Hagiography

John Newton, From Disgrace To Amazing Grace, by Jonathan Aitken (Crossway Books 2007). This is the first book I have read right through as an eBook, on my new Sony E-Reader. Great fun. You can buy it online, pay for it, download it and be reading it in five minutes.

But now, to business... First the author, Jonathan Aitken. He is a British politician who in 1999 was convicted of perjury and perverting the course of justice, was bankrupted, and went to prison. He had been a war journalist, had got entangled among international arms dealers (in the process he had managed to father a daughter with the wife of Adnan Khashoggi), had been elected an MP and risen to cabinet rank under John Major... But not under Margaret Thatcher -- there is a wonderful story of how he told an Egyptian newspaper that Mrs Thatcher thinks Sinai is the plural of Sinus, after which he enjoyed the view from the back bench in Thatcher’s government.

However, in 1997, after a colourful and chequered political history, to say the least, Aitken got interested in the Alpha Course. This is a study course in Christian biblical understanding and life developed from Holy Trinity Church, Brompton, fairly conservative in its approach, too much so for some, but stunningly successful around the world. Jonathan Aitken however embraced Christian faith in its protestant evangelical format, and then took on serious theological studies including Greek.

Now he has done what I am sure he thinks is a scholarly biography of John Newton. John Newton exists in Christian history as the writer of “Amazing Grace” and many other well-known English hymns of the late 18th century in which he collaborated with William Cowper. He is known as the former slave ship captain who was converted to Christ and wound up as Vicar of Olney, and then of St Mary Woolnoth in London, and was a leader of the Evangelical renovation of the Church of England. John Newton was a great and good man, a man of faith and prayer.

But this is not really a scholarly biography. Both Newton and Aitken, and of course many others, know themselves to have been found by grace, forgiven and transformed. I too am acquainted with the reality of grace. Far more people are than Jonathan Aitken seems to realise. Grace is a reality that the formal church often finds inconvenient and betrays. Grace is something close and real about God. It is of the esse of God. Without grace we are lost. John Newton experienced grace. So did Jonathan Aitken. In evangelical terms, in our need, grace abounds.

But we don’t go on about it. I suppose that is what mainly distances me from the evangelicals... Christ is better praised and loved by quiet love and faith. Newton’s hymns are among my favourites because they tell my story too. But they have never inspired me to prove something against the rest of the church, as Aitken seems to think is necessary. He has a sad view of the “quiet” church which actually includes many thoughtful, changed and deeply spiritual people, men and women of commitment and discipline, and deep love of Christ.

Aitken’s book fails the scholarship test because it reads like a polemic, a tract, an evangelical sermon. It is hopelessly repetitive. Some of it seems to be notes of the author’s own sermons or lectures on Newton and evangelicalism.

I find myself wishing the same story had been researched by some sensitive atheist or agnostic. Anyone but a militant Anglican evangelical at this time, perhaps. We might then have a really serious and objective biography of John Newton. Someone, some time, might undertake a study of the history of human biography, and of how many times a really important story has been wasted because it came to be told by the wrong person. But then, that is just the difference between biography and hagiography.