Great is our redeeming Lord

Great is our redeeming Lord. Charles Wesley* (1707-1788). This hymn was not published in Wesley’s lifetime. It appeared in the Arminian Magazine (1797), with a text of ten 8-line stanzas. It is a paraphrase, with many significant modifications, of Psalm 48. The most important of these occurs at the very beginning, when the Psalmist’s ‘Great is the Lord’ is turned into ‘Great is our redeeming Lord’: the hymn thereafter becomes one of Charles Wesley’s greatest hymns on the theme of redeeming love: The ten stanzas of 1797 were shortened to four in the first publication in a hymnbook, the revision of John Wesley*’s A Collection of Hymns for the Use of the People called Methodists published in...

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