Legacy Of The Lost; The Heresy of Charles Grandison Finney

In the annals of modern church history – and by this I mean the late 17^th to the later 18^th Centuries – there has been no greater heretic than Charles Grandison Finney.

This LINK will provide the reader with the opportunity to not only view a unbiased, fair look at Finney’s duplicitous methods of obtaining to the ministry of a Presbyterian church he not only disagree with strongly, but using the language of the lawyer who would get his client off with any trick, outright lied to obtain his ordination.

It is a sad fact that not only has the damage that Finney did in his own lifetime not been repaired, but that his works – washed a bit more clean through modern editing, though not without the obvious heresy that permeated His lifetime of ministry – still available on many pastoral bookshelves, have yielded the present climate of love and unity at all costs, most especially among non-denominational churches, but also of many independent splinters from long established denominations.

In fact, it is fair to say that the current climate of humanistic relativism that is sweeping the visible (though not the invisible) churches that go by various names, all saying they are followers of Christ, can be traced back to the humanistic legal language and philosophies of this man: Some are an active rebellion to the impossible perfectionism this heretic spoke of, while others continue to follow his heinous legalism.

This man denied the most basic tenets of Protestantism, bringing his followers back into the type of bondage that Rome imposes on those who hold to their dogmas.

He denied the vicarious atonement of Christ, whereby Christ’s sins were imputed to His people and His righteousness to them (cf. 1 Corinthians 1:30-31; 2 Corinthians 5:21), thus making it necessary for a sinner to have a “righteousness greater than the Pharisees,” which righteousness even the apostle Paul, and all others of the New Testament, never claimed (cf. Philippians 3:9). He thus laid a house on sand which can never stand against the tide of God’s wrath on judgment day.

I could go on, but the article above, with the links it contains at the bottom of the article, and this LINK to Finney’s unabridged 1851 edition of His Systematic Theology (without the modern day white-washing of editors trying to tone down the heretical errors so prevalent in it), provide detailed information that every professing Christian who truly loves God our Father, knowing His Son, our Lord, did for us what we could never do for ourselves, should consider a MUST READ. (It would be better named A Manifesto of Man's Sovereignty Over God.)

The heritage of this heretic lives on in far too many churches, not the least of which is the non-denominational denomination that is widespread throughout the world, touting various versions of this heresy, or counters to it that have lapsed into antinomianism in reaction to this perfection-by-man’s effort to attain right standing with God, which, of course, God tells us is impossible for man, but not for God.

To say that the current climate of ignorance of what the Scriptures truly teach, and the antipathy of those who, quite simply, do not care, is due, in large part, to this man’s legacy, is an understatement of the greatest proportion.

May God have mercy on the visible church, the covenant vehicle He has set up, which has gone after as many idols of the imagination as ever the Israelites did in carving and fashioning such from wood and metal (cf. Isaiah 44:10-20; Romans 1:18-32).

Those last verses lay out the folly and the results of those who have become their own greatest idol: Man, who at the height of his folly, thinks the same lie as in the Garden of Eden: “I shall be like God.”

God have mercy on the visible church in America, and those nations we have imported this idolatrous garbage of Pelagian self-worship too, as well, and all the false gospels that are, in one way or another, a part of the legacy of this Wolf in Sheep’s clothing who can only devour those taken in by the variety of false, damning gospels that have been spawned as a result (Galatians 1:8-9).

By His Grace To God’s Glory Alone – Bill Hier