T o L i V e I s c h r I s t

32 

Introduction

he showed little patience for theorizing about the Christian life.

 39

 We 

would fail to honor his pastoral legacy if this study of Newton’s let-

ters were nothing more than academic analysis. With two eyes fixed on 

Christ, Newton was a man of purpose and action. To honor his legacy, 

I will adopt his aim as my aim for this project. Think of this book as 

a field guide meant to get dirty, dog-eared, and faded in the clenched 

hands of a Christian pilgrim.

39

 Josiah Bull: “Were we to seek, in one word, to characterize the whole of Mr. Newton’s life-work, we 

should say its whole aim was utility” (Bull, Life, 322).

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33

CH A P TER 1

A M A ZING GR ACE

A savage ocean storm awoke the crew of the Greyhound, a cargo ship 

crammed with merchandise collected from the west coast of Africa. From 

port to port, the ship had been slowly filled with African gold, ivory, bees-

wax, and camwood (lumber). But now, late in the dark night of March 21, 

1748, a twenty-two-year-old sailor named John was awakened by gale-force 

winds battering the ship. Waves slammed into her and ripped away the 

upper timbers on one side, sending water through a gaping hole into John’s 

room. Awakened by the chaos, he jumped half naked from his bed to furi-

ously hand pump water back into the swaying ocean.

 1

 With the cold saltwa-

ter pouring into the aging and broken vessel, crewmates grabbed buckets 

and began tossing the water back into the dark sea. Newton cranked for 

his life while waves broke over his head. Desperation overwhelmed the 

doomed crew, and John’s heart pounded furiously with adrenaline-charged 

fears of being dumped overboard in the middle of a dark sea, weeks away 

from the nearest coastline. Like many sailors of his time, he couldn’t swim.

As John Newton later reflected, he was unfit to live and unfit to die. The 

fear of death strained his energies at the water pump, but it was a battle he 

could not win. Saltwater waves continued crashing against the ship, and 

the endless ocean of water rushed over the deck faster than the men could 

spit it back out. The ship creaked and groaned under the assault as the crew 

frantically battled the angry forces of the sea.

Newton’s moral life had already sunk. He was a wicked and insubordinate 

1

 For a detailed account, see Aitken, 69–84.

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34 

NE W TON ON T HE CHR IS T I A N L IF E

young man with a profane tongue, flesh-driven appetites, and stone-cold 

heart. He had gambled his way into debt and dabbled in witchcraft. And as a 

young man in foreign lands, he had become sexually promiscuous. Later, as a 

young captain of a slave-trading ship, he may have indulged his lusts further 

by raping captive African women in the “sexual free-for-alls on board ship 

that most captains in the trade regarded as theirs by right.”

 2

 He didn’t par-

ticularly enjoy alcohol, but he drank to prompt drunkenness in others and to 

entertain himself by the follies the liquor encouraged in them. What is clear: 

Newton was immune from no sin. He delighted to lead others into tempta-

tion, later calling himself “a ringleader in blasphemy and wickedness.”

 3

Not content with running the broad way myself, I was indefatigable in 

enticing others; and, had my influence been equal to my wishes, I would 

have carried all the human race with me. I had the ambition of a Caesar 

or an Alexander, and wanted to rank in wickedness among the foremost 

of the human race.

 4

Life on the sea only amplified Newton’s wretched tendencies.

 5

 He 

sailed for months in a bubble of unchecked sin, estranged from godly ex-

amples, cut off from the gospel, hardened by the dangers of sea life, and 

entrenched among a group of men who incited one another to sin. Life on 

an eighteenth-century merchant ship was the spiritually deadening cli-

mate his soul least needed.

The Wretch

If any man was unworthy of deliverance from the raging sea, it was the twenty-

two-year-old sailor John Newton. In this moment Newton was focused on 

2

 Aitken, 111. Phipps will only say Newton “probably raped slaves” (William E. Phipps, Amazing Grace in John 

Newton: Slave-Ship Captain, Hymnwriter, and Abolitionist [Mercer, GA: Mercer University Press, 2001], 33). 

Aitken is convinced of it (see Aitken, 64, 93, 107, 111, 116, 169, 320). But the evidence is lacking and this 

conclusion is disputed. The cash value of a female slave swelled if she was carrying the child of a white man, 

a prospect that only incited further sexual misuse by sailors at sea (Phipps, Amazing Grace in John Newton, 33).

3

 Letters (Taylor), 209.

4

 W, 2:246.

5

 In a preface he wrote for a book meant to reach sailors with the gospel, Newton said: “I traversed the ocean, 

in a great variety of situations and circumstances, near twenty years. But long, too long, I was a careless 

inattentive spectator of the wonders of the Lord in the great deep. My heart was hard, my language profane, 

my conduct most profligate and licentious. Thus I know, not only from observation, but from sorrowful 

experience, the disadvantages sea-men are in general under, with respect to the concernments of their 

precious souls. They usually pass the greatest part of their lives upon the sea, and therefore can derive little 

benefit either from instruction or example. Rather, they too recently strengthen and confirm each other 

in habits of wickedness. The frequency of their deliverances from the dangers to which they are exposed, 

often harden them into fearless insensibility. Thus they go on from bad to worse, strangers to God, and 

thoughtless of eternity” (John Ryther, The Sea-Man’s Preacher [London: 1803], vii–viii).

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