The Mystical Presence: And The Doctrine of the Reformed Church on the Lord's Supper

The Mystical Presence

And the Doctrine of the Reformed Church on the Lord’s Supper

John Williamson Nevin

Edited by Linden J. DeBie

General Editor, W. Bradford Littlejohn

The Mystical Presence

And the Doctrine of the Reformed Church on the Lord’s Supper

The Mercersburg Theology Study Series

1

Copyright ©

2012

W. Bradford Littlejohn and Linden J. DeBie. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers,

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This is an important book in an important new series. John Williamson Nevin carried forward Calvin’s understanding of the Lord’s Supper better than anyone else in America during the nineteenth century. His central emphasis on the eucharistic theme of ‘union with Christ’ still has much to teach us today. We now have his central writings on this topic in a handsome new edition. It deserves to be studied and savored by pastors and scholars alike.

—George Hunsinger

Princeton Theological Seminary

Over a century ago, John Williamson Nevin planted an exotic seed in the ground of American Protestantism . . . [He] cultivated a high-church, liturgical and sacramental Protestantism that starkly contrasted with and sharply challenged the populist revivalism around him . . . By launching this excellent new edition of Nevin’s works, Brad Littlejohn and his colleagues give us hope that it is finally time for the dead seed to grow into a tree. May it bear much fruit.

—Peter Leithart

New Saint Andrews College

The Mercersburg Theology Study Series Volume 1

The Mercersburg Theology Study Series is an attempt to make available for the first time, in attractive, readable, and scholarly modern editions, the key writings of the 19th-century movement known as the Mercersburg Theology. We believe this will be an important contribution to the scholarly community and to the broader reading public, who can at last be properly introduced to this unique blend of American and European, Reformed and catholic theology.

Series Introduction

By W. Bradford Littlejohn, General Editor

It has been 125 years since John Williamson Nevin departed this life, adored and mourned by thousands within his German Reformed Church but largely unmissed by the wider American Protestant world. Seven years later, he was followed by his erstwhile partner and protégé, Philip Schaff, already acknowledged at his death to be one of greatest church historians of his age, but not so well remembered for his earlier contributions at a little seminary in rural Pennsylvania. By the end of the nineteenth century, the Mercersburg Theology that had once rocked the narrow world of American Reformed Protestantism was fading quickly from memory, and even the institutions that had nourished it had moved on. Mercersburg Seminary, which Nevin had helmed during the crucial years of his career, was now Lancaster Seminary, and its sister institution where Nevin had also taught and presided, Marshall College, had also moved to the slightly more cosmopolitan base of Lancaster, where it now sported the name Franklin and Marshall College. The days of the German Reformed Church itself were numbered; following denominational mergers in 1934 and 1957 , the church found itself swallowed up in the vast and varied patchwork of the United Church of Christ.

This conclusion might be seen as a kind of posthumous Pyrrhic victory for Nevin and Schaff, an ecumenical union that sought to realize the kind of catholicity for which they fought so hard and so often, but at the cost of diluting both the confessional integrity that they so valued, and, inevitably, the distinctive legacy of the Mercersburg theology. Since that time, a small core of historians, pastors, and theologians within the UCC have labored to keep Mercersburg’s memory alive, but often with little visible fruit in a modern ecclesial landscape dominated by evangelical and liberal impulses so alien to Mercersburg’s vision.

The Mercersburg theologians were accustomed to Pyrrhic victories in their own lives, winning support within their own denomination at the cost of the exodus of some of its oldest leaders, and the friendship of old allies like the Dutch Reformed Church. Perhaps worst of all, John Nevin’s historical triumph over his former mentor Charles Hodge of Princeton Seminary virtually guaranteed his exile from the honor roll of American Reformed theologians. Hodge was convinced that his old pupil had gone off the deep end, abandoning the Reformed tradition for the worst forms of newfangled German pantheistic rationalism, and he did his best to ensure that everyone else in the Reformed world, and the evangelical churches more broadly, shared his damning conclusion. Such was his influence that he thoroughly succeeded, and few in the Presbyterian Church in which Nevin was brought up would so much as recognize his name for the next century and a half, much less hear it with approval.

Mercersburg has certainly not been without its appreciators, though most have hailed more from the academy than the pews. After a long period of substantial neglect, Mercersburg’s contributions were highlighted in the 1950s and 1960s by the leading church historian James Hasting Nichols and liturgical historian Bard Thompson. Nichols skillfully retold the story of the Mercersburg theology in Romanticism in American Theology: Nevin and Schaff at Mercersburg (1961), and republished a small sampling of its finest writings in The Mercersburg Theology (1966). Thompson, meanwhile, coedited an abortive attempt to edit and republish the key writings of the movement, The Lancaster Series on the Mercersburg Theology, which produced an edition of The Principle of Protestantism (1964) and of The Mystical Presence and The Doctrine of the Reformed Church on the Lord’s Supper (1966). During the 1970s, the small Pickwick Press also reprinted some of Nevin’s and Schaff’s writings. While not exactly constituting a renaissance of Mercersburg studies, these labors did lay the groundwork for renewed appreciation of Mercersburg within the church (culminating in the formation of the Mercersburg Society in 1983 and the launch of The New Mercersburg Review) and in the broader academy. Leading contemporary historians of nineteenth-century American church history have seldom failed to note Mercersburg and its unique voice on the American religious landscape, and some, such as E. Brooks Holifield, have shown particular interest in its contributions.

Nevertheless, it has only been very recently that a larger number of scholars have begun to focus detailed attention on the evolution and shape of the Mercersburg theology, with books by Stephen Graham, Richard Wentz, and William DiPuccio in the late 1990s, as well as articles by Linden DeBie and others, and in the past five years, a veritable flurry of new books on Mercersburg: Darryl Hart’s John Williamson Nevin: High Church Calvinist (2005), Linden J. DeBie’s Speculative Theology and Common-Sense Religion (2007), my own The Mercersburg Theology and the Quest for Reformed Catholicity (2009), Jonathan Bonomo’s Incarnation and Sacrament (2010), and Adam S. Borneman’s Church, Sacrament, and American Democracy (2011).

What is most exciting about some of these recent works, and a number of others, is that they are seeking to retrieve the Mercersburg Theology not merely as a historical curiosity, intriguing for the light it sheds on nineteenth-century piety, but also as a living voice to speak to contemporary Protestantism, prescribing many of its nineteenth-century remedies for our twenty-first-century malaises. The contempt of tradition, history, church, and sacraments that Nevin, Schaff, and their disciples so staunchly opposed in the 1840s and 1850s has remained the dominant ethos in American religion, sapping the strength of Protestantism throughout its various permutations—modernist, fundamentalist, and evangelical. As many Protestants are learning to appreciate anew these historic forms, and are again reaching out hands of friendship and dialogue to Catholics and Orthodox, perhaps the time has come at last when Mercersburg’s voice can be heard and appreciated in Reformed churches and among disgruntled evangelicals.

For this reason, perhaps the time has come for Mercersburg’s writings to finally be again made accessible to a wide audience of scholars, pastors, and laymen. And that is the goal of this present series. But before explaining the Mercersburg Theology Study Series at more length, it is perhaps worth addressing a couple of questions for those new to Mercersburg—who were Nevin and Schaff, and what was the Mercersburg Theology?

As the editors of each volume will be providing thorough answers to these questions in their own introductions, I shall offer here only the most minimal survey.

The Mercersburg Story

John Williamson Nevin, the undisputed author and guiding star of the movement, was born in 1803 to Scotch-Irish Presbyterians in rural Pennsylvania. The sturdy Old School Presbyterianism of his upbringing, however, to which Nevin was deeply attached, was on the verge of decades of struggle as the revivalism of the Second Great Awakening swept through America, rocking the Presbyterian Church to its core. Nevin found himself uncomfortably poised on the conservative edge of this new movement, having been first a halfhearted participant in the revival exercises at Union College in his teens, then a student at the staunchly Old School Princeton Seminary in his twenties, and then swept up in the abolitionism and social activism that characterized New School Presbyterianism during his thirties, as a professor at Western Seminary near Pittsburgh.

However, faced with the increasing radicalism of revivalism under preachers like Charles Finney, Nevin became increasingly critical of the movement and the whole subjective modern Puritan mind-set that, he was convinced, it sprung from. Dissatisfied with the fruits of American Protestantism, Nevin began to study the theologians and historians of Germany’s Mediating school, a group that sought to synthesize the new philosophical and theological insights of Schleiermacher on the one hand and Hegel on the other with the historical, confessional traditions and teachings of the church. The result for Nevin was an enthusiastic rediscovery of the importance of church history, ecclesiology, the sacraments, and the Incarnation, all matters that were largely neglected in nineteenth-century American Protestantism (though they were similarly emphasized by the contemporary German high-church movement and the Oxford Movement in England). This new trajectory in Nevin’s thought coincided with a call in 1840 to teach and then head the seminary of the German Reformed Church at Mercersburg, Pennsylvania. Naturally, this new ecclesial home provided a more congenial environment for Nevin’s appreciation of German theology, yet here too, the most powerful influence was that of low-church revivalism, with which Nevin soon found himself in direct conflict.

In 1844, three years after the death of the German-born Mediating philologist and head of the seminary, Frederick Augustus Rauch, the German Reformed Church called the young historian Philip Schaff from Germany to aid Nevin in his labors at the fledgling seminary, and out of their remarkable partnership, the Mercersburg Theology was born. Schaff, born in 1819, had studied at some of the great universities in Germany with some of the finest theologians and church historians of the age. Although he embarked to America worried that his theology would be out of step with that of his new institution, it proved to be a match made in heaven. Schaff had been influenced by the same writers as Nevin and completely shared his theological vision and diagnosis of the weaknesses of American Protestantism. Even better, while Nevin was melancholy and brooding, Schaff was sanguine and ebullient—their dispositions balanced each other perfectly.

Together, they quickly forged ahead in shaping a new theological vision for their denomination, and indeed, for the whole of American Protestantism, seeking to recover the churchly, sacramental faith of the Reformation and early church, and overcome the antihistorical and unphilosophical mind-set that they saw plaguing American religion. Inevitably, this bold vision did not endear them to many of their colleagues and ecclesiastical neighbors, and much of the next decade was spent in intense conflict. The details of these conflicts shall be explored in depth in the various volume introductions, so let us fast-forward through the brief noontide of the Mercersburg Theology into its slow twilight.

The partnership between Nevin and Schaff came to an untimely end in 1853, as Nevin, psychologically broken from years of controversy, spiritual struggle, and ill health, retired from his leadership responsibilities in the denomination. Although Nevin was to formally return in 1861, financial struggles at the seminary had in the meantime forced Schaff to move elsewhere—first to Andover Seminary, and then to Union Seminary in New York, where he was to do much of his most famous work.

During these later years, the Mercersburg Review continued to be published, with frequent articles from Nevin, and many more by students and colleagues who shared the vision of the Mercersburg Theology. While these later writings have probably received less attention from scholars than they deserve, it is undeniable that by the 1860s, the truly dynamic period of the Mercersburg Theology had passed—its attempt to make a dramatic impact on American Protestantism had been blunted, and its influence thenceforward was to be largely limited to the narrow bounds of the German Reformed Church. Its most lingering legacy, perhaps, was liturgical—the 1857 New Liturgy and its 1866 revision, in which Nevin and Schaff had a large hand, though inspiring another round of bitter controversy within the church, were to become beloved forms of worship for many of the German Reformed in subsequent decades. More recently, they have garnered the interest of several modern liturgical scholars as a unique production of nineteenth-century American religion.

Yet this brief narrative merely traces the course of the Mercersburg Theology; it does not disclose its essence. Only the texts themselves can truly do that, but if we may attempt to capture it in a nutshell, we might describe it thus: the Mercersburg Theology was a distinctively American yet cosmopolitan nineteenth-century theology—catholic, sacramental, both modern and ancient, Romantic and Reformed. Its eclecticism and historical awareness in an age of rigid orthodoxies, its ecumenism in an age of confessional quarrels, its theological seriousness and lofty speculation in an American landscape dominated by anti-intellectualism, set it apart from the crowd of competing American theologies. It was the product of the fusion of two powerful theological minds, and of two cultures and theological heritages—the Anglo-Scotch Reformed theology, mediated through two centuries of American practical divinity, and the German Romantic theology that was reaching its zenith. As such, it is deeply rooted within the soil of its own time, and yet is bold and fresh enough to transcend its own era, and speak to the churches still today.

Unsurprisingly, such a complex theological synthesis, weaving together traditions of thought which otherwise have rarely had much fellowship with one another, has produced a wide variety of different interpretations and receptions, even among the relatively narrow community of Mercersburg scholars. In The Mercersburg Theology Study Series, you will be exposed to many of these, as many of the movement’s leading interpreters offer their insights through the volumes that they are editing. But a brief survey may be helpful here.

Mercersburg Studies

Originally, it was typical to view Mercersburg predominantly within the context of the German Romanticism and idealism upon which it so clearly drew extensively. This was, of course, the damning charge of Charles Hodge, who considered almost any ideas coming out of nineteenth-century Germany to be thoroughly tainted. Others, however, have of course taken a rather different view of German theological and historical science in that period, and hence have viewed Mercersburg’s appropriation of them as a great mark in its favor, showing Nevin to be a man well ahead of his time. James Hastings Nichols’s study, Romanticism in American Theology: Nevin and Schaff at Mercersburg (1961), by and large took this tack, while of course also seeking to do justice to the variety of other influences upon Nevin and Schaff’s thought, such as the contemporary Oxford Movement in England. More recent studies, perhaps recognizing that German idealism hardly appeals to many people nowadays, have sought to emphasize other aspects of Nevin’s project. William DiPuccio’s The Interior Sense of Scripture (1995), while certainly giving some consideration to the specifically German influences, seeks to situate Nevin’s accomplishment within a broader set of philosophical and hermeneutical problems confronting modernity. Stephen Graham’s Cosmos in the Chaos: Philip Schaff’s Interpretation of Nineteenth-Century American Religion (1995) and Richard Henry Wentz’s John Williamson Nevin: American Theologian (1997), on the other hand, sought to highlight Mercersburg’s engagement with its American context, and attempt to offer a theology that was influenced by the unique American religious experience, full of the optimism of the New World. This project has in some ways been carried forward by Adam Borneman’s recent Church, Sacrament, and American Democracy: The Social and Political Dimensions of John Williamson Nevin’s Theology of Incarnation (2011), although, as the subtitle suggests, this volume has given particular attention to an aspect of the Mercersburg Theology heretofore largely neglected—its political interests and ramifications. D. G. Hart, meanwhile, in John Williamson Nevin: High Church Calvinist (2005), has reacted against the Germanized Nevin in another direction, seeking to stress, in rejection of Hodge’s accusations, Nevin’s impeccable credentials as a Reformed theologian who never lost sight of his Presbyterian roots. Linden DeBie, on the other hand, has sought to correct this overcorrection, by drawing attention back to the undeniable German idealism that was the matrix for the Mercersburg Theology, in Speculative Theology and Common-Sense Religion in Nineteenth-Century America (2007). In my own work The Mercersburg Theology and the Quest for Reformed Catholicity (2009), I seek to read Mercersburg in its Reformed Presbyterian context, as Hart does, but also in constructive dialogue and engagement with the other religious traditions and movements of the era, especially the Anglo-Catholic movement and the resurgent Roman Catholicism.

Clearly, the rich soil of Mercersburg Theology is capable of nourishing a varied garden of theological and historical projects. This variety is to be celebrated, not lamented, but we might perhaps wish for a bit more order. Too many of these projects thus far (including my own, I will be the first to admit) have been undertaken largely in isolation from the others, each shedding a valuable spotlight on Mercersburg, but failing to build on previous scholarship in a dialogical fashion. There have been a number of Mercersburg scholars, but despite the admirable efforts of the Mercersburg Society and the New Mercersburg Review, too little sign of a tradition of Mercersburg scholarship, and little attention to Mercersburg outside of specialist circles. It is this that the present series hopes above all to rectify.

The scattered nature and limited impact of recent Mercersburg research is surely due at least in part to the scattered nature of the primary sources themselves. Only a handful of works have been reprinted in their complete form and in readable editions, others have been reprinted in excerpts, while the vast majority remain in their original bindings, confined to a few libraries in the eastern United States. This has proven to be a considerable obstacle even for committed students of the Mercersburg movement, as there remains a great difficulty in finding and making sense of this large body of source material. More seriously, it has meant that a broader audience of theologians, historians, and religious professionals has rarely been able to tap into the riches of theological reflection and historical insight the Mercersburg movement has to offer, and have perhaps never even become aware of its existence. The growing availability of the primary sources on Google Books has certainly improved the situation,¹ but these digital texts are hardly an adequate substitute for accessible print editions, and will do little toward raising the profile of the Mercersburg Theology among scholars and churchmen more broadly. The time is long overdue for a proper critical edition of the key writings of the Mercersburg Theology, which might be both an aid to scholars and an opportunity for a broader audience to gain a first acquaintance with the writings of Nevin, Schaff, and their disciples.

The Present Series

The Mercersburg Theology Study Series thus aims to accomplish three major goals. First, it aims to reprint several significant Mercersburg works for the first time, making them available at last to a wide audience, and facilitating easy access for scholars of the movement. Second, in addition to reprinting select works for the first time, the project aims to reprint in a definitive, standardized, and readable form, select works of the Mercersburg Theology that, while available in modern editions, vary widely in quality and editorial supplementation, making it difficult for them to find as wide a readership as they deserve. Third, given that much of the Mercersburg Theology was hammered out through dialogue and debate with other Christian leaders of the day, the series will seek to include a few key texts from Mercersburg’s opponents, to provide an idea of how Mercersburg was perceived by contemporaries, and to help contextualize its counterpolemics.

Combining these three distinct categories, the series aims to provide the definitive compendium and introduction to the contributions of the Mercersburg Theology that will serve as a resource for scholars, religious professionals, and interested laymen for years to come. We hope this will encourage scholars in related fields to render more attention to the Mercersburg Theology as a unique and fruitful contribution to nineteenth-century American religion, and will help historically-conscious Reformed Christians to discover these untapped riches of their heritage.

To these ends, this series aims to be thorough and wide ranging, but it cannot of course be comprehensive. Except where there are compelling reasons to include other material, we shall focus on writings from the period 1843–1860, the most productive and creative period of the Mercersburg Theology. Special attention will necessarily be given to the writings of John W. Nevin and Philip Schaff, the chief architects of the Mercersburg Theology; regrettably, space permits the inclusion of only a few writings from other significant figures. However, the majority of Nevin’s and Schaff’s published writings during this period will be included (except for those writings of Schaff that exist in fine modern editions), prioritizing those which scholars of the movement consider to be key statements of Mercersburg’s unique theological and historical perspective. For the benefit of casual students of the movement, the writings will generally be organized topically, rather than chronologically, although editorial introductions will take note of historical developments between the various writings. All volumes will be re-typeset for ease of reading and standardization.

Since our purpose is not merely to make these works readily available, but to make them useful to scholars and accessible to laymen, each volume in this series will feature extensive editorial contributions. Chiefly, of course, the editors will supply introductions to the texts, contextualizing their polemical context and summarizing their arguments. But they will also supply extensive annotations, offering, for scholars, thorough citations of the sources upon whom the original writers are drawing, and for general readers, summaries of unfamiliar people or concepts referred to, as well as translations of any foreign language quotations (which are extensive in some of the texts). Full bibliographies and indexes will also be provided for each volume.

The enormous labors involved in such a project cannot be overestimated, and I am profoundly grateful for the commitments of so many fine scholars in many fields to contribute their editorial energies, and of many other research assistants who have already or will soon be volunteering their labor in the time-consuming tasks of transcribing, editing, and translating. Above all, Wipf and Stock Publishers deserves thanks for offering to print such a large project, and the Mercersburg Society for generous financial support. The current series is very ambitious, aiming to stretch to thirteen volumes over the next several years, and if it successfully reaches its hoped-for conclusion, it will be only by God’s grace.

Soli Deo Gloria

1. In association with this project, a website (www.mercersburgtheology.org) has been launched to serve as a digital hub for all things Mercersburg, offering bibliographies and links to digitized primary sources.

Planned Volumes in the Series (Titles Subject to Change):

The Mystical Presence, and the Doctrine of the Reformed Church on the Lord’s Supper

Edited by Linden J. DeBie

Coena Mystica: The Eucharistic Debate of Nevin and Hodge

Edited by Linden J. DeBie

Principles of Church History: Selected Writings of Philip Schaff

Edited by Theodore Trost and David Bains

The Incarnate Word: Selected Writings on Christology

Edited by William B. Evans

One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic: Nevin’s Writings on Ecclesiology

Edited by Sam Hamstra

Miscellaneous Writings on the Sacraments

Edited by David Layman

Essays in Church History

Edited by Nick Needham

The Early Creeds

Edited by Charles Yrigoyen

The Heidelberg Catechism

Edited by Lee Barrett

The Mercersburg Liturgy

Edited by Michael Farley

Schaff’s America and Related Writings

Edited by Stephen Graham

Philosophy and the Contemporary World

Edited by Adam S. Borneman

Mercersburg and Its Critics

Edited by Darryl G. Hart

Foreword

This is the first volume of what the organizers of this series plan as an extended edition of the works of John W. Nevin, of his colleagues at the Mercersburg Seminary in the 1840 s and 1850 s, and of some who in those same years objected to Mercersburg views. For a clearer picture of the United States’ unduly neglected theological history of the period—as well as a most welcome stimulus to theological reflection in our own day—the edition is a godsend.

Nevin, whose biography and general theological contributions are spelled out with helpful detail in the introduction to this volume, was one of a number of consequential American theologians in antebellum America whose works have never received the attention they deserve. At the time, attention in American religious life was largely focused on the energetic evangelists, church-planters, denomination-organizers, and publicists whose practical labors were achieving the most rapid Christianization of an expanding society in modern history. Between 1790 and 1860, while the U.S. population was increasing by a factor of eight, the number of churches was multiplying much more rapidly—Baptists by fourteen times, Methodist by twenty-eight, and Disciples or Restorationists by an unfathomable multiple (since there had been none of these churches in 1790 and over two thousand in 1860). Labors by those on the sectarian margins who exerted a strong appeal for the public at large, like the Adventist William Miller and the Mormon Joseph Smith, or of those among Jews and Catholics who were trying to establish a foothold in a new world very different from what they had known in Europe, also fascinated contemporary observers as they have historians since. Yet if much justifies a focus on the dynamic movers and shakers of American religious life in this period, one negative result has been relative inattention to the American Christian leaders who were important as much for what they thought as for what they did.

Such ones have of course never been entirely neglected. E. Brooks Holifield’s landmark Theology in America: Christian Thought from the Age of the Puritans to the Civil War is only the most comprehensive of a number of appreciative studies of the era’s theologians to appear in recent years. Nonetheless, once historical attention moves past Jonathan Edwards, examples drop off quickly of serious attention to later Christian thinkers.

That historiographical slighting represents a significant loss. As readers of this volume will recognize immediately, John W. Nevin’s reflections on the mystical presence in the Lord’s Supper is a serious treatise about a perennially important Christian reality. Its historical learning, biblical amplitude, dialectical skill, philosophical self-consciousness, and theological insight are all at or near the level of acumen displayed by contemporary European theologians who have been the object of much more extensive historical attention.

One of the driving motives behind the appearance of this series is the claim that the work of Nevin and his Mercersburg colleague, Philip Schaff, deserve fuller attention today because of its intrinsic quality. That is a fair claim. It is also true, however, that others in the American theological firmament, with whom Mercersburg often found itself in disagreement, were estimable theologians as well. The debate on the proper understanding of the Lord’s Supper that Nevin carried on with his former teacher, Charles Hodge of Princeton Theological Seminary, is one example of high-level theological reasoning on both sides. If, in my opinion, Nevin was the clear winner in that debate, Hodge did much better in some of his other engagements, as on Christianity as a way of life, on the meaning of baptism as an ecumenical Christian rite, or on the necessity of an Augustinian view of human nature.

Whatever one’s specific judgment about the theological reasoning of figures like Nevin or Hodge—or contemporaries like the Methodist Nathan Bangs, the Baptist Francis Wayland, the Lutheran Samuel Schmucker, the Congregationalists E. A. Park and N. W. Taylor, the Catholics Orestes Brownson and Francis Patrick Kenrick, and many more—fair-minded readers should recognize that they were doing consequential work. That recognition, in turn, opens the way to fresh historical recognition.

Much more is at stake in a series like this one, however, than simply better history. At stake is also the potential for direct encouragement to think through, or to rethink, exceedingly important matters of Christian faith and practice. Those who carefully follow Nevin’s reasoning on the mystical presence, for example, will find multiplied occasions to consider basic Christian questions more carefully—not only about the Lord’s Supper as one specific aspect of Christian existence, but about an entire nexus of exceedingly important questions dealing with the nature of divine revelation, the human need for God, the person and work of Christ, and much more.

In a word, those who take seriously the works to be featured in this exciting new publishing enterprise are in for the right kind of historical education and the best kind of theological challenge. May the announced later volumes come speedily, and may attentive readers multiply as they come forth.

Mark A. Noll

Francis A. McAnaney Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame

Author of America’s God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln.

Editorial Approach and Acknowledgments

by W. Bradford Littlejohn and Linden J. DeBie

The purpose of this volume, and indeed, of the entire series, is to reprint the key writings of the Mercersburg theologians in a way that is both fully faithful to the original and yet easily accessible to nonspecialist modern readers. These twin goals, often in conflict, have determined our editorial approach throughout. We have sought to do justice to both by being very hesitant to make any alterations to the original, but being very free with additions to the original in the form of annotations.

The entirety of the original texts are republished here, with the exception of a section of The Doctrine of the Reformed Church on the Lord’s Supper, which exactly (word for word) reproduces a section of The Mystical Presence. This has been omitted, and the omission clearly marked. We have decided to leave spelling, capitalization, and emphasis exactly as in the original, except in cases of clear typographical errors, which have been silently corrected. We have, however, taken a few liberties in altering punctuation (essentially just comma usage, with which Nevin is exceedingly prodigal) for clarity and ease of reading, as well as adopting standard modern conventions such as the italicization of book titles and foreign-language words. Original section headings have been retained as well. The entirety of the text, however, has been re-typeset and re-formatted to render it as clear and accessible as possible; pagination, of course, has accordingly been changed. The Mystical Presence portion of the text was originally digitized and formatted by Augustine Thompson, OP, and is re-used with his permission.

Original footnotes are retained, though for ease of typesetting, they have been subsumed within the series of numbered footnotes which includes the annotations we have added to this edition. Our annotations and additions are all marked in brackets, whether that be within a footnote that was original, or around an entire footnote when it is one that we have added.

Source citations in the original have been retained in their original form, but where necessary, we have provided expanded citation information in brackets, and have sought to direct the reader toward modern editions of these works, where they exist. Where citations are lacking in the original, we have tried as much as possible to provide them in our footnotes. (In general, both for these works, and for additional literature cited in our annotations, only abbreviated citations are provided in the footnotes; for full bibliographical information, see the bibliography.)

In the annotations we have added, we have attempted to be comprehensive without becoming cumbersome. In addition to offering citations for works referenced in the original, these additions fall under three further headings:

1) Translation

2) Unfamiliar terms and historical figures

3) Additional source material

We have attempted to be comprehensive in providing translations of any untranslated foreign-language quotations in these works, and have wherever possible made use of existing translations in standard modern editions, to which the reader is referred. Ryan Handermann served as an indefatigable research assistant in tracking down these translations, and, where they were unavailable, used his own extensive knowledge of Latin to provide a translation. We are deeply grateful to him for his assistance.

Additional annotations serve to elucidate any unfamiliar words, concepts, or (especially) historical figures to which Nevin refers, and where applicable, to provide references to sources where the reader may pursue further information. Interestingly, one of our chief aids in compiling this information was Philip Schaff’s own Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge, 13 (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 1954). Other reference works include The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, edited by F. L. Cross, Second Edition (Oxford: OUP, 1993) and The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by Paul Edwards (London: Macmillan, 1967).

Finally, we have occasionally included references to other passages and texts within the Mercersburg corpus (many of them slated to appear in later volumes of this series) dealing with similar themes, so that readers may know where to follow up on particular matters of interest to them. Adam S. Borneman supplied many of these notes for us, for which we are very grateful.

Throughout, we have occasionally relied upon the annotations in the 1966 edition of The Mystical Presence, and Other Writings on the Eucharist, edited by Bard Thompson and George Bricker, both for citation information for primary sources, and for other helpful information. In the latter case, you will find such contributions acknowledged by explicit reference to Thompson and Bricker.

Acknowledgments

As the general editor, I would like to take this opportunity to thank Keith Mathison, Rich Lusk, Jonathan Bonomo, and Adam Borneman for initiating the email exchanges back in 2010 that helped lead to the idea for this grand project, and for Christian Amondson of Wipf and Stock, who took my tentative suggestions for more Mercersburg reprints and steered them in this ambitious direction. Thanks also to the many others (most of whom are now planning to participate in some way in the project) who enthusiastically encouraged and supported the idea after its initial conception, providing helpful input in the scope, structure, and methods of the project—especially Bill Evans, who, along with Adam Borneman and Keith Mathison has provided advice throughout the course of the project. I would like to thank all those who bravely committed to serve as editors for volumes in the series, lending their momentum to the project when it was just the harebrained scheme of a PhD student. Even braver in this regard were Deborah C. Clemens and the Mercersburg Society that she presides over, who committed generous financial support for the project early on. And most of all, I thank my wife, for tolerating my investment in a massive time commitment that left her dealing with a cantankerous toddler far more than her fair share. For this current volume, of course, I am profoundly grateful to Linden DeBie, who agreed to take on the editorship of this first volume despite having committed already to editing the second volume and despite the urgent timetable and short notice. Throughout the process, he has been tireless and immensely gracious in receiving my input, solicited and unsolicited, and patient as I tried to iron out all the kinks in our methodology and set the right precedents for future volumes. I expect that in many such relationships, the strain of the project can be enough to dissolve existing friendships; I am happy to say that for this project, precisely the opposite has occurred.

* * * * *

As the volume editor, I have discovered what it means to have a dedicated editorial team behind you! The comprehensiveness and overall strength of this volume (for there are other editions of the Mystical Presence) are due to the tireless efforts of Bradford Littlejohn and the talented circle of friends and colleagues he has brought to this task. Having several sets of eyes to translate and scrutinize Latin texts (this is the first edition with complete language translations), search out obscure theologians from ancient history, advise this editor on countless theological and historical matters, and correct the inevitable oversights of one pair of eyes, has added untold worth to this volume. It truly can be said that this is not the work of one editor, but the cooperative effort of colleagues committed to bringing further light and study to the field of Mercersburg research.

In particular, we would both like to thank Dr. Nick Needham of Highland Theological College for giving thorough proofreading and input on chapter drafts, using his encyclopedic knowledge of church history and doing extensive research to assist on many of the annotations. He has been an enormous help throughout the process. Adam Borneman also provided input on some of the early sections of the text. Ryan Handermann, as mentioned above, lent generously of his time and Latin expertise in translating footnotes and chasing down obscure Reformation sources.

Editor’s Introduction

by Linden J. DeBie

Nevin’s Life and Work

John Williamson Nevin was born on February 20 , 1803 , in Herron’s Branch, near Shippensburg, a quaint Pennsylvania farming community. Nevin’s father was a successful, well-educated gentleman farmer of Scots-Irish extraction who raised his children in the tradition of the Westminster Catechism. The children began their training with simple Bible questions, followed by the Mother’s Catechism, then the Assembly’s Shorter Catechism, and finally the Assembly’s Larger Catechism. Indeed, the early emphasis on learning was specifically meant to foster induction into the Presbyterian religion. ²

Likewise, church life was essential to that budding faith and fundamental to the young person’s experience of corporate religion. Preaching was central to the Reformed, and the sacraments played a vital role in the community’s shared religious experience. As we learn from Nevin’s biographical sketch, his fond memories of the sacramental seasons of the church, which were celebratory and protracted, instilled in him a passion for the Eucharist that would inspire his most famous work, The Mystical Presence.³

In 1816 Nevin entered Union College in Schenectady, New York. At that time Union was under the leadership of Dr. Eliphalet Nott, whose skill as an administrator (and fund-raiser) had lifted the reputation of the institution considerably, so much so that the elder Nevin decided to enroll his son there in spite of his weak physical condition and what today we would recognize as mild depression. Indeed, Nevin’s dyspepsia under its worst form as it was called, was an early sign that Nevin would become a lifelong valetudinarian.⁴

Although Nevin was raised deeply confessional and schooled in the system of the catechism, he along with college students throughout the East was being exposed to popular religious revivals and to what the critics of this religious frame of mind (and Nevin later in life) would call enthusiastic religion. One of its chief marks was the experience of conversion which Nevin underwent in 1819–20, during his junior year. Later in life, Nevin would write that the whole experience was painful to him and the system misguided. At Mercersburg he became a leading voice warning Protestants against new measures revivalism and cautioned against its excesses as is evident in his popular tract, The Anxious Bench.⁵ But here in Schenectady, at the mercy of the powerful evangelist and pulpiteer, Asahel Nettleton, Nevin fell in with the other students swayed by the emotional appeal of this dramatic movement.⁶ In spite of physical and emotional troubles, Nevin graduated with honor in 1821.

Following his graduation, Nevin was undecided as to his future and any particular vocation. After some crooked halting, he decided to study at Princeton Seminary, which turned out to be a safe and secure harbor for the anxiety-prone young man. Here he was comforted by the warm religious sentiments of the beloved Archibald Alexander and edified by the influential historian Samuel Miller. Charles Hodge, who would become his rival during the Mercersburg years, had just joined the faculty and taught biblical languages. It was during Nevin’s study with Hodge that his life took a momentous turn. He was about to give up the study of Hebrew, questioning its usefulness, when his roommate advised him not to retreat but to master the subject. As a result Nevin became the best Hebrew scholar at Princeton and when Hodge went to Europe to study Greek and Hebrew, Nevin was appointed assistant teacher until Hodge’s return.⁷ It was during those two years that he wrote his popular history called Biblical Antiquities based on the work of Jahn.⁸ Nevin now had a vocation in mind: teaching.

Upon Hodge’s return Nevin was asked to fill the vacancy at the new Presbyterian seminary in Allegheny, Pennsylvania.⁹ He joined Dr. Halsey on the faculty of Western Theological Seminary in 1830 and was appointed the chair of Biblical Literature. During his tenure there he wrote for the Friend (of the American Anti-Slavery Society organized in Philadelphia), which was a small literary and morals weekly. It was in Pittsburgh that Nevin developed a reputation as an antislavery crusader and proponent of temperance. His writings led to angry denouncements by the wealthy slave owners, and a prominent physician described Nevin as the most dangerous man in all Pittsburgh.¹⁰ But due to his widening interest in literature, a significant change would soon occur that has led to much speculation.

Even before Pittsburgh, Nevin was reading outside of the Princeton corpus. As a young and impressionable student, like so many others of his time, he began to flirt with the rationalist literature of Germany.¹¹ In his autobiography he recounts that he was nearly seduced by its cold logic. Indeed, when Nevin left to teach at Western he believed himself under its influence. Still, in most ways he remained the modern Puritan of the Princeton stamp he would later come to disdain. Nevertheless his transformation to idealism and to high-church sacramentalism was underway. At Pittsburgh he ventured into literature untypical of the Puritan brand he wore. He enjoyed Romantic poetry, especially that of Coleridge. He continued in his admiration of the Cambridge Platonists as well as the work of the Puritans, Baxter and Howe, but now he hazarded into economics, biology, and philosophy. However, it was history that became his passion. He fell in love with work of the German Mediating historian, August Neander, who he claimed had awakened him to the living story of history and its evolving character.¹² His early wrestling with and eventual acceptance of the idealistic theology behind the work of Neander and others would seriously erode his confidence in the Scottish commonsense realism popular at Princeton.¹³ Soon he would reject what had been the unquestioned philosophical framework informing his faith.

Although Nevin’s transformation from commonsense realist to idealist remains a topic of debate, the path of Nevin’s course is clear. For the better part of his Pittsburgh years, his theological interests were exceedingly moralistic and focused on contemporary issues, such as slavery, temperance, and interfaith organizing. Here the Puritan-like character of his focus is obvious. However, all that came to an abrupt halt halfway through his Pittsburgh stay. After 1835 he no longer published anything on the subject of slavery and soon fell silent on the topic altogether.¹⁴ His attention had shifted to the study of history.

The study of church history was leading Nevin to jettison his Princeton orthodoxy and experiment with idealism. Eventually he would become a convinced idealist, but the transformation was by no means as sudden as his conversion at Union. There is evidence that Nevin was driven to the deep study of history because he had inherited the department of church history at Western in 1837, but the study of history had also become a safe haven providing him solace at a time when the Presbyterian Church was falling apart.¹⁵ His obvious distaste for the rancor dividing Presbyterians into New and Old Schools frustrated him. Nevin was slightly right of center in the debate that ultimately split the Presbyterian Church. But he like Hodge sought reconciliation and when that seemed beyond sight he despaired. In the end, he would not involve himself in the debates that raged. Instead he hid himself in the German literature. So smitten was he with the approach of scholars like Neander, that he mastered the language in order to read them in the original.

For a number of reasons, Western Seminary was on a weak footing and Nevin was unhappy there. One reason was lack of money, and Nevin was constantly aware that the seminary may not survive. But his personal unhappiness stemmed from criticism of his stand on slavery, and the trouble caused by his openness to New School concerns. Western was controlled by Old School interests with little sympathy for Nevin’s egalitarianism. About that same time he was offered a teaching position at the German Reformed Seminary in Mercersburg, PA. At first he refused, but the Synod wisely chose to approach him based on his sense of duty to God and that seemed to have made the difference.¹⁶ In 1840 Nevin became professor of theology and joined Frederic Augustus Rauch who, as headmaster of the academy or preparatory school, would share responsibilities with Nevin at both the seminary and Marshall College, as the academy was called. Rauch certainly aided Nevin in his growing appreciation for German philosophy and theology. Rauch was himself a disciple of Daub and a member of the Mediating school of German theology. However, it is only by way of anecdotal information that we can speculate as to depth of that influence. The men spoke highly of each other and their biographers mention long conversations and significant collaboration. Others note the short span of their relationship. In any case, Nevin’s growing interest in German culture and literature was surely nurtured by Rauch.¹⁷

However, Rauch soon became ill and died and Nevin took on leadership of both the seminary and college. It was brought to his attention that a confessional malaise was plaguing the denomination and hampering his efforts as the denomination’s chief fund-raiser. It was also suggested that a renewed interest in the Reformed’s beloved confession, the Heidelberg Catechism, might bring upon a renaissance of religious commitment. So Nevin decided to immerse himself in the study of the catechism. He would publish its history and genius in order to restore it to its place of prominence, all in anticipation of recovering for the denomination a renewed sense of history and purpose as well as financial support for its institutions.¹⁸

As much as Nevin left Pittsburgh the great controversialist, he entered Mercersburg an entirely different kind of controversialist and indeed, controversy would be his constant companion. Where before he was enmeshed in controversy over his stand against slavery and the moral issues of the day, in Mercersburg it was issues of philosophy and theology and of the central question of the church that embroiled him in often angry debate. Even as he prepared his articles on the Heidelberg Catechism in all innocence, his discovery that Calvin taught the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist and that that doctrine was reflected in the catechism led to charges of heresy against him by members of the Classis of Philadelphia.¹⁹ Shortly after that, in 1843, he became embroiled in another early confrontation over the methods employed by revivalist preachers. Nevin was highly critical of even his own colleagues in the German Reformed Church when they employed methods that he believed denigrated the system of the catechism. He said as much in his widely read but provocative tract called The Anxious Bench.

Revivals were very popular and were commonplace throughout the Protestant world of the nineteenth century. The denominational periodicals were filled with glowing reports of the success of revivals in winning souls to Christ. And Nevin wasn’t against them per se, except as some of them became extremely emotional affairs far from the decorum required of Reformed worship. This was especially the case with what became known as new measures revivalism in the style of Charles Finney, for example. Nevin characterized them as filled with excessive emotion, subjectivism, and irrational exuberance. Certainly the healthy somber revivals of the past had effectively addressed the serious problem of dead formalism, but the new measures revivalism in way of Finney had become a system unto itself; a system Nevin believed was at war with the confessional church and its established forms. It was also a system at war with the ancient catholic faith. Nevin found these revivals to be essentially Pelagian in character. They implied a justification that was based on feeling rather than the objective fact of religious faith.²⁰

With the loss of Rauch, Nevin was essentially without help in the mounting duties of the seminary and college. So the Synod called Philip Schaff, a young Swiss/German historian destined to become one of America’s greatest church historians.²¹ Soon after his arrival he published his Principle of Protestantism, which Nevin translated and wrote the introduction. Nevin’s sermon, Catholic Unity, which he had preached the previous year at the Triennial Convention of the Dutch and German Reformed Churches in Harrisburg, PA, was included as an appendix. The volume immediately set off a firestorm of controversy, for several reasons, but perhaps the most heated debate was over the seminary professors’ shared idea that the Protestant church developed directly out of the Roman Catholic Church.²² Hatred of Roman Catholics in America was fierce and most Protestants believed that Protestantism was simply a recovery of original Christianity.²³ This idea, along with the allegation that the seminary professors taught the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist, led the Classis of Philadelphia to bring charges against Nevin and Schaff at the Synod in York, PA in 1845. The professors were found not guilty of all charges by a near-unanimous vote. But allegations and suspicion about the teachings of the professors remained. To a large extent the Mystical Presence was published in 1846 to vindicate the position taken by the Mercersburg professors and establish once and for all the true doctrine of the Reformed on the Lord’s Supper.

The Mystical Presence was Nevin’s clarion call for Protestants to awaken to the fact that the Lord’s Supper forms the very heart of the whole Christian worship.²⁴ Furthermore, said Nevin, it had been so from the very start. In The Mystical Presence Nevin maintained that John Calvin, the foremost architect of Reformed doctrine, included the real spiritual presence of Christ in the Eucharist. Of course, Nevin made these bold claims at a time when a more Zwinglian understanding of the Supper had gained prominence throughout Protestant America and was thought by many to be authoritative for the Reformed. In The Mystical Presence Nevin sought to return the Reformed to their Calvinistic roots by demonstrating Calvin’s belief that in the Holy Supper we not only commemorate the cross of Christ, but we are also united to the real person of Christ by means of the Holy Spirit, both to his divinity and his humanity. Moreover, in a more recent advance in Nevin’s own theology, he included the idea that as much as we are united to Adam as our forefather, so we are, by means of the sacred meal, united to Christ as the second Adam. As Christ represented all humanity in its redeemed form, he overcame the curse we shared in the first Adam and repaired what was broken in our relationship with God. Nevin makes his case through a powerful sequence of historical, scientific (read: systematic-theological), and biblical argument.

As a way of summing up the German philosophical commitments that now undergirded his theological paradigm, Nevin had prefaced The Mystical Presence with a recent essay by the Mediating theologian Karl Ullmann, entitled The Distinctive Character of Christianity. The essay, which Nevin translated, is a wonderful example of Mediating thought displaying the style of speculative philosophy and theology popular at the time in Germany. It sets forth the historical dialectic made popular in Germany by Hegel in which history is a dynamic process with each epic being negated, that is, subsumed, overcome, and, of course, improved upon by the next epoch. Nevin and Schaff were convinced America would be the next great development in church history. But the speculative approach was considered by Hodge neology and utterly misguided.

Two years later Charles Hodge published his review of The Mystical Presence, panning it and rejecting Nevin’s historical argument.²⁵ Beyond the usual scope of a review Hodge included what he believed was the true doctrine of the Reformed on the Lord’s Supper. It led to a bitter controversy with Nevin responding subsequently in a long series of articles published in the Weekly Messenger of the German Reformed Church.²⁶ There Nevin applied both German philosophy and historical science, much of it his own previously published research²⁷ but also adding new material. He reproduced Hodge’s argument in sections followed by his own rebuttal. As a result he created a fascinating literary debate, which was the first of its kind in America.²⁸ It was published under the title Dr. Hodge on the Mystical Presence. Still, he could not hope to reach the larger audience of Hodge’s well-known and influential journal, Biblical Repertory and Princeton Review. So the alumni of the seminary launched the Mercersburg Review under the direction of Nevin. Nevin then reworked the material of the debate, adding new material but for the most part leaving out the philosophical argument, stating that his purpose was to provide the historical evidence upon which The Mystical Presence was based.²⁹ Scholars are in agreement that this first, monumental work of American eucharistic history was unique and brilliant. Effectively, Nevin demolished the arguments of Hodge and Hodge chose not to reply.

The Doctrine of the Reformed Church on the Lord’s Supper constituted an expansion and reworking of Nevin’s earlier reply to Hodge in the Weekly Messenger. Here Nevin first restated the fundamental doctrine of The Mystical Presence, alongside a counterstatement summarizing Hodge’s doctrine, before putting both to the test at the bar of history. He methodically presented a parade of Reformed confessions, along with a host of sixteenth-century theologians, to confirm the position he had taken in The Mystical Presence. And while it restated Nevin’s earlier position, he went into greater detail over the historical emergence of the doctrine, and the subtlety of Calvin’s sacramental position, by placing him in debate with his Gnesio-Lutheran adversary, Joachim Westphal.

Nevin’s clash with Hodge became portentous of clashes to come. In 1850 Nevin wrote several articles including Wilberforce on the Incarnation, Brownson’s Quarterly Review, and Natural and Supernatural; Rev. of Natural and the Supernatural, as Together Consisting of One System of God, by Horace Bushnell. They provide excellent examples of Nevin’s broad reach, self-confidence, and critical bent as the theological representative of the German Reformed. Later (1852) he would review the work of the outstanding German Mediating theologian, Isaac Dorner, in his Dorner’s History of Protestant Theology, and when Dorner came out against him in his Liturgical Controversy in the Reformed Church, Nevin would reply with fervor, articulating a Christology of extraordinary depth and creativity.³⁰

Still it would appear that the controversies deeply affected Nevin in spite of his bravado. The years of 1851 to 1852 were described as the years of Nevin’s dizziness.³¹ Likely he had experienced near nervous collapse. However, in spite of his emotional crisis he launched into a serious of articles on St. Cyprian, which appeared to many as the prelude to his defection to the Roman Catholic Church.³² Instead, they were for Nevin his concluding case for the ancient apostolic faith as the exclusive property of the one holy Catholic Church. However, the articles also celebrated the recent historic advances that he believed would launch the church into a new era, the era he and others called the Church of St. John. With those articles he proposed the closing of the Mercersburg Review.

Little if any rift developed between Nevin and Schaff during their years together at the seminary. But if there were a rift, it was over Nevin’s articles on Early Christianity and St. Cyprian. Schaff later confessed he disagreed with Nevin’s Romanizing tendencies. At the root of it was Nevin’s concept of ordination, which many in the denomination and beyond believed was more Roman Catholic than Reformed.³³

Due to economic necessity, the college relocated to Lancaster, Pennsylvania, in the spring of 1853 while the seminary remained in Mercersburg. This resulted in Nevin’s first retirement, which lasted until 1861. Previously, in 1854, he had moved his family to Carlisle, but in 1855 he returned to Lancaster. He continued to write and supply vacant pulpits in the area and became active in the denomination’s efforts to revise the liturgy. Naturally the resulting liturgy would reflect his high-churchmanship and its forms would exude his evangelical catholicism. In 1857 the Provisional Liturgy was published by the liturgical committee. Once again, Nevin was surrounded by controversy, as can be witnessed in the exchange between Nevin and Dorner. The published liturgy, which was likely the highest ever produced by a Protestant church of that time,³⁴ was never widely used.³⁵

In 1862 the quiet farms around Mercersburg were raided by Confederate troops and the fierce warfare forced the closing of the seminary in 1863. Schaff took a teaching position at Andover and Nevin gave up most of his denominational obligations. From 1862 to 1866 he lectured at the college primarily in the department of history, but he was in demand as a lecturer in an amazing variety of fields. Three years later, the chapel of Franklin and Marshall College was opened and Nevin became its pastor. Former president James Buchanan was frequently in attendance and Nevin became a spiritual mentor to him. At that time the college once again experienced financial difficulty and Nevin was called upon to be their provisional president. The war had drastically depleted enrollment. For a short time the college did well, but soon it was again steeped in financial trouble. Ultimately Nevin resigned in frustration (1876).

Toward the end of his life, Nevin pursued what had always been an interest of his, mysticism, by way of the celebrated Swedish mystic, Emanuel Swedenborg, whom Nevin had taken an interest in. In 1876 he wrote several articles for the Reformed Church Review having to do with deep issues of spirituality.³⁶ They cannot be said to be mysticism per se, but rather reflect Nevin’s interest in the subject in his declining years and the influence Swedenborg had on him. Although Nevin continued to write for the Reformed Church Review from time to time, in 1883 his failing eyesight ended his brilliant contributions to American religious literature. Three years later, in 1886, Nevin died, finally finding peace after a life of precarious health and bitter controversy.

The Occasion for Writing The Mystical Presence

Scholars of the Mercersburg movement agree that the immediate cause for writing The Mystical Presence was the charges and suspicion that preceded and followed the heresy trial which occurred at the Synod in