59. Higher Ground

The Story Behind the Hymn

Johnson Oatman Jr. was a New Jersey businessman and licensed Methodist Episcopal lay preacher who, remarkably and almost implausibly, wrote more than five thousand separate hymn texts over the full course of his adult life while simultaneously working full time throughout most of that same period first in the wholesale grocery business inherited from his father and later as the owner and operator of his own successful insurance agency, treating his prolific hymn-writing throughout as a purely devotional evening and weekend side pursuit conducted entirely alongside a demanding full-time secular business career, rather than ever pursuing it as his primary vocation or principal source of income.

Oatman built this particular hymn's central governing image around the recurring biblical language of spiritual elevation and ascent found scattered throughout the Psalms, particularly drawing on the frequently recurring image of God Himself as a rock or elevated place of safety and refuge — the specific 'higher ground' referenced in the hymn's title represents, within Oatman's own theological framework, the concept of ongoing sanctification: the broader evangelical belief that an individual Christian's spiritual life should properly be understood and lived as one of continual, deliberate upward progress toward ever-greater faith, maturity, and personal holiness over time, rather than remaining merely a single, completed, static event experienced once at the initial moment of conversion and never meaningfully progressed beyond afterward.

Despite personally writing such an extraordinary and almost unmatched total volume of individual hymn texts across his working lifetime — a body of work rivaling or exceeding even Fanny Crosby's own famously enormous output in this same general collection — Oatman reportedly kept remarkably few personal records or drafts documenting his own writing process, and by most accounts did not consider or present himself as a poet in any formal, self-consciously literary sense whatsoever, unlike some of the more classically trained or literarily ambitious hymn writers also represented elsewhere in this hymnal.

He wrote, by his own repeatedly stated personal account, simply and straightforwardly because he genuinely felt that well-crafted hymns represented a practical, immediately accessible, and demonstrably effective way to teach fundamental biblical truth directly to ordinary rank-and-file congregations who might never otherwise engage seriously or systematically with more formal theological writing or academic biblical instruction, a deliberately modest and functional view of his own vast hymn-writing output that stood in notable contrast to its sheer eventual scale and lasting influence across American Protestant hymnody.