Hodge-Nevin

Hodge-Nevin June 1, 2016

In the mid-19th century, Princeton’s Charles Hodge engaged in a public debate with the Mercersburg theologian John Williamson Nevin about the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist. It was sparked by Nevin’s book on The Mystical Presence, published in 1846, which Hodge reviewed in the Princeton Theological Journal in 1848.

Like all debates about the Eucharist, this one involved far more than the Eucharist. Divergent ecclesiologies were deeply entangled in the debate.

Hodge’s Systematic Theology contains no section on ecclesiology. Hodge intended to add a fourth volume to his text dealing with the doctrine of the church, but didn’t live to complete the task. So the oversight was not deliberate. Yet it tells us something about Hodge’s ecclesial vision that he could include a long section on sacramental theology in volume 3 without developing it within an overt doctrine of the church.

His ecclesiological introduction to Discussions in Church Polity indicate some of the reasons behind that. Following one of the threads of the Reformed tradition, Hodge insisted that the church could not be defined as a visible society. Such a definition does not, Hodge argued, fit the biblical terminology for the church, or the biblical descriptions of the church. When the New Testament speaks of the church, it speaks of a communion of holy people, of the called and justified. Since every visible body of believers includes some who are unholy and unbelieving, the New Testament writers cannot be speaking of such a body. They must be speaking of the invisible church of the elect, which is not coterminous with any historical formation of the church.

Hodge argues that this is the position of the creed, which defines the church as a “communion of saints”: ” the conception of the Church as the communion of saints, does not include the idea of any external organization. The bond of union may be spiritual. There may be communion without external organized union. The Church, therefore, according to this view, is not essentially a visible society; it is not a corporation which ceases to exist if the external bond of union be dissolved. It may be proper that such union should exist; it may be true that it has always existed ; but it is not necessary. The Church, as such, is not a visible society” (5).

Hodge identified a number of ways in which the church is visible. Believers are visible, not spirits or angels, and so the communion of saints is visible in the saints. Saints produce good works, which “manifest their faith.” Because the saints have been effectually called, are separated from the world and “animated by a different spirit, and are distinguished by a different life.” Perhaps most importantly, “The true Church is visible in the external Church, just as the souI is visible in the body. That is, as by the means of the body we know that the soul is there, so by means of the external Church, we know where the true Church is. . . . the external Church, as embracing all who profess the true religion — with their various organizations, their confessions of the truth, their temples, and their Christian worship— make it apparent that the true Church, the Body of Christ, exists, and where it is” (56-7). Hodge thus has a doctrine of the visible church, yet he thinks it would be as great an error to identify that visible organization with the church as it would be to confuse the body with the soul.

He dismisses Roman Catholic and high Anglican ecclesiologies as “Ritualist,” since they identify the true church as those who participate in sacraments and live in submission to some form of prelacy.

Nevin, for his part, hardly fits the caricature of the “ritualist,” though Hodge considered him such. For Nevin, though, the notion that the church was essentially invisible was a denial of the import of the basic confession of Christian faith, that the Second Person of the Trinity was made flesh. Nevin considered the church an extension through time and space of the mystical presence of Christ, and it can be no more disembodied than He can.

Nevin believed that the church was a genuine mediator of grace, through sacraments as through its other institutions and practices. As he wrote, ” The idea of the Church, as thus standing between Christ and single Christians, implies of necessity visible organization, common worship, a regular public ministry and ritual, and to crown all, especially grace bearing sacraments” (quoted in KH Steeper, Between Mercersburg and Oxford: The Ecclesiology of John Williamson Nevin, 47). As Steeper summarizes, “Mercersburg Theology is a churchly and sacramental system where the church is truly the body and presence of Christ in the midst of history. For this reason the church is seen as both divine and human. It is a mediator of God’s grace through the Word preached and the Sacraments that serve as ‘seals’ for the spiritual mysteries that they present. Finally, its liturgy is Christocentric and Incarnational as well, moving away again from the ‘subjective’ and private judgment” (48).

It’s no surprise that theologians so fundamentally at odds would disagree vehemently about the real presence.


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