The Evangelist of Desire/The Divine Dramatist/ John Wesley's Sermons
Moore, Arthur J.
GREAT REVIVALISTS THE EVANGELIST OF DESIRE John Wesley and the Methodists Henry Abelove Stanford University Press, $25, 136 pp. THE DIVINE DRAMATIST George Whitefield and the Rise of...
...Taking the poor seriously always seems to work...
...Even class differences, the heart of this approach, are treated only perfunctorily...
...It is his contention that Wesley never was a good organizer and that his message was essentially the same as others, most notably George Whitefield, in the evangelical revival of the eighteenth century...
...Similarly, his vision of an order of lay preachers within the Church of England was to insure that he could have no successor...
...This Stout effectively links to the growing market economy in which the preacher competed with the open-air vendors and hawkers and in which religion was increasingly treated as a commodity...
...Similarly, in his treatment of Wesley's impact on his followers, Abelove carefully selects his evidence to make his point...
...What made the difference in Wesley's case was the deference and love that he brought forth in his largely plebeian followers, combined with the fact that they did not accept those parts of his message that did not appeal to them, such as celibacy...
...He elicited deference by skillful use of the symbols of being a gentleman—his clerical garb and grooming, his house in London, and the coach he used for traveling in later life—and by surrounding himself with lay helpers of a lower social standing...
...This is a thesis book and not a biography but it is immediately apparent that Abelove is highly selective in his use of evidence...
...Wesley's social philosophy and teaching about money is barely mentioned...
...You may even begin to understand what was meant by Christian Perfection...
...Wesley did advocate celibacy, but so did Whitefield and other evangelists, and with 36: 13 March 1992 Commonweal no more success...
...The love was brought forth by contrasting that rank with his approach to the poor mingling with them, staying in their houses, and offering them medical treatment...
...The assertion that early Methodism may have encouraged women to practice birth control by refusing sex to their husbands—also inadvertently encouraging same-sex attachments— is based on skimpy evidence, indeed...
...Its title, The Divine Dramatist, illustrates Stout's belief that Whitefield's spectacular success as an evangelist came from his use of theatrical effects in his preaching and made him the precursor of modern-day evangelists...
...By contrast, a book that is a biography and also has a thesis is Harry S. Stout's life of George Whitefield...
...Whitefield's sermons, most of which did not survive, were more theatrical scenarios than those of Wesley, who rewrote his for publication and the edification of his followers...
...Arthur J. Moore Last year was the bicentenary of the death of John Wesley...
...Among other charges, he has been hailed and damned for having prevented an English version of the French Revolution...
...Stout dwells at length on the unlikely friendship between Whitefield and Benjamin Franklin and speculates that, had he lived, Whitefield would have supported the colonies in the American Revolution...
...That Wesley's close associates were aware of the class-based nature of his appeal is shown, Abelove believes, by the way Wesley's brother Charles and Whitefield intervened to prevent his marriage to Grace Murray, a widow who looked after him and was thus, in effect, a servant...
...Wesley's trouble with women is legendary and his eventual marriage was hardly a happy one, but Whitefield's married life was not a great model either...
...Even though the Methodism he began in England is declining in numbers, its influence is still strong...
...The sermons are chronologically arranged and the early Oxford sermons seem very stiff indeed, but the whole volume and Heitzenrater's introductions make fascinating reading...
...Although Whitefield's Calvinism led to his break with Wesley (which was later repaired in personal terms), a bad experience in Scotland taught him to avoid denominational labels...
...JOHN WESLEY'S SERMONS An Anthology Edited by Albert C. Outler & Richard P. Heitzenrater Abingdon Press, $49.95, 496 pp...
...Enough so that in the 1983 British general election, the leaders of both the Conservative party (Margaret Thatcher) and the Labor party (Michael Foot) came out of strong, albeit dissimilar, Methodist family backgrounds...
...Oddly, Abelove never mentions Wesley's youthful and disastrous dealings with Sophie Hopkey in Georgia...
...Ironically, he was first encouraged to come here by Charles and John Wesley, whose experiences in Georgia were not pleasant (John's was near catastrophic), and they never returned while Whitefield went from strength to strength...
...This is an engaging look at a man whose influence is still felt...
...Now Henry Abelove, a professor at Wesleyan University, has tried a new tack...
...The very real role that early Methodism played in giving women leadership roles and freedom remarkable for its time is not given extended treatment...
...Since 1791, over three hundred studies of the man and his religious movement have appeared...
...Still, aside from hagiography, the man and his impact remain complicated enough that one of his recent biographers titled his work, The Elusive Mr...
...Doctrine and church polity receive short shrift—the whole purpose of Wesley's confusing teachings on Christian perfection, which caused his break with Whitefield and the other Calvinists, was, in Abelove's view, to make him "unique, irreplaceable" to his followers...
...Also, much of Whitefield's career was in America...
...Wesley's complete (and prodigious) works are being published in a new edition, but anyone who wants a good, solid start might try an anthology of fifty sermons selected by the late Albert Outler just before his death and edited by Richard P. Commonweal 13 March J992: 37 Heitzenrater, himself a Wesley biographer and scholar...
...Like Wesley, he remained an Anglican clergyman until his death, but he taunted the hierarchy to enhance his own ministry in a way that Wesley, who was a staunch Tory, never did...
...Within the Methodist movement itself, Charles Wesley appears only tangentially in these pages...
...In short, this is a book whose thesis is more intriguing than proven...
...Dissatisfied with what he calls the "old story" that Wesley was a master organizer who preached a simple message, he has approached the subject equipped with a Freudian theory about group psychology embellished with insights from Lacan and glosses on sexuality from Foucault...
...Such a misalliance would have destroyed Wesley's standing in the eyes of his followers...
...THE DIVINE DRAMATIST George Whitefield and the Rise of Modem Evangelicalism Harry S. Stout Eerdmans, $14.95, 301 pp...
...The Wesley brothers hardly came from an aristocratic milieu...
...All the other evangelists of the time are summarily dismissed as having no real impact or, in Whitefield's case, of having died young...
...While not so poor as Whitefield, who attended Oxford as a "servitor" (basically a servant), these sons of a poor country parson would scarcely seem to qualify as upper-class icons...
...It is worth noting that this latter approach is similar to the portrait of Jesus drawn by John Dominic Crossan in his new book, The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Peasant [Harper-San Francisco] even though the class and cultural differences are profound...
Vol. 119 • March 1992 • No. 5
