John Williamson Nevin (1803-86)

I really like the sound of John W. Nevin’s High Church Calvinism.

Amazon are meant to be winging his book on Calvin’s view of the Lord’s Supper, The Mystical Presence, to me and I can’t wait! B. Gerrish calls it: “The most intriguing discussion of Calvin’s eucharistic thought in English”.

Grace and Gratitude: The Eucharistic Theology of John Calvin (Eugene, Wimpf and Stock Publishers, 1993) p3

Nevin went to Princeton Theological Seminary in 1823 and was chosen to teach Charles Hodge’s classes while Hodge spent a two-year sabbatical in Germany. Nevin became a professor at the new Western Theological Seminary in Pittsburgh, where he taught from 1830-1840. In 1840, Nevin assumed the position of professor of theology at the newly-established German Reformed seminary in the small town of Mercersburg in central Pennsylvania.

Along with Philip Schaff he promoted what became known as the known as the Mercersburg Theology.

Nevin seems to have been properly reformed and positive about the sacraments (believing in the “spiritual real [or true] presence” of Christ in the Supper), the Church year and liturgical worship.

According to Michael Farley:

After the liturgical controversy died down, however, Nevin devoted his later years to developing a sacramental theology of the Scriptures, and he even admitted the imbalance of his earlier sacramental writings with respect to preaching. In 1879, he confessed that:

In our past controversies with regard to the Lord’s Supper, we may not have done justice always to what must be considered in this way the true and real preeminence of the Word above all sacraments…[W]e may have failed to intone properly what the presence of the Lord in his Word means, without which there is no room to conceive of his presence among men in any other form. Should this have been so, let us trust that it may be so no longer.

John W. Nevin, “The Bread of Life: A Communion Sermon,” Reformed Quarterly Review 26 (1879): 28.

Bibliography

Nevin, John W., The Mystical Presence: A Vindication of the Reformed or Calvinist Doctrine of the Holy Eucharist (New York, Lippencott, 1846. Reprint, Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2000)

Theodore Appel, The Life and Work of John Williamson Nevin (Philadelphia, 1889) containing Nevin's more important articles.

DiPuccio, William, The Interior Sense of Scripture: The Sacred Hermeneutics of John W. Nevin. Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1998. – treats Nevin’s sacramental view of Scripture and preaching

Farley, Michael A., “The Liturgical Theology of John Williamson Nevin.” Studia Liturgica 33 (2003): 204-222.

Hart, D. G. John Williamson Nevin: High Church Calvinist. Phillipsburg, NJ: P & R Publishing, 2005.

The Mercersburg Theology, edited by James H. Nichols. New York: Oxford University Press, 1966.

Wentz, Richard E., John Williamson Nevin, American Theologian. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.