Nevin’s Lament, Nevin’s Hope

The following remarks were given to introduce the first annual Nevin Lectures, February 7, 2014.

Trinity House [now Theopolis] was founded in 2012 to promote the reformation of the church by training pastors, future pastors, and lay people in Scripture and liturgical theology. We believe the church exists for the life of the world; the waters of life flow from the Edenic sanctuary to the four corners of the earth. Through Water and Word, in a feast of Bread and Wine, the Spirit of Jesus shapes us into God’s agents to transfigure creation from glory to glory. By fostering reformation in the church, we hope also to contribute to the renewal of culture.

No deformation of Christ’s body is as tragic as our disfiguring fragmentation; nothing has mutilated the gospel so much as our rancorous and uncharitable disunity. Trinity House Institute’s commitment to reformation thus includes a commitment to promoting catholic unity among the people of God. Hence the Nevin Lectures.

The lecture series is named for John Williamson Nevin, a nineteenth-century American theologian and educator who, along with the church historian Philip Schaff, developed what came to be known as the “Mercersburg Theology.” Nevin was, in the words of Daryl Hart, a “high church Calvinist,” dedicated to nurturing catholic unity within the body of Christ.

In an 1844 sermon on Ephesian 4, Nevin declared that “unity of the church . . . is a cardinal truth in the Christian system,” involved in the very “conception of Christian salvation itself.” When we lose sight of the unity of the church, we “make shipwreck of the gospel.” This unity cannot remain “inward and invisible” but “must appear externally, in the world.” If the church is one in essence then she should be unified also in “an outward and visible way.” One body is the “normal character of the Church,” and anything less is a “serious defect.”

Any honest assessment, Nevin said, must conclude the church, most especially in America, is seriously defective: “Our various sects, as they actually exist, are an immense evil in the Church. Whatever may be said of the possibility of their standing in friendly correspondence, and stimulating the whole body to a more vigorous life, it is certain that they mar the unity of this body in fact, and deprive it of its proper beauty and strength. . . . Our sects, as they actually stand at this time, are a vast reproach to the Christian cause. By no possibility could they be countenanced and approved as good, by the Lord Jesus Christ, if he should appear again in the world as the visible head of his people.”

Nevin admitted that the wounds in Christ’s body couldn’t be healed through crusades or programs. The first step is for Christians to “lay to heart the evil that is comprehended in the actual disunion and division,” to lament the “calamity” of a fractured church.

Nevin lamented the fact that the church’s disunity was not lamented: “What is most deplorable . . . is that so many should be willing to acquiesce in it, as something necessary and never to be changed. And what is most needed in these circumstances . . . is that anxiety and concern should take the place of such indifference, and that men should be brought to acknowledge openly the reigning wrong of these divisions in the Church, and to inquire earnestly after some way of escape.”

Yet Nevin remained hopeful. Reflecting on Jesus’ prayer in John 17, Nevin said that the present order of the church cannot be the final order, and he looked ahead to a time “when the prayer of Christ that his Church may be one, will appear gloriously fulfilled in its actual character and state, throughout the whole world.”

We must wait on God, but waiting is not inaction. Nevin called on Christians to cultivate “Christian charity in the bosom of the Church itself.” “It is the duty of the Church,” he said, “to observe and improve all opportunities, by which it is made possible in any measure, from time to time, to advance in a visible way the interest of catholic unity. . . . Whatever can serve in any way to bring together the moral dispersions of the house of Israel, must be counted worthy of the most earnest regard.”

The Nevin Lectures are, we trust, one of these opportunities. Echoing Nevin’s lament, but also animated by Nevin’s hope, this lecture series will provide an annual venue for honest, theologically serious, charitable conversation and debate about the issues that divide us.

We have no illusions that we can solve the divisions of centuries in four lectures over a single weekend. But we are encouraged by Nevin’s observation: “Every instance . . . in which the open correspondence and communion of particular sections of the Church, is made to assume . . . a more intimate character than it had before, deserves to be hailed as . . . an approximation towards the unity, which the whole body is destined finally to reach.”

The Nevin Lectures series is a small step, but even the smallest step can nurture what Nevin thought most needful, an “inward sympathy and agreement between the parties it brings together.”