Whitefield (Dallimore) - Introductory Material Since it had been a year since I last read in this excellent biography, and I couldn't find where I had blogged through what I have already read, I decided to start over.

Introductory Material

On Knowing Whitefield

• "There are few men whose characters have suffered so much from misrepresentation and ignorance as George Whitefield!" (p6)
• One problem is that he only journaled for three years of his ministry and then refused--just as he refused to start a church with his name on it saying "Let the name of Whitefield perish, but Christ be glorified!" (p7)
• Some measure him by those three journaled years, even though "the man of later years [was] humbly apologetic for his earlier errors" (p7)
• Whitefield used of God to bring worldwide revival--the revivals on both sides of the Atlantic not disconnected but one (therefore Dallimore prefers the term The Eighteenth-Century Revival to any localizing terms
• Dallimore uses "source materials not heretofore used" (p15) and makes known "not only his accomplishments and abilities, but also his foibles and mistakes" (p15) of which he actually laments that there are so few that he might appear biased in his writing (!)
• The aim of the book is that God would use it to shape a generation of young preachers through whom He would bring another like revival... Men mighty in the Scriptures, their lives dominated by a sense of the greatness, the majesty and holiness of God, and their minds and hearts aglow with the great truths of the doctrines of grace.  They will be men who have learned what it is to die to self, to human aims and personal ambitions; men who are willing to be 'fools for Christ's sake', who will bear reproach and falsehood, who will labour and suffer, and whose supreme desire will be, not to gain earth's accolades, but to win the Master's approbation when they appear before His awesome judgment seat.  They will be men who will preach with broken hearts and tear-filled eyes, and upon whose ministries God will grant an extraordinary effusion of the Holy Spirit (p16)

 Spiritual and Moral Conditions in England before the Revival

• The rejection of Puritanism had plunged the nation into godless immorality (p19)
• Deists had conducted "a vigorous warfare against supernatural religion--Biblical Christianity," attacking especially the idea of the Bible as God's Word (p20) with (my observation) many of the same arguments as 19th century theological liberalism and 20th century secular humanism
• "Professional" clergy who desired the praise of the world and the pleasure of sin had given in to Deism quite readily (p22)
• "Every sixth house in London had become a gin shop and the nation was in an uncontrollable orgy of gin drinking" (p25)
• "It was among a people broken by gin that Whitefield and the Wesleys went about" (p25)
• This immorality had destroyed the vast majority of society into a diseased, wretched mass (pp26-27)
• Though there had been small awakenings and attempts to minister, including hospitals, prison condition improvement, charity schools, societies against immorality, and societies for promoting Christian knowledge (pp28-30); yet, "there was no noticeable improvement in the moral and religious state of the nation" (pp30-31)
• It was into this context that Whitefield first preached

Next week, God-willing, we'll pick up with Part 1, Chapter 1

Labels: Book Recommendations and Reviews, Timeless Tuesday (History), Whitefield (Dallimore)

  ¶ 8:34 PM