What’s a Pelagian? Speak english to me please, I’ve had a rough weekend (smile).
In order for you to know my beef with Charles Finney and how he ties to Pelagius, you have to have a general understanding of where the church was and where it is today. You’re asking a lot for me to give you the history of the church succinctly but here’s go.
Pelagius was a monk around 350 AD who denied the existence of original sin (man was tainted with Adam's sin) among other things. The most destructive view of Pelagius was his view that man had a free will to do good or evil apart from divine grace. IOW, in the Pelagius view, man was capable of choosing God and choosing not to sin. He didn’t need help from God.
Up until this point the church had always held that God empowered man. Augustine, and the church, declared Pelagius ideas about original sin and his views on man's free will to be heresy. Augustine (and the church) asserted all things come to us by God's grace including our salvation.
One would have thought that that would be the end of it but Pelagius student, John Cassian, took Pelagius' works and made modification to the doctrine into what is now known as Semi-Pelagian. This view emphasized the role of free will in that the first steps of salvation is in the power of the individual, without the need for divine grace. In other words, man makes a decision for God and then is helped to live his life by God.
Semi-Pelagian was condemned heretical by the Council of Orange of 529 AD. The Council of Orange once again affirmed that only through God’s grace that are we capable of knowing Him. Although Cassian's view was considered heretical, Cassian remained in the Church and, subsequently became a saint due to some things that he did for the Pope. His view never formally died out in the Church but it festered along with Augustine's view on divine grace.
Eventually, Augustine's view that we are saved by grace and not by man's will became obscured. But to say that the Reformation was centered on the free will of man would not be totally true (although I think it played more of a part than most historians give it credit). Other issues caused the future Reformers to go back to reexamine the writings of the early fathers in light of what was being taught by the Church. Primarily the Protestant Reformers drew upon the writings of Augustine. Many of the early Protestant creeds and confessions (London Baptists, Westminster, Belgic, etc.) centers on Augustine’s belief that God saves men. IOW, God choose us to be part of His kingdom. He opened our eyes, gave us faith, and set our feet so that we could live for Him. We did not choose Him but He chose us. We were dead in sin. We now have been born again because of God. Man's capability to freely choose only come in to play in that man will always make bad choices unless God changes men to make good choices. We chose God because He gave us that power. And we can make choices now because He has restored us to Himself and guides us.
The Roman Catholics had all but abandoned the view that God saved man apart from himself. Their view became a still modified Semi-Pelagian view that God reveals himself to man and man makes a choice. Man cooperates with God. This is documented in the Council of Trent which formally abandons Augustine’s view of salvation.
It would have been easy if this would have been the defining distinction between Protestants and Catholics. Unfortunately, about 150 years after the Reformation, a Protestant by the name of Joseph Arminian came on the scene. Arminian’s writings are rather obscured, but his followers formed in Protestantism what was known as the Remonstrant. The Remonstrants essentially stated the same thing the Roman Catholics were stating; that the fall of man was man’s choosing and man could be reconciled to God, with God’s help, simply by choosing God. But it was man's choice. This was deemed heretical by the Protestants who, once again, insisted that God choose and elect men, not the other way.
Charles Finney did not consider this at all heretical and, to his credit, said so. Even though he was a Presbyterian minister, he held to a Roman Catholic view on many issues including man’s ability to choose his salvation. While he might have been considered by some such as Billy Graham, as one of the great evangelists, his doctrine is totally inconsistent with what Protestantism was originally about; God saving men.
Charles Finney’s Influence on American Evangelicalism by Bob DeWaay