Friday, June 6, 2025

It is the 6th of June 2025. Welcome to the Christian History Almanac, brought to you by 1517 at 1517.org; I’m Dan van Voorhis.

A very happy Friday to you, if it is indeed the case when you are listening- and a happy beginning of summer break for my kids and a farewell to the quiet home office and serene CHA studios.

I like it when a mailbag question and the calendar line up long time listener and writer-of-questions, Nate from somewhere in the South- between North Carolina and Virginia, he wrote in wondering if we had done a show about Mercer's theology. Well, that name, referring to a school of thought and seminary (today Lancaster Theological Seminary) usually refers to two names: Phillip Schaff and John Williamson Nevin. We’ve done a show on Schaff (see transcript for link: https://www.1517.org/podcast-overview/2023-10-20), and it happens that today, the 6th of June, is the day that Nevin passed from this life to the next.

John Williamson Nevin was born in 1803 on the family farm near Shippensburg, PA- this is in South Central Pennsylvania near the Cumberland Valley and Maryland border. By his own account, he would have been a farmer, but his father wanted him to have an education. He was sent to Union College in Schenectady at 14, but as the youngest in his class, he was plagued with anxiety and had one of his first nervous breakdowns. He was concerned that he didn’t have a distinct conversion experience- this was partially in response to the Second Great Awakening and would form some of his later theology.

He ended up going to Princeton Seminary, where he was more at home with Reformed theology than that of the Second Great Awakening. Amongst his professors was Charles Hodge, the great Reformed theologian, and while Nevin would fill in for his teacher when he travelled, the two would later have a falling out.

BY 1830, Nevin was called to be a professor of Biblical literature at Western Theological Seminary (today Pittsburgh Theological Seminary), where he came to the attention of Frederick Rauch, a professor from Heidelberg called by the German Reformed Church to teach at Marshall College, then in Mercersburg, where the seminary was under its charter. Rauch died tragically young, and Nevin, along with Schaff, would become the face of this German Reformed Seminary and what would be called “Mercersburg Theology”.

From 1840, this would be Nevin’s home, and he would seek to chart a path for the “Mercersburg” theology that was between what he believed to be the excesses of the Second Great Awakening and what he saw as an overly “Puritanical” Reformed theology.

His first major work, the Anxious Bench, was a critique of Charles Finney’s New Measures (what some have seen as an overly pragmatic approach to evangelism), and we can’t help but see his own experience at Union College- unable to find a precise moment of conversion in the background. He argued that radical revivalism put too much emphasis on the individual and too little on God’s action.

If that work, published in 1843, was the shot across the bow of the Revivalists, he used his 1846 publication, The Mystical Presence, as a critique of the Reformed and their doctrine of the Lord’s Supper. He argued that the emphasis in Reformed churches had become too wrapped up in God’s eternal decrees and the atonement instead of on the incarnation and our union with Christ, seen especially in the Lord’s Supper. He argued that Calvin had a robust doctrine of the Lord’s Supper that had been flattened into mere symbolism and remembrance.

His 1848 work Anti-Christ or the Spirit of Sect and Schism was an attempt to identify the roots of the schisms and splits that were becoming the feature of American Protestantism. From 1849, he would help publish the Mercersburg Review, which would become the main organ of disseminating the Mercersburg Theology. Nevin would write some 50 articles for the journal in a 4-year span.  

His later life would be marked by nervous breakdowns and institutional instability brought in part by the Civil War. He would teach and serve as president and pastor at Franklin and Marshall College, where the Seminary was, and from where it would become Lancaster Theological Seminary.

He would resign in 1876, he went blind in 1883, and died on the 6th of June in 1886. John Williamson Nevin tried to navigate a middle way- using the Heidelberg Catechism of his German Reformed Church to bring together the Reformed and the Revivalists…. A call to unity that is commendable, even if rarely successful. Fun fact- his daughter would become a sculptor and is famous for, among other things, a statue of Peter Muhlenberg- son of Henry and brother of Frederick from Wednesday’s show. Nevin, born in 1803, was 83 when he died on this day in 1886.

The Last word for today comes from the daily lectionary and Galatians 6:

7 Do not be deceived: God cannot be mocked. A man reaps what he sows. 8 Whoever sows to please their flesh, from the flesh will reap destruction; whoever sows to please the Spirit, from the Spirit will reap eternal life. 9 Let us not become weary in doing good, for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up. 10 Therefore, as we have opportunity, let us do good to all people, especially to those who belong to the family of believers.

This has been the Christian History Almanac for the 6th of June 2025, brought to you by 1517 at 1517.org.

The show is produced by a man who thought he had an anxious bench- it just had a wobbly leg… he is Christopher Gillespie.

The show is written and read by a man unsure if it's a sculptress or a woman…maybe, but found out it's also the name of a mystery novel and BBC film… I’m  Dan van Voorhis.

You can catch us here every day- and remember that the rumors of grace, forgiveness, and the redemption of all things are true…. Everything is going to be ok.