George Whitefield (1714-1770) ***
One
of the best-known evangelist of the eighteenth century and one of the greatest
itinerant preachers in the history of Protestantism. Whitefield, an ordained
minister of the Church of England, cooperated with John and Charles Wesley in
establishing at Oxford during the 1720s the "Holy Club," a group of
young men dedicated to seriousness in religion and a methodical approach to Christian
duties. Whitefield showed the way to the Wesleys in preaching out of doors and
in traveling wherever he could to air the message of salvation. He visited
Georgia briefly in 1738 to aid in the founding of an orphanage. When he
returned to the colonies in 1739, his reputation as a dramatic preacher went
before him. His visit became a sensation, especially when it culminated in a
preaching tour of New England during the fall of 1740 when Whitefield addressed
crowds of up to eight thousand people nearly every day for over a month. This
tour, a remarkable episode in the
history of American Christianity, was the key event in New England's Great
Awakening. Whitefield returned often to the American colonies, where in 1770 he
died as he had wished, in the midst of yet another preaching tour.
Whitefield
was a decided, if unscholarly, Calvinist. In his one visit to Northampton,
Massachusetts, in 1740 he moved Jonathan Edwards to tears by the emotional and
evangelistic power of his message. Whitefield also moved Charles Wesley to
tears, but to tears of frustration at a Calvinism that was too harsh for
Wesley's more Arminian views. Whitefield and John Wesley broke with each other
over Arminian - Calvinistic issues in 1741, but they soon mended their
differences enough to establish a peaceful truce, and at a memorial service in
England after Whitefield's death, someone asked John Wesley if he thought that
he would see George Whitefield in Heaven, Wesley said, "probably not, for
George would be so close to the Throne of God that I would be prevented from
seeing him!" Whitefield was not a skilled theologian . Although he
preached on the bound will, the electing power of God, and the definite
atonement, all themes of traditional Calvinism, he confessed in a letter to
John Wesley early in his career that "I never read anything Calvin wrote.
Whitefield's
greatest significance may have resided in his innovative approach to pulpit
speech. Unlike the Wesleys, he was not a good organizer, so those quickened
through his preaching found their own ways to Anglican or Methodist
congregations in England or to Congregational, Presbyterian, and Baptist
churches in America. Whitefield did, however, know how to address plain people
in plain language. And he did so in a much freer context than was customary.
Whitefield remained in his own estimation only a herald of the gospel. To the
work of public preaching he devoted his entire adult life. The fifteen thousand
times that he preached in a ministry of thirty-three years remain his most
enduring monument.