From Disgrace to Amazing Grace, Essay Example

John Newton: From Disgrace to Amazing Grace, by Jonathan Aitken, was written and released to coincide with the 200^th anniversary of Newton’s death. In the book, Aitken, who has established himself as a credible biographer (Richard Nixon, Chuck Colson, et al.), traces Newton’s 82 years of life, observing his enduring legacy. Newton’s conversion experience was astonishing. He penned the most beloved Christian hymn of all time. He labored to abolish the trading of human lives through the institution of slavery. Some consider him a founding father of the spiritual revivals that encompassed England in the 18^th and 19^th centuries. He is remembered, “yet for all his seminal contributions to political and spiritual history, most people today are woefully ignorant about John Newton” (Aitken 17). In order to fill in a few important links between the man and the myth, an elucidation of three of Newton’s character traits show that he was a deserving minister who did far more good than give the world “Amazing Grace.”   

First, Newton was a man of courageous faith. His conversion happened because of his narrow escape of death by a storm at sea. Ironically, he could not swim, so surviving after pumping water from his ship for about nine hours straight gave him a feeling of relief and gratitude to God for his deliverance. “When I heard about six in the evening that the ship was freed from water there arose a gleam of hope. I thought I could see the hand of God displayed in our favor. I began to pray (Aitken 77).” Reading Thomas a Kempis’ Imitation of Christ that he found onboard the ship before the storm no doubt sewed the seeds of his eventual conversion (Bailey).

Newton was no stranger to adversity. His mother had died when he was seven. He quit school to sail with his father when he was ten. At eighteen, he hated military life so much that he deserted his ship. He was captured, publicly flogged, and demoted from a mid class sailor to a regular seaman. Experiences such as these toughened him so that his faith could be courageously bold. As he embarked on his journey in ministry, he wrote:

Oh, what zeal, faith, patience, watchfulness, and courage will be needed for my   support and guidance! My only hope is in the name and power of Jesus. May that precious name be as ointment poured forth to your soul and mine. May that power be triumphantly manifested in our-weakness (Aitken 176)!

Growing up as he did, prepared him to identify with common people. He did not put on airs. He never forgot where he came from as his life changed from sinful disobedience to God to faithful obedience to God’s perfect plan for his life.

Second, Newton lived a life of humility. This is especially true when his spiritual life was on trial before he became the minister of the Olney Parish, where he wrote his Olney Hymns of which Amazing Grace, originally title “Faith’s Review and Expectation,” is one. Newton found it a difficult task to obtain the required theological education, mentor support, and subsequent ordination in the Anglican Church. Newton said that a ministers’ greatest virtue is humility, praying:

Lord, give me a humbling sense of my sins, give a humbling view of thy glory, give me a humbling view of they love, for surely nothing humbles like these. All my pride springs from ignorance…May I be nothing in my own eyes, may I be willing and desirous to be the servant of all (Aitken 149).

His humility allowed him not to take his rocky road to the Protestant priesthood as a personally affront. He knew full well that his calling was rather unorthodox and that his past as a dealer in human flesh would make him the object whispering campaigns from among church going people. Eventually he was called to the parish of an uneducated, rural flock in Buckinghamshire, and he accepted his station with a bit of moralizing. “I see striking and unexpected instances of great danger to which the countenance and friendship of persons of distinction may expose a minister” (Aitken 181). His resolve never vacillated, even after he became friend and colleague to the famous writer, William Cowper, also of Olney, with whom he collaborated in several evangelical endeavors.

Third, Newton had perseverance. Toward the end of his life, he worked for the abolition of slavery in his country. He worked as tirelessly for that, with William Wilberforce, as he had once worked to perpetrate it through trade at sea. When Newton heard that the institution of slavery was to be abolished once and for all. In correspondence with Wilberforce, Newton expressed his joy.

Though I can scarcely see the paper before me, I must attempt to express my thankfulness to the Lord and to offer my congratulations to you for the success that he has so far been pleased to give to your unwearied endeavors for the abolition of the trade that I considered such a millstone sufficient, of itself sufficient, to sink such an enlightened and highly favored nation as ours to the bottom of the sea…Whether I who am within two months of entering my eightieth year shall live to see the accomplishment of the work is only known to him in whose hands are all our times and ways, but the hopeful prospects of its accomplishment will, I trust, give me daily satisfaction so long as my declining faculties and preserved” (Aitken 346-347).

Further, he embodied the firmness of the scriptural passage from Matthew that says, “To whom much is given, much is required,” when he wrote, in the last year of his life, “My memory is almost gone, but I remember two things: That I am a great sinner and that Christ is a great Savior” (Aitken 347).

For Newton, “Amazing Grace” could be written because he had known grace that was amazing. Newton had run from God. God had brought him to restoration. Restoration had given him new life. New life had caused him to minister with a spirit of urgency. This was true from the time he came under the preaching of Wesley until his death as an old man. Newton knew a life of pain. He knew a life of sin. He knew a life of forgiveness. He knew a life filled with the purposes of God.

In the forward of Aiken’s book, Philip Yancey writes, “Grace, like water, always flows downward, to the lowest place.” Newton had been in low places. That is where the Lord found him and brought him home. It is fitting that the remains of Newton and his wife, Mary Catlett, were re-interred in the yard of the Olney Parish when an underground train line was laid under the church in London where he later served and was originally buried (Adams). Newton would want to rest there. The inscription that Newton wrote for his tomb is among the most famous of all time. It provides a brief summation of the way he wished to be remembered in ways that speak of faith, humility ,and perseverance.

John Newton Once an Infidel and Libertine A Servant of slaves in Africa was by   the rich mercy of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ Preserved, Restored, Pardoned and appointed to Preach the Faith He had Long Laboured to Destroyed (Aitken 350).

Work Cited

Adams, Jere (Ed.). Handbook to the Baptist Hymnal. (1992). Nashville, TN: Convention Press.

Aitken, Jonathan. John Newton: From Disgrace to Amazing Grace. (2007): Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books.

Bailey, Albert. The Gospel in Hymns. (1954). New York: Scribner’s.