Charles Finney is significant in American history because he led the second great awakening in America. Charles Finney was also a lawyer so there’s part of the problem right there, right? As a matter of fact, Charles Finney, you might be interested to know this, got saved by studying for law school, reading legal commentaries. You say you’re kidding! No, that’s true, because in his day the commentary that was used was called Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Law, which was used everywhere. It was brought over from Europe and it became the basis for American common law and all the way through Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Law, and you can get these for free off the internet and put them on your Kindle and look through them, there is Scripture all over these commentaries.
In fact, Blackstone said we shouldn’t have any laws on the books that contradict what God has spoken in nature or in His Word. So therefore Blackstone called homosexuality “a crime against nature.” It was actually illegal in early America to be a homosexual because it was “a crime against nature” itself because God had spoken on that subject in creation, only male and female repopulate, not male and male, female and female, and God had spoken on that, against that in Romans 1. I mean, this is in Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Law so here’s this guy Charles Finney getting ready for a legal career and he gets saved reading the book that’s preparing him to be a lawyer. It’s kind of interesting isn’t it. So times have changed just a tad, wouldn’t you say, since the days of Blackstone’s Commentaries.
You know, you can look at a historical figure like Finney and have respect for him in a lot of ways but on the other end of the stick he brought in what’s called revivalism and one of his famous lines is you induce conversions by any means possible. So if you want to use guilt, use guilt. If you want to darken the sanctuary and get the dry ice out, or whatever you’re going to do, do that. And if it takes people to walk forward then you use that. Use any means possible to make a convert out of somebody. Well, the reality of the situation is that’s not biblical because it’s the Spirit that convicts men and women of their need for Christ, right? And they’re supposed to respond to that by way of faith.
So Finney brought in all of this extra verbiage into evangelical evangelicalism; you start seeing terms like confess, sorrow, yield, surrender, all of these things you don’t find in the Gospel of John related to how someone gets saved and so what happens to people is they get saved and I was like this for years, I evangelized others the way I was evangelized. Or I evangelized others based on what I hear or see other people do and most people haven’t really studied the Scripture on this subject and as you start to study the Scripture you start to realize how far off our evangelistic models are.
That’s one of the things we’ve tried to present in this soteriology class. But your average person hears all this stuff through writing or Christian media or conversation and so when they go out to evangelize they use the same terminology. And unless you’ve actually taken the time to reprogram your mind, as one of my students said as I was trying to teach this, he kept saying recalibrating (it’s like when you’re lost and your Map Scope keeps saying “recalibrating” because you’re so lost the Map Scope doesn’t even know where you are. Has that ever happened to you guys? Have you ever gotten so lost that Google Maps can’t even figure out where you are. Or have you ever misspelled a word so badly that Spell Check doesn’t even know how to spell the word correctly.
So a lot of people haven’t gone through this process of recalibrating. Romans 12:2 says our minds are to be reprogrammed. [Romans 12:2, “And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, so that you may prove what the will of God is, that which is good and acceptable and perfect.”] And so what people are out there doing is they won’t go through the discipline of reprogramming themselves and so essentially they are out there just rehashing verbiage that they hear which ultimately can be traced back to Charles Finney.
No comments:
Post a Comment