Two hundred and fifty years ago, Christianity’s most beloved song was sung publicly for the first time on New Year’s Day, and its echoes are still reverberating around the world.
For believers, and even many skeptics, Amazing Grace resonates with its message of redemption, hope, and transformation. But the song’s main theme is not what many people think.
The misconception comes from the common knowledge the hymn was written by John Newton (1725-1807), who spent much of his life in the slave trade, trafficking kidnapped Africans between Liverpool and the West Indies.
What’s not as well known is that Newton was pressed into service on his first slave ship, for deserting the Navy to see a girl he’d fallen in love with.
Aboard the vessel, he was so foul-mouthed, crude, and argumentative that he was put ashore in Sierra Leone where he was briefly enslaved by a tribe and forced to work on a plantation, until another ship came by.
But in March 1748, Newton was commanding a ship that got caught in a violent storm off Ireland. The vessel almost broke apart and people died, but he was rescued.
The near-death experience made Newton reexamine his life, and he slowly got back in touch with his childhood faith. Still, he kept slaving for the next seven years.
By 1764 — 16 years later after the life-changing storm — he was ordained in the Anglican faith and sent to Olney, a southeast English market town whose only other claim to fame is holding the world’s oldest pancake race, in which participants run with a pancake in a frying pan.
That got started 600 years ago when a woman cooking breakfast realized she was late for Sunday worship and absent-mindedly sprinted off.
When Newton had been in Olney for nine years, he was preparing a New Year’s Day service for St. Peter and St. Paul Church, with a focus on looking back and looking forward. He wanted to illustrate his own, long journey to faith.
So he wrote Amazing Grace and it was performed January 1, 1773.
Many people assume the song is a contrite confession for his role in slavery. But it’s not. It wasn’t until 15 years later that Newton published a pamphlet in which he started with an apology and described what he’d seen as a trader.
It was a shocking and disturbing revelation for most people, who knew only a fraction of the inhumane treatment endured by the enslaved.
As historian Sean Lang told the BBC, “[Newton] began to give people new eyes… but it took a long time to change [their] outlook. [Abolition] was a huge thing to do because [slavery] was a massive business and it was a daunting task to stop it.
“You couldn’t do it without changing attitudes and he was one of the first to start doing that,” he said.
In fact, it was a full 40 years between Newton’s ordination and the abolition of slavery in 1807. But the clergyman was a key mentor to William Wilberforce, who led the charge.
Today, Amazing Grace is still performed an estimated 10 million times a year. It’s been covered by everyone from Elvis to Willie Nelson, and the song is celebrated every New Year’s Day in Olney when the town’s four churches come together.
And the hymn truly is about freedom from slavery — the slavery of sin. “Amazing grace/ How sweet the sound/ That saved a wretch like me/ I once was lost, but now am found/ Was blind but now I see.”
What Newton had come to see was the true meaning of grace. In simple terms, grace is getting something we don’t deserve and can never earn. God demands perfection of those who would be in His holy presence for eternity, and none of us can be perfect.
So we’d be forever excluded, except God heaped all our sins upon Jesus when He died on the cross, making us pure and blameless because of His substitution. When we gratefully accept that gift, we’re saved from the penalty we rightly deserve.
Newton realized two things. God’s gift of eternal life can never be deserved or repaid, no matter how good a life we lead and — second — nobody is beyond redemption, no matter how bad a life we lead — not even when you spend half your life trafficking people.
As Paul says in Romans 5, we humans might give up our life for someone especially good, “But God showed His great love for us by sending Christ to die for us while we were still sinners.” (v. 8) That, in a nutshell, is what’s so amazing about grace.
And in Newton’s example, there’s great encouragement as we head into a new year. After his conversion, it took almost four decades to stop slaving, come to grips with his past, and dedicate himself to making amends. So, there’s still hope for the rest of us.
And even when we find more of that all-too-elusive love, gratitude, and obedience, we’ll understand we can never repay our debt. We’ll simply say with the hymn writer, “Tis grace has brought me safe thus far/And grace will lead me home.”
But while we’re on our way, our life should be a chorus of grateful praise.
Share your thoughts with Rick at info@followers.ca A former TV reporter and journalism prof, he pastors an independent, nondenominational church in Brantford, ON called Followers of Christ (www.followers.ca)
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