Nov 15, 2016 - Explore Greg Robbins's board "Charles Finney Quotes" on Pinterest. “Subsequent to the commencement of moral agency, and previous to regeneration, the moral depravity of mankind is universal.”375 And it is no less “total” than universal; it manifests itself in the entirety of humanity “without any mixture of moral goodness or virtue.”376 All men without exception are morally depraved through and through. 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. What needs correcting is only this bad will into a good one. We are exhorted, it is true, to renounce our own strength and rely on, draw on, live by the strength of Christ. Cf. The adoption of the end of God as our end, and obedience to the will of God, are not quite the same conception: they are assimilated to one another by the requirement that we shall prosecute this end when adopted in implicit obedience to the Divine prescription. 358 P. 925. By this I do not mean, that, were you disposed to exert your natural powers aright, you could not at once obey the law in the exercise of your natural strength, and continue to do so. Not merely the salvation of some rather than others, but the salvation of just these same rather than any others, subserves this end. 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. The goodness of the end, in point of fact, never transmits its goodness to the means used to attain it: And this destroys at once all schemes of teleological ethics. ", The revivalistic Congregationalists, led by Lyman Beecher, feared that Finney was opening the door to fanaticism by allowing too much expression of human emotion. Anonymous Review of Finney’s “Lectures on Revivals of Religion,” in The Literary and Theological Review, 1835, pp. Such rigid Calvinism, he said, "had not been born again, was insufficient, and altogether an abomination to God. The ultimate result is that, representing God as ordering the universe for the one end of the production of the greatest happiness of the greatest number, he finds himself teaching that men are left to perish solely for the enhancement of the happiness of others. A number of Tracts, n.d. II. Sign Up For Our Newsletter Those whose salvation He undertakes to secure, because they are salvable under the wise government He has established, He brings to salvation by suasive influences of grace, adapted in each case to their special needs, and therefore certain to be effective. When A Word Is Worth A Thousand Complaints (and When It Isn’t), Why There Are So Many ‘Miraculous’ Stories of Bibles Surviving Disaster. His rejection of a “physical” regeneration seemed to him to remove one of the grounds for inferring it; and his rejection of what he calls a “perpetual” justification removes another. The good end is no longer conceived as making the means chosen to secure it good; it is conceived as related to a system of means which are themselves good and which form with the end a good system. From Studies in Perfectionism by B. “The True Believer,” 1847. 422 Cf. How shall we account for the asserted fact that the will, inalienably able to turn at its option from its sins to God, in point of fact never does and never will so turn, except under the persuasive action of the Holy Spirit? The point raised is whether that is all that is necessary. And it turns secondly on the nature of the depravity attributed by the Augustinians to man. Finney is near to this crude form of statement when he writes:385 “Sin may be the result of temptation; temptation may be universal, and of such a nature as uniformly, not necessarily, to result in sin, unless a contrary result be secured by a Divine moral suasion.” He is still near it when he writes:386 “Sin may be, and must be, an abuse of free-agency; and this may be accounted for, as we shall see, by ascribing it to the universality of temptation, and does not at all imply a sinful constitution.… Free, responsible will is an adequate cause in the presence of temptation, without the supposition of a sinful constitution, as has been demonstrated in the case of Adam and of angels.… It is said that no motive to sin could be a motive or a temptation, if there were not a sinful taste, relish, or appetite, inherent in the constitution, to which the temptation or motive is addressed.… To this I reply,—Suppose this objection be applied to the sin of Adam and of angels. The only even apparent distinction between the two views lies in Finney’s calling his view a sanctification “by faith,” and setting it over against the other as a sanctification “by effort.” And as he expounds his view, that is a distinction without a difference. On the other hand, though God is supposed in the doctrine Finney is criticizing to have attached the communication of sinfulness to Adam’s posterity descended from him by ordinary generation, He is not represented as having done so arbitrarily but in a judicial sentence; so that a ground is assigned for His act and a ground in right—and Finney has not shown that this ground did not exist, or that existing, it was not a compelling ground in right. 237–277. 369 The Oberlin Evangelist, Lect. 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. In reply to Hodge, Finney says a great deal which is wholly ineffective because not to the point. Charles Grandison Finney was a descendant of the New England Puritans, and was born in Connecticut in 1792. To be governed in any action whatever by our constitutional affections, whatever they may be—whether what in the common estimation would be called wicked or what in that estimation would be called good, alike—is in view of the supreme obligation that rests upon us to direct our activities to the one end of the good of being, no longer merely unmoral but in the highest degree immoral. The church erupted—dozens stood up to give their pledge, while others fell down, groaned, and bellowed. God is of course included in this being, but only as part of the whole—Being—to which our benevolent purpose is directed. After a couple years teaching in New Jersey, he returned to New York to help his mother, who had become seriously ill. Finney does allow this; and this is his sole concession to the supernaturalism of salvation. A universal will-not, like this, has a very strong appearance of a can-not. 17 ff. He cannot subintroduce here an attribution of intrinsic goodness to them: what makes these means good is in his system solely their relation as means to the supreme ultimate end. 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. We do not seem to be told how we know that the good of being, in the sense of its happiness, is the supremely valuable thing in the universe. We are told with extended explication how the infant picks up sin in the course of living: it is connected, we see, with its picking up a moral nature, too, in the course of living—though how it accomplishes this greater feat, we are not so explicitly told. Those that are salvable—that is, those that are salvable under the wise government which He has established—He secures the salvation of. “To represent the (human) constitution as sinful,” he argues,384 “is to represent God, who is the author of the constitution, as the author of sin. Does he not teach that all that makes any conduct right is the end to which it is directed? He soon became disenchanted with Presbyterianism, however (due largely to his growing belief that people could, with God, perfect themselves). 367 “Sermons on Important Subjects,” p. 30. 423 A letter of Beecher’s printed in his “Autobiography,” ii. “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. If We Say that We Have No Sin, We Deceive Ourselves, The Difference Between Legal & Gospel Mortification. Or if a man preaches the gospel from a desire to glorify God and benefit his fellow men, he is just as wicked for so doing as a pirate. To him on the contrary, everything which is not the substance of the soul is one of its acts; and as he cannot attribute sinfulness to the soul itself, he therefore confines all sin to actual sinning. 15–27. “Sermons on Gospel Themes,” 1876. And soon the ecclesiastical courts were drawn into the debate. Meanwhile, he began studying law and became an apprentice to a judge in Adams. "I will give my heart to God, or I never will come down from there," he said. 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. Finney, however, asserts it and argues it. John Woodbridge expounds his teaching in the following fashion:392 “Concupiscence is reduced to the blameless, though, when they become excessive, somewhat dangerous cravings of physical appetite. 1–28. It will not account for universal sinning. 396 “Lectures on Systematic Theology,” 1851, p. 266: “He may be prevented” from committing commercial injustice, “by a constitutional or phrenological conscientiousness, or sense of justice. Thus the peculiar ideas and experiences connected with the “entire sanctification” movement gradually lost their appeal. “It”—that is the doctrine of entire sanctification—“ascribes the whole of salvation and sanctification from first to last, not only till the soul is sanctified, but at every moment while it remains in that state, to the indwelling Spirit, and influence, and grace of Christ. 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. L. Woods, “Examination of the Doctrine of Perfection, as held by Rev. 1878. But, having rejected these doctrines, its adherents, says he, have unfortunately lost sight of Christ as our sancification also. Now comes a description of God’s mode of action under His decree of salvation. This great change is effected by the sinner “taking such a view of the character and claims of God as to induce him to renounce his self-seeking spirit and come into sympathy with God.” You see, nothing but better knowledge is required; better knowledge leads to a better life. p. 38. The particular government which has been established has not been arbitrarily established. He therefore constantly speaks as if the Augustinians thought of the sinfulness of the soul as a modification of the soul itself in its very substance, or else as the addition of another substance to the soul; as if, in a word, they were all Flacians. “Holiness or unholiness,” says he,391 “belongs primarily and essentially to man himself, as an intelligent, moral being, and to his actions secondarily and consequentially.… The connection between the character of the actions and the character of the agent is invariable. Persuasion—all that God does looking to the salvation of men is confined in its mode to persuasion. For that, nothing less than a universal bias to sin will supply an adequate account. 8 (Bellingham, WA: Logos Bible Software, 2008), 166–214. Everybody, of course, understands that a right intention is necessary to the rightness of any action. We need from Christ only an adequate inducement to use our own strength aright. 242 ff. And our ultimate choice is righteous only when it is the choice of the good of universal being. In this whole statement the greatest care is expended in making it clear that all that God does toward saving men is directed to inducing the objects of salvation to save themselves. It is determined by its wisdom. 1921, pp. 275–292, “Oberlin Theology.” W. E. C. Wright, “Oberlin’s Contribution to Ethics,” in The Bibliotheca Sacra, July, 1900, pp. Foot, “Influence of Pelagianism on the Theological Course of Rev. These are opposing theories. 143–166. Perfectionist Publications of Other Oberlin Men. 2, of same year, stereotyped, from which many subsequent issues). 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 originators of the doctrine never lost their hold upon it or their zeal for it. He adds in a tone which may appear a little petulant: “All that can justly be said … is, that if infants are saved at all, which I suppose they are, they are rescued by the benevolence of God from circumstances that would result in certain and eternal death, and are by grace made heirs of eternal life. p. 116. 406 G. F. Wright devotes an article in The Bibliotheca Sacra, April, 1876, pp. The value of the object chosen—but, mind you, its moral value—indicates the rightness of its choice. 1846, pp. 15 Ibid., 206. It is not to “sit down and do nothing,” leaving it to Christ to do it for us. Of course it is not “individualistic” hedonism which Finney teaches, not even merely “altruistic,” to continue to use the phraseology of the modern schools, but “universalistic.” The doctrine which he inculcates is that moral conduct consists in actions directed towards the happiness of all sentient being; from which it follows, to put it briefly, that happiness is the chief good and benevolence the comprehensive virtue, and actions are good or bad according as they do or do not manifest the one and promote the other.411 If we ask what has become of the “right,” in the sense of the morally excellent, conceived as good per se, it can only be said that it has dropped out of sight altogether. Charles Grandison Finney was born in Connecticut on Aug. 29, 1792 and died Aug. 16, 1875 in Ohio. In his system things—whether means or other things—are not good in themselves: they receive their goodness for their relation—as means or otherwise—to the supreme ultimate end, which is defined as the good of being. Charles Grandison Finney left a successful law practice when he believed God called him to become a preacher. He knows perfectly well that the maxim facit per alium facit per se is as valid here as elsewhere. And when now we are told that this contrary effect, unexampled otherwise, nevertheless follows with invariable certainty, whenever the persuasive action of the Holy Spirit is exerted to that end—how can we help suspecting that the action of the Spirit in question is something more than persuasive? Finney stated that unbelief was a "will not," instead of a "cannot," and could be remedied if a person willed to become a Christian. It differs from that doctrine at this point only in its completer Pelagianism. He was bound to elect those and not others—or else alter the system of government He had it in mind to establish, under which none others could be saved: and He cannot alter this system of government because it is the wisest and best system. Neither proposal passed. “A truly regenerated soul cannot live a sinful life.” “The new heart does not, cannot sin. If he should become a pirate, it would be for exactly the same reason.… Whichever course he takes … with the same degree of light it must involve the same degree of guilt.” By the “selfish man” in these extracts, there is not meant a man unusually selfish: “selfishness” is only the mark in Finney’s nomenclature of the imperfect, as “benevolence” is of the perfect man. He is willing to allow that they may have received a certain amount of moral injury through the physical deterioration that has come to them by evil inheritance. 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 it is here that the benevolence scheme is most severely strained. “Doctrine of the Will,” 1844. There were those who received “the blessing” and could not keep it; lapsing speedily into their old “earthy” conditions. 374 It was a matter of course that S. B. Canfield, “An Exposition, etc.,” 1841, pp. He also foresaw that by the wisest arrangement, he could secure the return and salvation of a part of mankind. H. Clay Trumbull, “My Four Religious Teachers,” 1903, pp. To say that God is not the direct former of the constitution, but that sin is conveyed by natural generation from Adam, who made himself sinful, is only to remove the objection one step farther back, but not to obviate it; for God established the physical laws that of necessity bring about this result.” Well, God established the physical laws which bring it about that every child of man becomes totally depraved at the first dawn of moral agency, and, according to Finney, He did it arbitrarily, and in full knowledge of the effect and therefore with the intention that that effect should follow. This system of means and its appropriate end are bound together in an indissoluble unity. Not so much with his theology, but with his desire to call people to a saving knowledge of Christ. But Finney does not set his theory forward as indicating the manner in which God brings a deserved punishment upon a guilty race. It follows, on this principle, that love to God and hatred of him, are equally indifferent things; and that they become praiseworthy or criminal, solely in consequense of their connection with some previous purpose of the mind.” What the moral man above everything has to do, is, recognizing the purely “constitutional” nature of his affectional movements, to abstract himself from them altogether, and to determine all his activities by voluntary choices made in view of the perception of the supreme intrinsic value of the good of being. -- O Lord, revive thy work in the midst of the years, in the midst of the years make known; in wrath remember mercy. John C. Lord, “Finney’s Sermons on Sanctification, and Mahan on Christian Perfection,” in The Biblical Repertory and Princeton Review, April, 1841, pp. We are saved “by free grace drawing and securing the concurrence of free-will”366—a formula which, so far as the words go, might have a good meaning; but not in the sense which Finney puts on them, for in Finney’s sense “drawing” means just teaching. On the contrary, it was observed that those who obtained it were apt to be among the less balanced characters of the community. 409 Cf. 357 Charles Hodge, The Biblical Repertory and Princeton Review, April, 1847, p. 244, says that it is “merely a dictum of philosophers, not of common people” that “I ought, therefore I can.” Every unsophisticated heart and especially every heart burdened with a sense of sin says rather, “I ought to be able, but I am not.” He cites Julius Müller’s reply to Kant, in “Lehre von der Sünde,” ii. What seemed to chafe Finney most about evangelical Christianity was the belief that Christ's atonement is a penal satisfaction offered to God. Here it is that election is determined. It amounts to saying that he acts rightly who does the things which in point of fact tend to the supreme good, not he whose actions are governed by the intention of subserving the good of God and the universe. Free agency plus temptation may account for the possibility of sin, and may lay a basis for an account of the actual occurrence of sinning in this or that case. It is interesting to observe that Beecher’s son George appears to have shown, apparently in 1836, some leanings to perfectionism (“Autobiography,” ii. C. G. Finney, on Making a New Heart,” 1832. Thus all men become depraved from the very first moment when moral agency begins with them. “The first righteous act possible to an unregenerate sinner is to change his heart, or the supreme ultimate preference of his soul.” If this is the first act, it is also the last—for it is the whole thing. Does he mean that God is a necessary as opposed to a free agent? We cannot do anything we will and call that a means to that end. Biography of Finney:—G. “Lectures on Revivals of Religion,” 1835 (many subsequent editions). "I have a retainer from the Lord Jesus Christ to plead his cause, and cannot plead yours.". 370 “Sermons on Important Subjects,” pp. His parents named him after the model of gentility in the popular novel Sir Charles Grandison (1753) by Samuel Richardson. Unitarians opposed Finney for using scare tactics to gain converts. 256 ff. 429–444. 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