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Amazing Grace: The Story of America's Most Beloved Song
Steve Turner
Ecco, 288 pages, $23.95

John Newton, the author of "Amazing Grace" and "Glorious Things of Thee Are Spoken," was remarkably thickheaded. If Calvinists believe in the "perseverance of the saints," this future Calvinist devoted himself to demonstrating the persistence of the sinner. The first few chapters of Steve Turner's engaging Amazing Grace chronicle Newton's dogged commitment to self-destructive vice to the point that this reader could not help scrawling in the margin of page 37, "This man was thick!"

Like many a seafaring man of the 18th century, Newton repeatedly engaged in physically and spiritually destructive behaviors. He deserted the Royal Navy, then was flogged for desertion and demoted. He made up disrespectful songs about his ship's captain and was demoted again. He frequently drowned himself in drink. He prided himself in creative profanity and sharp attacks on Christian belief. Even though on several occasions he seemed to have been miraculously preserved when he should have lost his life, he persisted in the godless philosophy he learned from the Third Earl of Shaftesbury's Characteristicks (which book Alexander Pope said had "done more harm to Revealed Religion in England than all the works of Infidelity put together"). He hardened his heart against God's advances.

One definition of neurosis (variously attributed to figures ranging from Rudyard Kipling to Bill Clinton) is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. Though his stupid persistence might qualify him for that label and worse, Newton was not just neurotic, he was spiritually sick. And God let that sickness run its course until Newton was willing to be healed.

The story of his conversion during an Atlantic storm is well known, and Turner tells it with exceptional drama. He seizes the moment to offer readers a lesson in what Wesley called experimental religion. "Still at the [ship's] wheel he reasoned that the best way forward was to ask for the power of the Spirit and then to start acting as though the gospel was true. The proof would be in the living."

The proof indeed came in the living, and Turner goes on to tell the story of a man devoted to God, to the people of his parish, and to the woman he loved. Indeed, his early persistence in vice was matched only by the perseverance of his romantic longings for Mary Catlett, whom he eventually married.

What emerges from Turner's book is the picture of a man deeply devoted to teaching the gospel to the people of Olney parish. He was also devoted to the spiritual and emotional welfare of his depressive friend, poet William Cowper. With Cowper, he produced an amazing body of hymnody, revolutionary for its time. Vibrant hymn singing was one of the earmarks of the 18th-century evangelical revival, but because of liturgical restrictions, the popular hymns were forced out of the confines of the church's Sunday worship into less formal gatherings outside consecrated buildings. In the Olney parish, this meant extra meetings in the vicarage on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and on Sundays after church. The hymns that Newton and Cowper wrote seem formal and didactic by today's standards, but in their time they were marked by a simplicity of language and straightforwardness of meaning designed to be sung by laborers and other "plain people."

Often Newton wrote hymns to match the biblical passage from which he was planning to teach. One of these hymns was "Amazing Grace," and we can date the composition of the hymn because we know the text (1 Chron. 17:16-17) and the day he preached on it (Jan. 1, 1773). The passage records King David's response to God's promise to make his name like the greatest men of the earth. "Who am I . . . that thou hast brought me hitherto?" Turner recounts the main points of Newton's exposition of the passage and shows how the verses of "Amazing Grace" reinforce Newton's pastoral teaching.

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March (Web-only) 2003, Vol. 47