Whitefield, George
WHITEFIELD, GEORGE (1714–1770), English evangelist and itinerant revivalist in America. Born in humble circumstances in Gloucester, England, Whitefield received his bachelor of arts degree from Oxford in 1736, the same year in which Bishop Martin Benson ordained him as deacon in the Church of England. Associated with John and Charles Wesley in an effort to revive a sedate and passionless Anglicanism, Whitefield followed with keen interest the missionary labors of the Wesley brothers in the newly founded colony of Georgia in North America. After nearly three years of preaching in the New World, the Wesleys returned to England discouraged and dismayed by the enormity of the religious challenge abroad. Neither they nor Whitefield's own admirers, however, could discourage the twenty-three-year-old Whitefield from setting out for Georgia on the first of seven voyages to America.
After an absence of less than one year, Whitefield returned to England late in 1738 to receive his ordination as priest, to strengthen his ties with the trustees of the Georgia colony, and to learn that England's hierarchy looked askance at his cavalier attitude toward canon law and the liturgical form of the national church. No less an authority than London's bishop, Edmund Gibson, published in 1739 a pastoral letter condemning "enthusiasm," a dangerous zeal associated with young Methodism in general, and with young Whitefield in particular. For evidence that Whitefield claimed a special and direct guidance from the Holy Spirit, Bishop Gibson turned to the young zealot's first journal, written from December 1737 to May 1738, in which "enthusiasm" seemed so conveniently and convincingly represented. Whitefield responded to this and to many other charges contained in the letter: that he preached extemporaneously in the open fields, that he criticized the national clergy, and that he claimed to "propagate a new Gospel, as unknown to the generality of ministers and people"—all this, said the bishop, in what is surely a Christian country already. Even as Whitefield sought to defend himself against the bishop's attack, he found pulpits in England closed to him and the clergy there growing increasingly wary of him. Overtures from the Georgia trustees enticed him once more, as he was now offered a pastoral charge in Savannah, together with a promise of five hundred acres of land for a proposed orphanage. Two weeks after the Gibson letter was published, Whitefield was on his way back to America.
This second visit, lasting from November 1739 to January 1741, was Whitefield's most successful evangelical tour of the American colonies. Wherever he went up and down the Atlantic coast, his reputation as a dramatic, divine messenger preceded him. Enormous crowds gathered in eager anticipation, in churches or outdoors, in town squares or country meadows. Calvinist in his own theological stance, Whitefield found his greatest reception from similarly oriented denominations: Congregationalists, Presbyterians, Dutch Reformed, and (later) Baptists. While the first Great Awakening could certainly have occurred without him, it is difficult to imagine that burst of intercolonial and interdenominational pietism arising so swiftly and to such heights apart from the labors of this thundering, persuasive, and tireless traveler.
Even as Bishop Gibson found in Whitefield's own writings his best evidence for the evangelist's excesses, so critics of revivalism in America rifled through his published journals for the ammunition so amply supplied there. Whitefield, for his part, repeatedly and needlessly alienated those who stopped short of uncritical adulation and applause. And although he eventually moderated his censorious tone (and even more important, stopped publishing his journals), damage was done to the evangelical cause on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. Whitefield also damaged his relationship with the Wesleys by publishing an attack in 1741 upon the Arminianism evident in John Wesley's sermon "Free Grace."
Still, by the thousands the people came to hear and to believe, in Ireland, Scotland, Wales, and England as well as throughout the American colonies. For an entire generation Whitefield not only created an evangelical Atlantic community, he embodied it. Any pious project that required broad support found George Whitefield either assisting or directing the effort. He raised funds for Princeton University, helped Dartmouth emerge as a school open to Native Americans, promoted union in England among Calvinist Methodists, pleaded for more support of the Bethesda (Georgia) orphanage, took up collections for victims of natural disasters in Europe or elsewhere, and sustained the hopes of hundreds of thousands that a great and sweeping revival of piety would enliven and awaken all of Christendom.
In 1770 Whitefield made his seventh and final trip to America. After preaching on Saturday, September 29, to an impromptu crowd gathered in the fields of Exeter, New Hampshire, he urged his horse on to Newburyport, Massachusetts. The next morning at six o'clock, he died. He lies buried beneath the pulpit in the town's Presbyterian church.
Bibliography
Two recent scholarly biographies elevate Whitefield studies to a higher plauteau: Harry S. Stout, The Divine Dramatist: George Whitefield and the Rise of Modern Evangelicalism (Grand Rapids, Mich., 1991); and Frank Lambert, Pedlar in Divinity: George Whitefield and the Transatlantic Revivals, 1737–1770 (Princeton, N. J., 1994).
This is the complete article, containing 836 words
(approx. 3 pages at 300 words per page).
