Seventeen. George Whitefield and the Great Awakening

Author(s):  
Irina Yur'evna Khruleva

The first "Great Awakening" took hold of all British colonies in North America in the 1730s-1750s and developed contemporaneously with the Enlightenment movement, which had a significant impact on all aspects of life in the colonies, influencing religion, politics and ideology. The inhabitants of the colonies, professing different religious views, for the first time experienced a general spiritual upsurge. The colonies had never seen anything like the Great Awakening in scale and degree of influence on society. This was the first movement in American history that was truly intercolonial in nature, contributing to the formation of a single religious and partially ideological space in British America. The beginning of the Great Awakening in British America was instigated by both the colonial traditions of religious renewal (the so-called "revivals") and new ideas coming from Europe, hence this religious movement cannot be understood without considering its European roots nor not taking into account its transatlantic nature. The development of pietism in Holland and Germany and the unfolding of Methodism on the British Isles greatly influenced Protestant theology on both sides of the Atlantic. This article explores the differences in understanding the nature of the Great Awakening by its two leaders - J. Edwards and J. Whitefield.


Author(s):  
Eric C. Smith

As the pastor of the Charleston Baptist Church, Oliver Hart established a pattern of moderate revivalist ministry. His weekly routine of public and private ministry of the Word mirrored that of most ministers in the broadly Reformed tradition. Hart invested a significant portion of each week to preparing and delivering sermons, which he developed according to the classic Puritan method. Outside his own congregation, he partnered with evangelical leaders from a variety of other denominations, including the Anglican evangelist George Whitefield, to spread the revivalism of the Great Awakening. Hart gained a wide acceptance among the residents of Charleston in part because of the respectable social persona he developed, in contrast to the erratic behavior of the Separate Baptists and other radical revivalists. Most significant, Hart adopted the classic moderate evangelical approach to slavery while in Charleston, ministering earnestly to enslaved Africans even as he owned slaves himself. Hart’s respectable, moderate revivalism set the tone for the next century and a half for white Baptists in Charleston and the broader South.


1973 ◽  
Vol 70 (3) ◽  
pp. 405-406
Author(s):  
James H. Edmonson

2019 ◽  
pp. 231-252
Author(s):  
Jane Giscombe

The hymns and psalms of the Congregational minister Isaac Watts circulated in the North American colonies prior to the revivals of the 1730s and’40s. Watts's transatlantic links are clearly evident in his regular correspondence with ministers and academics including Cotton Mather and Benjamin Colman. He gave forty-nine of his own books to Yale and many of these survive. Watts exchanged many letters with Benjamin Colman, pastor in Boston and an overseer of Harvard. Watts has often been regarded as having been first published in America in 1729 when Benjamin Franklin reprinted his Psalms of David. This paper examines two earlier publications of Watts's work, both printed in 1720 in Boston, and Cotton Mather’s reception of Watts’ early work. In so doing, it seeks to understand better Watts's influence in the American colonies before the arrival of George Whitefield and the Great Awakening of mid-century.


Author(s):  
Eric C. Smith

Oliver Hart experienced evangelical conversion at the peak of a dynamic series of revivals known as the Great Awakening. His childhood pastor, Jenkin Jones, publicly supported the evangelist George Whitefield and did all that he could to promote revivalism in Hart’s Particular Baptist congregation. Along with Hart’s personal story, this chapter recounts the Baptist reception of the Great Awakening throughout colonial America, including in New England and in the South. It corrects the common misperception that most Particular Baptists stood aloof from the Great Awakening, and introduces the emergence of the Separate Baptist movement.


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