349. Great God of Wonders

The Story Behind the Hymn

"Great God of Wonders" was written by Samuel Davies, an American Presbyterian minister who in 1759 succeeded the renowned theologian Jonathan Edwards as president of what is now Princeton University. Davies died in 1761, and the hymn was not published until eight years later, appearing posthumously in Thomas Gibbons's 1769 collection Hymns Adapted to Divine Worship. It is often noted as one of the very few hymns from colonial America to have survived into ongoing use, most other hymnody of that period and place having been lost or forgotten.

Davies was highly regarded in his own time as both a preacher and an educator, influential enough that his sermons and hymns found wide circulation in England as well as in the American colonies. Exactly what circumstance prompted him to write this particular hymn is not recorded, and it appears that later editors made revisions and additions to the text over the following century, meaning the version commonly sung today may differ somewhat from Davies's original wording. Davies himself appears again elsewhere in this collection: a documented 1756 encounter of his with an enslaved man in Hanover, Virginia, is credited by one historian as the possible origin of "Lord, I Want to Be a Christian."

The hymn's entire argument turns on a single repeated question, posed at the end of nearly every stanza: "Who is a pardoning God like Thee?" Rather than describing God's attributes in the abstract, Davies frames divine grace specifically as pardon — forgiveness extended to "guilty, daring worms," a phrase startling enough in its bluntness to make the scale of the mercy being described unmistakable.

The hymn's central claim is essentially comparative: not simply that God is gracious, but that no other power, human or angelic, holds any share in the particular prerogative of pardoning sin — a claim the refrain repeats as a question whose only possible answer is silence.