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One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic
Tome 1
John Nevin’s Writings on Ecclesiology (1844–1849)
By John Williamson Nevin
Edited by Sam Hamstra Jr.
General Editor David W. Layman
Foreword by Charles E. Hambrick-Stowe
One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic, Tome 1
John Nevin’s Writings on Ecclesiology (1844–1849)
Mercersburg Theology Study Series 5
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paperback isbn: 978-1-5326-1897-0
hardcover isbn: 978-1-4982-4493-0
ebook isbn: 978-1-4982-4492-3
Manufactured in the U.S.A. September 11, 2017
The Mercersburg Theology Study Series
Volume 5
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
Contributors
Charles Hambrick-Stowe is pastor of the First Congregational Church, Ridgefield, Connecticut. He previously served as academic dean and professor at Northern Seminary (Lombard, Illinois) and Doctor of Ministry director at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary. Dr. Hambrick-Stowe is the author or editor of six books and numerous articles in the field of American religious history.
Sam Hamstra Jr. is the Affiliate Professor of Church History and Worship at Northern Seminary, as well as the Founder and President of ChapterNext, a church consultancy. He is the editor of several studies, most recently The Reformed Pastor: Lectures on Pastoral Theology by John Williamson Nevin, and has authored several works on worship, most recently What’s Love Got to Do With It?: How the Heart of God Shapes Worship.
David W. Layman earned his Ph. D. in Religion from Temple University in 1994. Since then, he has been a lecturer in religious studies and philosophy at schools in south-central Pennsylvania. He is editor for volume 6 of the Mercersburg Theology Study Series, Born of Water and the Spirit: Essays on the Sacraments and Christian Formation.
John Williamson Nevin (1803–86), professor successively at Western Theological Seminary, the Theological Seminary of the German Reformed Church at Mercersburg, and Franklin and Marshall College. He was a leading nineteenth-century theologian and founding editor of Mercersburg Review.
Foreword
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