Charles Grandison Finney

By his own account he bought his first Bible to chase down the citations in Blackstone. Finney was reading law in Adams, New York, apprenticed to a country attorney named Benjamin Wright, and the Commentaries kept sending him back to Mosaic statute. He was six foot three, sang well enough to direct the church choir, and had never attended college — the Jefferson County frontier his family moved to from Connecticut after the Revolution did not run to colleges. In 1821, at 29, he underwent a conversion he described as a baptism of the Holy Spirit, and shut the practice down. A client came the next morning. Finney told him he had a retainer from the Lord Jesus Christ to plead his cause and could not plead the client's.

From 1825 he worked the Burned-over District of upstate New York — Evans' Mills, Rome, Utica, Auburn — and through the winter of 1830 and 1831 he ran the revival at Rochester that was copied across the North. In 1832 he took a converted theater on Chatham Street in New York City and barred slaveholders and slave traders from communion. The Broadway Tabernacle went up for him in 1836. From 1835 he taught at Oberlin, which admitted Black students and women, and he served as its president from 1851 to 1866.

What alarmed other ministers was not the preaching but the method, which he published in 1835 as though it were an engineering manual. Hold meetings on consecutive nights for weeks, and advertise them. Put a bench at the front of the room for anyone under conviction, in full view of the congregation, and pray over the people sitting on it. Name individuals aloud from the pulpit. Let women pray in assemblies of both sexes. Underneath the measures was a break with the Calvinism he was ordained into. In the older view, conversion was God's unilateral act and a revival was something a congregation waited for. Finney wrote that a revival was no miracle at all but the ordinary result of the right use of the constituted means — something a man could go out and produce.

Every American evangelist since has run on his machinery. Dwight L. Moody carried it into the industrial cities, Billy Graham into the stadium and onto television, and the anxious bench became the altar call that congregations now take for granted. The Calvinist objection never went away either. B. B. Warfield wrote that God could be dropped out of Finney's theology without much changing it, and Reformed seminaries still teach him that way. Oberlin kept the other half — the college that took Black students and women, and the president who refused slaveholders communion while telling abolitionists their cause could not become the church's first business, which cost him with the radicals. He died at Oberlin on August 16, 1875.

Charles Grandison Finney's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Lectures on Revivals of Religion book
  The manual for the new measures, and the book his critics reviewed as heresy 1835
• Oberlin theological department other
  He took the post on conditions — admit Black students, guarantee free speech, let him keep preaching in New York 1835
• Broadway Tabernacle building
  Built for him in New York and called the largest Protestant house of worship in the country 1836
• Lectures on Systematic Theology book
  The full statement of the doctrine that got him called a Pelagian 1846
• Memoirs of Rev. Charles G. Finney book
  Published after his death and the source of most of what is known about his early life 1876

• 1818 aged ~26 Settles in Adams, New York, and begins reading law Apprenticed to Benjamin Wright. He never attended college and had no theological training.
• 1821 aged ~29 Converts at 29 and abandons the law He described the experience as a baptism of the Holy Spirit and began studying for the Presbyterian ministry under George Washington Gale.
• October 5, 1824 aged 32 Marries Lydia Root Andrews She travelled the revival circuit with him and led the women's prayer meetings. They had six children.
• 1830 aged ~38 Runs the Rochester revival It carried into March 1831 and became the model other towns asked for.
• 1832 aged ~40 Moves to New York City and bars slaveholders from communion He preached at the Chatham Street Chapel, a theater fitted up as a church.
• 1835 aged ~43 Publishes Lectures on Revivals of Religion and joins Oberlin Arthur Tappan funded the chair. Theodore Dwight Weld, his own convert, had turned it down to work full time against slavery.
• 1836 aged ~44 The Broadway Tabernacle opens
• 1851 aged ~59 Becomes the second president of Oberlin College He held the office until 1866 and went on preaching in the town until his death.
• August 16, 1875 aged 82 Dies at Oberlin at 82

• Jonathan Edwards 1703–1758
  Theologian and preacher whose role in the Great Awakening shaped American evangelical religion. succeeded the movement of
• Dwight L. Moody 1837–1899
  Ran revival like a business and left the Chicago school that trained American fundamentalism. influenced
• Billy Graham 1918–2018
  Evangelist whose mass crusades, media reach, and presidential relationships made him a defining figure in modern American Protestantism. influenced
• William Lloyd Garrison 1805–1879
  Editor of The Liberator and founder of the American Anti-Slavery Society. differed with
• Harriet Beecher Stowe 1811–1896
  Author of Uncle Tom's Cabin whose novel galvanized the abolitionist movement. shared the reform generation of