Dallimore’s biography of Whitefield is also a wide account of the 18th C Great Awakening. I’m glad he goes into tangential chapters on the Wales evangelists (Harris and Rowland) and the development of the Wesleys.
I’ve always been fascinated by the “conversion” of John Wesley. Wesley is clearly a church going person all his life, but his story is not one of a sudden shift from nominalism to a genuine faith in Christ. He is intensely focussed on Christ in his Oxford years, he runs the main Christian society, the Oxford Holy Club, which brings spiritual benefit to many (including Whitefield). He goes to preach Christ to Georgia and concludes on his way back that he himself is not converted. He “seeks after Christ” earnestly for many years.
Later Wesley concluded that the Aldersgate church experience was his conversion, where his heart was “strangely warmed” at the hearing from the reading of Luther’s preface to Romans (or was it Galatians?). But even after that Dallimore gives evidence from Wesley’s journal of continuing self-introspective doubts, especially after visiting the Moravians.
Surely the answer here is that Wesley himself had a gradual coming to an objective trust in the work of Christ and was hindered by his subjectivism along the way. I don’t think Wesley himself really knew the point of his own regeneration, Aldersgate was as good as any. He may have been a weak Christian all along (from childhood!), he may have been unconverted for a fair time after Aldersgate and at some point crossed the line into objective genuine trust in Christ. I sense more the former, as the whole time Wesley is looking for Christ. Would he have done this without being regenerate? And yet to claim this is to undermine the 18th C emphasise on regeneration as it came to be understood.
In the critical discussion of Wesley’s conversion on p196, Dallimore makes the same error that has plagued Protestant Evangelicals ever since the great awakening. He uses as a measure of Wesley’s conversion that point at which he understood and appropriated the doctrine of regeneration, rather than the the gospel itself. But surely you can become a regenerate Christian by hearing the gospel without any knowledge of regeneration? Wesley’s great weakness was being too focussed on the mechanics of personal response, rather than simply on Christ and the gospel.
(I’m reading Dallimore’s “George Whitefield – The life and times of the great evangelist of the 18th century revivalâ€)
