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ix PREFACE My interest in George Whitefield began in 1993 when I heard a couple of stories about him in a history class with John Corrigan at Arizona State University. While telling the anecdotes about how Whitefield could make audiences tremble by his pronunciation of the word “Mesopotamia,” and that the famous actor David Garrick would give a hundred guineas just to say “O” like Whitefield, the taciturn Dr. Corrigan could not contain his mirth and let a chuckle escape. I was intrigued. How could someone “clothe words with emotion” as Corrigan had explained Whitefield did? The question haunted me for a couple of years until, during a break in classes in my M.A. program in Syracuse, I pulled out a book from Corrigan’s class and began reading a Whitefield sermon. I was strangely moved in a climactic section near the end, feeling what I have since come to recognize as an indicator of an exceptional rhetorical passage. I suspected there was more than vocal inflection involved in Whitefield’s effect on people. Although I had not yet studied enough rhetoric to recognize what made the section so powerful, I was surprised that a text written over two centuries earlier could reach forward and touch my soul in that way. I was further intrigued and reread all the other sources on Whitefield I had in my possession. Two more years of graduate school passed, and I was sitting in John Angus Campbell’s office chatting about dissertation ideas. Our conversation drifted into homiletics, and I told John a couple of the Whitefield anecdotes, becoming somewhat animated in the telling. John smiled and said, “I think we have found our dissertation topic.” I immediately knew he was right. With John’s guidance I began to study Whitefield seriously at this point, seeking to understand what made him so successful and striving to recreate in my imagination the oratorical voice that might produce the effects described by his biographers. I quickly recognized that many historical sources were colored with admiration and produced a rather two-dimensional figure. I instinctively recognized there was a deeper person buried under the images created by evangelical writers. I also was not discovering in these works the source of his eloquence or any explanations for how his homiletic practice operated, not at least until I read Harry Stout’s book The Divine Dramatist. Here at last was a missing piece of the puzzle and an honest portrayal of Whitefield’s life from which a more robust character emerged. Seeking to understand him more deeply, I began reading Whitefield ’s sermons. As my graduate education progressed, I received sufficient training in rhetorical criticism to identify the persuasive action and forces present in the texts. I found in Whitefield a person who understood the art of persuasion, considered his audiences, and produced just the right kind of discourse to meet his goals. Surprised that nothing I had read to that point delved deeply into his extant sermon texts, I believed that my dissertation could provide a new perspective on Whitefield, one that analyzed his sermons to describe the rhetorical action that blended with features other scholarship had discovered. The focus of previous Whitefield studies has been largely contextual , discussing events of his life and his responses as recorded in his Journals and other primary sources penned by his contemporaries. Explanations for his eloquence have been posited that include his solid character, dramatic acting ability, marketing skills, public relations efforts, and even a spiritual anointing. However, these studies seldom investigated the substance of his preaching and the logic of his arguments. successful persuasion will always contain a component of logic. Sermonic evidence has been used sparingly to exemplify particular features of his ministry. But there are one hunderd and ten extant sermons and pamphlets, each between five thousand and six thousand words—a treasure trove of primary data. Whitefield wrote very little to explain his preaching strategies or views on persuasion. I believe that one reason for this is that he knew everything was embedded in his sermon texts or otherwise available from studying the classical sources on persuasion. Accordingly, this study reads the sermonic writings and tries to recreate his ministry from within the texts. Perhaps preachers can learn the most by reading his sermons and analyzing the persuasive strategies, but those with other interests can learn much as well. Whitefield’s art, at a structural level, relied on principles that can be x PREFACE [13.58...

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