19. The Awakeners
As George went traipsing through New England, Ben kept providing coverage in the Pennsylvania Gazette. Readers couldn’t get enough of this fascinating orator, and the savvy Philadelphia printer was happy to address that need. Even if the relationship was “just business” at this point, it was good business for any printer. As one historian put it, “Franklin was a newspaperman and Whitefield was news.”1
The Gazette reported on a “sorrowful accident” that occurred when Whitefield spoke at a Boston church in September 1740. As usual, “vast numbers of people crowded in there before the time of service,” and suddenly there was a noise from the gallery (“some persons breaking a board to make a seat”), but “some imprudent person” said the gallery was giving way, causing a panic. “Some jumped out of the galleries into the seats below, others out of the windows, and those below pressing hastily to get out, several were thrown down and trod upon, whereby many were much bruised, and some had their bones broke.” There were five fatalities.
Yet even such a tragedy couldn’t stop the Whitefield mania. The same Gazette article reported that George was preaching twice a day, traveling to Cambridge, Roxbury, and Charlestown, and speaking Saturday night on the Boston Common. We might wonder if Ben had a pang of nostalgia when he printed that “Rev. Mr. Whitefield preach’d at the Old South Meeting House” on Sunday and collected a huge offering for the orphanage. That was Ben’s boyhood church.2
The visit to Cambridge was especially significant, since that was the home of Harvard College. The school had only about a hundred students at the time, but it was the most prominent institution of higher learning in the American colonies. This was where the young men of New England received training for the ministry. Going back to his own time at Oxford, George had difficulty with the direction of theological training. The Enlightenment was rewriting the rules. Scholars were scrapping the traditional faith for the sophistry of deism and a general skepticism toward received tradition. On this visit, George wrote in his journal that Harvard was “not far superior to our [English] universities in piety. Discipline is at a low ebb. Bad books are become fashionable among the tutors and students.”3
Despite that critique, Whitefield was received well at Harvard, welcomed by the president and heard by thousands in the courtyard. Later, when this volume of his journal was published, his critical comments about Harvard caused a ruckus. In a later edition, he tried to ease the matter: “I spoke and wrote too rashly of the colleges and ministers of New England, for which . . . I take this opportunity of asking public pardon from the press. It was rash and uncharitable and though well-meant, I fear, did hurt.”4
Whitefield spent several weeks in the Boston area, eventually moving west to Worcester and Brookfield. On October 17, he arrived in Northampton, a guest of the pastor-scholar Jonathan Edwards.
A Glorious Alteration
When historians discuss the Great Awakening in America, two names are commonly invoked: George Whitefield and Jonathan Edwards. As pastor of the Congregational Church in Northampton, Edwards was an unlikely revivalist. His sermons were long and erudite, and he read them from manuscripts. He was a scholar, steeped in Calvinist theology, but also well acquainted with Enlightenment thinking.
In the 1720s and 1730s there were other glimmers of revival in the American colonies, notably in the preaching of Theodore Frelinghuysen and the Tennent family (William and sons Gilbert, John, and William Jr.). But if you wanted to pin down one event as the beginning of the Great Awakening, it would be the revival in Northampton in 1735. Jonathan Edwards not only pastored this event, but he also studied it. And his careful analysis of this spiritual outpouring provided an important intellectual framework for the ministry of George Whitefield and other revivalists to follow.
Edwards was just thirty-one years old when he began preaching to his central Massachusetts church about justification by faith. Soon afterward he noticed that “the Spirit of God began extraordinarily to set in and wonderfully to work amongst us.” The following spring and summer saw a “glorious alteration in the town.” Within half a year, Edwards counted “more than 300 souls” who were “savingly brought home in Christ.” That would be a significant number in any small town, but it was more than a head count. “There were remarkable tokens of God’s presence in almost every house,” Edwards wrote. “It was a time of joy in families on account of salvation being brought unto them.”5
The revival spread through the surrounding communities as well. As Whitefield found later, revival always upsets the status quo. A number of traditional leaders opposed this new emphasis on religious experience. Proponents of the revival became known as “New Lights”; opponents were known as “Old Lights.” (Among Presbyterians, the terms New Side and Old Side were in play.)
There was a fear that people would become overemotional, seeking some passionate experience that had little grounding in good theology. And there were some preachers who went to such extremes, but not Jonathan Edwards. His carefully reasoned account of the Northampton revival, A Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God, was well read and well respected.
Key to the Edwards analysis was an understanding of salvation as both a spiritual and experiential event. This observation was anchored not only in Scripture but also in the Enlightenment philosophy of John Locke and others. If humans are sensate creatures, then it makes sense that God would engage with us through our senses. Thus we would not only know God with our minds but also experience him with our emotions. When many churches were following the Enlightenment into a highly cerebral approach to faith, this was a stunning coup. Edwards cerebrally opened the door to religious experience.
“He that is spiritually enlightened . . . does not merely rationally believe that God is glorious,” Edwards preached in 1733, “but he has a sense of the gloriousness of God in his heart. There is not only a rational belief that God is holy, and that holiness is a good thing, but there is a sense of the loveliness of God’s holiness.”6
This was the environment George Whitefield entered as he toured New England in the fall of 1740. The fervor of 1735 had died out somewhat. There were still Old Lights and New Lights throughout the region, as well as a longing for a revival of the earlier revival. In a 1739 letter inviting Whitefield to visit him, Edwards wrote that the people of New England might be “more hardened than most of those places where you have preached.” Still, he felt that George had “the blessing of heaven attending you wherever you go, and I have a great desire, if it be the will of God, that such blessing as attends your person and labours may descend on this town.”7
If Whitefield was daunted by this task, he didn’t show it. In his journal he called Edwards “a solid, excellent Christian,” adding that he hadn’t met anyone like him in New England. Over the weekend of October 17–19, 1740, George preached four times in Jonathan’s church and was well received, especially when he talked about their previous revival, five years earlier. “When I came to remind them of their former experiences, and how zealous and lively they were at that time, both minister and people wept much.”8
There is nothing negative in Whitefield’s journal entries about the visit to Northampton, and yet something seems missing. George expressed his respect for Edwards, but he actually had more praise for Sarah Edwards, Jonathan’s wife. While the Northampton scholar was apparently moved by the evangelist’s oratory (“Preached this morning, and good Mr. Edwards wept during the whole time,” George reported9), we might guess that he was somewhat reserved in his personal reaction to Whitefield. (However, after that weekend, Edwards made some comments indicating that Whitefield seemed reserved, so maybe George was daunted after all.)
Sarah Edwards was not so reserved. In a letter to her brother, describing the time with Whitefield, she offered both affirmation and analysis. “He is truly a remarkable man, and during his visit has, I think, verified all that we have heard of him. He makes less of the doctrines than our American preachers generally do, and aims more at affecting the heart.”
For the Old Lights, “affecting the heart” would be a bad thing, but Sarah had been through the Northampton revival of 1735, where her own heart had been “affected.” She worked closely with her husband in evaluating the “religious affections” of that experience.
“It is truly wonderful to see what a spell this preacher often casts over an audience by proclaiming the simplest truths of the Bible,” she told her brother about Whitefield.
“I have seen upward of a thousand people hang on his words with breathless silence, broken only by an occasional half-suppressed sob. He impresses the ignorant, and not less the educated and refined.”
Here we begin to imagine that Sarah was still carrying on an argument with her husband. Jonathan would agree that George impressed the ignorant, but Sarah might have pointed out that Jonathan himself was crying his eyes out. Maybe the “educated and refined” were affected in a different way.
Sarah’s letter went on: “A prejudiced person, I know, might say that this is all theatrical artifice and display; but . . . he is a very devout and godly man, and his only aim seems to be to reach and influence men the best way. He speaks from a heart all aglow with love, and pours out a torrent of eloquence which is almost irresistible. Many, very many persons in Northampton date the beginning of new thoughts, new desires, new purposes, and a new life, from the day on which they heard him preach of Christ and this salvation.”
The letter’s conclusion confirms our suspicions. Apparently she and Jonathan had been discussing their reactions. “Perhaps I ought to tell you that Mr. Edwards and some others think him in error on a few practical points; but his influence on the whole is so good we ought to bear with little mistakes. I wish him success in his apostolic career.”10
In November Jonathan Edwards preached to his congregation on Jesus’ parable of the sower (Matthew 13:1–30), fearing that they would be like the seed sown on rocky soil, which sprouts up quickly, but withers. Whitefield had sown seed and stirred an excitement that led to rapid growth, but now the new believers needed to get rooted in a deeper understanding of God. “Religion that arises only from superficial impressions,” Edwards taught, “is wont to wither away . . . when it comes to be tried by . . . difficulties.”11
Whitefield might not disagree with that. Just a few months earlier he had written to his other prominent colleague/critic, John Wesley, using another agrarian Bible reference. “My business seems to be chiefly in planting; if God send you to water, I praise his name.—I wish you a thousand-fold increase.”12 George understood his role in a divine process. He was the sower of seed, the planter of an awareness of God—in Sarah’s term, apostolic. Other people would nurture those tender souls, instructing them, gathering them, and helping them to grow. But God was using George Whitefield to break through to people’s hearts, even if they didn’t fully understand it.
Titans
While Edwards had some issues with Whitefield’s seeming superficiality, his own teaching and writing created an important role for Whitefield-like preaching. If God’s Spirit affected the emotions as well as the mind, then God could use powerful oratory to open up people’s emotions. Whether he liked it or not, Edwards had paved the way for Whitefield, creating a theoretical framework in which George’s gifts could flourish.
It’s hard to overstate the importance of Jonathan Edwards to the development of American evangelicalism, and that doesn’t take anything away from Whitefield’s role. It’s tempting to say that Whitefield was the heart of the Great Awakening and Edwards the head, but we really have to see Edwards as much more than that. He was the spinal cord, if you will, connecting the head with the heart and body. Without Whitefield’s energy—both the power of his preaching and his ambitious itinerary—the brilliance of Jonathan Edwards might have been confined to a small region, a narrow culture, and a short span of time. Whitefield took this experiential Christianity to the masses.
While Edwards and Whitefield are clearly the two titans of the Great Awakening, Edwards is paired with someone else when scholars talk about the major thinkers of Colonial America—Benjamin Franklin. Both Edwards and Franklin came out of a Puritan background, adapting it to a new era. Both were fans of John Locke’s philosophy and used it to craft their own. Both deeply affected the way Americans would think for the next three centuries.
In an insightful essay, “Franklin, Edwards, and the Problem of Human Nature,” Daniel Walker Howe drew some fascinating conclusions. “Edwards’s message urged people to let God take over their hearts, and all else would follow. Franklin’s message was that God helps those who help themselves. There have always been many Christians in America who can’t help feeling that both are somehow true.”
Howe acknowledged that it’s “remarkable” to think that these divergent philosophies would find any point of commonality, but they did: George Whitefield. “Edwards and Whitefield had in common the desire to save souls; Franklin and Whitefield had in common a concern with social morality and organized social reform. Franklin welcomed Whitefield’s energy, rhetorical power, and organizational skills in humanitarian causes.” Over the next century or so, Howe said, American evangelicals “developed along the lines Whitefield pioneered and Franklin approved.”13
So when George preached in Jonathan’s pulpit in the fall of 1740, he completed a strange triangle that would affect the world in ways that neither of them—nor Ben Franklin—would ever dream.