THE LIFE AND TIMES OF GEORGE WHITEFIELD
By Robert Philip
Banner of Truth. 588 pages
ISBN 978-0-85151-960-9
Who needs a re-issue of this effusive old biography when so much more has been researched and published in the 170 years since it appeared?
That, I confess, was my first reaction. But within the first 20 pages I was hooked; from which point it took over from all my other reading, whether armchair, bus, train or bed. It helps to know the basics of the 18th-century evangelical revival. With neither footnotes nor index, many names or movements will faze the casual reader. ‘Neither Whitefield nor Wesley appears to have understood Calvinism, when they began to preach, the one for and the other against it.’ But to Philip, this division was a blessing in disguise, bringing wider fruitfulness. Some disguise! — but it is Whitefield who characteristically apologises, shuns needless confrontation, and longs to heal the breach. We read much from his own lips and pen, public and private.
We learn little about his biographer, except from the way he writes, notably in digression. His view of slavery is ours, not Whitefield’s; he is ashamed of but realistic about his hero’s blind spots, offering much commonsense about the USA, Scotland, Portugal, John Cennick, episcopacy, liturgy, the stage, and army chaplains. No reader can avoid the Holy Spirit’s role in the preacher’s heart, habits and homiletics: ‘Alas for the man, and especially the minister, who can read the bursts and outpourings of George Whitefield’s heart [and Robert Philip’s], without shame, and without feeling his own heart burn to share them.’
The publishers cannot have anticipated Whitefield’s relevance to another current question: what is there in Oxford University’s DNA which repeatedly drives it first to cradle the gospel, then abandon it?
Christopher Idle,
who has edited and abridged the Journals of John Wesley
