102. Breathe on Me, Breath of God

The Story Behind the Hymn

Edwin Hatch, an English clergyman and academic scholar who spent much of his own working career specifically studying the earliest history of the Christian church, wrote this hymn's text in 1878, drawing its central governing image directly from John 20:22, the specific Gospel passage in which the newly resurrected Jesus physically breathes on His assembled disciples and tells them plainly, 'Receive the Holy Spirit.'

Hatch's own considerable scholarly output as an academic historian focused heavily and specifically on tracing how the early church's various institutions, leadership structures, and formal theology had gradually developed and changed over the course of its first several centuries of existence, and this hymn's simple, direct request for a fresh, deeply personal 'breath' of God's own Spirit reflects a broader recurring theme found consistently throughout Hatch's wider intellectual and academic interests as a church historian.

Rather than functioning as any kind of formal academic argument or historical analysis, the hymn itself remains throughout a genuinely simple, personal prayer, directly expressing a heartfelt desire to personally recover something of the same direct, unmediated spiritual vitality that Hatch, through his own extensive scholarly research and writing, had come to believe had genuinely characterized the earliest first-century Christian communities he spent the greater part of his academic career carefully studying and writing about — a scholar's considered historical judgment about the early church translated, in this hymn, into an entirely personal and immediate present-tense prayer for himself.