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In 1829 an English publisher issued a compendium of George Whitefield’s sermons and letters titled The Revived Puritan—a very apt description, in fact, of what Whitefield was.

Whitefield was an intelligent, clear-headed, articulate communicator, but he was not original or innovative in his theology. Like all evangelical clergy in eighteenth-century England, he insisted that he taught the doctrines of the Church of England (defined in the Thirty-Nine Articles, the two Books of Homilies, and the Book of Common Prayer). The five-point Calvinism of his preaching came to him through the Puritans. His biblical interpretation followed Puritan Matthew Henry, whose Exposition of the Old and New Testaments was Whitefield’s lifelong companion. At every point the substance of his message was conventionally Protestant and Puritan—no less, no more.

Yet the things Whitefield took from this tradition came out in his own way, cast into a direct message calling for present response. His message consisted of five principal themes.

People live thoughtlessly, drifting from one day to another, never thinking of eternity. But God the Creator—mankind’s lawgiver and holy judge, the sovereign Lord who made us for himself and has us in his hands every moment—has revealed in Scripture that a day of judgment is coming when he will either welcome us into heaven’s eternal joy or banish us forever to hell.

Thus, Whitefield delivered urgent imperatives with agonized compassion for fellow mortals in dreadful danger: “Before ever … you can speak peace to your hearts, you must be brought to see, brought to believe, what a dreadful thing it is to depart from the living God.”

G. K. Chesterton described original sin as the one Christian doctrine that admits of demonstrative proof, and that was how Whitefield presented it. From Genesis 3 and Romans 5 he analyzed it in the standard Reformed way: the sin of Adam was imputed to his posterity, and we all now share the penalties for his sin—physical decay, mortality, and a morally twisted disposition.

Whitefield testified, “Our first parents contracted [original sin] when they fell from God by eating the forbidden fruit, and the bitter and malignant contagion of it hath descended to, and quite overspread, their whole posterity.… All the open sin and wickedness, which like a deluge has overflowed the world, are only so many streams running from this dreadful contagious fountain.”

Before salvation can be known, “You must be made to see, made to feel, made to weep over, made to bewail your actual transgressions against the law of God.”

“Would you have peace with God?” Whitefield asked. “Away, then, to God through Jesus Christ, who has purchased peace; the Lord Jesus has shed his heart’s blood for this. He died for this; he rose again for this; he ascended into the highest heaven, and is now interceding at the right hand of God.”

Whitefield’s preaching, like his personal faith, centered upon the person of “dear Jesus,” the once-crucified, now glorified God-man, the gift of the Father’s love and the embodiment of divine mercy. Through plain biblical exposition, Whitefield set forth the Incarnation, Jesus’ friendship with sinners, his pity for the needy, his atoning death, bodily resurrection and ascension, his present heavenly reign and future judgment.

It has been said that nineteenth-century evangelist Charles Finney rode down sinners with a cavalry charge. Whitefield’s way, however, was to sweep them off their feet with an overflow of compassionate affection; as Christ’s ambassador he modeled his master’s goodwill toward the lost.

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