John Williamson Nevin: Evangelical Catholic

By Linden J. DeBie and Anne T. Thayer

John Williamson Nevin's life has never been given the full attention that it deserves. That may be due in part to the controversial nature of his thinking. Yet in many respects, his enormous contribution to American religious history is acknowledged by those who have read him. He stood out as the great advocate of evangelical catholicism, and his call for a thorough examination of the place of the church in nineteenth-century theology was revolutionary. It was Nevin who first saw the threat to the church in the erosion of faith in the church as a divine institution sacramentally entrusted by God with the reclamation of the whole world--an erosion that occurred well before the Civil War in the hypersubjectivity of Protestant America.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Release date: Sep 21, 2023
• ISBN: 9781725269552

Linden J. DeBie

Linden J. DeBie received his doctorate in the philosophy of religion from McGill University. He is author of numerous academic books and articles having to do with philosophy, religion, and history. This is his first novel.

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Introduction

In his famous essay, The Hedgehog and the Fox, Isaiah Berlin wrote citing a fragment of verse from the Greek poet Archilochus, The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.

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The illustration may mean no more than that for all the cunning of the fox, he is defeated by the hedgehog’s one defense. Berlin cleverly adopted the fragment and interpreted it as a grand metaphor for human beings in general. Foxes, he suggested, are those who are fascinated by a great number of things. Hedgehogs seek to bring everything into a single, all-inclusive system. Said Berlin, Tolstoy was a fox who wished he were a hedgehog.

The illustration may be equally apt for John Williamson Nevin. Nevin was in many ways foxlike, diving into a great assortment of controversial issues and questions. But his focus was on a central question, the church as informed by the doctrine of the incarnation, and his faith was in a unified historical theory, which he clung to with wavering commitment toward the end of his life.

Nevin’s life has never been critically and comprehensively examined, although his role in shaping American religion is recognized by those who have discovered him. With his colleagues in the German Reformed Church, Nevin embraced German Idealism over Scottish Common-Sense Realism, evangelical catholicism over scholastic Calvinism and revivalism, and German historiography over dispensational histories and the rationalistic approach of the enormously popular Mosheim. Together they forged a middle path between the larger movements playing out in American religious culture. But the fact remains, that Nevin’s place in American history has largely been ignored, leading to a general underestimation of his substantial contribution to American religious history. Perhaps this is the case because his views were often controversial and unpopular. Also contributing to his obscurity was that he was the de facto leader of a small denomination and of an often-disparaged movement that began in the most unlikely of places, the rural hills and farmland of south-central Pennsylvania.

Mercersburg is a quiet, little village located almost equal distance between the urban centers of Pittsburgh and Philadelphia. It remains to this day a sleepy farming community, but it was here that the German Reformed Church moved its seminary in 1837. Soon Frederick August Rauch, as brilliant a philosopher as America could boast at the time and a recent immigrant from Prussia, took control of the high school, soon to become Marshall College. Soon after he also led the seminary. He remained at the head of the seminary until the arrival of John Nevin in 1840. However, Rauch unexpectedly died the following year, and so Nevin took over both the college and seminary. Shortly he was joined by Philip Schaff who would go on to become perhaps America’s greatest church historian of the time.

Rauch, Nevin, and Schaff, these were the founding members of the Mercersburg Movement which produced several generations of loyal students who carried on the tradition. Rauch the philosopher, Nevin the theologian, and Schaff the historian, all idealists, convinced evangelical catholics, and German-influenced historiographers, who took the seminary and denomination in a radical new direction, and away from the course that American Protestantism was then headed.

The audience for this book is intended to be principally scholars of American church history and theology interested in Nevin and the Mercersburg Movement. Beyond that, there are pastors and laity that may find Nevin noteworthy, along with students of American church history who wish to get better acquainted with him. Anyone who wants to have a thorough grasp of American church history and theology in the nineteenth century will find this biography useful.

As for methodology, I am indebted to as different writers as George Marsden and Frederick Beiser, both brilliant historians but from different fields. Marsden wrote, among other things, a magisterial biography of Jonathan Edwards. Beiser is the author of several outstanding works on German philosophy from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century. However, they are in accord that their method seeks to allow their subjects to speak for themselves. I want to follow the same general path. As the reviewer Andrew Crumey wrote, The task of the historian is to try to understand matters within their own contexts, not to dismiss them in light of what followed.

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In other words, I wish to avoid the temptation of Presentism. And yet what I want to propose is, simultaneously, if it is at all possible, to create a dialogue with the present and refer to what followed after Nevin in light of what mattered most to him. Aware of the danger of trying to have it both ways, this experiment might provide a creative portal to the past while remaining fully aware that it is a past seen through the lens of the present. My hope is that a study of Nevin by way of this method might give us a better perspective on the issues facing the church and its theology today.

For the sake of the flow of the narrative, I have avoided the use of sic and simply corrected the more glaring grammatical and old stylistic oddities, bringing the text in line with contemporary style without changing it. The fairly comprehensive footnotes provide guidance concerning name changes, obscure people and places, and direction for further research.

I wish to thank the several librarians who helped me with my research, especially Alison Mallin of the Evangelical and Reformed Historical Society. Also, I want to thank the scholars that looked at parts of the manuscript and gave comments, including professor Anne Thayer who wrote the Foreword. But most importantly I want to thank Dr. David Wayne Layman, current editor of the Mercersburg Theological Study Series, who acted unofficially as my editor. His help was invaluable, and thanks to him mistakes were corrected, the structure of the chapters improved, and the clarity of the entire work enhanced. However, in the end, I am responsible for its contents.

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. Berlin, Hedgehog and the Fox,

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. Crumey, Pulling on a String, C

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Overture

The sun is just up on an early summer morning as I leave my home on the outskirts of Queens, New York, to visit all the places that were a significant part of the career of John Williamson Nevin. I put my Volkswagen in drive and make my way down the perpetually potholed Northern Boulevard. Potholes are as much a part of New York City as great music and art. Tooth-jarring Northern Boulevard is a major corridor connecting Queens to Long Island.

New York City, New York

I need to be on the road early if I want to avoid another hour getting into Manhattan. The traffic can be a nightmare, but this early in the morning I breeze over the Throgs Neck Bridge, named for the narrow passage between East River and Long Island Sound. Now and late evening (if you dread standstill traffic), is the time to view gorgeous Long Island Sound from the Throgs Neck. On this bright, sunny morning Little Neck Bay shimmers. To my left, the New York skyline competes with the iridescent Sound featuring a light show given off by the stunning art-deco Chrysler Building. Its crimson reflection draws life from the rose-pink rising sun making for a surreal crossing. To my right, across Little Neck Bay and up the shoreline toward Great Neck, the handsome homes and mansions give away their expensive secret. For such a view wealthy New Yorkers endure the forty to forty-five-minute commute into Manhattan that made this coastal crescent accessible.

But now I face the unavoidable: grim and claustrophobic Cross Bronx Expressway—a reality check for urban motorists. It does, however, give way to my destination. As I turn onto the Henry Hudson Parkway I can see the river that bears the early explorer’s name. Of course, the brawny metallic span above me is the George Washington Bridge. There is a turnoff and overlook here and I get out of my car. I focus my gaze upriver toward the Hudson Valley. I want this famous river to begin our story about this remarkable if not so famous man.

When in August 1609 Henry Hudson first navigated up the river that bears his name, he passed what the first Dutch settlers (mostly Walloons from what is today French-speaking Belgium) of 1624 and 1625 would call Nut (Noten) Island, just across the bay from another island where they kept their animals, called by the Delaware Indians Manna-hata. These were two of the earliest settlements of the Dutch Reformed, and they would become the birthplace of the colony of New Amsterdam and the settlements of New Netherland. Soon the colonists moved from Nut Island to Manhattan finding it preferable. These early landings began four short years after the legendary landing two hundred and forty miles north at Plymouth, Massachusetts. The famous rock and landmark became the home of the English Separatists (most know them as the Pilgrims). They were an early group of a larger migration to New England of Puritans, who like the Dutch and German Reformed, held out hope for transforming the church.

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Like the Dutch they were indeed Reformed, but distinct in that some were Separatists, abandoning all hope of reforming what they believed were utterly corrupt and irredeemable Roman and Anglican church communions. Unlike the Dutch, who for the most part sought economic betterment, the English came to the New World in hopes of being free to practice their Protestant faith.

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Today historians speak of the Magisterial and Radical Reformation. The Magisterial Reformation included the Lutherans, the Swiss, German, and Dutch Reformed. They sought to purge the church of its alleged abuses, and they held to the idea of one undivided, holy, and apostolic church.

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The early Separatists such as the Anabaptists and Zwickau Prophets are considered part of the Radical Reformation, as they had given up on reforming the Church of Rome.

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The terms begin to blur with the second-generation Reformers, but it is safe to say that the Lutheran, Swiss, German, and Dutch leaders were holding out for a purified Roman Catholic Church. Early and later Separatists along with the non-separating Congregationalists were seeking to establish a purified church apart from Rome. This would become a central preoccupation with John Nevin, the distinguished if controversial pioneer of nineteenth-century ecumenism. He would scandalize many of his colleagues by refusing to condemn Roman Catholicism and even anticipate the reunion of the one church, a restoration that would include both Roman and Protestant communions.

Four years after the famous landing of the Pilgrims the less famous Dutch were reading the Heidelberg Catechism aloud in their fortress churches.

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Certainly language and custom would distinguish the two but so would their version of Protestantism. The Puritans of Massachusetts Colony were united by the Savoy Declaration of 1658, which used the Westminster Confession as a template. Later they would come to be called Congregationalists for the way they governed their churches, and in time they would be guided by the Westminster tradition. An important distinction in their polity was that oversight for the Dutch and Germans remained with the foreign assembly, in this case in Amsterdam.

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The founders of the Massachusetts Bay Colony maintained order by establishing congregational governance or rule by the local congregations. Other Puritans established order around assemblies of presbyters. Nevin believed the directions taken by New England congregationalism before and during his time to be misguided, and he came to brand its most recent iteration Modern Puritanism or reigning Puritanism

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which he believed encouraged sectarian division in the church.

The Dutch clung to the Heidelberg Catechism, and the Congregationalists would look to the Westminster Confession. While the two documents are akin in their shared Calvinistic theology, they are very different in spirit. If the devil is in the details, then it is the details of these two documents that would bedevil their fraternity. Indeed, the Puritan or congregational spirit, as it was later developed by the successors of Jonathan Edwards into the New Divinity (middle to late eighteenth century), would become a major source of antagonism among the nineteenth-century American Reformed churches. This was especially true of Princeton Seminary under Nevin’s great adversary Charles Hodge and of Nevin’s institution, Mercersburg Seminary. Often at odds with one another, Hodge and Nevin were united in their shared opposition to the New Divinity of New England, especially the nineteenth-century successors of the earliest leaders such as Samuel Hopkins and Timothy Dwight. Indeed, Charles Hodge of Princeton believed it his mission to purge the American Reformed of what he called a rationalistic tendency.

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And John Nevin at Mercersburg likewise believed it a scourge, labeled it rationalistic, and condemned it to the waste heaps of history.

Nor should we underestimate the power and place of these confessions among these Christian people. Though it is by no means as prevalent or persuasive as it was in the centuries before the nineteenth, even today the Heidelberg Catechism is considered by many to be the very heart and soul of the Continental branch of the Reformed faith. So, it should not be surprising that it was the Heidelberg Catechism that Nevin used to launch his new career (1840) among the German Reformed as president of their seminary in Mercersburg, Pennsylvania. He was compelled by its generosity, warmth, and theological depth, and he was confident that its restored use among the German Reformed would revitalize their struggling congregations.

Although the Dutch colonized nearly a century before the Germans began to arrive in great numbers, the fraternal bond between these two as symbolized in their mutual devotion to the Heidelberg Catechism, was vital and lasting. When the Germans arrived in America and found their way to the Dutch settlements in the Hudson Valley (although they mostly sought land and prosperity in Pennsylvania), it was to the Dutch that they looked for assistance for their churches. In most cases, it was desperation that drove them.

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The regions of the German Palatinate from which most of them came were decimated by years of religious war and dynastic conflict—religious, political, and military. But this desperation was of another sort. The Germans needed the Dutch to provide them with pastors. Education in the New World was fledgling. But more importantly, rigorous religious training in established seminaries was non-existent.

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Nor were there the required assemblies needed for oversight, examination, licensure, and ordination. This meant that prospective clergy could only receive their training abroad (typically but not always in the Netherlands).

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Then they had to make the long, dangerous voyage to the New World. And for them it was indeed a new world filled with dangers including an unexplored wilderness, and an indigenous people often at odds with the violent, dismissive, and exploitative behavior of the colonists, and the economic imperialism practiced by their sponsors, the Dutch West India Company.

Consequently, it was the Amsterdam Classis, the assigned assembly of church oversight for the Dutch in America, that supplied the Dutch and German congregations with their ministers. In time both the Dutch and the German Reformed churches would free themselves from this obligation, establish their own colleges and seminaries, and convene their synods.

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But the first German congregations were under the order and discipline of the Dutch Reformed Church in Amsterdam. Although this obligation could prove a hardship, once free of Amsterdam the relationship blossomed and remained friendly and vibrant as sister denominations in America, right up until the rise of the Mercersburg Theology of which Nevin was chief architect. In what must be considered a misstep in Nevin’s overall desire for church unity, the Dutch officially severed ties with the German Reformed (1853 and lasting until 1863), citing the Mercersburg Theology as the reason. Nevin, indignant and unrepentant, responded by publishing his article, The Dutch Crusade (1854), but I’m getting ahead of our story.

I continue south on the Henry Hudson Parkway to Thirty-Fourth Street and head east. I take Fifth Avenue south so that I can make a right onto Twenty-Ninth Street on my way to the Dutch Reformed Church’s (renamed the Reformed Church in America in 1867) prestigious Marble Collegiate Church. Dodging the chaotic traffic, I circle the block doing my best at once to navigate and still admire its singularly wonderful mix of Romanesque, Gothic, and Classic architecture. Inside one can marvel at the magnificent Tiffany windows. Most RCA sanctuaries are modest meetinghouse style buildings, and while Marble is in the style of a meetinghouse it is anything but modest. Marble wasn’t built until 1851 and yet its pedigree dates to 1628. As a collegiate church, Marble is a direct lineal descendant of the very first New York congregation.

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As such, the church serves as a reminder of the respected place of the Dutch when New Amsterdam became New York (1664). Original Dutch presence and prominence allowed them the place of privilege among the denominations tolerated by the British.

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Gone now but on what is today Exchange Place, stood the Garden Street Reformed Church (also called South Dutch Church) built in 1693. Garden Street Church was the center for the collective work done by the collegiate churches, which produced the first approved English translation of the Heidelberg Catechism, the Church Order, and the Palatinate Liturgy, all brought over by the Dutch (as well as the German Reformed), and strictly adhered to by both until the liturgy and catechism fell into disuse around the beginning of the eighteenth century.

Recently the four remaining New York City collegiate churches (long ago have they ceased to be Dutch in any fashion) entered into dual association with the United Church of Christ. It is a matter of great interest to our story that the UCC is the product of a union of Nevin’s adoptive denomination, the German Reformed, which in 1934 united with the Evangelical Synod of North America to form the Evangelical and Reformed Church. In 1957 the E&R Church united with the Congregationalists and the Christian Churches to form the United Church of Christ. However, their historic Calvinism has nothing to do with the reason for their affiliation. The RCA is becoming more conservative and has divided itself internally over the cultural wars. The more liberal collegiate churches are feeling squeezed by the political control of increasingly dominant mid-western and west-coast conservatism. This was considered an obvious move by the liberal-minded UCC and fundamentally tolerant and liberal collegiate churches. But it was complicated, oddly enough, by history, theology, and polity. Regardless of practicality, what was true of these two branches of Reformed faith in the sixteenth century remains true. The Dutch church’s DNA is reformed catholicism. Congregationalism on the other hand, relished its independence, and that freedom or independence is evident in the Westminster Confession and in their congregational structure and governance.

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The Dutch were raised up in the theology of the Heidelberg Catechism, which is a significant rub in comparison to Westminster.

The witty Dutch Reformed scholar Daniel Meeter characterized Westminster in a clever way such that we can begin to appreciate the difference that remains significant. He likened the spirit of Westminster to a religious gymnasium. Worship and the shared confession provide the necessary space, coaching, and equipment to develop the believer’s muscles (faith). Perhaps the Reformed worship steeped as it is in the Heidelberg Catechism, could be compared to a social club where the party atmosphere is like that of a festive gathering: the experience of worship and fellowship are the means by which they connect with God and each other. Meeter would say that in the Westminster tradition believers are concerned with getting to heaven. In the Heidelberg tradition believers are concerned with meeting up with God.

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Of course, this is a huge simplification but Nevin, one of the most catholic of nineteenth-century American, Reformed theologians, would endorse the spirit of this observation, but he might tweak it by saying that Calvin and the Heidelberg are concerned with our union with God in Christ. It is significant that the Heidelberg Catechism was a product of the Reformation itself. Westminster was a product of later Reformed scholasticism with its systematic bent and penchant for logical construction.

In either case, the analogies, while elucidating, are again too simple. But the contrast is important. Puritans are what you expect them to be: generally sterner, morally austere, and inwardly focused. However, when taken to excess the result might become a kind of subjectivism, encouraged by an overwhelming concern for one’s own salvation.

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Not surprisingly then, American revivalism develops out of this tradition. As Meeter characterized it, Westminster is more about the believer, the Heidelberg more about God. And so naturally, given this Puritan tendency, Congregationalists and their Reformed cousins, the Presbyterians, were historically less catholic especially in their ecclesiology and sacramental theology.

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Things have changed over the years, and yet what is in our DNA never changes. This very issue preoccupied Nevin throughout his life. He battled what he called hyper subjectivism and the excesses of revivalism throughout his career at Mercersburg and beyond. And unless we are utterly content with the direction of modern evangelicalism, it remains an issue of contention within the Reformed family today, as well as a source of legitimate criticism from the greater ecumenical community.

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Today among the UCC, the latent Puritan tendency toward subjectivism might be evaluated in terms of their concern for human rights and justice and the acceptance of difference. They are in so many ways still very moralistic! Nothing wrong with that. But unquestionably, they have come to define the UCC far and away beyond Christology and ecclesiology, the more pressing issues for Nevin. Indeed, Nevin would liken their humanism to a modern, messianic heresy.

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So, when today some of the old Dutch churches of New York, including the one I’m circling, entered into dual affiliation, alarming even those sensitive to the issues of social justice, we can look to history for some clues about why that is.

Given the historic reality that both the UCC and the RCA are amenable to higher councils in the form of assemblies and judicatories and that Congregationalists are more independent, the question arises: From whence comes the source of discipline for affiliated churches? Who has oversight of errant ministers? Who examines them and based on what theology or confession? These are troubling questions. But not least among the issues raised by some of the more theologically minded Dutch Reformed clergy in the East, is the deeper one of a loss of Reformed catholicity. The historic balance of word and sacrament appears to them threatened. Nevin would have been right there with them and deeply concerned. There has been a steady erosion of this catholic principle which Nevin noticed before many. The Dutch as much as the Congregationalists began the tilt toward word over sacrament—the Protestantizing of the Magisterial Reformed. Yet it was the recovery of lost catholicity and concern over the eclipse of the sacrament of Holy Communion, that drove Nevin to lead his denomination in a thorough, historical reexamination of the Church Question,

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as significant, original, and compelling as the one conducted only a few years earlier among the Anglicans, known as the Oxford Movement (from about 1833 to the middle of the century). Nor was the church question resolved and, as we have seen, it still vexes denominations today. Although a minority, many of the old German Reformed leaders, heirs of the Mercersburg tradition, find themselves enveloped by late modern and postmodern hyper-pluralism, a church system given over to the old ambitions of the Radical Reformation and one far less concerned about sacraments and catholicity, an entirely new church utterly severed from Rome. Nevin considered the rabid nineteenth-century Protestant denigration of Rome regressive and yet at the same time, he was an admirer if not a disciple of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century liberal theology.

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He simply made the church, its history and theology, his first concern which left room for both these positions. No wonder Nevin has become a fascination to more catholic minded theologians and pastors who recognize both the blessing and curse of post-modern liberalism.

I complete my third circuit of Marble just as a wary New York City cop eyes me suspiciously. After all, tourists gawk at cathedrals but not Dutch churches, and New York City of late has been on high alert for suspicious activity. What will be the outcome of the affiliation arrangement? The questions I raise swirl through my head as this time I turn right instead of left on Thirty Fourth Street and head West, back toward the Henry Hudson Parkway. The traffic is much heavier now as I begin the bumper-to-bumper bridge crossing into New Jersey. It provides me a good long look at Lady Liberty but mostly I gaze North, past the sheer cliffs of the rocky Palisades and then back towards Tarrytown, once again thinking of the Dutch, of Sleepy Hallow and Ichabod Crane, and of the first American-born author to garner international fame, Washington Irving. Although an English-speaking native, he loved the Knickerbockers and appeared at times to wish it was their culture rather than British culture that had taken hold in America. Finally, I careen my neck as if to see even further upriver as far as I can, knowing it was at one of these Dutch settlements that Nevin’s great uncle first settled. Two of them, the great uncle and his brother Daniel MacNevin, John Williamson Nevin’s grandfather, came from Ulster, Ireland, around 1750. Daniel continued on to Pennsylvania along with the host of Scotch-Irish immigrants (truly displaced Scots) headed for the Cumberland Valley.

They came much like the English and the Dutch before them, fleeing religious persecution and seeking economic opportunity. Daniel married Margaret Williamson thus establishing the family’s prominence, and perhaps creating a sense of privilege that led a few contemporary historians with more than a little truth to back them up, to brand their great grandson an elitist.

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Of course, as a Whig descendant of the Federalist Party, Nevin’s family’s comportment was certainly intellectually and socially aloof. America had no native bluebloods, so they had to find other ways of creating a caste system. John Williamson, Margaret’s brother and John Williamson Nevin’s namesake, was a distinguished medical doctor during the Revolutionary War. He served as a member of the Continental Congress and had a hand in framing the Constitution. He was of English extraction but adding to the veneer of nobility, it was rumored he was descended from the great Scottish chieftain and patriot, William Wallace.

Margaret and Daniel farmed the land around Shippensburg in the county of Franklin. They had plenty of children, typically described by admiring historians as well above average and always successful. The oldest boy named John, was the father of John Williamson Nevin.

Schenectady, New York

Once over the bridge I am in New Jersey, namely Hudson County, which is still a magnet to immigrants and continues to be the home of most of the new arrivals to America. I turn north and head up the Palisades Parkway, a beautiful American highway, tree-lined and well kept. It is what the person who came up with the name parkway must have been thinking of when he or she coined the term. It will take me to Schenectady, and to Union College where Nevin matriculated in 1817 when he was just fourteen years old. It should come as no surprise by now that Schenectady was a Dutch settlement that took the Mohican name for beyond the pines. The settlers were typically from the Albany area nearby, and the settlement grew considerably after the English takeover of New Netherland.

Today Schenectady is a middle-sized industrial city with a population of more than sixty-six thousand. However, at the time of Nevin’s arrival, it was predominantly agricultural and known for its dairy farms. It was also a hotbed for abolitionists, which makes it all the clearer why John Williamson’s father sent him there. The Nevin family was enthusiastically anti-slavery. Still, there were plenty of other reasons to enroll young Williamson (as he was known all his life) at Union. One was that at that time Union was under the leadership of the very capable Eliphalet Nott who had raised the college’s reputation, making it one of America’s leading institutions of learning. The college also had a noble lineage as its second president and perhaps its most famous one, was Jonathan Edwards Jr. (1799–1801), the son of the great revivalist and American intellectual. Edwards Sr. was perhaps the most important early American theologian. Nevin studied and admired him, appreciated his brilliance but entirely rejected, as ultimately did the entire country, his essentially Berkeleyan philosophy. He would also criticize certain aspects of Edwards’ Calvinist-inspired Covenantal Theology.

Union was initially begun by the Dutch Reformed but finally was chartered through an association of Protestant denominations pooling their resources as is clear from the name.

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Traditional and evangelical at the outset, Union differed from Princeton and Queens College (now Rutgers University) in its early recognition of the need not just to prepare future pastors but also prepare young men for the world of commerce. That certainly would have fit into the Nevin family’s agenda for their boy, who was undecided about a career. Today the campus remains absolutely charming. I turn off Union Street onto Library Lane and pass through the comely gates that proudly announce the founding of the college (1795), making it one of America’s oldest. Beautiful old brick and clapboard houses are scattered among newer buildings. The campus is pristine, and at its center is an enormous grassy common wonderfully kept. As I gaze at it, I am taken by a fabulous, unique example of Gothic architecture (1858). President Nott worked with the French architect Joseph Ramée, to re-envision the Roman Pantheon, and it may just be that this remarkable edifice was intended quite ironically to be, in fact, a chapel.

Capped with a reddish-brown mosaic, it tapers up and is topped with a suggestive little roundel. One look at this conical and convex dome and the nickname the Nipple becomes obvious. But it is also unique in that it is one of the few sixteen-sided buildings in the world. It was named after President Nott, who had a long and productive tenure there. Undoubtedly the stiff and serious-minded Nevin would not approve of the later-day students’ aphorism no matter how apt the comparison. He had no use for jocularity and condemned crude displays of humor including jokes. Nor was his memory of Union particularly happy. However, in his writings his use of puns and subtle humor were well known, and his biographers refer to it often suggesting he was not entirely humorless.

Nevin, like most of the students in American colleges of that era, was subjected to the intense soul-searching that desperately sought assurance of justifying faith. But of course, no student could be sure, it would seem, without the help of a touring revivalist. One of the best, Asahel Nettleton, did a job on Nevin in his junior year, leaving him scarred for life. But bringing souls to the new birth was all the rage in Protestant colleges during that period (with precious few exceptions), and we can easily imagine how impressionable any child Nevin’s age might be.

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I suspect that in this day and age many might consider the whole affair immoral and maybe even illegal—a form of child abuse. The altar call as it was later termed, might include a desperate walk to the front (standing below the damning gaze of the hypnotic evangelist). The penitent, coaxed on by the convincing speaker, might find there a special seat or bench which was set apart. (The so-called Anxious Bench was not a tactic of the more traditional Nettleton, but its popular use would soon soar.) The Bench served to illustrate that salvation was a precarious, lonely, and individual affair. Nevin would later chronicle how far in this practice the Reformed, indeed American Protestants in general, had strayed from the ancient church and even from churchly Calvinism. Even Calvin who with Luther would insist on justifying faith as essential and personal, would never conceive of a rigid punctiliar salvation. Rather, Calvin would fuse justification and sanctification in a lifelong churchly process.

Still, the students were virtually at the mercy of the faculty who were organizing these events and arranging for evangelists. Few students escaped the introspection, but Nevin was one of a handful to later challenge what he believed was an aberration, an ignominious display without merit in Christian nurture. His tract, the Anxious Bench (1843), was exceedingly popular and widely distributed, and sought to expose what he believed were the excesses of New Measures revivalism, an even more results oriented and edgy form of revivalism than the one practiced by Nettleton. And while Nevin’s exposé was brilliant and generally endorsed by the religious establishment who did not approve of the Machiavellian tactics of New Measures, they mostly missed the nuance of his argument. Preoccupied with the disruptive histrionics of so-called Finneyism, they missed Nevin’s deeper critique. He pointed to an overwhelming subjectivism of the system in general where everything is made to stand or fall on one’s own sense of saving grace, turning all into a psychological experience. Having missed that critique, Protestants did not address—indeed, they generally went on to embrace—the idea of faith as an intensely personal affair. The phenomenon still holds for many evangelicals today. And while revivals no longer inflame students as they once did, evangelicals are often so focused on personal salvation with its intense subjective drive for assurance, that they feel compelled to cite the day and hour of their conversion. Nevin echoed Calvin, and he foretold the eclipse of sanctification as the other essential side of the single reality of salvation.

As intriguing as the Nipple is, I am more interested in Old Chapel, which is far more exemplary of Protestant worship in the nineteenth century. It is a classic meeting house style in every sense of the word. Elegant in its simplicity, it is unadorned, a rectangle straight and strong. The wooden pews are set in rows practically mounted before the stage. The pulpit and table are gone (stripped down for utilitarian purposes), as is all the sacred furniture. But it doesn’t take much imagination to realize that the intent of this building was not so much to celebrate the sacraments, as to allow the preacher to be seen and heard. It was the centrality of the preached word, or more specifically, the way the word was preached, that had eclipsed the sacramental acts of worship, and to which Nevin would severely object. He would be villainized for restoring the sacraments to the place of prominence for the German Reformed, and roundly criticized for his Romanizing tendencies not only by outside religious leaders but by members of his own denomination. Others would celebrate his recovery of sacramental faith. But today even among Nevin’s admirers, his alleged neglect of the preached word is cause for criticism.

Old Chapel dates from 1855, well after Nevin’s student days. Rather it was Ramée’s expanding but not completed campus that greeted Nevin. He most likely lived in Ramée’s North and South College which were started in 1812 and occupied in 1814. Indeed, Ramée’s building efforts were ongoing throughout Nevin’s time there, so it is hard to determine where chapel was held. The campus was growing and so well before Ramée and Nevin, just as with the German Reformed seminary, an academy or high school was established in 1785. After repeated attempts to receive a charter as a college were rejected, finally the charter came through in 1795.

New Brunswick, New Jersey

Turning south I gain access to the I-95, a great east coast highway stretching down all the way to the city of Miami. But I only go as far as New Brunswick where the RCA has its older seminary (of two), New Brunswick Theological Seminary and the first on American soil.

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The buildings are all new except for the splendid Gardner Sage Library designed in the basilica style of architecture (1875). Thankfully, it was preserved while the others were torn down. Gardner Sage is an absolute gem of a building, and reading here is like being in a time machine with narrow, tiled alcoves where you are stared down at by the busts and portraits of great Dutch divines, as well as a colorful mosaic of the legendary Boehm—that great pig face of a man.

I stop by the library briefly only to peruse the portraits of professors, searching for the one most relevant to our story. It is still here as I remembered, that of Joseph Berg, professor of theology and Nevin’s most formidable antagonist in the German Reformed Church. Berg, an anti-Roman Catholic crusader from Philadelphia, left the German Reformed Church once he had had enough of Nevin and the Mercersburg Theology. He took a position at New Brunswick Seminary and remained there until 1855.

From the library steps, you can look back at old Queen’s College campus, and what is recognized as truly magnificent Federal-style architecture from the early nineteenth century. Again, from the steps, I notice how small the seminary appears compared to the university. Yet the seminary predates the college by twelve years. The very same phenomenon occurred for the Germans in Pennsylvania. Unlike Union College, it only later became apparent to the board that a school of preparation was necessary if they were to expect qualified candidates for the ministry. Equally, it wasn’t long before the inevitable occurred. Higher education for secular careers attracted many more students to the college than future pastors. So, while the seminaries grew modestly, the colleges fared much better. Still, it is interesting to note that our American ancestors believed it more important to train clergy than lawyers, at least in the beginning.

The excursion to New Brunswick provides me an excuse to avoid I-95 and take a more pleasant and historic route to my next destination, Princeton, New Jersey. Originally Old Route 1 went from Fort Kent in Maine all the way to Miami, Florida, taking in the thirteen original colonies. It was also the well-traveled stagecoach route from New York to Philadelphia, and it is very likely Nevin used it. It remains to this day, a beautiful treelined highway, once you get beyond the outskirts of New Brunswick which are scarred and struggle with urban blight. I stop here for lunch and enjoy a Mexican meal as good as I’ve had in Vera Cruz. The people are so warm and friendly, and I have just enough Spanish to evoke a sympathetic smile when I order my meal. A century before Nevin’s and right up until today, immigration was definitive for the American experience. The people of our story were immigrants, some newly arrived, others second generation (John Williamson Nevin) and a very few at this point (among the Germans), third. Nobody but the horribly treated indigenous tribes came from here. And yet the doctrine of Manifest Destiny was wildly popular among the European ancestry. Not so much for the Whig Nevin who was skeptical about vain ambition and the government’s treatment of the indigenous and Mexico, but for so many others.

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Their racism along with the economic seduction of slave labor supported a mythology that blinded them to the inescapable logic of human equality, and what was supposed to be their belief that God had created people in his image. No, it wasn’t so much the issue of immigration (as it is today) that was needed for the new country’s growth. The great issue was slavery and with it the equally intolerable treatment of what I incredulously heard called by a recently appointed presidential cabinet minister, our African American immigrants. Yet, even up to the outbreak of the Civil War Nevin’s natal denomination, the Presbyterian Church, would not declare slavery a sin and denounce it. But Nevin long before broke ranks and called it a blight and a sin, and spent his early career denouncing it such that he was branded a crusading troublemaker and the most dangerous man in all of Pittsburgh, even to the point that his life was threatened. His later silence on the subject remains a source of controversy.

My lunch among the economically hard-pressed on the fringes of New Brunswick reminds me of the Spanish and Indian War, which was a watershed event for early, nineteenth-century Americans, and Nevin with his Whig sentiments would take up the subject as a tipping point in American politics.

Princeton, New Jersey

Back again on Route 1 and coming into Princeton, I realize what a contradiction this beautiful university town is to the locally, often repeated question (usually posed by jocular New Yorkers)—You from Jersey, what exit? The old seminary with its beautiful recently renovated library remains a juggernaut in training Presbyterian (and other) ministers, and as a world leader in theological research and scholarship. Nevin reluctantly began his studies here in 1823 under the presidency of the pious luminary, Archibald Alexander. I say reluctantly because he really didn’t know what he wanted to do, and he was utterly depressed. His so-called conversion experience at Union and general poor health had only made things worse. After college, he spent a long period of time recuperating at home, but his anxiety was lethal. Nor was remaining on the farm an option. He needed to make a vocational decision, and seminary seemed the only choice. Today, just as at New Brunswick, the university campus dwarfs the seminary, cornering it and maybe even challenging it in a worldly manner, with an array of the most eclectic architecture found anywhere among American universities. From the old Federal style similar to that at Rutgers, to Greek Revival and everything in between, it’s here. And I get the sense that it’s unashamedly so. Not for fads that come and go—but with the swagger of a global leader and the confidence that All of world culture is before you.

But when Nevin studied here there was no university and Princeton Seminary was staunchly evangelical, a bastion of Old School Presbyterian orthodoxy and avowed enemy of late eighteenth century, rationalistic New England Divinity, as well as a stronghold against anything thought unorthodox.

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Nevin found his way here with his nerves tied up in knots, and a stomach that would trouble him most of his life. Still unsure and yet so bright, he managed things until, in doubt about it all, he thought to drop out of the required Hebrew class seeing no point to it. But egged on by his roommate, he not only prevailed but mastered the subject, so much so that he became the best Hebrew scholar in the school. His skill was such that it surpassed his teacher and future rival, Charles Hodge, and so he became the substitute professor of Hebrew Language and Literature

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while Hodge, the budding star in the Presbyterian pantheon, studied biblical languages in Europe. Hodge knew as well as his older colleagues, Alexander and Miller, that he was deficient on that score. So, as much as they feared for their young prodigy at the hands of the European rationalists, they sent him off to France, Germany, and England to study the ancient languages.

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Unbeknownst to Nevin, the temporary position would become a catalyst for his future academic career. He also managed his first book, Biblical Antiquities (published in 1829) which became a bestseller in the religious market.

However, even at Princeton Nevin was moving away from the rigid Presbyterian orthodoxy that would make Hodge a leading figure in American religious education. Nevin not only turned his back on Princeton, but he also filled the vacuum with the despised, new rationalistic German literary science and idealism of the Continent. The former nearly seduced him but for the liberation he found in idealism.

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Yet it all proved fortuitous because this was well before he had any inkling that he would lead the German Reformed in America. Which is why I jump back onto the turnpike and head west toward Western Theological Seminary, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the site of Nevin’s first full-time academic position.

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

I try and stick to county roads, but sometimes I find myself navigating congested highways. Nevertheless, driving through Pennsylvania is a joy with its ancient, worn mountains, its lush valleys and verdant farms, and the occasional Amish carriage. Below and around me are cold limestone rivers and streams that abound in trout. I overcome the temptation to stop, get out my fly rod, and waste the rest of the day chasing wary Browns. The mountains are not soaring like the Rockies but old, the ancient Alleghenies, and where the mountains give way farms spring up.

It’s early summer so the corn is from waist-high to six feet, depending on when it went in. This year was a rainy one and so the seeds went in late. When I speak to farmers, some think this ominous, these recent several years of heavy rain, that is. Others say climate and weather are not the same. Voiced or not, the question is heavily on their minds. In Nevin’s day, the feeling was nature was vast, unlimited in what could be taken from it. Even today on this particular drive, the country appears too immense to be concerned with population, water, and resources. But I know something that Nevin did not.

The first cutting of the hay is done and the fields, empty or lined with bails, wait for the second cutting. This is the longest leg of my journey, Princeton to Pittsburgh, and it is precisely the journey Nevin took upon leaving Princeton, and taking his first professorship in Allegheny City. He must have gone initially to Shippensburg to settle his affairs, and arrange for his family to join him later. I can’t help being amazed trying to imagine their journey by stagecoach. Even today, except for all the concrete and strip malls, the terrain is rugged and mountainous, with deep forests standing beside massive valleys, crisscrossed with rivers and seemingly impassable heights (at one point, rather than go over the mountain, they thought it best to tunnel through it).

Coming out of Princeton to the North the road follows a great ridge for a good distance. I peer down at the periodic valleys either filled with farms, suburban sprawl, or a dense forest dark enough to conjure up images of Mirkwood. I imagine in Nevin’s day there was but one lonely, potted dirt road all the way. I’m wrong. A stagecoach map of the period revealed an astonishing number of routes, and Nevin could easily have traveled any number of them. Likely, he went to Trenton, caught a stagecoach out of Philadelphia and then straight, pretty much as the crow flies, west and just a little south for the whole route. I’ve read of the abundance of pubs, inns, and little towns along the route, some still here but mostly gone now. My trip took five and a half hours. Nevin’s would have taken nearly a week or more depending on the weather.

Coming up on Pittsburgh I see I’m traveling through the Allegheny National Forest. That makes great sense as my destination is Allegheny City as it was once called or Alleghenytown, then a quiet village right across the Allegheny River from the bustling city of Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh’s early prosperity was due in great part to its geography. It is situated where the Allegheny and the Monongahela Rivers converge to become the Ohio River, making shipping easy and profitable. But significant economic prosperity came as manufacturing exploded and Pittsburgh became Iron City. During the 1970s and 1980s, the collapse of steel left the city devastated. This put pressure on their universities to reinvent themselves as research centers in science and technology, which helped the economy move into high-technology fields explaining the great success they currently enjoy.

Perched up on Monument Hill, the location of the first seminary building, the view is breathtaking, the river dividing itself before the western shore of the proud city where there is a gorgeous fountain, and behind it a beautiful park (Point State Park). Allegheny City is gone now, it was annexed by Pittsburgh in 1907, and the City Center was demolished in 1960 and then rebuilt.

Today what was once Allegheny City is now the North Shore neighborhood with several bridges making easy access to the newly recovered and prosperous city. I can imagine Nevin making his commute to and from the downtown. When he arrived, Allegheny had a population of 2,801 people, and when he left in 1830 the population had soared to 10,089. It was a beacon for retired Revolutionary War veterans and included a growing German population. This was a factor in Nevin’s understanding of German ways and culture in America, although he certainly encountered them in Shippensburg (without favorable impression). He soon brought his deceased father’s family to live with him, and shortly after that he met and married Martha Jenkins from Lancaster County.

The seminary began as did all the seminaries we visited, as small academies run by dedicated pastors. The first such schools began in 1785 under Joseph Smith and 1787 under John McMillian near Washington, Pennsylvania. In 1825 the Presbyterian Synod approved a plan to build a seminary further east. After a great deal of crooked halting the plan came to fruition and Allegheny was chosen as the site. Yet before any buildings were constructed the seminary met in one of the rooms of First Presbyterian Church (beginning around 1829).

Nevin saw the acquisition of their first building in 1831, later (1854) it was destroyed by fire, well after Nevin had left for Mercersburg. I’m standing on the site of that building overlooking the downtown. Now the area is surrounded by the Heinz complex, which has taken over a good portion of the North Shore’s riverbank.

The history of their early meetings supports Nevin’s tales of woe where it is recorded that every meeting was an emergency. Much of it was over the New and Old School split with Western remaining with the Old School camp. But money was also a perennial problem. The board minutes of that period report 25 years of crisis or death.

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Pittsburgh has overcome the loss of shipping and the devastation of the mill closures, attracting large firms in the medical and tech industries. What it cannot conceal is what so many other cities in the East and South must live and come to terms with, their history of slavery. Pittsburgh was where Nevin first fell into controversy over slavery, and from that moment on became a consummate controversialist. Some of his battles were trite, some monumental. Here he fought the institution of slavery, which thrived in the commercial citadel of Pittsburgh. His reputation as a firebrand issued from his newspaper the Friend, and from sermons and speeches where he advocated in favor of abolition, and ultimately was forced to close the paper in the face of violence.

One might think this enough to overwhelm the young dyspeptic. Instead, he embroiled himself all the more deeply in the controversy, bringing opprobrium on himself from the wealthy businessmen. His consolation was the study of history which excited and distracted him in Pittsburgh. It was here that Nevin became a wary admirer of German Idealism and a devotee of the science of history, all well before his call to the German Reformed Seminary in Mercersburg, Pennsylvania.

The fortunes of the seminary changed with the combining of Western Theological Seminary with Pittsburgh-Xenia Theological Seminary to form Pittsburgh Theological Seminary in 1959, my next stop. The seminary is no longer on the North Shore, but a short eighteen minutes by car to the west and just a little north. Thick suburban traffic put a lie to the GPS travel time. Still, it is a beautiful campus about the size of Princeton Seminary’s campus, with a brand-new library equipped with the best research technology available. It is here that the archives are kept, and I get a copy of the periodical called the Friend, Nevin’s first editorial position.

With everything that Nevin would have known in Allegheny City demolished except the splendid view, I head next to Mercersburg where John Williamson Nevin made his name. This gives me the option of Interstate 81 or a winding, mountainous northeastern Route 30. I choose the mountainous route thinking it more like what Nevin would have experienced.

Mercersburg, Pennsylvania

I feel like an autumn leaf spiraling down into Mercersburg from the twisting roads of the rugged Alleghenies, and when I get there it is clear why. Mercersburg is bounded on the West and South by spectacular mountains as if part of a natural amphitheater.

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And again, I must wonder at their descent by stagecoach, the modern equivalent of a thrill ride. To the South and East is farmland dotted with hills as far as the eye can see.

Mercersburg was and to some extent still is a quaint farming community but has grown considerably. The town had quite a time negotiating with the denomination to be chosen for the site of the new seminary and academy, but they came up with the best offer and despite the remoteness of the place, they won the bid. The committee was in fact pleased that in their isolation the students would not be distracted by worldly pursuits.

Today the town has American flags on every one of the numerous telephone poles lining Main Street. The police station on the corner is no bigger than a Starbucks which somehow seems reassuring, and halfway down Main Street is the former home of James Buchanan, the fiftieth president of the United States (1857). It is now appropriately a pub (Buchanan loved his ale), called simply the James Buchanan. The Buchanan name and legacy are things the locals are still very proud of, and a Jacksonian streak of popularism still runs deep within them.

Consistent with the Democrats’ position, Buchanan had just been inaugurated when the Dred Scott decision was handed down, undoubtedly horrifying the Nevin family and a whole country of Whig voters with them.

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Yet Nevin remained ominously silent. The firebrand had cooled his literary output over the question of slavery just before leaving Pittsburgh and was criticized for that. Not that he wasn’t stirring up all kinds of trouble over other issues. It was just that for reasons we will investigate later, he fell relatively silent on slavery.

The modest houses of Main Street are mostly stone and brick, attached and nicely kept displaying the town’s prosperity. What I would suggest as the most outstanding feature of the little farming community is Mercersburg Academy’s, Irvine Chapel. It is by far the most prominent feature of what in 1835 became the location of the German Reformed High School that later became Marshall College (1836), under Frederick Augustus Rauch. The seminary under Lewis Mayer relocated there in 1837.

Today Mercersburg Academy is a very selective, private preparatory school of about 435 students, male and female, most grades 9–12 but some postgrads as well. It is as the reviews state, elite. I wonder if the parents share the old seminary board’s sense that the quiet town of Mercersburg would not lead their young people into temptation. The campus is beautiful, well-groomed, and perfectly maintained. And crowning that meticulous campus is Irvine Chapel, a great Gothic cathedral so out of keeping with its surroundings that one might think it descended from heaven. I felt that way as divine music from a splendid pipe organ lured me in for a closer look. It took me back twenty years to when I first worshipped there as a graduate student and listened to a celebrated scholar of the Mercersburg Movement, Howard Hageman. It was all coming back to me now. The dark spacious chapel, the haunting diffuse and reverberating acoustics, the wonderful organ, the spectacular architecture, and the raised pulpit, all which exude an atmosphere of deep sacramental mystery. Nevin would have loved it! When I entered the cathedral I read the inscription above the door, Put On the Whole Armor of God.

Irvine Memorial Chapel was built in 1926 under the supervision and planning of Dr. William Mann Irvine and the architect Ralph Adams Cram. Of course, no such building could be contemplated by the seminary. They barely had enough room for student housing and little money. They could not even pay Nevin’s salary. At first, students met in the Reformed Church and housing faculty and students, as well as finding suitable classrooms, was an early problem.

When Nevin arrived there he immediately met Frederick Augustus Rauch, the president of what was originally the academy or high school and now was Marshall College. Nevin and his entire family stayed with Rauch until other arrangements could be made. That act of hospitality began a brief but productive collaboration between Rauch, the first American Hegelian and Nevin, the future leader of the German Reformed Church.

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The two immediately hit it off, and Rauch became a firsthand source of the new German learning that Nevin was exploring. Sadly, Rauch died, and Nevin was left to lead both the college and seminary.

Immediately after his arrival, Nevin set off on a fundraising trip throughout the region. Here he learned directly of the denomination’s struggles. In typical intellectual fashion, he thought the solution might be found in renewed interest in the Heidelberg Catechism, setting off the first of a never-ending series of controversies.

Nevin was the kind of person to speak his mind even when that might cause consternation all around him. He lacked any serious diplomatic skills, and although these controversies would bedevil his spirit to no end, he seemed unable to resist speaking out regardless of the consequences. Although the years at Mercersburg were controversial, his vision was truly prophetic in anticipating much of what would come to be in American Protestant religion.

Shippensburg, Pennsylvania

I get back on Route 30 and head north and a bit east to Shippensburg where Nevin was born. As I near Orrstown, a few miles outside of Shippensburg, I realize why the Nevin family farmed here. Majestic pastures and serene farms are everywhere the eye can see, far outnumbering towns and stores.

The Nevin farm was in Herron’s Branch near Orrstown, which is the oldest community of the Cumberland Valley. Twelve Scots-Irish families arrived there in July of 1730 and built cabin homes along what became the western outpost of colonial settlement. Still, I wonder why here and why did it prosper? A little research revealed that the land was rich and fecund, abounding with springs. But the principal reason was that the governor, Edward Morris, wanted a fort built here. His intent was to provide protection for the troops and colonists during the French and Indian War. Also important was that Shippensburg, named after the prosperous Shippen family, was a crossroads traversed by several crucial native American trails, so it was a natural gateway to the west and south. There were so many people settling there during the first third of the eighteenth century that a road was proposed from Harris’ Ferry to the Potomac. When the course of the ‘Great Road’ was laid out . . . in 1744, Shippensburg was the only village on its entire course.

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The family farm was an oasis for Nevin during his troubled adolescence. Here among the fields and forests, he found solace from ill health and a troubled mind. Anxiety over his future and his faith nearly destroyed him, yet on Herron’s Branch, the young man found a measure of peace. I can only guess among the dozens of farms which one might have been