The Divine Dramatist: George Whitefield and the Rise of Modern Evangelicalism
Harry S. Stout,
William B. Eerdmans Company: Grand Rapids (1991),
301 pages

Dr. Harry Stout, the author of this work, is the John B. Madden Master of Berkley College and Professor of American religious history at Yale University.

One element in the book constitutes its chief value. It gives due prominence to a man who has long been sadly discounted by historians. It shows George Whitefield not only to have possessed unequalled powers as an orator, but to have been one of the foremost figures of the English-speaking world during his entire adult lifetime. This is true of the book throughout, but it is particularly evident in the chapters "An Uncommon Friendship"-Whitefield's association with Benjamin Franklin, and "American Icon," which declares his wholesale acceptance in the 13 Colonies. All who admire Whitefield and believe the gospel that he preached will rejoice in this emphasis.

Nonetheless, the chief message of this book is false. It appears in the title The Divine Dramatist, and continues on virtually every page. It makes it appear that Whitefield was a superb actor and that his evangelism was accomplished solely by his dramatic power. Professor Stout tells us:

Given Whitefield's unprecedented success in marketing religion in the eighteenth century we have to wonder what techniques he employed. My search for an answer took me to a most unexpected and ironic source: the eighteenth century stage. ... Whitefield became an actor preacher, as opposed to a scholar preacher.

Having decided on this theory that Whitefield was above all an actor, Stout weaves it into his entire account of the evangelist's life. He begins with a chapter that he titles "The Young Rake," in which he falsely charges that as a boy George was characterized by his dissolute behavior. He also asserts that the Whitefield family had fallen from its goodly status and that the lad determined to achieve such success on the stage that he would raise it to its former position again. This jumping to a conclusion is symptomatic of the author's style, and examples of his mistake could be pointed out in abundance.

Most glaring are his omissions of important elements in Whitefield's life. In a painfully garbled account he speaks of his conversion as a humanly contrived experience copied from the Puritans, but the transformation it effected in his life is almost entirely overlooked. He portrays Whitefield as having no interest in theology, but disregards the doctrinal content of the first ten sermons that he published, for example, and of the letters that he wrote during his second passage to America. He knows nothing of the fact that Whitefield was the first founder of Methodism, and that in preparing to sail to America he invited John Wesley to give leadership to his work; that during his absence Wesley sought to turn the people against him and that when he returned home he found Wesley had succeeded in his endeavor to the extent that he had but a hundred or so left to hear him. So he started over again, and within two months his great congregations were restored. Dr. Stout fails to recognize that a movement then sprang up under Whitefield's ministry, giving him in three years as large a body of followers as Wesley had, and that he held the first Methodist Conference-an accomplishment that Wesley then copied. Stout fails as well to see that following Whitefield's third visit to America, upon his return to England he determined to give up the leading of his own movement and to become "but the servant of all"-to assist any pastor, whatever his denomination, as long as he was very sound in the faith, and, above all, to help Wesley. This remained his chief endeavor throughout the last 20 years of his life. Without recognizing these important elements of Whitefield's career we have his life only in a sad distortion.

Mention must be made also of Dr. Stout's assumption that Whitefield was lacking in physical courage. In reporting an event in which Whitefield was standing, raised by a short flight of stairs to address a crowd, being attacked by an unruly mob, he jumped down the stairs toward them and they fled. Stout makes it appear that Whitefield was in fear of his attackers, and that in this action he escaped from them. Whitefield was constantly in danger in performing his open-air ministry in England and Wales, and every day of his life he exhibited more courage than is required by the average of us in a lifetime.

Although Dr. Stout at times recognizes Whitefield's sincerity, he also continually portrays his ministry as simply superb acting. He pictures him as aiming only at maintaining his personal prominence and, therefore, Whitefield's quoting the words of the Apostle Paul, "We preach not ourselves, but Christ Jesus the Lord, and ourselves your servants for Jesus' sake" was the basest of hypocrisy.

A work that differs from all others upon a certain subject must of necessity provide footnotes which refer the reader to the author's sources of information. But one looks in vain for such a scholarly adjunct here. Yet although there are no footnotes, the author frequently encloses a word, two words, or even a phrase in quotation marks, often preceding such words with words supplied by himself, in such a way as to give the quotation an entirely false meaning.

The book abounds with technical errors. This reviewer has marked his copy with the term "false" written in the margin where these mistakes occur and has done so more than 300 times! For instance, Stout confuses Howell Harris, the Welsh evangelist, with Gabriel Harris, a businessman from Gloucester. He pictures Whitefield as arriving at his open-air meetings, proud to be conveyed there in William Seward's grand carriage, but Seward tells us that upon being converted he had sold his carriage-this before he ever even knew George Whitefield. He speaks of Whitefield as putting on his revivals in town after town, but Whitefield never referred to the results of his work as "revival" and virtually never used the word. He would have used the term, as biblically-oriented people have ever done, only as descriptive of a work done by God. He charges that Whitefield's pronunciation was so poor that he spoke of the "Lord God" as the "Lurd Gud," yet Whitefield's preaching won the high praise of such masters of the English tongue as Lord Bolingbroke and the Earl of Chesterfield. Pages could be filled with the technical errors that Stout has made.

The author makes no mention of the sine qua non of the study of Whitefield, Richard Owen Roberts's Whitefield in Print, a tome of 765 pages which lists 8,285 works on its subject. In reading The Divine Dramatist this reviewer found his mind often reverting to the Scripture, "But the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God:... neither can he know them because they are spiritually discerned." The knowledge of Whitefield which has long been degraded by Arminian writers is further dishonored by this book which portrays him as chiefly a self-promoting actor.