Grimmo’s post on changes to the words of Wesley’s famous hymn put me in mind of another equally significant change to an equally famous hymn.
In the first verse of ‘Rock of Ages’, we are used to singing:
Be of sin the double cure: cleanse me from its guilt and power.
But this is not what Augustus Toplady wrote.
The original version of ‘Rock of Ages’ says:
Be of sin the double cure: save from wrath and make me pure.
The original speaks of the double nature of Christ’s propitiatory atonement, whereby he receives our sins and we receive his righteousness; the later version makes a quite different (more Wesleyan) point about the power of sin in the life of the believer.
The New Testament doesn’t say that we are cleansed from the power of sin. In fact, to the contrary, it tells us that sin remains within us as a powerful and active enemy of faith. The rule and dominion of sin is broken certainly. Sin is no longer our master. And God himself is now active within the believer’s life by his Holy Spirit to lead us to put to death the misdeeds of the body. But we are not cleansed from sin’s power now in this life in the same sense that we are cleansed from its penalty, and from the guilt that flows from it.
Mind you, the perfectionist strand of Wesleyanism does teach that the believer can be free from the power of sin in this life. The ‘entire sanctificationists’ (as they are sometimes called) say that the power of sin is completely wiped out by the cross, and that Christians only have to claim this gift by faith to walk in victory over sin day by day.
When you bear in mind that Toplady was a Calvinist and an occasional opponent of Wesley’s Arminianism, I wouldn’t mind betting that it was a Wesleyan entire sanctificationist, sometime in the late 18th or early 19th century, that made the subtle but important change to Toplady’s hymn.
Yeah, great hymn, and I think we should restore the original line. But I suspect that the “double cure” Toplady on view was justification and sanctification, rather than imputation.
One website pointed me to the following comment in Calvin as a possible inspiration for Toplady –
“Christ was given to us by God’s generosity, to be grasped and possessed by us in faith. By partaking of him, we principally receive a double grace: namely, that being reconciled to God through Christ’s blamelessness, we may have in heaven instead of a Judge a gracious Father; and secondly, that sanctified by Christ’s spirit we may cultivate blamelessness and purity of life.”
Tony, thanks for this post.
I can see what you mean about the newer line – how you suspect a Weslyan entire sanctificationist might have been the sort of person the revise the line!
Cleansing from sin’s power seems like a mixed metaphor at the least. Guilt can be cleansed. But a dominating power or master is perhaps broken or overthrown or defeated.
But there do seem to be some places in the NT which connect the cleansing impact of the gospel with growth in godliness and good deeds.
In the context of separating from idolatry, 2 Cor. 7:1 says, “Since we have these promises (esp. God’s fatherly adoption), beloved, let us cleanse ourselves from every defilement of body and spirit, bringing holiness to completion in the fear of God.”
Titus 2:13-14 speaks of “our great God and Savior Jesus Christ, who gave himself for us to redeem us from all lawlessness and to purify [=cleanse] for himself a people for his own possession who are zealous for good works.”
Heb. 9:14 asks, “how much more will the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself without blemish to God, purify [=cleanse] our conscience from dead works to serve the living God.”
One might add 1 Peter 1:22 and 2 Peter 1:9.
Toplady was right to pray in his hymn that the Rock of Ages, cleft for me, might, as the second part of the double cure, “make me pure”. Or perhaps even better, having made me pure, that he might help me to live out my purity.
Am I on the right track here, or have I missed or underplayed something.
Thanks Craig and Sandy. Excellent comments.
Craig, it’s often hard to know what was in a poet’s mind, isn’t it? Is the ‘making pure’ a reference to our ongoing progress in godliness (what theologically we call ‘sanctification’)? It could be—and Sandy, you rightly pick up places in the NT where are called upon us to cleanse or purify ourselves (2 Cor 7:1 being an good example).
But then the ‘making pure’ could also be a reference to the purity that is ours by exchange, the righteousness of Christ that now belongs to us by imputation. Given the context of the verse, which emphasizes our hiding in Christ, how the Rock was cleft ‘for me’, I took it to be a reference to the ‘alien’ righteousness and cleansing and purity that Christ achieved *for* us, and granted us, rather than the cleansing, sanctifying work his Spirit subsequently works *in* us (which is, of course, equally important and true).
But I might be wrong.
TP
I mentioned this hymn today to someone who has been struggling to overcome something in her life. I brought her attention to the “double cure” referred to in the hymn. I have always understood it to be imputed righteousnes and the death of the old man. There are three key words in Romans six: Know, Reckon, and Yield. We are to know we were crucified and buried and raised with the Lord Jesus. We are to reckon ourselves to be dead to sin and alive to God. And yield our members as intruments of righteousness. We were saved from the penalty of sin by faith in Christ’s death for us, and are sanctified by faith in the fact of our death in Christ and resurrection in Him. Few Christians understand the second part, I fear, but to me that is the second part of the double cure. If the second part is just positional righteousness, that would be nothing more than the first part of the double cure, and no double cure at all, in my opinion. But of course I can’t be sure what Toplady meant. However I suspect the person who changed the words was thinking along the lines of what I wrote above.
Tony, you wrote:
The New Testament doesn’t say that we are cleansed from the power of sin.
The entirety of Romans 5-8 is precisely aimed at this idea, in particular the (admittedly hard to parse) 5:12-21 and the (easier to see) version in 6:4-6, and re-iterated in Romans 7:13-25.
In particular, Paul sees everyone in a state of spiritual death, unable to overcome the power of their own selfishness. He sees this in his own life prior to being strengthened by the spirit (Romans 7:19-20). He describes in Romans 5:12-21 that this weakness (which he calls death) was initially due to Adam’s rebellion but was increased by Israel’s failure to keep the law given to them.
But then in Romans 6:4 and 6:6 we see Paul claim that this was exactly the reason of Christ’s death, so that we would no longer be dominated by this sin. We are still tempted, but we now have the ability to overcome temptation. This is what Romans 6:4-6 says (twice) as well as Romans 8:7-8. It is also the point of the other verses that have been quoted already [Hebrews 9:14, Titus 2:14, and one from each of Peter’s epistles.]
Amen to what David wrote! I like your sentance “He sees this in his own life prior to being strengthened by the spirit (Romans 7:19-20).” So many teach that Paul struggled with sin all his life, but I don’t believe it, and to assert that is to deny the truth of the rest of Rom 6-8. Thanks for your comment.
Thanks, Steve.
I think some of the problem is with our tendency to “sound byte” the Bible (and the unfortunate chapter break that happens immediately after Romans 7:25). People do see the link between Romans 7:25 and 8:1.
There is, after all, a “Therefore” at the beginning of 8:1. People ignore this therefore (not looking back to chapter 7 to see what Paul is talking about) in the same way they ignore the “Therefore” in John 3:16, refusing to read it as part of the larger commentary [John 3:14-21]. What is even worse is how often John 3:19-21 get lopped off the end of discussions about John 3:16. This obscures John’s point and the theme of his entire gospel to the Greeks after the temple had been destroyed condemning the Jews [who have been “condemned already”]
What’s particularly important is Paul’s word choice in Romans 8:1. “There is therefore now no “katakrima” for those in Christ.” This gets translated “condemnation,” conflating it with the much more common [to the NT corpus] word “krima.”
Paul is the only person to use this term, and he only uses it in 3 places, Romans 8:1, Romans 5:16 and 5:18, which is of course discussing the same topic as Romans 7 just got through discussing: the spiritual weakness toward sin that Adam’s rebellion had cast all humanity under.
It should be clear that Romans 8:1 represents the break between Paul un-regenerated and Paul regenerated. In addition to the wording of Romans 8:1 itself we notice the complete absence of any discussion of the “Spirit” in Romans 7:12-23, contrast that with Romans 8:1-8 which describes the power of the Spirit liberally.