Revival is in the sovereign purposes of God, Grandpa would answer; our call is to serve, not save. Only God can do the latter; we failed to do the former. As for the future...some think it may belong to a renewed Pentecostalism.

But before we get to that...

Grandpa worked in the mail room for the Chicago, Burlington, and Quincy (CB&Q) out of Union Station in Chicago during the heyday of U.S. mail by rail service. It also happened to be the heyday of U.S. Pentecostal revivalism.

Today’s varied Pentecostal phenomena began as a trickle of "other tongues" bubbling up and out of Charlie Parham’s Bethel Bible College in Topeka, Kansas, in 1901. In 1906 it spread to Los Angeles, California, where in true latter rain fashion glory poured down on Azusa Street so heavily that it burst forth like a deluge defying undersized LA storm drains. From there the phenomena flooded the world with a modern Pentecost.

Not surprisingly, much of it flowed back to the Midwest where in 1914 in Hot Springs, Arkansas, a group of adherents moved to gather into a common flow compatible, positive streams of the movement. They formed the General Council of the Assemblies of God—or simply, the AG, as it came to be known.

While Pentecostal associations had formed earlier, the AG gathered around classical Reformed views of the trinity, Christology, justification, and sanctification. This distinguished them from Pentecostals adhering to Unitarian modalism (Jesus only), on the one hand, and Wesleyan perfectionism (total sanctification), on the other.

In short, in fact AG-type Pentecostals in theory, anyway, were neither restorationist nor holiness; at the outset they could embrace church history and trace their roots through Calvin and Luther to Aquinas, Augustine and St. Paul, even if more than a few would have hated to admit it.

Grandpa encountered AG-type Pentecostals while working in the CB&Q mailroom in the late 1920s, but cared little about AG roots. He cared more about my Dad’s endorsement of what the AG stood for. My Dad was the guy who had married Grandpa’s oldest daughter. Tracing his own religious roots to an encounter with an on-fire Salvation Army group while serving in WWI, Dad insisted that the family get acquainted with what was happening in churches like Crystal Street Assembly of God in Elgin, outside of Chicago.

Grandpa got acquainted; but his personal conversion to Pentecost came in the gravel pit down behind the barn a good jog down the hill from the house. There he was baptized in the Spirit in Pentecostal fashion and started preaching a night or two weekly at the Union Mission not far from Union Station. Long known by fellow workers in the CB&Q mailroom as "Rosie" after the family surname Rosenquist, he soon became known as "Holy Roller Rosie" for his open testimony and mission preaching. You might say the CB&Q mailroom caught on fire without singeing so much as a stamp!

At its peak in the 1930s more than 10,000 trains crisscrossed the U.S. carrying mail, much of it on the CB&Q. The CB&Q would evolve into the Burlington Northern and become one of the nation’s largest railroads. But mail by rail declined with passenger service until in 1977 it went the way of the Pony Express. To the contrary, the Pentecostal revival matured, expanded, and with an influx of denominational folk following the charismatic insurgency of the 1960s, Pentecostals went Mainstream.

Long before this, however, Grandpa had traded his Chicago Union Station postmark and part time mission preaching for a fulltime Bible, travel trailer, and a tent. It happened that he was floored one day by a heart attack. As a doctor and others tried to revive him he says that he visited heaven. Like St. Paul "he was caught up into Paradise. He heard inexpressible things that man is not permitted to tell" (2 Corinthians 12:4). But restored to this world, grandpa spent the rest of his life trying his best to tell. Released by the CB&Q on an early disability pension, and ordained by the AG, he hitched the trailer to the family Studebaker and set out to preach the gospel wherever he could set up the tent. He filled it as best he could with folk gathered from hither and yon in the out-of-way places to which he, grandma, and the younger children traveled.

The kids delivered music in song, along with accordion, piano, trombone and guitar; Grandpa preached; Grandma supervised. Later, following my father’s untimely death, my mother and I would join them for a time; and along with singing once in awhile, I got to help set up and take down the tent.

What I remember about those days was the clear gospel preached by Grandpa, against the backdrop of his Pentecostal testimony, and the total absence of Holy Roller hype—Grandpa disdained Finney’s "new methods," even though many Pentecostals were using them. Whatever grandpa’s experience of heaven, he had his feet firmly planted on earth and his gospel deeply in the Bible. There was not a hint of Finney’s "other gospel" tainted by manipulating emotions with charismatic kookiness. In all the places traveled to, and the many, many Pentecostal churches visited, not one person responding to grandpa’s altar calls ever coughed up a demon, spit out a devil, rolled on the floor, or shook until hairpins fell out; nor did one get saved under pressure. While there were those who spoke in tongues, or had an encouraging, uplifting prophecy or two, and while from time to time we heard testimonies of healing, what was missing was everything out of order and untoward. Decency and in order were the orders.

Grandma saw to it.

A skeptic by nature, Grandma followed Grandpa into Pentecost reluctantly. You see, Grandma was a very formal Presbyterian, and resisted my Dad’s overtures to "come and see what’s happening at Crystal Street AG!" It was not until Grandpa’s heart attack when the doc could not find a pulse that Grandma really prayed in a way beyond blessing the food at mealtimes and repeating liturgical formalities. But if prim and proper, Grandma was a take charge lady at heart. When the doc said, "I can’t find a pulse," Grandma took charge of prayer and put Pentecostals at hand to shame. But they didn’t mind. Well into her prayer Grandma began to speak in a language she had never learned. She was still speaking that strange tongue when the doc announced Grandpa had a pulse; but so intent was Grandma on her praying that she paid the doc no mind.

Only when Grandpa spoke up in plain English did Grandma take notice.

Ever after Grandma was convinced that such things were the sovereign work of God, not the working up of men. You couldn’t just evoke extraordinary experiences and special visitations at will, she insisted; so it wasn’t enough to "go see" the latest spectacle at the church down the street, even if it was AG endorsed by my Dad. It needed to be God, and Grandma needed to know that in her own heart and in agreement with her Presbyterian upbringing. If these "outpourings" were true charismata, actual expressions of God’s grace for extraordinary times, then to Grandma they were not playthings given as past times. The Bible made this clear, she and Grandpa agreed. So Grandma watched for gimmickry and manipulation.

There was enough of it around, but not in Grandpa’s meetings. This may have been why he remained mostly unnoticed, navigating the backwaters of the revival circuit. He had as exciting a testimony as any around; but he shared it simply and quietly and let it work as God willed. Grandpa did not promote Pentecostal phenomena; he preached Jesus.

In any case, the gimmickry you did see—demons coughed up and captured in bottles; pictures of fire claiming to be Moses’ burning bush duplicated; braces and crutches propped around the platform as if cast off by cripples having been healed, but there always more props than people claiming to have been healed; etc.—did not come prepackaged with the Pentecostal phenomena. Where they were so packaged, you could be sure Finney’s "new methods" carried to logical extremes were at work; that is, the charismata were always stuffed twisted, crooked, and forced out of shape into the gimmickry by man not God. In other words, it was the deliberate application of forced Finney-emotional-marketing-methodology to the charismata that too often turned real Pentecostal revival into charismatic kookiness.

So when Dr. Michael Horton states, "Finney became the father of the antecedents to some of today’s greatest challenges within evangelical churches, namely, the church growth movement, Pentecostalism and political revivalism," he commits what N. T. Wright would call a fundamental "category error." He mixes apples with oranges. Finney did not father Pentecostalism; he fathered applied evangelical humanism, the methods of which some Pentecostals, like other evangelicals, may ill-advisedly employ.

Indeed, Finney certainly is the father of modern evangelical revivalism, including especially Billy Graham’s crusade methodology: revivalism based on psychology and marketing methods intended to manipulate a mass audience emotionally so as to produce immediate, visible results. It follows as stats show that the results do not last; this was the hallmark of Finney revivalism that few want to chat about over a cup of tea and crumpets: few upper New York pastors wanted Finney back after he had been through their districts. One man described his preaching as "like a cannon ball shot through a basket of eggs." Finney did not just persuade; he decimated an audience and dragged worn-out, tired, overwhelmed, emotionally drained, reluctant, put-upon victims to his altars. The difference between Finney and Saladin is that Finney disguised his sword.

One astute commentator wryly notes, "Given Finney’s exalted status in modern evangelicalism, one can only hope that his theological views are not well known by those who honor him so highly. Otherwise, we have no choice but to conclude that many important Christian leaders truly believe that even the most serious doctrinal error (actually, a denial of the core of the gospel itself) does not matter as long as the outward results are impressive."

Finney himself wrote, "There is nothing in religion beyond the ordinary powers of nature. It consists entirely in the right exercise of the powers of nature. It is just that and nothing else. When [men] become religious, they are not enabled to put forth exertions which they were before unable to put forth. They only exert the powers they had before in a different way and use them for the glory of God."

This puts Finney as far from authentic Pentecostalism as a flea from Grandma’s puppy that just came from the groomers. Fleas and hounds may get along but fleas and Grandma’s poodle never did. Grandma saw to that. If others do not, that does not make Grandma’s pooch a fleabag. Finney introduced humanism not to Pentecostalism but to the practice of evangelical religion, en masse, including modern mass evangelism, church growth, and the like. If certain Pentecostals get caught up in the practice of humanism it is no different than Baptist Graham falling into the mix; Graham does not pull all Baptists into the stew with him, nor do Pentecostal film-flam artists, or just everyday ordinary works-oriented tongue-talkers pull Grandma, Grandpa, and their heirs in with them.

Mr. Finney, meet Grandpa; then get on your knees if you can wherever you might be, and, if it were possible, pray, repent, and get right with God; you’re in the pot with the rest of the arrogant, self-assured, self-help lot, but not with Grandpa, Grandma, or me.

There is a great wringing-out ground that we will all pass through one day, Finney included, and I do not mean the wringer on Grandma’s old washer. Paul warns,

• "For no one can lay a foundation other than that which is laid, which is Jesus Christ. Now if anyone builds on the foundation with gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, straw—each one’s work will become manifest, for the Day will disclose it, because it will be revealed by fire, and the fire will test what sort of work each one has done. If the work that anyone has built on the foundation survives, he will receive a reward. If anyone’s work is burned up, he will suffer loss, though he himself will be saved, but only as through fire" (1 Corinthians 3:11-15 ESV).

This tells us where Finney went wrong, and Grandpa didn’t. Paul asserted you must build on Jesus as Messiah (anointed one, Gr. Christ), the Savior who reconciles Jew and Gentile to God and each other in one family. Grandpa preached this even as he sang from time to time that the debt we owe is "too high, you can’t get over it, too low, you can’t get under it, too wide, you can’t get around it—you gotta’ come in at the door!" You must be reconciled to God through Jesus who is the door as well as the way, the truth and the life! Finney believed otherwise; Jesus was not Christ, the Messiah, Savior. To Finney, Christ might as well have been Jesus’ surname; he completely missed the point of Jesus as Savior; he asserted that Jesus died merely as the Great Example, but not for the sins of Grandpa, Grandma, you or me; that was not necessary, Finney insisted. Man can save himself. Christ died to inspire us to do so.

So you tell me who between Grandpa and Finney built with the gold, silver, and precious stones, and who with the wood, hay, and straw. Mr. Finney, meet Grandpa; if you made it to where he is, you can chat a bit; but be sure to ask Jesus directly about why he died.

Consider that Grandpa experienced Pentecost in a gravel pit; gravel pit aside, likewise Finney says he experienced "a mighty baptism of the Holy Ghost…like a wave of electricity going through and through me...[it] seemed to come in waves of liquid love."

And Graham assures us that "Through his Spirit-filled ministry, uncounted thousands came to know Christ in the nineteenth century, resulting in one of the greatest periods of revival in the history of America." So, must have been God…?

Consider also that Horton points out that following his mighty baptism Finney bypassed seminary and "began conducting revivals in upstate New York. One of his most popular sermons was, ‘Sinners Bound to Change Their Own Hearts.’" Grandpa, too, bypassed seminary but insisted only a miracle of God could change a sinner’s heart.

Further, if Finney’s preaching decimated his hearers like "a cannonball though a basket of eggs," his message decimated the gospel. Described as "stubborn, arrogant—and sometimes even a bit devious," Finney had as little respect for the integrity of the gospel as for his own pastor and other ministers whom he ridiculed. Grandpa had deep respect for his brothers in ministry and ridiculed no one because he respected the gospel out of reverence for the Lord Jesus whom he loved and served.

So whatever the validity of Finney’s personal experience of a "mighty baptism," the integrity of the gospel—what it is in itself—must measure his message; and whatever the apparent results of his message, the integrity of the gospel must also measure his ministry. Finney came up short on both points. It follows that Finney’s experience, message, and ministry are the measure of nothing, least of all Pentecostalism. Horton is just plain wrong.

Indeed, Horton’s category error flows out of a sincere desire to uphold the integrity of the gospel over against Finney’s crass humanism. But for this reason Horton must compare one’s claim of a spiritual experience, whether made by a Pentecostal, evangelical, or Calvinist, to the Scripture, not to Reformed tradition as if the tradition had the status of inspired Holy Writ; so when a neo-Calvinist claims—as one did straight-faced to me—that Paul was the first Calvinist, we have on the table another fundamental category error, and merely see what things look like on their head, with tradition upending what Paul actually said by making the earthly-grown Reformed orange equal to the divinely-inspired Pauline apple. This category error leads to several others including the foundational error that blinds too many Reformed folk to the valid scriptural basis for Pentecostal claims.

A cornerstone claim of Reformed tradition is that God imputes to the believer Jesus’ positive keeping of the Law as the believer’s source of righteousness; this is rather than God crediting to the believer Jesus’ total obedience unto death as if it were the believer’s death. Yet, the latter is what Paul asserts: "We know that our old self was crucified with him in order that the body of sin might be brought to nothing, so that we would no longer be enslaved to sin. For one who has died has been set free from sin. Now if we have died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him" (Romans 6:6-8 ESV).

Paul is not talking here about sanctification as opposed to justification; he will get to sanctification soon enough in Romans 7; rather, in Romans 6 he is continuing the discussion of justification by faith opening chapter 5 with "Therefore being justified by faith we have peace with God…," continuing with "Since, therefore, we have now been justified by his blood…"(Romans 5:1, 9). In Romans 6, then, he is clarifying the foundation upon which we have been justified, "his blood," Christ’s death and resurrection being imputed to us: "we have been united with him," (6:5). If this is not clear enough, observe that Paul appeals to the meaning inherent in the believer’s sacramental baptism, a public confession by the believer and affirmation by the church that the believer has been justified by Christ’s death.

Thus, the Reformed claim of what has been imputed is a fundamental category error: while Reformed tradition rightly exults in a reservoir of righteousness available to the believer, it mistakenly supposes it consists of Jesus’ sinless earthly life; this is to invert Jesus’ earthly life before death with his resurrection life subsequent to death; and thus the natural man with the spiritual, Jesus’ perishable body (he died) with his imperishable body (he lives forever; see 1 Corinthians 15); finally, it is to invert an abstract concept of imputation with the existential reality of impartation of life and Holy Spirit empowerment. We have no real existential access to Jesus’ earthy life; it is gone forever, poured out in his blood; it can only exist as a historical memory, or as in the Reformed tradition, an ideological theory. We have real existential access only to Jesus’ resurrection life rising out of his blood from the grave to exist unto God forevermore. Thus, to claim imputation of Jesus’ earthy life as the sine qua non of justification is make redundant at best, and vestigial at worse, the actual power of justification: the imputation of Jesus’ obedience unto death and subsequent resurrection life. In practice, this is to remove from one’s field of vision, as if putting on blinders, and from one’s range of experience, as if putting on a straight jacket, the presence of resurrection life clothing the believer in Christ’s righteousness (we are "in Christ") and infilling the believer by the Holy Spirit with power from on high—in new birth overflowing into a "mighty baptism" in the Holy Spirit. Thus, it is to render the church powerless, abandoned to Finney-type marketing methods and psychological manipulation leading to the ashes of a post-evangelical world.

To the contray, Paul insists that God imputes to the believer, not Jesus’ earthly obedience, but the infinite value of his obedience unto death in order that the resurrection life of Jesus may be imparted to the believer as life unto God forevermore. "We know," Paul writes, "that Christ, being raised from the dead, will never die again; death no longer has dominion over him. For the death he died he died to sin, once for all, but the life he lives he lives to God. So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus" (Romans 6:9-11 ESV). Here Paul launches a discourse culminating in his grand declaration of victory through life in the Spirit in Romans 8: "he who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through his Spirit who dwells in you…for all who are led by the Spirit of God, are sons of God." Thus, through the gracious vindication of the believer by the cross and the regeneration of the believer in the resurrection we "have received the Spirit of adoption as sons, by whom we cry, Abba! Father! The Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God…Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness. For we do not know what to pray for as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words. And he who searches hearts knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God" (Romans 8:14-16, 26, 27 ESV). Here then is all of the righteousness of Christ given to us with the resource of the resurrection power of the Holy Spirit to live it out.

So in the face of Finney’s claims, there is something "in religion beyond the ordinary powers of nature." There is the power of the Holy Spirit enabling us to serve, Grandpa would say, leaving the saving to God, not Finney’s new methods, whether applied by Graham or an angel from heaven.

This serving in the power of the Spirit in no way reflects Finney, or any sort of works righteousness. Rather, it is Christ living in and through us as Paul asserts. If Finney got it wrong—plunging generations of evangelicals into a desperate race with demons of their own making—leading voices in Pentecostalism do not. The wiser ones had Finney figured out long ago and sent him off to chase after those who mistake ego for God’s voice, ambition for his call, personality for his gifts, and marketing psychology for his anointing.

Listening to, watching, and working with Grandpa set the course leading me to this conclusion, now a deeply held conviction. One could only wish that Finney had had just such a Grandpa, too.

As for the future of the faith, it belongs to no "ism," envagelical or Pentecostal. It belongs to followers of Jesus who will take Grandpa’s advice to heart. Leave saving the world to God; let’s serve. If we will be faithful in our God-given task of living out fully what it means to be servants of the Lord Jesus Christ in the power of the Holy Spirit, God will do the rest. The future belongs to us because it belongs to Jesus our Lord.