Dr. Nathan Busenitz · The Master's Seminary · 61 minutes
Lecture by Dr. Nathan Busenitz, from The Master's Seminary's public channel. Study notes below from Medina Community Church.
This lecture finishes the story of the Evangelical Revival by weighing its two great figures honestly. John Wesley's doctrine of Christian perfection would echo for centuries, through the Holiness movement all the way to Pentecostalism, and his broken marriage stands as a sober warning to anyone in ministry. George Whitefield preached eighteen thousand sermons, crossed the ocean thirteen times, and died the morning after his final sermon. Both men, for all their differences, were men of one book, and the lecture ends where the whole course keeps ending: with the authority of Scripture and the gospel it contains.
The revival ran on nothing but the biblical gospel preached and the Spirit working: no manipulation, no orchestration, no engineered decisions. The lecture contrasts this with the decisionism that will arrive with Charles Finney after the Second Great Awakening, where crowds respond and five-year follow-ups find little fruit, and repeats the standing thesis: numbers are the world's measure of success; faithfulness is God's, as Hebrews 11 measures the saints.
Whitefield and Wesley were ordained Anglicans who burst the parish system, and Methodism grew from an Anglican offshoot into its own denomination. Looking ahead, the lecture names the big three of American Protestant history: the Methodists, the Baptists, and the Presbyterian-Congregational stream descending from the Puritans.
Wesley taught that a Christian could reach a state, often through a crisis experience he called the second blessing, in which the believer no longer willfully sins. He denied teaching sinless perfection, yet, as Haykin shows, described the blessing as sin separated from the soul and full deliverance from evil thoughts and tempers, and, curiously, never claimed the experience himself. Whitefield had already pressed the inconsistency: how can one cry up perfection while teaching that salvation can be lost?
Wesley's successor John Fletcher renamed the second blessing the baptism of the Holy Spirit, and that language shaped the transatlantic Holiness movement, Keswick deeper-life theology, and the carnal-Christian, non-lordship thinking of later centuries. In 1901 in Topeka, Kansas, the Holiness preacher Charles Parham tied the baptism of the Spirit to speaking in tongues, and Pentecostalism was born. The lesson the lecture draws: aberrant ideas, half-formed in one generation, can grow worse in the next.
After conversion, the Wesleys' emphasis shifted from external discipline to the new birth. John's sermon The Almost Christian presses the very lesson of his own Holy Club years: a person can do everything right outwardly and remain unregenerate, a Pharisee rather than a Christian, until God changes the heart.
Wesley's romantic history darkens his story. His brother Charles intervened to end John's hoped-for marriage to Grace Murray, arranging her marriage to another, and John's anguished letters mourn the loss at the hands of his own familiar friend. In 1751 John married the widow Mary Vazeille; the marriage failed within a few years, they separated in 1755, and they remained apart for the rest of his ministry.
The lecture declines to assign blame it cannot verify, but draws the lesson plainly, with Ephesians 5 in view: a minister must care for his wife as Christ cares for the church, for you can lose your ministry and keep your marriage, but you cannot lose your marriage and keep your ministry. God used Wesley mightily in spite of this wound in his legacy; no one should aspire to repeat it.
In 1769 Whitefield made his seventh voyage to the colonies, his thirteenth crossing, and stayed. Preaching as his failing body allowed, he delivered a final sermon in New Hampshire in September 1770 and went home to heaven the next morning. The lecture notes the pattern, Calvin carried to his pulpit, Luther preaching days before death: retirement from ministry is an American idea, not a church-history one. John Wesley, still his brother despite their division, preached the memorial in England to six thousand mourners.
Roughly eighteen thousand sermons, only seventy-eight published; fifteen journeys to Scotland, two to Ireland, visits to Bermuda, Gibraltar, and the Netherlands; the best-known preacher of his century and, before Washington, perhaps the most recognizable figure in the American colonies. Dallimore credits him with teaching the evangelical world a new manner of preaching, zealous, direct, applied, that dominated Protestant pulpits for a century, with holding the fundamentals of the faith, and with pioneering nearly every enterprise of the revival: open-air preaching, lay preachers, the magazine, the association, the conference. Known in his lifetime as the founder of Methodism, he relinquished leadership of its Calvinistic branch to serve as, in his phrase, the servant of all.
Wesley was Methodism's great organizer, which is why his Arminian branch became the worldwide movement, some seventy million Methodists today, though most of the denomination went liberal in the twentieth century. Francis Asbury carried Methodism across America from 1771, logging over three hundred thousand miles on horseback; from five thousand American Methodists in 1776 the movement became the young nation's fastest growing. Wesley's Arminian Magazine, founded 1778, wore its soteriology in its title. Charles died in 1788, John in 1791.
The lecture borrows Chilcote's six headings, correcting their shallowness where needed: wholehearted commitment; orthodoxy as right praise, embodied in Charles' six thousand hymns; disciplined spirituality framed by daily prayer; mission, with O For a Thousand Tongues as a manifesto; order, the genius that turned revival into a movement; and above all Scripture. Wesley called himself a man of one book, and the Wesleyan revival was, at bottom, a rediscovery of the Bible.
The closing word gathers the whole unit: what marks Whitefield and the Wesleys is what marked Luther, Zwingli, Calvin, Knox, and the Puritans, the lordship of Christ, the authority of his word, and the gospel found in that word. The solas were not invented in the sixteenth century; they were rediscovered there, and every generation that hopes for revival must rediscover them again.
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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. The lecture contrasts the Evangelical Revival with later revivalism by noting that Whitefield and Wesley
2. Wesley's doctrine of Christian perfection taught that
3. John Fletcher's contribution to the perfectionist stream was
4. The lecture traces Pentecostalism's birth to
5. Wesley's sermon The Almost Christian warns that
6. John Wesley's marriage to Mary Vazeille
7. The lecture's ministerial warning drawn from Wesley's story is that
8. Whitefield's death came
9. Whitefield's memorial in England was preached by
10. Of Whitefield's roughly eighteen thousand sermons,
11. Dallimore notes that although Whitefield was known in his lifetime as the founder of Methodism, he
12. Wesleyan Methodism became the dominant worldwide branch largely because
13. Francis Asbury is remembered for
14. Wesley described himself as
All fourteen correct. Lecture 17 is complete.
Wesley's perfectionism, half-formed in his own teaching, grew into whole movements after him. What responsibility does a teacher bear for where an idea travels after it leaves his hands?
Whitefield relinquished leadership of his own branch of the movement to be the servant of all. Where is that kind of relinquishment hardest, and most needed, in ministry today?
Both men are commended finally as men of one book. What would have to change for that description to fit your own week?
Hebrews 11 commends the saints of old not for their visible success but for their faith, by which, though dead, they still speak.
The lecture draws on Haykin's The Revived Puritan, Dallimore's biography of Whitefield, and Chilcote on the Wesleys; Wesley's sermon The Almost Christian and Charles Wesley's hymns remain the movement's most accessible primary sources.