The Early Creeds

The Mercersburg Theologians Appropriate the Creedal Heritage

John Williamson Nevin, Philip Schaff

• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781532697913, 9781532697920
• eBook ISBN: 9781532697937
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

This volume is a collection of essays on the early creeds by John Nevin and Philip Schaff, the two principal representatives of the Mercersburg Theology that was birthed in nineteenth-century Pennsylvania. It also contains a critical response by John Proudfit, a more traditionally scholastic Calvinist. In these essays Nevin and Schaff argued that the early creeds provide an indispensable lens through which the Bible should be interpreted and an essential bond to preserve the unity of the church through the centuries. According to these Mercersburg theologians the liturgical and confessional use of the early creeds is crucial for shaping the identity of Christians and mediating the life of Christ to believers. Nevin and Schaff's enthusiasm for the creeds was a function of their understanding of Christianity as an evolving tradition, the Christian life as growth in Christ-likeness, the church as the nurturing body of Christ, and the sacraments as conduits of Christ's vivifying personhood. These convictions stood in sharp contrast to the a-creedal sensibilities of most nineteenth-century American Protestants who emphasized the sufficiency of Scripture alone, the church as a gathered community of like-minded individuals, dramatic conversion experiences, and the direct presence of Christ to the individual soul.

Chapter 1

“The Apostles’ Creed”

(By John W. Nevin)

Editors’ Introduction

By 1849 the professors of the German Reformed Theological Seminary at Mercersburg, John Williamson Nevin and Philip Schaff, were generating interest in their work and fomenting controversy in their own denomination and beyond. Nevin’s The Anxious Bench (1843) and The Mystical Presence (1846), and Schaff’s The Principle of Protestantism (1845) had especially stirred minds in the German Reformed Church by developing theological themes that were becoming known as the Mercersburg Theology.

In addition to their published books and pamphlets both men were contributors to regularly circulated periodicals. Nevin was a frequent author of articles in the Weekly Messenger of the German Reformed Church. Schaff was founder and editor of Der Deutsche Kirkenfreund, a journal which sought to provide American denominations of German-language background, such as the Lutheran and German Reformed communions, with information on “theological and practical religious” topics.66 As the Mercersburg movement took shape, however, some of its proponents thought it necessary to reach a wider audience for the thought of Nevin and Schaff by publishing a periodical devoted especially to the main themes of their theological perspective.

In 1848 the Alumni Association of Marshall College, the sister institution to the Theological Seminary at Mercersburg, moved to establish a periodical primarily intended for clergy and other readers with theological, philosophical, and literary interests. It would become a special voice for the views of Nevin and Schaff as well as their theological kinsmen. Although Nevin refused the invitation to be the editor of the proposed journal, he offered to support its publication and promised to be a principal contributor. It was named The Mercersburg Review and its first issue appeared in January 1849. True to his promise Nevin wrote an introductory item (“Preliminary Statement”) and the journal’s first main article, “The Year 1848,” and was a regular writer for many years thereafter. The journal continued to be published under various names until 1926.

Given the theological and historical interests of the Mercersburg movement, it is not surprising that Nevin contributed three articles on the Apostles’ Creed to the first volume of the Review.67 They are published together here in the order of their appearance since in the opening article Nevin announced that he intended them to be three parts of a whole. In fact, almost immediately the three articles were subsequently republished together in booklet form without significant modification.68 They are treated here as Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.

Nevin’s decision to begin the fledgling journal with an extended discussion of the Apostles’ Creed was not adventitious. During the early and middle nineteenth century in some ecclesial circles the role of the Apostles’ Creed in the life of the church had become a contested matter. In many sectors of the Protestant churches in North America the Creed was suffering from a kind of benign neglect or even overt hostility. This waning of enthusiasm for the Creed was even true of many congregations of the German Reformed, Dutch Reformed, and Presbyterian traditions, all of which had highly valued it during the period of their European birth and growth.

Nevin himself later lamented that in his early days he had failed to appreciate the power and significance of the Creed. As a student at Princeton Seminary he had learned church history from the text books of the mildly rationalistic J. L. Mosheim,69 whose tomes had narrated a tale of the church’s fall from apostolic integrity to a period of superstition and papal despotism. Nevin’s professors at Princeton did not emphasize the Creed, nor did his colleagues at Western Seminary where he taught from 1830 to 1840.70 Even worse, Nevin admitted that he had not encountered the use of the Creed in worship in any substantive way in the Presbyterian congregations of his youth and young adulthood. Nevin’s student and biographer Theodore Appel recollected, “The probability is that neither Dr. Nevin at Pittsburgh, nor many other Presbyterian divines, if they had been called upon to repeat it from the pulpit, would have been able to have gone through with it without stumbling, or travestying it from beginning to end.”71

Nevin credited his discovery of the work of the ecclesial historian Johann August Wilhem Neander72 as a primary catalyst for his appreciation of the significance of the evolution of the church, and therefore of the power of the Creed in Christianity’s maturation. Later Nevin would rely extensively upon the work of Rev. Joseph Bingham, an early eighteenth century Anglican historian of ancient Christianity, to deepen his knowledge of the history of the Creed and its antecedents and increase his enthusiasm for them.73

Part 1: “Outward History of the Creed”

Nevin’s series of articles on the Apostles’ Creed were intended to resist the anti-creedal tendencies that dominated American ecclesial culture. The origin of the Creed had been questioned ever since the Renaissance when the celebrated humanist Lorenzo Valla74 raised serious doubts about its apostolic provenance (and thereby incurred the wrath of the Roman heirarchy). Even John Calvin did not hesitate to conceal his skepticism about the Creed’s apostolic authorship, even though he valued it highly and affirmed that it did communicate the apostolic consensus.75 The issue of apostolicity again became a matter of heated controversy in the seventeenth century, with critiques of theories of its origins being leveled by many English and Dutch classical scholars. But the notion of apostolic authorship continued to have its defenders throughout the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. During Nevin’s youth the Danish theologian N. F. Gruntvig had even argued that the words of the Creed had been dictated by Jesus himself, and therefore the Creed possessed even greater authority than the gospels.76

Because these issues of origin and authorship were in the air, Nevin grappled first with the history of the Creed, especially the source of its name. He rejected the opinion, once popular among some scholars and church leaders, that Jesus’ twelve apostles actually wrote sections of the Creed. Here he followed Bingham’s critique of the view of Baronius,77 who, having accepted the testimony of a sermon erroneously ascribed to Augustine, had maintained that the Creed was called a “symbol” (used as a synonym for “collation”) because each of the apostles had contributed a separate written article to it.78 Nevin also rejected the conclusion of Thomas Comber that the twelve apostles had jointly fashioned the exact wording of the Creed in a special editorial meeting.79 According to Nevin, the Creed was the product of no one individual author or identifiable group of authors. The early surviving versions of the creed, he observed, exhibit variations, with some articles, such as “the descent into hell” and “the communion of saints,” missing entirely. In fact, Nevin’s source for much of this material, Joseph Bingham, had concluded that an historian should refer to “apostolical creeds” in the first four centuries, rather than one “Creed,” for none of them enjoyed “perpetual and universal use for the whole church.”80 Following Bingham, Nevin pointed out that before the composition of the Nicene Creed, local variants of creedal formulae were common. Irenaeus,81 for example, cited a much longer and more elaborate “rule of truth” that he claimed was used by the church dispersed throughout the world, while Origen82 quoted a formulaic summation of the apostolic teaching that was different, but equally lengthy.83 Tertullian84 cited the words of the apostolic creed three times, but the citations do not match, even though he claimed universality and authenticity for each version. Nevin noted that even later authors, referring to the period before the Council of Nicea, displayed a lack of uniformity, for different wordings were used by the churches of Jerusalem, Caesarea in Palestine, Alexandria, Antioch, Aquileia, and Rome.85 According to most of the Protestant scholars whom Nevin read, it was the Roman Creed that was the ancestor of the formula that was eventually named the “Apostles’ Creed.”

However, Nevin vigorously affirmed that the Creed’s name indicates that it does indeed reflect the faith of the original apostles even if they did not compose it. He was comfortable with the theory that the wording of the Creed had slowly evolved, and that its authority did not rest upon its authorship by specific apostles. Rather, its spiritual power and normativity resided in its expression of the Christ-infused communal spirit and life of the developing apostolic church. Its content, he believed, is from the “old church tradition” from earliest times. Following Bingham, Nevin concluded that some formulae, very much like the spirit of the received Creed, had been used in admitting catachumens to baptism.86 According to Nevin, the Creed was preceded by a number of “rules of faith” or “rules of truth” which ...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Contributors
• Foreword
• Editorial Approach and Acknowledgments
• General Introduction
• Chapter 1: “The Apostles’ Creed”
• Chapter 2: “Puritanism and the Creed”
• Chapter 3: Nevin and Proudfit: Opposed Views of the Early Creeds
• Chapter 4: “The Athanasian Creed”
• Chapter 5: “Origin and Structure of the Creed” and “The Unity of the Apostles’ Creed”
• Bibliography