Interesting Facts about John Newton’s “Amazing Grace”

“Amazing grace how sweet the sound that saved ______________.”

Whether you grew up singing in church or not, most people know the next few words of this famous song. It has been called the spiritual anthem of the United States. You’re just as likely to hear it sung on American Idol as you are at a local church.

Biographer Jonathan Aitken describes John Newton’s hymn, “Amazing Grace,” as “the most sung, most recorded, and most loved hymn in the world. No other song, spiritual or secular, comes close to it in terms of numbers of recordings (over three thousand in the United States alone), frequency of performances (it is publicly sung at least ten million times per year), international popularity across six continents, or cultural longevity (234 years old and still going strong).”^[1]

There are whole books and videos that go into detail about both the backstory and history of the song. As I’ve read Jonathan Aitken’s biography, here are a few facts I’ve found interesting. 

A Song for a New Year’s Day Sermon

Pastor John Newton first introduced the hymn to his congregation in 1773. At this time, Newton had started writing and introducing hymns to go along with his sermon (as well as for the Olney Hymnbook that he and William Cowper had started working on). Newton wrote these hymns in plain language so his congregation could understand and sing them, but they also were meant to accompany and assist his sermon that morning. “Newton thought he could help them [his congregation] if he amplified his sermons by writing simply worded hymns that illustrated the biblical passages on which he was preaching.”^[2]

“Amazing Grace” was first sung on January 1, 1773 to go with Newton’s New Year’s Day sermon. He leveraged these first sermons of the year to reflect on God’s goodness and mercy in his life. On the prior day (12/31/1772), Newton wrote these words as he looked back over his life and used up the final pages of a journey he had kept for years:

How many scenes I have passed through in that time! By what a way the Lord has led me! What wonders has he shown me! My book is now nearly full, and I shall provide another for the next year. O Lord, accept my praise for all that is past. Enable me to trust thee for all that is to come, and give a blessing to all who may read these records of thy goodness and my own vileness. Amen and amen.

The text Newton chosen for his New Year’s Day sermon were David’s words from 1 Chronicles 17:16-27. In this passage, David responds to God with thanksgiving after the prophet Nathan informed David that his sons/house would reign on Israel’s throne forever (ultimately pointing to Jesus, the son of David). 

Anyone familiar with both David’s story and John Newton’s story can see the parallel accounts of how great sinners received the unmerited mercy, steadfast love, and amazing grace of God. Biographer Jonathan Aitken writes, “There can be little doubt that Newton saw spiritual parallels between God’s grace to King David and God’s grace to himself. They had both been the worst of sinners; they had both endured tempestuous journeys of extraordinary drama; they had both been undeserved recipients of God’s mercy, salvation, and grace.”^[3]

The outline of John Newton’s sermon from David’s words is as follows:^[4]

“Who am I?” 
`1) I am miserable—a sinner condemned by the law and guilty under it.
2) Rebellious—We have defied God. We ere not merely undeserving of God’s mercy but we were “undesiring” of it. 
3) Undeserving—We have no right to the mercy and love God poured out on us despite our condition and our rebellion.

“That thou has brought me hitherto”
`1) Before conversion—God’s providence protected and led us.
2) At conversion—God’s mercy was poured out when God enabled us to hope in His mercy.
3) Since conversion—Mercy and goodness have followed us and kept us.

“You have spoken about the future”
“Are these [things listed above] small things?  Yes, compared to what follows – He has spoken for a great while to come, even to Eternity.  Present mercies are but earnests of his love, present comforts but foretastes of the joy to which we are hastening.  O that crown, that kingdom, that eternal weight of glory!  We are travelling home to God.  We shall soon see Jesus, and never complain of sin, sorrow, temptation or desertion any more.”

[The applications in light of these truths] “From hence infer”
`1) Love, gratitude, obedience
2) Trust and confidence
3) Patience

“Amazing Grace” not only reflect David’s words from 1 Chronicles 17, but Newton borrowed language from several other passages for the lyrics, including Luke 15:24; John 9:25; Ephesians 6:16; Hebrews 6:19; and 2 Peter 3:12.

Connection with William Cowper

The friendship of hymn-writers John Newton with William Cowper, as well as the ministry of John Newton to the depressed and suicidal Cowper, is worth reading about. One article I’d recommend is by Scott Hubbard, “A Friend in the Fire.”^[5] But I find it interesting that the same Sunday that “Amazing Grace” was introduced to the world was also the last Sunday that William Cowper ever entered the church. I find it worth noticing that both painful and bitter realities and great spiritual fruit can blossom in the same day.^[6]

Ignored in Britain but Beloved in America

I also find it interesting how the hymn was largely ignored in Great Britain but became popular in the United States. Even though “Amazing Grace” was first sung in 1773, it was first published in 1779 in Newton’s Olney Hymns. (This is the hymnal that Newton and Cowper worked on together, although Cowper’s despair resulted in Newton writing the great majority of the hymns.) The Olney hymnal became incredibly popular in Britain, but it doesn’t seem like “Amazing Grace” did. “It made only one appearance in all the other hymnbooks published in Britain during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.”^[7]

Newton never recognized “Amazing Grace” as anything remarkable or especially significant among his hymns. In his remaining 34 years of life, he never once mentioned it in his journal entries. Its relative obscurity in Britain and his lack of personal references to the song suggest Newton had no idea how popular it would become or how powerful its influence would be.

The song enjoyed much greater notoriety in America in the 19^th century. By the 1830s it was sung in churches across most major denominations. But what really popularized the hymn was the addition of the tune we sing it with today. When Newton wrote “Amazing Grace,” it was not tied to any specific tune but was sung with various tunes. In 1835, William Walker published the songbook, The Southern Harmony, which was the first printed connection of Newton’s hymn with its associated tune (the tune being known as “New Britain”). Walker’s songbook sold six hundred thousand copies in the decade after its publication, which “established the union of the words and the music of “Amazing Grace” once and for all.”^[8]

Connections to the Southern Slave Context

Part of John Newton’s narrative is both his role as a slave-trader as a ship captain early in life (and a slave himself at one point), but also the role he later played in supporting William Wilberforce and the abolition of slavery in Britain. That complicated history makes the following connections all the more interesting, and ironic, to me.

There are at least a couple connections between “Amazing Grace” and the African American culture of the slaveholding south in the 19^th century. Many historians believe the tune William Walker attached to Newton’s hymn was likely taken from a plantation song, a major source for Walker’s songbook.^[9] But a deeper connection comes from the final stanza, at least as know it today.

The last stanza of “Amazing Grace” that many sing today, beginning with “When we’ve been there ten thousand years,” was first attached to the hymn in the 1852 anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The novel was written by Harriet Beecher Stowe, the daughter of the famous preacher, Lyman Beecher, and sister of the hymn-writer and abolitionist, Henry Ward Beecher. Various theories exist as to who might have first attached this stanza to “Amazing Grace,” but Stowe’s classic novel is the first printed example we have.

Aitken notes that this added stanza “had been orally around in Afro-American worship for at least half a century, for they were from a verse in a hymn often sung in Virginia known as ‘Jerusalem, My Happy Home.’ This verse was established as the new conclusion of ‘Amazing Grace’ by Edwin Othello Excell (1851-1921), a renowned revivalist and worship leader…. In 1910 Excell published a best-selling hymnbook, Coronation Hymns, which for the first time printed the new verse after Newton’s original first three stanzas. This combination of verses became the accepted twentieth-century form of ‘Amazing Grace.’”^[10]

All Grace

While John Newton might not have attached any unique significance to his beloved hymn, Tony Reinke explains why “Amazing Grace” is such a fitting song for John Newton’s life and doctrine.

“For Newton, the Christian life could only be explained by God’s sustaining grace. Grace saved his wretched soul. Grace sought him out. Grace removed his spiritual blindness and opened his spiritual eyes. Grace taught him to fear God. Grace relieved his fears. Grace led him to hope. The life and ministry of Newton can all fit under the banner of grace-God’s abundant, all-sufficient, infi-nite, sovereign, unceasing, and amazing grace.”

For Additional Resources

• Jonathan Aitken, John Newton: From Disgrace to Amazing Grace
• Steve Turner, Amazing Grace: The Story of America’s Most Beloved Song
• Tony Reinke, Newton on the Christian Life
• John Piper’s message, “John Newton: The Tough Roots of His Habitual Tenderness”
• The John Newton Project online

FOOTNOTES

^[1] Jonathan Aitken, John Newton: From Disgrace to Amazing Grace, 224. (This book was published in 2007).

^[2] Aitken, John Newton, 224.

^[3] Aitken, John Newton, 226-227.

^[4] You can see Newton’s handwritten notes at the Museum of the Bible, or online at  https://www.museumofthebible.org/john-newtons-sermon-notes. You can read a summary outline of those notes here: https://www.johnnewton.org/Groups/231011/The_John_Newton/new_menus/Amazing_Grace/sermon_notes/sermon_notes.aspx.

^[5] Scott Hubbard, “A Friend in the Fire: How John Newton Loved William Cowper through Depression,” 11/5/2020, https://www.desiringgod.org/articles/a-friend-in-the-fire. See also John Piper’s biographical sketches of both William Cowper, https://www.desiringgod.org/messages/insanity-and-spiritual-songs-in-the-soul-of-a-saint, and John Newton, https://www.desiringgod.org/messages/john-newton-the-tough-roots-of-his-habitual-tenderness.

^[6] “It seems quite remarkable that the day Newton presented the hymn for the first time was also the day that Cowper attended church for the last time.” Steve Turner, “Amazing Grace”: The Story of America’s Most Beloved Song.

^[7] Aitken, John Newton, 232.

^[8] Aitken, John Newton, 233.

^[9] See Aitken, John Newton, 234.

^[10] Aitken, John Newton, 235.