John Newton and the English Evangelical Tradition.

John Newton and the English Evangelical Tradition
By D. Bruce Hindmarsh
Eerdmans, $30, 366 pp.

A few years ago Bill Moyers did a documentary for PBS on the hymn "Amazing Grace." From that program I learned that the composer was the captain of a slave ship that made the triangular voyage from England to Africa to the Caribbean. John Newton underwent a conversion experience, gave up the sea, was ordained to the Anglican priesthood, and, until his death in 1807, served parishes in the English Midlands and London.

What I discovered in Bruce Hindmarsh's learned biography was that Newton became a convert not because of his disgust for the slave trade, but because of his horror at the dissolute life he had led. Blasphemy, not slave trading, was the sin of which he accused himself. It was only decades later, mainly under the impulse of reformers like Wilberforce, that he came to some sound convictions about the dismal trafficking which had been part of his youth.

I also learned that Newton lived in the midst of theological developments so complex that Hindmarsh supplies the reader with a schema to sort out the various eddies of theological dispute. Newton had a Calvinist orientation. He was a fine Anglican parish priest, an indefatigable preacher and well-known writer, and he had connections with the Wesleyan revival of the eighteenth century. One companion in his parish at Olney was the poet-writer William Cowper who, despite intermittent fits of madness, was author and collaborator with Newton of the anthology Olney Hymns.

Like most Protestants of the time, Newton had very little contact with or knowledge of Catholicism although, as Hindmarsh notes, he had read a bit in the Jansenist literature coming from France. In these writings he would have found a kind of Augustinianism congenial to his own Calvinist leanings. In a series of 1772 letters, Newton developed a paradigm for how grace works that is not unlike the traditional Catholic understanding of the three stages of the spiritual life--a doctrine which has roots in the writings of Origen of Alexandria.

Many readers, not professionally concerned with theology, might find this book a bit slow where Hindmarsh disentangles the various strands of English theological work in the eighteenth century, but apart from those somewhat dense pages, his detailed study of Newton is crisply presented. I especially liked the long description of Newton's parochial life at Olney, where he labored for thirty-five years (1764-79). Newton preached twice on Sunday while finding time not only to visit his flock regularly but also to conduct regular study groups and prayer circles. He was a good parson, and I am happy to have been introduced to his life by such a reliable biographer. On my next visit to London this unreconstructed papist will pay honors to Newton's tomb at Saint Mary Woolnoth.

Lawrence S. Cunningham is the John A. O'Brien Professor of Theology at the University of Notre Dame.