Charles G. Finney and the Spirit of American Evangelicalism

Christian Century, August 13, 1997 by Timothy D. Hall

This work by Charles E. Hambrick-Stowe -- a lively volume in Eerdmans' Library of Religious Biography series -- captures the intensity of Charles G. Finney, an extraordinary lawyer-turned-evangelist who transformed American revivalism and greatly influenced pre-Civil War American society. The author, a United Church of Christ pastor and adjunct professor of church history at Lancaster Theological Seminary, reassesses Finney's character and legacy. Others have portrayed Finney as a headstrong purveyor of divisive emotionalism, but Hambrick-Stowe sees him as a seeker of broad evangelical consensus among Presbyterians and Congregationalists, and a ready ally of revivalists from other denominations. Others identify Finney as a theological loner, but Hambrick-Stowe locates him within a large fellowship of Congregationalist and "New School" Presbyterian colleagues who shared a theology systematized by Yale's Nathaniel Taylor. Critics like Princeton's Charles Hodge thought Finney was repudiating Reformed doctrine, but Hambrick-Stowe detects strong continuities with the New England Calvinism of Jonathan Edwards.

Hambrick-Stowe's vivid prose conveys the excitement of Finney's early campaigns in the 19th-century northeast. His immersion in the writings of Finney and his contemporaries is evident from the helpful note on sources at the end of the volume, and it pays off in his masterful use of quotations to infuse a sense of immediacy and authenticity into this retelling of the evangelist's life. Hambrick-Stowe provides a taste of the fervor which drove Finney to spread his gospel message far and wide, as well as the sense of the indignation that gripped conservative opponents whom the evangelist branded "cold," "stupid," "dead" and "unconverted." He recovers the force of an intellect whose arguments could bring a room full of New York lawyers to their knees in repentance. He probes the inner struggle for holiness that produced Finney's perfectionistic doctrines on the baptism of the Holy Ghost and the "higher Christian life." And he humanizes the evangelist through sympathetic accounts of the network of family and friends who supported him in his work, nursed him through serious illnesses, and comforted him in several devastating losses.

Less convincing is Hambrick-Stowe's portrayal of Finney as operating within "the Calvinist tradition." Finney may have employed some terms common to the New England theology of the previous generation, and Hambrick-Stowe shows that he enjoyed early support from presbyteries dominated by New School ministers. Yet he contrasts crucial aspects of Finney's theology with the conservative Edwardseanism of many contemporaries, acknowledges the eventual erosion of support for Finney even among several New School allies, and writes that Finney left the Presbyterian Church in part to avoid a heresy trial. Ultimately Hambrick-Stowe stretches the meaning of "Calvinist" much too far by applying it to one who denied original sin, stressed human ability in securing salvation, embraced perfectionism, and declared that the theology of sin and grace expressed in the Westminster Confession should be "banished from every pulpit, and from every formula of doctrine, and from the world."