the way for the editors who follow in his impressive wake. I frequently referred to Linden’s first two volumes for editorial guidance and quickly gave up on trying to keep up with the depth and breadth of his editorial comments. I thank Wipf & Stock for its commitment to Mercersburg Theology; this volume marks our third project together on that subject. I thank the Mercersburg Society for its support; I have been a member nearly since its inception and have benefited immensely from The New Mercersburg Review and the society’s annual conferences. Finally, I thank by wife Debbie for her support throughout the project.
General Editor
David Layman thanks Brad Littlejohn for the energy and passion that initiated this project, and for his continued counsel and assistance. He is grateful to Lee Barrett for sharing the task of continuing this invaluable work as fellow general editor. Sam Hamstra Jr. took on an enormous task; the general editor primarily limited his contributions to providing cross-references to the growing body of texts and commentary within the Mercersburg Theology Study Series, along with tracking down especially obscure references. The latter task was made immensely easier by Google Books, a searchable repository of digital texts. This volume now fills out the first six volumes in the projected series, which is identified throughout by the abbreviation “MTSS”.
The general editor also continued to rely on the resources of the Philip Schaff Library of Lancaster (Pennsylvania) Theological Seminary and the Archives of the Evangelical and Reformed Historical Society. Finally, he thanks his daughter, Karen Louise Layman, for assistance in the final copy editing.
The Mercersburg Theology Study Series
Volume 7
The Mercersburg Theology Study Series presents attractive, readable, scholarly modern editions of the key writings of the nineteenth-century theological movement led by Philip Schaff and John Nevin. It aims to introduce the academic community and the broader public more fully to Mercersburg’s unique blend of American and European, Reformed and Catholic theology.
Founding Editor
W. Bradford Littlejohn
Series Editors
Lee Barrett
David W. Layman
Published Volumes
1. The Mystical Presence and the Doctrine of the Reformed Church on the Lord’s Supper Edited by Linden J. DeBie
2. Coena Mystica: Debating Reformed Eucharistic Theology Edited by Linden J. DeBie
3. The Development of the Church Edited by David R. Bains and Theodore Louis Trost
4. The Incarnate Word: Selected Writings on Christology Edited by William B. Evans
6. Born of Water and the Spirit: Essays on the Sacraments and Christian Formation Edited by David W. Layman
General Editor’s Introduction to Tome 2
For readers who come to this tome first, this brief introduction will summarize the themes that emerge from Nevin’s work on ecclesiology between 1844 and 1849, and prepare the reader for the texts in this tome. The interested reader can find several exceptional biographical summaries in earlier volumes of the Mercersburg Theology Study Series.1 There are two basic theories in modern scholarship for the origins of Nevin’s ecclesiology. The traditional one locates Nevin in German Romanticism and “idealism and speculative theology.”2 A partial corrective to this position thinks that Nevin was, at least in theological and spiritual origins, a “high-church Calvinist”.3 In the latter view, Nevin began his work at Mercersburg as a conservative “old-school” (i.e., non-revivalist) Presbyterian, simply transplanted into a German Reformed context.4
The first monograph in Tome 1, Anxious Bench, lends support to the latter view. As Sam Hamstra Jr. explains in his general introduction, the most dynamic religious expression in American Christianity at the beginning of the national period was revivalism, or as it was reified by later evangelicals, the Second Great Awakening. Preachers used innovative methods, such as protracted meetings and camp meetings, to draw people and stimulate emotional intensity among the listeners. A particular technique was the “anxious bench,” located at the front of the congregation, where those who were “anxious” for their conversion would gather to receive the prayers of the community—and the hectoring of the preacher and his assistants. As Hamstra describes in his introduction to Anxious Bench, Nevin had a visceral reaction to a ministerial candidate’s introduction of the device at the Mercersburg, Pennsylvania congregation in 1842, and he wrote the work to explain his response. He thought it a manifestation of religious “quackery,” psychological manipulation that generated the appearance of spiritual transformation rather than its reality. The bad pushed out the good: emotional display and theatrical appeals to sentiment replaced real moral change. The real issue—would the listener of the gospel experience God’s converting grace—was replaced by a false issue: would the listener come forward to the anxious bench?5
In the first edition of Anxious Bench (1843), Nevin had pointed to “the system of the catechism” as the proper method of conversion and nurture, which required faithful, consistent attention of the pastor to the spiritual needs of the congregation, not the spasmodic enthusiasm of itinerant preachers and mass gatherings. In the second edition (presented in Tome 1), he developed his claim by describing the ministry of seventeenth century English Puritan Richard Baxter as a model of the earnest and arduous spiritual endeavor required of a pastor who wanted to bring genuine renewal to his parish. Extraordinary revivals were authentic phenomena, so long as they occurred in the ordinary patterns of pastoral ministration.6 This sociological pattern corresponded to Nevin’s emergent theological organicism:
The sinner is saved then by an inward living union with Christ as real as the bond by which he has been joined in the first instance to Adam. This union is reached and maintained, through the medium of the Church, by the power of the Holy Ghost. It constitutes a new life, the ground of which is not in the particular subject of it at all, but in Christ, the organic root of the Church.7
This fundamental thesis would undergo a number of changes; but its core vision can be traced through all the monographs and essays in One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic.A subtle shift can already be detected in a sermon delivered six months later. Nevin was arguing that the organic grounding of every Christian in Christ required the “Catholic Unity” of the church. The church is a whole in Christ, and not merely an all, a collection of individuals. The individual life of the believer flows out of this common source, which must be one. With this sermon, Nevin began to manifest Hegelian readings of ideality and actuality as applied to the church.8 He recognized that this unity was not yet “actual,” yet it was the “ideal,” and in the nature of life must be externalized.9 Recent reading suggests that Nevin’s immediate source for this Hegelian view, Frederick Rauch,10 had in fact left Nevin an idiosyncratic fusion of theological Hegelianism and Aristotelianism. Aristotelianism posits a distinction of matter and form, also known in the philosophical tradition as “potentiality” and “actuality.” Rauch thought “potentiality”
