spiritually matters. Their position stood in stark contrast to American evangelicalism’s more typical embrace of a “back to the Bible” primitivism. Nevin and Schaff exposed the quest somehow to restore a repristinated New Testament church both as naïve and, because of its inherent sectarianism, as schismatic—ironically destructive of the unity of the church as the Body of Christ, as Nevin argued forcefully in Antichrist: or, The Spirit of Sect and Schism (1848). Similarly, nineteenth-century evangelical preaching tended to focus so exclusively on the Cross and Atonement, the gospel message that Christ died for our sins, that the doctrine of the Incarnation was lost or at least relegated to insignificance. While it was during this period that Christmas began to be observed more widely in American Protestant churches, domestic life, and popular culture, Mercersburg’s Incarnational theology went far deeper than that. Nevin’s elevated role for the doctrine of the Incarnation was, again, integral to his emphasis on the church as the Body of Christ over time and in the world today. The idea of an organic theological connection between Christology and ecclesiology set the movement wholly apart from the American Protestant norm.
Nevin and Schaff are perhaps best known for their blistering critique of revivalism as the standard method of transmitting the faith, and this, too, was bound up with Mercersburg Theology’s doctrine of the church. The revivalist focus on a single moment of decision reinforced the individualism and voluntarism of the American sense of selfhood, minimizing the fact that the gospel is proclaimed by the church and that sinners come to Christ and grow in grace within communities of faith. While Nevin upheld the power of personal conversion experiences (and had experienced this himself as a young man), he insisted that children, youth, and adults develop most fully and reliably as believers through the gradual process of catechism within the fellowship and worship of the Christian church. Mercersburg Theology took seriously the fact that in orthodox Christianity the church is not a secondary byproduct of likeminded individuals clubbing together (even if expressed in theological terms as covenanting) but is an essential article of faith. As recited in the Apostles’ Creed, “I believe in . . . the holy catholic church;” and in the Nicene Creed, “I believe in one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church.” The Mercersburg theologians went so far as to reclaim in the American Protestant context the traditional Catholic understanding of the church as the mother of the faithful. For Nevin, believers do not create the church, the church gives birth to believers. This understanding of the church was therefore fundamentally at odds with the voluntary principle of church organization.
The application of Mercersburg Theology in the life of the church had practical implications that created a firestorm within the German Reformed denomination and, more widely, involved Nevin in a paper war with Hodge and others, especially with regard to liturgy, the authority and use of creeds, and sacramental theology. Nevin’s argument for the real spiritual presence of Christ in the sacrament, which in The Mystical Presence (1846) he demonstrated was Calvin’s own position, countered the low memorialist understanding of Holy Communion prevailing in much of American Protestantism. The Zwinglian view of what goes on in the Lord’s Supper held sway among many German Reformed pastors and congregations, where opposition to Mercersburg Theology developed under the banner of a more broadly evangelical “Old Reformed” movement. Further, while the German Reformed tradition had always been known as “the church of the Heidelberg Catechism,” Nevin’s writings placed that seminal 1563 expression of Reformed theology within the context of the whole confessional tradition of Christian orthodoxy reaching back to the theologians and councils of the early centuries of the church. Mercersburg Theology’s affirmation of the ongoing significance of the historic creeds burst onto the scene at the same time that Congregationalists and Presbyterians were wrestling with the contemporary relevance of their own Westminster Confession. Meanwhile, many other American Protestants renounced traditional denominational labels and claimed to be “simply Christian.” Such groups adopted a restorationist “no creed but Christ” posture that viewed eighteen hundred years of church tradition as nothing but unbiblical human invention. Within the overall mix of movements within nineteenth-century American Protestant Christianity, Nevin’s position has often been aptly described as “countervailing.”
High Christology and deep appreciation of confessional tradition blended in Nevin’s ecclesiology to energize the work of creating liturgies for the church that seemed more Catholic than Protestant to evangelical sensibilities. Indeed, in several pieces included in this volume, Nevin sought to rescue the very term “catholic” from what he considered the Roman Church’s sectarian appropriation of it. Not surprisingly, in those years of vehement and even violent anti-Catholicism in America, Nevin and those pastors who sought to implement Mercersburg-style worship in their churches were roundly accused of flirting dangerously with the foreign enemy in Rome. In fact, Nevin’s argument for a catholic conception of the church and the church’s mission in the world provide early, though usually unacknowledged, theological underpinnings for the social gospel and ecumenical movements of later generations. But the worship wars in the German Reformed Church sadly divided congregations, caused acrimony at synod meetings, and crippled mission efforts until a weary denomination found a way to live in peace in the 1870s, after the nation’s own Civil War.
The ecclesiological issues addressed head on by John Williamson Nevin and his Mercersburg colleagues have turned out to be perennial in American religious life. This edition of Nevin’s writings make this rich vein of theological thought accessible to scholars, pastors, thoughtful church members, and others seeking to understand what it might mean to be the church in the twenty-first century. As social scientists analyze steady declines in worship attendance, formal religious affiliation, general religious knowledge, and even religious identity, the distinctive perspective of Nevin and his colleagues could prove increasingly relevant. While it was never very successful as a church growth program, the Mercersburg Theology’s great strengths have always been its stringent critique of the theological and spiritual weaknesses of more popular religious movements and its offer of a strongly Christ-centered, historically-nurtured alternative. As the role of Christianity becomes increasingly relativized in a more thoroughly pluralistic society, it is imperative for Christian churches of all traditions to develop deeply rooted positive understandings of what it means to be the church of Jesus Christ. The theology developed by John Williamson Nevin and his Mercersburg colleagues offers valuable resources for this contemporary task.
Sam Hamstra’s substantial volume introduction to this edition of Nevin’s ecclesiological writings describes them in their historical context. The in-depth, detailed introductions for each of the documents will prepare scholars and general readers alike to grapple with Nevin’s provocative arguments. This collection of Nevin’s writings on “the church question” is a worthy addition to the Mercersburg Theology Study Series.
1. Sam Hamstra Jr., ed., The Reformed Pastor. Nevin is also a major source for Hamstra’s Principled Worship.
Editorial Approach and Acknowledgments
The purpose of this series is to reprint the key writings of the Mercersburg theologians in a way that is both fully faithful to the original and yet easily accessible to non-specialist modern readers. These twin goals, often in conflict, have determined our editorial approach throughout. We have sought to do justice to both by being very hesitant to make any alterations to the original, but being very free with additions to the original in the form of annotations.
We have decided to leave spelling, capitalization, and emphasis exactly as in the original, except in cases of clear typographical errors, which have been silently corrected. We have, however, taken a few liberties in altering punctuation—primarily comma usage, which is occasionally quite idiosyncratic and awkward in the original texts, but also other punctuation conventions which are nonstandard and potentially confusing today. In several articles the volume editor has added quotation marks to the original author’s quotes as required by modern conventions. We have also adopted standard modern conventions such as the italicization of book titles and foreign-language words. The entirety of the text has been re-typeset and re-formatted to render it as clear and accessible as possible;
