<< Front page News April 23, 2004

Soul saving at Oberlin

When John J. Shipherd and Philo P. Stewart founded Oberlin Colony, they believed that they were guided by the Lord. The College was just one component of a religious and experimental utopian communitarian colony that believed in the saving grace inherent in good works. One had to work at salvation, but human perfection was attainable. The College was designed to educate the future evangelist ministers of this revivalist movement and their wives, pious schoolteachers. They were to train a “generation for utopia.”

Joining Shipherd were Asa Mahan, Mr. and Mrs. Henry Cowles and especially Albert Finney, who started out leading revivals along the Erie Canal. The College was not only educating evangelists. It was itself an evangelical institution, publishing such magazines as Oberlin Quarterly and Oberlin Evangelist.

Finney believed that after the conversion of sinners, other reforms would be relatively easy and that this had to happen before the millennium. He didn’t take as a given that everybody in the Oberlin community was saved. Apparently for Finney, conversion, like charity, began at home.

For Finney, the whole of Oberlin College seems to have been seen as one big revival meeting. In 1851, his commencement speech read, “You are not only educated, but educated in God’s College, a College reared under God, and for God you cannot but know that it has been the sole purpose of the founders and patrons of this College to educate here men and women for God’s cause!”

He wasn’t kidding. In 1846, there were attempts by the faculty to replace some of the religious curriculum with literary education but Finney blocked them. There were several years of understated struggle. In 1860 the faculty seemed to cave, writing a joint letter saying of the students that they saw “their salvation [as] paramount by far to all other interests.” In 1864, Finney wrote that Oberlin, “should make the conversion of sinners and the sanctification of Christians the paramount work and subordinate to this all the educational operations.”

Students were always involved in the cause, sometimes voluntarily and sometimes not. In 1837, all students were visited in their rooms by professors who talked with them about religion, trying to stir up piety. There were also regular revivals and prayer meetings on campus. It worked somewhat. There was a period of religious renewal in every academic year of this pre-Civil War era. In 1851, Finney preached every day for two weeks and succeeded in converting many students. In 1860 there were daily morning prayer meetings, afternoon meetings three times a week and an all-female meeting, also three times a week.

Oberlin students were, for the most part, enthusiastic. In 1858, 40 students were employed as Sunday school teachers in neighboring towns. Oberlin had six missionary societies. In 1836, 17 out of 40 female students declared intentions for that field. The College specifically took an interest in converting Native Americans. There was an Oberlin mission to Oregon started in 1839 and one to Minnesota in 1843. Former and some current Oberlin students were instrumental in both.

In 1841, the “Oberlin Perfectionists” became active. This was a society devoted to the idea of becoming perfect and achieving salvation through good works, the founding ideal of Oberlin. Conventions were held in upstate New York in 1842 and in Medina and Strongsville, Ohio in 1843. There were many congregations in both states, most led by Obies.

But, always the outsider, Oberlin’s doctrine wasn’t accepted everywhere. The American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions fired two American missionaries working in Siam for preaching the Oberlin heresy.


 
 
   

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