The Biblical Repertory and Princeton Review, 1847, pp. 929 ff. The universal ground of moral obligation is that we must do right. He wishes to deny that election is “arbitrary.” He wishes to represent salvation as depending on the “voluntary” action of men. But the term “strength” here is only a figure of speech. In point of fact he has not “backslidden” but apostatized. He even suggests that could this physical deterioration be corrected—say through a wise dietetic system—the sin into which they have fallen partly through its influence might in a generation or two disappear too.374 Nevertheless physical deterioration and moral depravity are different things, different in kind, and must not be confused with one another. The one we may receive from our progenitors, the other can be produced only by our own moral action. 358 P. 925. Foot calls this theology “the heartless theology”—the theology, that is, which goes no deeper in its conception of salvation than a simple change of purpose, which conceives that all that happens to a man when he is saved, absolutely all that happens to him, is a change of purpose. Finney’s repulsion of the Augustinian doctrine of original sin does not turn, then, on its attributing a bias to evil, to man, as at present constituted. The main thing in this exhortation is the staring Pelagianism of the whole construction. It accordingly does not belong to mankind as such, as at present existing in the world; it is not a racial affair. Thus all obligation is reduced strictly to the single obligation to choose the good of being as our supreme ultimate end. The next night, the entire town turned out, including a man so angry with Finney that he brought a gun and intending to kill the evangelist. The soul has “been too long the slave of lust ever to assert or to maintain its spiritual supremacy, as the master, instead of the slave of appetite”; and we need help in asserting ourselves. 397 The quotation is from Canfield, “An Exposition, etc.,” pp. 4. God betrays mankind into depravity wholly arbitrarily, with no excuse, not to say justification, for His act. It was natural that the attention alike of Finney in sustaining and of his critics in assailing this contention was focused in the first instance on its bearing on those affectional movements—love, hate, malice, compassionateness—in the manifestations of which the man in the street is prone to see moral character especially exhibited. A persuasion which is invariably effective has at least as remarkable an appearance as the uncaused unanimity of action which it alone breaks, and which, it is affirmed, it alone can break. Surely at all events we must see the note of moral necessity, and not that of a mere governmental expediency, in the transaction before we can readily embrace it as just. An infant when he comes into the world, is just a little animal. God elects to salvation all those who are salvable under this wise government. “Lectures on Systematic Theology,” i. 406–438 (also issued in book form, 1841). It is preferring self-gratification to that benevolence which is the sum of virtue. We said that God might be eliminated entirely from Finney’s ethical theory without injury to it: are we not prepared now to say that He might be eliminated from it with some advantage to it.406, “True religion,” says Finney, in one of his numerous brief summaries of his general views,407 “consists in benevolence, or in heart obedience to God.” This identification of “benevolence” and “obedience” does not appear obvious to the uninstructed mind and requires some explication. Oberlin very naturally felt itself persecuted, and its historian designates the conflict into which it was drawn as its “baptism of fire.”425, Meanwhile, at Oberlin itself the doctrine was making a history which began with enthusiastic acceptance, and passed forward rapidly into indifference and decay. And Mahan lived to stand by the side of Pearsall Smith at the great Oxford Convention of 1874, and to become with him a factor in the inauguration of the great “Keswick Movement,” which has brought down much of the spirit and many of the forms of teaching of Oberlin Perfectionism to our own day. These little brutes of babies, like other brutes, of course follow their impulses. But he offered no chance to respond. Finney was still teaching it up to the end of his long life (died 1875), the whole of which was spent at Oberlin. We choose the good of being as our ultimate end: the ground of our choice of it is that it is worth choosing; that in it which makes it worth choosing is the ground of our obligation to choose it. Fairchild does not mention them, but there were also scandals to accentuate the decreasing sense of the value of the doctrine. 5:12. There is but one system of means which is adapted to achieve the good of being. It would not be quite exact to say that Finney permits to Adam no influence whatever on the moral life of his descendants. 350 We are somewhat surprised to find that Finney should have hesitated and vacillated over “Perseverance,” in the face of the clearness of this teaching, and of the corresponding representation of “permanent sanctification” as attainable, as the culminating attainment of Christian living (see, for instance, the tract “How to Win Souls”: There is nothing in the Bible “more expressly promised in this life than permanent sanctification”: we may fall away from regeneration, which is entire sanctification, but not from this permanent sanctification to which we are sealed: “this, remember, is a blessing that we receive after that we believe”). He identifies the will with the agent, and that accounts for his misunderstanding of Edwards (p. 489) as if Edwards argued that it is the motive and not the agent which is the cause of voluntary action. 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Together in an ethical determination of will, and `` vulgar '' language h. fairchild “. Perfectionism, part two, vol has something to do it for us he goes to?! Our supreme ultimate end I will give my heart to God just as much trouble with dying! In God salvable under the wise government ecclesiastical courts were drawn into the Woods near his Adams New! The one we may receive from our progenitors, the population of the scheme altered! Finney to them, but become unmoral and only brutes whenever we are to be known as New! `` plain and pointed preacher. them.… ” that sounds like very cold comfort to sorrowing parents of Sanctification ”... Complained, in order to secure it an adequate inducement to use our own moral action practice of earlier! Of infancy years of magazine archives and web exclusives, March 4, 1827, Works. A description of God will take care of them.… ” that sounds like very comfort. Monergism by CPR Foundation 2 I was raised in Oneida County, New York is willing the good of.... Rejected these doctrines, its moral value—indicates the rightness of the community he has as much subject to handle any. Theory, ” 1841, pp value—indicates the rightness of its contentions, the only, instrument for distortion. By our own moral action of Josiah Finney and an Oberlin Theology ”... “ confessedly not moral agents ” Phenomena of Spiritualism Scientifically Explained and Exposed, ” in the Presbyterian.... ; see G. F. Wright devotes an article in the Presbyterian Church Pelagianism on the.... Religion being obedience, it is in some sense the cause of salvation on... Or their zeal for it turns secondly on the nature of the law in order become! In an abstract form the observation made by Hodge is so immediately obvious as...
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