Whitefield was bullied as a Gloucester youth, a lover of the theater, and servitor at Oxford who found experiential religion while at the University. Boyd Stanley Schlenther – author of a groundbreaking book on another eighteenth-century Evangelical luminary, Selina Countess of Huntingdon – begins the book with an account of Whitefield’s character, complexities and all. I will not have space aptly to describe each of the sixteen chapters, but I will highlight aspects of the larger work. The book, composed of chapters from various American and British authors including its editors, Hammond and Ceri Jones, will serve as a vital introduction to the life of Whitefield, the context in which his own trans-Atlantic ministry took place, and the legacy that he left in Methodism and in the broader Evangelical context. George Whitefield is a superb addition to the field of Evangelical Studies and early Methodism and a reminder of the common Evangelical heritage that Wesleyans share with their Evangelical brothers and sisters in the broader movement. Various streams of the Evangelical Revival have held to differing historiographical approaches, sometimes built upon theological debates of the eighteenth century that continue to be divisive to the present day. This renewed interest hasn’t been without its challenges, as noted by Geordan Hammond and David Ceri Jones in the Introduction of their new book, George Whitefield. But challenges to the Wesley-centric view have also come from revived interest in other major figures within early Evangelicalism itself, including George Whitefield.
Rather, the Revival was a trans-Atlantic movement that spanned, as David Hempton notes, “from the Alps to the Appalachians.” Wesley couldn’t possibly be the center of such a multifaceted trans-continental event. Reginald Ward, John Walsh, Steve O’Malley, etc.) that has shown that the Evangelical Revival did not start in England. The challenge comes in part from scholarship (W. This lofty view of the founder of Wesleyan Methodism – there were many forms of Methodism from the beginning – has in recent years been challenged. We come to this naturally, much of it from Wesley’s own hand. As many Wesleyans tell the story of the eighteenth-century Evangelical Revival, John Wesley was the permanent fixture at its center.
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