George Whitefield on Original sin & the human will
Will in bondage; needs sovereign grace to be freed
We hide ourselves from God as long as we can, and will not come, and never should come, did not the Father prevent, draw, and sweetly constrain us by his grace, as he here prevented Adam.
THE POSITION
Fallen people do not merely fail to come to God; they "will not come, and never should come" unless the Father goes before them and draws them — and he reads that out of Adam hiding in the garden, whom God "prevented" in the same way. Original sin is guilt and not only corruption: a convicted sinner must own that he is "by nature" a child of wrath and that God may justly cut him off "though you never actually had offended him in all your life." The new birth is necessary because what is born of the flesh stays flesh.
8 Then the man and his wife heard the voice of the LORD God walking in the garden in the breeze of the day, and they hid themselves from the presence of the LORD God among the trees of the garden. 9 But the LORD God called out to the man, “Where are you?” 10 “I heard Your voice in the garden,” he replied, “and I was afraid because I was naked; so I hid myself.”
18 OTHERS HOLD THIS
ABOUT THIS FIGURE
Anglican priest and field preacher of the Evangelical Revival and the First Great Awakening, who crossed the Atlantic seven times and died on his last American tour. Wesley's Oxford companion and, from his 1740 letter answering Free Grace, his public opponent on election — the Calvinist half of the Methodist split, set here beside Wesley and Edwards. This entry rests on that letter and eleven of the sermons printed in the standard selected editions.
Cite this page
"George Whitefield on Original sin & the human will", Examined Doctrine, July 2026 edition, https://examineddoctrine.com/position/whitefield/original-sin (archived at https://examineddoctrine.com/editions/2026-07/position/whitefield/original-sin).