Reading
John Williamson Nevin

My paternal relatives belonged to St. Luke’s German Reformed Church in Luthersburg, PA. My father’s baptismal certificate is in German and the church conducted its services in German until 1939 when a nutty Austrian propelled German into an invasion that began WW II. I was always interested in the theology of the German Reformed Church. So, I was naturally drawn to DG Hart’s biography John Williamson Nevin, (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R, 2005).

Nevin was a Scotch-Irish Presbyterian who studied at Princeton from 1823-28 and was a favorite of Charles Hodge. He achieved the rank as the “best Hebrew scholar” at Princeton. Because of his academic abilities, when he graduated from Princeton, he took over Hodge’s teaching duties while the latter was on a sabbatical in Germany from 1826-28. No small feat for a freshly minted graduate. Their later falling out is more remarkable since Hodge came to criticize his pupil and replacement for being too influenced by German theologians, those Hodge himself went to study with on his sabbatical.

From 1830-40, Nevin was a professor at Western Theological Seminary in Allegheny, near Pittsburgh. This ten years was a time of personal assessment and recognition of theological issues he had not yet resolved in his mind. In 1840 he accepted a call to Mercersburg Seminary of the German Reformed Church which was viewed by many as just a move from Scot Presbyterian to German Presbyterian. The German Reformed views certainly had a profound affect on Nevin. However, it seems that Nevin’s move to Mercersburg had the effect of burying him as an influence on the greater Reformed world. He became a forgotten genius. But, in two ways he has had a lasting influence.

When he began his tenure at Mercersburg with an inaugural address on 20 May 1840, little did he realize the impact Finneyite revival was having on the German Reformed Church. Also, the lack of ministers had opened the denomination to all forms of “wild and irregular” religious experiences. In the denomination’s official publication, Weekly Messenger, Nevin joined the issues with these problems. John Winebrenner, a former German Reformed pastor who in 1825 began the Church of God in Harrisburg as a separatist German Reformed group under the influence of Finney. They began a running dispute that continued for many years and had a profound affect on Nevin. All of this lead to Nevin writing, probably his most famous work, The Anxious Bench [AB].

AB was the most trenchant and probing critique of revivalism in the Finneyite mold ever written. Nevin was discomforted with the state of evangelicalism in American and it was, in his view, Finney who introduced the individualistic concern with personal experience that plagued the church then, as it still does. In the book Nevin outlines four dangers of the anxious bench: It creates a false issue for the sinner [what outward action must I take] rather than the real issue [Repentance]; it obstructs and diverts attention to the Holy Spirit in the truly awakened; it foster spurious conversions; and harm and loss to the souls of men who are false professors of faith.

In AB, Nevin does not stop at criticism as we often see today in analysis of wrongs. He offers a Reformed corrective: “system of Catechism”. By this Nevin emphasized the that God carries out His saving work through the family and Christian Church through ordinary and divinely established means of grace. Nevin emphasized the Church as the divine supernatural organism of God which was contrary to Finney’s view of religion as a natural, right way of exercising human facilities. Because of Finney, the world was introduced to a man-centered system of self-salvation by his free will. For Nevin, the church is not a collection of saved individualists, the product of those individuals. The Church is a divine organism with its own supernatural life, a living body existing prior to individual believers manifesting its life through those brought to faith.

Nevin’s other memorable contribution was over the Lord’s Supper in Mystical Presence. He debunked the Lutheran and Roman views of transubstantiation [the elements change to the body and blood of Christ] and consubstantiation [the flesh and blood was in with and under the outward signs] by affirming the classic Reformed position that Christ’s ascended body “remains constantly in heaven, according to the Scriptures” so His participation in the supper could only be spiritual. With these errors understood, he then maintained that Christ’s person was present in the sacrament “so far as the actual participation of the believer is concerned.” To Nevin, the Reformed Church spoke of a spiritual real presence. This means:
…the body of Christ is in heaven, the believer on earth; but the by power of the Holy Ghost, nevertheless, the obstacle of such a vast local distance is overcome, so that in the sacramental act, while the outward symbols are received in an outward way, the very body and blood of Christ are at the same time inwardly and supernaturally communicated to the worthy receiver, for the real nourishment of his new life.
This, Nevin substantiated was the view of Calvin but his critics believed he was attempting to improve on Calvin.

His former teacher, Charles Hodge, became his harshest critic. He dismissed Nevin’s view of the supper. He acknowledged that Nevin marshaled the facts but that two views of the sacrament had been present from the beginning. One, in the “sacrificial virtue” of Christ’s body and blood, and the other in the mysterious and supernatural “efficacy flowing from the glorified body of Christ in heaven”. Hodge interpreted the latter view as simply a concession to Lutherans in the 16th century and that the former as correct. While history and the Westminster Confession [Shorter Catechism # 69] proved Nevin correct, tangling with Hodge was not a contemporary benefit to Nevin or his views.

Hodge, as the centurion of Reformed faith, saw Nevin as too Catholic. For Hodge sola scriptura and justification by faith alone, the formal and material causes of the Reformation, were the keys to understanding Biblical faith. And, he believed Nevin’s mystical presence was compromising those principles. But Nevin wanted the supernatural church to be grounded in the mystery of the incarnation of Christ through the sacrament. For Nevin, Hodge, like Finney, had a subjective and individualistic form of devotion that from Nevin’s churchly view was flawed.

This is a book worth reading. It shows how doctrinal issues flare up in every generation and that devoted servants of Christ can have sharp differences. Hart says Nevin’s greatest contribution is showing us that the American church lost its function in society, not by adopting modernism, but when it no longer regarded the church as a medium of grace but more or less a voluntary society of Christian disciples. Certainly food for thought at a time when we see individualistic evangelical Christianity running rampant. A greater question may be, if the church is primarily a supernatural creation of God ministering salvation and grace through the Word, is not being such a church a greater danger to the souls of men than the most hostile of cultures?