John Newton

The whole world has sung his song to God. He spent his young manhood daring God to damn him. That is not a contrast the world knows what to do with. It is the only kind of story grace ever tells.

The Childhood

John Newton was born in London in 1725 to a Nonconformist mother who taught him hymns and Scripture by heart and a Royal Navy captain father who was rarely home. The mother died of tuberculosis when John was six. The father remarried, sent him to a hard boarding school for a couple of years, and pulled him out at eleven to sail with him.

By seventeen he was loose on the world: in love, badly, with the daughter of his mother's closest friend (a girl named Mary Catlett, whom he eventually married), and on the wrong side of every opportunity his father tried to engineer for him. He was pressed into the Royal Navy in 1744, deserted, was caught, was flogged before the entire ship's company, and was demoted from midshipman to common sailor. He was, in short, exactly the man you would expect to die obscurely at twenty-two of yellow fever in some West African port.

The Slaver

Instead, he traded ships and ended up on the African coast working for a slave trader on Plantain Island, near Sierra Leone. He was, briefly, more or less a slave himself — half-starved, mocked by his master's African mistress, sleeping in fields, eating what he could pull out of the dirt. His own father heard he was alive and arranged for a passing English captain to bring him home. He joined the Greyhound in February 1747, and spent more than a year aboard her before she turned for England.

He had not been merely irreligious in those years. He had been actively, performatively blasphemous. He invented new oaths to scandalize even sailors. He mocked Christianity with such inventiveness that the captain of the Greyhound — not himself a religious man — said he had never met anyone like John Newton, and that if there was such a thing as a Jonah whose presence could doom a ship, it was this young man.

The Storm

On the night of March 21, 1748, the Greyhound ran into a north Atlantic storm so violent that one of the ship's sides was stove in. Cargo washed away. The ship was filling faster than the pumps could clear it, and they tied themselves to the deck and pumped through the night, expecting to die before morning.

At one point the captain sent Newton below for a knife. Another man went up to the deck in his place, and the sea took him off it before Newton got back. Newton was alive because somebody had wanted a knife.

And standing at the pumps in the soaking dark, he said the first sincere words he had said to God since he was a child. They came out sideways, half a sailor's oath still in them: If this will not do, the Lord have mercy upon us.

He immediately recoiled at himself. What mercy can there be for me? But the words had been said, and they had not been performance, and they had not been mockery. They had been, for the first time in his adult life, real.

The ship survived. Newton always afterward marked March 21 as his anniversary. He observed it every year for the rest of his life as a day of fasting, prayer, and remembrance — which is to say that fifty-nine Marches later, in the last year he was alive, an old man in London was still keeping the anniversary of a night at sea he had done nothing to survive.

What Conversion Actually Looked Like

It is important to be honest here, because Newton was. The storm was not the moment Newton became a Christian in any developed sense. It was the moment something began. I was no longer an infidel, he wrote later — and that is the whole of what he would claim for that night. He was years away from understanding the doctrines of grace, and he never pretended otherwise.

What followed was a long and sometimes embarrassingly slow remaking. He continued in the slave trade for several years after the storm — eventually becoming captain of his own slave ship, the Duke of Argyle, in 1750. He held morning and evening prayers on board for his crew. He read his Bible nightly. He saw nothing inconsistent in this for years, because he had been raised in a culture in which the slave trade was simply the normal commerce of a colonial empire. The conscience does not grow up overnight.

But it grew. By 1754 he had quit the sea (forced by a mysterious seizure that left him fit for ministry but not for command). He took a job as a tide surveyor in Liverpool. He began studying Hebrew and Greek. He began to write. He fell in with George Whitefield and admired him for fifteen years — followed his preaching around closely enough that Liverpool took to calling Newton “young Whitefield,” which was not intended kindly. By 1764, after years of struggle for ordination (he was rejected by several bishops because of his Methodist sympathies), he was finally ordained an Anglican curate and given the parish at Olney in Buckinghamshire.

The Olney Years and the Hymn

At Olney he met William Cowper, the brilliant melancholic poet whose lifelong battle with depression and despair would have crushed a man of less generous patience than Newton. The two men became dearest friends, lived next door, and produced together the Olney Hymns (1779), one of the most influential hymn collections in English history.

And among those hymns, written for a sermon Newton preached on January 1, 1773 from 1 Chronicles 17, was a piece that began:

Amazing grace! how sweet the sound,
That sav'd a wretch like me!
I once was lost, but now am found,
Was blind, but now I see.

Two things must be said about the hymn if it is to be heard the way Newton wrote it. First, the word “wretch” was not poetic exaggeration. Newton meant it. He was the slave-ship captain. He was the blasphemer. He was the man who had to take a deep breath before he could even read aloud some of the things he had once said about God. When he sang “wretch like me,” he was being autobiographical to the bone.

Second, every line is the doctrine of sovereign grace in song. I once was lost — total depravity. But now am found — the active pursuit of God, the shepherd looking for the sheep. Was blind, but now I see — regeneration, eyes opened by the Spirit. 'Twas grace that taught my heart to fear, and grace my fears reliev'd — the work was God's, not Newton's, from beginning to end. How precious did that grace appear, the hour I first believed — the very faith was a gift; the “hour” was when grace gave him eyes. The hymn is, sung honestly, a Reformed soteriology in fewer than two hundred words. The whole world sings it without realizing it is being catechized into the doctrines of grace.

What He Did With the Long Life He Was Given

Newton lived to be eighty-two. He moved from Olney to a London parish in 1780 and stayed there until he could no longer climb the pulpit. In London he became the spiritual mentor of a young, brilliant Member of Parliament named William Wilberforce. When Wilberforce considered leaving political life to become a minister, Newton talked him out of it, and put it in writing: It is hoped and believed that the Lord has raised you up for the good of his church and for the good of the nation.

Wilberforce stayed. He spent the next twenty years pushing the abolition bill through Parliament and finally won the vote in 1807 — the year Newton died. The former slave-ship captain lived to give his eyewitness evidence against the trade to the Privy Council committee in 1788 and to a Commons select committee in 1789 and 1790. That same year he published Thoughts upon the African Slave Trade, a pamphlet in which he wrote, of the business he had once commanded a ship for: It will always be a subject of humiliating reflection to me, that I was once an active instrument in a business at which my heart now shudders.

It is the cleanest possible picture of grace finishing what grace began. The man who had been the slave-trader, sovereignly chosen, was sovereignly remade — until the very evil that had defined his old life was the evil his testimony helped destroy.

No One on That Deck Knew What Was Happening

There was no part of John Newton that qualified for grace in March of 1748. He was not seeking. He was not asking. He was the man his own captain had privately concluded was the reason the ship was in trouble.

And look at what the rescue actually looked like from inside it. It did not look like a rescue. It looked like a knife. An errand below deck, another man going up to the rail in his place, the sea taking that one and not this one — and nobody standing in that water could have told you which of those seconds was God. Newton spent the next fifty-nine years working out that he had been carried through a night whose shape he never once saw while he was in it.

That is what being sought out looks like from the inside. Not clarity. A knife, an errand, a man at the rail. The shape comes later, if it comes at all — which is exactly why Newton, to the end of his life, never once claimed he had helped.

Grace was not amazing to him because it arrived on time. It was amazing because it came for the worst man on the ship.

It never wanted a better one.