Steve Stanley’s Reviews > A Quest for Godliness: The Puritan Vision of the Christian Life > Status Update

Most modern evangelists seem to have given up expecting more than a small percentage of their ‘converts’ to survive. So it is not obvious that results justify the methods that stem from Finney. I shall suggest later that these methods have a natural tendency to produce a crop of false converts, as evidently they have in fact done.

It may be said that results justify their use; but the truth is that most of Finney’s ‘converts’ backslid and fell away, as, so it seems, did the majority of those since Finney’s day whose ‘decision’ was secured by these means.

Now, if Finney’s doctrine of the natural state of sinful man is right, then his evangelistic methods must be judged right also . . . But if Finney’s view of man is wrong, then his methods must be called into question—which is an issue of importance at the present time: for it is Finney’s methods, modified and adapted, that characterize a great deal of evangelism today.

It is God’s sovereign prerogative to make his word effective, and the preacher’s behaviour in the pulpit should be governed by recognition of, and subjection to, divine sovereignty in this matter.

When the preacher has finished instructing, applying and exhorting, his pulpit work is done. It is not his business to devise devices in order to extort ‘decisions.’ He would be wiser to go away and pray for God’s blessing on what he has said.

The Puritans would have criticised the modern evangelistic appeal, with its wheedling for 'decisions', as an unfortunate attempt by man to intrude into the Holy Spirit's province. It is for God, not man, to fix the time of conversion.

We complain today that ministers do not know how to preach; but is it not equally true that our congregations do not know how to hear? An instruction to remedy the first deficiency will be labour lost unless the second is remedied too.

The thought of communion with God takes us to the very heart of Puritan theology and religion. . . . Thus, to the Puritans, communion between God and man is the end to which both creation and redemption are the means; it is the goal to which both theology and preaching must ever point; it is the essence of true religion; it is, indeed, the definition of Christianity. (201-22)

Sanctification has a double aspect. Its positive side is vivification, the growing and maturing of the new man; its negative side is mortification, the weakening and killing of the old man.