Who Was Charles Finney? Lawyer, Revival Preacher and Oberlin Teacher
Charles Grandison Finney was an American preacher who lived from 1792 to 1875. He was studying law in the village of Adams, New York, when he was converted in the fall of 1821. He left the law to preach, and over the next fifteen years he led revivals in the towns of upstate New York and then in Philadelphia, Boston and New York City. He pastored in New York, then spent the rest of his life at Oberlin College in Ohio, teaching theology, pastoring the church there, and serving for a time as the college's president. He told his own story in the Memoirs of Rev. Charles G. Finney, written late in life and published the year after he died.
Here is the outline of his life, mostly as the Memoirs tell it.
Boyhood on the frontier
Finney opens the story of his life plainly:
I was born in Warren, Litchfield county, Connecticut, August 29, 1792.
Memoirs, chapter 1
When he was about two, his family moved to Oneida County, New York, which was then mostly wilderness. Later they moved again, to Jefferson County near Lake Ontario. His parents weren't church members, and he seldom heard a sermon. He went to common school, then taught school himself, spending a few years in New Jersey and attending a high school in New England for a time. He thought about going to Yale, but a teacher talked him out of it.
A law student in Adams
In 1818 he came home to Jefferson County and began studying law in an office in Adams. He was a bright, confident young man who led the church choir, but he says he knew almost nothing of the faith.
Thus when I went to Adams to study law, I was almost as ignorant of religion as a heathen. I had been brought up mostly in the woods.
Memoirs, chapter 1
Two things pushed him toward the Bible. His law books kept quoting the laws of Moses, so he bought a Bible, the first he ever owned, and looked up the references. And the local pastor, George W. Gale, a Princeton-trained Presbyterian, kept stopping by the office to talk. Finney argued with him freely. He also went to the church prayer meeting and noticed that the people prayed for revival week after week and never seemed to expect an answer. For a while that nearly drove him to unbelief. In the end he settled that the Bible was true, and he had to decide what he'd do about Christ.
Conversion in 1821
He settled it in October 1821. He went into the woods north of the village one morning, promising he wouldn't come back until he had given his heart to God, and came out at noon with a quiet he couldn't explain. That evening, alone in the law office, he had the experience he describes as a "mighty baptism of the Holy Ghost." We tell the whole story in his own words in Charles Finney's conversion.
The next morning a client came in to remind him that his case was set for ten o'clock. Finney told him:
I have a retainer from the Lord Jesus Christ to plead his cause, and I cannot plead yours.
Memoirs, chapter 3
He never went back to the law.
Learning theology and starting to preach
Finney studied theology under Mr. Gale, but the two argued constantly, especially about the atonement. Finney read the Bible the way he had learned to read a law book and came to believe that Christ died for all men, not only for the elect. When he was licensed to preach by the presbytery and preached his first sermon in Gale's pulpit, Gale wasn't pleased:
Mr. Finney, I shall be very much ashamed to have it known, wherever you go, that you studied theology with me.
Memoirs, chapter 4
Finney had no seminary training and didn't want city pulpits. He took a six-month commission from a women's missionary society and rode horseback through the small settlements of northern Jefferson County, starting at Evans' Mills. He was licensed and ordained by the Presbyterians, and in October 1824 he married Lydia Andrews of Whitestown.
The revivals in upstate New York
What followed was a long run of revivals that Finney traces town by town in the Memoirs: Evans' Mills, Antwerp, Gouverneur and De Kalb in the north, then Western, Rome, Utica and Auburn in Oneida County and beyond, then Troy. People called them the Western Revivals, because central New York was the West to the churches on the coast. A praying man named Daniel Nash, whom everyone called Father Nash, often went ahead of him or alongside him to pray.
The meetings drew farmers, lawyers, merchants and mill hands. One morning near Utica, Finney walked through a cotton factory, and the workers were so deeply moved that the owner shut down the machines:
Stop the mill, and let the people attend to religion; for it is more important that our souls should be saved than that this factory run.
Memoirs, chapter 14
Controversy over "new measures"
Not everyone welcomed the revivals. Finney preached without notes, in plain language, and pressed people to repent right then. He prayed for people by name and held meetings for anxious inquirers. Leading ministers in New England, among them Lyman Beecher and Asahel Nettleton, worried about these "new measures." In 1827 the two sides met at a convention in New Lebanon, New York, to talk it out, and Finney devotes much of chapter 16 to it.
His theology was debated too. Old School Presbyterians, especially at Princeton, held that Finney gave too much weight to the human will in conversion, and critics then and since have raised the same objection. Finney knew he was seen this way. He says in his first chapter that "by a certain portion of the church I have been considered an innovator, both in regard to doctrine and measures." He wrote the Memoirs partly to state plainly what he had preached and why.
Philadelphia, Rochester and New York City
From 1827 on he preached in larger towns: Wilmington, Philadelphia, Reading and Lancaster, then New York. In the fall of 1830 he went to Rochester, New York, for what became the best known of all his revivals. It lasted about six months, reached many of the city's lawyers and leading families, and spread to towns all around. It was there, he says, that he first regularly used the "anxious seat," a front bench where people seeking salvation could sit to be prayed for and taught.
In 1832 he became pastor of a free church that met in a remodeled theater on Chatham Street in New York City. Later his supporters built the Broadway Tabernacle for him, on a plan he drew himself. During those years he gave weekly lectures on revival that were printed in the New York Evangelist and then as Lectures on Revivals of Religion, the book that made him known around the world. The lectures he gave to church members in the following winters became Lectures to Professing Christians, which you can read free in TheWay Library.
Oberlin
In 1835 he was asked to teach theology at a new school in the Ohio forest called Oberlin. He agreed on two conditions: the faculty, not the trustees, would run the school, and
that we should be allowed to receive colored people on the same conditions that we did white people; that there should be no discrimination made on account of color.
Memoirs, chapter 23
Oberlin became his home for the rest of his life. At first he spent winters preaching in New York and summers teaching in Ohio. He also pastored the First Church in Oberlin for many years and served as the college's president from 1851 to 1866. He kept traveling to hold revivals: Boston more than once, Rochester again in 1842 and 1855, and two long trips to England and Scotland.
His wife Lydia died in 1847. He married twice more, and his second wife went with him on his travels in England.
His last years
The Memoirs end in 1868. A short conclusion by the editors finishes the story. He gave up the pastorate in 1873 but kept lecturing at the seminary, and he preached in both Oberlin churches in the last month of his life. On a quiet Sunday evening he walked out with his wife to hear the music at the church nearby. That night he was taken ill, and he died at dawn:
he died, August 16th, 1875, lacking two weeks of having completed his eighty-third year.
Memoirs, Conclusion
Read Finney for yourself
The best way to meet Finney is in his own words. Start with the Memoirs of Rev. Charles G. Finney, free to read online. For a guide to the book, see the chapter-by-chapter summary of the Memoirs, and for some of his best lines, the Charles Finney quotes page.
His other books in TheWay Library:
His conversion is also retold, mostly from the Memoirs, in J. Gilchrist Lawson's Deeper Experiences of Famous Christians. You can browse more lives like his under Biography and Revival, or see everything by Charles G. Finney.