Читать книгу One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic, Tome 2 - John Williamson Nevin - Страница 6

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” was equivalent to “genus” (e.g., “tree”), itself invisible but becoming manifested in the “species and individual” (e.g., “white oak tree,” “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 of the German Reformed Church. Four years later, he was joined by Philip Schaff, a church historian fresh from the best universities in Germany. Together they created “Mercersburg Theology,” a “high-church” movement that called for a renewed appreciation of the resources of pre-Reformation Christianity, restoration of a “high” Calvinistic doctrine of the presence of Christ in the Eucharist, and liturgical renewal. Nevin finished his career as a teacher and administrator at Franklin and Marshall College in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.

2. Nichols, Romanticism in American Theology; DeBie, editor’s introduction to Nevin, The Mystical Presence, MTSS ed., esp. xxxv. See also DeBie’s biographical essay in Coena Mystica, MTSS, vol. 2, and Speculative Theology and Common-Sense Religion.

3. Hart, John Williamson Nevin: High Church Calvinist; Layman, general introduction to Born of Water and the Spirit, MTSS, vol. 6, 12–19.

4. Nevin himself seemed to have some of this attitude: One, Holy, Catholic, Apostolic, Tome 1, 176n35.

5. See Nevin, One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic, Tome 1, 23–24; Anxious Bench in ibid., 52–55, 61–70.

6. Ibid., 98–100.

7. Ibid., 91–92. For an extended restatement and development, see “Hodge on the Ephesians” below, 98–101.

8. See Payne, “Schaff and Nevin, Colleagues at Mercersburg,” 170.

9. “Catholic Unity,” in Nevin, One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic, Tome 1, 120.

10. Rauch was a German émigré, and Nevin’s first colleague at Mercersburg. Linden DeBie provides more background on the relationship of Rauch and Nevin in the editor’s introduction to Mystical Presence, MTSS ed., xxvi.

11. This interpretation is based on Rauch, “Ecclesiastical Historiography in Germany,” 314–15n. Rauch stated the “idea of the Church” according to “Hegel’s school” in the body of the text. The editor first discovered this text through a citation by DeBie in Speculative Theology, 61n9; DeBie was using a reprint in Reformed Church Review (1905).

12. Hatch, Democratization of American Christianity.

13. Nevin, One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic, Tome 1, 145n10. In October 1844, Schaff had presented his lectures on “The Principle of Protestantism” in German, which Nevin translated: Schaff, Principle of Protestantism, MTSS, vol. 3. Schaff’s full theory is stated in What is Church History?, MTSS, vol. 3, 287–307.

14. The present writer argues Nevin eventually abandoned it: Layman, general introduction to Nevin, Schaff, and Gerhart, Born of Water and the Spirit, 23–4, 31.

15. Schaff, Principle of Protestantism, MTSS, vol. 3, 128–41. See 120 for “Rationalism.”

16. For the shift in Nevin’s identification of the antichrist, see Nevin, One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic, Tome 1, 161. For the latter phrase, see Borneman, Christ, Sacrament, and American Democracy, 89.

17. Nevin, One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic, Tome 1, 235. Winebrenner was an ex-German Reformed pastor who had formed his own evangelical denomination.

18. Schaff, What is Church History, MTSS, vol. 3, 288–91. Schaff applied the specifically Hegelian word aufheben on p. 289. (Literally aufheben can be translated both “cancel” and “lift up,” but as a technical philosophical term is usually rendered “sublate”.)

19. At present, the most recent edition of “Early Christianity” is in Yrigoyen and Bricker, ed., Catholic and Reformed. “Cyprian” has no modern edition; but both sets of essays are scheduled for publication in a further volume of MTSS.

20. Nevin, “Early Christianity,” in Catholic and Reformed, 204–5, 254, 309; “Cyprian,” 418–19 (“Third Article”).

21. See the summary in Layman, general introduction to Born of Water and the Spirit, 31.

22. Nevin’s claim can be found in “Cyprian,” 560, 562–63 and “Wilberforce on the Eucharist,” 150–51. Later critical readings are in Nichols, Romanticism in American Theology, 203–6 and Littlejohn, “Sectarianism and the Search for Visible Catholicity,” 410n20. For this entire episode in Nevin’s career, see Payne, “Schaff and Nevin, Colleagues at Mercersburg.” The present writer is more inclined to take Nevin at his word: Layman, “Revelation in the Praxis of the Liturgical Community,” 114–38.