Parenting & Family Quote by George Whitefield

Whitefield aims straight at the pressure point of Enlightenment-era religion: the demand that faith submit its credentials to “carnal reasoning.” By invoking Abraham and Isaac, he picks the Bible’s most morally combustible obedience story and treats that combustibility as the feature, not the bug. The line is a rhetorical dare: if you can swallow that command on God’s authority, you can swallow anything else God “reveals,” even when your mind throws up “many objections.”

The intent isn’t gentle reassurance; it’s disciplinary formation. Whitefield is training an audience to treat incomprehension as a virtue and internal resistance as suspect. “Unbelievers” are not merely mistaken; they are refusing a posture of submission. The phrase “though they cannot fully comprehend it” sounds modest, almost reasonable, but its subtext is harder: comprehension is not the point, and the craving for it is a spiritual problem. “Carnal” does double duty here, meaning both bodily/worldly and intellectually proud. Reason becomes implicated in sin.

Context matters. Whitefield, the electrifying evangelist of the Great Awakening, preached to crowds primed by modern skepticism, denominational fracturing, and a rising confidence in rational inquiry. He answers that moment with an older Protestant move: revelation over reason, trust over audit. Abraham functions as the ideal convert: he “knew” the command was God’s, therefore obedience is framed as clear-eyed certainty, not tragic ambiguity.

It works because it recasts the scandal of the story into a test of allegiance. If your ethics recoil, Whitefield implies, that recoil is exactly what faith must override.