Itinerants in Opposition: Asahel Nettleton v Charles Finney

Brad Anderson

Mention the word “revival” and, depending on one’s company, there will be a myriad of responses. Christians today- no matter their background- have been influenced by the effects of the revivals of the Second Great Awakening. In the midst of this expanse of the Gospel in the 19th century, stand two men avid promoters of revivals: Charles Finney and Asahel Nettleton.

Asahel Nettleton was the son of a Connecticut farmer born on April 21, 1783. Nettleton was catechized as a child, struggled with belief in God through his teen years, but by his late teens had come to confess Christ and find that the “Saviour was exceedingly precious.” In 1805 Nettleton entered into Yale College under the presidency of Timothy Dwight who would eventually say of him, “He will make one of the most useful men this country has ever seen.” He began his itinerant ministry in 1812. It has been noted that he had converted nearly 30,000 sinners, and many of them remained true to their confession. Young Nettleton envisioned a life as a missionary but was kept from that work due to health, having contracted typhus, and finances, needing to pay off debts.

Charles Grandison Finney was born in 1792. While a young lawyer what started as an interaction with the law of Moses, turned into Bible study, and in 1821 he converted to Christianity. He left his law practice and became a Presbyterian minister where he would use his oratory skills of winning a jury in delivering his sermons to his congregation.  He would go on to promote and package revivals of religion in the 19th century.

Since we tend not to give a great deal of time to Nettleton, it is worth our time to gain some familiarity. Being an itinerant, Nettleton entered into revivals and churches where he was invited by a congregation. He never sought to disrupt a church, and felt that true revivals would heal a church. He wanted to leave having built up the local congregation and pastor. He never felt that a church could have a revival for revival’s sake, but believed true revival “depends on the sovereign interposition of God.”

His preaching was solemn, affectionate, and remarkably plain. His sermons were direct as if speaking to each individual obtaining “a knowledge of the human heart which few possess.” It was never his object to produce mere excitement in sinners. One remarked that what was so remarkable about Nettleton was his “power to produce great excitement without the appearance of feeling. The preacher chiefly addressed Biblical truth to their consciences.” Any other display of excitement he felt was injurious and useless. The effects of his teachings were not of simple sympathy towards their condition, but a true conviction of sin.

Personal conversation seemed to be where Nettleton worked best. His discussion techniques were very unique. He desired not to talk much with an awakened sinner because too much talk might “dissipate rather than deepen religious impressions.” He desired any conversation to be short, to correct any falsehood. Beyond this corrective conversation he desired that a convert spend time being alone, devoted to prayer and reading of Scripture.

Nettleton frequently gave this advice when he addressed a congregation after one of his sermons: “I love to talk to you, you look so still. It looks as though the spirit of God was here. Go away as still as possible. Do not talk along the way, lest you forget your own hearts. Do not ask how you like the preacher; but retire to your closets—bow before God and give yourself to him this night.”

As a fellow itinerant with Charles Finney, Nettleton had the greatest opportunity to address the concerns which many had with this new school of evangelism. Finney made it known that he had a deep affection for Nettleton’s ministry, but opposition was more central for him than niceties.

Nettleton wrote to another pastor his firm stance against the “new measures” practiced by Finney and those who followed him.  The specific measures that needed addressing were: excitement in meetings, praying for persons by name, encouraging females to pray and exhort, and calling people to the anxious seat -or to rise up in public assemblies to signify they had given their heart to God. Of the general excitement of these new meetings Nettleton remarked, “Fire is an excellent thing in its place, and I am not afraid to see it blaze among briers and thorns; but when I see it kindling where it will ruin fences, and gardens, and houses, and burn up my friends, I cannot be silent.” Finney’s arrogance was unfiltered as he chided his critics:

“…do you expect me to abandon my own views and practices and adopt yours, when you yourselves cannot deny that, whatever errors I may have fallen into, or whatever imperfections there may be in my preaching style, and in everything else, - yet the results unspeakably surpass the results of yours?”

Nettleton’s quiet humble petition for revival has been turned into a spectacle for self-righteousness and self-focus by Finney. Finney’s revivalist success helped him to encamp himself in his own ideas.

In July of 1827 a week long convention was called to settle the dispute between supporters and dissenters of the “new measures” in New Lebanon, New York. The division were those aligned with Nettleton’s orthodox evangelism and those following Finney’s more fiery revivalism. Both reluctant leaders attended, yet Nettleton did not stay long.  It was quickly agreed that “revivals of true religion are a work of God’s Spirit, by which, in a comparatively short period of time, many persons are convinced of sin, and brought to the exercise of repentance towards God, and faith in our Lord Jesus Christ.” The parties agreed that revivals combined divine initiative and human “instrumentality, that different modes of revival could happen and problems may occur due to revivals.” This is where the agreement stopped. The conference did not push any promoters of the “new measures” to recant any of their actions showing it was at best a stalemate for Nettleton and in all reality looked like a vindication for those who favored the “new measures”. Some believe that Nettleton’s brief attendance led to the conference’s inability to properly chastise Finney and his followers.

The New Lebanon Convention could have been a clash of two theological systems, but at that time, no one was focused on Finney’s theology. The posture and intentions of Nettleton and others was set on disproving Finney’s methods. Much effort since then has been given into investigating the theology of Charles Finney, which was blatantly Pelagian and Arminian and easily put God at man’s disposal.

What is of much interest, even now, is that Nettleton was no armchair evangelist. He believed in revivals and engaged in them regularly and with great benefit. He even defended some of the common questions against revivals: suddenness of conversion, the distress that revivals urge, the terrified and alarmed state of people by revival preaching, revival enthusiasm, and even the concern that many turn back to worldly ways after revivals. He answered these concerns truthfully and Biblically, not relying on his own intuition but on God’s Word.

Finney believed that successful preaching must be based on the proposition that humans have the full ability to convert themselves. Plain and simple, Finney wanted converts and clear results from his revivals.  Finney believed a revival "is not a miracle or dependent on a miracle. It is a purely philosophical result of the right use of the constituted means." William McLoughlin summarized Finney's major contribution to revivalism by saying that, “both he [Finney] and his followers believed it to be the legitimate function of a revivalist to utilize the laws of mind in order to engineer individuals and crowds into making a choice which was ostensible based upon free will.”

To believe in such a free will, Finney had a severe issue with the understanding of original sin: he denied it—“There is no proof that mankind ever lost their ability to obey [God], either by the first sin of Adam, or by their own sin.... The Bible everywhere, and in every way, assumes the freedom of the will." Man’s nature is all right, and the solution to the sin problem was not that man needed to receive a new nature but he needed to determine to stop sinning. Ian Murray sums it up well

Finney’s great argument was that if men have to experience a change of nature before they can become Christians, and such a change as only God can effect, then no sinner can be responsible for his unbelief and lack of repentance. The Bible, he asserted, teaches plainly our duty to come to Christ. How can God command us to do what we cannot do? So from the fact of human responsibility - as he understood it - he deduced that men must possess the ability to obey. The deduction sounds rational and logical, but it is not scriptural.

Nettleton would agree that we have free will, but only in that our freedom is based on our nature. One’s will can only express one’s nature. If we are by nature children of wrath then we choose thusly.

The study of these two men together is a study in contrast. What might be most interesting to note is this: based on measures/method, who’s ministry stood the test of time? From one of Nettleton’s revivals in 1818, it was reported that, 26 years later, all eighty-four converts were still professing Christ. Another revival, only three out of eighty-two conversion was said to be false. A friend of Finney’s later in life asked him these questions

Let us look over the fields where you and I have laboured as ministers and what is now their normal state?  What was their state within three months after we left them?  I have visited and revisited many of these fields and groaned in spirit to see the sad, frigid, carnal, contentious state into which the churches have fallen and fallen very soon after we first departed from among them.

As life came to an end for these men Nettleton relived the warmth and fondness of the revivals he was a part of while Finney ended his years still caught, in his mind, in the controversy of his earlier years.

There were many others who stood against Charles Finney and the “new measures” and yet those measures stand today. May Christ’s church lay our hope in God’s word as the hymn points us to:

How firm a foundation, ye saints of the Lord,

is laid for your faith in his excellent Word!

What more can be said than to you God hath said,

to you who for refuge to Jesus have fled?

"Fear not, I am with thee, O be not dismayed,

for I am thy God, and will still give thee aid;

I'll strengthen thee, help thee, and cause thee to stand,

upheld by my righteous, omnipotent hand.”