Great Christian Biographies with John Piper: George Whitefield 1

Would you pray with me? Father in heaven, we want so much now to be strengthened in our pastoral labors and our evangelistic labors in our families and in our own souls, our worship of Christ and our obedience to him.

And so be pleased to let Whitfield speak and let his life speak again.

He was so mighty in the Word and mighty in the Spirit and by biography he lives on and we praise you for that.

He was a sinner, regenerated and justified and now completely pure in his soul, one day to be raised from the dead all by grace.

And I pray that we would learn from him and be helped by him in Jesus name.

Amen. Just so that you don't feel any pressure to write anything down if it's a juicy

Whitfield quote, this manuscript will be online, I think, before I'm done here with its 89 footnotes.

So don't feel the need to write anything down because I'm sure it's all here and you can just relax, think, pray, ask the

Lord to sanctify this word to you personally rather than trying to record anything since you just go to your computer and get it all afterwards.

The facts about Whitfield's life as a 18th century itinerant

Anglican evangelist from the beginning of his ministry until the end are almost unbelievable.

I mean, can they really be true? And all

I know to say is that multiple attestations of his life from those who knew him and the agreement of biographers who don't like him and do like him, all of that seems to say these things are so.

As incredible as they are. So, let me try to paint a picture of that unbelievable life and then we'll tackle a few things about him.

From his first outdoor sermon on February 17, 1739 at the age of 24 to those coal miners in Kingswood near Bristol in England until his death 30 years later in Newburyport, Massachusetts, where he's buried.

That was 1770, September 30. Between those two times separated by about 30 years, he preached almost daily.

It's estimated that he preached 18 ,000 sermons and if you count the exhortations and the meditations that he gave verbally, the sober estimates are that he spoke about a thousand times every year for 30 years.

So, do the math. The daily pace that he kept for 30 years and many of those weeks speaking more than he was sleeping.

Henry Venn, the vicar of Huddersfield, who knew him well, expressed this amazement for all of us.

He said, Who would think it possible that a person should speak in the compass of a single week and that for years in general 40 hours and in very many 60 and that to thousands and after this labor instead of taking any rest, should be offering up prayers and intercessions with hymns and spiritual songs as his manner was in every house to which he was invited.

Now be sure that you understood what I just read. Many weeks speaking, not preparing to speak, which he had no time to do, but speaking, saying things 60.

That's 6 -0 not one -sixth. 60 hours a week, many weeks of his life and in the slower weeks, 40 hours of speaking.

So, 6 hours a day, 7 days a week, one week, and 8 hours a day, 7 days a week, another week.

That's general. That's not believable unless you get enough biographers and enough contemporary witnesses saying that.

I found in all my reading for the last year no references to what we would call vacations or days off.

When he felt the need to recuperate, he thought in terms of an ocean voyage to America.

Those ocean voyages took about 8 to 10 weeks. He made 13 of them.

It's an odd number because he died in the States and on those trips, he preached every day and that was a relief because once a day was modest and he had time to read and be refreshed.

But on land, the pace was unremitting. Two years before he died, at the age of 55, not a surprise, he wrote in a letter,

I love the bracing open air. The following year, it is good to go into the highways and hedges, feel preaching, feel preaching forever.

Day after day, his life was one preaching, preaching, preaching.

Now keep in mind when it says 60 hours or 40 hours of preaching, a week that he was talking without a microphone to thousands of people out of doors usually with the wind and the competing noises.

This is not believable. A body can't do that. I mean,

I'm an absolute wimp standing here with this ridiculous little gizmo assisting me in a tiny little room like this with only 1 ,500 people instead of outside with 8 ,000 or 10 ,000 or 20 ,000.

The energy it would take to project your voice, these things seem to me unbelievable.

Wednesday, April 6, 1740, he's on Society Hill in Philadelphia, and he says he spoke twice in the morning to 6 ,000 people and in the evening to 8 ,000 and on Thursday the next day upwards of 10 ,000 gathered and it is reported that when he opened his mouth and used these words of Jesus, he opened his mouth and taught them saying it was distinctly heard at Gloucester Point two miles away down the

Delaware River. And there are times when the crowd was 20 ,000, not 10 or 8 or 6.

Every sermon over and over for 30 years, a thousand times a year, this is a

Herculean task. There's never anything like it.

Now add to this that he was continually traveling in a day when you had to go by horse or carriage or on a ship.

He covered the length and breadth of England over and over again. He traveled to Wales regularly.

He made two visits to Ireland, was stoned there, carried a scar in his forehead the rest of his life because of the mob violence in Ireland.

Fourteen visits to Scotland, seven to America, Bermuda for 11 weeks, not for a vacation, but daily preaching.

Every major town on the American seaboard. Michael Hakin reminds us what is so remarkable about all this is

Whitfield lived at a time when traveled to a town 20 miles away was a significant undertaking.

He was J .C. Ryle, I think is accurate, eminently a man of one thing and always about his master's business.

Quote, from Sunday morning to Saturday night, from January 1 to December 31, accepting when laid aside by illness, he was almost incessantly preaching

Christ, going about the world and treating men to repent and come to Christ and be saved.

Or as another biographer said, his whole life may be said to have been consumed in the delivery of one continuous or scarcely interrupted sermon.

He was a phenomenon of his age and I think probably not of his age only, but of the entire history of Christian preaching for 2 ,000 years.

There has been nothing like the combination of preaching pace, geographic extent, auditory scope, attention -holding effect, converting power, nothing like it in the history of the world.

No preacher, Ryle says, has ever retained his hold on his hearers so entirely as he did for 34 years.

His popularity never waned. Augustus Toplady called him the apostle of the

English Empire. He was, quote, Anglo -America's most popular 18th century preacher and its first truly mass revivalist.

Estimates are, get this, this is adding incredibility to incredibility.

The estimates are that in America, which he came to love more than he loved his England, he would have sided with the revolutionaries had it come to that.

He loved this land. The ethos fit him better than England. He was a modern communicator.

It's estimated that four -fifths of the entire population of the

American colonies heard Whitfield at least once. So he got no radio, no internet, no television, and they all stood in his presence.

Four -fifths of the population of the country in those days, sometime during the ministries that he had in his eight years that he spent in America.

So what should we make of this phenomenon? What was the key to his power?

At one level, he had natural powers that were unsurpassed.

He was naturally gifted in eloquence, and at another level, he had spiritual power from God to convert sinners and transform communities.

There's no reason to doubt that he was an instrument of God in the salvation of thousands.

J .C. Ryle said this, I believe that the direct good which he did to immortal souls was enormous.

I will go further. I believe it is incalculable. Credible witnesses in England, Scotland, and America have placed on record their conviction that he was the means of converting thousands of people.

So he had an anointing. He wasn't simply eloquent. There was something on him.

Jonathan Edwards could tell this. He wrote him a letter from his home in Northampton to Whitfield in Georgia in February of 1740, inviting him to come preach in his pulpit.

So on October 19, Whitfield recorded this in his journal. Preach this morning and good

Mr. Edwards wept during the whole time of the exercise, and the people were equally affected.

And the effect on the community there in Northampton was not momentary.

It wasn't just Edwards weeping in the pew. It was a lasting impact because Edwards said in about a month there was a great alteration in the town.

So the impact of Whitfield and Wesley and the Great Awakening in those days was profound.

There was a spiritual thing going on, not just an eloquent thing going on.

William Wilberforce, who led the battle, as you know, against the slave trade in England, was 11 years old when

Whitfield died. Wilberforce's father died when he was nine.

When he died, he went to live with his aunt and uncle William and Hannah Wilberforce for a couple of years.

William and Hannah Wilberforce were very close friends with Whitfield.

This was the spiritual air that Wilberforce breathed in even before he was converted.

And when you read the one book that Wilberforce wrote, you can smell

Whitfield everywhere because of the prominence of the doctrine of justification by faith in the very terms in which

Whitfield expressed it in the remaining sermons. There are only 57 sermons of Whitfield of the 18 ,000.

There are only 57 extant, except for 18 others, and those aren't in print.

So you can get to 57 today. Logos, and have them on your computer, and you've got everything there is to read of sermons.

The journals are still available. So there was a power in that moment in history coming through the

Westleys, coming through Edwards, coming through Whitfield, not just an eloquence.

Henry Vann said, Whitfield no sooner opened his mouth as a preacher than God commanded an extraordinary blessing upon his word.

So at that level, there is an explanation of this man in terms of the

Holy Spirit and the anointing of God to awaken sinners, bring conviction, bring conversion, bring transformation that would extend for a century of transformation in various people through various people in England.

However, there is another level. Whitfield held people in thrall who did not believe a single doctrinal word that he said.

So you know there's more going on here than mere anointing to convict for sin.

And we need to think about this. There were natural oratorical gifts that were remarkable.

And how are we to relate those two? How are we to think through what this man did, and how he spoke, and his personality, and what he was by nature, not just by super nature.

Benjamin Franklin, who loved and admired Whitfield and totally rejected his theology, said this, every accent, every emphasis, every modulation of voice was so perfectly well turned and well placed that within, that without being interested in the subject at all, one could not help being pleased with the discourse, a pleasure of much the same kind with that received from an excellent piece of music.

He loved to listen to Whitfield preach hell, heaven, regeneration, didn't believe any of it.

Virtually everybody agrees with Sarah Edwards. So she recounted after he came to Jonathan Edwards Church in Northampton, Sarah wrote to her brother to say what happened.

Everybody agrees with what she said. She said he is a born orator.

You have already heard, she's saying, you have already heard of his deep tone yet clear and melodious voice.

Oh, it is perfect music to listen to that alone. You remember that David Hume thought it worth going 20 miles to hear him speak, and Garrick, the actor who envied

Whitfield's gifts, said he could move men to tears in pronouncing the word

Mesopotamia. It is truly wonderful to see what a spell this preacher often casts over an audience by proclaiming the simplest truths of the

Bible. And then she raises the question that in the last 15 years of Whitfield scholarship has been very controversial, and I want to tackle it.

She said a prejudiced person, I know, might say this is all theatrical artifice and display, but not so will anyone think who has seen and known him.

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 the heart all aglow with love, and pours out a torrent of eloquence, which is almost irresistible.

Now, Harry Stout, professor of history at Yale, has written a book called

The Divine Dramatist, George Whitfield and the Rise of Modern Evangelicalism, which

I read very carefully all the way through, cover to cover. He's not so sure that Sarah Edwards is right about the purity of Whitfield's motives.

This book by Harry Stout, which you will not find in the bookstore because I told them not to carry it, so you can criticize me if you said you ought to have it there because Piper quotes from it.

This is the most sustained piece of historical cynicism

I have ever read. In the first hundred pages of Stout's book,

I wrote in the margin the word cynical 70 times, but having restrained myself tremendously at this point in being negative about this book,

I do think we need to come to terms with what he faced.

And if we face it head -on, I think we will find something deeper than Stout found.

Even asking his kind of question about drama, the

Divine Dramatist, I think we find something different than he found.

He says the key to understanding him is these are all quotes.

These are very pejorative, and they're all his. The amalgam of preaching and acting,

Whitfield was the consummate actor. The fame he sought was the actor's command performance on center stage.

Quote, Whitfield was not content simply to talk about the new birth. He had to sell it with all the dramatic artifice of a huckster.

That's the worst sentence in the book, I think. I'll read it again. Whitfield was not content simply to talk about the new birth.

He had to sell it with all the dramatic artifice of a huckster.

He should be ashamed of that sentence. He really should. And if you watch this, Harry Stout, you should be ashamed of that sentence.

Tears, this is continuing to quote him, Tears became

Whitfield's psychological gesture. Quote, Whitfield became an actor preacher as opposed to a scholar preacher.

So that gives you a flavor of what he's saying. Now, that last sentence is at one level,

I believe, true. Whitfield became an actor preacher as opposed to a scholar preacher.

He was an actor preacher as opposed to a scholar preacher. He was not a

Jonathan Edwards. He had a closer friendship with Benjamin Franklin, the deist, than he did with Jonathan Edwards, whose theology he totally agreed with.

They were wired so differently. If you look at the picture of his little traveling pulpit, it's like a little stage, not a pulpit, not like one of these or a wooden one.

It's a little platform where he could have all of his body free. His preaching was full of action.

Cornelius Winter, his assistant near the end of his life, said,

I hardly ever knew him go through a sermon without weeping. Sometimes he exceedingly wept, stamped loudly and passionately, and was frequently so overcome that for a few seconds you would suspect he never could recover.

And when he did, nature required some little time to compose himself.

So you get the picture. of how flamboyantly active and melodramatic or dramatic he was.

Another contemporary from Scotland, John Gillies, reported how Whitfield moved with such vehemence upon his bodily frame that his audience actually shared his exhaustion and felt a momentary apprehension for his life.

So I do not doubt that Whitfield was acting in one sense as he preached.

That is, he was taking the part of his characters in the drama of the sermon, pouring all of his energy into making their part real.

When he takes the part of Adam, for example, I got this from one of his sermons, in the garden, and says to God, if thou has given me this woman, if thou has not given me this woman,

I had not sinned against thee, so thou mayest thank thyself for this transgression.

That's pretty dramatic, telling God, thank yourself for my sin.

I am speaking to 8 ,000 people. That's pretty loud. How are you going to do that without energy?

But the question is, why was

Whitfield acting? Why was he so full of action and drama?

Was he, as Stout claims, and here comes a whole other sequence of pejorative cynical phrases, was he, as Stout claims, plying a religious trade, pursuing spiritual fame, craving, that's his word, respect and power, driven by egotism, putting on performances, integrating religious discourse into the emerging language of consumption.

Is that what's going on? I think the most penetrating answer is given by Whitfield himself as he talks about acting on the stage in London.

This is right at the core of my discovery and what I think makes him tick, so listen carefully for the next minute or so to this quote.

I think this is the key to understanding how his spiritual power and his natural power intersect and the meaning of his so -called acting in his preaching.

James Lockington was present at this sermon that I'm about to quote in London, and Whitfield is speaking, okay?

So what I'm about to read you, written down verbatim by this James Lockington, and is Whitfield's own reflection on acting.

I'll tell you a story. Picture him saying this to 3 ,000 people in London, maybe. I'll tell you a story.

The Archbishop of Canterbury in the year 1675 was acquainted with Mr.

Butterton, the actor. One day the archbishop said to Butterton, Pray, inform me,

Mr. Butterton, what is the reason you actors on the stage can affect your congregations with speaking of things imaginary as if they were real, while we in the church speak of things real, which our congregations only receive as if they were imaginary?

Why? My Lord, says Butterton, the reason is very plain. We actors on the stage speak of things imaginary as if they were real, and you in the pulpit speak of things real as if they were imaginary.

Therefore, added Whitfield, I will ball!