John Williamson Nevin, Public Theologian

John Williamson Nevin is remembered, when he is remembered at all, for his anti-revivalist and pro-sacramental writings. Those more familiar with his work know of his catholicity and his emphasis on the centrality of the Incarnation to the Christian vision of reality. On of the great virtues of Richard Wentz’s John Williamson Nevin is to place Nevin in his American context and to demonstrate his persistent concern for American public life. He presents Nevin as a public theologian.

In contrast to his better-known Mercersburg colleague Philip Schaff, “Nevin was less enamored of the potential of American denominationalism and more concerned with the ability of America to rise above the materialism that made common cause with the subjective character of American nationalism.” He denied that the papacy was the Antichrist, and suggested instead that the spirit of Antichrist was more likely “present in the sectarian spirit of ‘pseudo-Protestantism.’”

Schaff gradually made his peace with denominationalism. Nevin never did: “Although denominationalism was an apparently necessary outgrowth of the Reformation, it was a temporary condition.” He worried that efforts to reunite American Protestants had not really repented of the impulses of denominationalism, its “sensuousness” that fit neatly with American nationalism (and consumerism). Nevin complained that American spirituality “is too generally a sort of attenuated sensuousness—our religion a sublimated utilitarianism—our morality a nice calculation of profit and loss. The notions of gain and godliness are apt to run wonderfully together in our minds.” He “noted that modernist notions assumed that it was possible to arrive at a common understanding of basic religious beliefs without regard to a stable historical base of tradition and confession. The same was true of those Protestants who proposed a new federal ecclesiastical order based on a broad consequence of doctrine.”

One of his deep worries about denominationalism was that it inhibited the church from offering a genuinely public voice to the nation: “Unless the word is spoken effectively it will not become flesh. Public address cannot be factional. If it suits only the lives of some elements and groups within the culture, its rhetoric is ineffective. In these situations its public charter is called into question.” The church wasn’t a political faction or a social club. Rather, it was the historical realization of a “higher order” of existence, grounded in the incarnation. And it’s task was to reveal that higher order (in Wentz’s words) “through the very life and constitution of the public order, supernaturalizing it in the course of the historical development of that order.”

Thus, Wentz writes, “the speech of American religion was in danger of losing its true theological significance by being reduced to the private domain of a false and pseudo-Protestantism. Only the catholic vision of historical Christianity present in the sacramental presence of the Church could maintain the power of lyrical speech and retain the public order of theology.”

In short, Nevin’s work on sacramental theology, catholicity, and revival is all of a piece with his public theology. One of the effects of a renewed sacramental life would be that the American church would finally become capable of addressing America as what it really is, “a mystical presence that illuminates the public dimensions of existence.”