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Of all the lists of the true marks of the church created throughout the history of the Christian church, John Nevin gravitated towards those of the ante-Nicene and Nicene era—in particular, one, holy, catholic, and apostolic. Throughout his extensive career, Nevin commented upon and defended each of those as they provided a positive vision for an American Protestant church ruptured by sectarianism and individualism. Of those four marks, Nevin dedicated a significant amount of energy to catholicity. In the process, he distinguished the ecclesiology of Mercersburg Theology from that of both the Roman Church and the Anglican Church, as well as from most of Protestantism, thereby earning his reputation as “Catholic and Reformed”26 or “High-Church Calvinist.”27
In his revealing and remarkable article entitled “Catholicism,” Nevin systematically and carefully unpacks the catholicity of the true church. While most Christians “generally understood” catholicity as universal, Nevin suggested an alternative, one rooted in the incarnation. Brad Littlejohn has noted, “For the Church to be ‘catholic’ means that it constitutes the proper wholeness of mankind and creation; it is no mere universal convocation of men from all over the world, but the renewal of the human race as a whole.”28 Richard Wentz adds,
Nevin here suggests that Christianity, perhaps more accurately Christ as the Incarnation, represents the introduction of wholeness into the life of the world. The world can never again escape the fact that claims to truth are particular and partial realizations of a truth that is greater than the sum of its parts. Any claim to exclusiveness is inevitably challenged by the inclusive wholeness already present in “the earth in its natural form”. . . . For Nevin Christianity was catholic in the sense that it represents the universal in our midst, already present, but judging and beckoning us to a more radical realization than is present among individuals, whether they are aware of it or not.29
For Nevin, then, catholicity is “no vague dedication to universality, even in some morally ideal sense.” Instead, “it is the discovery of wholeness amid the penultimate claims of the world, as expressed in human history.”30
23. Hamstra, general introduction to One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic, Tome 1, 17.
24. See Nikolajsen’s discussion on marks of the church in The Distinctive Identity of the Church, 117–18.
25. Schaff, History of the Creeds of Christendom I.2.7. The Mercersburgian writings on the Apostles’ Creed are slated to appear in volume 8 of MTSS.
26. See Yrigoyen and Bricker, Catholic and Reformed.
27. See Hart, Nevin: High–Church Calvinist and Layman, general introduction to Born of Water and the Spirit, 12–19.
28. Littlejohn, Mercersburg Theology, 149.
29. Wentz, Nevin: American Theologian, 66–67.
30. Ibid., 69.
Catholicism31
Among the attributes which Christianity has claimed to itself from the beginning, there is none perhaps more interesting and significant than that which is expressed by the title Catholic.32 It is not the product in any way of mere accident or caprice; just as little as the idea of the Church itself may be taken to have any origin of this sort. It has its necessity in the very conception of Christianity and the Church. Hence it is that we find it entering into the earliest christian confession the Apostles’ Creed, as an essential element of the faith that springs from Christ. As the mystery of the Church itself is no object of mere speculation, and rests not in any outward sense or testimony only, but must be received as an article of faith which proceeds with inward necessity from the higher mystery of the Incarnation, so also the grand distinguishing attributes of the Church, as we have them in the Creed, carry with them the same kind of inward necessary force for the mind in which this Creed truly prevails. They are not brought from abroad, but spring directly from the constitution of the fact itself with which faith is here placed in communication. The idea of the Church as a real object for faith, and not a fantastic notion only for the imagination, involves the character of catholicity, as well as that of truth and holiness, something which belongs inseparably to its very nature. To have true faith in the Church at all, we must receive it as one, holy, apostolical, and catholic. To let go any of these attributes in our thought, is necessarily to give up at the same time the being of the Church itself as an article of faith, and to substitute for it a mere chimera of our own brain under its sacred name. Hence the tenacity with which the Church has ever held fast to this title of catholic, as her inalienable distinction over against all mere parties or sects bearing the christian name. Had the title been only of accidental or artificial origin, no such stress would have been laid on it, and no such force would have been felt always to go along with its application. It has had its reason and authority all along, not so much in what it may have been made to mean exactly for the understanding in the way of formal definition and reflection, as in the living sense rather of christianity itself, the consciousness of faith here as that which goes before all reflection and furnishes the contents with which it is to be exercised.
The term catholic, it is generally understood, is of the same sense immediately with universal; and so we find some who are jealous of the first, as carrying to their ears a popish sound, affecting to use this last rather in the Creed. They feel it easier to say: “I believe in a holy universal or general church,” than to adopt out and out the old form: “I believe in the holy catholic, or in one holy catholic, church.” In this case however it needs to be borne in mind that there are two kinds of generality or universality, and that only one of them answers to the true force of the term catholic; so that there is some danger of bringing in by such change of terms an actual change of sense also, that shall go in the end to overthrow the proper import of the attribute altogether.
The two kinds of universality to which we refer are presented to us in the words all and whole. These are often taken to be substantially of one and the same meaning. In truth however their sense is very different. The first is an abstraction, derived from the contemplation or thought of a certain number of separate individual existences, which are brought together in the mind and classified collectively by the notion of their common properties. In such view, the general is of course something secondary to the individual existences from which it is abstracted, and it can never be more broad or comprehensive than these are in their numerical and empirical aggregation. It is ever accordingly a limited and finite generality. Thus we speak of all the trees in a forest, all the stars, all men, &c., meaning properly in each case the actual number of trees, stars, or men, individually embraced at the time in our general view, neither more nor less, a totality which exists only by the mind and is strictly dependent on the objects considered in their individual character. We reach the conception by a process of induction, starting with single things, and by comparison and abstraction rising to what is general; while yet in the very nature of the case the generality can never transcend the true bounds of the empirical
