John Wesley in America by Geordan Hammond

Some of the descriptions of Whitefield’s life presented here are frankly profound: his attentiveness to the craft of preaching, his uncommonly active travel itinerary (totalling three full years spent at sea), his pastoral attentiveness to the forgotten people of the British Isles, and more. Here is a mosaic of Whitefield filled out with all the quirks of a human life. This kalaidoscopic Whitefield is more complex and far more compelling than the one of Whitefield’s own construction, presented in his autobiographical journals. The essays flow easily from one to the next to form a coherent whole, and together add up to a very captivating picture of Whitefield. In fact, for an edited multi-author work, it exhibits an unusually smooth structure. They planted the seed of Jones’ lecture in the soil of the conference where it germinated and is now bearing fruit. Jones’ lecture led to a conference commemorating the tercentenary of Whitefield’s birth, convened in Oxford in 2014 by Jones together with Geordan Hammond. Their relationship was mostly rich and robust, but also strained as a result of a theological disagreement: Whitefield was a Calvinist, Wesley was not.Ī recent work, George Whitefield: Life, Context, and Legacy (Oxford University Press, 2016) has its genesis in David Ceri Jones’ 2012 annual lecture for the Manchester Wesley Research Centre, in which he called for the usual pictures of Whitefield-either as the saintly evangelist or the diabolical Calvinist Methodist-to be revisited and redressed. It was Whitefield who convinced Wesley to try his hand at field preaching. This new volume of essays on George Whitefield offers such a vision of Christian life.Ī contemporary of John Wesley’s, Whitefield was one of the foremost Methodist evangelists of the Great Awakening. Some lives have been held up as examples of the faith-not necessarily because we imagine that we have witnessed in a particular life a perfect moral performance, but because we have seen a life that opens up to be completed in a way that it could never complete itself. Tales of faith and struggle come to invigorate our own experiences and reveal to us the possibilities of a life that is open-or closed!-to God’s grace.

Wesleyan theology centres on the Christian life, and we have always been attentive to the witness of testimony to illuminate our own lives. This is as true for Wesleyanism as it is for other Christian traditions. Christians have always wanted to know what it means for a life to be touched by grace.

John Wesley in America by Geordan Hammond