Isaac Watts: Local Hero, but not quite a Unitarian (by David McCulloch and Simon Strickland-Scott)
““Joy to the world, the Lord is come / Let earth receive her King / Let every heart, prepare him room / And heaven and nature sing.””
Isaac Watts is commemorated twice over at Stoke Newington’s Abney Park Cemetery but is not buried there. A statue of the hymnist stands near the war memorial and Watt’s Mound has been preserved.
Isaac Watts was born in Southampton in 1674 into a devout non-conformist family. According to Wikipedia, in 1690 Watts went to the Stoke Newington Dissenting Academy. This is a bit vague because there were at least three such academies (alternative places of learning for non-conformists excluded from university) in the Stoke Newington and Newington Green area. Nevertheless Watts’ association with the area was established from an early age.
As some readers will be aware Abney Park today is made up of two former estates, Abney House and Fleetwood House and Watts was closely associated with both. He first became a live-in private tutor to the Hartopp family at Fleetwood House. Through his hosts he met the neighbouring Abney family (who were also non-conformists) and later moved in with them and remained there for the rest of his life.
Within the grounds of Abney House was a heronry, an island surrounded by Hackney Brook which served as a nesting place for herons. It was here that Watts would sit for many hours contemplating and composing his hymns. The heronry is preserved today as Watt’s Mound though the brook, which ran around the north side of what became the cemetery, has long since been culverted.
So it was on this mound that Watts would make his name as the “Father of English Hymnody,” and aptly so, since he is credited with writing around 750 hymns. His hymns have been embraced and published by many different denominations such as Baptists, Lutherans, Presbyterians, and Methodists. Even today, most UK Christians sing his most famous hymns, which were included again in the most recent edition of the classic English hymnal “Hymns Ancient and Modern.”
Though German Lutherans had been singing hymns since the early 17th century, John Calvin in the mid-16th century had urged his followers to sing only metrical psalms. English Protestants had tended to follow Calvin’s principles of worship, and the singing of psalms was the normal form of singing at Reformed acts of worship in England, whether Anglican or Nonconformist. So, it was a considerable innovation when Watts published in 1707 his “Hymns and Spiritual Songs”, a collection of metrical sacred verse, inspired by Scripture, which was easily set to music. In fact, it contained what would become one of the most popular English hymns of all time; “When I Survey the Wondrous Cross.”
Watts didn’t reject metrical psalms sung in English entirely; he simply wanted to see them better sung because he believed that traditional translations of the Psalms lacked meaning for the normal early 18th century English person. “They ought to be translated in such a manner as we have reason to believe David would have composed them if he had lived in our day,” he wrote. This desire prompted the publication of the “Psalms of David Imitated in the Language of the New Testament” in 1719.
Many of his English colleagues could not recognize or accept these “translations” from a scholarly perspective. How could “Joy to the World” really be a version of Psalm 98? or “O God Our Help in Ages Past” be Psalm 90? Watts was unapologetic, arguing that he deliberately omitted several of the cursing psalms, widely held to be incompatible with Christian charity, and large parts of other Psalms, keeping portions “as might easily and naturally be accommodated to the various occasions of Christian life, or at least might afford us some beautiful allusions to Christian affairs.” Furthermore, where the psalmist fought with their personal enemies, Watts turned his invective against the Christian’s spiritual adversaries: sin, Satan, and temptation. He openly said, “Where the flights of the Christian’s faith and love are sublime, I have often sunk the expression (of these hymns) within the reach of an ordinary Christian.”
It would have undoubtedly been more accurate for Watts to have called his hymns paraphrases of the Psalter, but perhaps desiring for them to be accepted widely in churches, Watts declared his collections to be “translations”. Within a few years, Watts’ decision had proved wise, as the collection was swiftly adopted in churches. Predictability however, the popularity of his hymns led to attacks from detractors. “Christian congregations have shut out divinely inspired psalms and taken in Watts’ flights of fancy,” protested one. But after church splits, firings of pastors, and other arguments, Watts’ hymns proved to be lastingly popular. “He was the first who taught the Dissenters to write and speak like other men, by showing them that elegance (of expression) might consist with piety,” wrote Watts’s contemporary Samuel Johnson.
A concern of some critics of his hymns was that Watts’ theological writings were far from the norm in the 18th century Dissenting and Nonconformist traditions.
A pastor of an Independent (what would nowadays be called a Congregational) chapel in Stoke Newington, Watts wrote more than thirty theological treatises, some of which expressed unorthodox views on the personhood of Christ and the Holy Spirit. Watts argued that the human soul of the God-Man Jesus pre-existed his Incarnation, whereas most 18th century evangelicals would have followed the orthodox teaching that Jesus’ human soul came into being at his conception, and his divine nature as the Son of God would have existed from all eternity. Theological critics such as Jonathan Edwards attacked Watts’ Christology, but noticeably continued to use Watts’ hymns in his own church. Watts was also noted in his time for his ecumenical approach, arguing that it was right for Christians of all types to work together for the spread of the Gospel.
Whilst sharing the Calvinist belief in predestination Watts came to also believe that everyone was ultimately predestined for salvation, thus bringing him more closely aligned with the teachings of universalism. Watts is also claimed by Unitarians though this is disputed by more orthodox Christians.
These competing claims derive from a controversy which raged among non-conformists from 1719. This pitted two factions, known as Subscribers and Non-Subscribers, against each other. The controversy began in Exeter when a small group of newly qualified Presbyterian ministers questioned whether they should have to declare (or ‘subscribe’) to a belief in the trinity in their personal statement of faith prior to ordination when the Bible makes no such declaration.
The ensuing argument reached London in the form of the Salters Hall Debates named after the City of London venue in which they were held (the non-conformist chapel attached to the Livery Hall of the Worshipful Company of Salters)
Watts contributed to the debate by issuing a number of pamphlets. In The Christian Doctrine of the Trinity (1722), Watts wrote the following:
“I infer that it can never be necessary to salvation to know the precise way and manner how one God subsists in three personal agents, or how these three persons are one God.”
This was interpreted as siding with the Non-Subscribers who, by extension, were associated with Unitarianism. In reality Watts was trying to steer a middle course in which both sides could be reconciled. Indeed when pressed on the subject Watts declared himself to be a Trinitarian. The debates themselves (there were two of them) concluded in a narrow win for the orthodox Subscribers.
Towards the end of his life, Isaac Watts wrote a complaint about hymn singing in church: “To see the dull indifference, the negligent and thoughtless air that sits upon the faces of a whole assembly, while the psalm is upon their lips, might even tempt a charitable observer to suspect the fervency of their inward religion.” He had considered this a problem since his earliest years.
Watts was also a scholar of wide reputation, especially in his later years. He wrote essays on psychology, astronomy, and philosophy; three volumes of sermons; the first children’s hymnal; and a textbook on logic that served as a standard work on the subject for generations. But his poetry remains his lasting legacy and earned him acclaim on both sides of the Atlantic. Benjamin Franklin published his hymnal in the American colonies, and John Wesley acknowledged him as a genius, using Watts’ idea of popularising the Christian message through hymn singing as a key element in the development of Methodism. Watts at the end of his life meanwhile felt that the work of John and Charles Wesley greatly outshone his own. It is a fair assessment however, to say that without Watts’ innovations, the tradition and development of hymn singing in English churches would be very different.
Watts died in November 1748 (nearly a century before Abney Park became one of the so called ‘Magnificent Seven’ cemeteries built to relieve overcrowding in London’s parish churchyards) and is buried at the non-conformist graveyard at Bunhill Fields.
