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Review of Hart's Work on Nevin

This review was published in Westminster Theological Review 67:2 (2005): 437-440.
(Reprinted here with permission).

D.G. Hart: John Williamson Nevin: High-Church Calvinist. American Reformed Biographies, eds. D.G. Hart and Sean Michael Lucas. Phillipsburg, NJ: P & R Publishing, 2005. Pp. 272. $22.99, hardcover.

When Charles Hodge reviewed John W. Nevin’s The Mystical Presence he admitted a certain reluctance to do so. His former student’s book had lain on his desk for two years before he could muster the unction to read it. Hodge’s response foreshadowed how Nevin’s theology would fall into relative oblivion while his teacher’s would continue to have widespread currency. Yet Hart’s biography of Nevin is timely, not just because it is only the second biography of Nevin ever written and immensely more critical and readable than the first, Theodore Appel’s, published in 1889, but also because Hart situates Nevin in the ecclesial context of nineteenth-century America, relates him to the Reformed tradition in general, and applies his “singular contribution” to contemporary issues.

This biography, published in the new P & R series, “American Reformed Biographies,” aims to provide “learned treatments of men and women” for academics and non-specialists alike. Hart and Sean Lucas hope the series will yield biographies that promote knowledge and wisdom, while not shying away from asking difficult questions of the subjects under consideration.

One of the difficult questions scholars have asked of Nevin is his relationship to the Reformed tradition. Nevin was reared in the Presbyterian tradition, studied at Princeton Seminary, taught there for Hodge between 1826-1828 when Hodge went to Europe to study, and served at Western Seminary in Pittsburgh beginning in 1830 until he took up duties in 1840 at the new seminary for the German Reformed Church in Mercersburg, Pennsylvania. Despite Nevin’s heritage, Hodge thought that Nevin strayed from the tradition by immersing himself in and capitulating to German modes of thought, particularly that of Friedrich Schleiermacher. Hart contends, however, that Nevin sought to bring the Reformed tradition back to a robust understanding of the church’s nature and ministry in an American culture hostile to ministerial authority, ecclesial rituals, and historic retrievals of past wisdom, while using discourse derived from German thinkers precisely because he was ministering to an ethnically German community. Hart’s biography richly describes Nevin’s rearing in the Scotch-Irish Presbyterian tradition and how Nevin’s later theology must be seen as an attempt to retrieve the sacramental faith of his youth.

Hart shows how Nevin executed his ecclesial retrieval through his critique of New Measures revivalism in The Anxious Bench (1843), his call for a return to Calvin’s understanding of the Eucharist in The Mystical Presence (1846), and his efforts to reform the liturgy of the German Reformed church (which resulted in a liturgical controversy). To be sure Nevin’s theology seemed as strange to his contemporaries as it does to some today. Hart describes it as “quirky,” “offbeat,” “odd,” and “peculiar” as well as “original” and “solitary.” When Reformed theologians discoursed using the categories of common sense philosophy and focused on the questions of human depravity, the extent of the atonement, and human (in)ability, it is no wonder that Nevin’s theology, which stressed the mediatorial role of the church as the extension of the incarnation in time, appeared as odd. But Nevin’s answers to the problems that American Christians were facing were so penetrating and creatively combined such different strains of thought that Nevin still merits study today as a complex but relevant theologian (227).

Nevin’s Reformed views, Hart says, may not have been Hodge’s federal theology or J.H. Thornwell’s jure divino Presbyterianism, but they were “thoroughly” within the bounds of Reformed Orthodoxy (196). Hart’s main argument explains that this is the case because Nevin was simply a high-church Calvinist, going back to the fonts of the tradition, which for Nevin included Calvin and the early Reformed creeds. Nevin wanted to bring back an appreciation for the church as Calvin understood it—as the chief way in which God works salvation in the world. Consequently, Nevin’s writings emphasize the objective presence of Christ in the sacraments, ministerial authority, church membership, and the church year. It is no wonder, then, that Nevin bested Hodge on the historical question of who was being faithful to Calvin on the Lord’s Supper. Still, Hart rightly notes Nevin’s uniqueness. In the liturgical controversy in the German Reformed Church Nevin based his version of the liturgy on the ancient church of the third and fourth century and used the name “altar” to describe the Eucharist, something the Reformers were reluctant to do because of its Roman Catholic connotations.

Hart also argues that Nevin minimized the importance of the preached word in his zeal to promote his sacramental liturgy. Here Hart’s biography fails on two accounts. First, he does not take note of Nevin’s own confession concerning this. In “The Bread of Life: A Communion Sermon” (1879) Nevin acknowledged that in his past polemics he had not done justice to the preeminence of the Word above the sacraments and that he wanted to rectify his error. But, Nevin only admitted to an error of omission not commission. While his stress on the sacraments seemed like a privileging of them over the Word it was the very step he wanted to take in reinvigorating the church’s understanding and practice of them. Nevin’s newfound emphasis on the Word can be seen in a series of essays he wrote after the liturgical controversy, which focus on the bible’s divine inspiration and importance for the life of the church. Secondly, even though Hart’s biography mentions these essays it does not take up any extended analysis of them. Had Hart explicitly considered these he might have come to a different conclusion about Nevin’s view of the preached Word and its place in the liturgy or at least explained his view in light of them.

Hart perceptively notes that Nevin betrayed his own understanding of church history in the liturgical controversy. Nevin asserted that the church develops organically over time like a tree grows. Yet his own theologizing was not in step with the people in the pews and in his liturgy Nevin imposed a foreign liturgy on them. Nevin also failed to show how his liturgical reforms were a logical outcome of the confessional tradition of the German Reformed Church. Nevin’s reforms were not new measures like Charles Finney’s were, but, like Finney, Nevin did not show how his liturgy conformed to sixteenth century liturgical standards.

Nevin may have failed in that area but it was not from lack of responsibility. Hart’s biography gives us a small glimpse of a man who served in many different capacities: college president, seminary professor, chief contributor to a theological journal, denominational liaison, and college teacher of philosophy, history, and aesthetics. Hart comments, “For the sake of perspective, Nevin’s work as an administrator would be the equivalent of Charles Hodge teaching and writing all that he did while also presiding over the college of New Jersey for two decades and functioning as the chief liaison between Princeton Seminary and the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church” (227).

Despite Hart highlighting Nevin’s prodigious efforts one still wants to know more about the man as a whole. The genre of biography is driven by the subject’s life and thought and biographers have to utilize what material they have been given. This biography is rich on the intellectual development of Nevin and on the surrounding cultural context but it leaves one wishing that more of Nevin’s personality had been highlighted. Nevin’s oeuvre and the existing archives may not be copious or rich in detail but more from them could have been mined. Readers are left with only a few stories that indicate the “interesting details” rather than the full personality.

This is a biography, and a good one, but make no mistake, it is an intellectual biography, which makes it somewhat surprising that Hart does not deal more with recent scholarship on Nevin. Since this series hopes to make an academic contribution then it should deal with the scholarly conversation concerning Nevin. To take one example, Hart does not interact with Richard Wentz’s 1997 book, John Williamson Nevin: American Theologian. In that book Wentz argues that Nevin has been wrongly cast as an example of a Romantic theologian in an American context. Hart pays homage to this when he titles his introduction “Romantic or Reformed.” The academic discussion of this book would have been enhanced by a thorough engagement with leading Nevin scholars.

Even though this biography does not discuss contemporary Nevinian scholarship in depth it does contribute to scholarship on American religion by challenging Arthur Schlesinger Sr.’s commonly received narrative of nineteenth-century Protestantism. Schlesinger argued that the “critical period” for Protestantism was between 1870 and 1900 as the church dealt with Darwinism, higher criticism, urbanization, industrialization, and immigration. Against that, Hart maintains that Nevin’s theology poses a challenge to such a notion. Schlesinger’s view rests on an assumption that the health of the church can be judged by how it relates to the external world. What if the criteria are different? Nevin supplies a different set of criteria: the church as an agency of grace. “If the church is mainly a transformer of culture, then when the culture changes in ways hostile to the church, a period of critical importance has emerged. 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 significance” (237). Hence, Nevin’s significant insight is that “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 grows” (238). Hart stresses that this is where Nevin rightly challenges us today: Is the church being faithful to its divine calling to be a supernatural agency mediating divine grace through Word and Sacraments or has it sold its birthright for the mess of the pottage of relevance? Hence, the period of critical importance is not post-Civil War America but some time before, most likely between the First and Second Great Awakening.

Hart’s thesis is intriguing and those with Reformed convictions will applaud his and Nevin’s stress on the church being faithful to its divine calling. Still, one’s final assessment will depend on one’s own particular ecclesiology. Unfortunately, Hart never lays his own presuppositional cards on the table, leaving the reader to wonder how they might influence his dealing of the Nevinian stack. This reviewer wonders if Hart hasn’t created a false dichotomy between the two sets of criteria. If theology is application of divine revelation to questions that abound in a culture then how the church answers those questions are of critical importance. True faithfulness includes a missional concern for contextualizing the gospel in any given cultural context. In whatever ways Nevin’s theology may be quirky and odd, Hart’s biography does justice to it as a charming quirkiness that merits closer attention. Followers of Charles Hodge and others would do well not to emulate his example of being reluctant to read Nevin, or, for that matter, biographies about him.

T. Chris Crain

Providence Christian Academy

Saint Louis, MO

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Chiasm in 1 Samuel 1:2-8

I’m not proficient in finding chiasms in the bible nor do I think that every pericope has one but as I was preparing to preach on 1 Samuel 1:1-20 I noticed what certainly seems like one. The verbal repetition clinches the case for me. Here ‘tis:

A. He had two wives. The name of the one was Hannah, and the name of the other, Peninnah. And Peninnah had children, but Hannah had no children, v. 2.

B. Now this man used to go up year by year from his city to worship and to sacrifice to the Lord of hosts at Shiloh, where the two sons of Eli, Hophni and Phinehas, were priests of the Lord. On the day when Elkanah sacrificed, he would give portions to Peninnah his wife and to all her sons and daughters, vs. 3-4.

C. But to Hannah he gave a double portion, because he loved her, though the Lord had closed her womb, v.5.

C’. And her rival used to provoke her grievously to irritate her, because the Lord had closed her womb, v. 6.

B’. So it went on year by year. As often as she went up to the house of the Lord, she used to provoke her. Therefore Hannah wept and would not eat, v. 7.

A’. [8] And Elkanah, her husband, said to her, "Hannah, why do you weep? And why do you not eat? And why is your heart sad? Am I not more to you than ten sons?" v. 8.

Another way to look at it is conceptually:

A. 2 Wives and Sons from one

B. Year by Year worship and Eating

C. Love and closed womb

C’. Hate and closed womb

B’. Year by Year of weeping and not eating

A. One Wife and “10” Sons

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Poythress, Vern S.; The Presence of God Qualifying Our Notions of Grammatical-Historical Interpretation.

I was so bummed when John Milbank didn't show up for his discussion with Michael S. Horton.

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