Charles Grandison Finney, Part 1: Finney's System

Finney’s approach to Christianity began with an embarrassment over traditional theology, especially the theology of the Westminster Confession. He rejected the authority of that confession and of any kind of church tradition. Finney insisted that people who taught traditional Reformed theology were both thoughtless and inconsistent. He accused them of being unwilling to define their concepts, even to themselves.
Instead of the authority of tradition, Finney accepted the double authority of reason and consciousness. By reason, Finney meant something like plausibility; this kind of reason was his chief tool in understanding the Bible. He supplemented reason with consciousness or self-awareness, which (he argued) granted full and immediate access to one’s own mental states. In Finney’s system, no interpretation of Scripture was allowable which contradicted one’s own self-awareness. That is why he rejected Jonathan Edwards’s distinction between natural and moral freedom. Read it all HERE