(hymn, 1779)
John Newton’s famous hymn is essentially spiritual autobiography. Written in first person, it rings true with the authenticity of his personal experience. His life’s path had been strewn with “many dangers, toils, and snares” as he sought to escape from the watchful eye of God. He had been one who rejected and blasphemed against God, and he’d lived a wild and dissolute lifestyle that had led only to pain and despair. It was a life filled with enough unexpected twists and turns, unforeseen coincidences, and divine deliverances to almost pass for a work of fiction in its telling. But his story is true, and in the end he found grace, amazing grace, and it finally brought an end to all his running.
When, later in life, Newton discovered a nascent gift for verse, he was able to share the essence of his own spiritual journey in a hymn that has universal appeal, for we all have, at one point or another, made foolish decisions, taken false turns, and avoided turning to God for mercy. We have all felt ourselves to be a “wretch” at times, we have all needed “amazing grace,” and most of us have probably felt the lifting of some of the burden of our imperfect lives when we have raised our voices to sing this hymn.
When he became a curate at Olney in Buckinghamshire, England, John Newton began to write hymns along with his friend and esteemed poet William Cowper. He developed a habit of writing a hymn to accompany and illustrate the sermons he preached each Sunday, and so on New Year’s Day, 1773, he offered “Amazing Grace” to his congregation along with a sermon based on 1 Chronicles 17:16–17. Like his other hymns, “Amazing Grace” was rich with the language of both Scripture and personal experience. A phrase such as “I once was lost, but now am found,” for example, echoes the words of the prodigal son in the famous parable. Newton did not let such concepts remain theological abstractions but made specific connections to his own experiences of these truths.
“Amazing Grace” debuted in print in 1779 in Newton and Cowper’s collection Olney Hymns, along with 347 other hymns that one or the other of them had penned. At the time, “Amazing Grace” did not distinguish itself as more significant than any of the others, and for a time it lapsed into obscurity. It was only in the United States, during the Second Great Awakening (c. 1780–1840), that the song was rediscovered and used extensively among the revivalists, who saw it as an effective way to communicate their emphasis upon human sinfulness and the necessity of reaching out for God’s grace. It fit with their passionate preaching and calls for a personal experience of salvation through repentance and an embrace of God’s grace.
It is not clear what melody was used when the hymn debuted, and it has been associated with more than twenty tunes over the years. But in 1835, when it was joined to a traditional tune by William Walker called “New Britain,” it had found its perfect pairing. This is the version of “Amazing Grace” by which it is most commonly known today, arguably the most popular and famous of all hymns. One Newton biographer estimates that it is performed about ten million times worldwide each year.
In the 1960s “Amazing Grace” was taken up as an anthem by civil rights marchers and folksingers, and Judy Collins’s performance was a surprise popular hit. Despite its clearly Christian message, it has been loved and sung lustily even by those who would not fully embrace its theological message because of its realism about the human condition, the joy of finding mercy and hope, and the longing for a better life in the world to come.
In 1725, John Newton was born in London to a father who was a merchant shipper and a devout mother who died when he was only six years old. She had tried to instill faith in her young son, but it faded once his seafaring father took him on as an apprentice on his ship. Influenced by the coarse habits of the sailors and a shipmate who introduced him to agnosticism, Newton renounced his faith.
Because of his early experiences at sea, Newton was able to secure a position as a sailor on a slave ship that transported its human cargo from Africa to other parts of the world. The captain of the ship, it turned out, was a cruel tyrant, and when the stubborn Newton rebelled, he was imprisoned at sea, put in chains like the slaves they were transporting, and nearly starved to death. Then, on landing at their destination, he was enslaved outright and put to work on a plantation in Sierra Leone. Starving and ill from depravation, he would secretly dig up roots and eat them in order to keep himself alive when there was no food to be had.
Newton was eventually able to write a letter to his father, explaining the dire circumstances under which he was living, and a ship sent by his father was miraculously able to find him on the small island where he was being held. In spite of all his suffering, the hardened and cynical Newton was unsure about whether he wanted to return to his native land, and had to be tricked by the captain into boarding the ship bound for England. On the long journey home, Newton distinguished himself among the crew of hardened sailors for his exceptional debauchery and profanity. When a violent storm arose in the North Atlantic, the seas became unbearably rough and threatened to tear the ship to pieces. A man standing next to him was swept overboard and never seen again. Newton joined with the other sailors to bail water and repair the damage, but not before mouthing a quick prayer for God’s mercy.
By the time the ship limped into harbor, miraculously spared, Newton was on his way to becoming a new man. He had been reading an abridgment of the classic book The Imitation of Christ, which he had discovered on board, and had been pondering the fact that God had apparently answered his prayer. Although he had long been one to turn aside any belief in God’s mercy, he now saw himself as a recipient of it. It was not a dramatic overnight conversion, for he continued to struggle with many of the same behaviors that had created problems for him before, but as he reached out for God’s grace, he began to change.
Newton continued to work in the slave trade for many years, until health issues necessitated that he give up the life at sea and settle down. Some years later his conscience began to bother him in regard to his former vocation, and he began to see the great evil he had perpetrated against other human beings. He became an ardent and outspoken opponent of the slave trade and began to work with the young William Wilberforce and other abolitionists. His voice of authentic experience was a valuable help in bringing the evils of slavery to the attention of the populace of England and exposing its inhuman cruelties. It is not unlikely that in the composition of his great hymn, Newton had in mind his own wretchedness when he pondered his earlier blindness toward the evils of slavery.
After working a couple years as a customs agent and immersing himself in the church community, Newton experienced a call to the ministry and became a priest of the Church of England in the small village of Olney. Most of his congregation was poor and illiterate, and he seemed to be the perfect person to communicate the gospel to them. Whereas most clergymen of his day were in the habit of delivering ponderous theological sermons to their churches, Newton was almost unique in his tendency to share his own personal experiences with sin and temptation with his congregation. His passionate, if unpolished, sermons were much loved by his listeners, who also sang with great passion the hymns that he wrote in order to reinforce the lessons from his simple, straightforward preaching.
When John Newton died in 1807, he left behind an autobiography (usually now published under the title Out of the Depths) and hundreds of heartfelt hymns such as “Glorious Things of Thee Are Spoken,” “Let Us Love and Sing and Wonder,” and “How Sweet the Name of Jesus Sounds.” In writing them he generally avoided flights of poetic language in order to make his hymns accessible to all, and he wrote of his own personal experiences with God in such a way as to make them universally relevant to all who followed the same Savior. He composed his own epitaph, which reads: “John Newton, clerk. Once an infidel and libertine, a servant of slaves in Africa, was by the rich mercy of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, preserved, restored, pardoned, and appointed to preach the faith he had long labored to destroy.”