Review of Brian G. Najapfour, Joseph Hart (1712–1768), Eighteenth-Century Hymnody, and the British Evangelical Movement
Does your reading pile grow and grow like mine? Every month there is another devotional or magazine in our church mailbox; every week new books by outstanding authors on important topics appear; every day blog posts, newsletters, and podcasts proliferate without number. There are too few hours in the day to keep up. (Perhaps, you are thinking to yourself, those long-winded writers in The Outlook are part of the problem!)
Of course, this problem is really a tremendous privilege: we live in a time of abundant educational opportunities, with no good reason not to avail ourselves of the excellent Reformed study materials that are continually appearing. Yet time is still precious. For that reason, when I have both things to read and things to write on my to-do list, you can understand why I might try to combine those tasks.
I appreciate short book reviews in The Outlook and other Reformed magazines, but I also admire the long labor of people like Rev. Shane Lems and Dr. Andrew Compton, who have been thoughtfully reviewing a variety of books on their blog The Reformed Reader for more than fifteen years.1 So when I received a review copy of Dr. Brian G. Najapfour’s Joseph Hart (1712–1768), Eighteenth-Century Hymnody, and the British Evangelical Movement, I sensed it deserved something more than a mere blurb. I hope you’ll think so too.
Najapfour, who has written for The Outlook and served on the board of Reformed Fellowship, wrote his doctoral dissertation on Hart for the Theological University of Apeldoorn. You may have never heard of Hart, but you may recognize his most famous hymn, “Come, Ye Sinners, Poor and Wretched,” which appears in more than fourteen hundred songbooks.2 Najapfour presses past the origin of this beloved text to offer a holistic examination of Hart’s life, ministry, and religious context. Mark Noll, the premier historian of evangelical Christianity, authored the foreword, confirming the scholarly significance of Najapfour’s project.
Well and good, you may think, but why should those of us who are not premier historians of evangelical Christianity care about an eighteenth-century hymnwriter? I think the book addresses at least three timeless questions that each Reformed believer should consider.
Why We Must Each Be Converted
It may seem odd to talk about the conversion of someone who was raised in the church and assented to Calvinist teaching throughout his life. Hart’s outward behavior seems to have demonstrated little that would conflict with a Christian walk. On the inside, however, his adolescence was full of what he later called “Vanities and Vices.”3 As Najapfour recounts, Hart’s attempts to reconcile Calvinist doctrine with his sinful habits led him into a period of legalism followed by a period of antinomianism. In other words, Hart first sought his salvation in earnest moral living, and when he finally realized that he needed the saving work of Christ, he retreated to the other extreme, considering good works totally unnecessary.
Through both of these seasons of error, Hart retained some notion of Reformed doctrines of salvation. In fact, Najapfour connects Hart’s antinomianism with hyper-Calvinism: he viewed any kind of human effort towards our sanctification as an insult to the already finished work of Christ. Thus, Hart could idly submit to the ravages of sin in his own life, claiming that it was simply not God’s will to free him yet from those sins.
Najapfour’s careful overview of Hart’s life reminds Reformed believers to guard continually against the deceit of sin in our lives too. The unpleasant truth is that legalism and antinomianism can coexist with a “sound” understanding of Reformed theology; they are not heresies of their own so much as wrong applications of the gospel we confess. Legalism and antinomianism are less like one-time potholes on the road to conversion and more like long ditches of which we must continually beware in the narrow walk of following Christ.4 Either we falsely assume that we can stay on the path by our own efforts, or we let our feet wander into all kinds of evil because Jesus has already paid our debt—and both errors will most often end up causing us to crumple on the ground, exhausted by our inability to keep the law and wondering if we are even saved to begin with.
Around forty years of age, Hart embarked on a serious effort to reform his sinful behavior but fell into despondency because he had never received a special revelation of his salvation. On Pentecost Sunday, 1757, Hart heard a sermon that finally granted him assurance of salvation directly from the promises of Scripture—what he described as his “reconversion.”5 Although he continued to wrestle with assurance, this marked an enduring turning point for Hart. After 1757, the hymns and writings Hart composed contained plentiful references to the cross and blood of Jesus, combining gratitude for Christ’s finished work with a zealous desire to put sin to death.
Conversion stories are a frequent theme of evangelical Christianity, but Hart’s example shows us that the central story must always be Jesus and His finished work on the cross, not the ups and downs of an individual life. As Hart himself observed, “there is no chalking out the Paths of one Child of God by those of another; no laying down regular Plans of Christian Conversion, Christian Experience, Christian Usefulness, or Christian Conversation.”6 Each one of us, whether raised in the church or not, must be converted from sin to a life of thankful, holy living for God—and each of those journeys, like each particular believer, remains unique.
What We Sing and Why
In his lifetime, Hart was esteemed alongside preachers like George Whitefield and hymnwriters like John Newton, John and Charles Wesley, and Isaac Watts. Najapfour writes, “If Watts’s hymns helped ignite the flames of the evangelical revival . . . Hart’s hymns continued to fuel the revival.”7 Hymnwriting flourished in the British evangelical movement, in contrast to a more traditional Calvinistic focus on psalm singing. While no one objected to singing psalms per se, hymnwriters like Isaac Watts often argued that the English metrical translations of the psalms were too literal and lacked the Christocentric focus needed for New Testament worship.
Najapfour is fairly neutral in presenting the debate between psalmody and hymnody. His point is mostly to note that hymnwriting was a distinctive practice of the evangelical movement and that Hart had recognition as a talented poet in his own day. But that debate is important to consider because it shapes the way each one of our churches conducts its worship today. There are still Reformed churches that sing only psalms, some that sing a mixture of psalms and hymns, and others that sing mostly hymns or contemporary music with only an occasional psalm. There are solid Reformed arguments for and against each one of those positions, and many of those arguments stem from the conversations going on in the eighteenth century during Hart’s lifetime. Even if Reformed believers still cannot agree on what the Bible says we should sing, we can agree that those songs profoundly shape what we believe and how we express our faith, and they should be unequivocally based on the Bible in content and tone.
What We Believe
On a broader level, Najapfour’s study of Hart’s hymns points toward a faith that is not reducible to rationalism. Hart wrote at a time in which philosophers like John Locke were casting doubt on any aspect of Christian faith that did not accord with reason. Locke’s critique of anything irrational also extended to forms of language like poetry and metaphor—and hymns would certainly fall into such a category.
Rationalism is still alive and well today, and many people reject Christianity because it includes things that escape the grasp of logic: the mystery of the Trinity, the resurrection of Jesus, or the experience of faith itself. So when we sing hymns, we not only bear witness through the content of what we sing. In addition, the form of what we sing testifies that our faith is greater than what the human mind can analyze and comprehend. The heartfelt song of a redeemed sinner is something irrational and contemptible to the unbelieving world. Najapfour notes that the Holy Spirit is a particularly important theme in Hart’s hymns. The Spirit leads the church into all truth, bringing to mind the comforting words of Jesus our Savior.
In sum, Najapfour’s study of the life and works of Joseph Hart is valuable not just for students of eighteenth-century Protestantism but for anyone who sings in church, anyone who wonders how to present the gospel to others, and anyone who wrestles with doubt and sin in the Christian walk. Hyper-Calvinism and the loss of the doctrines of grace are still twin dangers today. In the life and hymns of Joseph Hart, we see a narrow walk that points to the simple gospel as the answer to both legalism and antinomianism. As Joel Beeke writes in the afterword, Hart presented a gospel that “embraced election and evangelism as non-identical twins born of the same divine love.”8 In the words of Hart’s most famous hymn, our whole lives ought to be spent telling others—and reminding our own feeble hearts—that “Jesus ready stands to save you,/Full of pity, love, and pow’r.”
1. See https://reformedreader.wordpress.com/.
2. Hymnary.org, “Come, Ye Sinners, Poor and Needy,” https://hymnary.org/text/come_ye_sinners_poor_and_needy_weak_and.
3. Quoted in Brian G. Najapfour, Joseph Hart (1712–1768), Eighteenth-Century Hymnody, and the British Evangelical Movement (Jordan Station, ON: Paideia Press, 2024), 13.
4. This is consistent with Sinclair B. Ferguson’s account in The Whole Christ: Legalism, Antinomianism, and Gospel Assurance―Why the Marrow Controversy Still Matters (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2016).
5. Quoted in Najapfour, Hart, 36.
6. Quoted in Najapfour, 176.
7. Najapfour, 62.
8. Joel Beeke, afterword to Najapfour, Hart, 184.
………………..Dr. Michael R. Kearney is a board member of Reformed Fellowship.