The film “Amazing Grace” is coming or has come, to a theatre near you. A high-minded friend who has seen the film told me that it was a “must see.” He also told me that the film’s music was the tune of what has become our country’s unofficial national hymn: Amazing Grace, or, as the tune is also called, New Britain. This hymn was, until the 1930s, sung to a variety of other tunes. Had it not been married more recently to the tune to which it is usually sung today, it might have never made it to the charts.
The tune is a nineteenth century North American folk music (Appalachian), with roots in Great Britain. This is why the tune is so singable; it has that “down home” flavor. Its popularity has not been hurt by being recorded by the Royal Scots Dragoons, and sung by Judy Collins and Mahalia Jackson. That fact, coupled with some arrangements from choirs, has misled many to think of the tune as black gospel.
It is easy to read this hymn as the story of John Newton’s (its author) own spiritual experience, and similar to the experience of many who sing the hymn today. It was probably this very fact that for a long time helped keep the hymn out of the hymnals of those parts of the church that emphasized Christian nurture from earliest childhood, rather than adult conversation. Those who have been from their childhood nurtured in the faith never experienced the crisis of fear of which the hymn speaks in the second stanza. In contrast to the old “Southern” Presbyterian Church, the “Northern” Presbyterians did not have the hymn in their collections before the jointly-published The Hymnbook was launched in 1955.
Something that is not generally understood about this hymn is that it was not based on Newton’s mid-life conversion. It was inspired by the story of David’s response to the covenant God made with him, as recorded in 1 Chronicles 17 (especially verses 16 & 17). That this story was what moved Newton to write the hymn may explain the fact that the author never names the grace that was so amazing, as we might well expect of one who also gave us “How Sweet the Name of Jesus Sounds” and other explicitly evangelical hymns. For those who read this hymn as an account of their own pilgrimage, and to counter the notion of “cheap grace,” I, in 1994 penned this additional stanza, which all so desiring are free to use:
You ask me how this grace I know,
This grace of which I sing?
‘Tis found in Christ, to whom I owe
My life, my everything.
William S. Smith is a retired Presbyterian pastor and former missionary. He served as a PCUS, then PC(USA) missionary to Brazil. His latest pastorate was First Church in Murfreesboro, Tenn.
