John Williamson Nevin: High Church Calvinist

The Anxious Bench continues to astonish me not only for its insight into the American religious psyche, but for its well-nigh prophetic foreshadowing of the modern American evangelical movement and what passes for its theology. As I've written earlier, its melancholic tone captures perfectly the unease which any Churchly Presbyterian must experience when attempting to discuss the faith with an evangelical. Accordingly, I've been distressed to hear John Williamson Nevin labeled a heretic by some within the Reformed community. While I am no expert on the Mercersburg Theology, any wholesale dismissal of Nevin and Phillip Schaff's work strikes me as uninformed, to say the least.

D.G. Hart's intellectual biography of Nevin is not the book to make one an expert in the Mercersburg Theology (only actual study will do that), but does, with admirable insight, place Nevin in his historical, theological, and most especially ecclesiastical contexts. Nevin will continue as the patron saint of American Presbyterians whose Churchly orientation leaves them at odds not only with evangelicalism, but with much of what passes for Reformed thinking today.

The central issue [for Nevin], unlike most American Reformed or Presbyterians of his day [or ours, MWK], was not the five points of Calvinism or the imputation of Adam's sin. Instead, it was the church and its ministry. (p. 236)

But if the church is primarily an agency of grace through word and sacrament, then when those means of salvation become marginal, Christianity has entered an era fraught with abiding sigificance. (p. 237)

...Nevin's abiding insight: Christianity's primary influence needs to be evaluated not by the church's ability to influence society, but by its performance of sacred rites and recitation of holy words through which the body of Christ grow.s Nevin's recognition that the church has something to offer that no other institution can is still as pertinient at the beginning of a new millennium as it was in 1843 when he first articulated it. That he saw it so early and so clearly is a reason why Nevin should continue to be read and studied by believers and academics alike. (p. 238)