©2005, Hart P&R Publishing, 271 pp. in hardback

Today is a day of much individualistic thinking within the contemporary church. How do Christians committed to thinking covenantly respond to the current scene? Now is not the first time this question has been asked.

John Williamson Nevin was born into a Scottish-Irish Presbyterian family who lived on a Pennsylvanian farm. He grew up in a home that focused on the covenant, the church, and the catechism as a means of spiritual training. As he reached his college years he became increasingly aware of an individualistic focus within the Christian church and also a focus on the necessity of an actual religious experience to verify one’s conversion. This thinking was underlined by the revival practices of Charles Finney.

To Nevin these focuses were problems so serious for Christianity that he devoted his life to studying and writing on the importance of the church – the covenantal community – in the life of the individual believer. His writings also emphasized the importance of the sacraments and weekly worship.

Although he was educated at Princeton Seminary and served as a professor at Western Theological Seminary, the bulk of his productive years were spent on the German Reform Church. Thirteen of those years were spent as a professor of theology in the seminary in Mercersburg, Pennsylvania. His work load and ongoing controversy wore down his health. He resigned his responsibilities, which included the presidency of Marshall College, in the early 1850’s. Within a few years he again entered the classroom and continued to work within the church to put his views into action in local congregations particularly by making worship more liturgical.

Nevin believed that modern Protestantism in America had departed from historic Protestantism. American Christianity did not recognize the history of the early church and the foundation it lay on which future centuries of Protestantism were to be built. He was aided in his teaching by a co-professor the noted historian, Philip Schaff.

In addition to being a professor Nevin was also a prolific writer, in such works as The Anxious Bench, Mystical Presence, and Anti-Christ and in articles in the Mercersburg Review he argued against pietism and experientialism. He sought to turn people’s attention to the importance of the church and the sacraments in the Christian’s life. He believed baptism united a person to Christ, but in saying this he did not hold to baptismal regeneration.  He held to salvation through Christ alone. Yet he was working out reformed teaching that recognized the church as the body of Christ.

This theology, which was called “the Mercersburg Theology”, did not get a receptive hearing within the German Reformed Church or the wider reformed world.  Opposition came from fellow pastors as well as the Princeton Seminary professor, Dr. Charles Hodge. The lack of acceptance was particularly seen in the attempt to reform liturgy within his own denomination. The battle was divisive and ended in a decisive defeat for the implementation of liturgy into the worship services.

Hart does a fine job of providing the reader with a thoughtful and balanced picture of Nevin as a person as well as the theology he taught.

Questions regarding the meaning of church membership for believers and their children are much discussed today among Calvinistic Christians. Readers of this book will realize these issues are not new to the Reformed scene nor have they been imported from nonreformed locales.  Hart takes the reader along the path of Nevin’s study and shows the reader that Nevin was trying to flesh out that which he had been taught as a covenant child in the reformed family. The reader may disagree with Nevin’s conclusions but he will come away from this book with a better understanding of some of the issues that many in the past and today are trying to wrestle with in light of scriptural teaching.

Review ©2008 Byron Snapp, Hampton, Virginia