Mercersburg Theology: Heir of Liberalism or Precursor of Neo-Orthodoxy? Or Both?
Lee C. Barrett
I have a deep, dark confession to make here. I, Lee Barrett, am theologically promiscuous. By day I am a devoted Kierkegaard scholar. But by night I close my Danish books, gently put them aside, and sneak off to a clandestine tryst with John Nevin. Yes, my theological infidelity weighs on my heart. To make matters worse, this Nevin with whom I dally was, in part, the spiritual descendent of my beloved Kierkegaard’s great nemesis, G. W. F. Hegel. My theological transgression is like sleeping with the enemy. But I remain hopelessly torn between my two loves. Many of my friends are dyed-in-the-wool Kierkegaard zealots, but many of my other friends are stalwart champions of the Mercersburg tradition. That is like saying that some of my friends “feel the burn” of Bernie Sanders, while others are ready to put Donald Trump’s visage on Mount Rushmore. In the popular imagination, Kierkegaard and John Nevin are about as different as Sanders and Trump, or, perhaps more accurately, Pope Francis and Trump.
The reasons for this perception are obvious. Kierkegaard has been hailed as the father of radical individualism, while Nevin has been lauded as the arch defender of ecclesial community. Kierkegaard refused to be ordained, while Nevin regarded ordination as at least quasi-sacramental. Kierkegaard died in his hospital room shortly after rejecting the offer of a clergyperson to serve him communion, while Nevin made the Eucharistic celebration, independent of the virtues or vices of the officiant, central to his piety.
But I have been profoundly shaped by both of them. What can this mean? Perhaps I simply suffer from multiple personality disorder. (Many of my former students will favor this interpretation.) Or, maybe, just maybe, below the glaring surface disjunctions there lurks a strange, elusive commonality between the two thinkers. And let us expand the playing field beyond the contrast of Nevin and Kierkegaard. Maybe the hidden similarities that I detect are not just the shared property of those two authors, but perhaps they represent a more widespread shift in Christian life, and feeling, and thought that was occurring in countless places in the early to mid-nineteenth century. Perhaps the Mercersburg movement was one expression of a much more sweeping Copernican revolution in theology. It is this possibility that I hope to explore here. In this endeavor I am enormously indebted to the work of Annette Aubert, for she has demonstrated that there was indeed an intensive interchange between Mercersburg and Heidelberg and Halle and Berlin, a truly trans-Atlantic interaction.[i] That conversation even ranged from central Pennsylvania to Copenhagen, for I discovered a copy of Friedrich Rauch’s (the first of the Mercersburg theologians) small volume on Faust in Kierkegaard’s library, along with copious notes. Yet another illustrative transatlantic connection was that Philip Schaff and Kierkegaard both attended the philosopher Schelling’s lectures in Berlin in 1841-1843 at various times (as did the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin and the future communist Friedrich Engels; I wonder what the conversations at the breaks were like).[ii] Another improbable connection is that Kierkegaard’s arch-enemy, Bishop Hans Lassen Martensen, the primate of Denmark, was not only a close correspondent with the German theologian Isaac Dorner, but was also read avidly by the Mercersburg people. Aubert has pointed out that Emanuel Gerhart, the Mercersburg systematician, cited Martensen the Dane repeatedly and enthusiastically.[iii] Following Aubert’s lead, and extending her trajectory, I hope to show how the Mercersburg movement was part of a broader shift in Christian consciousness, a shift that included such odd bedfellows as Kierkegaard and his adversary Martensen, and to show how that shift remains critical to the health of the church in the twenty-first century. In so doing, I will concentrate on the writings of Nevin as being exemplary of this sea-change in theology.
In doing this I will make reference to something called the “mediating theology” of the nineteenth century, in which I locate the Mercersburg theology. This movement has largely been forgotten, and, when it is remembered at all, it is has acquired a very bad reputation. This negative impression is largely due to the influence of Karl Barth and other neo-orthodox theologians, who dismissed mediating theology as the last gasp of the Protestant liberalism that they blamed for all the ills of the church.[iv] The basic neo-orthodox complaint with liberalism was that it glorified the believer’s religious experience rather than glorifying God. The liberals, or so it was claimed, based their understanding of Christianity on an analysis of the depth structures of human longings and yearnings, and thereby opened the door to reconceiving the gospel so that it would be subservient to felt human needs. Liberalism was, in the eyes of its critics, an invitation to indulge in a convenient religion of personal self-gratification and cultural self-congratulation. In the words of Barth, theology was reduced to anthropology, and talk about God really became talking about humanity in a loud voice. (In graduate school I had a Barthian professor who showed me a short animated cartoon that began with the face of Schleiermacher, which then morphed into the face of Feuerbach, which then morphed into the face of Freud, and which finally dissolved into the face of Satan.) I will argue that Barth was unfair to this movement, and that the work of the neo-orthodox theologians themselves, and most exciting recent theology, would be unthinkable without the mediating thinkers. The Mercersburg folks, the German and Danish mediators, Kierkegaard, and later the neo-orthodox theologians were all part of the same seismic shift in theology. To be sure, there were differences among them, but those differences were all of the nature of family quarrels. But, as we all know, family quarrels can be some of the most bitter.
So, what was so significant about the mediating theologians and their American expression in Mercersburg? And, more importantly, why should we care? Why dredge up the names of John Nevin, Isaac Dorner, F. A. G. Tholuck, Hans Lassen Martensen, Carl Ullmann, and Julius Müller? The reason is simple: these now obscure mediating theologians helped transform the church’s basic understanding of what the most urgent, pressing human spiritual problem is, and, correlatively, what Christian redemption is really all about. They changed the dominant understanding of what we need redemption from, and what we need redemption for.
Now, before we get going, I must warn you that the mediating theologians were by no means a monolithic bunch. They were not a one-size-fits-all movement. There were myriad parties, factions, and schools, which often bickered endlessly with one another. Some were more indebted to Hegel, some to Schelling, some to Schleiermacher, some to Romanticism, and some to the “Awakening” movement of the early nineteenth century. But all of them shared more theological substance with one another than they did with their adversaries, who were the rationalists on the left and the strict confessionalists on the right. So I am going to focus on the similarities among the mediators and paint them with a broad brush, or perhaps even a paint roller. (This is odd for me, for when I interpret Kierkegaard I work with a precise fine point pencil; but now I get to shift from painting like Vermeer to painting like Jackson Pollock.)
During the late Middle Ages and Reformation periods, the basic human problem, according to most forms of Western Christianity, was identified as sin, understood as the violation of God’s law, a transgression which brought with it guilt and condemnation. Sin could be imaged differently, as a failure to cultivate the virtues of faith, hope, and love, as straying from the narrow path, as willful disobedience to divine commands, as a disruption of shalom, as ingratitude, as disbelief, or as lack of trust, but in all these instances sin was regarded as something culpable, contrary to God’s purposes, and therefore liable to punishment. Consequently, the good news of the gospel was most fundamentally God’s promise to either forgive sin, or to heal it, or both. Christians might quarrel about how the forgiveness was related to the healing (in other words, how justification was related to sanctification), but in general they were wrestling with the same issue. They were part of the same conversation.
I like to pay attention to the root metaphors and basic images that theologians (or even entire eras) favor. The rhetorical flourishes in their sermons and devotional literature, or even in their lectures, often display what they really mean more than their more abstract theological formulae. So, it is crucial that in this conversation during the Reformation era God was imaged primarily as a parent, as the righteous and just head of the cosmic household whose will must be obeyed. The understanding of salvation, the blessed life, revolved around the hope that this parent would not reject the disobedient child, but would accept and protect it. In some instances the hope included the expectation that God would not only forgive the prodigal, but would also heal its waywardness, so that the child could rest secure in the thought that its behavior was pleasing to the parent; the parent, it was hoped, would look at the child and declare it to be good. The child would never fully understand the parent (remember that Luther spoke of the “Deus absconditus” (the hidden God) and Calvin insisted that the finite can never contain or grasp the infinite. (Similarly, when I was a child my father was largely inscrutable to me; all I knew was that he disappeared during weekdays for eight hours, but I had no idea what he did. I simply trusted that he would come back with money, food, and toys, and that he would care for me, protect me, and sometimes discipline me. It was by no means a symmetrical relationship. And so it is here, with God. Think of the imagery in “A Mighty Fortress is Our God.”)
The mediating theologians, including our Mercersburg forebears, shifted the focus and changed the theological conversation. No longer was the violation of righteousness the main concern (although sin remained a seriously complicating factor, deserving of much attention). Now the most fundamental problem was alienation, the sense of being cut off, isolated, trapped within the confines of one’s own limited existence. For example, Nevin preached, “Whether men are conscious of it or not, the great problem of humanity has always been the bridging over of this deep, dark, and awful chasm of separation…”[v] Nevin explained that this alienation “has its foundation in our nature, not simply because of the sense of sin, but in view of the sense of deficiency separately considered.”[vi] The types of alienation that the theologians wrestled with were multiple: the alienation of humanity from God (that is the basic one),[vii] of the individual from the community, of human being from the natural world,[viii] of secular culture from the church, of reason and science from revelation, of nationalities from other nationalities, of ethnic groups from other ethnic groups, of perceiving subject from perceived object,[ix] and of the heart from the head. The problem they concentrated on is that people do not feel unified, or feel integrated into some social or cosmic whole, but rather that they feel fragmented, being pulled in different directions. As Dante had earlier imaged it, we feel like we are lost in a wood, or, to shift metaphors, we feel like strangers in a strange land, aliens, homeless drifters. This world is not our home, Nevin frequently reminded his audiences, and “it would be so even if man had not fallen.”[x] The resolution to this dilemma, according to Nevin, was to discern the “complete harmony of nature and spirit” and “the one system” that pervades all things.[xi] The veil that obscures the harmony of nature and grace must be removed.[xii] Most importantly, the chasm between the infinite and the finite, between God and humanity, had to be bridged.
I am no historian, so I do not know why the problem of alienation was elevated to the rank of the most vexing issue facing humanity in the nineteenth century. But I can make some irresponsible guesses. The shift probably had something to do with the Industrial Revolution, and the progressive subversion of humanity’s ties to nature. It probably had something to do with urbanization, and the erosion of the sense of being part of an organic local community. It probably had something to do with the rise of the nation state, and the smashing of any sense of a cohesive Christendom. It probably had something to do with the growing power of the intrepreneurial class, and the resultant alienation of labor from capital. It probably had something to do with the increasing differentiation of the economic, political, and ecclesial spheres, and increasing questions about the role of religion in cultural life. It probably had something to do with the chaos caused by the Napoleonic wars and the breakdown of traditional ways of life.
For whatever reason, the dialectic of alienation and reconciliation became the governing motif in the mediating theologies. They articulated a wide-spread longing for the restoration of a sense of belonging, of rootedness, and of connectedness. Consequently, Christianity was construed by them as a religion in which the triumph of relationality was heralded. The individual needed to feel connected to God, connected to fellow human beings, and connected to nature. Accordingly, “love” became the central virtue and the central attribute of God. Religion, Nevin claimed, begins in “the form of affection and love,”[xiii] for that is what God most essentially is. Love upstaged other divine attributes like glory, the Rudolf Otto-style sense of the numinous, power, righteousness, and mystery. This was a different understanding of the divine nature, for God’s sheer awesomeness and holy righteousness had been foundational divine attributes for Luther and even more so for Calvin, and for just about all the major theologians and preachers of the Reformation period. But now love was thrust into the limelight. Christians had always talked about love, of course, but by these mediating theologians love was given a strong nuance of interpersonal intimacy. For example, Nevin asserted, “Man was originally formed for love and union with God.”[xiv] Similarly, he described the mystical union with Christ as a “oneness of life” rather than as a coincidence of wills or a legal arrangement.[xv] Nevin insisted that a genuine relationship with God is not a negotiated settlement of differences or a harmony of wills, but is a “living union.”[xvi] Making the interpersonal nature of Christianity even more clear, Nevin explained that faith is an “actual apprehension of the person of Christ”; it is not primarily cognitive assent to doctrinal propositions.[xvii] This love, both divine and human, was described by most mediating theologians as a self-transcending openness to the other, a reciprocal delight in the sheer existence of the other, and active care for the well-being of the other. As Nevin wrote, “The goodness of God is that principle of His nature disposing Him to make His creatures happy.”[xviii] This new emphasis of divine love is evident in shifts in Nevin’s theological vocabulary while he taught at Western Seminary and transitioned to Mercersburg, and in Kierkegaard’s working lexicon as he finished his Masters program and launched into his writing career. Either coincidentally or providentially, that shift occurred for both them at the same time, in the late 1830’s. By the time of his lectures on theology in 1851, Nevin overtly proclaimed that it is “love which is the only foundation of all other aspects of His [God’s] character. Out of love He created the world…”[xix]
Given the new way that God’s love was construed, God’s very nature was reimaged. No longer was God seen primarily as a disciplinary, judgmental parent, but rather as an empathic, supportive parent, or even as a beloved friend or spouse. Some sort of experienced sense of tender intimacy with God, analogous to that of lovers, was desired. Faith, Nevin claimed, necessarily involves an encounter with the immediate, self-authenticating “presence” of Christ.[xx] An authentic relationship with God is really nothing less than “a common life and fellowship of existence.”[xxi] Talk of union with God abounded in the pages of all the mediating theologians. For example, Nevin proclaimed, “The whole world, in its deepest sense, is striving after a union with God. Nothing less than a union with its divine creator can satisfy the soul.”[xxii] This became a metaphysical principle for him, for he concluded that “There was certainly a necessity in the constitution of the world for a union of humanity with the Godhead.”[xxiii]
A caveat must be injected here. It must be emphasized that this “union” was not some sort of ontological identity of creaturely being with divinity. The soul was not to be lost in God, with all sense of individuation dissolved, as if a drop of water had returned to the ocean and dispersed its molecules. No, even eschatologically the individual would still be the self-same discrete individual, and God would still be God. Love does not entail the merging of all interpersonal boundaries, but rather suggests the apotheosis of mutuality and reciprocity. One person can only love another if that person remains in some relevant sense different. And so it is with the individual’s relationship with God. Accordingly, against all pantheisms and monisms Nevin warns, “God, in uniting humanity to Himself, did not destroy human personality.”[xxiv]
Although the merging of the individual and God was neither imagined nor desired, growth in God-likeness was nevertheless essential for the mediating theologians. To participate in a relationship of reciprocal affirmation and mutual understanding, the individual would need in some respects to resemble God, or “image” God. The soul and God would not be united in being, but they would be perfectly united in feeling and in will. The individual would value the same things that God values, want the same things that God wants, rejoice in the same things that God rejoices in, and will the same things that God wills. There had to be a mutual understanding between God and the human, a mutual admiration and delight in one another’s excellences. The mediating theologians, often without admitting or even recognizing it, implicitly revived the old medieval dictum that “only like can know like,” and its corollary that “only like can truly love like.” Along these lines, Nevin advised that the only way to know is God to attain a “full harmony” of God’s will and the individual’s will.[xxv] A godly “fixed habit of soul” and the “consent of the whole man” with God is necessary for a perception of divine light.[xxvi] For Nevin and his theological fellow travelers it was axiomatic that we must be fellowship with God in order to know God.[xxvii]
To be fair, this theme of love as a mutuality of affect and volition was not entirely new in Christianity. It was screamingly present in the writings of Bernard of Clairvaux, and it became the common coin of the Rhineland mystics. Later it played a major role in Carmelite spirituality, and permeated the hymns and devotional literature of the Pietists. It is even inscribed all over the pages of Jonathan Edwards (juxtaposed very discordantly to his other theme of “sinners in the hands of an angry God,” a ferocious parental image if ever there was one). The distant roots of the interpersonal love theme can be found in Augustine in the West and the Cappadocians in the East. But, in the nineteenth century this minority report became the foundational principle for systematic theologies, seminary pedagogy, and denominational platforms.
Of course the images of God as an evaluating parent and righteous judge were never abandoned by the mediating theologians, and certainly not by the Mercersburg people. Nevin talks about God as a disciplinary father all the time. But, especially in Nevin’s chapel sermons, this language is dramatically upstaged by the rhetoric of companionship and intimacy with God. In the same way, sin continued to be emphasized, but now sin was viewed more essentially as an egocentric turning away from God and neighbor to “the service of self,” rather than as a flouting of the divine rules.[xxviii]
This shift toward the centrality of “love” manifested itself in every doctrinal topic that the mediating theologians dealt with. Let us begin with the most core of core beliefs, the doctrine of the Trinity. In the early nineteenth century the doctrine of the Trinity had fallen on hard times. The rationalists either jettisoned it, as did the Unitarians, or banished it to the category of highly speculative and esoteric doctrines that do not really matter much in ordinary life. Even the influential Friedrich Schleiermacher did not quite know what to do with it, so he relegated it to the end of his exposition of the Christian faith, on the grounds that the one-in-three business did not directly follow from any description of Christian experience. But almost all of the mediating theologians were fascinated with the Trinity, and restored it to a position of primacy. For them, the doctrine of the Trinity became the expression of the basic reality that in God’s own self God is love. They conceptualized the Trinity differently, some favoring the social model in which God is the perichoretic dance of three persons whose oneness is their reciprocal delight in one another, while others favored a more psychological model in which God is the lover, the beloved, and the love that flows back and forth between them. But however they sought to conceive the Trinity, the consensus was that in some ineffable way, God’s inner life is the eternal dialectic of unity (the Father), differentiation (the Son), and the synthesis of unity and difference (the Holy Spirit). In other words, God is the joyous, glorious, eternal dance of unity-in-difference.[xxix] God is not undifferentiated, static unity, like a solitary old man with a white beard seated on a throne. If no man is an island, then God is not one either. In some incomprehensible way, the one God is the power of community, the drama of differentiation and reconciliation. Unity-in-difference is the heart beat at the core of the universe; love does indeed make the world go ‘round.
The theme of unifying love also accounts for the mediating theologians’ shift of christological attention away from the atonement toward the sheer fact of the Incarnation, a shift from Good Friday to Christmas. In fact, it was this shift, glaring in the work of Nevin, which largely motivated the classis of North Carolina to sever ties with rest of the German Reformed Church. According to the North Carolinians, the Mercersburg heretics were talking too much about the person of Christ, and not enough about the atoning work of Christ. In spite of the over-heated polemics, they actually had spotted something important in the structure of Nevin’s thought. For Nevin, and for most mediating theologians on both sides of the Atlantic, Jesus Christ was first and foremost the enactment and the actualization of the loving union of God and humanity. Jesus is both the human who loved God perfectly, and also the God who loved humanity so much that God graciously became human. In the life of Jesus the loving reciprocity of God and humanity is made real, not just ideal. The mediating theologians loved to refer to Jesus as the “theanthropos,” the God-man. This emphasis accounts for their universal tendency to highlight Jesus as the Second Adam. Jesus loved God with all his heart, mind, and strength, as Adam and Eve should have done, but had failed so miserably to do. In the unfolding of his life, Jesus redoes properly what had gotten marred in Adam and Eve. Human nature is perfected in Jesus, and finally becomes that which God had always intended it to be. Most of the mediating theologians, including Nevin, at least flirted with the idea that there would have been an incarnation, even if Adam and Eve had not fallen.[xxx] The Incarnation was not a band-aid operation in response to human sin; rather, the Incarnation had always been God’s primary purpose in creation.
The theme of the Incarnation as the actualization of divine-human love is also evident in the fascination with kenoticism (the view that God “emptied” God’s self of divine attributes in order to be in solidarity with lowly, fragile, and broken human beings), which is evident in many of the mediating theologians, particularly those with Lutheran roots. God wanted to be in a relationship of mutuality and genuine intimacy with human beings so badly that God was willing to descend from heavenly security and enter this messy world of tragedy and sin simply in order to share our experience. More Reformed mediating theologians, given their commitment to Calvin’s principle that “the finite cannot contain the infinite,” balked at endorsing full-blown kenoticism, but invented somewhat convoluted ways to say the same thing: God has become one of us by assuming sinful human nature. Nevin himself argued elliptically that somehow the human properties of Christ are communicated to the divine nature, without compromising the divine perfection.[xxxi] Using different conceptual strategies, most mediating theologians, including Nevin, read John 1 in the light of Philippians 2: The Word became flesh and dwelt among us, in the form of a servant, in the mode of self-humbling lowliness, just in order to be in fellowship with lowly, broken creatures like us.[xxxii] Typical of this trend, Nevin proclaims that the Logos emptied himself for a time,[xxxiii] and that therefore the spirit of Christ is the spirit of “self-denial and self-renunciation.”[xxxiv]
The love theme also influenced the way that the mediating theologians thought of salvation. One way or another, all of them agreed that salvation was most basically the internalization of the life of Christ, so that we ourselves could love God and neighbor in the extravagant, unstinting way that Christ does. We believers come to participate in the glorified humanity of Christ, so that his love for God and neighbor becomes our own animating principle. In Paul’s language, we put on the mind that was in Christ. Or, in the language of Bernard of Clairvaux, John Calvin, and John Nevin, we share in a mystical union with Christ. Or, according to the evocative lyrics of Henry Harbaugh, Christ lives in us, and we live in Christ.
This love focus also has enormous implications for the way that justification and sanctification are conceived. Christ’s righteousness is not just imputed to us, as if Christ’s fulfillment of the law and his acceptance of the punishment for sin were chalked up to our account on the credit side of our spiritual ledger. That would make justification a merely economic or forensic transaction.[xxxv] But Christ’s love for God and neighbor does not remain “extra nos” (outside us); rather, it gets inside us and transforms us. Our hearts are drawn to the beauty and sublimity of Christ’s love, and Christ gets inside us. We participate in Christ’s very personhood, in the way that lovers participate in one another, and therefore we participate in Christ’s righteousness. Because we are in Christ, and Christ is in us, God declares us to be righteous, no longer sees our sins, and accepts us as God’s beloved covenant partners. Of course we will then manifest our love affair with Christ by spontaneously performing Christ-like acts of self-giving love for our neighbors. This emphasis explains why most of the mediating theologians wanted to synthesize James and Paul (love and faith), and resisted Luther’s dismissal of James as an epistle of straw. It also explains why John, widely celebrated as the gospel of love, quickly emerged as their favorite gospel.
Even faith was reconceptualized in accordance with the love motif by the mediating theologians. Faith is not cognitive assent to doctrinal propositions (head stuff), nor is it the mere efflorescence of religious emotions (heart stuff), nor is it resolute obedience to divine imperatives (hand stuff). It is not thinking the right thoughts (orthodoxy), or feeling the right emotions (orthopathos), or performing the right actions (orthopraxis). Faith is a much more mysterious phenomenon, for it is more basic and subterranean than thinking, feeling, or doing. Faith is born in a level of the self much deeper than those more superficial functions. Faith has to do with a new life principle, a new spiritual energy, which affects everything that a person thinks, feels, and does. It is more foundational than the dissolution of human existence into cognition, affection, and volition. That is why all the mediating theologians insisted that Christianity is primarily a “life,” a primal force. It is a life, not a doctrine, not a spiritual high, and not an ethic, not even a socio-political ethic. Doctrines, and spirituality, and social ethics are important, but they are not the roots of faith; they are the fruits of faith. Faith is a new life, as both Nevin and Kierkegaard repeated ad nauseum. It is not a new way of life, for that would be too behavioral. Christian faith is a new energy, a new orientation, a new directionality, and a new set of motivations. In this sense, love is the necessary fruit of faith; in fact, the distinction of love and faith is conceptual, for life must manifest itself in action.[xxxvi]
To recapitulate, all of these theological emphases in one way or another addressed a specific type of problematic experience: the unsettling sense of alienation and fragmentation. The renewed focus on the Trinity as God’s eternal movement of self-giving and self-receiving, and on the Incarnation as the reunion of God and humanity in perfect fellowship, were good news to people who hungered for connection, for belonging, and for reconciliation. This version of the good news stirred the hearts of several generations of Christians so powerfully that it survived the pessimism of the early twentieth century, and would resurface in modified form in the thought of such disparate theologians as Paul Tillich and Karl Barth (in spite of their protestations that they were doing something radically novel). Tillich’s whole theology was fueled by a yearning for the New Being, which was the experience of the underlying unity of all life. (By the way, Tillich wrote his dissertation on Schelling, one of the inspirations of the mediating theology, and he never wandered far from Schelling’s orbit.) Barth famously made “reconciliation” the controlling motif of volume four of his epic Church Dogmatics. By doing so, all Barth did was change the theological method of the mediating theologians while retaining much of their substance, so that it looked like he was deriving all his doctrinal conclusions from narrative patterns that were objectively in Scripture, instead of mucking about in the messy stuff of human experience. But, even so, he ended up with many of the same doctrinal conclusions that people like Martensen and Dorner did, and he knew it. So maybe neo-orthodoxy was not so “neo” after all.
So we finally come to the big question: Why should we care about any of this? I hope that the answer is obvious. Our world and the world of the early nineteenth century are not so very different. Maybe post-modernity is just the nineteenth century on steroids. Most people are still suffering from acute forms of alienation. They feel cut off from one another, and desperately seek largely illusory communities through the social media. They feel cut off from their local and global neighbors, and devolve into fearful xenophobes who build gated communities and fantasize about walled borders to protect them from the “other.” They feel cut off from any sense of a higher purpose or meaning to their lives, other than self-gratification and maybe the protection of their immediate families. They feel cut off from real human intimacy and from authentic mutuality. And, most basically, they feel cut off from fellowship with God. With the symptoms of alienation all around us, perhaps the mediating theologians’ message of God’s unifying and reconciling love might just fall on receptive ears.
It must be admitted that the good news as articulated by the Mercersburg people and the other mediators sounds counter-intuitive and even preposterous. For the news is this: in spite of all the empirical evidence that racism is resurgent, that hyper-nationalism is on the ascendant, that economic disparities are becoming more acute, that families are dissolving, that friendships are being betrayed, that violence is proliferating, and that psyches are deteriorating, in spite of all that, alienation and brokenness will not have the last word. And we do not believe that they will not have the last word because we see convincing signs of human progress or objective indicators that a golden age is immanent. No, we can believe that reconciliation will be triumphant simply because God will have it so. Because that is who God is: the power of unity-in difference. The power of reconciliation created the universe in the first place, sustains it now, and will see it to completion. Appearances to the contrary not withstanding, love does make the world go ‘round, and love will win. That message is incredible, fantastic. But, to people who are at the end of their ropes, trapped in the plastic casings of their own Ipads, it may be the only hope available.
[i] Annette G. Aubert, The German Roots of Nineteenth-Century American Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).
[ii] Klaus Penzel, The German Education of Christian Scholar Philip Schaff: The Formative Years, 1819-1844 (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen, 2004) 117.
[iii] Aubert, 115, 130, 144, 160.
[iv] See Karl Barth, Protestant Theology in the Nineteenth Century, trans. by Brian Cozens and John Bowden (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002).
[v] John Nevin, College Chapel Sermons, ed. by Henry M. Kieffer (Philadelphia: Reformed Church Publication House,
1891) 70.
[vi] John Nevin, Dr. Nevin’s Theology: Based on Manuscript Class-Room Lectures, compiled by Rev. William Erb (Reading: I. M. Beaver, 1913) 229.
[vii] Nevin, Sermons, 159.
[viii] Nevin, Sermons, p. 70.
[ix] Nevin, Sermons, 79.
[x] Nevin, Sermons, 89.
[xi] Nevin, Sermons, 52.
[xii] Nevin, Sermons, 54.
[xiii] Nevin, Sermons, 134.
[xiv] Nevin, Dr. Nevin’s Theology, 125.
[xv] Nevin, Dr. Nevin’s Theology,291.
[xvi] Nevin, Dr. Nevin’s Theology,243.
[xvii] Nevin, Sermons, 60-61.
[xviii] Nevin, Dr. Nevin’s Theology, 88.
[xix] Nevin, Dr. Nevin’s Theology, 94.
[xx] Nevin, Sermons, 46, 50.
[xxi] Nevin, Sermons, 144.
[xxii] Nevin, Sermons, 131.
[xxiii] Nevin, Sermons, 132.
[xxiv] Nevin, Sermons, 133.
[xxv] Nevin, Sermons, 86.
[xxvi] Nevin, Sermons, 138.
[xxvii] Nevin, Sermons, 144.
[xxviii] Nevin, Dr. Nevin’s Theology, 224.
[xxix] For example, see Hans Lassen Martensen, Christian Dogmatics, trans. by William Urwick (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1866) 108-109.
[xxx] Martensen, 237-246.
[xxxi] Nevin, Dr. Nevin’s Theology,245.
[xxxii] Nevin, Sermons, 101-107.
[xxxiii] Nevin, Dr. Nevin’s Theology,265.
[xxxiv] Nevin, Sermons, 159.
[xxxv] See William Evans, Imputation and Impartation: Union with Christ in American Reformed Theology (Colorado Springs: Pater Noster, 2008).
[xxxvi] Nevin, Dr. Nevin’s Theology,306-308.
Mercersburg Today 