Introduction
Introduction
George Whitefield (1714-1770) was the leading Reformed Evangelical Anglican clergyman of the eighteenth century. The driving force, humanly speaking, of evangelical revivals on both sides of the Atlantic and both North and South of Hadrian’s Wall, he also made a substantial impact in Wales. He was a gigantic presence in the English-speaking church and world: dramatic and controversial, passionate and bold, heroic and flawed, adored and despised in equal measure. Yet despite the enormous influence and impact he had in his own time, today he is almost, as Dr. Lloyd-Jones put it, ‘the most neglected man in the whole of church history. The ignorance concerning him is appalling.’1
This is not the place for a full biography or character assessment. Born in Gloucester, Whitefield’s father was the proprietor of the Bell Inn, though, more widely, he came from a clerical, educated, and cultured ancestry. When he was about four years old he caught measles, the cause of his lifelong squint which can be seen in the best portraits of him and later earned him the sobriquet Dr. Squintum. He matriculated at Pembroke College, Oxford, performing servile duties to pay his way through the undergraduate degree (1732-1736). During this time he was a member of the so-called ‘Holy Club’ along with John and Charles Wesley, and was rigorously ascetic in his religious practice. Only in 1735 did he experience the freedom of new birth, an inner conversion to Christ and the gospel of grace. ‘God was pleased,’ he wrote, ‘to remove the heavy load, to enable me to lay hold of his dear Son by a living faith.’2
In 1736, at the tender age of only 21, he was ordained in Gloucester Cathedral. That Sunday he preached his first sermon (Sermon 8 below). He was for a time a chaplain at the Tower of London and preached in various churches in the City, in Hampshire, and in Gloucestershire. In 1737, having resolved to follow the Wesleys to Georgia, he preached a great many ‘charity sermons’ in Bath, Bristol, and London to raise money for charity schools in England and Georgia. These were very successful fundraising events and churches were happy to open their pulpits to the young preacher for this purpose. He in return was often scathing about the lifeless, unspiritual nature of the clergy and their leadership, which did not always go down particularly well from one with so little experience. After his return from the first of many trips to America he found, unsurprisingly, many churches were closed to him because of this.
Perhaps inspired by the example of Howell Harris in Wales, Whitefield took to preaching instead in the open air. He met with extraordinary success. And thus he began to attract large crowds and become what Boyd Stanley Schlenther calls ‘the eighteenth century’s most sensational preacher in Great Britain and America.’3 The world became his parish.
More could be written on the development of Whitefield’s ministry, but for this the reader is directed to the suggestions for further reading at the end of this introduction. For our purposes here, we will begin by outhning Whitefield’s identity as a Reformed Evangelical Anglican par excellence and give a sense of the context in which he was writing. We will look, therefore, at his evangelical preaching, his entrepreneurial Anglicanism, and his developed Reformed theology. Sermon 58 begins with a complaint against those who write biographies without exposing the faults of their heroes. So whilst zeroing in on many things which are praiseworthy in Whitefield, we will also endeavour (as he would wish) to paint him not as a model of perfection but as a sinner saved by grace alone, warts and all.
WHITEFIELD THE EVANGELICAL PREACHER
Martyn Lloyd-Jones was bold enough to assert that Whitefield was, ‘beyond any question, the greatest English preacher who has ever lived.’4 J. C. Ryle was equally dogmatic, saying that, ‘No Englishman, I believe, dead or alive, has ever equalled him.’5 He was certainly one of the most active men of his age. Augustus Toplady, his contemporary, reported that, ‘It appears, from a little account-book, wherein that great man of God, the Rev. Mr. George Whitefield, minuted the times and places of his ministerial labours, that he preached upwards of eighteen thousand sermons, from the æra of his ordination to that of his death.’6 This probably did not include his other speaking engagements, talks to religious societies and such like which he referred to as ‘exhorting’, so all told it is probable that Dallimore’s estimate of around a thousand talks per year for thirty years is quite accurate.7 Whitefield was an extraordinarily prolific preacher.
This figure does not represent a thousand freshly-written talks every year of course, but repeated use of carefully refined and proven messages which he preached in a wide variety of venues and to a wide variety of listeners. He spoke to miners in Kingswood, orphans and slaves in Georgia, aristocrats at Lady Huntingdon’s house, churchgoers in their pews, and the seething masses of London on Kennington Common, sometimes up to 40,000 of them at a time. The statistics seem incredible in an age without microphones and amplification systems but are not exaggerated, or at least, not by too much it seems.8 His booming voice could be heard over a mile away. Occasionally we read (e.g. Sermon 9) something like, ‘Blessed be God, you are not such cowards to run away for a little rain!’ or an aside which reminds us that the original audience were standing in a field and not a church building. We can only imagine the electricity of the atmosphere on such occasions, though it is said that apart from those who came to heckle and throw stones there was often a holy hush amongst the crowds that gathered to hear.
Whitefield was a born orator with a flair for the dramatic. The great actor David Garrick (1717-1779) is reputed to have said he would give a hundred guineas to be able to say ‘O!’ like Whitefield.9 This should be borne in mind as one reads through the sermons, as that attention-grabbing ‘O!’ occurs frequently in the exhortations. We must imagine the weight and depth of each one to get a sense of the force of the sermons as they were heard, rather than passing over them quickly, like mere readers, as if they were just a single letter to be skirted over without much impact. Whitefield would stamp his feet for emphasis, don a black cap in imitation of a judge as he spoke of God’s death sentence upon sinners, and had a flair for vivid, descriptive narrative which had people of all kinds on the edges of their seats. He often spoke near the end of his sermons of his heart being enlarged, of an ardent longing for people to be converted, and he would use pathos, passion, and provocation to win them over to the Saviour. As J. C. Ryle put it, there was a ‘holy violence’ about him which grabbed people’s attention.10 ‘Pardon my plainness,’ he says in Sermon 31, ‘If it were a fable or a tale, I would endeavour to amuse you with words but I cannot do it where souls are at stake.’
Whether Whitefield ought to be imitated in these stylistic matters is debatable, though we need not doubt his integrity and sincerity as some have done; he was by no means attempting to be a mere entertainer or raise a personal following, as the rest of his life and ministry well attest. However, in an age when many ministers are afraid to make an appeal to their hearers to ‘close with Christ’ and make a commitment to him, preferring rather to invite them to a series of exploratory discussions, Whitefield may spur us on to be more courageous and bold. Fishermen, after all, should be able to reel in the fish and not just toss in bait and cast out the line without a hook. Seekers may not need to be heavy-laden with courses to attend and hoops to jump through before they find rest for their weary souls; a seasonable on-the-spot exhortation may sometimes do the job far better. It is possible to go too far, of course; hectoring, badgering, and manipulating people has no apostolic warrant. Yet are we, like Whitefield, like Paul, like Jesus, emotionally committed to desiring conversion and spiritual growth in a way that our earnestness can be heard and felt and people made to appreciate how serious the gospel call truly is? Can we honestly subscribe to Whitefield’s sentiment when he told his listeners (Sermon 27), ‘I shall return home with a heavy heart, unless some of you will arise and come to my Jesus. I desire to preach him and not myself. Rest not in hearing and following me.’
Amazingly, Whitefield was able to edify and reach a wide cross-section of society without ever needing to use PowerPoint or mood-music, or dumbing-down the theology of his sermons. Yet ‘God’s anointed barnstormer’ as J. I. Packer calls him,11 had such a lucid clarity about him that his message was crystal clear to everyone, as well as that rare sense of focus which made many in his audiences feel as if he were directly addressing them and them alone. He knew, however, that some would be disappointed with him, saying (in Sermon 12),
If any here do expect fine preaching from me this day, they will, in all probability, go away disappointed. For I came not here to shoot over people’s heads but, if the Lord shall be pleased to bless me, to reach their hearts. Accordingly, I shall endeavour to clothe my ideas in such plain language, that the meanest Negro or servant, if God is pleased to give a hearing ear, may understand me. For I am certain, if the poor and unlearned can comprehend, the learned and rich must.
We could certainly do with fewer exegetical lectures and more of this sort of personal, relevant appeal. Whitefield quite deliberately addressed both the heart and the head in his sermons. This was ‘the very life of preaching’ he said. To use his own words (from Sermon 59),
That we might deal with you as rational creatures, we have endeavoured calmly, and in the fear of God, to address ourselves to your understandings; but the hardest work is yet ahead, namely, to affect and warm your hearts. This I take to be the very life of preaching. For man is a compound creature, made up of affections as well as understanding; and, consequently, without addressing both, we only do our work by halves . . . Without a proper mixture of these, however a preacher may acquire the character, in the letter-learned and polite world, of being a calm and cool reasoner; yet he never will be looked upon by those whose senses are exercised to discern spiritual things, as a truly evangelical and Christian orator.
Truly evangelical preaching must combine both rational argument and exposition with an ‘affective’ and emotional aspect. Merely to ‘explain the Bible’ from a pulpit is not Christian preaching. In our enthusiasm to educate our congregations have we forgotten this? Nor would it be correct, in Whitefield’s eyes, to leave ‘application’ (or ‘improvement’ of the text as he would term it) to be tacked onto the end of a pulpit essay. Even the casual reader of these sermons will soon see how Whitefield cannot resist continually applying the text to his hearers rather than deferring this essential goal of preaching until the end. With tears he exhorted his hearers to know Christ and love him more; with white streaks appearing on their blackened, unwashed faces, the miners of Kingswood responded in kind, as did other congregations in many of the places Whitefield spoke the word.
We should add two notes of caution here. First, Whitefield says in Sermon 23, ‘I speak in plain language, you know my way of preaching. I do not want to play the orator, I do not want to be counted a scholar. I want to speak so as I may reach poor people’s hearts.’ There was a certain ‘noble negligence’ as one contemporary put it, about Whitefield’s style.12 He is not always grammatically polished and his style is not literary, smooth, and beautiful to read (though it should be easier to read in this edition than in the 1771 volumes). Yet he was certainly not an untutored dullard or the kind of minister who stopped reading books as soon as his theological credentials were in the bag. A cursory glance at the footnotes here, to observe the sources he cites, reveals a man of thoughtfulness and wide reading. Where it was appropriate for his particular audience he was perfectly capable of quoting Latin aphorisms and alluding to a variety of classical authors as well as to the best of Anglican and puritan biblical and devotional writing, Reformers, and contemporary theologians. From early on in the ‘Holy Club’ he had used the Greek New Testament daily, as the basis for his devotions and sermon preparation. He used his learning when he thought it could serve the goal of his preaching, but anyone who approaches these sermons expecting an uneducated rant because they hear he confessed, ‘I do not want to be counted a scholar,’ will be disappointed and somewhat surprised by what they find.
Second, we must be cautious at times about Whitefield’s style since he himself repented of some aspects of his early preaching. In 1748 he wrote to a friend, after revising all his published journals,
Alas! Alas! In how many things have I judged and acted wrong. I have been too rash and hasty in giving characters, both of places and persons. Being fond of scripture language, I have often used a style too apostolical, and at the same time I have been too bitter in my zeal. Wild-fire has been mixed with it, and I find that I frequently wrote and spoke with my own spirit, when I thought I was writing and speaking by the assistance of the Spirit of God. I have likewise too much made inward impressions my rule of acting, and too soon and too explicitly published what had been better kept in longer, or told after my death. By these things I have given some wrong touches to God’s ark, and hurt the blessed cause I would defend, and also stirred up needless opposition. This has humbled me much . . . I bless [God] for ripening my judgment a little more, for giving me to see and confess, and I hope in some degree to correct and amend, some of my mistakes.13
He amended his printed sermons so that much of the ‘wild-fire’ was removed from them, yet it may still be detected here and there, particularly where he is addressing serious gospel issues in the teaching of others (such as in Sermons 9 and 10). All of us who preach regularly know how important it is to correct prevailing errors in church and society in order to be faithful shepherds of God’s people. Yet we also do well to remember the humility of Whitefield in his 30s as he looked back on his earlier ministry and sought to amend his words and his ways. ‘Those who oppose him he must gently instruct,’ in a way they can hear and be corrected by, said the Apostle (2 Timothy 2:24-26). How important it is for us to remember these lessons in a day and age, not unlike Whitefield’s, which desperately needs clarity on the gospel and its implications, amidst a plethora of false opinions and a disdain for ‘enthusiasm.’ Do we treat our opponents as we would wish to be treated ourselves?
So much for Whitefield’s style. What about the content of this preaching which set the eighteenth century world ablaze and awakened sluggish souls? Whitefield ranges over a number of subjects, from the education of children and family religion (Sermon 4), persecution (Sermons 55 and 56), how to listen to sermons (Sermon 28), drunkenness (Sermon 52), cursing and swearing (Sermon 18), prayer (Sermon 54), and even British military victories (Sermon 6). Yet his main subject again and again is the gospel of God’s grace towards justly condemned sinners. The great themes to which he returns time after time are original sin, our inability to save ourselves, the gracious provision of the gospel in atonement, justification, sanctification, and final glory, and sober warnings of judgment to come for those who refuse to repent and turn to Christ. His great motto was, ‘You must be born again,’ Christ must be all to us and we must give our all to him.
Whitefield also opposed the great currents of heresy in his day: Arianism and Socinianism, both forms of anti-Trinitarian theology which emptied churches throughout the land as they evacuated the faith of the divine power of a divine Christ; Antinomianism, the lawless discipleship and dead ‘orthodoxy’ which led to ill-disciplined, proud, and ineffective Christians; Arminianism, which robbed God of his glory in the salvation and assurance of sinners in an attempt to make room for human free will; Roman Catholicism, which foisted a false gospel and a spurious authority onto people, and a great deal of anxious superstition. Whitefield opposed these things because they struck at the heart of his core message: God’s grace alone has the power to save, motivate, and preserve weak and sinful creatures, through faith alone, in the Christ of the scriptures alone, for God’s greater glory.
The great evangelist also called drowsy Christians to be more whole-hearted in following their Lord. He attacked the complacent, pleasure-seeking spirit of the age which infected the church and made believers feel that the pursuit of holiness was ‘being righteous over-much.’ His antipathy towards card-playing and especially the theatre tells us a great deal about the moral standards of the day, and such themes had been a stock in trade for puritan preachers since the previous century. In our supposedly more enlightened times we may feel this is a little overboard. And yet, it is true that if only Christians found more delight in Christ and his word they would not be so often at the cinema or engaged in other mindless entertainments, and they would be much more assured and confident in their faith as a result. Translated into twenty-first century garb his exhortations here have much to teach a generation ‘amusing themselves to death.’ As he says at the end of Sermon 27, ‘It is only owing to your losing sight of him that you go so heavily from day to day. A sight of Jesus, like the sun rising in the morning, dispels the darkness and gloominess that lies upon the soul. Take therefore a fresh view of him, O believers.’14
Whitefield goes about his subjects in an expositional way. The sermons here are generally presented in biblical order so it can quickly be seen that he preached from Law, Prophets, and Writings (the full range of Old Testament genres) as well as Gospels and Epistles, finding in each one something to make people wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus (2 Timothy 3:15). Often he simply works his way through the text verse by verse; sometimes he just spends time putting it in context and then focuses on a single verse. Every time, he makes an appeal to his listeners to respond to what they have heard in the living and active word of God. His appeals were variously based on the text and could be either invitations to enjoy the benefits spoken of, warnings to escape the wrath to come, pleadings to accept an offer given, or commands to repent and obey a new Lord. Baptists will immediately recognise how Charles Spurgeon, in the nineteenth century, modelled himself and his ministry on Whitefield. Yet are there any evangelicals brave enough to do the same today? We may be orthodox in comparison with the church of our day, yet it may also be that we have little of this power to convict and change people through the gospel in our preaching. An unapplied, ossified orthodoxy will transform neither church nor world in the way the eighteenth century was moved by Whitefield and his friends.
There are some starthng observations in Whitefield’s interpretations of his texts, which makes these sermons useful to the modern preacher and Bible reader. For example, it may surprise us to read that the serpent in the Garden of Eden himself ate the fruit forbidden to our first parents as part of his seduction; but how else, asks Whitefield, could Eve have argued with herself that it was ‘good for food’ as Genesis 3:6 narrates? We may wonder at the way he connects certain truths together or draws implications we may never have seen before. We may not always agree with Whitefield’s understanding, but it is refreshing to gain his perspective on a text which may have become too familiar to shock us.
We may be forgiven for a sense of déjà-vu as we read some of Whitefield’s polemic against one particular group of opponents. There is a peculiarly modern ring about the objections he deals with from ‘the reasoners’ and those who upheld ‘science’ as the cure for all ills. This was the time known as ‘the Enlightenment’, when rationality was king and the human mind with all its immense potential became like an idol to many as they scoffed at the traditional religion of Western Europe as old-fashioned and hopelessly backwards. Whereas in the previous two centuries the West had divided over the interpretation of religion, in the eighteenth century it began to be divided between the religious and the secular. Yet ‘however infidels may style themselves reasoners’, says Whitefield, ‘of all men they are the most unreasonable’ (Sermon 3). How so? ‘Let not,’ he says, ‘the deceived reasoner boast any longer of his pretended reason. Whatever you may think, it is the most unreasonable thing in the world not to believe on Jesus Christ, whom God has sent’ (Sermon 45). Indeed, ‘A modern unbeliever is the most credulous creature living,’ he says (Sermon 46) because, ‘this human wisdom, this science, falsely so called . . . blinds the understanding and corrupts the hearts of so many modern unbelievers’ (Sermon 45).
The same could be said for many of the heterodox religious groups at the time such as the Arians and Socinians who allowed reason to overrule scripture in their ‘theology’, in an attempt to make it more palatable to the modern mind and modern morals. Whitefield’s teaches us how to respond to multiple secular attacks on gospel truth. As Ryle so gloriously puts it, ‘He was among the first to show the right way to meet the attacks of infidels and skeptics on Christianity. He saw clearly that the most powerful weapon against such men is not cold, metaphysical reasoning and dry disquisition, but preaching the whole gospel – living the whole gospel – and spreading the whole gospel.’15 In this he has much to teach us as we fashion our own responses to the trendy atheism and aggressive secularism of our world. The gospel remains the power of God.
We noted above how Whitefield removed some of the over-exuberant ‘wild-fire’ from his early sermons. Yet does this also mean, as some have alleged, that all the fire has gone from these sermons? Without the man to speak the words have the words lost their power and effectiveness? Is it impossible to put such fiery, idiosyncratic preaching into cold black and white print without losing everything that was impressive? Lloyd-Jones was familiar with this line of argument, writing, ‘That is why people, when they have read the sermons of Whitefield, often say, “I cannot understand this. How could the man who produced sermons like this be such a phenomenon, such a wonderful preacher?”’ Yet, he concludes, ‘If you have ever said that, you are just displaying your ignorance of what is meant by preaching.’16 It may be thin as a commentary or unpolished and unsophisticated as literature. It may only give a faint idea of what it was like to hear Whitefield in the flesh. But is that not also the case for the sermons of Luther, Calvin, Spurgeon, and even Lloyd-Jones himself? Their voices can no longer be heard and their ‘pulpit power’ experienced, but the message contained in their sermons is of lasting effect and continual relevance, and far more important than any personal anecdotes or amusing stories they may have been able to narrate in an effort to liven things up in print. An old sermon is a particular type of material, and must be read in a way that is sensitive to its genre and the distance that separates us from the original occasion. Yet once we have trained ourselves to make those tiny internal adjustments, we can indeed hear the voices of these preachers once more. They being dead, yet speak, if we let them. As one reader put it concerning Whitefield,
It is, indeed, acknowledged by one of his great admirers, Cornelius Winter, that his peculiar talents can be but faintly guessed from his printed works. Worthless, however, his writings are not, as specimens of that strain of preaching which, when combined with eminent powers of delivery, is fitted to arrest the attention of all classes of men from Hume, and Bolingbroke, and Lord Chesterfield, down to the lowest ruffian of Kingswood or Moorfields. It cannot but be most instructive to examine the sort of material which was capable of being wrought up into an instrument of such surprising and almost universal power. And we doubt not that men of sound judgments and benevolent hearts, might easily derive from Whitefield’s extant ‘Remains’, many an useful suggestion, for the improvement of their own ministrations.17
WHITEFIELD THE ANGLICAN ENTREPRENEUR
Whitefield is remembered as a great evangelical, and by those who (somewhat mistakenly) consider evangelical religion to have begun only in the 1730s, as a founding father of evangelicalism.18 His name has been honoured and kept alive in recent years by evangelical Baptists and Presbyterians, but he has been strangely undervalued by those in the Church of England. Yet he himself would have identified his churchmanship as classically ‘Anglican.’ As Packer puts it, ‘like all England’s evangelical clergy then and since, Whitefield insisted that the religion he modelled and taught was a straightforward application of Anglican doctrine as defined in the Articles, the Homilies and the Prayer Book.’19 Glancing through his sermons we find quotations from the Articles of Religion, especially where they touch on the doctrines of justification, original sin, and the place of good works. There are also many allusions to liturgical texts from the Book of Common Prayer, which Whitefield considered to embody the theology of the Articles and indeed of the Bible itself. His view of the Church of England was, ‘My dear brethren, I am a friend to her Articles, I am a friend to her Homilies, I am a friend to her liturgy. And, if they did not thrust me out of their churches, I would read them every day’ (Sermon 9).
Upon his first return to England from Georgia, Whitefield found that many pulpits were closed to his fundraising work for the orphanage there due to his youthful over-exuberance in denouncing the established clergy in his early sermons. As we have already noted, he took this opportunity to begin a new phase of evangelical mission in this country. Whitefield’s paternal grandfather, Andrew Whitefield, had been a successful businessman in Bristol which enabled him to retire early and live the life of a country gentleman. His father too was a businessman and George inherited a certain entrepreneurial streak from these men which made him go looking for opportunities to expand his ministry. Far from taking early retirement, however, he worked himself into an early grave!
His first step out of the established mould had been to go to Georgia, a brand new colony in America designed to take the poor and criminal elements from England and put them to good use (much as would happen in Australia some time later). Never becoming the incumbent of an ordinary parish, Whitefield was one of those who thrived on the edges of the establishment, and so when itinerant preaching proved more difficult in churches he took to the open air and began to preach anywhere and everywhere he could. Rather than waiting for people to invite him to preach or hoping that sinners would come to hear, he adopted the more aggressive strategy of going out and calling to them, in the ‘highways and byways’, rejoicing that this tactic had Gospel precedent and dominical sanction (Luke 14:23). ‘The world is now my parish’ he had declared six weeks after being ordained (antedating Wesley’s now more famous use of this phrase by a month).20 The grey skies of London, Bristol, and other cities became like the dome of his very own cathedral into which thousands of people poured to hear this curious and dramatic Anglican clergyman.
Augustus Toplady narrates how his hero Whitefield once tried to persuade him to become an itinerant preacher too, encouraging the younger man with promises of greater fruitfulness should he do so. Yet as Toplady told Lady Huntingdon, ‘I consider the true ministers of God as providentially divided into two bands: viz., the regulars and the irregulars.’ Some such as Whitefield were akin to cavalry and others, like him, were more like sentinels or guardsmen watching over a more circumscribed district.21 He could see the great blessing that the irregular and unusual ministry of men like Whitefield had been, but did not think it was for him, or for everyone; an ordinary Reformed Evangelical parochial ministry within the Church of England structures was just as vital and important as the more high-profile ‘celebrity’ roles. Yet Whitefield was clearly in his element as an Anglican cavalryman, with a self-endangering and self-sacrificing boldness which earned him the respect of many of his contemporaries. The important thing to notice is that other evangelicals in the Church of England like Toplady, Romaine, and Hervey – the regular guardsmen – considered him no less Anglican for his more irregular tactics, since he always remained doctrinally in line with the Anglican heritage even when he was being more adventurous in terms of institutional order.
Yet even cavalry need to have a settled base camp from which to operate, and eventually this led to Whitefield planting three churches: ‘The Tabernacle’ in East London at Moorfields, a chapel on Tottenham Court Road in the West End, and another ‘Tabernacle’ in Bristol. Add to this the orphanage in Georgia and a school at Kingswood and it is clear that Whitefield had a flair for fundraising and starting new projects, as platforms for gospel ministry. His expertise did not, however, extend to the maintenance of ‘empire.’ In that department he was far outstripped by the imperious John Wesley. He lost the school to Wesley, and the orphanage did not develop as he hoped (see Sermons 57 and 61), being saddled with a huge debt by the time that Whitefield died. Yet it is clear that with his entrepreneurial and radical style of Anglicanism, Toplady was not saying too much when he styled Whitefield, ‘The apostle of the English empire’ as well as ‘a true and faithful son of the Church of England.’22 He sought to extend the boundaries of the Church into places where no church buildings had yet been put up, where the ordinary parochial ministry had failed or had not even attempted to reach the populace. He found the harvest was plentiful though the workers were few (Matthew 9:37-38) and obeyed his ordination call (as the Ordinal annexed to the Book of Common Prayer puts it), ‘to seek for Christ’s sheep that are dispersed abroad, and for his children who are in the midst of this naughty world, that they may be saved through Christ for ever… For they are the sheep of Christ, which he bought with his death, and for whom he shed his blood.’
Whitefield may be fairly criticised, however, for undermining the Church of England in one respect. As Packer insightfully puts it, he ‘did in fact unwittingly encourage an individualistic piety of what we would call a parachurch type, a piety that gave its prime loyalty to transdenominational endeavours, that became impatient and restless in face of the relatively fixed forms of institutional church life, and that conceived of evangelism as typically an extra-ecclesiastical activity.’23 He may not have wished to have this effect, but involuntarily he did. It has taken evangelicals many years to rediscover the local church itself as a vehicle for evangelism and we must continue to value this God-given means for reaching our nation for Christ and not rely entirely on extra-parochial, parachurch missionary activity. A passion to see new spiritual life through evangelism must, rather, be part of the DNA of each local church, whatever is happening elsewhere. An Anglican church which is simultaneously a ‘shop front’ for outsiders, a nursery for new Christians, and a family in which to serve and grow is a magnificent blessing for any community, no matter how large it happens to be.
That being said, Whitefield’s ‘storm trooper’ activity gave huge impetus to the evangelical party within the Church of England. He was also keen to foster relations with those outside the pale of the established church, being a man with a famously ‘catholic spirit.’24 He says below in Sermon 23 that, ‘There is nothing grieves me more than the differences amongst God’s people,’ and he sought to work with any who loved the Lord in sincerity and truth, even if that meant a loss of face for him. He was able to work, despite some massive theological differences, even with John Wesley, on occasion, yet only by renouncing all his leadership roles in England and Wales in 1748 and appearing merely as one of Wesley’s ‘assistants.’ This speaks volumes about the true interests of both men, perhaps, but certainly about the humility of Whitefield and his willingness to work with those outside his own theological comfort zones. Unlike Wesley, he was also able to partner nonconformists, whom Wesley often despised and avoided. This, however, was a function of Whitefield’s other distinctive, his Reformed theology, which we will briefly examine next, and of Wesley’s more sectarian Arminianism, not to mention his upbringing.25 It is however vital to remember that Whitefield considered the Church of England itself to be ‘Reformed’ and was in no way unusual for holding to that view. It had been held by archbishops, bishops, clergy, theologians, and lay-people before him, many of whom he quotes with approval in the following pages (such as bishops Hall and Beveridge and archbishop Ussher), a noble line of theological predecessors standing in the same distinguished tradition of reflection on the holy scriptures.26
WHITEFIELD THE REFORMED DIVINE
One modern biographer claims that Whitefield ‘showed no interest in theology’, but was more concerned with feelings, imagination, and experience.27 This is palpable nonsense, as any casual reader with an awareness of theological issues will be able to discern in the pages which follow. To quote again from Augustus Toplady, Whitefield was not merely an evangelist but ‘a most excellent systematic divine.’28
His divinity began with an error-free Bible. ‘If we once get above our Bibles and cease making the written word of God our sole rule both as to faith and practice,’ he declared, ‘we shall soon lie open to all manner of delusion and be in great danger of making shipwreck of faith and a good conscience,’ going on to speak of ‘the unerring rule of God’s most holy word’ (Sermon 2); elsewhere he only ever uses the word ‘unerring’ of Jesus (Sermon 58) or the Holy Spirit (Sermon 39). It was the quintessence of ‘enthusiasm’ said Whitefield, ‘to pretend to be guided by the Spirit without the written word; yet it is every Christian’s bounden duty to be guided by the Spirit in conjunction with the written word of God,’ every inward impression or suggestion being tested against that inerrant standard. This doctrine of an entirely trustworthy Bible is a common point amongst Reformed Anglicans of the period.29 Indeed, it may have been encouraged by the Church of England’s Article 21, which portrays general councils as erring and in need of a higher authority to establish the truth, i.e. holy scripture, which is therefore by implication, unerring (while the Church of Rome, despite claims to inerrancy, ‘hath erred,’ Article 19). Some editions of the Book of Common Prayer in the eighteenth century even contained a version of the Psalms which spoke of God’s ‘unerring word’ at Psalm 119:81 and 119:114. We seem to have dropped this vital adjective in recent years, perhaps embarrassed by allegations of ‘fundamentalism’ or obscurantism. Have we also lost confidence in the dependability of the word?
Taught by his trustworthy Bible, Whitefield was a Protestant. He rejected the infallibility and inerrancy of the Pope or the Church and settled instead on the scriptures themselves as the final arbiter of his faith. As a result, he could be somewhat vehement in his dislike of Roman Catholicism, allied as it was at the time not just with ‘false divinity’ but with theories of arbitrary government, insidious plots, and the Jacobite Rebellion. Like the Reformers of the sixteenth century and the puritans of the seventeenth, he stood squarely against the Pope, transubstantiation, and other Roman ‘superstitions’ regarding Mary, the invocation of saints, purgatory, and the ‘idolatry’ of their religious ‘art.’ His anti-Catholicism is not to many people’s taste today, even among Protestants. Neither, though, is Whitefield’s restraint when he keeps his denunciation of Rome within bounds, ‘lest while I am speaking against antichrist, I should unawares fall myself and lead my hearers into an antichristian spirit’ (Sermon 6).
Continuing to be taught by his trustworthy Bible, Whitefield became a Calvinist. Yet as he said in a private letter to John Wesley in August 1740, ‘Alas, I never read any thing that Calvin wrote; my doctrines I had from Christ and his apostles; I was taught them of God.’30 Again, he wrote to another friend in 1742, ‘I embrace the calvinistical scheme, not because Calvin, but Jesus Christ, I think, has taught it to me.’31 Indeed, he only mentions Calvin once in these sermons (Sermon 15), and that is a passing and imprecise reference. Yet Whitefield’s Reformed theology is ultimately what separated him from Wesley, or rather, the latter’s insistent anti-Calvinism is what separated him from the Church of England and from those who adhered to its Articles by conviction. Wesley’s repeatedly republished Free Grace sermon, denouncing predestination and other Reformed Anglican tenets as satanic, unscriptural, and loathsome was highly provocative but ultimately unpersuasive for Whitefield. He considered Arminianism, a progressive and liberal view of theology which downplayed the sovereignty of God in favour of a more liberated human free will, to be ‘antichristian’ both in principles and practice, and to share too much in common with Roman Catholicism, indeed, to be ‘the back door to popery’ (Sermon 14). Such views were not at all unusual amongst the puritans of the previous century or amongst his contemporaries of course, and Wesley was entirely aware of his deviation from the Anglican tradition when he proclaimed himself an Arminian and fought for the acceptance of this avant-garde theology through his Arminian Magazine and other publishing endeavours.
Whitefield, however, was a firm believer in the Reformed doctrine of salvation and Reformed biblical theology, or as it is often known, covenant theology. He was a particular fan of seventeenth century Cambridge theologian, John Edwards (not to be confused with Whitefield’s American contemporary Jonathan Edwards),32 but he also recommended other classic Reformed works by Matthew Henry, Thomas Boston, John Pearson, John Owen, and John Bunyan (whether Anglicans, Baptists, Presbyterians, or Congregationalists).33 Whitefield was in harmony with the Anglican and Reformed tradition in general, holding as he did to predestination and reprobation (Sermons 41, 44), the inseparability of justification and sanctification (Sermon 14), the imputation of the active obedience of Christ (Sermons 14, 44) and the perseverance of the saints (Sermons 60 and 61). No wonder when he returned from Georgia in April 1741 and met Wesley, who disliked these doctrines and crusaded against them, he told him plainly face-to-face that they ‘preached two different gospels.’34
Whitefield’s Reformed credentials are also revealed by the use he makes of the Reformed doctrine of the covenant, which was the way the puritans gained an overview of ‘the Bible as a whole.’ He is happy to speak, for example, about ‘the covenant of works’ with Adam in creation (Sermons 1, 12, 24) and ‘the covenant of grace’ with the redeemed (Sermons 12, 44). Less noticed perhaps is the use he makes of the covenant of redemption, or pactum salutis – the teaching that the covenant of grace by which humans are saved in history is based on an eternal covenant between the members of the Trinity, which is revealed in the pages of scripture. Emphasis on this foundational covenant was about getting the biblical story straight rather than about abstract systematics. It was about seeing where the narrative of God’s grace and love for the world begins, so that we can properly appreciate the climaxes and consummation of his plan in the death, resurrection, ascension, and second coming of the Lord Jesus Christ. It is part of the romance of the gospel, the Trinity bound together in partnership for our redemption, before the world began. Whitefield reveals this exegetically-based, Reformed framework to his thinking in several of his sermons. For example, while preaching on 1 Corinthians 1:30 (Sermon 44) he proclaims,
There was an eternal contract between the Father and the Son: ‘I have made a covenant with my chosen and I have sworn unto David my servant’ [Psalm 89:3]. Now David was a type of Christ, with whom the Father made a covenant, that if he would obey and suffer and make himself a sacrifice for sin, he should ‘see his seed, he should prolong his days and the pleasure of the Lord should prosper in his hands’ [Isaiah 53:10]. This compact our Lord refers to, in that glorious prayer recorded in the 17th chapter of John. And therefore he prays for, or rather demands with a full assurance, all that were given to him by the Father: ‘Father, I will that they also whom thou hast given me, be with me where I am.’35
This was no small detail for Whitefield. ‘Would to God this point of doctrine was considered more,’ he says, ‘and people were more studious of the covenant of redemption between the Father and the Son!’ Then, in an aside clearly aimed against Wesley and other Arminian evangelicals, he says if people were more attentive to the eternal covenant between the members of the Trinity, ‘We should not then have so much disputing against the doctrine of election, or hear it condemned (even by good men) as a doctrine of devils. For my own part, I cannot see how true humbleness of mind can be attained without a knowledge of it; and though I will not say, that every one who denies election is a bad man, yet I will say… it is a very bad sign… for, if we deny election, we must, partly at least, glory in ourselves’ (Sermon 44). This emphasis in Whitefield’s preaching was not just evident in the heat of the Calvinist controversies; it is part of how he conceives of and preaches the gospel message. Characteristically, however, he says in his farewell sermon (Sermon 61), ‘They that are not led to see this [doctrine], I wish them better heads; though, I believe, numbers that are against it have got better hearts: the Lord help us to bear with one another where there is an honest heart.’ He referred of course to John Wesley, who intensely disliked both predestination and the idea of a covenant between the members of the Trinity.36
Another Reformed doctrine which Wesley despised but which Whitefield gloried in was particular redemption, or as it is sometimes known, definite or ‘limited atonement.’ This is the teaching that the Father’s election, the Son’s redemption, and the Spirit’s application of salvation are all coextensive; that God planned to save a certain people, his sheep, his church, the bride of Christ out of the corrupt mass of mankind, and sent his Son explicitly to achieve this goal, and his Spirit then to draw the elect to Christ. The opposite, Arminian, theory was that Christ came to die for everyone indiscriminately, not to actually save them but to make them saveable, on condition that they repent and believe, which they have the power to do if they want to. Both views limit the atonement in some way, of course: the Calvinist limits the number of people ultimately atoned for (some people are completely saved) while the Arminian view limits the effectiveness of the cross (all people are potentially saved if they fulfil the conditions on their side). It is often asserted that belief in definite atonement saps the energy out of evangelism somehow. Yet reading and studying the example of Whitefield shows just how facile and superficial it is to claim that one cannot be a Calvinist – one cannot believe in a Father who unconditionally chooses, a Son who intentionally redeems and a Spirit who irresistibly calls only the elect – and still be a passionate evangelist. To read Whitefield and to know something of what God did through him is to see how ridiculous such a claim truly is. Far from undermining evangelism, this doctrine seemed to fire all that Whitefield did. He believed that Christ ‘hath virtue enough in his blood to atone for the sins of millions of worlds’ (Sermon 51), and yet ‘he offered up his soul an offering for the sins of the elect’ (Sermon 38).
This is not the place to explore these knotty issues in full. Needless to say they were a source of controversy in Whitefield’s day just as they are today. Yet Packer is correct to observe that, ‘Whitefield was entirely free of doctrinal novelties.’37 That is, he did not have an eccentric, pick and mix style of theologising dependent on which passage of the Bible he had read that morning in his quiet time, and he was not especially idiosyncratic in his core doctrinal commitments. In his preaching, he wasn’t trying to show how clever he was to reinvent the faith from scratch with just his Bible and a set of selectively-adopted historical-critical tools in hand for mining it. He stood, self-consciously, in a tradition or stream of theology; not uncritically or unthinkingly, but loyally and humbly, realising he was not the first man to have dealings with the Saviour or to have heard him speak by his Spirit through his word. Someone described John Wesley’s approach to these issues by saying it had in it, ‘something of that provoking glibness with which young or half-cultivated people settle in a few sentences questions that have exercised the deepest minds ever since the dawn of speculation… Indeed, it is evident on reading [his anti-predestination sermon] that, of all the deep works which had been written on the subject, Wesley had never read one.’38 Whitefield’s approach appears markedly different to that of the more famous man eleven years his senior.
This being said, other more prominent aspects of Whitefield’s ‘framework’ will be remarkably familiar to modern evangelicals. It surfaces very clearly in a topical sermon called ‘Walking with God’ (Sermon 2). He treats the familiar themes of the Fall, salvation in Christ alone, and how to grow as a Christian through Bible reading, prayer, and meditation on heaven. He closes the sermon with application to the unconverted, the converted, and to ministers serving the church. Sermons such as these would not be unusual in any evangelical church today.
Whitefield may be thought ‘novel’ in one or two of his views, however. For example, evangelical Christians have always had differing opinions on some aspects of eschatology, and Whitefield appears to be best classified as what we might call a postmillennialist. So in Sermon 36 he rejoices that,
. . . there are more excellent things ahead. Glorious things are spoken of these times, ‘when the earth shall be filled with the knowledge of the Lord, as the waters cover the sea.’ There is a general expectation among the people of God, when the partition-wall between Jew and Gentile shall be broken down and all Israel be saved. Happy those who live when God does this. They shall see Satan, like lightning, fall from heaven. They shall not weep, as the Jews did at the building of the second temple. No, they shall rejoice with exceeding great joy. For all the former glory of the Christian church shall be nothing in comparison of that glory which shall excel. Then shall they cry out with the governor of the feast, ‘thou hast kept thy good wine until now!’
Later in Sermon 57 he prays, ‘Who shall live when God doth this? Hasten O Lord that blessed time!’ Not everyone would share his optimism about the future glorious state of the church this side of Christ’s return, but it is important that we acknowledge the evangelical pedigree this view does seem to have. As Packer says, Whitefield was not a man given to theological novelties and eccentricities (he had a sufficient number of personal eccentricities already!), so we must be careful, should we choose to dissent from him here, that we do so with gentle rigour and do not rule ‘off-side’ a view held by as foundational a figure (for evangelicals and Anglicans) as George Whitefield. We must not believe anything simply because he did; he objected to any kind of Pope. Yet if he held a view, after serious consideration, it is safe to say it deserves a respectful airing amongst those who claim to be Reformed and evangelical, even if we finally decide, like noble Bereans, that scripture teaches otherwise.
Despite his general doctrinal clarity, Whitefield did not get everything right of course. He was attacked by those on either side of him theologically. Where he was able to do so without compromising the gospel, he re-examined his teaching and corrected it in the light of critique, even when that came in the form of anonymous and less than complimentary pamphlets. When assailed by a group of Presbyterians in America, for example, he told them he did not find, ‘the least resentment stirring in my soul’ against them and that indeed, ‘I think it no dishonour, to retract some expressions that formerly dropped from my pen before God was pleased to give me a more clear knowledge of the doctrines of grace. St. Augustine, I think, did so before me . . . I was not so clear in some points at my first setting out in the ministry. Our Lord was pleased to enlighten me by degrees; and I desire your prayers, that his grace may shine more and more in my heart, till it breaks forth into perfect day.’39
Some of the phrases these anonymous Presbyterians objected to in his published sermons he himself now dismissed as ‘false divinity’, or realised that they could be misconstrued. After dealing with their objections, he went on, ‘And now to convince you that I am not ashamed to own my faults, I can inform you of other passages as justly exceptionable.’ He went on to correct himself on several further points adding, ‘In the meanwhile, I shall be thankful to any that will point out my errors; and I promise, by divine assistance, they shall have no reason to say that I am one who hates to be reformed.’ All the same, he defended himself from their accusations that he was an Arminian and a ‘Christian perfectionist’ because he was close to Wesley, or a Quaker because he had a favourable opinion of some particular Quakers, or that his teaching smelled of Popery and would lead people to Rome (the usual jibes of guilt by association and the straw man fallacy which sadly characterise some theological disputes). Yet his conclusion overall was: I was young, I foolish, I got it wrong, please pray for me. This was in 1740 when he was in his mid-twenties; the evidence suggests this meekness and humility only increased as he got older. We glimpse something of that in the following sermons, refined after years of meditating on scripture before his death at the age of 55. With many eyes on him, it would have been easier to stick to his guns and show no weakness or repentance in public. But he was, we must assume, a much bigger man in the eyes of God and a much better example to his fellow ministers, for his transparent honesty and ability to admit mistakes.
So we have seen that the preacher who wrote and delivered the following sermons was clearly evangelical in his preaching, Anglican in his loyalties while radical in his methods, and solidly Reformed in his theology. These are wonderful things to be, and God used just such a man three hundred years ago, to shake up the church and transform the lives of many thousands.
THIS EDITION OF WHITEFIELD’S SERMONS
In the mid-nineteenth century, J.C. Ryle said, ‘To me it is a matter of astonishment that, amidst the many reprints of the nineteenth century, no publisher has yet attempted a complete reprint of the works of George Whitefield.’40 Despite some progress in the twentieth century, when short selections of his sermons, extracts from his letters, and parts of his journals were republished by the Banner of Truth, it remains the case that the seven volume edition of Whitefield’s works which was edited by Dr. Gillies just after Whitefield died, has not seen the light of day since then. This is a great shame.
What you have in your hands is a brand new edition of volumes five and six of the 1771-1772 set of Whitefield’s complete works published by Gillies, plus some bonus material and the added value (it is hoped) of extensive footnotes. The other volumes contained letters, tracts, and a biography which can, of course, be found with diligent effort in internet archives but are not easily read and digested in such electronic format. There will always be a place for books, and perhaps these other volumes will be released to the book-reading public again at some point, in a modern readable format.
Seventy-nine sermons by Whitefield are said to have been printed in total, but he himself only authorised fifty-seven for the press and was reluctant to allow others into print. For example, in a letter dated September 26th 1769 he complains, ‘I wish you had advertised against the publisher of my last sermon. It is not verbatim as I delivered it. In some places, he makes me to speak false concord, and even nonsense. In others, the sense and connection are destroyed, by the injudicious disjointed paragraphs; and the whole is entirely unfit for the public review.’ Gillies adds that the executors of Whitefield’s will were most upset by another unauthorised collection of sermons circulating after Whitefield’s death since they were ‘unable to authenticate them, either as to language or sentiments.’ They were, ‘utterly unfit for publication’ and the executors wished to have them all burned, ‘otherwise the purchasers must be deceived, and the name of the deceased sorely wounded.’41
In addition, some of his early sermons (such as one on John 3:3, ‘Unless one is born again . . . ’) did not make it past Whitefield’s later self-censorship. Presumably this is because of the virulence of his attack on other clergy and on others, contained within these products of his youthful exuberance, and it was not thought right to overrule him here for this edition. I have endeavoured to note, if possible, when and where each one was first preached, conscious however that the final editions represented here underwent some refinement over the years as Whitefield repeated the material.
This current edition, then, includes those fifty-seven sermons published by Whitefield himself, plus two others (Sermons 58 and 59) which were authorised by Gillies to appear in 1772 but are not found in selections since then. To this have been added two further sermons (Sermons 60 and 61) which are of great theological and historical interest. Parts of Sermon 61 appeared in Select Sermons of George Whitefield,42 but important chunks of that sermon were omitted. It is often thought, for example, that when Whitefield crossed the Atlantic for the thirteenth time in 1769 he intended it to be his final farewell to old England, since he did in fact die in Massachusetts a year later. Yet reading the full text of Sermon 61, now republished here, we discover the truth. He went to establish his orphan house academy as a college, intending it to become another Harvard or Yale, then to do some preaching on the East Coast, but then finally, ‘to return to my dear London and English friends again.’ He mentions plans to provide a bolt hole for evangelicals in America should the persecution and opposition in England prove too hot in future, but he had by no means decided to leave England for good. His American ministry is extremely important, and we should be grateful for the way in which American friends have kept his name alive; but Anglican Evangelicals in old England should have no qualms about reclaiming Whitefield for themselves. He remained one of us!
Conscious of Whitefield’s annoyance at injudicious editors I have been careful at every stage to ensure Whitefield can be understood properly by a modern audience without false concord, nonsense, or disjointed paragraphs. Some of the original punctuation and paragraphing was frankly bizarre and has been altered. Colons and semi-colons are not used quite so liberally nowadays, and paragraphs enduring over three or four pages would quickly annoy those who are used to reading on the internet, where a paragraph of more than three or four lines may seem overly weighty and a temptation to the mouse-hand. I have also endeavoured to update grammar, spelling, and syntax in such a gentle way that Whitefield still speaks with an eighteenth century voice and yet is coherent and clear for today’s reader. This is not a translation into twenty-first century idiom, but the occurrence of thee, thy, and thou is not so frequent as to be terribly distracting; any difficulty is quickly overcome the more one reads. The King James Version of the Bible has been retained except in those places where it was too quaint or obscure to contemporary ears, and then a light touch only has been applied to compensate for this.
On this note, even a casual reader will quickly discover just how soaked in the Bible this preacher was. It was once said that John Bunyan’s blood was bibline, and it is clear that Whitefield shared this happy but uncommon condition, dropping allusions and quotations from all over the Bible into his preaching with great frequency. Some of these references are so obscure that it is unlikely many in the original audience understood them, even making allowances for higher standards of biblical literacy in those days. Why did Whitefield do this? One reason may be that scriptural allusions usually suggested themselves to him as most apposite first, before any illustrations taken out of popular culture or literature (though he is perfectly able to make such references where he feels it is appropriate). It may also be a function of the high regard in which he held the word of God. He believed in the power of the word to do God’s work, so that even a less well-known passage of the Bible may be used to awaken a dead sinner or prod a sleepy Christian or pique the curiosity of an onlooker. It would be an unusual seeker today, however, who immediately grasped the significance of Whitefield’s appeal in Sermon 40, unrelated to the text being preached on: ‘Do not be Bethshemites!’ I have added, in square brackets, biblical references at every point like this where I considered it essential or important for an understanding of what he was saying. It would, however, be impossible (and unnecessarily cluttering) to note every single sideways glace at another part of God’s word, since Whitefield lived and breathed the Bible and his speech was thoroughly drenched in it. Besides, readers may be edified by making a note of these things themselves in the margins as they read.
Important allusions to liturgical texts have also been noted, since although these would have been readily recognisable to Whitefield’s listeners, many of whom prayed every Sunday with the Book of Common Prayer this is no longer the case. Whitefield would not, I believe, lament the loss of its beautiful but archaic language today, though his use of the liturgy in his preaching shows that he well appreciated the healthy framework that regular and orderly liturgical prayer can give to our doctrine and devotion. Obvious errors in the text have also been corrected (e.g. the date of Georgia Day in Sermon 57 was originally printed as February 1st).
Where eighteenth century books used capital letters as markers of structure or for emphasis, we tend to use subheadings or other textual markers and so I have sought to present the text in as helpful a way as possible for modern readers. Hence all subheadings are my own, as are the footnotes which explain the occasional references to people or places which may be unfamiliar today. I hope these will prove useful and, on occasion, even amusing to the reader (see the note on Bedlam in Sermon 51). Some of Whitefield’s quotations were exceptionally difficult to track down since he often cites other authors from memory, capturing their concepts but playing fast and loose with their exact phraseology, or he fails to mention who his source is. No efforts have been spared to track these down (see the note on Origen in Sermon 2 for example). If you should happen to find an allusion in the text without an accompanying footnote and wonder where it has come from, rest assured the editor spent many hours late at night wondering the same thing but without discovering an acceptable answer. He would be delighted to hear from anyone who can fill these lacunae.
Most importantly, the reason for making this edition of Whitefield’s sermons available again in this format is that we need a heavy dose of his theology, we need his inspiration, and we need his urgent international vision for evangelism, working with others of like mind whatever denomination they may be but without compromising the precious truths of the gospel. If these volumes stimulate such efforts and provoke and equip others to study George Whitefield more deeply, then they will have been worth the effort. Whitefield’s legacy is not institutional like Wesley’s; his orphan house never became a college to rival Yale or Harvard much as he wanted it to. He wrote no great hymns like Toplady or Watts. His legacy is in his sermons and in the effect he had on others in his day, both in the Church of England and amongst the dissenting denominations. He showed them that Reformation theology could be allied to passionate appeal and radical methods of evangelism. His legacy is that a generation of Evangelicals, not least Anglican Evangelicals, grew up with that confidence and were emboldened to imitate his faith and patience. We are beneficiaries of that.
It is important to add one final clarification and encouragement. It would be easy to be a little disheartened as we marvel at what God did in and through this great man, in view of our own seeming insignificance and the difficulties of our own day. Most of us will never be great ourselves and the next generation will not reprint our sermons or pore over our journals (or blogs!) with keen interest. We may never see the reformation and revival of our churches for which we all long. With his characteristic overstatement, Dr. Lloyd-Jones outhnes the things people did for the gospel and wrote to defend it prior to the Great Awakening and then concludes rather dismissively, ‘but they were of no avail whatsoever,’ until the Revival came.43 I may be pedantic, but this cannot quite be true, can it? Whitefield himself urges us (Sermon 57) not to despise the day of small things. There are several clergymen in Whitefield’s paternal pedigree chart going back four generations, with combined ministries in the Church of England amounting to around three hundred years.44 Perhaps we, like these several generations of unsung, un-noticed Revds. Whitefield, are part of God’s plan to nurture godly families, sustain gospel ministry in obscure places, and prepare the ground for greater things to come. But if not, the faithful nobodies who seem to make little impact may indeed still be just as pleasing to God as the barnstormers who capture the headlines and make the most waves. As long as the gospel remains the power of God for salvation, such people are not wasting their time in the harvest field and may avail much for God and his kingdom. May we never forget this, even as we praise God for what he accomplished in the days of George Whitefield (1714-1770).
That being said, before you begin your own journey of discovery into these stirring sermons, be encouraged by the words of one of Whitefield’s biographers, who wrote:
‘Half a dozen men like Whitefield would at any time move a nation, stir its churches, and reform its morals. Whitefield’s power was not in his talents, nor even in his oratory, but in his piety. In some respects, he has no successors; but in prayer, in faith, in religious experience, in devotedness to God, he may have many. Such men are the gift of God, and are infinitely more valuable than all the gold in the Church’s coffers. Never did the world need them more than it needs them now. May Whitefield’s God raise them up, and thrust them out!45
FOR FURTHER READING:
George Whitefield’s Journals (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 1960)
A. Dallimore, George Whitefield: The life and times of the great evangelist of the 18th century revival 2 Volumes (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 1970; 1980)
L. Gatiss, The True Profession of the Gospel: Augustus Toplady and Reclaiming our Reformed Foundations (London: Latimer Trust, 2010)
D. M. Lloyd-Jones, ‘John Calvin and George Whitefield’ in The Puritans: Their origins and successors (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 1987)
J. I. Packer, ‘The Spirit with the Word: The Reformational revivalism of George Whitefield’ in Honouring the People of God: The Collected Shorter Writings of J. I. Packer Volume 4 (Carlisle: Paternoster, 1999)
J. C. Ryle, Christian Leaders of the 18th Century (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 1978)
1D. M. Lloyd-Jones, ‘John Calvin and George Whitefield’ in The Puritans: Their origins and successors (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 1987), 105.
2George Whitefield’s Journals (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 1960), 58.
3Boyd Stanley Schlenther, ‘Whitefield, George (1714—1770)’ in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).
4‘John Calvin and George Whitefield,’ 104.
5J. C. Ryle, Christian Leaders of the 18th Century (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 1978), 56.
6‘Anecdotes, Incidents, and Historic Passages’ in The Complete Works of Augustus Toplady (Harrisonburg, VA: Sprinkle Publications, 1987), 495.
7A. A. Dallimore, George Whitefield: The life and times of the great evangelist of the 18th century revival, Volume 2 (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 1980), 522.
8ibid.
9ibid., 530.
10Ryle, Christian Leaders, 53.
11J. I. Packer, ‘The Spirit with the Word: The Reformational Revivalism of George Whitefield’ in Honouring the People of God: The Collected Shorter Writings of J. I. Packer Volume 4 (Carlisle: Paternoster, 1999), 45.
12Josiah Smith, The Character, Preaching, &c. of the Reverend Mr. George Whitefield, impartially represented and supported (Boston, 1740), 11. The same was said of Richard Baxter, another great English preacher, by a lecturer at St. Helen’s, Bishopsgate, Erasmus Middleton, in Biographia Evangelica or, an Historical Account of the Lives and Deaths of the most eminent and evangelical Authors or Preachers: Volume 4 (London, 1786), 32-33, ‘There was a noble negligence in his style: For his great mind could not stoop to the affected eloquence of words. He despised flashy oratory: But his expressions were clear and powerful, so convincing the understanding, so entering the soul, so engaging the affections, that those were as deaf as adders, who were not charmed by so wise a charmer. He was animated with the Holy Spirit, and breathed celestial fire, to inspire heart and life into dead sinners, and to melt the obdurate in their frozen tombs.’
13The Works of the Reverend George Whitefield: Volume 2 (1771), 144. See also George Whitefield’s Journals, 462 note 1 on further retractions from his journals concerning his overly hasty, ‘rash and uncharitable,’ assessment of some American theologians.
14Whitefield also published a sermon called The Polite and Fashionable Diversions of The Age, Destructive to Soul and Body (1740) which did not make it into the definitive edition of his works reprinted here, although the title alone preaches a message we would do well to consider.
15Christian Leaders, 47.
16‘John Calvin and George Whitefield,’ 122-123.
17Review of ‘Philip’s Life of Whitefield’ in The British Critic and Quarterly Theological Review Volume XXIII, Number XLVI (London, April 1838), 295.
18I refer of course to David Bebbington’s classic statement of this thesis in Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A history from the 1730s to the 1980s (London: Routledge, 1989). See the devastating reassessment of this position by a wide variety of scholars in M.A.G. Haykin and K.J. Stewart (eds.), The Emergence of Evangelicalism: Exploring historical continuities (Nottingham: Apollos, 2008).
19‘Reformational Revivalism,’ 51.
20See Boyd Stanley Schlenther, ‘Whitefield, George (1714-1770).’
21Toplady, The Complete Works, 862.
22‘A Concise Character of the Late Rev. Mr. Whitefield’ in Toplady, The Complete Works, 494.
23‘Reformational Revivalism,’ 59.
24See, most recently, the inspiring, ‘George Whitefield and Christian Unity’ in Iain Murray’s, Heroes (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 2008), 47-83.
25According to I. Murray, Wesley and Men Who Followed (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 2003), 12-16, Wesley’s father was once arrested and imprisoned for speaking so furiously against dissenters. Whitefield also castigates Wesley for saying that no Baptist or Presbyterian writer knew anything of the liberties of Christ. See George Whitefield’s Journals, 583.
26For more on this see Lee Gatiss, The True Profession of the Gospel: Augustus Toplady and Reclaiming our Reformed Foundations (London: Latimer Trust, 2010).
27H. S. Stout, The Divine Dramatist: George Whitefield and the Rise of Modern Evangelicalism (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1991), 39 speaking specifically of Sermon 49 below which actually contains several distinctively Reformed theological points concerning union with Christ, double imputation, and the ordo salutis.
28Toplady, ‘A Concise Character,’ 494.
29E.g. James Hervey in his ‘Contemplation on the Starry Heavens’ in Meditations and Contemplations: Volume 2 (1748), 227 speaks of the Word of God as ‘this unerring directory’, and of its ‘infallible guidance.’ See also Toplady, The Complete Works, 311, 342, 389, 646, 664, 735, 745, 769 for the word as unerring and John Newton, Letters, Sermons, and a Review of Ecclesiastical History (1780), 246 (Letter 20) and 324 (Letter 32) for ‘the unerring word of God.’ The word ‘unerring’ was a far more common term at this stage than ‘inerrancy’ or ‘inerrant’ which, while not entirely unknown from as early as the 1650s, only seem to have entered common theological use among Protestants in the nineteenth century. See my ‘The Unerring Word of God’ in The Gospel Magazine (September-October 2010), 152-154.
30The Works of the Reverend George Whitefield: Volume 1 (1771), 205. He was right to find the doctrines of grace in the Bible of course, though I’m not sure what it says about his theological education that he had failed to read what the great David Broughton Knox called, ‘the most important handbook of Christian theology so far written.’
31ibid., 442.
32See Dallimore Volume 1, 405 on John Edwards’ influence.
33See The Works of the Reverend George Whitefield: Volume 3 (1771), 497-498 and Volume 4, 306-307. Whitefield’s huge debt to Matthew Henry has been well exposed by David Crump, ‘The Preaching of George Whitefield and His Use of Matthew Henry’s Commentary’, in Crux, XXV, 3 (September, 1989), 19-28.
34See T. Jackson (eds), The Works of John Wesley: Volume 1 (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 2007), 305.
35A modern exposition of the biblical basis for this eternal covenant can be found in A. J. Köstenberger and S. R. Swain, Father, Son and Spirit: The Trinity and John’s Gospel (Nottingham: IVP, 2008), 169ff.
36See e.g. The Works of John Wesley: Volume 10, 238-239, 324-325, 422-423.
37‘Reformational Revivalism,’ 56.
38J. Wedgwood, John Wesley and the Evangelical Reaction of the Eighteenth Century (London: Macmillan, 1870), 226-227.
39See ‘A Letter to Some Church-Members of the Presbyterian Persuasion’ in The Works of the Reverend George Whitefield: Volume 4, 43-49.
40Christian Leaders, 60-61.
41The Works of the Reverend George Whitefield: Volume 3, 406-407.
42Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 1958.
43‘John Calvin and George Whitefield’, 108.
44See Dallimore volume 1, 38-39.
45L. Tyerman, The Life of the Rev. George Whitefield (1877), 105.