Models for Reformation: The Christian Abolitionists (1800s)
By Jay Rogers
Published March 2008
In the early 1800s, Christian evangelists were seeing thousands of individual’s lives changed through the preaching of the Gospel. Charles G. Finney and other reformers of this time believed that Jesus Christ, working in the lives of a perfected people, was going to change the world.
Up until the early 1800s, those within the abolitionist movement saw the elimination of slavery as a long, slow process. But it was not until the preaching of Charles G. Finney that Americans began to realize that slavery could be done away with suddenly, once and for all.
Charles G. Finney, the great revival preacher, recorded in his Memoirs, “I had made up my mind on the question of slavery, and was exceedingly anxious to arouse public attention to the subject. In my prayers and preaching, I so often alluded to slavery, and denounced it, that a considerable excitement came to exist among the people.“1
The excitement that accompanied Finney’s revivals affected one young man named Theodore Weld. Weld was initially and vehemently opposed to Finney’s work, but was converted in Utica, New York, during one of Finney’s meetings. Weld was a formidable enemy to Mr. Finney, but after his salvation he became an ardent supporter. Weld traveled with Finney, assisting the preacher in his meetings and later emerged as a student leader at Lane Seminary in Cincinnati, Ohio.2
For a period of time when Weld traveled with Finney, he was taught the biblical view of sin and its effects on the individual and society. Finney believed that individuals could be liberated from sin and that sin in society could be confronted and overthrown through preaching the Gospel. Anything that was destructive or dehumanizing to the human race was deemed as sin.
Studying the Old Testament story of the tribes of Israel and their liberation from slavery in Egypt, as well as the teachings of Jesus Christ, both Finney and Weld came to a common conclusion: slavery was sin. Therefore, it had to be rooted out and destroyed immediately. It could not be tolerated, not even temporarily. Slavery, according to Finney and Weld’s view, must be attacked and overthrown by the power of God’s Holy Spirit in the believer’s life.
Other Christians such as Lyman Beecher, Harriet Beecher Stowe and William Lloyd Garrison emerged later and did much to fan the flames of the abolitionist movement. From beginning to end, the most notable abolitionists were Christians who had dedicated their lives to bringing social justice to America.
1 Charles G. Finney, Memoirs (New York: A.S. Barnes, 1876), p 324. 2 Ibid, p 185-188.
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