George Whitefield Tercentenary Essays

The tercentenary of George Whitefield's birth in 2014 has stimulated an energetic scholarly reassessment by historians of religion and culture of the eighteenth-century evangelist and his remarkable transatlantic ministry. Whitefield was nothing less, as the editors here remark, than ‘a phenomenon’ (1). The international ‘Whitefield at 300’ conference at Pembroke College, Oxford—his alma mater—resulted in a ground-breaking volume of sixteen substantial essays, George Whitefield: Life, Context, and Legacy, edited by Geordan Hammond and David Ceri Jones (Oxford University Press, 2016). But over forty papers were presented at the conference and there have been several other spin-offs, including recent contributions to Wesley and Methodist Studies. Six additional papers are published in this special journal issue. Kenneth Roxburgh examines Whitefield's connection with the Cambuslang revival near Glasgow. Simon Lewis shows that Whitefield's Anglican critics frequently portrayed him as a ‘seditious crypto-papist’ (17), a standard polemical strategy. Grayson Ditchfield explains the disdain of Latitudinarian Churchmen for the early Methodist enthusiasts, whose Calvinistic doctrines and theatrical preaching was in stark contrast to the ‘calm rationality’ (35) of Archbishop Tillotson and his successors. The Latitudinarians remained always suspicious of evangelical dogma and ‘heart religion’. Peter Forsaith surveys portraiture of the eighteenth-century clergy, suggesting that Whitefield was ‘a caricaturist's dream’ who attracted plenty of ‘satirical abuse’ (57, 59) because of his famous squint and his eccentric style. A major lacuna in the literature is a proper critical edition of Whitefield's multitudinous journals, one of the chief ways in which he communicated with his adoring public. The standard 1905 edition by William Wale leaves a great deal to be desired, and Digby James has begun the task of producing a more reliable version. Here James hints at a few of his initial findings. In the final chapter, Maximilian Hölzl demonstrates that recent German theologians acknowledge Whitefield as the pioneer of modern evangelism. Overall these six essays are brief and eclectic, containing first thoughts rather than clear conclusions. They inevitably lack the range and depth of the recent OUP volume. Nevertheless it is good to have them in print as further welcome fruit of the burgeoning of Whitefield Studies.

Récupéré en direct depuis OpenAlex et désinversé. Les résumés ne sont pas conservés dans cette base de données : les index inversés représentent 8,6 Go des 9,3 Go de texte de la base, et le serveur dispose de 13 Go libres.