“this tree”). To close the circle, Rauch then claimed that genus/potentiality was approximately equivalent to the Hegelian “idea.”11 This formulation enabled Nevin to synthesize his underlying biological metaphor of a plant that grows and manifests its “germ” with the idealism that was becoming increasingly attractive to him. In other words, it is precisely at this time—sometime between February and August of 1844—that the theory of the influence of idealism can accurately explain Nevin’s position.
Two years later, Nevin presented another sermon on “The Church.” He immediately leapt into a more detailed explanation of the distinction between the “Ideal Church” and the “Actual Church.” He had obviously thought more deeply about this formulation, and was prepared to express it more rigorously. Three further conceptual developments also manifest themselves: Nevin began to explore how Christians could perceive the ideal church within its flawed actuality. His answer was that one needed to have faith in the church. The ideal was not a matter of empirical observation but of supernatural conviction. Most of the evangelicals around Nevin were attempting to produce the church through revivalistic enthusiasm and sectarian primitivism. They thought they were recapitulating an allegedly pure apostolic Christianity, although in fact their actual religious expression was a thoroughly modern notion of personal, democratized religious experience.12 Nevin rather thought that the church was already present, but had to be seen through the transformed perception of faith. Secondly, he was coming to believe that the “essence” of this church, apprehended through faith, was expressed in the Apostles’ Creed: “Credo in God . . . in Jesus Christ his only Son, . . . [and in] the holy catholic church.” It must be believed to be seen at all. More technically, Nevin had assimilated the theory of Philip Schaff (his new colleague at Mercersburg after the death of Rauch) that the “development of the church” was evolution, “regular development.”13 For the next five or six years, this understanding of development would overlay Nevin’s native biological metaphor of the organism.14 But the first two themes would remain with Nevin for the rest of his life, and are ever more energetically stated and explored in the present tome.
Now that Nevin had established his central vision of Christian catholicity grounded in the supernaturally revealed presence of Jesus Christ, he turned his attention to the realities of American church life, which saw a plethora of antagonistic Christian communities, each competing for its share of the “religious market.” In this he was doubtless inspired by Schaff. Schaff had labeled sectarianism as “one-sided practical subjectivism,” in contrast to “Rationalism,” which was “one-sided theoretic subjectivism.”15 That is, Schaff thought that sectarianism was religious individualism and privatized spirituality as manifested in the concrete organization of religious communities. Nevin’s first major foray against sectarianism was a theological analysis of sectarianism as the contemporaneous American expression of the “antichrist.” No longer identifying it with the pope—as most Protestants since the Reformation had done—Nevin rather tied it to the denial that the Church was an ongoing manifestation of Christ’s incarnation in the world, the historical extension of the Incarnate Christ.16 He began with a biblical-theological account of what “antichrist” meant in 1 John 4: a denial that Jesus Christ “is come in the flesh.” He proceeded to interpret this root error as he thought it was manifested in the later heresies of the early church. Here he resorted to convenient dichotomies: Docetism and Ebionism, Pelagianism and Manichaeanism, Nestorianism and Eutychianism. He attempted to show that the errors manifested on each side were also characteristic of contemporaneous sectarianism. The total of twelve “marks” can be distilled to the following claim: the sects of his day denied that Jesus Christ in his person united divinity and humanity, and was a supernatural presence who continued to reveal himself, continually and historically embodied in the Church. This denial either left God remaining in heaven, or humanity left on earth, with no union in “actuality”.
Some of the arguments of Antichrist will likely appear forced to the contemporary reader. In contrast, “The Sect System” (in two essays) is energetic, Nevin at his acerbic best. He had reluctantly bought John Winebrenner’s History of all the Denominations in the United States at “the request of a persistent itinerant book salesman.”17 Winebrenner’s production consisted of essays on as many of the different sects and religious communities as he could locate. Most of the essays were written by adherents of the sect described. In response, Nevin perceptively skewered the pretensions of each sect to represent the whole truth of Christianity. Most of them professed to simply and directly obey the Bible, but that supposed common foundation brought no relief from ecclesiastical enmity. Sects endeavored to interpret that common Bible through a hermeneutics of “private judgment,” but each only held to intellectual independence so long as it led a person into its own communion. They were simultaneously rationalistic and superstitious, claiming to use reason to interpret the Bible and exposit the truths of Christian belief, yet bound to a narrow range of notions invented by their founder. Sectarianism was therefore incapable of bearing the universality and supernatural life of the church, a life that was necessarily recognized in and through faith.
After “Sect System,” Nevin turned his attention to the history and thought of the early church. He was motivated in part by the claim of most of the sects to be the repristination of primitive Christianity. This was of course self-contradictory, since they contradicted each other. They could not all be faithful reenactments of apostolic faith and practice. His intellectual interests were also moved in this direction by the influence of Schaff, whose concept of historical development said that in historical and theological change, in the annulment of earlier periods, one should be able to discern new and higher expressions of the same spiritual and moral life.18 So Nevin wanted to determine the content of patristic spirituality and thought, and thereby evaluate the authority claims of contemporaneous evangelicalism. His study produced three essays on “Early Christianity,” and four on “Cyprian” (the third-century bishop of Carthage).19
The first essay in the present Tome was written around the beginning of 1851, some six or eight months prior to his immersion into the life and thought of the early church. Nevin seemed full of hope that Christian catholicity could provide a unifying vision for a future Christendom. This vision would be sorely tested over the next two years (“Cyprian” was completed in November, 1852). Nevin’s conclusion about contemporaneous Christianity’s claims to ground itself in the apostolic era (or, for Anglicans, in the Nicene era) was clear: evangelicalism was not a repristination of primitive Christianity.20 Less certain is Nevin’s attitude to Schaff’s theory of historical development, but he was beginning to intellectually distance himself from it.21 What is least certain is how he finally incorporated the apparent authority claims of the patristic era generally, and Cyprian’s claims particularly. Nevin asserted in “Cyprian” and later that he was simply attempting to present the facts for detached consideration, but some scholars find this claim disingenuous.22 In any case, there can be no doubt that the spiritual and ecclesiastical claims of the early church left their mark in the essays that follow.
1. Littlejohn, series introduction to Mystical Presence; DeBie, biographical essay in Coena Mystica. Born in 1803, Nevin grew up in a Presbyterian community in central Pennsylvania. After theological education at Princeton and a decade at Western (now Pittsburgh) Theological Seminary, in 1840 he accepted a call from the Mercersburg (Pennsylvania) Seminary
