Greetings everyone!
I am sorry I have not posted for a while. I will begin posting again as Lent commences. Thank you all for your patience. Remember Lent begins Wednesday, February 25th.
Worship
•December 9, 2008 • Leave a Comment
What is worship? Is this even an important question? Should we put a lot of prayer, thought and study into worship? These are questions that demand answers. Since the worship of God is fundamental to who we are as Christians, then we ought the be concerned with how we worship God. Further, worship is our life. Our lives are in Christ and every element, every moment of our lives are (for better or worse) worship. Saint Peter exhorts us: “But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession, that you may proclaim the excellencies of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light.”
What is worship? Robert E. Webber gives an intriguing answer, “Worship does God’s story.” ”Worship proclaims, enacts, and sings God’s story. Worship is not a program. Nor is worship about me. Worship is a narrative–God’s narrative of the world from its beginning to end.” So, let us explore the worship of our covenant God. Webber sets up a paradigm that we’ll explore in the next several months: “Here is what biblical worship does: It remembers God’s work in the past, anticipates God’s rule over all creation, and actualizes both past and future in the present to transform persons, communities, and the world.”
Soli Deo Gloria!
Mercersburg Theology
•December 8, 2008 • Leave a Comment
John Williamson Nevin
One of my great theological interests is worship. Since the chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy him forever the worship of our Triune God must be central to our thinking and praxis. Central to my thinking about the worship of God has been the concepts of transcendence and immanence. One the one had Scripture teaches us that God is wholly other: he is Creator, we are creature, he is necessary and independent Being, we are dependent being, he is infinite, we are finite. The LORD declares through the prophet Jeremiah: “Am I a God at hand, declares the LORD, and not a God afar off?” In the Exodus we see the presence of God accompanied by fire, smoke, thunder, etc. At the giving of the Law at Sinai no one was to touch the mountain, the place where God descended was holy and could not be touched by any creature. In the Temple God’s presence was in the Holy of Holies, separate from the rest of the Temple and the people of God. At Advent we prepare for the Incarnation of God in our Lord Jesus Christ. In Christ the transcendent God became immanent: “Behold a virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall call his name Immanuel (which means ‘God with us’).” Thus in Christ the transcendent One became immanent. This relates to our worship of God in that the worship of God incarnates God’s story. So as we think about and discuss worship one of the most important things to consider is the balancing of the transcendent and immanent. John Williamson Nevin (1803-1886) is a fascinating theologian. I have only begun my study of his theology but reading a few biographies and his book The Mystical Presence has made him somewhat of a hero of mine. On this blog I will endeavor to post monthly on what came to be known as the Mercersburg Theology, we’ll call it our “Mercersburg Monthly”. Nevin is particularly relevant because he spoke out against a truncated, low-church, revivalistic piety in the Church that centered on the individual and not on Christ. He has much to say to our generation that is overly concerned on subjective spirituality and has lost all notions of a “churchly faith”. It is not my intention to unpack these things right now, but (Lord willing) monthly we will take a look at these things. For now here’s a brief biographical sketch of Nevin.
Early Life and Influences
John Williamson Nevin (1803-1886) was born in Franklin County, Pennsylvania, southwest of Harrisburg. He was raised in the Scotch-Irish Presbyterian congregation at Middle Spring in the Cumberland Valley three miles outside of Shippensburg, Pennsylvania. The piety of his boyhood in the Middle Spring congregation deeply impacted Nevin. He described the piety in his autobiography as the “Scotch regime” being “in full force.” Hart describes Nevin’s early piety well: “What Nevin meant by those phrases was a system of piety that grew out of the church. As he described this “Scotch regime,” it was “the old Presbyterian faith,…based thoroughly on the idea of covenant family religion, church membership by God’s holy act in baptism, and following this a regular catechetical training of the young.” Nevin describes his early piety as “churchly” and “staid, systematical, and grave; making much of sound doctrine; wonderfully bound to established forms; and not without a large sense for the objective side of religion embodied in the means of grace.” It can be said that the whole trajectory of Nevin’s career is to preserve the faith of his boyhood in the face of the low church piety sweeping the American Church in the nineteen-century. The Reformed Christianity he would inherit from his childhood was very much the traditional ministry of the Word and sacrament which his later theological career would seek to retain for the church.
He graduated from Union College, New York in 1821. His time of study at Union was very formative for Nevin. While in upstate New York Union was “clearly in the cultural orbit and theological trajectory of the Puritan faith and outlook” of New England. What was most important about his college years was the visit of revivalist Ashael Nettleton to the Union campus. This would grant Nevin the great opportunity to analyze the difference between the “churchly” piety he cherished and the revivalism of Puritanism which he would later write against in his book The Anxious Bench. Nevin, who had not yet made a public profession of faith, was “converted” during one of Nettleton’s revival meetings in 1819. This would put Nevin “on a collision course with the dominant trend in American Protestantism.” In 1823 Nevin enrolled at Princeton Theological Seminary, New Jersey. While Charles Hodge was in Europe studying, Nevin taught his classes from 1826 to 1828. Darryl Hart comments on this situation: “The poignancy of Nevin’s tenure at Princeton from 1826 to 1828 deserves comment no matter how small. Here was Nevin, who over the course of his life would eventually lose most of Hodge’s confidence in him as a reliable theologian, substituting for arguably the most conservative Calvinist in nineteenth-century America. Moreover, here was Hodge, whose major critique of Nevin would be that his former student dabbled too much in doctrines German, going off to Germany to study in the presence of theologians whom Nevin would appropriate much better, even if only studying with them secondhand through their books and articles.” He taught at Western Theological Seminary (today Pittsburg Theological Seminary) from 1830 to 1840. Then from 1840 to 1858 he taught at Mercersburg Seminary in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. The call to Mercersburg surprised Nevin. He sought counsel from Archibald Alexander at Princeton. His response was that the move was not a major one. It was merely moving from one branch of Reformed Christianity (the Scottish) to another (the German). Hart’s comments on Nevin’s move are insightful: “Ironically, then Nevin’s relocation to the German Reformed Church would turn out to be the means by which he attempted to reappropriate the churchly faith of his Presbyterian past.”
Peter J. Wallace summarizes well the intellectual climate in which Nevin sorts out his theology of the Lord’s Supper. He is not just defending what he perceives to be the faith of the Church on this matter but is proposing an alternative form of Protestant devotion in the midst of low church trajectories infecting the nineteenth-century American Protestant church. “It is a commonplace to see the revivals of the Second Great Awakening as an important part of the background to the controversy between John Williamson Nevin and Charles Hodge. Both Nevin and Hodge attempted to stem the tide of revivalism in their own ways; but there is a larger set of issues at work: (1) a shift from covenantal to constitutional language in Reformed Theology, both in the New Divinity and more broadly in the wake of the American Revolution; (2) the spread of common sense philosophy as the dominant paradigm in American theology—especially in Nathaniel William Taylor; (3) the revival movement of Charles Finney, which was rooted in both of these first two movements; and (4) the social reform movement of the United Front which flowed from the revivals and sought to transform American culture into a Christian society.” The great triad of republicanism, common sense philosophy and revivalism that Mark Noll points out that makes American Christianity something unique in the history of the Church becomes the very thing that Nevin fights so valiantly against in The Anxious Bench. His alternative vision for American Christianity is laid out in The Mystical Presence.
D.G. Hart, John Williamson Nevin: High Church Calvinist (New Jersey: Presbyterian and Reformed, 2005), 37.
John Williamson Nevin, My Own Life: The Early Years (Lancaster, PA: Historical Society of the Evangelical and Reformed Church, 1964), 4.
Advent
•December 7, 2008 • Leave a Comment
The Liturgical Year begins with Advent. Advent is when the church celebrates the time when God breaks in on us. The emphasis during Advent is to ready ourselves for the coming of Christ at the end of history and to celebrate his coming at Bethlehem. The spiritual challenge that accompanies this season is to repent of our sins and be ready for the second coming of Christ and to rekindle (by the agency of the Holy Spirit) an eager longing for the coming of the Messiah to be birthed in your heart.
