His name was John Newton and he went to sea at an early age. He rejected the faith of his mother. But later as the captain of a slave ship in the middle of a storm, he met Jesus and it changed his life forever. Join Charles Morris for the next Haven Today for a program called "Amazing Grace and John Newton."

February 20, 2007

Amazing Grace and John Newton

His mother died when he was 7 and later he went to sea as he questioned the faith he was taught so young. While captaining his own ship, a ship carrying slaves from Africa, John Newton met Jesus in the midst of a howling storm. He went on to become a minister in England and supported his friend William Wilberforce in working to end slavery. The first bill passed 200 years ago. I’m Charles Morris and welcome to Haven Today, telling the great story that’s all about Jesus. This program is called, “Amazing Grace and John Newton”. In a moment we’ll be talking with a noted scholar who will bring this point in history to a point of faith. It’s this weekend that a new movie opens called, “Amazing Grace”. Later, I want to tell you about a book we have with the words of John Newton, by John Newton. That hymn has been sung by Christians for many years and over the last few decades it’s been picked up and sung and played by many others. Listen now to the voice of Judy Collins and may these words bring God’s grace to you.

Song: Amazing Grace
Performed by: Judy Collins

This is Haven Today and the program, if you couldn’t tell by the music we opened with, is “Amazing Grace with John Newton” who wrote the lyrics. We don’t have all the lyrics and we actually have a few lyrics added but we’ll get our special guest to tell us a little bit about that. Dr. Bruce Hindmarsh is actually in New York City this week taping a special with the British Broadcasting Corporation on “Amazing Grace” but we have him a few days ahead of time from Regent College in Vancouver, BC where he teaches and also, well Bruce before I keep extolling you let me say, welcome back to Haven Today
BH: Thank you Charles. Good to be with you again.
CM: Alright, and I get to say this, you don’t. You would never say it. I said it on our last time together. Bruce has a PhD from Oxford, he did his dissertation on the man we’re going to be talking about today. And I would describe Bruce as the “Amazing Grace” scholar alive today. And with that kind of introduction, Bruce sorry, I may have gone over the top there for you. I apologize for that. But tell us, who was John Newton? He’s going to be in a movie that starts later this week by the same name, but tell us about him. Where did he come from? What were his roots? And how did he even come to write these lyrics, “Amazing Grace”?

BH: Newton lived about 300 years ago in England and he grew up as the child of someone in the merchant marine. This was the great maritime age of Britain, in terms of being a nation at sea with sailors and a great Navy and a great merchant marine.
CM: Well, they ruled the sea, didn’t they, Great Britain did at the time?
BH: They did, they did, they did, the “wooden walls of Britain”. So Newton grew up in a sense, destined for that kind of a career and went with his father to sea and had some experience being with his father on ships, initially to the Mediterranean. And his mother was a devout believer in Christ. And she was a “dissenter” and we don’t tend to use that kind of language in North America, maybe we might talk about “free churchmen” but that simply meant that they weren’t a part of the Church of England.
CM: OK
BH: They were a kind of descendents of the Puritans and they were quite a minority, maybe 2% of the population. But she would teach young John Newton the hymns of Isaac Watts and she would teach him about faith in Christ and he obviously was quite close to his mother but she dies when he’s 7 years of age. And that obviously went very deep.
CM: And his father was off at sea so it left him almost an orphan, didn’t it?
BH: It did, it did. And I think there’s a sense for him that sort of the innocence of childhood went with his mother. And he talks about descending into hardness of heart and learning the ways of the world, and in a way, when he was doing these voyages and out to sea he probably learned some bad habits. He was exposed to –
CM: Loose living, some Christians today might call that. He certainly knew about that.
BH: He did. He talked about being a libertine and a free thinker which we today would say would be sort of immorality and becoming an Agnostic. So he really had lost his faith and that’s the kind of direction he was going. Newton wasn’t real close to his father, but his father wanted to set him up in business and he had the idea that he’d set him up in Jamaica and set him up in, I think it was the sugar cane business, but with a kind of business in Jamaica. And Newton was supposed to make a visit to Kent before he was going to go. He was going to visit some friends of the family.
CM: And how old would he have been at this point?
BH: Oh, that’s a good question. He’s a young man.
CM: Late teens maybe I think?
BH: Yeah, I think so.
CM: OK
BH: I think so. And he meets Mary Catlan, the daughter of this family and he falls head over heels in love with her. And he uses a kind of shorthand in his autobiography, he says, “It was more than all the writers of romance have ever described.” You know? That was his way of saying that he was just absolutely besotted, just in love with this woman, and love at first sight. So he intentionally stays longer. And, I mean there aren’t any cell phones and there, you know, no email, so his father can’t get a hold of him, he just stays with this family longer, long enough that the ship for Jamaica has left. And so he misses the boat and, because he wants to stay around for Mary Catlan, he wasn’t sure he wanted to do this. And Newton will do this kind of thing another time. Eventually he does end up with a kind of being set up with a kind of career, his father makes sort of another attempt and once again he overstays, but this second time he gets press ganged into the navy.
CM: Now explain what press ganged means to us.
BH: These were the tense days before when England was about to be at war with France.
CM: Yes.
BH: And what they could do is if you were wandering around in the kind of streets of the town, streets of London, the Navy could come and grab you and just take you onboard to be a common seaman, to be a part of the Navy. If you didn’t have papers, if you couldn’t show that you were a proper apprentice, you didn’t have a trade, you didn’t have a profession –
CM: Didn’t look like a gentleman so –
BH: That’s right. They could take you, put you on board. And his father intervenes and gets him promoted to midshipman, which would be a kind of junior officer, so he wouldn’t have to be, as they said, “before the mast” kind of live the rough life of a common sailor. So he’s in the Navy and he’s desperate, he does not want to do this. He is thinking about Mary Catlan, he’s in love with Mary Catlan
CM: Yeah, he’s in love, sure.
BH: That’s right. So the ship, I should say, is destined for a tour of duty actually in East India. So it’s going to be going over to around the cape toward India and I think the tour is going to be 3 to 5 years or something like that. And he is desperate, so he goes AWOL. I think it’s around Southampton, somewhere on the south coast. He goes ashore and he goes AWOL and he takes off and he’s on his way back to Kent, on his way back to his first love.
CM: His life, at that point was in jeopardy.
BH: Oh yeah, and what happens is, he’s caught. And he’s taken back on board and the captain of the ship feels like, you know, “I’ve promoted you to midshipman. I’ve taken care of you, but I’ll have none of this.” And this is of course also an occasion for discipline. You can’t have this kind of example set for others. So he is whipped with a cat-o-nine-tails publicly, publicly disgraced. He’s demoted back in front of the mast and becomes again a common sailor. And the ship is leaving the coast of England. He’s looking over the edge of the boat as the horizon is receding and he’s thinking about murder suicide. He says he thought about murdering the captain and then killing himself, that’s how dark things had become. And it’s interesting what the Lord uses sometimes in our lives to keep us going. He says the only thing that kept him alive at that point, that kept him from doing this awful thing was his hope of seeing Mary Catlan again someday.
CM: Well.
BH: So I sometimes say as Newton tells this story there’s sort of 3 “C’s”. It’s the story of his courtship, it’ll be a story of his career, sort of lost and found, and it’ll be a story of his conversion
CM: Wow
BH: and these three kind of coincide.
CM: Well, let’s speed up his biography a little bit and let me, let me just point out that eventually he becomes a captain himself and he’s a captain of a slave trading vessel. And he didn’t really think anything about it at the time because it wasn’t viewed as being bad at the time.
BH: That’s right. That’s right he ends up transferring from the Navy to a slave trading ship and he becomes, indeed, a captain of a slave ship and he makes several trips that way. And he says at the time he thought of it as an unpleasant occupation, like being a jailor, and he didn’t really understand the full evils of what he was involved in as chattel slavery. And later on he not only does indeed come to understand that and repent of it, but he gives evidence to the Privy Council, he writes a tract against the slave trade and he refused a doctorate, an honorary doctorate. He said, “That doctorate belongs to the Africans.” And he said, “I’m just an old, converted slave trader. I’m just a converted sinner, I don’t deserve a doctorate.” So he will later, certainly when he realizes what he’d been involved in he comes to that awakening of conscience and eventually –
CM: Well, and we need to put a kind of a bit of a message here to rest and I’m glad you were doing that just then, but he has come under criticism because when he went through this experience of really sinking his teeth into the Word and the Holy Spirit was at work in his heart, he was still captain of a slave trading ship. Synthesize that for me. How, you know, here he was getting spiritual but yet he hadn’t seen that, you know being a slave trader was wrong. And I know you talk about that in your dissertation too.
BH: Well, I think the question is, was Newton a hypocrite?
CM: Right, yes, yes.
BH: Was he a complete hypocrite or was he a phony? And so, for example – I won’t say, I won’t name names but – sometimes it’s been made to look like Newton was writing the hymn “Amazing Grace” while the waves are crashing over the gunnels, wiping the brine from his forehead while underneath the African slaves are crying out in misery.
CM: Yes, yes, yes.
BH: And that is simply a failure of chronology because what happens is he, it is as a slave trader that he does begin to have spiritual questions. And we could talk about his conversion and how that goes through, but the first thing he says in his autobiography is how slow it seemed like the light of grace had dawned. He compared his spiritual experience with another famous convert from the 18th century, Colonel Gardner and he said, for him he seemed like it was, like he just knew right away after his conversion, the light dawned bright. He said, “For me it was slow.” And he leaves the slave trade, for 10 years he’s in Liverpool working as a civil servant, what they call a tide surveyor, sort of the customs office and in 1764 he finally becomes a pastor and it’s as a pastor he writes the hymn “Amazing Grace”. So he’s been long out of the slave trade and long left all of that behind.
CM: and just tell us here a little bit because he lacked a formal education but yet he was a very educated man and aspired to the ministry for some years before he was given a vicarage, a pastorate and then a vicarage there in Olney, England.
BH: Yeah, his story is actually probably quite an encouragement for some of us who maybe feel like we didn’t get our education when we should have.
CM: Yes
BH: because he was self taught. John Wesley thought it was appalling that he was initially turned down for ordination because he hadn’t been to university because he knew how much Newton had learned.
CM: Well, he knew Greek, he learned Hebrew
BH: Oh, he taught himself Latin. He actually taught himself Syriac, I mean nobody knows Syriac but he taught himself Syriac. And he did get a good education. He gave himself a course in Divinity, if you like, like a seminary education. And so he is one of the great, as you say, autodidact, or self-taught pastors.
CM: And he really knew his Bible. You only have to read his Olney Hymnal that he and Cooper put together years later to know this man knew the Word of God too.
BH: He did, he did. And it’s a good thing he did because he would often preach you know, 6, 7, 8 times a week, so –
CM: yeah, and after you get on that kind of schedule you’d better have some fodder in the background. Let me just tell everyone, if you’ve joined us, this is Haven Today and I’m Charles Morris and you are listening to Dr. Bruce Hindmarsh who is a professor of Spiritual Theology at Regent College in Vancouver, BC but he is also an “Amazing Grace” scholar and did his dissertation at Oxford on that man we’re talking about today, “Amazing Grace and John Newton”. Let’s move on then, he gets into the pastorate and he only pastors in 2 places, Olney in England and then later as you’ve told us, down in London. He did some amazing things that a Church of England pastor didn’t do in those days. Let’s talk about what happened in Olney.
BH: Olney, this is a small town of about 2000 people in the English midlands and he becomes their parish pastor. And really, what we see is an evangelical pastor who witnesses renewal, revival, an awakening that is general, throughout not only the kind of local town but the local region because he becomes an itinerant. Not maybe like some of John Wesley’s itinerants, but he will take the Gospel to the outlying villages and so on. He establishes a regular pattern of meetings, not just the church meetings but also mid week meetings, he, pattern of visitation, he –
CM: Which a Church of England vicar did not do in those days, for the most part.
BH: No, no in many cases no.
CM: You went and had tea with proper people but you didn’t really reach out to the lower classes?
BH: That’s right and he would meet people sometimes just in a cottage. When we say cottage, you know, we think of a romantic cottage, but as you say, the poor people. He would meet them and talk with them and pray with them. There were prayer meetings. There were meetings where he would write a hymn for the meeting as a way of, so along with his talk, along with his sermon, so he’d give a talk, but he’d write a hymn so they could remember it. And a lot of these people were poor lace makers.
CM: Yes, tell us about the factory in Olney, what it was famous for and how he wanted to reach out to them and did.
BH: Well, a lot of, Olney was famous for its lace making and a lot of the immigration was Flemish, was from the Low Countries and even the names of people in the area. And part of what the people brought with them was this, this kind of lace making skill. And this would have been sort of a home industry. But these people were very poor. So, day laborers and then out of their homes, doing the lace making and what you need to picture is people working by lamp light, working away at the lace and singing some of these hymns that Newton had taught them. This was Newton’s way of helping them remember the things he was teaching them in the sermons. So for example we know when he wrote “Amazing Grace” because there’s a sermon on 1 Chronicles 17:16 and 17 and that’s the text that the hymn was written to and the sermon follows the hymn and the hymn follows the sermon. And it’s in his diary. And so we know that this wasn’t just the story of his conversion. And sometimes it’s made to sound that way. And that’s, and of course it was –
CM: In a sense, yes.
BH: His conversion was dramatic. He was in a near shipwreck in the North Atlantic in 1748 on one of these voyages when it looked like the ship was going down. And he, a man was swept overboard, the ship was breaking apart and he crawls up out of the belly of the ship onto the deck and he says, “Boy if this doesn’t do, if we can’t make it,” he says, “Lord have mercy.” And then he stops himself and he thinks, “Who am I to pray ‘Lord have mercy’ when I’ve been this hardened sinner, haven’t’ prayed for years –
CM: Yes
BH: And all night long as he’s steering this ship he’s thinking – all of a sudden, the agonies of a repressed conscience all break loose and he thinks, “Who am I to pray? What hope of mercy is there for me?”
CM: The teaching of his mother as a child is all coming back,
BH: It all comes back
CM: it’s sweeping back over him, even as the storm rages.
BH: Even as it rages. And so he always remembers that. And it’s interesting, one of his spiritual practices Charles was – I read through his diary, 600 pages of his diary – and he would keep an anniversary, on March 21 1748, every March 21 in his diary he would remember God’s grace to him. And he kept kind of “spiritual birthdays” if you like, and spiritual anniversaries, the anniversary of his beginning in ministry, his own birthday, his wife’s birthday, all these were occasions for spiritual reflection, but the last entry in his diary was a commemoration of that moment at sea when his conscience first became awakened. As I say, it was a journey from that point actually coming to real faith in Christ but “Amazing grace, how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me?” How can that not be about his personal experience?
CM: Yes.
BH: But what I found really interesting when I looked into the history of the hymn is, do you know who is saying in that hymn, if you look at Newton’s sermon, if you look at the Bible text that it’s printed under, do you know who was saying “Amazing grace how sweet the sound” in that hymn?
CM: No, no tell us.
BH: It’s King David
CM: King David
BH: It’s King David. The prophet Nathan comes to David and renews the covenant with David and renews God’s promises to David and David says, “Who is me and what is my house that you have spoken not only of the present but of the future? T’is grace that brought me safe thus far and grace will lead me home.” And the hymn was called, “Faith Review and Expectation”. That you look back on how God has led you and God speaks to the future and you look ahead. And so the depth and richness of this hymn, which we sometimes think about is just a hymn of testimony, that’s all it is. Well, yes it is, but it’s David and it’s that greater side of David, Jesus Christ, so Newton would have explained all this. Think about David and of course we take our place alongside David and the unfolding of the biblical covenants that climax in God’s promises in the Son of David. And so we, like David can look back on how God has led us, can claim his promises and look forward to how grace will lead us home. That’s of course exactly what the hymn does,
CM: Yes
BH: so it becomes David, it becomes Christ, it becomes the poor parishioners in Olney, it becomes John Newton, and of course when we look at the history of the hymn, it’s become everybody’s story.
CM: I feel like every one of us have been to class with Dr. Bruce Hindmarsh. Bruce, thank you so much for sharing with us today on Haven Today.
BH: Thank you it’s good to be with you.
CM: “Amazing Grace with John Newton” here on Haven Today. A special thanks to Dr. Bruce Hindmarsh for leading us from this point in history to a point of faith. I hope you can see the movie, “Amazing Grace” that opens this week in North America. I’d like to suggest that you learn more about how the Lord was working in the heart of John Newton. We have available the book, “Life and Spirituality of John Newton”. This is the words of Newton by Newton. It’s highly readable and this short book is a series of letters written on how he came to faith after living the life of a slave trading ship’s captain to become one of England’s most famous ministers. It ends with 3 letters written to a business man in England on how to grow in grace. I’d like you to have “Life and Spirituality of John Newton” as our thank you for your gift to Haven Today. We’re on the air because of friends like you. Along with this book I want to send you the full time that we’re spending with Dr. Bruce Hindmarsh in which he talks about John Newton, William Wilberforce and gives us a history of the famous hymn, “Amazing Grace”. You can contact us by calling us at 1-800-654-2836, that’s 1-800-654-2836. Or you can go to our website, haventoday.org, that’s haventoday.org. Let us know the station you’re listening to when you get in touch. If you also want to join me in reading the Bible in 90 days be sure and check out our website as well for that, haventoday.org. Or call 1-800-65-HAVEN. I’m Charles Morris and thank you for joining me with Bruce Hindmarsh. Come back again tomorrow, won’t you? We’ll be talking again about Amazing Grace, the amazing grace that comes from Jesus Christ, the great story, and we’ll do it together here on Haven Today.