Dr. Nathan Busenitz · The Master's Seminary · 69 minutes
Lecture by Dr. Nathan Busenitz, from The Master's Seminary's public channel. Study notes below from Medina Community Church.
Two hundred years after the Reformation, England needed reviving again, and God answered not with a new method but with the old word preached in the open air. This lecture follows George Whitefield and John and Charles Wesley from the Holy Club at Oxford, where three unconverted men strained to earn heaven, through their conversions, to fields where tens of thousands gathered to hear the new birth proclaimed. It ends with the sorrow of the revival's split over Calvinism, and the lesson Whitefield leaves about disagreeing without antagonism.
The early 1700s church was marked by worldly clergy who cared more for philosophy, science, and recreation than for souls, the fruit of a state church soaked in Enlightenment thinking. Citing Haykin's biography of Whitefield, the lecture lists decayed ministerial authority, an intellectual assault on supernatural Christianity, spreading luxury, youthful indifference, and open immorality. The Christian life had been reduced to a moral life of good works, an incipient form of the liberalism Schleiermacher would later systematize.
The Reformation was not human ingenuity but the recovery of Scripture in the people's language, and the coming Awakening will be the same. The lecture presses the point pastorally: church history settles in the soul that the only true catalyst of revival is the preaching of the word, that faithfulness, not numbers, is the measure of success, and that Jeremiah was faithful a lifetime with no converts.
John Wesley was born in 1703 in Epworth, fifteenth of nineteen children of an Anglican minister; at about five he was pulled from the burning rectory and ever after believed God had set him apart for ministry, though by his own testimony he was not yet converted. Charles came four years later. George Whitefield, more than a decade younger, was born poor in 1714, lost his father at two, and worked his way through Oxford as a servitor running errands for wealthier students.
At Oxford the Wesleys founded a club of a dozen earnest students striving to please God by disciplined living, and mocking classmates dubbed them Methodists for their methods. Like Luther in the monastery, they pursued holiness without new hearts. Whitefield joined in 1733 and disciplined himself so severely in pursuit of salvation that his health suffered for life.
Charles Wesley lent Whitefield a book, Henry Scougal's The Life of God in the Soul of Man, and through it, Whitefield testified, God showed him he must be born again or be damned: external actions cannot change the heart. In 1735, after long soul-struggle, Whitefield became the first of the Methodists truly converted, and Haykin compares his conversion's kindling role in the Evangelical Revival to Luther's in the Reformation.
Still unconverted, the Wesleys sailed in 1735 as missionaries to Georgia. There John courted Sophy Hopkey, decided the question of marriage by drawing lots, lost her to another man, then barred her from communion; her husband's defamation suit sent Wesley fleeing home. The lecture flags the lots as poor decision-making and the episode as the first of several sad romantic chapters in Wesley's story, but God used the retreat: Moravians shared his ship back to England.
On May 24, 1738, at a Moravian meeting where Luther's preface to Romans was being read, John Wesley felt his heart strangely warmed and ever after dated his conversion to that evening; Charles had found peace with God three days earlier. The Moravian thread runs from Hus through the Pietists and Zinzendorf to this room in London: inward transformation, not creedal assent, pressed home at last on two men who had crossed an ocean trying to earn it.
Charles Wesley's great contribution was some six thousand hymns. O For a Thousand Tongues to Sing was written on the first anniversary of his conversion, and And Can It Be, describing a salvation in which God did everything, is, the lecture notes with a smile, one of the most Calvinistic hymns in the hymnal, written by an Arminian.
Whitefield broke the Anglican parish mold by preaching outdoors to whoever would come, nobles and laborers together, in crowds reported up to thirty thousand without amplification. Benjamin Franklin, skeptical of such numbers, paced away from Whitefield preaching in Philadelphia, computed the semicircle at two square feet a listener, and concluded the reports were true; he also joked that he left his money home lest Whitefield's preaching empty his pockets. Wesley followed Whitefield outdoors, declaring the whole world his parish, and itinerant evangelism became Methodism's signature.
Whitefield made seven trips to the American colonies, thirteen ocean crossings in all, dying in New England on the last. Sarah Edwards described his melodious voice and heart aglow with love, and said many in Northampton dated new life from his preaching. Few of his sermons survive; his extemporaneous style left little on paper. His Calvinism fueled rather than froze his evangelism: God has his elect everywhere, and it was Whitefield's joy to go find them, the pattern of Romans 9 beside Romans 10.
Wesley retained his high-Anglican Arminianism through conversion, and while Whitefield was in America in 1739 he published Free Grace, a sermon against election from Romans 8:32. Whitefield's replies pressed the contradictions, crying up perfection while denying perseverance, and warned that making salvation depend on free will rather than free grace would leave Christ without the fruit of his death in a single soul. By 1741 separation was inevitable: Calvinistic Methodism, surviving in Wales, and Wesleyan Arminian Methodism, the first Arminian evangelicalism in British history.
Yet Whitefield's personal affection for the Wesleys held to the end, and the lecture draws Murray's lesson: error must be opposed, even in fellow believers, but opposition that cannot coexist with love for the saints neither glorifies God nor edifies the church. The two men were united on the first-order truths of the gospel while unable to share a platform on second-order soteriology, a tension the church still navigates today.
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Key TermsTap an answer. A wrong guess points you back to the outline; when all fourteen are right, the lecture is marked complete on this device.
1. Haykin's summary of early 1700s England, quoted in the lecture, describes
2. The lecture's pastoral thesis is that the only true catalyst of revival is
3. The name Methodist began as
4. The book that showed Whitefield he must be born again or be damned was
5. John Wesley's courtship of Sophy Hopkey ended with
6. At his conversion on May 24, 1738, John Wesley was listening to
7. Charles Wesley wrote O For a Thousand Tongues to Sing
8. Benjamin Franklin's experiment in Philadelphia
9. Whitefield's Calvinism functioned in his ministry as
10. The lecture pairs which two chapters as sovereignty beside evangelism in Paul?
11. Wesley's sermon Free Grace, from Romans 8:32,
12. Whitefield warned Wesley that grounding salvation in free will rather than free grace would mean
13. The division of the revival produced
14. Murray's closing lesson from Whitefield is that
All fourteen correct. Lecture 16 is complete.
Whitefield, like Luther, nearly destroyed his health trying to earn what only grace could give. Where do people, including believers, still confuse discipline with regeneration?
Whitefield said his Calvinism sent him hunting for God's elect across two continents. How does confidence in God's sovereignty practically change the way you share the gospel?
Whitefield and Wesley could no longer minister together, yet kept their affection to the end. What would it look like to hold a real doctrinal line with someone you love?
He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, how will he not also with him graciously give us all things?
The lecture draws on Michael Haykin's The Revived Puritan and Iain Murray's account of the Whitefield-Wesley division; Scougal's The Life of God in the Soul of Man remains the little book God used to convert Whitefield.