It is harsh to say that you would erase a man’s legacy if you could. I don’t say that lightly.

But St. Paul teaches us: If any man preach any other gospel unto you than that ye have received, let him be accursed (Galatians‬ ‭1‬:‭9‬ ‭KJV‬‬). Let him be accursed means, in cruder (but more direct) language: He can go to hell. If we find that anyone has perverted the Gospel of Christ, we must renounce him and all his works, just as surely as we do the Devil himself.

That being said, I would argue that no one man has been so detrimental and destructive to the cause of the Gospel, and by his influence over the popular conception of what Christianity means, and how it is commonly practiced, than Charles Grandison Finney.

When German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer came to America, he found a largely “do-it-yourself” approach to religion, which he dubbed “Protestantism without the Reformation.” In other words, it didn’t have the smells and bells and other arcane elements of Roman Catholicism. But it also didn’t have the Reformation essentials of sola gratia, sola fide, and solus Christus. In short, both a sense of historical rootedness and the very nature of the Gospel itself had been largely lost. Word and sacrament had largely been replaced by moral and social reform.

How had this happened? Charles Finney’s fingerprints are all over this degeneration of the faith and practice of Christianity in America over the past two hundred years.

Am I exaggerating to say that one fellow has had that much influence? Not at all. Even if you have never heard of Charles Finney, you have probably participated in his methods—what he called “new measures.”

Have you gone down for an “altar call” and “made a decision for Christ” after a fiery sermon? Does your church privilege how worship makes you feel, over theology, knowledge of doctrine, and knowing God through Scripture? Have you found yourself at revivals, church camps, or youth rallies being constrained to sing for hours, songs with repetitive lyrics—hypnotic and swaying? Do you mark your conversion by some transcendent experience you had, instead of rooting it on the objective facts of Christ’s life, death, and resurrection for you? Do you find that most “revival” or youth speakers seem to be trying harder to make you question your salvation, instead of giving you assurances of it? That they’re trying to convince you you might actually not be a Christian, and never were one? Have you noticed that the preachers and speakers in your circle use a lot of high-pressure tactics, guilt trips, and gimmicks to leverage people into saying a “sinner’s prayer,” or being baptized? If you answered yes to any of these questions, you’ve been exposed to Finney’s “new measures.”

Charles Finney is hailed as “The Father of American Revivalism.” But Revivalism is not the same as actual revival. Revivals are when times of refreshing shall come from the presence of the Lord (Acts‬ ‭3‬:‭19‬ ‭KJV‬‬). They are the work of the Holy Spirit, and they are known not only for great swells of activity in the churches, with renewal and conversions and good works; but are also accompanied by joy and peace. A true revival tends to be a calmer affair. But Revivalism is typically a hot and bothered thing, often with a great amount of frenzy attending it. This is because the Revivalists don’t believe in asking and waiting for the Holy Spirit. So they try and manufacture His work through their own efforts. Revivalism is as different from actual revival; as demons possessing human bodies is from the Incarnation of Christ.

Here’s what Revivalism looks like.

Have you ever been at a church service, revival, youth conference, camp, or some other churchy type event; and they laid on the guilt trip and fear factor real thick; and then had you sing really emotional songs forever; and then had people “come down” to be saved, or “rededicate” themselves to Christ? You’ve perhaps noticed that the emotions are running high. And sometimes they even add more aesthetics to it—dimmed lights, people continuing to beg and plead for more people to come forward over the soft, thrumming music? Did you just take it for granted that this is more or less how folks had always been led to the Lord? No. All of these innovations evolved from Finney’s “anxious bench.”

The “anxious bench” was where those who had come under the conviction of Finney’s preaching—or other likeminded revival preachers—would come forward, and would be promised that if they raised their hand, or knelt and said a prayer, they would be saved. Of course many, moved by the emotional atmosphere, did come forward to “get saved.” And those numbers of “conversions” were used as justification for this new method. But no one was keeping track of how many of those conversions “stuck.” So there were many false conversions.

Over time the anxious bench has been rechristened the “altar call” or the “invitation,” but it’s all the same thing.

Have you ever noticed that it’s not long before the fire of such experiences dies down? Have you ever noticed the same person “getting saved” at multiple such events? Only this time it’s “really going to stick”? Perhaps you have even been that person. Or perhaps you have “rededicated” yourself to Christ at these things dozens of times. Have you noticed that not only does the fire quickly grow cold, but you never have any assurance of your salvation?

This is the bitter fruit of Charles Finney’s “new measures” (now 200 years old). Finney preached his revivals for decades. Eventually the areas where his revivals had saturated were called “The Burned-Over District.” You could also call it the Burned Out district. The people had been worn smack out by the repeated “excitements” (as Finney and Company called their methods), which—by law of diminishing returns—left them mostly with false conversions and no assurance of their standing before God. The effect was such that no one could go in with the true Gospel of Christ anymore—no one would hear them. By continually stoking the fires of “excitements,” Finney actually seared the conscience of a generation. Those who once might have flocked to his meetings instead went over into cults, doomsday sects, utopian communes, and other fringe elements.

Don’t you see it in our churches today? How many have you known who “made a decision for the Lord” at a revival or youth rally; or were hastily baptized at a church camp, are now completely burned out, and cold to anything like historic, orthodox Christianity? They will listen to Oprah, or Joe Rogan, or QAnon—but if you try to give them the Gospel, they will not have it. “We have tried that already,” they say. Lord have mercy, we have spent the last two generations waterboarding young folk with Finneyism, until now they believe that is Christianity.

Almost everything that’s ubiquitous in modern revival and even simply church culture can be traced back to Finney.

I’ve already shown how the modern “altar call / make a decision for Christ” model of conversion is simply the evolution of Finney’s “anxious bench.” But biblically—search Acts for the conversion stories—is this how conversions happen? Manufactured like an assembly line?

Now here’s where the pragmatist asks: But can it really be so bad if it works? Shouldn’t we prefer a method that works to one that doesn’t, even if it’s flawed? Can’t God still use imperfect means to save sinners?

God can do as He pleases. He once chastised a false prophet by making a jackass talk. This is not biblical warrant to let jackasses do the preaching. A noble end doesn’t justify using shortcuts. And that’s exactly what the fiery emotional preaching, followed by an equally emotional appeal, accompanied by entrancing, repetitive music is: a shortcut. A gimmick intended to manufacture responses.

Finney casually admitted that this was what he was doing. Whereas Scripture, as we have seen earlier, defines a revival as times of refreshing … from the presence of the Lord; and the early American preacher Jonathan Edwards considered revival to be “a surprising work of God”; Charles Finney claimed that revivals could be entirely engineered and manufactured by human effort. He wrote:

[A revival] is not a miracle, nor dependent on a miracle, in any sense. It is a purely philosophical [i.e., natural] result of the right use of the constituted means—as much so as any other effect produced by the application of means.

Systematic Theology, 182

These “means,” as Finney described his “new measures,” were essentially cause-and-effect manipulations. And especially, he wanted to stir up the emotions, which he referred to as “excitements.” This is crucial to understanding Finney’s project, and how it has shaped (I say warped) present-day Christianity. Because there’s a cold, clinical pragmatism involved here, no matter how fiery the preaching, or warm and fuzzy the worship music. Check out Finney’s estimation of the church—how he mocks the Bride of Christ:

There is so little principle in the church, so little firmness and stability of purpose, that unless they are greatly excited, they will not obey God … [U]nless they are excited, they will go back from the path of duty, and do nothing to promote the glory of God.

So you see, the Revivalist mentality fostered by Finney views the Church with contempt. Those who have followed in Finney’s wake are coming into the churches—and often not even the churches at all, but luring Christians from their churches into unaccountable parachurch “worship events”—are self-righteously saying: Thank Gawd that we are not like these vanilla churches who read the Scriptures and pray, and proclaim the Law and Gospel, and sing psalms, and hold Christ up to weary sinners in the Lord’s Supper, and thereby stir one another up to love and good works. We are exciting. We get results!

Funny enough, Finney said exactly the same thing about converting unbelievers; as he did about engineering revival in the Church: “The evangelist must produce excitements sufficient to induce sinners to repentance” (emphasis added). Finney did not regard most ordinary Christians as being any better than unconverted heathens, and that’s a fact I’ll prove later.

To justify the methods he was using, Finney crafted a free-will theology that was terribly optimistic about the ability of man to choose and do the good, by his own lights. Thus, he said: “When God commands us to do a thing it is the highest possible evidence that we can do it. He has no right to command unless we have the power to obey.”

Finney likewise balked at the idea that humans after the Fall of Adam inherit a sin nature. Thus, he stated:

Moral depravity, as I use the term, does not consist in, nor imply a sinful nature, in the sense that the substance of the human soul is sinful in itself. It is not a constitutional sinfulness. It is not an involuntary sinfulness. Moral depravity, as I use the term, consists in selfishness; in a state of voluntary committal of the will to self-gratification … There is no proof that mankind ever lost their ability to obey, either by the first sin of Adam, or by their own sin.

Systematic Theology, 245, 327

Our problem, he argued, was not our inability to do the good, or to choose God—but simply our unwillingness. So he said:

The moral government of God everywhere assumes and implies the liberty of the human will, and the natural ability of man to obey God. Every command, every threatening, every expostulation and denunciation in the Bible implies and assumes that … I maintain … that men are able to do their duty, and that the difficulty does not lie in a proper inability, but in a voluntary selfishness, in an unwillingness to obey the blessed gospel. The denial of ability is really the denial of the possibility of grace in the affairs of man’s salvation. I admit the ability of man, and hold that he is able, but utterly unwilling to obey God.

Systematic Theology, 325, 352

The theology of Finney sounds exactly as if it were cribbed directly from the fourth century heretic, Pelagius. Pelagius said:

Nothing impossible has been commanded by the God of justice and majesty. … Why do we indulge in pointless evasions, advancing the frailty of our own nature as an objection to the one who commands us? No one knows better the true measure of our strength than he who has given it to us nor does anyone understand better how much we are able to do than he who has given us this very capacity of ours to be able; nor has he who is just wished to command anything impossible or he who is good intended to condemn a man for doing what he could not avoid doing.

“On the Christian Life”

And again:

Whenever I have to speak on the subject of moral instruction and the conduct of a holy life, it is my practice first to demonstrate the power and quality of human nature … The best incentive for the mind consists in teaching it that it is possible to do anything which one really wants to do.

“Letter to Demetrias”

And again, Pelagius denied that the Fall of Adam corrupted human nature. Rather, the only reason everyone everywhere continues to sin is because a) Others set a bad example for us; and b) sin has become a habit. Thus:

It is said we sinned in Adam, not because sin is innate, but because it comes from imitation … Sin is not born with man, but is committed afterwards by man. It is not the fault of nature, but of free will … But we say that man is always able both to sin and not to sin, so that we confess ourselves to have always a free will … [N]o other cause occasions for us the difficulty of doing good than the long custom of vices, which has infected us from childhood, and gradually, through many years, corrupted us, and thus holds us afterward bound and addicted to itself, so that it seems in some way to have the force of nature.

But St. Paul in holy Scripture proves that both Pelagius and Finney were liars. For he says:

There is no one righteous, not even one. There is no one who understands; there is no one who seeks God … Therefore, just as sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin, in this way death spread to all people, because all sinned … So then, as through one trespass there is condemnation for everyone, so also through one righteous act there is justification leading to life for everyone. For just as through one man’s disobedience the many were made sinners, so also through the one man’s obedience the many will be made righteous … I know that nothing good lives in me, that is, in my flesh. For the desire to do what is good is with me, but there is no ability to do it. For I do not do the good that I want to do, but I practice the evil that I do not want to do. Now if I do what I do not want, I am no longer the one that does it, but it is the sin that lives in me. So I discover this law: When I want to do what is good, evil is present with me. For in my inner self I delight in God’s law, but I see a different law in the parts of my body, waging war against the law of my mind and taking me prisoner to the law of sin in the parts of my body … The mindset of the flesh is hostile to God because it does not submit to God’s law. Indeed, it is unable to do so … And when you were dead in trespasses and in the uncircumcision of your flesh, he made you alive with him and forgave us all our trespasses.

Romans‬ ‭3:10-11; 5:12, 18-19; 7‬:‭18‬-‭23‬; 8:7; Colossians 2:13 CSB, emphasis added

Read St. Paul honestly: Can the universal depravity of the human race really be chalked up to nothing more than bad examples and bad habits? Paul says that the unregenerate mind is hostile to God and cannot submit to His Law. He goes so far as to say that Christians had been dead in our sins, until God intervened to make us alive with Christ. And even as a Christian, the Apostle confessed that he was unable to keep the Law, even though his heart had been regenerated to love it and want to obey it. Does that sound like something that can be cured by a free will decision? Do dead men have free will?

Moreover, what both Finney and Pelagius before him failed (or outright refused, in their arrogance) to understand is that the justice of God’s commandments doesn’t depend on our ability to do them. Since God is just and righteous, whatever He would command is just and right.

Finney taught precisely what Pelagius had taught—and this teaching had been roundly condemned as heresy by the church universal since the fourth century.

Because Finney, like Pelagius before him, denied that humanity after Adam is universally dead in sin, he argued, in the words of the title of his most famous sermon, that sinners are bound to change their own hearts.

What a far cry this is from what Scripture actually teaches! For David prayed: Create in me a clean heart, O God; And renew a right spirit within me (Psalm‬ ‭51‬:‭10‬ ‭KJV‬‬). He knew that a person cannot change his own sinful heart, but that God must create a new one for him.

And this God does. For He says:

A new heart also will I give you, and a new spirit will I put within you: and I will take away the stony heart out of your flesh, and I will give you an heart of flesh. And I will put my spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes, and ye shall keep my judgments, and do them.

Ezekiel‬ ‭36‬:‭26‬-‭27‬ ‭KJV‬‬, emphasis added

God is the one who changes a sinner’s heart, and then He places His own Holy Spirit in us, so that we may begin to obey Him. As we have seen above from Scripture, until God does this work of regeneration, a sinner will remain hostile to God and unable to make even a beginning of obedience (Romans 8:7).

Finney taught that a sinner must change his own heart; but Jesus said: The Spirit is the one who gives life. The flesh doesn’t help at all (John 6:63 CSB). So the way he taught that a sinner may obtain salvation is completely wrong-headed and man-centered. So it should not surprise us that he also taught an unbiblical and man-centered doctrine about how one perseveres in salvation.

Finney actually taught that every time a Christian sins, they lose their salvation and have to go back to square one. He doesn’t mince any words, either. Read this:

Whenever he sins, he must, for the time being, cease to be holy. This is self-evident. Whenever he sins, he must be condemned; he must incur the penalty of the law of God … The Christian, therefore, is justified no longer than he obeys, and must be condemned when he disobeys … In these respects, then, the sinning Christian and the unconverted sinner are upon precisely the same ground.

Systematic Theology, 46

How can anyone ever have any hope or assurance of salvation on those terms? Is that the Gospel—the Good News—Jesus died to give us?

No. This is not what Scripture says at all. Again, in Romans 7:19, St. Paul says: For I do not do the good that I want to do, but I practice the evil that I do not want to do (CSB). Does he say that every time he sins instead of doing the good he would rather do, he’s back at square one and no better than an unconverted heathen? Heavens no! Rather he proclaims that: there is now no condemnation for those in Christ Jesus, because the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set you free from the law of sin and death (Romans‬ ‭8‬:‭1‬-‭2‬ ‭CSB‬‬).

Because Finney denied that Christ’s death actually atoned for sins and justifies believers before God; or that His righteousness is imputed to believers through faith (more significant problems with his theology), he cannot lead us to Romans 8 for our comfort. He cannot hold up Christ and Him crucified, cannot comfort the sinner by reminding them that the seamless robe of Christ’s righteous covers us. He can only tell us to start over and try harder this time.

If a sinner is bound to change himself, and Christ’s death doesn’t atone for sin, and His active obedience isn’t credited to those who have faith in Him, and every time we sin we are damned again, no better than an infidel—how is that Good News exactly? And what did Christ’s death actually accomplish? Again, Scripture is against Finney: I do not frustrate the grace of God: for if righteousness come by the law—that is by our own works, our own efforts, our own obedience—then Christ is dead in vain (Galatians‬ ‭2‬:‭21‬ ‭KJV‬‬). If Finney was right, then Jesus died for nothing.

Listen up. When I say Charles Finney’s greasy fingerprints are all over modern pop Christianity, I mean it. He was hailed as a hero by D.L. Moody, Billy Graham, and Jerry Falwell. He was a favorite of Christian songwriter Keith Green, many of whose songs are still sung forty years after his death (for example, “My Eyes are Dry”). His influence is as wide-ranging as the Promise Keepers movement of the ‘90s; the Vineyard movement; the Word of Faith movement; and various social and moralistic crusades within the church’s recent history. It’s not an exaggeration to say that the current evangelical church is the legacy of Charles Finney.

And what has that legacy produced? What is the fruit of Finney’s “excitements” and “new measures”? Jesus warned: Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves. Ye shall know them by their fruits (Matthew 7:15-16 KJV). We’ve got 200 years of Finney’s fruit to inspect. Is the Church better off for all of Finney’s innovations?

I suspect any observant person knows the answer. Doesn’t it seem like the more “excitements” we put on, the more “revivals” we engineer, and “new measures” we dream up—the more the church actually shrinks, and the more the unbelieving world mocks us?

Listen, you don’t even need to go to know. Finney and his associates realized in their lifetimes that they had failed to bring anything good to the Church, and their “excitements” and “new measures” had done more harm and no good.

Remember earlier when I mentioned the so-called “Burned-Over District”? Here’s Finney in his own words, late in life:

I was often instrumental in bringing Christians under great conviction, and into a state of temporary repentance … [but] they would of course soon relapse into their former state.

Speaking of their fellow Revivalist preachers, one of Finney’s close associates, Asa Mahan, lamented:

I cannot recall a single man … who did not after a few years lose his unction, and become equally disqualified for the office of evangelist and that of pastor.

In other words, even the preachers all lapsed into apostasy or disgrace. This does not bode well for Finney’s methods—and is reflected in the shocking litany of defections from the faith and uncovering of scandals and abuse among so many of the popular evangelical leaders of today.

Another of Finney’s associates admitted that for all the buzz and fluster they had generated, there were no lasting results:

During ten years, hundreds, and perhaps thousands, were annually reported to be converted on all hands; but now it is admitted that real converts are comparatively few. It is declared even by [Finney] himself, that “the great body of them are a disgrace to religion.”

Why we have continued variations on Finney’s formula for two centuries now when even he and his old partners in the venture admitted at the time that their preachers had gone off the reservation and their converts were “a disgrace to religion” is a mystery indeed.

Indeed, Charles Finney and his “new measures” did nothing but harm. Eventually churches that had once welcomed him begged him not to return. (Very politely, of course.) Writing a generation or so later, the great Princeton theologian B.B. Warfield observed: “Even after a generation had passed by, these burnt children had no liking for the fire.”

Is your church a “Burned-Over District”? What about your community? How many people do you know have been burnt, or burned out, from all the “excitements,” and are now, again to quote Warfield, “like a dead coal which [cannot] be reignited”?

Why not do something truly radical and go back to the “old measures”—the ones Jesus, Paul, and the other apostles taught us, and which sustained the Church for 1800 years—through persecution and political upheavals, through plagues without and heretics within?

The old measures are simple enough: Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost: teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you (Matthew 28:19-20 KJV). Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature (Mark 16‬:‭15‬ ‭KJV‬‬).

Make Word and sacrament—baptism and the Lord’s Supper—central.

Preach the whole counsel of God—Law and Gospel. The Law to condemn, the Gospel to convert. Then when you have converted, the Law to correct them, and the Gospel to comfort them. Rinse, repeat.

Make sure that you press upon them that God is actually doing something in the reading and preaching of the Word; in baptism; in the Lord’s Supper; and in prayer. That He is creating faith in hearts, and then sustaining that faith as the Word is preached. That He is imparting real grace to real sinners in baptism. That He is strengthening and sanctifying us in the Lord’s Supper. That He has ordained to work through the prayers of His people.

Remind the Church that they are not just individuals who have chosen to come worship here because they like the preacher or it has a good children’s program or whatever. That they are the body of Christ, and His Bride, chosen and beloved in Him before the foundation of the world.

Impress on them that their good works matter; not to secure or maintain their salvation; but because Christ is loving others through them.

Teach them to look for Christ in all of Scripture.

Teach them the ecumenical Creeds (Apostles, Nicene, Athanasian, and Chalcedon) and theology proper. The Trinity, the hypostatic union, the attributes of God. Teach them that He is infinite, eternal, and unchangeable in His being, wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness, and truth. Teach them, in other words, to know their God, and love Him with their minds as well as their heart and soul, and strength.

Remind them often that the chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy Him forever. Remind them even more often that their only hope in life and in death, is that they belong body and soul, in life and in death, to their faithful Savior Jesus Christ.

Boldly proclaim the glorious future that we have been promised: bodily resurrection, in a renewed heavens and earth, to an incorruptible and imperishable eternal life where we will dwell face-to-face with Christ our Redeemer.

Remind them often that Jesus is interceding for them right now in heaven; and that He has promised that He will never cast away the one who comes to Him, and no one can snatch them from His hand.

Instruct them to pray for, and seek the peace and prosperity of, their neighborhood, city, nation, and leaders. And peace and prosperity includes faith in Christ.

Impress on them that making disciples and teaching them to observe the Lord’s commandments includes our children at home. Parents have a sacred charge to bring up their children in the nurture and admonition of the Lord.

These “old measures” may not be as spicy as the “excitements” of the new ones. But they are the ones the Lord has given us. So it is most sure that He will bring seasons of refreshing and revival through these, and spare us the trouble of mucking things up by trying to manufacture our own.