One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic, Tome 2

John Nevin's Writings on Ecclesiology (1851–1858)

Nevin, Hamstra

• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781498246026
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

John Nevin's vision of the church as "one, holy, catholic, and apostolic" grew out of his critique of the revivalism and sectarianism that prevailed throughout evangelical Christianity in the nineteenth century. He deepens his perception of catholicity as an expression of Christian wholeness, his response to the parochialism that ruled American religion and life. He grounds congregational life and mission in the Lordship of Jesus Christ, ordered by the whole Christian tradition, which comes into focus in the Apostles' Creed. This edition carefully preserves the original texts while providing extensive introductions, annotations, and bibliography to both orient the reader and to facilitate further scholarship.The Mercersburg Theology Study Series presents for the first time attractive, readable, scholarly modern editions of the key writings of the nineteenth-century movement known as the Mercersburg Theology. An ambitious multi-year project, it aims to make an important contribution to the academic community and to the broader public, who can at last be properly introduced to this unique blend of American and European Reformed and Catholic theology.

document 1

“Catholicism” (1851)

Editor’s Introduction

As noted in the general introduction to Tome 1, the “Church Question” boils down to this query: is the Church, as represented by appropriately constituted local congregations and served by properly instituted and ordained pastors, essential in the Triune God’s strategy to seek and save the lost?23 If the answer is “Yes,” as Nevin asserted, then the ministry of the local church is the normal divine instrument by which children within the church are nurtured in the faith and adults outside of the church are brought to faith. That answer to the “Church Question” naturally leads to another series of questions: How do I find this church among the religious options in my community? How do I know if a congregation is the true church and not an imposter? What are the marks of the true church?

Throughout history, Christians have answered those questions by corporately creating succinct lists of the marks of the true church. During the Reformation era, the Protestants insisted that the list include the proper preaching of the Word of God and administration of their abbreviated list of sacraments: the Lord’s Supper and baptism. More recently, John Howard Yoder and William Visser ‘t Hooft identified three essential functions of the true church: witness, service, and communion.24 Back in the fourth century, Christians included four marks of the church in the Nicene-Constantinople Creed: one, holy, catholic, and apostolic. By so doing, the church followed the example of those who had come before them. In the time period immediately following that of the apostles, the church developed baptismal creeds that included marks of the true church, such as holy and catholic. The Apostles’ Creed, the complete text of which doesn’t appear until the eighth century, grew out of these creeds. For this reason and more, Philip Schaff calls it the “Creed of creeds” and described it “as an admirable popular summary of the apostolic teaching, and in full harmony with the spirit and even the letter of the New Testament.”25

Of all the lists of the true marks of the church created throughout the history of the Christian church, John Nevin gravitated towards those of the ante-Nicene and Nicene era—in particular, one, holy, catholic, and apostolic. Throughout his extensive career, Nevin commented upon and defended each of those as they provided a positive vision for an American Protestant church ruptured by sectarianism and individualism. Of those four marks, Nevin dedicated a significant amount of energy to catholicity. In the process, he distinguished the ecclesiology of Mercersburg Theology from that of both the Roman Church and the Anglican Church, as well as from most of Protestantism, thereby earning his reputation as “Catholic and Reformed”26 or “High-Church Calvinist.”27

In his revealing and remarkable article entitled “Catholicism,” Nevin systematically and carefully unpacks the catholicity of the true church. While most Christians “generally understood” catholicity as universal, Nevin suggested an alternative, one rooted in the incarnation. Brad Littlejohn has noted, “For the Church to be ‘catholic’ means that it constitutes the proper wholeness of mankind and creation; it is no mere universal convocation of men from all over the world, but the renewal of the human race as a whole.”28 Richard Wentz adds,

Nevin here suggests that Christianity, perhaps more accurately Christ as the Incarnation, represents the introduction of wholeness into the life of the world. The world can never again escape the fact that claims to truth are particular and partial realizations of a truth that is greater than the sum of its parts. Any claim to exclusiveness is inevitably challenged by the inclusive wholeness already present in “the earth in its natural form”. . . . For Nevin Christianity was catholic in the sense that it represents the universal in our midst, already present, but judging and beckoning us to a more radical realization than is present among individuals, whether they are aware of it or not.29

For Nevin, then, catholicity is “no vague dedication to universality, even in some morally ideal sense.” Instead, “it is the discovery of wholeness amid the penultimate claims of the world, as expressed in human history.”30

23. Hamstra, general introduction to One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic, Tome 1, 17.

24. See Nikolajsen’s discussion on marks of the church in The Distinctive Identity of the Church, 117–18.

25. Schaff, History of the Creeds of Christendom I.2.7. The Mercersburgian writings on the Apostles’ Creed are slated to appear in volume 8 of MTSS.

26. See Yrigoyen and Bricker, Catholic and Reformed.

27. See Hart, Nevin: High–Church Calvinist and Layman, general introduction to Born of Water and the Spirit, 12–19.

28. Littlejohn, Mercersburg Theology, 149.

29. Wentz, Nevin: American Theologian, 66–67.

30. Ibid., 69.

Catholicism31

Among the attributes which Christianity has claimed to itself from the beginning, there is none perhaps more interesting and significant than that which is expressed by the title Catholic.32 It is not the product in any way of mere accident or caprice; just as little as the idea of the Church itself may be taken to have any origin of this sort. It has its necessity in the very conception of Christianity and the Church. Hence it is that we find it entering into the earliest christian confession the Apostles’ Creed, as an essential element of the faith that springs from Christ. As the mystery of the Church itself is no object of mere speculation, and rests not in any outward sense or testimony only, but must be received as an article of faith which proceeds with inward necessity from the higher mystery of the Incarnation, so also the grand distinguishing attributes of the Church, as we have them in the Creed, carry with them the same kind of inward necessary force for the mind in which this Creed truly prevails. They are not brought from abroad, but spring directly from the constitution of the fact itself with which faith is here placed in communication. The idea of the Church as a real object for faith, and not a fantastic notion only for the imagination, involves the character of catholicity, as well as that of truth and holiness, something which belongs inseparably to its very nature. To have true faith in the Church at all, we must receive it as one, holy, apostolical, and catholic. To let go any of these attributes in our thought, is necessarily to give up at the same time the being of the Church itself as an article of faith, and to substitute for it a mere chimera of our own brain under its sacred name. Hence the tenacity with which the Church has ever held fast to this title of catholic, as her inalienable distinction over against all mere parties or sects bearing the christian name. Had the title been only of accidental or artificial origin, no such stress would have been laid on it, and no such force would have been felt always to go along with its application. It has had its reason and authority all along, not so much in what it may have been made to mean exactly for the understanding in the way of formal definition and reflection, as in the living sense rather of christianity itself, the consciousness of faith here as that which goes before all reflection and furnishes the contents with which it is to be exercised.

The term catholic, it is generally understood, is of the same sense immediately with universal; and so we find some who are jealous of the first, as carrying to their ears a popish sound, affecting to use this last rather in the Creed. They feel it easier to say: “I believe in a holy universal or general church,” than to adopt out and out the old form: “I believe in the holy catholic, or in one holy catholic, church.” In this case however it needs to be borne in mind that there are two kinds of generality or universality, and that only one of them answers to the true force of the term catholic; so that there is some danger of bringing in by such change of terms an actual change of sense also, that shall go in the end to overthrow the proper import of the attribute altogether.

The two kinds of universality to which we refer are presented to us in the words all and whole. These are often taken to be substantially of one and the same meaning. In truth however their sense is very different. The first is an abstraction, derived from the contemplation or thought of a certain number of separate individual existences, which are brought together in the mind and classified collectively by the notion of their common properties. In such view, the general is of course something secondary to the individual existences from which it is abstracted, and it can never be more broad or comprehensive than these are in their numerical and empirical aggregation. It is ever accordingly a limited and finite generality. Thus we speak of all the trees in a forest, all the stars, all men, &c., meaning properly in each case the actual number of trees, stars, or men, individually embraced at the time in our general view, neither more nor less, a totality which exists only by the mind and is strictly dependent on the objects considered in their individual character. We reach the conception by a process of induction, starting with single things, and by comparison and abstraction rising to what is general; while yet in the very nature of the case the generality can never transcend the true bounds of the empirical process out of which it grows and on which it rests. But widely different now from all this is the conception legitimately expressed by the word whole. The generality it denotes is not abstract, a mere notion added to things outwardly by the mind, but concrete; it is wrought into the very nature of the things themselves, and they grow forth from it as the necessary and perpetual ground of their own being and life. In this way, it does not depend on individual and single existences as their product or consequence; although indeed it can have no place in the living world without them; but in the order of actual being they must be taken rather to depend on it, and to subsist in it and from it as their proper original. Such a generality is not finite, but infinite, that is without empirical limits and bounds; it is not the creature of mere experience, and so is not held to its particular measure however large, but in the form of idea is always more than the simple aggregate of things by which it is revealed at any given time in the world of sense.

The all expresses a mechanical unity, which is made up of the parts that belong to it, by their being brought together in a purely outward way; the whole signifies on the contrary an organic unity where the parts as such have no separate and independent existence, but draw their being from the universal unity itself in which they are comprehended, while they serve at the same time to bring it into view.33 The whole man for instance is not simply all the elements and powers that enter empirically into his constitution, but this living constitution itself rather as something more general than all such elements and powers, in virtue of which only they come to be thus what they are in fact. In the same way the whole of nature is by no means of one sense simply with the numerical aggregate, the actual all, of the objects and things that go to make up what we call the system of nature at any given time; and humanity or the human race as a whole may never be taken as identical with all men, whether this be understood of all the men of the present generation only or be so extended as to include all generations in the like outward view. Even where the thing in view may appear by its nature to exclude the general distinction here made, it will be found on close consideration that where the terms before us are used at all appropriately they never have just the same sense, but that the whole of a thing implies always of right something more than is expressed merely by its all. The whole house is not of one signification with all the house, the whole watch with all its parts, or the whole library with all the certain books that are found upon its shelves. Two different ways of looking at the object, whatever it may be, are indicated by the two terms, and also two materially different conceptions, the force of which it is not difficult to feel even where there may be no power to make it clear for thought.

And now if it be asked: which of these two orders of universality is intended by the title catholic, as applied to the Christian Church, the answer is at once sufficiently plain. It is that which is expressed by the word whole (a term that comes indeed etymologically from the same root34), and not that whose meaning lies more fitly in the word all. A man may say “I believe in a holy universal Church,” when his meaning comes merely to this at last, that he puts all Christians together in his own mind, and is willing then to acknowledge them under this collective title. The universality thus reached, however, is only an abstraction and, as such, falls short altogether of the living concrete mystery which is set before us as an object, not of reflection simply, but of divine supernatural faith, in the old ecumenical symbols. The true universality of Christ’s kingdom is organic and concrete. It has a real historical existence in the world in and through the parts of which it is composed; while yet it is not in any way the sum simply or result of these, as though they could have a separate existence beyond and before such general fact; but rather it must be regarded as going before them in the order of actual being, as underlying them at every point and as comprehending them always in its more ample range. It is the whole, in virtue of which only the parts entering into its constitution can have any real s...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Contributors
• Editorial Approach and Acknowledgments
• General Editor’s Introduction to Tome 2
• Document 1: “Catholicism” (1851)
• Document 2: “The Christian Ministry” (1854)
• Document 3: “Hodge on the Ephesians” (1857)
• Document 4: “Thoughts on the Church” (1858)
• Bibliography