George Whitefield—The Anglican Evangelist -- By: Lee Gatiss

Journal: Southern Baptist Journal of Theology
Volume: SBJT 18:2 (Summer 2014)
Article: George Whitefield—The Anglican Evangelist
Author: Lee Gatiss


George Whitefield—The Anglican Evangelist

Lee Gatiss

Lee Gatiss is the Director of Church Society, an Anglican Evangelical ministry based in the United Kingdom, and Adjunct Lecturer in Church History at Wales Evangelical School of Theology. He has studied history and theology at Oxford, Cambridge, and Westminster Theological Seminary, and trained for ministry at Oak Hill Theological College in London. Having served churches in Oxford, Kettering, and London, he is also the author of many books and articles on theology, biblical interpretation, and church history, and has a Ph.D. on the Hebrews commentary of John Owen. He is the Editor of the NIV Proclamation Bible (Hodder & Stoughton) and the new two-volume edition of The Sermons of George Whitefield (Crossway).

It is wonderful this year to be celebrating the 300th birthday of the great English evangelist, George Whitefield. Whitefield is remembered as a great evangelical. By those who (somewhat mistakenly) consider evangelical religion to have begun only in the 1730s, he is hailed as a founding father of evangelicalism.1

His name has been honored and kept alive in recent years by evangelical Baptists and Presbyterians, but he has been strangely undervalued by those in the Church of England itself. Furthermore, his identity as an Anglican has, therefore, been somewhat obscured.

Positively Anglican

Yet Whitefield himself would have identified his churchmanship as classically, positively, “Anglican.” As Jim Packer puts it, “like all England’s evangelical clergy then and since, Whitefield insisted that the religion he modelled and taught was a straightforward application of Anglican doctrine as defined in the Articles, the Homilies and the Prayer Book.”2 Or as Arnold Dallimore

put it, “He preached nothing but the basic doctrines of the Church of England; in glowing contrast to the majority of the clergy.”3

Reading through Whitefield’s works we can easily observe this confessional slant to his ministry. Here we find quotations from the Thirty-nine Articles of Religion, especially where they touch on the doctrines of justification, predestination, original sin, and the place of good works. There are also many allusions to liturgical texts from the Book of Common Prayer, which Whitefield considered to embody the theology of the Articles and indeed of the Bible itself. It was “one of the most excellent forms of public prayer in the world,” he said.

visitor : : uid: ()