79. In the Cross of Christ I Glory

The Story Behind the Hymn

John Bowring was a remarkable British linguist, diplomat, economist, and politician, reportedly able to read or converse in an extraordinary number of different languages over the course of his life — claims of Bowring's linguistic range vary somewhat across different historical sources, but he was widely and genuinely regarded by contemporaries as one of the most linguistically accomplished Englishmen of his generation — who went on to serve for a number of years as a Member of Parliament in London before eventually being appointed governor of Hong Kong during a particularly turbulent and controversial period of nineteenth-century British colonial history in East Asia, a governorship that notably included his direct involvement in provoking the Second Opium War through his aggressive handling of a specific diplomatic incident involving a ship called the Arrow.

He wrote this hymn's text in 1825, well before his later and considerably more controversial colonial career, drawing directly on Galatians 6:14 — 'far be it from me to glory except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ.' Bowring himself personally held Unitarian theological views throughout his life, a position notably outside mainstream Trinitarian Christian orthodoxy and somewhat unusual among the wider community of widely sung hymn writers generally represented in this and most other hymnals, given Unitarianism's specific rejection of the traditional doctrine of the Trinity.

Yet the hymn's own tightly focused, deliberately narrow message centering entirely on the cross as the singular central symbol of Christian faith, without extended theological elaboration on more specifically Trinitarian or otherwise doctrinally contested territory, made it broadly acceptable for use across a wide range of denominational lines, appearing regularly in Anglican, Baptist, Methodist, and numerous other Protestant hymnals throughout the entire nineteenth century regardless of its own author's considerably less conventional personal theological convictions on other doctrinal matters.

Bowring himself generally regarded his occasional hymn writing as a distinctly minor personal sideline pursued alongside his far more demanding, high-profile, and ultimately more historically consequential political and diplomatic career, yet this single hymn text has remained in continuous, active congregational use for nearly two centuries, long after the specific political controversies surrounding his eventful and often contentious governorship of Hong Kong had otherwise faded from all but specialized historical memory.