Mercersburg and the Reformation: Continuities, Discontinuities, and Lessons to Be Learned
William B. Evans
Erskine College and Seminary
First Published in the New Mercersburg Review 57, Fall 2017
This topic—Mercersburg and Reformation—is a splendid opportunity to engage great themes of the Protestant Reformation (that watershed in Western cultural history) and the Mercersburg Theology movement (less important in the larger scheme of things, but still of great interest to readers of this journal). And yet here we confront complexities that take the form of both continuities and discontinuities—between the Reformation and Mercersburg, but also between the Reformation and later Protestantism.
We think immediately of the two seminal texts that emerged from the first decade of the Mercersburg movement. There is Philip Schaff’s The Principle of Protestantism, which schematizes the Reformation in terms of a formal principle (the authority of Scripture) and a material principle (justification by faith), but it then proceeds to place the Reformation in a larger Hegelian and Schellingian framework of historical development involving both the Catholic past and the church of the future that will combine the best aspects of Catholicism and Protestantism.[1] In other words, for Schaff not only was there considerable good in the Catholic past, but the Reformation itself was a moment in the dialectic of history to be transcended rather than the last word.
Then there is John W. Nevin’s The Mystical Presence, which sought to retrieve John Calvin’s doctrine of the true presence of Christ in the Lord’s Supper from the subjective clutches of American “Puritans.”[2] Nevin was swimming against the current of American Protestantism, and the mere suggestion that the sacraments might actually do something was troubling to many.
Thus we are not surprised that almost immediately both Schaff and Nevin were charged by some of their contemporaries—both within and without the German Reformed Church—with having “Catholicizing tendencies.” In fact, the level of concern on this point was widespread—even Emanuel V. Gerhart—the great systematizer of the Mercersburg movement—was decidedly ambivalent about Nevin and Schaff on this matter for a time.[3] So, were the Mercersburg theologians champions of the Protestant Reformation, or were they crypto-Catholics, or were they something else again?
The urgency of this question is heightened by fact that John Nevin himself dallied with the idea of conversion to Rome in the early 1850s—a period referred to by contemporaries as “Nevin’s dizziness.” And some associated with the Mercersburg movement, notably Mercersburg alumnus and prominent German Reformed pastor Daniel Gans, did in fact, as the saying goes, “swim the Tiber.” So, was Mercersburg perhaps a gateway drug for Roman Catholicism?
We can approach this from another angle. The Reformation is depicted by some contemporary scholars (most of them Roman Catholic, incidentally) as the progenitor of modernity with its expressive individualism, secularism, liberal democracy, and social leveling. Here we think, for example, of Charles Taylor’ A Secular Age and Brad S. Gregory’s The Unintended Reformation—both of which suggest that the Reformation had a host of unintended consequences that led to the contemporary modernity and post-modernity that some of us applaud and some of us have decided reservations about.[4] Viewed in this light, some of the Mercersburg thinkers (especially John Nevin) appear decidedly conservative and, yes, Catholic in their sensibilities regarding social hierarchy. Thus it is not at all surprising that Nathan O. Hatch in his The Democratization of American Christianity presents Mercersburg as a reaction against the historical process he chronicles. As Hatch puts it, Nevin and Schaff’s “belief in the church’s authority, stemming from and steeped in tradition and learning, did not comport with the free-wheeling marketplace of religious ideas of provincial America.”[5] So once more the question is posed: Is the Mercersburg impulse Protestant or Catholic in spirit?
In seeking to answer this question we will engage as test cases four areas often thought to be emblematic of the magisterial Protestant Reformation: the theology of the Word, the priesthood of all believers, justification by faith, and divine sovereignty. We will explore the continuities and discontinuities that Mercersburg evinces. Finally, we will seek to discern some lessons regarding the continuing significance of Mercersburg.
I. The Theology of the Word
The theology of the Word of God is rightly regarded as central to the magisterial Reformation. Luther and Calvin sought to recover the centrality of Scripture and its proclamation in the life of the church, and this recovery had at least three dimensions. First there is Scripture in its mediatorial aspect. Both Luther and Calvin were suspicious of those with schwärmerisch tendencies; that is, those enthusiasts who claimed the immediate inspiration of the Holy Spirit. Luther had to deal with the Zwickau Prophets and he famously remarked that his Wittenberg colleague Andreas Karlstadt thought he had “swallowed the Holy Ghost, feathers and all.” Calvin opposed spiritual radicals such as Caspar Schwenckfeld on similar grounds. The magisterial Reformation was convinced that God speaks though the Word.
Second, there is the centrality of the Word in the ministry of the church. The sacrament of the mass was no longer the “main event” of the worship service. Instead, the preaching of the Word assumes center stage. Calvin, for example, is quite insistent that the sacraments are secondary to the Word—they depend upon the Word for their identity and they are given by God as concessions to human weakness.[6]
Third, there is the matter of interpretation. In contrast to the Roman Catholic tradition, which insisted on the role of the magisterium in interpretation and determining the parameters of the canon, the magisterial Reformers insisted that Scripture is self-authenticating and self-interpreting.
Well, how does Mercersburg stack up? With regard to the mediatorial aspect of Scripture, it is safe to say that Nevin and Schaff were not schwärmerisch “enthusiasts.” From The Anxious Bench onward they opposed the immediacy and excessive subjectivity of revivalism with the objectivities of the Church—especially Scripture, ministry, and the sacraments.
But now things get more complicated. There is pretty much a consensus that the written and preached Word is not as central for Mercersburg as it was for Luther and Calvin. Rather, it is the sacraments that are central. As Nevin put it, “Baptism and the Lord’s Supper are the central institutions of Christianity.”[7] This sacramental focus had implications for the place of the Word. Once again, John Nevin writes: “the sacraments as means for the application of redemption have a certain priority over the Word, which has power to reach us only as we stand in proper relation to God by the sacraments.”[8] Of course, this sacramental focus of Mercersburg cannot be properly understood apart from it’s deeply incarnational center—the written Word is important, but subordinate to the incarnate Word of God, Jesus Christ.
But Nevin’s sacramental sensibility went deeper than the traditional Reformed focus on the means of grace. In fact, his conception of reality in general was profoundly sacramental. As Nevin told his students, “The whole constitution of the world is sacramental, as being not simply the sign of, but the actual form and presence of invisible things.”[9] Here he approaches what contemporary Roman Catholic theologian David Tracy has called the “Catholic analogical imagination.” As Tracy puts it,
We literally reimagine reality as a new series of ordered possibilities; we then choose some central clue for the whole of reality—for Catholics that central clue to the whole—to the relationship between God and humanity, the individual and society—is found in what T. S. Eliot called the half-guessed, the gift—half-understood—incarnation as the secret of both God and humankind and the relationship of both church and cosmos as finally sacramental.[10]
Tracy might as well be talking about Nevin!
Then there is the question of interpretation. We are fortunate to have William DiPuccio’s fine study of the Mercersburg hermeneutic,[11] but a few comments are in order here. It was one thing for Luther and Calvin to assert the principle of Sola Scriptura with Scripture as self-authenticating and self-interpreting in their context of robust ecclesiology and learned exegesis—both of which set fairly clear boundaries on interpretation. But when the notion of Scripture alone was imported into the context of American individualism and democratization, those boundaries became anything but clear. Rampant sectarianism was the result—something that Nevin excoriated in his essay “The Sect System.” Nevin and Schaff realized that truism of late modernity and post-modernity: interpretation is inevitable—we don’t simply read Scripture in a common-sense fashion and directly apprehend its meaning. We have to interpret; pre-understanding is important, and one of Nevin’s more compelling points in “The Sect System” is that these groups, while claiming to just be reading the Bible, were actually reading Scripture through their own “theological goggles” (his term!), and the true authority of Scripture was being replaced by the “hierarchical despotism” of sectarian leaders.[12]
But what sort of theological pre-understanding will enable people to read Scripture rightly? Mercersburg was convinced, rightly I think, that the Christian’s union by faith and the Holy Spirit with Christ, a participation in the very divine-human life of Christ, is more fundamental than both doctrine and piety, and that faith precedes understanding.[13] Here, of course, Nevin and Schaff were tapping into that rich Augustinian and Anselmian tradition of Christian Platonism. If theology and exegesis are matters of fides quaerens intellectum (“faith seeking understanding”) then theology and exegesis are to be done from within the circle of faith. And where is that circle of faith to be found? It is found in the creedal tradition of the Church, and especially in the Apostles’ Creed!
Thus it might appear, if we follow Nevin in particular, that Mercersburg rather decisively subordinates the interpretation of Scripture to the tradition of the Church. But even here the situation is more complex. Philip Schaff certainly championed the indispensability of tradition, but he also contended that the regula fidei as expressed in the great creeds of the church is
not a part of the divine word separately from that which is written, but the contents of scripture itself as apprehended and settled by the church against heresies past and always new appearing; not an independent source of revelation, but the one fountain of the written word, only rolling itself forward in the stream of church consciousness.[14]
So, far from setting the tradition of the church over against Scripture, Schaff actually subordinates it to Scripture in a manner that sounds pretty authentically Protestant and Reformational!
On balance, then, with respect to the theology of the Word in the context of the question we have posed, Mercersburg was more Protestant than Catholic, and for reasons that make a good deal of sense in context. Nevin and Schaff were seeking to recover the sacramental dimension and healthy respect for tradition that had been a prominent part of the Reformation but largely lost in nineteenth-century America, and in order to do this they had to recover aspects of the Catholic past that had been jettisoned by later Protestant thinkers.
II. The Priesthood of All Believers
According to Martin Luther all Christians are priests through their union with Christ who is the great High Priest. Thus all Christians are to proclaim the Word of God and forgiveness to others, but for the purposes of order in the church some are set apart to ordained ministry. This ordained ministry is not understood as a category of priesthood separate from that of all Christians.[15] Calvin’s position is similar. He writes: “For we who are defiled in ourselves, yet are priests in him, offer ourselves and our all to God, and freely enter the heavenly sanctuary that the sacrifice of prayers and praise that we bring may be acceptable and sweet-smelling before God.”[16] And of course, both Calvin and Luther were particularly concerned to exclude the notion of a special priesthood offering the sacrifice of Christ anew in the mass.
But at this point in Protestant history the priesthood of all believers was not understood to imply a divine immediacy of grace, as if Christians go directly to God without the mediation of the church and the means of grace. As Paul Althaus notes,
Luther never understands the priesthood of all believers merely in the “Protestant” sense of the Christian’s freedom to stand in a direct relationship to God without a human mediator. Rather, he constantly emphasizes the Christian’s evangelical authority to come before God on behalf of the brethren and also of the world. The universal priesthood expresses no religious individualism but its exact opposite, the reality of the congregation as a community.[17]
By the nineteenth century, however, a significant shift had occurred. Evidence of this comes from a highly significant source—the Presbyterian B. B. Warfield, who compared what he termed “evangelical” and “sacerdotal” soteriologies in the following terms:
The exact point of difference between them turns on the question of whether God, by whose power alone salvation is wrought, saves men by dealing himself immediately with them as individuals, or only by establishing supernatural endowed instrumentalities in the world by means of which men may be saved. The issue concerns the immediacy of the saving operations of God: Does God save men by immediate operations of his grace upon their souls, or does he act upon them only through the medium of instrumentalities established for that purpose.[18]
That this is coming from the flagship seminary of the Presbyterian Church says a good deal about American Protestantism. Needless to say, neither Luther nor Calvin would have spoken in such terms. For them, grace is mediated—though union with Christ and through the means of grace—the Word and the sacraments—in the church. Reasons for this shift are complex—having to do with the sociology of American Christianity, philosophical context, and theological developments in the Reformed tradition—and need not detain us here, but the contrast is indeed stark.
Where does Mercersburg fit in here? Mercersburg, of course, stoutly insisted on the mediation of Christ and the church as the body of Christ. The benefits of salvation are inseparable from Christ’s person and are received through the church’s means of grace, which communicate Christ himself. Rather than individual Christians having an unmediated experience of grace and then the aggregate of such people making up the church as a sort of “sand heap” (one of Nevin’s favorite metaphors)—and all this made possible by a sort of external transaction done by Christ in the past—a person becomes a Christian by being baptized into Christ and his church. As Nevin put it early in his time at Mercersburg (in The Anxious Bench):
Due regard is had to the idea of the Church as something more than a bare abstraction, the conception of an aggregate of parts mechanically brought together. It is apprehended rather as an organic life springing perpetually from the same ground, and identical with itself at every point. In this view the Church is truly the mother of all her children. They do not impart life to her, but she imparts life to them. Here again the general is left to go before the particular, and to condition all its manifestations. The Church is in no sense the product of individual Christianity . . . but individual Christianity is the product, always and entirely, of the Church as existing previously and only revealing its life in this way.[19]
The contrast, I would submit, can scarcely be more stark! But we also encounter a wrinkle. Note that the contrast here is not so much between Catholicism and Protestantism as between the Protestantism of the magisterial Reformation, with which Mercersburg had considerable affinity, and popular nineteenth-century American Protestantism. And the core issue seems to have been, as Nevin intuited, Christological. The incarnation, the opponents of Mercersburg conceded, was necessary in order for Christ to pay the legal penalty for sin, but once that forensic exercise was over, the application of the benefits of salvation was a purely external affair, a business transaction if you will. Salvation was not “in Christ,” but rather on the basis of what Christ has done. But for Nevin and Schaff, salvation is only to be found in Christ, in his person as the second Adam and organic source of a new and redeemed humanity. Here, of course they were simply echoing Calvin and Luther. As Calvin famously wrote in that programmatic statement at the beginning of Book III of the Institutes, “First, we must understand that as long as Christ remains outside of us, and we are separated from him, all that he has suffered and done for the salvation of the human race remains useless and of no value for us.”[20]
III. Justification by Faith
It is with good reason that we turn now to what Schaff terms the “material principle” of Protestantism—the doctrine of justification by faith—for it is closely connected in much more recent Protestant thinking with the notion of the priesthood of all believers and an immediatist view of grace and salvation. Charles Hodge, for example, declared in his 1845 review of Schaff’s The Principle of Protestantism that the doctrine of justification by faith is “our continued protest against the error of a mediating church or priesthood.”[21]
Philip Schaff’s description of this doctrine in The Principle of Protestantism is a good place to start, and it is remarkable for its conventionally Protestant character. The doctrine is set in opposition to all Pelagian or semi-Pelagian self-righteousness (as reflected, e.g., in Roman Catholic synergism). The merit of Christ is the only ground of justification, and faith is the instrumental cause. Justification consists in the forgiveness of sins and the imputation of the righteousness of Christ to the believer, and the faith that receives Christ involves not only assent by also heartfelt trust. All this is textbook Protestantism. The only mildly “creative” move here, in response to the objection that such justification is a legal fiction, is Schaff’s viewing the decree of justification as a creative act by which the “principle of righteousness” (that is, Christ himself) is actualized in the believer.[22]
Turning to John W. Nevin, the picture becomes more complex. In some contrast to Schaff, Nevin insisted that justification had been overemphasized in recent Protestantism, and he was clearly concerned about how some had taken this emphasis on justification in an antinomian direction. But Nevin’s deeper concern was the abstraction of the doctrine from the persons involved. He was convinced that many in his day framed the doctrine in a completely extrinsic way. “The tendency,” he told his students at Mercersburg, “is to over-emphasize the external side of the transaction and to ignore the internal or organic relation.”[23] In other words, Nevin was deeply concerned that people were trying to understand justification without reference to the believer’s union with Christ!
To be sure, there is much that is conventionally Protestant in Nevin. Justification is by faith and involves both forgiveness of sins and the imputation of Christ’s righteousness. But certain factors in Nevin’s thinking create dissonance with Reformational thought. First, he bought into the eighteenth and nineteenth-century moral-philosophy assumption that merit and demerit inhere in persons and cannot be abstracted from personality.[24] By itself this was not a major problem, but he also believed that there was a precise parallel between hamartiological and soteriological imputation (ironically, Nevin and Hodge shared this conviction). Adam’s offspring, according to Nevin, are accounted as sinners because they participate in his sinful condition, and likewise those united with Christ are accounted righteous because they participate in his righteousness.
The moral relations of Adam, and his moral character too, are made over to us at the same time. Our participation in the actual unrighteousness of his life, forms the ground of our participation in his guilt and liability to punishment. And in no other way, we affirm, can the idea of imputation be satisfactorily sustained in the case of the second Adam. The scriptures make the two cases, in this respect, fully parallel.[25]
This is, to use seventeenth-century scholastic categories, mediate imputation (i.e., imputation through participation in a moral quality). In contrast, Luther and Calvin clearly affirmed the justification of the ungodly (recall Luther’s simul iustus et peccator), what nineteenth-century theologians termed a “synthetic justification” (i.e., a justification not in accordance with the facts, and in contrast to an analytic justification that was in accordance with the actual facts). But Nevin speaks in terms of what is really a proleptic and analytic justification. God declares the sinner righteous because they are (or at least will be) righteous. Nevin writes in The Mystical Presence:
The judgment of God must ever be according to truth. He cannot reckon to anyone an attribute or quality, which does not belong to him in fact. He cannot declare him to be in a relation or state, which is not actually his own, but the position merely of another. . . . The law in this view would be itself a fiction only, and not the expression of a fact. But no such fiction, whether under the name of law or without it, can lie at the ground of a judgment entertained or pronounced by God.[26]
Nevin also expanded the definition of faith to include works of evangelical obedience. Seeking to reconcile Paul and James, Nevin told his students: “There is no great difficulty in reconciling them, if we keep in view what Paul means by faith. He always takes it as a life, necessarily including other affections and graces, such as love and hope, as well as corresponding outward acts.”[27] While there is Protestant precedent for this move (most notably in Jonathan Edwards and his successors[28]), it does sound rather “Catholic.”
Thus, Nevin (more than Schaff) stands in some tension with the magisterial Reformation on this crucial matter. In other words, Charles Hodge had some reason for concern, and it is no accident that the 1970s-era Pickwick Press anthologies of Nevin and Schaff respectively were entitled Catholic and Reformed and Reformed and Catholic.
IV. Divine Sovereignty
For our last test case we turn to the issue of divine sovereignty. It goes without saying, of course, that John Calvin was a staunch predestinarian, and that Reformed Orthodoxy followed Calvin on this.[29] Less well known, perhaps, is the fact that Martin Luther was as well. Here we think particularly of Luther’s critique of Erasmus in The Bondage of the Will and the programmatic distinction he makes between the hidden God of the decrees and the God revealed in Jesus Christ.[30] The later Lutheran tradition, of course, softened the sharp polarities in Luther’s thought on this issue—a process that began with Phillip Melanchthon. Many Lutheran orthodox theologians make election dependent on divine foreknowledge of who will believe, and great emphasis is placed on the resistibility of grace as an explanation of why some are saved and not others.[31]
Philip Schaff, though he knew the terms of the debate intimately, seems to have been more Lutheran on this matter, and seeking a higher synthesis. He wrote in his History of the Christian Church:
Calvinism emphasizes divine sovereignty and free grace; Arminianism emphasizes human responsibility. The one restricts saving grace to the elect; the other extends it to all men on the condition of faith. Both are right in what they assert; both are wrong in what they deny. If one important truth is pressed to the exclusion of another truth of equal importance, it becomes an error, and loses its hold upon the conscience.[32]
Nevin, on the other hand, was a scion of the Presbyterian Church, raised on the Westminster Standards. By training and background he was, as the saying goes, a metaphysical Calvinist. But in the course of his debate over Lord’s Supper with Charles Hodge of Princeton, Nevin concluded that Calvin’s “abstract” doctrine of the decrees rendered the Incarnation, the atonement, and the sacraments a charade. By 1848 Nevin had publicly and decisively broken with predestinarian Calvinism.[33]
But there was still the question of continuity with the Reformation, and here the Mercersburg answer was ingenious. They appealed to what they took to be the distinctive tradition of the German Reformed Church as Melanchthonian on the decrees and Calvinistic on the sacraments—ideas that were being trumpeted in Germany at this time by August Ebrard and Heinrich Heppe. Ebrard, for example, even took pains to present predestinarian Calvinism as a minority view within the larger Reformed tradition.[34]
This “Heppe Thesis,” as it is sometimes called, was part of a broader historiographical discussion in Germany regarding how the Reformed tradition should be understood. More recent scholarship has tended to view the German Reformed tradition as more predestinarian than Ebrard and Heppe allowed, though conceding that the German Reformed emphasis has been more on the accomplishment and application of salvation in history than on eternal decrees.[35] It is one thing to note the influence of Melanchthon; it is quite another to view him as the “father of the German Reformed tradition”! As Karl Barth ironically noted in his “Foreword” to Heppe’s Reformed Dogmatics, “Of course Heppe has his notable weaknesses. . . . On Heppe’s historical outlook we should note that according to him, wonderful to relate, not Calvin but the later Melanchthon must have been the Father of Reformed theology.”[36] Despite these problems, the Heppe thesis did enable the Mercersburg theologians to carve out a meaningful (and to some degree legitimate) Reformational past that distinguished them from the metaphysical Calvinism of Princeton.
IV. Lessons to Be Learned
So, was Mercersburg Catholic or Protestant? A simple either/or answer is neither useful nor particularly interesting. On balance, Nevin and Schaff fall on the Protestant side. They were Protestant theologians—they used primarily Protestant categories; they taught at Protestant schools and were ordained by Protestant churches. But Nevin and Schaff drew on both Catholic and Protestant antecedents (and on other influences as well) in order to speak to their own nineteenth-century context. More interesting, I think, is the question of what lessons we can learn from Mercersburg. Let me tentatively suggest four areas where we can profit from Nevin and Schaff.
First, there is the issue of theological method. Here, of course, we do well to remember Jeffrey Stout’s comment that “Preoccupation with method is like clearing your throat: it can only go on for so long before you lose your audience.”[37] With that warning in mind, we will get this point out of the way as quickly as possible! I would submit that we find in Mercersburg a compelling integration of Scripture, fidelity to the best of the Christian tradition (including the Reformation), and critical philosophy done in a way that was profoundly contextual. It is no accident that Brian Gerrish’s Tradition and the Modern World: Reformed Theology in the Nineteenth Century has a fine chapter on Nevin, and Gerrish makes this important point regarding continuity with the past that is crucial to our topic here:
Talk about a departure from the Reformation heritage during the [nineteenth] century contradicts the self-image of those on whom the verdict falls. To a man, they thought of themselves not as rebels (as the neoorthodox were later to think of themselves), but as upholders of a tradition.[38]
There are lessons here for both the right and the left in our contemporary context. The right needs to learn that theology is not mere repristination; it is not an exercise in historic preservation. In all honesty, that tends to be my own tradition’s problem. The right also needs to learn that theology is not mere Biblicism and proof-texting that presupposes a common-sense, populist hermeneutic. Texts need to be interpreted. The Bible needs to be interpreted, and, I might add, the tradition needs to be interpreted. But the left needs to learn that theology is not the ideological backfilling of whatever social agendas are current today, and that meaningful, substantial continuity with the Christian past is essential if we are to take the task of Christian theology seriously. Theology worthy of the name did not begin with the Enlightenment!
Second, there is the importance of Mediation and Ecclesiology. As we know, Mercersburg was a churchly renaissance over against the ecclesially challenged low-church Protestantism of the day. And the fragmented character of much of American Protestantism today suggests that the Mercersburg ecclesiology is still relevant.
But this ecclesiological emphasis was not merely an aesthetic or nostalgic impulse (as some have seen the Oxford Movement). It was firmly rooted in a theology that was heavy on mediation; we have seen a number of examples of this here today. And of course, the ultimate mediation, or better Mediator, is Jesus Christ himself. Not only does this Mercersburg theme anticipate some rich 20th century theology—T. F. Torrance comes to mind[39]—but this emphasis on mediation enabled the Mercersburg theologians at least begin to transcend the traditional polarities of the soteriological debate between Roman Catholicism and Protestantism. Here we are painting with a broad brush, but we can generalize by saying that Catholicism has emphasized transformation of life while Protestantism has emphasized forensic justification. The Council of Trent defines justification primarily as a process of becoming righteous. Meanwhile, some Protestants have returned the favor by insisting that transformation of life has no relevance at all for one’s standing as righteous before God.
A striking recent example of this is Bruce McCormack of Princeton Theological Seminary. McCormack describes as the Protestant position the idea that God’s work in us cannot in any sense be the “basis of God’s forgiveness,” and he then takes both Luther and Calvin to task for their inconsistency with this—Luther for his emphasis on faith and Calvin for his sacramentology and emphasis on union with Christ![40] The tendency of hyper-Protestants, both in the nineteenth century and today, is to assume that there is a tension or contradiction between Christ pro nobis and Christ in nobis. Calvin and Luther rightly felt no such tension between the “Christ for us” and the “Christ in us,” and neither did Mercersburg.
This relates to the most important lesson I’ve learned from Mercersburg. This was an insight toward which they gestured, though the exegetical insights needed for a more complete solution to the problem awaited the twentieth century. If we try to relate justification and sanctification directly we set up a contest in which something has to give. There must be a third element in the equation—Christ himself. Only when Christ himself is the principle and source of salvation can both the forensic and the transformatory be given their proper due without collapsing one into the other.[41] Mediation is important.
And of course, mediation as Mercersburg understood it is also about incorporation into something larger than ourselves. We live in an age of, dare I say it, invidious individualism the likes of which Nevin and Schaff could scarcely have imagined. Charles Taylor aptly speaks of the “buffered self,” the self as isolated from any point of transcendence that might provide a sense of meaning and purpose.[42] The natural human tendency to be turned in on one’s self, incurvatus in se as Luther put it, has now been ideologically instantiated. And if one thing is clear to me at this point it is this—that the post-Enlightenment autonomous self qua self cannot sustain human dignity and purpose. We desperately need to be part of something larger than ourselves. We need to be incorporated. We need mediation.
Third, there is the centrality of Christ. As we have seen, the church is important for the Mercersburg theologians because Christ is central, and the church is his body. In fact, we’ve already explored some of the implications of this centrality, but I want to pursue an issue I alluded to at the beginning of this lecture—the implications of Christ for social ethics. As we noted earlier, Nathan Hatch has presented Mercersburg as standing in opposition to democratization, as hierarchical traditionalists throwing a spanner into the engine of American egalitarianism. And here an uncomfortable question is posed—was the social impulse of Mercersburg of a piece with European Roman Catholic traditionalists like Joseph de Maistre?
From what I can tell, Nevin remained a social hierarchicalist, a patrician snob, if you will. It was the Swiss-German Schaff who came to terms with the variegated character of American Christianity. He became a fervent advocate of the American separation of church and state, and was deeply involved in what has been called the “Evangelical United Front” with its voluntary societies devoted to various moralistic causes such as Sabbath observance and temperance. He finally embraced the revivalism of D. L. Moody, and he began to distinguish between invidious sects and denominations. In short, Schaff made his peace with American democracy, and I would argue that in doing so he was ultimately truer to the Christological center of Mercersburg. Another European visitor to America, Alexis de Tocqueville, articulates well the logic here:
All the great writers of antiquity were a part of the aristocracy of masters, or at least they saw that aristocracy as established without dispute before their eyes; their minds, after expanding in several directions, were therefore found limited in that one, and it was necessary that Jesus Christ come to earth to make it understood that all members of the human species are naturally alike and equal.[43]
The final lesson of Mercersburg in its Catholic and Reformation context, I would suggest, is that the Reformation is not the final chapter. Here again, Schaff leads the way with his theory of historical development. Ever the optimist, Schaff pondered whether the denominational diversity of America would be instrumental in the emergence of a higher Christian synthesis. Schaff’s Schelling-influenced eschatological vision of a religious future in which America would play a decisive role is evident in this quote from 1888:
God has great surprises in store. The Reformation is not by any means the last word He has spoken. We may confidently look and hope for something better than Romanism and Protestantism. And free America, where all the churches are commingling and rivalling with each other, may become the chief theatre of such a reunion of Christendom as will preserve every truly Christian and valuable element in the various types which it has assumed in the course of ages, and make them more effective than they were in their separation and antagonism. The denominational discords will be solved at last in the concord of Christ, the Lord and Saviour of all that love, worship, and follow Him.[44]
We read this in light of subsequent history and we think, “That’s kind of naïve.” As the Christian center of gravity shifts further and further to the global south and to what we now call “world Christianity,” such America-centric suggestions sound at best parochial.
And yet there is also a salutary humility at work here. If Schaff was wrong on the details, he got the big picture right. Christians are called to an eschatological awareness that God continues to be at work. Brevard Childs aptly remarked regarding the Psalter, that great hymnal of the Reformed tradition: “However one explains it, the final form of the Psalter is highly eschatological in nature. It looks forward to the future and passionately yearns for its arrival.”[45] Heidelberg Catechism Q. 123 looks forward to “the full coming of thy kingdom, wherein thou shalt be all in all.” This biblical and confessional eschatological horizon should prevent idolatrous efforts to freeze history, and the history of theology, at a particular favored chapter.
Some of us will recall Francis Fukuyama’s argument that the end of the Cold War marks “the endpoint of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.”[46] We theologians too face Fukuyamaesque temptations to announce the end of history, to think we have finally arrived. But Mercersburg reminds us that theology worthy of the name must be a theologia viatorum, a pilgrim theology, a theology on the path.
[1] Philip Schaff, The Principle of Protestantism, trans. John W. Nevin, ed. Bard Thompson and George H. Bricker (Philadelphia: United Church Press, 1964).
[2] John W. Nevin, The Mystical Presence: A Vindication of the Reformed or Calvinistic Doctrine of the Holy Eucharist (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1846).
[3] See the nuanced discussion in Charles Yrigoyen, Jr., “Emanuel V. Gerhart: Apologist for the Mercersburg Theology,” Journal of Presbyterian History 57/4 (1979): 494-497.
[4] See Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007); Brad S. Gregory, The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015).
[5] Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 165
[6] See John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. John T. McNeill, trans. Ford Lewis Battles (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1960), IV.14.3.
[7] William H. Erb, Dr. Nevin’s Theology: Based on Manuscript Class-Room Lectures (Reading, PA: I. M. Beaver, 1913), 372.
[8] Erb, Nevin’s Theology, 285.
[9] Erb, Nevin’s Theology, 373.
[10] David Tracy, “The Catholic Analogical Imagination,” Proceedings of the Catholic Theological Society of America (1977), 236.
[11] See William DiPuccio, The Interior Sense of Scripture: The Sacred Hermeneutics of John W. Nevin (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1998).
[12] John W. Nevin, “The Sect System,” in Catholic and Reformed: Selected Theological Writings of John Williamson Nevin, ed. Charles Yrigoyen, Jr. and George H. Bricker (Pittsburgh: Pickwick, 1978), 144.
[13] See John W. Nevin, “Review of God in Christ” by Horace Bushnell, Mercersburg Review 1 (1849): 312; John W. Nevin, “The Apostles’ Creed,” Mercersburg Review 1 (1849): 207, 211, 345.
[14] Schaff, Principle of Protestantism, 116.
[15] See Paul Althaus, The Theology of Martin Luther, trans. Robert C. Schultz (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1966), 313-318.
[16] Calvin, Institutes, II.15.6.
[17] Althaus, Theology of Martin Luther, 314.
[18] B. B. Warfield, The Plan of Salvation, rev. ed. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, n.d.), 18. Here Warfield echoes themes earlier presented by his predecessor at Princeton Charles Hodge. See W. Bradford Littlejohn, The Mercersburg Theology and the Quest for Reformed Catholicity (Eugene, OR: Pickwick Press, 2009), 36-37.
[19] John W. Nevin, The Anxious Bench, 2nd ed., in Catholic and Reformed: Selected Theological Writings of John Williamson Nevin, ed. Charles Yrigoyen, Jr. and George H. Bricker (Pittsburgh: Pickwick, 1978), 110-111. See also John W. Nevin, “Catholic Unity,” in James Hastings Nichols, ed., The Mercersburg Theology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966), 40-41.
[20] Calvin, Institutes, III.1.1.
[21] Charles Hodge, “Schaff’s Protestantism,” The Biblical Repertory and Princeton Review 17 (1845): 627, quoted in Littlejohn, Mercersburg Theology, 36.
[22] See Schaff, Principle of Protestantism, 80-97.
[23] Erb, Nevin’s Theology, 203.
[24] See Nevin, Mystical Presence, 117.
[25] Nevin, Mystical Presence, 190-91. See also 166.
[26] Nevin, Mystical Presence, 189.
[27] Erb, Nevin’s Theology, 306.
[28] See William B. Evans, Imputation and Impartation: Union with Christ in American Reformed Theology (Milton Keynes, UK: Paternoster, 2008), 107-111, 124, 257-258.
[29] See, e.g., John Calvin, Concerning the Eternal Predestination of God, trans. J. K. S. Reid (Cambridge: James Clarke); John Calvin, The Bondage and Liberation of the Will: A Defense of the Orthodox Doctrine of Human Choice against Pighius, ed. A. N. S. Lane, trans. G. I. Davies (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1996).
[30] See Martin Luther, The Bondage of the Will, trans. J. I. Packer and O. R. Johnston (Cambridge: James Clarke, 1957). See also Althaus, Theology of Martin Luther, 274-286.
[31] See the compend of Lutheran Orthodox theologians on this topic in Heinrich Schmid, The Doctrinal Theology of the Evangelical Lutheran Church, 3rd ed. rev., trans. Charles A. Hay and Henry E. Jacobs (Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1961), 270-292.
[32] Philip Schaff, History of the Christian Church, 8 vols., 3rd ed. (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1910), VIII: 815.
[33] See John W. Nevin, “Doctrine of the Reformed Church on the Lord’s Supper,” in John W. Nevin, The Mystical Presence and Other Writings on the Eucharist, ed. Bard Thompson and George H. Bricker (Philadelphia: United Church Press, 1966), 372-373; “Hodge on the Ephesians,” Mercersburg Review 9 (1857), 46-83, 192-245.
[34] See B. C. Wolff, “German Reformed Dogmatics,” Mercersburg Review 9 (1857): 249-272; Mercersburg Review 10 (1858): 58-83 (a “free translation” of a portion of Ebrard’s Christliche Dogmatik).
[35] See, e.g., Lyle D. Bierma, German Calvinism in the Confessional Age: The Covenant Theology of Caspar Olevianus (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1996).
[36] Karl Barth, “Foreword,” in Heinrich Heppe, Reformed Dogmatics: Set Out and Illustrated from the Sources, ed. Ernst Bizer, trans. G. T. Thomson (London: Allen & Unwin, 1950), vii.
[37] Jeffrey Stout, Ethics after Babel: The Languages of Morals and their Discontents (Boston: Beacon Press, 1988), 163.
[38] B. A. Gerrish, Tradition and the Modern World: Reformed Theology in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 2. See also B. A. Gerrish, “The Flesh of the Son of Man: John W. Nevin on the Church and the Eucharist,” in Tradition and the Modern World: Reformed Theology in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 49-70.
[39] See, e.g., William B. Evans, “Twin Sons of Different Mothers: The Remarkable Theological Convergence of John W. Nevin and Thomas F. Torrance,” Haddington House Journal 11 (2009): 155-173.
[40] See Bruce L. McCormack, “What’s at Stake in the Current Debates over Justification: The Crisis of Protestantism in the West,” in Mark Husbands and Daniel J. Treier, eds., Justification: What’s at Stake in the Current Debates (Downers Grove, IL: IVP, 2004), 81-117.
[41] On this, see Evans, Imputation and Impartation, 259-267.
[42] See Taylor, A Secular Age, 37-42.
[43] Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. and ed. Harvey C. Mansfield and Delba Winthrop (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 413. The most complete study of Schaff’s evolving interpretation of American Christianity is Stephen R. Graham, Cosmos in the Chaos: Philip Schaff’s Interpretation of Nineteenth-Century American Religion (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995).
[44] Philip Schaff, Church and State in the United States (New York, 1888), 83; quoted in George H. Shriver, Philip Schaff: Christian Scholar and Ecumenical Prophet (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1987), 41.
[45] Brevard Childs, Introduction to the Old Testament (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1979), 518.
[46] Francis Fukuyama, “The End of History,” The National Interest 16 (1989), 18.
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