In the hands of men like Finney and Taylor, 19th century Christianity lost a good deal of its bite. Finney’s reasonable god was closer to the deity of Thomas Paine than to that of Jonathan Edwards’ and his god became that of many evangelicals. Richard Lovelace calls this an ‘increasingly kindly, fatherly, thoroughly-comprehensible god who was, in effect, the projection of grandmotherly kindness mixed with the gentleness and winsomeness of a Jesus who hardly had to die for our sins’. Many American congregations would begin to pay their ministers to protect them from the real God.
- Douglas Frank, Less Than Conquerors
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