Ownership (eBook)

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Three Men Who
Would Change
the World

JONATHAN EDWARDS, GEORGE WHITEFIELD, and John Wesley together provided the foundation of American evangelical Christianity. Consider the highly regarded recent five-volume A History of Evangelicalism, of which the first volume is subtitled “The Age of Edwards, Whitefield, and the Wesleys.”1 A thorough discussion of American Christianity, modern British Christianity, and even modern world Christianity requires an examination of these three figures.2 These men share many similarities, and their stories are interwoven, even as they’re also quite different from each other. As this book unfolds, you will see how we must understand all three men together to make sense of slavery and evangelical Christianity in the eighteenth century—and to make better sense of Christianity today.

These three men lived in the same era. In fact, John Wesley was born just 99 days before Jonathan Edwards. While the Atlantic Ocean separated them—except for a brief chapter—the fact that they were born in the same year gives us a plumb line to compare their lives, their influences, their reactions to events in the Atlantic world, and the interactions between England, colonial America, and beyond. We can imagine George Whitefield as Wesley and Edwards’s little brother since he was born eleven years after them, in 1714. These three men lived in a dynamic time that is the foundation for all of evangelical Christianity.

A second similarity shared by these three men is their focus. The ministerial focus of all three of these men was clear: conversion. For them, conversion—the evidence of the new birth and of eternal salvation—is the experience through which every genuine Christian must pass; conversion was the “one thing needful.”3 Historian Thomas Kidd writes, “[the] distinctive belief of evangelicals is that the key moment in an individual’s salvation is the ‘new birth.’”4 Their focus on the individualistic experience of the new birth, generally opposed to a more passive cultural Christianity, is the foundational doctrine that links them and the early evangelical movement together.

A third similarity among these men is their direct and extended relational networks. John Wesley met George Whitefield when Whitefield arrived at Oxford in 1734 and joined the Holy Club. George Whitefield met Jonathan Edwards on Whitefield’s second preaching tour across colonial America in 1740. Wesley and Edwards never met face-to-face, yet they read each other’s writings, and Wesley even edited and republished five of Edwards’s works. (Wesley’s assessment of Edwards was dire. Wesley warned that in Edwards’s work “much wholesome food is mixt with much deadly poison.”5) Wesley and Whitefield remained in frequent communication until Whitefield’s death. Wesley preached Whitefield’s funeral eulogy—near the climax of Wesley’s thoughts on slavery, as we will see. Whitefield and Edwards would meet face-to-face a second time, and their ministries brushed shoulders frequently.

Beyond their direct relationships, the networks around these three men formed a “who’s who” of early evangelicalism. In recent years, scholars attempting to define evangelicalism have fought for firm criteria. Scholars of early evangelicalism usually start with David Bebbington’s quadrilateral of conversion, activism, crucicentrism, and biblicism. Scholars of recent evangelicalism typically highlight the highly political nature of American evangelicalism beginning around 1980 and the fracturing of evangelicalism regarding race; modern politically charged American evangelicalism shares little affinity with the theological and spiritual foundations of early evangelicalism. The relational origins of evangelicalism provide another approach to understanding evangelicalism. Scholar Timothy Larsen explains that an evangelical is one “who stands in the tradition of the global Christian networks arising from the eighteenth-century revival movements associated with John Wesley and George Whitefield.”6

Apart from their many similarities, these three men each possessed unique gifts—among the most impressive in the entire history of Christianity. Wesley was one of the most effective organizers the church has ever seen. Edwards is among the most powerful Christian thinkers, theologians, and philosophers. Whitefield preached as powerfully and passionately as anyone. Wesley and Whitefield were ministers of the Church of England; Edwards was a Congregationalist. Edwards and Whitefield were Calvinistic in their theology; Wesley was an Arminian. Edwards and Wesley spent most of their lives on their respective home continents; Whitefield made thirteen transatlantic trips.

The popular relevance of each man has waxed and waned over the centuries. Whitefield owned the eighteenth century with his dynamic preaching, boundary-pushing ministry, and celebrity status. Wesley had a significant influence during his lifetime, but nothing compared to the explosive growth and influence of Methodism, the movement birthed out of his ministry, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. And the influence of Edwards has been on the rise in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries in a way that was hidden earlier.

John Wesley was the first one born and the last one to die among them. His life spans Whitefield’s and Edwards’s—by a lot. Wesley’s life is a lens through which we see how White British and American evangelical Christians in the eighteenth century thought about and engaged in slavery. It is with his story that we will begin. As you read the rest of the chapter, look for the formative influences these men were born into and accepted along the way as we seek to understand and own the evangelical legacy of slavery and how it eventually changed.