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by Charles E. Hambrick-Stowe

This volume in the Mercersburg Theology Study Series brings together writings by John Williamson Nevin on ecclesiology, the theological topic that he and his colleague Philip Schaff considered the primary issue of their day in the American church. The essays bristle with the same intellectual energy on the page today as they did when originally published more than a century and a half ago. Edited by Nevin scholar Sam Hamstra, who has previously published an edition of Nevin’s lectures on pastoral theology,1 this collection provides essential materials for historians, theologians, and church leaders to explore the enduring relevance of Mercersburg Theology. As these documents reveal again, Nevin’s writings stand as a brilliant expression of Reformed theology that deserve deeper examination on their own terms and as a prophetic theological “voice crying out in the wilderness” in the twenty-first century.

Trained at Princeton Theological Seminary, and having taught there during a sabbatical of his teacher Charles Hodge and at the Presbyterian seminary in Pittsburgh, in 1840 Nevin moved to south-central Pennsylvania to assume the position of professor of theology at the tiny seminary of the German Reformed Church (officially, the Reformed Church in the United States). In 1844 Schaff, Swiss-born and educated at three of Germany’s elite universities, emigrated to America to join Nevin on the Mercersburg Seminary faculty. Schaff’s inaugural lecture, published as The Principle of Protestantism (1845), made it clear that the two were kindred spirits in their theological understanding of the church and its ministry. Nevin had launched his first salvo in 1843 with The Anxious Bench and continued to preach sermons and publish articles in The Mercersburg Review and in other publications on “the church question” for the next two and a half decades. Although he retired from his Mercersburg post and moved to Lancaster in 1852, Nevin continued active involvement in theological and educational work for the denomination, including service as president of Franklin and Marshall College.

The organic approach that Nevin and Schaff developed with regard to history, Christology, liturgy, sacramental theology, soteriology, catechesis and the experience of grace and salvation, along with their doctrine of the church, thoroughly rubbed against the grain of prevailing American Protestant culture. Since all these elements of theology are integrally connected, as the writings in this volume demonstrate, each one bears directly in very practical ways on that final category of ecclesiology. Because the Mercersburg Theology was not a religious movement focused on a single issue particular to the nineteenth century, but constituted a school of thought that radically reconceptualized the Reformed tradition as a whole, its understanding of the nature of the church remains both controversial and instructive to this day.

Mercersburg Theology insisted that history—and therefore tradition, the church’s development over time—substantively and 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.