The 2024 Total Solar Eclipse has made a path over old revival fires from our nation's history. The 2017 eclipse did as well, but the 2024 version is about to point out a very specific area: The Burnt Over District.
The region was so alit in revival fires that the people soon hardened to the news of anything "revival." They chaffed under the evangelistic ferver even producing "side effects;" some were actions, some were variant forms of faith.
What was the solution to a people who had hardened their hearts to the the truth of the Gospel but wanted some action in society?
The Second Great Awakening's Charles Finney.
Meet Mr Finney
The 2024 Total Solar Eclipse's path would overshadow Charles Grandison Finney's Chapel and Oberlin College in Ohio.
His leadership abilities, musical skill, 6'3" height, and piercing eyes gained him recognition in his community. After a dramatic conversion experience and baptism in the Holy Spirit, he gave up legal practice to preach the Gospel.
In 1835, he became the professor of systematic theology at the recently-created Oberlin Collegiate Institute in Oberlin, Ohio.
Oberlin attracted Finney because it was a receptive environment with students who were
eager for instruction. Finney became the pride of the college and the town, heading the theological department and serving as pastor of First Congregational Church for nearly 40 years. He also served as the second president of Oberlin College.
What FInney Did In Oberlin, Ohio
Finney was having problems with the Calvinistic idea of selections as well slavery, and that is why he became involved with Oberlin College.
The distinctive Oberlin Colony, formed in 1833, existed as a response to the widespread need for societal reform, and pioneered its ideals of nondiscrimination regarding gender and race in education. FInney helped strike down oppressive dress-down codes for women and even stricter vegetarian diets.
FInney, passionate in music, especially with instruments, when most felt this was too extravagant to be in a church service, forged bringing instrumental music into worship at Oberlin College and for many in the Second Great Awakening. The effect is felt broadly today as a commonplace experience of a church service today.
What FInney Did In the Burnt Over District
Finney was active as a revivalist from 1825 to 1835, and circuited the western and central New York areas of the burnt-over district.
Finney delivered powerful and convicting messages throughout upstate New York, an area that would later be known as the “burnt-over district” because it had been thoroughly burnt over with the flames of Christian revival.
Finney was revolutionary in the theological community because he championed the idea that people choose to accept God in order to go to heaven.
This was controversial in its day that was overshadowed with Calvinism, the idea that only a select few get to go to heaven.
Here is an account of Finney's impact in Rochester, New York.
"The whole community was stirred. Religion was the topic of conversation in the house, in the shop, in the office and on the street. The only theater in the city was converted into a livery stable; the only circus into a soap and candle factory. Grog shops were closed; the Sabbath was honored; the sanctuaries were thronged with happy worshippers; a new impulse was given to every philanthropic enterprise; the fountains of benevolence were opened, and men lived to good."
Finney was known for his extemporaneous preaching style, preparing no notes, and another accounts shows the effect received by his listeners.
He poured the floods of gospel love upon the audience. He took short-cuts to men's hearts, and his trip-hammer blows demolished the subterfuges of unbelief.
How Finney met the burnt-over district's burned out problem was when he combined social reform into his preaching.
He was involved with particularly the abolitionist movement, frequently denouncing slavery from the pulpit, calling it a "great national sin," and refusing Holy Communion to slaveholders.
Themes of sanctification and backsliding were made popular with his revival preaching, but his greatest contribution was "conversion," the individual choice to received Jesus Christ and Lord and Savior which is prevalent in almost every church service in America today.
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