Soli Deo Gloria: For the Glory of God Alone

The Messenger, December 10, 2009
By ARTHUR W. HUNT III
Special to The Messenger
During the autumn of 1740, a Massachusetts farmer, Nathan Cole, was working in his field when he got word that the itinerate minister George Whitefield would be preaching some 12 miles away.
The farmer dropped what he was doing, saddled his horse, grabbed his wife and started out, hoping he could get to his destination in an hour to hear Whitefield, who was to begin at 10 o’clock that morning.
Cole recounted the episode: “I saw before me cloud or fog rising, I first thought off from the great river but as I came nearer the road I heard a noise something like a low rumbling of horses feet coming down the road and this cloud was a cloud of dust made by the running of horses feet.”
Cole writes how streams of people on horseback were hastily, but quietly, gathering to hear the Anglican minister. The farmer estimated that upward to 4,000 people had already gathered outside the church yard. Then, upon looking toward the river, he saw ferry boats bringing over loads of more souls.
Some churches refused to let Whitefield preach in their pulpits, due to his enthusiastic style. But it didn’t matter. No church could hold the kind of crowds he attracted. An outdoor gathering of 8,000 people was not uncommon.
The multitudes that attended his sermons were enormous, wrote Benjamin Franklin, “and it was matter of speculation to me, who was one of the number, to observe the extraordinary influence of his oratory on his hearers and how much they admir’d and respected him, notwithstanding his common abuse of them by assuring them they were naturally half beasts and half devils.”
The Great Awakening was a time of spiritual rejuvenation in England and the American colonies during the 1730s and 1740s under the preaching of ministers like George Whitefield and Jonathan Edwards.
“Immediately preceded by a long season of coldness and indifference,” a New England minister observed, “the Great Awakening broke upon the slumbering churches like a thunderbolt rushing out of a clear sky.”
Historian Iain Murray says the Awakening was an “earnest re-statement of the older Puritan teaching on the need for men first to be humbled if they are to be soundly converted.”
Both Whitefield and Edwards preached justification by faith alone and in the redemptive work of Christ in behalf of his elect. In this way, the spiritual shaking that rocked the American colonies was a reassertion of Reformation principles.
The revivalism associated with the Great Awakening was notably different from the revivalism under ministers like Charles Finney and Billy Sunday, or for that matter, the “revival meeting” so popular in the 20th century.
Whitefield and Edwards extended no altar calls, and it would have been unthinkable for them to ask their listeners to raise their hands or repeat a canned prayer.
However, it was not unusual for a listener to remain in the field after hearing a Whitefield sermon, on his face prostrate, sobbing great sobs, for hours on end.
Editor’s note: Arthur W. Hunt III is assistant professor of communications at the University of Tennessee at Martin and a member of Grace Community Church in Union City.

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