Customer Reviews

The Divine Dramatist: George Whitefield and the Rise of Modern Evangelicalism (Library of Religious Biography)

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1 star:		(2)

 

 

The Whitefield portrayed in The Divine Dramatist "lived his life almost exclusively for public performance" (xv). His principal motivation appears not to have been saintly piety, but unabashed egocentrism. Harry Stout's itinerant revivalist is an arrogant, shameless egotistic self-promoter (xxii, xxiii, 16, 36-37, 55, 109, 166, 223) who had mastered the art of ingratiation (11). He was an actor who "played the role of pious celebrity to perfection" (103) in order to "sculpt[ ] of himself a heroic figure" (53, 56). An inferiority complex (33, 36-37, 75) caused him to crave "respect and power" (46). Egocentrism serves as the framework from which Stout hangs his Whitefield. He preached because it supplied what neither missions nor charity could. It made "him an unrivaled somebody" (37). Whitfield went to Georgia because a pulpit in Gloucester "seemed too small" and the "much bigger stage" offered by the missions' field was "most tantalizing" (29). Once in Georgia "he realized that this small, struggling colony . . . was much too small a canvas on which to paint his life's work" (61). Whitfield therefore undertook responsibility for establishing an orphanage in Georgia because it "would require substantial travel" and could serve "as a pretext for itinerant preaching" (62, 64, 67-68). The egotistical, self-promoting actor-preacher that emerges from Stout's narrative never quite fully morphs into an eighteenth-century Elmer Gantry. While sharing the fictional charlatan's egocentrism, Stout's itinerant revivalist also experienced a genuine "conversion experience that, he passionately believed, was unmerited and of divine initiative," fervently desired "to activate his hearers to seek their salvation" and was "undistracted by the allure of sex or wealth" (xxiii, xxiv). Stout's portrayal is intriguing, but is it accurate? Unfortunately, as he does not fully unveil the basis for his psychoanalysis of this eighteenth-century super-star, it is difficult to ascertain the veracity of the entertaining portrait he provides.

This volume came warmly recommended by Mark Noll in "The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind", but turns out to be not so much an autobiography as a mean spirited diatribe about how George Whitefield was a Bad Guy. Beyond the pedestrian failures of not adequately representing Whitefield's theology, this book fails to report his theology altogether. As I read, I thought time and again of those murky Sunday School classes where the Higher Critic of a teacher, having no life with God, labors to remove all the miraculous from the story of Moses and the Red Sea (although I continue to marvel at how God drowned the Egyptians in 18" of water). And I discovered from this book that George Whitefield was invariably insecure, self-adoring, tricky, a hypocrite, sneaky, effeminate, a cheat, self righteous, and well, you get the idea. One wonders if the author could use a little sermon on charity from his subject. But the greatest failure of this little book is its missing what invariable makes biographies of godly persons so readable: not so much the life of the person, but the life of God lived through the person. On this count, the book fails entirely. Save your money.

Harry Stout does a marvelous job with the difficult task of assessing George Whitefield's career with respect to his skills as a dramatist and promoter. Before reading this book I was very skeptical of the often undue emphasis historians in recent years have attempted to place on style rather than content to revivalists' preaching. But I found Stout's arguement to be very convincing. This is a very helpful volume for anyone interested in George Whitefield, the Great Awakening, or American religion.

"The Divine Dramatist" turns the life of a theologian into something not only readable, but fascinating. It turns out that Whitefield was the catalyst behind the most major movement in American history. It reads like a novel, but is very informative. Anyone interested in this subject matter must read it.

The Divine Dramatist is an excellent and compelling story on the life, works and personality of the pre-American Revolution evangelists George Whitefield. Whitefield, an egocentric genius in self-promotion was an heir to the break-away Protestant revolt of 16th century Europe and he brought with him the many religious biases and biblical distortions of his time. With no one authority and scripture only as his guide the legacy he left is 30,000 plus different Christian denominations all claiming the bible as their sole authority and guided by the Holy Spirit yet each disagreeing on what scripture says. Thus with such disagreement new denominations and non-denominations, as they label themselves, pop-up daily. One wonders, how can this happen if the Holy Spirit is their guide?

I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in the history and proliferation of bible believing churches. While Whitefield was not a money hording preacher per se, his business blue-print for successful religious marketing is the ground-floor for various Protestant preachers in selling their brand of bible Christianity and the development of mega-churches in America.

Terance

What a great book! Stout is a wonderful historian and it shows

Adding to the previous negative reviews, how can one take seriously a book which, on page 2, cannot even get the location of Whitefield's birth correct? Stout makes him a son of Bristol instead of a son of Gloucester (35 miles to the north). If he makes such a mistake this early what confidence can one have in the rest of the book?