Clap your hands, all you peoples;

shout to God with loud songs of joy.

The Lord is king, he is robed in majesty;

the Lord is robed, he is girded with strength.

Since, then, we have a great high priest

who has passed through the heavens,

Jesus, the Son of God,

let us hold fast to our confession.

—Psalm 47:1-2; 93:1; Hebrews 4:14, 16, NRSV

During his whole life on earth,

but especially at the end,

Christ sustained

in body and soul

the wrath of God against the sin of the whole human race.

This he did in order that,

by his suffering as the only atoning sacrifice,

he might deliver us, body and soul,

from eternal condemnation,

and gain for us God’s grace,

righteousness, and eternal life.

—Heidelberg Catechism, Q&A 37

O Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, how can it be that you would leave the brightness of heaven to enter the darkness of earth? How can it be that you would pray for the cup of death to pass and yet drink it all the way down? How can it be that you bled for sinners, that you tasted death, that you lay in a borrowed grave—all for us, always for us, only for us sinners? O Lord Jesus Christ, how can it be? Amen.

In a compact poetic manner, this text exclaims the mystery of God's grace extended to sinners who turn to Christ in faith. These sinners receive the righteousness of Christ and can approach the Lord's throne in confidence. Such is the amazing love of God in Christ! Charles Wesley wrote his powerful and joyful hymn text in 1738 in the days immediately following his conversion to belief in Christ (May 21); he sang it with his brother John shortly after John's "Aldersgate experience."

 

"And Can It Be" was first published in John Wesley's Psalms and Hymns (1738). It is subtitled "Free Grace" in John and Charles Wesley's Hymns and Sacred Poems (1739). Traditionally one of the great hymns of Methodism, this text appears in a number of modern hymnals.

 

Like so many of Charles Wesley's hymn texts, "And Can It Be" is full of allusions to and quotations from Scripture; a few of the more obvious texts are Philippians 2:7, Acts 12:6-8, Romans 8:1, and Hebrews 4:16. Wesley's use of metaphors is also noteworthy—he deftly contrasts light and darkness, life and death, slavery and freedom, and especially Christ's righteousness and our unrighteousness.

 

The tune SAGINA by Thomas Campbell, is almost universally associated with "And Can It Be." SAGINA borrows its name from a genus of the pink family of herbs, which includes baby's breath and the carnation. Sing this tune vigorously and in parts, especially at the refrain; singers should be sure to keep the melismas legato, especially in lines 5 and 6.

Several members of the Wesley family are significant figures in the history of English hymnody, and none more so than Charles Wesley (b. Epworth, Lincolnshire, England, 1707; d. Marylebone, London, England, 1788). Charles was the eighteenth child of Samuel and Susanna Wesley, who educated him when he was young. After attending Westminster School, he studied at Christ Church College, Oxford. It was there that he and George Whitefield formed the Oxford "Holy Club," which Wesley's brother John soon joined. Their purpose was to study the Bible in a disciplined manner, to improve Christian worship and the celebration of the Lord's Supper, and to help the needy. Because of their methods for observing the Christian life, they earned the name “Methodists.”

 

Charles Wesley was ordained a minister in the Church of England in 1735 but found spiritual conditions in the church deplorable. Charles and John served briefly as missionaries to the British colony in Georgia. Enroute they came upon a group of Moravian missionaries, whose spirituality impressed the Wesleys. They returned to England, and, strongly influenced by the ministry of the Moravians, both Charles and John had conversion experiences in 1738. The brothers began preaching at revival meetings, often outdoors. These meetings were pivotal in the mid-eighteenth-century "Great Awakening" in England.

 

Though neither Charles nor John Wesley ever left the Church of England them­selves, they are the founders of Methodism. Charles wrote some sixty-five hundred hymns, which were published in sixty-four volumes during his lifetime; these include Collection of Psalms and Hymns (1741), Hymns on the Lord's Supper ( 1 745), Hymns and Spiritual Songs (1753), and Collection of Hymns for the Use of the People called Methodists (1780). Charles's hymns are famous for their frequent quotations and allusions from the Bible, for their creedal orthodoxy and their subjective expression of Christian living, and for their use of some forty-five different meters, which inspired new hymn tunes in England. Numerous hymn texts by Wesley are standard entries in most modern hymnals; fourteen are included in the Psalter Hymnal, 1987.

 

Charles's elder brother John also studied at Christ Church College, Oxford, and was ordained a priest in the Church of England in 1728. A tutor at Lincoln College in Oxford from 1729 to 1735, Wesley became the leader of the Oxford "Holy Club" mentioned above. After his contact with the Moravian missionaries, Wesley began translating Moravian hymns from German and published his first hymnal, Collection of Psalms and Hymns, in Charleston, South Carolina (1737); this hymnal was the first English hymnal ever published for use in worship. Upon his return to England in 1738 Wesley "felt his heart strangely warmed" at a meeting on Aldersgate Street, London, when Peter Bohler, a Moravian, read from Martin Luther's preface to his commentary on the epistle to the Romans. It was at that meeting that John received the assurance that Christ had truly taken away his sins. That conversion experience (followed a few days later by a similar experience by his brother Charles) led to his becoming the great itinerant evangelist and administrator of the Methodist "societies," which would eventually become the Methodist Church. An Anglican all his life, John Wesley wished to reform the Church of England and regretted the need to found a new denomina­tion. Most of the hymnals he prepared with his brother Charles were intended for Christians in all denominations; their Collection of Hymns for the Use of the People called Methodists (1780) is one of the few specifically so designated. John was not only a great preacher and organizer, he was also a prolific author, editor, and translator. He translat­ed many classic texts, wrote grammars and dictionaries, and edited the works of John Bunyan and Richard Baxter. In hymnody he is best known for his translation of selec­tions from the German hymnals of Johann Cruger ('Jesus, thy boundless love to me"), Freylinghausen, and von Zinzendorf ('Jesus, thy blood and righteousness"), and for his famous "Directions for Singing," which are still printed in Methodist hymnals. Most significant, however, is his well-known strong hand in editing and often strengthening his brother Charles's hymn texts before they copublished them in their numerous hymnals.

Little is known of Thomas Campbell (b. Sheffield, England, 1777; d. England [?], 1844) other than his publication The Bouquet (1825), in which each of twenty-three tunes has a horticultural name.

And can it be? Now there’s an opening gambit—a conjunction and a rhetorical question. Was it that daring to suggest that “God should die”? Was it ever possible to say, even for a moment, that “God is dead?” What about the extra-Calvinisticum? (Look it up.) Could God’s amazing love go so far? But how can God’s love survive God? It finally does not make sense to say, simply, that God died, without some qualification. But surely we can say it as fully as possible of Our Lord, who was very God of very God—that in some real sense, even affecting his divinity, he fully died, dead as a doornail, so that, with all due respect for Chalcedon and the Athanasian Creed, in some real sense, limited as that real sense might be, God died. 

 

And after all that, this quibble: the “for me” is typical of Wesley. Watts would have made it something like, “for the world”.