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.
document 1
Editor’s Introduction
As noted in the general introduction to Tome 1, the “Church Question” boils down to this query: is the Church, as represented by appropriately constituted local congregations and served by properly instituted and ordained pastors, essential in the Triune God’s strategy to seek and save the lost?23 If the answer is “Yes,” as Nevin asserted, then the ministry of the local church is the normal divine instrument by which children within the church are nurtured in the faith and adults outside of the church are brought to faith. That answer to the “Church Question” naturally leads to another series of questions: How do I find this church among the religious options in my community? How do I know if a congregation is the true church and not an imposter? What are the marks of the true church?
Throughout history, Christians have answered those questions by corporately creating succinct lists of the marks of the true church. During the Reformation era, the Protestants insisted that the list include the proper preaching of the Word of God and administration of their abbreviated list of sacraments: the Lord’s Supper and baptism. More recently, John Howard Yoder and William Visser ‘t Hooft identified three essential functions of the true church: witness, service, and communion.24 Back in the fourth century, Christians included four marks of the church in the Nicene-Constantinople Creed: one, holy, catholic, and apostolic. By so doing, the church followed the example of those who had come before them. In the time period immediately following that of the apostles, the church developed baptismal creeds that included marks of the true church, such as holy and catholic. The Apostles’ Creed, the complete text of which doesn’t appear until the eighth century, grew out of these creeds. For this reason and more, Philip Schaff calls it the “Creed of creeds” and described it “as an admirable popular summary of the apostolic teaching, and in full harmony with the spirit and even the letter of the New Testament.”25
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,