2. Rock of Ages

The Story Behind the Hymn

Augustus Toplady was an English clergyman with strict Calvinist convictions, convictions that put him in direct, often bitter conflict with John Wesley and the growing Methodist movement of his day.

The two men argued in print for years over grace, election, and free will, exchanging pamphlets that grew increasingly personal. Historians generally judge Toplady the harsher of the two, even though Wesley’s movement is remembered far more warmly today.

During much of this period Toplady served as vicar of Broad Hembury in Devon and edited a periodical called The Gospel Magazine, using both his pulpit and his editorial pen to press his Calvinist arguments against Wesley’s Arminian theology.

Toplady wrote this hymn in the middle of that ongoing dispute. Its plea to be saved from both the guilt and the power of sin — a ‘double cure’ found only in Christ — was widely understood at the time as a direct rebuttal of the Wesleyan idea that human effort plays any real role in salvation.

A popular but unverified legend holds that Toplady once took shelter from a sudden storm in a crevice of rock at Burrington Combe in Somerset, and that the experience inspired the hymn’s image of hiding in ‘the cleft’ of an unshakable rock.

True or not, the story captures Toplady’s theological point precisely: no one can shelter themselves from judgment through their own effort. Only Christ can provide that refuge.

Toplady suffered from tuberculosis for much of his adult life and died in 1778 at just thirty-eight years old, only a few years after this hymn was first published.

Despite — or perhaps because of — the sharp controversy surrounding its author, this hymn far outlived the eighteenth-century quarrel that produced it, and is sung today across denominations that would likely have startled Toplady himself.