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Church History Since the Reformation

Transcript - CH507 Church History Since the Reformation © 2019 Our Daily Bread University. All rights reserved.

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LESSON 11 of 24CH507

Charles Finney and Classic Evangelicalism

Church History Since the Reformation

This is lecture 11—Charles Finney and Classic Evangelicalism. Greetings once again in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, and let me invite you to join me in prayer as we begin class today. Let us pray. Good and gracious God, we ask that you would open us up once again to that which you have to teach us today that we might more effectively minister in your name. For it’s in that name that we pray. Amen.

American evangelicalism emerged as a recognizable historical movement during the revivals of the Great Awakening. Nourished by four primary traditions—the Protestant Reformation, continental Pietism, American Puritanism, Wesleyan Arminianism—this movement took its classic form during the first half of the nineteenth century and largely under the leadership of people like Charles Grandison Finney. Those of you who are reading along with us in our text in Latourette will want to look specifically at volume 2, pages 1226 to 1250. There are a number of other good resources available for this period as well. Let me suggest Timothy L. Smith’s classic Revivalism and Social Reform, Harper Torch Books, 1965, or George Marsden’s The Evangelical Mind and the New School Presbyterian Experience, Yale Press, 1970. Or perhaps Donald Dayton’s Discovering an Evangelical Heritage, Harper & Row, 1976. One further source that I’ll mention, Leonard I Sweet, Evangelical Tradition in America, Mercer University Press, 1984.

Our story for today really begins with Andy Jackson, the seventh president of the United States. He lived from 1767 to 1845 but served as president here 1829 to 1837. His presidency ushered in the so-called era of the common man. When Andy Jackson came to the presidency, no one quite knew what to expect. Some feared what was coming. Daniel Webster, for example, commented, “Nobody knows what he’ll do when he comes. My opinion is that when he comes he’ll bring a breeze with him. Which way it will blow, I cannot tell, but my fear is stronger than my hope.”

Garth M. Rosell, PhD Experience: Professor of Church History

and Director Emeritus, Ockenga Institute at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary



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Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story spoke sadly of the triumph of King Mob. Others, however, were elated. “It was a proud day for the people,” said Amos Kendall. “General Jackson is their own president.” Certainly a new order was replacing the old. The American population was swelling. New states were being admitted to the Union. Voting rights were being extended to those even without property. Old Hickory was for many a portent of better things yet to come. His election, in fact then, marks a kind of symbolic opening of what Alice Felt Tyler has called “a time of freedom’s ferment,” a period of great excitement, activity, innovation—politically, socially, and religiously.

The best illustration of this I suspect was New York State, which during the restless 1830s and 1840s were a kind of nineteenth-century equivalent to twentieth-century Southern California. It was then called a “burned over district” because the fires of revival had swept across again and again. It was a sampler of the religious and social tendencies and experiments of the day. Here coming together in various shapes and forms were examples of the spirit of the day, an amalgam of a kind of rekindled Puritan dream, the building of a holy commonwealth in the wilderness, a great surge of millennial optimism, a rebirth of revivalism once again. All of these seemed to coalesce around the idea of the kingdom, the establishment of a form of kingdom life, a utopian community in some cases here in America. We have a whole variety of examples of these kinds of experiments and developments. Let me mention a few of them as a backdrop to the emergence of the larger and much more pervasive evangelical developments which parallel them.

Jemima Wilkinson, a former Quaker, started a movement called the Universal Friend. In 1776, Jemima Wilkinson, then twenty-four years of age, became involved with some New Light Baptists and as a result was expelled from her Quaker communion. They had by this time become quietistic. She became convinced that a new spirit had taken possession of her body and that she had been reborn as the public universal friend. It was kind of female John the Baptist, and as such she summoned people to repentance, itinerating for some ten years on horseback, accompanied by a small band of women. In 1787, she sought land on which to construct her new Zion, settling finally on a hill overlooking Keuka Lake. There they practiced a modified form of biblical communism. They stressed celibacy and equality of the sexes. They lived according to the vision of universal peace. The community, in fact, lasted up until 1863, though she died in 1819.



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Another example of this kind of impetus was Ann Lee from the development of the Shaker communities. Ann Lee had been converted in England through contact with a small group of Shaking Quakers, as they were called, a group parallel to America’s New Light or revivalist Quakers. Following conversion, she had series of trances or visions in which it was communicated to her that the very root and foundation of human depravity, the source of all evil, was sexual intercourse. This, in fact, was the original sin of Adam and Eve, as one of the Shaker hymns later put it: “As lust conceived by the Fall hath more or less infected all, so we believe ’tis only this that keepeth souls from perfect bliss.” She called people, therefore, to a celibate life, organized a little band of eight, and brought them to America. They arrived in New Lebanon, New York, in 1776 and there established the first American Shaker community, the headquarters of the movement.

The New Lebanon community blended Ann’s new revelations with a kind of perfectionist or millennialist ideology. In fact, during the final four years of her life, Mother Ann, as she was called, performed a series of miracles which convinced her followers that she was Christ in His second appearing, a kind of female element of the Godhead. Then in 1787, this movement was formally constituted as the United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing. By 1825, there were twenty Shaker communities scattered throughout New England, New York, Ohio, Indiana, and Kentucky. I only recently stayed in the little community in Pleasant Hill, Kentucky, and one can visit these Shaker communities. A good deal of literature has been written about them, but they’re another example of this kind of kingdom-oriented or millennialists, this-worldly establishment of Christian practice.

Another example is the Oneida community led by John Humphrey Noyes. Noyes had been born in Vermont and was converted under the preaching of Charles Finney. Finney, in fact, recommended that he study theology at Andover Seminary and then do further work at Yale. He eventually established communities at Putney, Vermont, and Oneida, New York. His thought was based upon four underlying assumptions. First, the idea of total security from sin; this was a perfectionist community. Second, commitment to practice of primitive communism, biblical communism. The right, in fact, to diminish the labors and increase the advantages of life by association. Third, the belief that this principle of association must find one living expression before the kingdom can come in its glory, and that’s what he was attempting to set up. And fourth,



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the idea of complex marriage, that each woman is the wife of each man and each man is the husband of each woman. Noyes felt that this was essential to perfect fellowship. “Sexual communion,” Noyes wrote, “differs only in its intensity from other acts of love. Restricted love becomes unsocial and, in fact, dangerous to the community.”

Another example of kingdom thinking is the development of the Mormon community. Joseph Smith arrived in New York from Vermont with his parents in 1816. He was concerned about religious controversies, the intense denominational competition which he found there. He retired to the woods to seek guidance from God, and there he encountered two personages—Father and Son—in a blazing pillar of light. These told him that all denominations were wrong, and after a period of testing and further revelations, he was told that he had been given a special task, that guided by the angel Moroni, he was enabled to discover the long buried plates of gold telling of that lost tribe of Israel that had inhabited America long before. He was provided with translating spectacles and deciphered the plates, and in 1830, the Book of Mormon was published at Palmyra, New York.

Thus in 1830, Joseph Smith joined with five friends to restore on the basis of these new revelations, the Church of Christ in these Latter Days. In a vision, he and Oliver Cowdery were ordained to the priesthood of Aaron by John the Baptist and were thus equipped to baptize others for the remission of sins. He became first elder of a new church; Cowdery became the second elder. Smith received a further revelation that he was a seer, a translator, a prophet, an apostle of Jesus Christ, and elder of the church. Thus the church was to give heed to all his words and commandments, “for his word shall you receive as if from my own mouth.”

By 1830 then, there was a new Scripture published, a new church formed, a new prophet with powers of immediate revelation, given authority to guide the church. Later the ideas of plural gods, polygamy, and so on developed within the movement. And Mormonism, which is a fascinating American development, is worth studying as a part of this millennial, kingdom-oriented development here in America. All of it clustering again in New York State.

Another example we find in the Fox sisters in Spiritualism. In 1849, the widely publicized Rochester Rappings occurred. Two sisters, Maggie, age thirteen, and Katie, age twelve, the Fox sisters,



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had begun to hear strange rappings in their home. It seems that the girls could elicit answer to questions. One rap was a yes; two raps would be a no. This was brought to Rochester for public demonstration. Ultimately the girls were signed up by P. T. Barnum to travel. It was an overnight sensation, and people flooded into their meetings to get answers to questions, communicating with the spiritual world as they thought. It gained special interest among the upper classes, the up and outers. It was fashionable in the Back Bay, for example, of Boston. It’s an interesting development, another example of this kind of thinking and of the interesting lure which supernaturalism seems to have in this form, especially for the upper classes.

Another example was the Transcendentalist movement. Ralph Waldo Emerson was the acknowledged leader and sage of the new Party of Hope. He first unveiled the new movement in his 1836 essay on nature. The Transcendentalist Club began to meet at the home of George Ripley. Then in 1838, Emerson in an address revealed his distaste for and rejection of traditional biblical religion. He set forth his alternate views depicting men and women as having infinite souls of which the universe is but a mirror. The self is a microcosm of the all, and everything is sacred, especially the integrity of the individual mind and soul.

Transcendentalist thought is often veiled, somewhat abstruse and baffling, yet all of them tended to be anti-clerical, anti-ecclesiastical, and anti-traditional. This perspective then, combined with the millennial vision, led to a number of transcendental utopian ventures. In 1841, George Ripley established Brook Farm as a communitarian society. By 1947 this had gone bankrupt. In 1843, Bronson Alcott started a similar community at Fruitlands, though it lasted only through the summer. In 1841, Baloo started Hopedale, which lasted for some fifteen years. And these and a number of other examples reflect the kind of transcendentalist wing of these movements.

Among all of these there’s a lot of oddity and strange positions and views, but they all seem to drink at the same stream of millennialists or kingdom orientation, all of them trying to establish in some form here America a version of the kingdom which seemed attractive to them. The largest and most influential of all of these movements, and one which comes far closer to a kind of biblical model, are the classic evangelicals, and I want to focus for a time on that interesting movement and its most notable leader, Charles Grandison Finney.



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Although also a lawyer, pastor, professor, and college president, Charles Finney is most often remembered as a revivalist, and it’s only right that this should be so, for despite the fascinating diversity of his career, religious revivals clearly remained the organizing center and the motivating passion of his life. “An immensely important man in American history by any standard of measure,” as Sydney Ahlstrom has phrased it. Finney introduced thousands in his own generation and since to that evangelical Christianity that is united by a common authority, the Bible, drawn together by a shared experience, conversion, and committed to the same duty, obedience to Christ and worldwide missions and benevolence.

The first half of the nineteenth century, as I’ve suggested, is often called the Age of Jackson. Yet, historians have often commented as well, that in a special sense the age was as much Finney’s as it was Jackson’s. Indeed, the very pervasiveness of Finney’s influence, the fact that persons of very widely divergent religious traditions continue to read and appreciate Finney, seems to suggest that his life and thought cannot be made to conform easily to the standard theological and ecclesiastical categories. Perhaps this is why some have called Finney a Calvinist while others have called him an Arminian. In actuality, Finney is best seen as a bridge figure seeking to guard his listeners as he himself commented in his memoirs against hyper-Calvinism on the one hand and low-Arminianism on the other. Such a stance allowed him to link together in active ministry Presbyterians and Wesleyans, Congregationalists and Baptists, and here you have one of the major characteristics of the emerging classical evangelical movement, and that is that it bridges a whole variety of different denominational groups and, indeed, begins to sustain them together in a common millennial vision. His fundamental concerns through life remained that of getting sinners converted and then setting those converted folk to work, preparing for the coming of Christ’s kingdom here on earth.

Let me talk a little bit about Finney. Finney’s often called the father of modern revivalism. I think that’s a correct title. He was born in August 1792 in Warren, Litchfield County, Connecticut, the seventh child of farming parents, Sylvester and Rebecca Rice Finney. With land increasingly scarce and costly in Connecticut, in 1794 the Finneys joined with many other families in the great westward migrations, settling in Hanover, now Kirkland, Oneida County, New York, following a brief stay at the village of Brothertown.



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Charles first attended a nearby common school, then the Hamilton-Oneida Academy in Clinton. While he was there, he came under the influence of Principal Seth Morton, who taught the popular 6 foot, 2 inch Finney the basics of classical education, singing, and the cello, which he enjoyed throughout his life. In 1812, Finney returned to Connecticut to attend the Warren Academy in preparation for further studies at Yale College. Persuaded against attending Yale, Finney then spent two years teaching in New Jersey. In 1818, his mother’s illness forced him to return to New York, where he began the study of law, entering the office of Judge Benjamin Wright in Adams as an apprentice. Although it is uncertain as to whether or not Finney was admitted formally to the bar, we do know that he regularly argued cases in the local justice court in Adams. I’ve looked at some of those records as I’ve traveled around following the footsteps of Finney.

Finney’s remarkable religious conversion on October 10, 1821, dramatically changed the direction of his life. He left a promising legal career, claiming that he had been given a retainer from the Lord Jesus Christ to plead his cause and to plead others. He sought entry into the Presbyterian ministry, was taken under care by the St. Lawrence Presbytery in 1823, studied theology with George Gale, his Princeton-trained pastor in Adams, was licensed to preach in December 1823, and subsequently ordained in July 1824.

He was hired by the Female Missionary Society of the Western District and began his labors as a missionary to the settlers of upstate New York in the spring of 1824. Under his preaching there, a series of revivals broke out in a number of the little villages [in . . .] Jefferson and St. Lawrence counties, places such as Evans Mills, Antwerp, Brownville, and Gouverneur. By 1825, his work has spread to the towns of Western Troy, Utica, Rome, and Auburn. These so-called western revivals centered in Oneida County in which Finney used such new measures as the anxious seat, protracted meetings, allowing women to pray in public, and the like brought Finney national fame. Not everybody was pleased with his success, however. Yale-trained revival leaders such as Lyman Beecher and Asahel Nettleton, troubled by false reports of alleged excesses in the meetings, joined with other evangelical leaders from the northeast at the village of New Lebanon in the summer of 1827 to discuss their differences. And it was at that meeting that Finney emerged as the new leader of evangelical revivalism. This leadership was consolidated during the years between 1827 and 1832 as Finney’s revival swept the



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great urban centers, such as New York City, Philadelphia, Boston, and Rochester. Although Finney was involved in promoting revivals throughout his lifetime, even traveling to England for that purpose in 1849 and 1850 and then again in 1859 and 1860, these early years were the high watermarks of his revival career.

He was forced in 1832 to curtail his travels because he had contracted cholera in addition to the recurrent respiratory illnesses that troubled him through most of his life. He became pastor of the Chatham Street Chapel, which was the Second Free Presbyterian Church in New York City, and he subsequently held pastorates at the Broadway Tabernacle of New York, and at the First Congregational Church of Overland, Ohio. In 1835, he accepted an appointment as professor of theology at the newly formed Oberlin Collegiate Institute in Ohio, now known as Oberlin College. He later served as president of that college from 1851 to 1866.

Theologically Finney can best be described, I think, as a New School Calvinist. His preaching and teaching, always pointed and dramatic, stressed the moral government of God, the ability of people to repent and make themselves new hearts, the perfectibility of human nature and society, and the need for Christians to apply their faith to daily living. For Finney, this included the investment of one’s time and energy in establishing the millennial kingdom of God on earth by winning converts and involving one’s self in social reform, including anti-slavery, temperance, and the like.

What is often forgotten in the study of evangelical history is the profound commitment that we find in evangelicalism to revivalism, to the outreach of evangelism on the one hand, but always combined with benevolence or social justice, involvement in social issues on the other. Evangelicalism has a strong and long history of commitment to both. Let me talk about that just a bit with you.

In terms of a revival movement in America, Finney marks what we have called the Second Great Awakening. The First Awakening, which took place under Whitefield and Edwards and a number of other folk in the previous century, was followed after the American Revolution by the emergence of a new revival, a new awakening. This had two major phases. The first of the phases emerged in Kentucky and Tennessee in the 1790s and the early 1800s. That revival is a fascinating one and is often used as a kind



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of archetype for American revivalism, even though it’s probably the least characteristic of the overall flow of American revival history. These revivals broke out on the frontier in recently populated areas. In fact, it broke out in Logan County, Kentucky, which was known for its rowdiness. That’s where a lot of these early frontier types tended to move and live. It broke out in three little Presbyterian churches—Muddy River, Red River, and Gasper River Presbyterian Churches, but the churches were too small to hold the people, and so under the auspices first of the Presbyterians and then joined by the Baptists and Methodists, and the like, they moved outdoors, and the great camp meeting development in America began to take place. These camp meetings were rather raucous affairs. There are some interesting descriptions of them. One of my favorite is that of Richard McNemar in his narrative of these revivals. Many of the libraries in our major cities have copies of that report, and you can find that fairly easily if you are diligent in looking for it. It’s well worth reading.

These meetings not only stressed the power of the gospel to bring people to new faith in Christ, but they also exhibited a number of physical or behavioral characteristics that had been troubling to people. There would be along with the revivals, and you have to remember that it wasn’t one single preacher preaching to people who were sitting in even rows as we find in many of our churches today, these were outdoors and generally there were five, six, seven, ten, fifteen preachers, sometimes young people sitting on the shoulders of their parents preaching. That was quite popular for some youth preachers to do their work that way. Other preachers would get up on stands that had been built for the purposes, so that people would tend to wander around and cluster around those who they wanted to listen to, and these would go on for a number of days. And people would come in from all over the countryside, and they would set up their tents and would live there for a period of time.

In addition to the preaching of the gospel, there were a number of physical manifestations. People would get down on all fours, for example, and would bark around the foot of trees. The idea was that if they could bark the devil up the tree, then the revival could take place in good order down on the ground. Others would catch the jerks, as they were called and they would have a jerking kind of motion of their body, sometimes very extreme jerking, and this was evidently catching, because a number of folks would catch these jerks and they would be passed on to other folk. One Presbyterian minister came trying to argue these people out of



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their jerking. He himself caught the jerks, and when he went back to give a report to his congregation, evidently from the report, they all caught it as well.

Others would be laid out flat on the ground in somewhat stiff or catatonic shape, and they would be as at Cain Ridge, the famous 1805 meeting, laid out in even rows so that people wouldn’t step on them. There were so many that had been struck down in the Spirit. Other kinds of manifestations would take place as well. One minister who doubted the authenticity of all of this decided that he was going to prove that these folk who had been struck down were really frauds, so he took a spike and he hooked it on the end of a pole and he was going to go up and poke some of these folk and make sure with their reaction that they were simply faking it on the ground. And he was about to poke his first victim, according to one of the accounts, and he himself was struck down and was out for several hours in the same state.

Many have pointed to these kinds of unusual events and have said, What kind of relation do these have to authentic biblical faith? And it’s a good question to raise. Is it impossible, however, for the Holy Spirit to use unusual means to bring people to faith? It’s certainly true that there were excesses and things that we would not to be part of our revival tradition that occurred there, but we do know also that a good many of these people genuinely came face to face with Christ and their lives were changed, and we have evidence of that changed life in their behavior. Remember Jonathan Edwards’s marks of genuine revival. Those marks need to be used as test cases for revival wherever it comes, at whatever era. Does it bring people to a deeper love for the Scriptures, a deeper love for Christ, a more active concern for the neighbor? Are these things characteristic of the revival? Those are the marks of genuine revival. And we must remember that the Spirit sometimes works in unusual ways that break down the barriers and the categories that we’re used to, given our cultural background and our own bent.

Be that as it may, this first wing of the Second Great Awakening is not very characteristic of what took place in the much larger, mainstream revival which we generally talk about as the Second Great Awaking, and that was one which was much more orderly, dignified, that which focused around the work of Charles Finney and many other of his colleagues in the early nineteenth century. In fact, the descriptions of that revival are descriptions of great solemnity and of great orderliness. Finney himself had been



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trained as a lawyer. He was deeply concerned that his revivals not fall away in excesses of emotion. The gospel must be presented to people in a persuasive manner so that their minds are changed and their wills are activated and they turn to God in genuine faith and obedience.

It’s remarkable to read about these great revivals of this period, and those of you who are interested in Charles Finney and his colleagues may want to turn to some of the wonderful resources we have available for that purpose. The best recent biography of Finney is Keith Hardman’s Charles Grandison Finney, Syracuse University Press, 1987. Christian History magazine in its issue 20 has a special focal issue on Charles Finney and revivals of this time, and you may want to turn to that. Perhaps the most interesting thing of all is to read Finney’s writings themselves. My good colleague in London, Richard A. G. Dupuis, and I recently put out a new annotated critical edition of The Memoirs of Charles G. Finney, published by Zondervan Publishing House in 1989, and that volume reflects Finney’s own understanding of the development of revivals in this period, and it’s a fascinating account to read. Along with that, you might want to read Finney’s Lectures on Revivals of Religion. The best edition is William Mc Loughlin’s University Press Edition of 1960. These and a number of other sources will get you directly into the accounts of the period, and those of you who have an interest will find it absolutely fascinating to read about God’s work in these remarkable revivals of the early nineteenth century.

Those who had led the revival forces had been people like Asahel Nettleton and the great Boston preacher, Lyman Beecher, theologically undergirded by the work of Nathaniel Taylor and others. These had grown out in part of the Timothy Dwight Yale revivals, and those of you who may want to look at the great campus revivals. We’ll find J. Edwin Orr’s Campus Aflame, an excellent source for studying the revivals on college campuses. But they came most notably in connection with the great ministry of Charles G. Finney whom I’ve mentioned already. And Finney emerges then in the late 1820s as the leader of this Second Great Awakening.

Along with that strong emphasis upon evangelism was a parallel emphasis upon what they called benevolence or the eradication of social evil from the world, and this was again a kingdom-oriented millennialist perspective. Some of the other examples that I gave earlier on are ones that can be faulted for their lack



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of biblical faith or integrity, some of their strange developments and emphases, but with Charles Finney we’re talking about the revival of a basically biblical perspective and the foundation of what has come to be understood now as classic evangelicalism, rooted in the Great Awakening, but now taking its form in the early nineteenth century awakenings. And that combined not only interest in evangelism, but a deep commitment to the eradication of social evil, and this was to prepare the way for Christ to return, to establish His kingdom right here on earth. Remember the passage in Revelation 20 where it speaks of a thousand years of peace here on earth. That kingdom Finney and his colleagues came to believe was to be established here in America. These folk were ardent postmillenarians, postmillennialists perhaps more correctly. They believed in the kingdom being established here, this thousand years being experienced, and that the church if it gets to work can speed up the coming of that millennial kingdom. You can see how powerful this would be as an engine for reform, because if people come to believe that they not only are to be converted so that they become part of God’s family, but their responsibility from a biblical standpoint is to get to work in cleaning up society so that Christ can return and establish His kingdom here, and that if they do their work more rapidly, the kingdom will be introduced more quickly. Finney himself commented that if they had been working as they should have been, the kingdom would have been here already, and if they got to work, the kingdom could be here within three years. That was one of his comments.

So what they are arguing for here is that the final rapture and judgment will come only at the end of that thousand-year period and that Christ, when society is cleaned up enough so that He can return, will return to establish His kingdom right here. This meant that literally thousands of Christians became involved in little societies for the cleaning up of society. We have examples of that in Finney’s Rochester revival, perhaps his most famous of all of his revivals, the Rochester, New York, revival, in the establishment of a whole series of little benevolent societies, and these are literally flooded by new converts who have come through the Finney meetings there—the Rochester [Society] for Prison Reform, the Monroe County Peace Society, the Rochester Female Charitable Society, the Monroe County Temperance Society, the Rochester Moral Reform Society, the Rochester Society for Sabbath Observance, the Society for Detecting Thieves and Felons, the Monroe County Bible Society, and many, many others. There was even a little society established to do nothing but pray for the success of all the other societies, and there was a



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special society, for example, that was established to take care of the families of disabled stagecoach drivers, because no one was taking care of those families when their means of support was cut off.

Out of these emerged then the large national societies—the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (1810), the American Education Society (1815), the American Bible Society (1816), the American Colonization Society (1816), the American Sunday School Union (1817), the American Tract Society (1826), the American Temperance Society (1826), and the American Home Missionary Society (1826). These folk were concerned about anti-slavery, penal reform, pacifism, women’s rights, temperance, missions, Bible distribution, tract distribution, and the like.

I think we need to remind ourselves that part of the great heritage of evangelicalism has been a deep and profound biblical commitment to practical needs of people, and one of the most overwhelming needs of Finney’s day was the need to abolish slavery, that institution which destroyed families and did such damage to our whole national history and past. Finney himself and his colleagues were deeply involved in anti-slavery, and some of you will remember materials that Finney produced in his sermons and in his writings not only arguing against slavery, but arguing for better prisons, arguing for fuller distribution of the Bible and great missionary efforts around the world, and the like.

One of my favorite examples of this comes right out of Oberlin, and I’m reading here from Finney’s memoirs. This is a section of the memoirs which was unfortunately omitted in the currently printed edition and now has been recaptured in the new edition which Richard Dupuis and I have just put out, but it’s an interesting occurrence that happened at the college when Finney was there. “As might be supposed when black students first came here,” Finney wrote, “there was considerable excitement about their being received into our families and sitting at our tables and in regard to their sitting promiscuously at the tables in the boarding hall. Very soon after I arrived, which was about the time, I think, of the arrival of the first black students here, the question came up in the form of a request from some of the white boarders in the boarding hall that all of the black students in the hall might have a table by themselves; whereupon, I made a motion in the faculty meeting to which all my faculty colleagues consented that any of the white students who were unwilling to sit at the table with the black students in the hall might have a table by themselves.


Christ-Centered Learning — Anytime, Anywhere

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“This put the few in the hall that took that ground in an awkward position, but still they could not complain, but we were determined if there was any separation that it should not be by giving the black students a table by themselves, but those that objected to sitting with them. Although this action of the faculty did not set very comfortably, I suppose, upon those students, still it was in such a shape that they could not object to it. In the meantime, different members of the faculty took black students to board, we had them sit at our own tables, making no distinction on account of color. The same was done by all the leading families in this place. In our preaching, in our public instruction, we aimed to correct this feeling that existed here and almost universally prevailed against prejudice against color. It soon subsided and now for years the people in their public assemblies seem to be hardly aware of any distinction between them. Black people sit where they please and nothing is said, so far as I know, or thought about it.”

That’s an interesting reflection in a very early period of history of the strong stand that Finney and his colleagues were taking not only against slavery, but against all forms of injustice, and that becomes a part of this great evangelical tradition. Deeply concerned to win people to faith in Christ, evangelism at the core, but also concerned to stand against injustice and to lay the foundation for Christ’s return and the establishment of the kingdom here on this earth.

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