ABSTRACT
The story of the Protestant evangelical awakening is normally told with little reference to John Witherspoon. The rise of evangelicalism has first of all been the history of Jonathan Edwards, George Whitefield himself, and the John Wesley brothers. If Witherspoon’s evangelicalism was unique, it was unique in the way most Kirk ministers would have been ‘unique’. Finding Witherspoon’s place in the transatlantic network of evangelical ministers and promoters of revivalist evangelicalism is made more difficult because the Princeton president left behind little in the way of personal correspondence and kept no personal journal of his inner thoughts and almost no accounting of his external connections. Witherspoon considered Phillip Doddridge ‘eminent and useful’, while John Newton later recommended Doddridge’s fellow Dissenting minister, Isaac Watts, along with Witherspoon, as ‘good models among writers of divinity’. It is also likely that Witherspoon was influenced by Whitefield in taking up a negative assessment of Count Zinzendorf and the Moravians.
