Implosion: Can America Recover From Its Economic and Spiritual Challenges in Time?

by Joel C. Rosenberg

  First, Dwight personally engaged the faculty and staff. He met with them and got to know them. He let them know who he was and where he was coming from, and he made it clear that under his leadership, Yale would now be returning to its biblical heritage. He suggested that those who supported this direction were welcome to stay, but for anyone who embraced theological heresy or European radicalism, it was time to leave. Some have suggested that Dwight unleashed a purge at Yale, firing numerous professors who refused to boldly profess their Christian faith.[393] While I have not found sufficient evidence to back up such broad claims, there is no question that Dwight did let at least one faculty member go—Josiah Meigs, professor of mathematics, who was a supporter of the antireligious elements of the French Revolution and who clashed repeatedly with Dwight on a range of issues.[394]

  Second, Dwight personally engaged the students. He didn’t hide from their skepticism and cynicism but directly answered them. In a class he taught to seniors, he asked the students to give him a list of all the tough questions they wanted answered that semester. “When the senior class decided to test their new instructor by suggesting they debate the question, ‘Are the Scriptures of the Old and New Testament the Word of God?’ Dwight, to their utter amazement, picked up the gauntlet,” one chronicler noted. “With academic rigor he refuted the popular arguments against the reliability of Scripture and submitted his reasons for believing it to be the revelation of God. With a rhetorical knife sharpened by faith and years of diligent study, he cut through the seductive abstractions of the French philosophies and demonstrated to their devotees the unreasonableness of what they had embraced.”[395]

  Third, Dwight powerfully taught the Word of God day in and day out. In the classroom and in the college chapel, he did what few, if any, members of the faculty or administration at Yale had done in quite some time—he opened the Bible and made it the centerpiece of the students’ instruction. He also began “preaching six solid months on the question of biblical authority and accuracy.”[396]

  Students could not refute Dwight’s deep understanding of Scripture or his deconstruction of all manner of philosophical and religious heresies. He spent time with the students one-on-one and in small groups. They were generating lots of questions, but Dwight patiently answered them all. A man once asked him whether he allowed his children to read “the books of infidels.” “Yes,” Dwight replied, “for they must become acquainted with them sooner or later, and while I am living I can confute the arguments they use. . . . I should be unwilling to have them find these arguments unawares, with nobody to meet them.”[397]

  Indeed, Dwight treated his students with the same love and respect that he afforded his own children. The approach startled everyone at first, but eventually it began to work. In 1796, barely one in ten students at Yale claimed to be followers of Jesus Christ. But God was beginning to answer Dwight’s prayers. “Signs of revival began to emerge as early as 1797, when a group of twenty-five students founded the Moral Society of Yale College. Members of this secret society pledged to hold one another accountable in small groups similar to the Wesleys’ Holy Clubs at Oxford. . . . This stirring foreshadowed bigger outpourings to come.”[398]

  Dwight kept faithfully praying and teaching the Word. One by one, students were giving their lives to Christ. Dwight thanked God for each soul, but he was praying for something more dramatic. And then, suddenly, the dam broke. During the 1801–1802 school year, a true revival broke out on campus. Fully one-third of students enrolled in Yale—about 80 out of 230—prayed to receive Christ. Thirty-five of them decided to enter full-time Christian ministry. Benjamin Silliman, a student at the time, wrote to his mother to say that Yale College had become “a little temple: prayer and praise seem to be the delight of the greater part of the students, while those who are still unfeeling are awed into respectful silence.”[399] Heman Humphrey, then a freshman, wrote, “The whole college was shaken. It seemed for a time as if the whole mass of the students would press into the kingdom. It was the Lord’s doing, and marvelous in all eyes. Oh, what a blessed change! . . . It was a glorious reformation. It put a new face upon the college.”[400]

  Each year, of course, some of the spiritually strongest students would graduate, and new skeptics and cynics would arrive. But Dwight was undeterred. He kept praying and preaching and answering questions, and he saw another revival sweep the campus in 1808. Then another during the 1812–1813 academic year when nearly half the student body accepted Christ. A fourth revival came in the spring of 1815, “this one sparked by a group of students who gathered at 3:30 every morning to pray for the campus.”[401]

  Dwight, however, was not content simply to lead students to the Lord. He discipled them and endeavored to equip them to preach the gospel and teach the Word to the rest of the country and the world. And the Lord rewarded those efforts. Newly converted students shared the gospel with fellow students, leading many to the Lord. They gathered for prayer and Bible study. And they encouraged one another to think beyond their time at Yale on how the Lord might use them to further advance the Kingdom of God. Over the course of his tenure at Yale, Dwight saw an average of one in five graduates enter full-time Christian ministry, often as pastors or missionaries.[402]

  One of his earliest converts, from the class of 1797, became one of his most fruitful disciples. Lyman Beecher, who considered Dwight his mentor, not only trusted Christ under Dwight’s preaching but stayed on at Yale for another year to study theology. Upon leaving Yale, Beecher went on to become an ordained pastor, a renowned Bible teacher, an evangelist, the president of a seminary, a trainer of missionaries to reach the American West, an outspoken abolitionist, and a key figure in the Second Great Awakening. A tireless organizer seemingly cut from the same cloth as John Wesley, Beecher launched one new ministry after another. He helped found and build the American Bible Society, the American Sunday School Union, the American Tract Society, and the American Society for the Promotion of Temperance.[403]

  When Dwight died on January 11, 1817, he had not seen all the fruit his ministry would eventually bear, but he had surely proven faithful to his task. “It would be impossible to adequately describe the legacy he left behind at Yale and beyond,” two church historians noted. “Revival spread from Yale to Dartmouth and Princeton, though Harvard continued its slide toward Unitarianism. Yale continued to experience revival long after Dwight’s death. The largest revival came in 1831, when 104 students became members of the college church, and 900 others in New Haven were converted.”[404]

  The Rise of Charles Finney (1792–1875)

  While Timothy Dwight’s influence during the Second Great Awakening was primarily in New England, and Francis Asbury’s influence was primarily in the Mid-Atlantic, the South, and over the Appalachian Mountains, God also raised up men in New York State—the most populous state in the union in the 1800s and thus one of the most influential—to preach the gospel to the lost and revive the existing churches. One of the most prominent—and at times controversial—of these men was Charles Grandison Finney.

  Charles Finney was born in Litchfield County, Connecticut, on August 29, 1792, but his family soon moved to Oneida County in central New York and later to the southern shores of Lake Ontario, near a town called Sackett’s Harbor. “Neither of my parents were professing Christians, and among our neighbors there were very few religious people,” he wrote in his autobiography. “I seldom heard a sermon, unless it was an occasional one from some traveling minister.”[405]

  The first time Finney became interested in the Bible was while studying to become a lawyer in the town of Adams, New York, in Jefferson County, not far from the Adirondack Mountains. Noticing how often the law of Moses or other Scriptures were cited in his law books, he bought his first copy of the Bible and began to read it eagerly, though he understood little of it at first. What bothered Finney and kept him from the faith for some time was the dullness and lethargy and even hypocrisy that he saw in the churches he attended. He met numerou
s ministers, for example, who didn’t seem to truly believe the very Scriptures they were teaching. This troubled him greatly, and rightly so.

  But there were also occasions when he misread the hearts and motives and sincerity of genuine believers, for he was not yet one himself. For a period of time, Finney attended a weekly prayer meeting that he concluded had no purpose and no impact. “On one occasion when I was in one of the prayer meetings, I was asked if I did not desire that they should pray for me,” he wrote. “I told them no, because I did not see that God answered their prayers. I said, ‘I suppose I need to be prayed for, for I am conscious that I am a sinner, but I do not see that it will do any good for you to pray for me, for you are continually asking, but you do not receive. You have been praying for a revival ever since I have been in Adams, and yet you do not have it. You have been praying for the Holy Spirit to descend upon you, and yet complaining of your leanness.”[406]

  Little did Finney know that God was about to answer the prayers of those nameless but faithful saints—and the prayers of many others like them around the Northeast. Indeed, a sweeping revival was coming there, too, and the Lord was going to use Finney as one of the key agents of change.

  It began on October 10, 1821, when Finney himself was miraculously saved. After many months of searching the Scriptures and imploring God for insight, one night Finney’s eyes were opened. “Right there the revelation of my pride was distinctly shown to me as the great difficulty that stood in the way,” Finney wrote. He wept on his knees, deeply struck by “an overwhelming sense of my wickedness.” Yet at that moment, a passage of Scripture he had been reading (Jeremiah 29:12-13) “seemed to drop into my mind with a flood of light,” and he sensed the Lord saying directly to him, “Then shall you go and pray unto me, and I will hearken to you. Then shall you seek me and find me when you shall search for me with all your heart.”[407]

  What happened next stunned Finney. “I instantly seized hold of this with my heart. I had intellectually believed the Bible before, but never had the truth been in my mind that faith was a voluntary trust instead of an intellectual state. . . . I seized hold of [God’s promises] with the grasp of a drowning man. . . . I remembered saying with great emphasis, ‘If I am ever converted, I will preach the Gospel.’”[408]

  Finney was not only saved to his great joy and relief, but he was true to his word, and the Lord used him to great effect. Immediately, acquaintances could see a change in his countenance and asked him what had changed. He told them of his salvation, and others began trusting Christ from that first day. The more people with whom Finney shared the gospel and his own experience, the more people were struck deeply by their own need for salvation, and they, too, prayed to receive Christ.

  Soon Finney was leading so many people to the Lord that he decided he could no longer do the work of a lawyer but had to preach the gospel with all of his time. He realized that he had decided to become a lawyer before coming to Christ. He had never made the decision with God’s wisdom or direction. Therefore, he concluded after prayer, the career wasn’t from the Lord. He became convinced that he had the spiritual gift of an evangelist as described by the apostle Paul in Ephesians 4:11 and thus had to obey Paul’s admonition in 2 Timothy 4:5 to “do the work of an evangelist, [and] fulfill your ministry.”

  The Impact of Charles Finney

  Word spread rapidly that something extraordinary was happening. The power and favor of Christ was upon Finney’s life, and people could see it and sense it and were moved by it. Though he had no formal training in theology, he understood the basics of the gospel, and when he shared these truths, people said yes to Jesus. “The work spread among all classes and extended itself not only through the village but also out of the village in every direction,” Finney recalled. “My heart was so full that for more than a week I did not feel at all inclined to sleep or eat.”[409]

  Finney’s parents were soon converted after he shared the message of Christ with them. Ministers began to ask him to preach, and he accepted many of those invitations. Floods of people were converted through his proclamation of the gospel.

  Pastors who thought they had already been saved realized they had never truly been born again and were dramatically converted. Soon they, too, began preaching the gospel with new sincerity and conviction. People who had attended church for years but had never really believed now trusted Christ and began sharing the gospel with family, friends, and neighbors. Time after time, skeptics and cynics came to Finney’s meetings to mock the young preacher, but time after time they shortly fell to their knees, weeping and begging Christ for mercy.

  Finney realized that he desperately needed to know as much of the Bible as he possibly could. He later wrote, “I read my Bible on my knees a great deal during those days . . . beseeching the Lord to teach me his own mind.”[410]

  Finney also wrote, “I used to spend a great deal of time in prayer, sometimes literally praying ‘without ceasing.’ I also found it very profitable, and felt very much inclined to hold frequent days of private fasting. On those days I would seek to be entirely alone with God—and would generally wander off into the woods, or get into the meeting house [church] or somewhere away entirely by myself. . . . Whenever I fasted and let the Spirit take his course with me, and gave myself up to let him lead and instruct me, I always found it in the highest degree useful. I found I could not live without enjoying the presence of God.”[411]

  God heard Finney’s prayers and used him even more mightily in the years ahead. Sometimes Finney would show up at a completely packed church to preach (he often spoke for up to two hours at a time) only to find that the moment he stood up to speak, people began crying and publicly confessing their sins and rededicating their lives to Jesus Christ before Finney said a word. People were not only receiving Christ as their Savior and Lord but were intensely moved by their own sinfulness and their desperate need for God’s mercy and forgiveness.

  Revivals swept through central and upstate New York in places like Syracuse, Rome, and Utica, and “a great revival in Rochester over the winter of 1830–31 catapulted him to national renown.”[412] Rochester was one of the larger cities in western New York, with a population of approximately ten thousand at the time. Finney not only preached three times on Sundays but held revival meetings at least three other times each week. In fact, in Rochester, the outpouring of the Holy Spirit to save the unsaved and draw the already saved into a closer walk with Christ was so astounding that Finney’s meetings drew hundreds of thousands of people from all over the region. Dr. Lyman Beecher, who contemporaneously chronicled the impact of the Finney revivals, observed that the ministry in Rochester “was the greatest work of God, and the greatest revival that the world has ever seen in so short a time. One hundred thousand . . . were reported as having connected themselves with churches as the results of that great revival. This is unparalleled in the history of the church.”[413]

  “The moral aspect of things [in Rochester] was greatly changed by this revival,” Finney observed. “It was a young city, full of thrift and enterprise, but also full of sin. The inhabitants were intelligent and enterprising in the highest degree, but as the revival swept through the town and converted the great mass of the most influential people, both men and women, the change in the order, sobriety, and morality of the city was wonderful.”[414]

  Christianity Today has noted that “the zenith of Finney’s evangelistic career was reached at Rochester, New York, where he preached 98 sermons between September 10, 1830, and March 6, 1831. Shopkeepers closed their businesses, posting notices urging people to attend Finney’s meetings. . . . Crime dropped by two-thirds over the same period.”[415]

  Better yet, one historian noted, “the revival spread far beyond Rochester as revivalists and pastors who visited the city carried its enthusiasm and message back to the surrounding towns” and “a wave of revivals broke out from New England to Ohio as the new divinity suddenly caught hold and new measures proved an effective method for advanci
ng them.”[416] Finney preached the gospel all over the Northeast, including in New York City for a year. To train and equip pastors, evangelists, and laypeople, he also published books of his sermons and later his autobiography.

  The Legacy of Charles Finney

  Revival “is the renewal of the first love of Christians, resulting in the awakening and conversion of sinners to God,” Finney wrote in his much-read and -discussed 1835 book, Lectures on Revival. “A revival of [true Christianity] is the arousing, quickening, and reclaiming of the more or less backslidden church and the more or less general awakening of all classes, and insuring attention to the claims of God. It presupposes that the church is sunk down in a backslidden state.”[417]

  In order to train a future generation of pastors and lay leaders and affect the moral and spiritual climate of the entire nation, Finney accepted the position of president of Oberlin College in Ohio in 1851. Like Francis Asbury, Finney took a long-term view. He didn’t simply want to win souls; he wanted to win, build, and send pastors and fellow soul-winners throughout the United States. Also like Asbury, Finney cared deeply about the poor and needy in society, and he encouraged his students to do so as well. What’s more, he believed women should receive better education, and Oberlin was the first college in the U.S. to admit women into its classes.[418]