Foreword by Mark A. Noll
In 2014 scholars and an impressively large number of lay people gathered at several locations in North America and the United Kingdom to commemorate the 300th anniversary of the birth of George Whitefield. These meetings offered learned papers on many different aspects of Whitefield’s momentous career—life-changing conversion as an Oxford undergraduate, spectacular fame (and notoriety) as a preacher in England and Scotland, dramatic scenes of spellbound crowds in the much sparser populations of colonial America, celebrated controversy with his friends John and Charles Wesley over Calvinism (his position) versus Arminianism (theirs), and more. The meetings also featured full attention to themes that have continued to keep Whitefield alive in reaches far beyond the academy—his laser-like focus on the need for sinners to be born again, his all-out dedication to a preaching vocation, his mind-bending capacity for travel that took him to the colonies seven times and to ceaseless itinerations in the British Isles, and still more of the heroic qualities that have distinguished him in some circles as a paragon of self-giving godliness.
It was no surprise that these tercentennial commemorations and the publications that followed concentrated on Whitefield’s career from 1736 through 1742.1 In the former year he emerged in England as a preaching phenomenon; in the latter year a combination of his renown and the power of his message riveted much of Scotland (reliable witnesses reported as many as thirty thousand auditors harkening spellbound in the twilight on July 11, 1742, at Camsbuslang, near Glasgow, as he preached on the text “for thy Maker is thine husband; the Lord of hosts is his name”). Between 1736 and 1742 also took place Whitefield’s voyages to the New World, where from Georgia in the South to Maine in the North he drew audiences by the thousands, sparked the colonial Great Awakening, and in so doing all but singlehandedly created an ongoing evangelical tradition that may also have exerted an indirect influence leading to the American Revolution.
Peter Choi’s George Whitefield: Evangelist for God and Empire begins with what might be called the Spectacular Whitefield of those uniquely luminous years. Yet his widely researched and beautifully written book makes its fresh contribution by turning away from the years 1736–1742 to pursue other questions. For example, what do we learn about Whitefield the person and the message he preached if we examine the twenty-eight years of his life after 1742 with the same care that so many have lavished on his early public career? Or, what happens when we shift focus from viewing Whitefield bestriding the British Empire of his day to examine the effects of the empire on his ministry? Again, what fresh insights come from treating Whitefield’s efforts to sustain an orphanage in the frontier of colonial Georgia as the centerpiece of his life instead of merely a sideshow to justify his travels as fundraiser for this orphanage? Or again, do we add important dimensions to understanding Whitefield and his age if we find out why he could so adamantly condemn slave owners for abusing their human property in 1740 but less than ten years later lead the charge to legalize slavery in Georgia, where other evangelicals who founded that colony had prohibited the institution?
As the book before you addresses these questions, we gain a much fuller picture of George Whitefield’s entire life. We learn how directly the events of British imperial history—especially wars with France in the mid-1740s and then from 1754 to 1763—affected his preaching. We learn why Whitefield, himself an Anglican minister, quarreled so contentiously with other leading Anglicans in the 1760s. Most of all, these pages provide an unusually clear account of Whitefield’s gospel message understood first as a message in its times and for the places where he traveled. For these historical and religious purposes, in other words, Peter Choi provides a Whitefield of flesh and blood. His portrait confirms the Grand Itinerant as a great preacher and a positive force in promoting evangelical faith, but also as a man embedded in his times who, as a feature of that embeddedness, combined God-honoring service with morally questionable flaws—just like all the rest of his eighteenth-century evangelical peers, and all of their spiritual descendants today.
More than a quarter of a century ago, as one of the first volumes in the Eerdmans Library of Religious Biography, Harry Stout published an unusually effective biography of Whitefield focused on his spectacular early career. By placing Whitefield in the context of an age fascinated by the power of the stage and accepting the marketplace as the key arena for truth claims, Stout advanced understanding of Whitefield so effectively that the book continues to be read (and assigned in classes) to this day. Peter Choi has done something similar for the latter decades of Whitefield’s life. Stout and Choi both acknowledge that conventional accounts have much to offer about Whitefield as a faithful preacher, dedicated itinerant, and heroic Christian exemplar. In addition, however, Choi’s George Whitefield: Evangelist for God and Empire now joins Stout’s The Divine Dramatist: George Whitefield and the Rise of Modern Evangelicalism by demonstrating that the world in which Whitefield lived shaped him just as much as Whitefield’s larger-than-life career shaped that world. Readers now, as then, are in for a feast of historical insight and spiritual wisdom.
MARK A. NOLL
1. For example, George Whitefield: Tercentenary Essays, ed. William Gibson and Thomas W. Smith, a special issue of Journal of Religious History, Literature and Culture 1, no. 2 (2015): v–106; and George Whitefield: Life, Context, and Legacy, ed. Geordan Hammond and David Ceri Jones (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).