Methodist church members are embarrassed today to recall that the 1966 Methodist Hymnal only reluctantly included “How Great Thou Art” in response to polls indicating that most members of the denomination showed that it was their most requested hymn! Many in leadership complained that “the church’s official hymnal would bring respectability to the theme song of the Billy Graham Crusades” and that doing so “would cheapen the church’s official hymnal” (according to Methodist hymnologist Carlton Young). Hopefully, few would hold that opinion today!
“How Great Thou Art” has a fascinating history that begins long before Billy Graham’s birth and spans many years and several continents. We can trace it from Sweden to Germany to Russia to Estonia to Poland to Ukraine to India to England to Canada to America! It originated with Carl Boberg (1859-1940) about 1886. He was a leading evangelist of his day and he became editor of an influential publication of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Sweden: Sanningsvittnet (“Witness of the Truth”). Boberg served in the Swedish parliament and published several volumes of poetry, including hymns. He also helped compile the first two hymnals for the Swedish Covenant Church.
The account of the “travels” of the hymn is quite extraordinary. Boberg’s inspiration is said to have come one day when he was caught in a thunderstorm on the southeastern coast of Sweden. He had recently left his work as a sailor and began serving as a lay minister. The violence of a severe thunderstorm sent him running for shelter. As it passed, he rushed home and opened his windows to let in the fresh bay air. The vision of tranquility that greeted him stirred something deep in his soul. The sky had cleared. Thrushes sang, and in the distance, the resonant knell of church bells sounded. With the juxtaposition between the roaring thunderstorm and such bucolic calm as background, Boberg sat down and wrote “O Store Gud”—the poem that, through a winding series of events and varied translations, would become “How Great Thou Art” (literally “O Mighty God”).
According to Boberg’s great-nephew, Bud Boberg, “My dad’s story of its origin was that it was a paraphrase of Psalm 8 and was used in the ‘underground church’ in Sweden in the late 1800s when the Baptists and Mission Friends were persecuted.” The author, Carl Boberg himself gave the following information about the inspiration behind his poem:
It was that time of year when everything seemed to be in its richest coloring; the birds were singing in trees and everywhere. It was very warm; a thunderstorm appeared on the horizon and soon there was thunder and lightning. We had to hurry to shelter. But the storm was soon over and the clear sky appeared. When I came home I opened my window toward the sea. There evidently had been a funeral and the bells were playing the tune of “When eternity’s clock calls my saved soul to its Sabbath rest”. That evening, I wrote the song, “O Store Gud”.
After being published in a local newspaper, an unknown Swede put “O Store Gud” to the tune of a Swedish folk song, whose name has also been lost to history. Soon he penned the nine stanzas of the original version in Swedish beginning with “O Store Gud, nar jag den varld beskader.” Several years later, Boberg unexpectedly heard his poem sung by a congregation to an old Swedish folk melody. As it passed from one hand to another, the text evolved and the music was transformed significantly before settling into the version we know so well today.
In 1907, Manfred von Glehn (1867-1924), a wealthy Baltic German Baptist nobleman, heard the song in Estonia and translated the text from the Swedish into German. It became the hymn, “Wie gross bist du.” In 1927, a Russian version by the evangelical leader Ivan S. Prokhanoff (1896-1935), known as “The Martin Luther of Russia,” appeared in Kimvali (Cymbals), a collection published by the Baptist Press in Poland. English missionary Stuart K. Hine (1899-1989) and his wife heard the Russian version sung as a vocal duet in Ukraine. Hine had been much-influenced by the teachings of the great English Reformed Baptist preacher, Charles Spurgeon. As the Hine couple crossed into Sub-Carpathian Russia, the mountain scenery brought back the memory of this song. The new language version of the first three stanzas were composed while in the Carpathian Mountains. They had to flee Ukraine during the terrible genocidal starvations in the winter of 1932-33 caused by Stalin, known as the Holodomor. For years, Hine and his wife sang the song with locals before he finally sat down and translated it into English. When war broke out, Hine and his wife were forced to return to England in 1939. They used the first three stanzas in evangelistic endeavors during the “Blitz years.” The fourth stanza was added after the war following a visit to a British encampment for displaced Polish refugees.
While in Ukraine, it was typical of the Hines to ask if there were any Christians in the villages they visited. In one case, they found out that the only Christians that their host knew about were a man named Dmitri and his wife Lyudmila. Dmitri’s wife knew how to read — evidently a fairly rare thing at that time and in that place. She taught herself how to read because a Russian soldier had left a Bible behind several years earlier, and she started slowly learning by reading that Bible. When the Hines arrived in the village and approached Dmitri’s house, they heard a strange and wonderful sound: Dmitri’s wife was reading from the gospel of John about the crucifixion of Christ to a houseful of guests, and those visitors were in the very act of repenting. In Ukraine, this act of repenting is done very much out loud. So the Hines heard people calling out to God, saying how unbelievable it was that Christ would die for their own sins, and praising Him for His love and mercy. They just couldn’t barge in and disrupt this obvious work of the Holy Spirit, so they stayed outside and listened. Stuart wrote down the phrases he heard “the Repenters” use, and (even though this was all in Russian), it became the third verse that we know today: “And when I think that God, His Son not sparing, Sent Him to die, I scarce can take it in.”
Hine published his English translation alongside the Russian version in Grace and Peace, a magazine that he published and was circulated to missionaries in over 15 countries. The story of “How Great Thou Art” might have ended here, in relative obscurity, were it not for a British-American theologian traveling to India, a singing cowboy, and a popular American evangelist on a self-described crusade. When J. Edwin Orr (1912-1987) of Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, CA, a British-American theologian and evangelist, travelled to India in 1954, music was the farthest thing from his mind. He was there to preach. But while there he heard an English version of “How Great Thou Art” sung by a Naga choir from the state of Assam in north-eastern India near Burma (now known as Myanmar). He was so impressed by the song he brought it back to America and had it performed at a conference for college students where he was speaking.
In attendance at that fateful conference were the children of Tim Spencer, a singing cowboy and actor who had found fame singing in the “Sons of the Pioneers” alongside Bob Nolan and Roy Rogers. At that time, Spencer owned Mana Music, Inc, a publisher of Christian music. He quickly arranged to buy the rights to the song and then did what all good publishers do—he started pushing the song. As late as 1954, “How Great Thou Art” remained all but unknown in the U.S., but with Mana Music’s backing the song eventually landed in the hands of George Beverly Shea (1909-2013), famed soloist in Billy Graham’s travelling crusades. Graham reportedly loved the song and quickly made it his evangelical crusade’s signature song. Given Graham’s reach, Shea all but introduced the song to the nation. He sang it live on radio, before stadiums filled with thousands of people, and during nationally televised events like the 1957 Madison Square Garden Crusade, which ran for 16 weeks and was viewed by an estimated 96 million people. During those weeks the choir joined him to sing it ninety-three times!
How astonishing that this song, recorded over 1,800 times in the last 50 years, had its origins as a poem in a small town in Sweden. It has been recorded by countless choirs and even such pop artists as Carrie Underwood and Elvis Presley. Boberg died in 1940, over a decade before “How Great Thou Art” became famous at the Billy Graham crusade in New York City.
The words and music can too easily become so familiar that we fail to be moved as we should at the greatness of God that they convey.
Stanza 1 is addressed to God, and calls us to look around us to see the greatness of God in the creation we all see, and then tell Him how it thrills us. This stanza directs our attention into the heavens. On a clear night countless stars stretch into the vastness of space. On a stormy day we are awed by the booming thunder of a spring storm. What power is His!
O Lord my God! When I in awesome wonder
Consider all the works Thy hand hath made.
I see the stars, I hear the rolling thunder,
Thy power throughout the universe displayed.
Stanza 2 leads us to look around in amazement to see even more of His greatness in the countryside as we take a walk through the woods. We pause to hear the birds singing from their perches among the flowers and leaves on the trees. At the top of the mountain path we gaze across snow-covered heights to lush valleys below. On the way down we pass through the shaded valley beside the stream flowing down to the river below. What beauty is His!
When through the woods and forest glades I wander
And hear the birds sing sweetly in the trees;
When I look down from lofty mountain grandeur
And hear the brook and feel the gentle breeze:
Stanza 3 demands that we pause to consider the most awesome display of His greatness. How is it that this God would care about sinners like us, and even go so far as to send His own Son to the cross to die in our place? There are no words to express the amazing love He has shown toward us in removing our sin, and at such a cost. It’s no enough to think of God the Creator. We must be drawn further to worship God the Redeemer. What grace is His!
And when I think that God, His Son not sparing,
Sent Him to die, I scarce can take it in;
That on the cross, my burden gladly bearing,
He bled and died to take away my sin:
Stanza 4 is the testimony of longing in the heart of every believer. We yearn for home, our heavenly home, to which our Savior will take us. Yes, we’ll join in that “shout of acclamation” when that day comes. It will be the most wonderful day of our lives when He returns, and we can “bow in humble adoration” at His feet. What glory is His!
When Christ shall come with shout of acclamation
And take me home, what joy shall fill my heart!
Then I shall bow in humble adoration,
And there proclaim, my God, how great Thou art!
The refrain gives voice to the joy of knowing that our God is great!
Then sings my soul, my Savior God, to Thee:
How great Thou art, how great Thou art!
Then sings my soul, my Savior God, to Thee:
How great Thou art, how great Thou art!
Here are two translations from Stuart Hines’ Russian text. They give sharper clarity to the original intent of Carl Boberg.
When burdens press, and seem beyond endurance,
Bowed down with grief, to Him I lift my face;
And then in love He brings me sweet assurance:
‘My child! for thee sufficient is My grace’.O when I see ungrateful man defiling
This bounteous earth, God’s gifts so good and great;
In foolish pride, God’s holy Name reviling,
And yet, in grace, His wrath and judgment wait.
This is the now-famous performance of the song by Carrie Underwood.
Here is the congregation at Winchester Cathedral singing the song.
Here is a wonderful arrangement of the song composed by Dan Miller and performed at Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church in Ft. Lauderdale.