223. Christ Receiveth Sinful Men

The Story Behind the Hymn

Erdmann Neumeister was a German Lutheran pastor, poet, and hymn writer, born in 1671, who became one of the most influential church poets of his generation in Germany. He is remembered especially for pioneering a new style of devotional text for use in Lutheran services — poetic, reflective texts built around a scripture reading — a form so effective that it was later adopted directly by composers writing church cantatas, including Johann Sebastian Bach, who set several of Neumeister's own texts to music in his own church cantatas decades later.

The German original behind this hymn reflects Neumeister's characteristic theological emphasis: the assurance that Christ actively welcomes sinners rather than merely tolerating them, a comfort central to Lutheran preaching on grace. The text remained within German-speaking Lutheran hymnody for well over a century before it reached English-speaking congregations.

Its translator, Emma Frances Bevan, was an English writer born in 1827 who became known for her careful translations of German hymns into English verse, publishing several collections of translated German hymnody during the mid-1800s, of which this text, rendered in 1858, became by far the most widely sung. Her translation retained the direct, confident assurance of the German original: not a plea for mercy so much as a settled declaration that mercy has already been given.

The English version found its widest popularity later in the century when the American gospel song composer James McGranahan set it to a new tune. McGranahan was closely associated with the Moody-Sankey revival tradition, eventually serving as song leader for Dwight L. Moody's evangelistic campaigns after Ira Sankey's health declined, and his setting helped carry this originally formal Lutheran text into the very different setting of American revival meetings, where its refrain — “Christ receiveth sinful men,” repeated “o'er and o'er again” — became a favorite invitation hymn.

Few hymns in common use trace quite so long or varied a path: from a German Lutheran pastor whose poetic forms shaped Bach's own church music, through a careful Victorian translator, to the fervent revival meetings of nineteenth-century America, arriving finally as a hymn sung in churches around the world that know nothing of its eighteenth-century origins.