Philosophy and the Contemporary World

John Williamson Nevin (1803-86) was an innovative and controversial American theologian. Although reared in Presbyterianism, he became the premier exponent of the ""Mercersburg Theology"" of the German Reformed Church. He promoted a view of Christianity as evolving, focused on the incarnation, and centered in the sacraments.Adam S. Borneman is a Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) pastor and independent scholar based in Atlanta, Georgia, where he currently serves as program director with The Ministry Collaborative. He is the author of Church, Sacrament, and American Democracy: The Social and Political Dimensions of John Williamson Nevin's Theology of Incarnation (2011).Patrick Carey is emeritus professor of theology at Marquette University, former chair of Marquette's Department of Theology, a past president of the American Catholic Historical Association, and author or editor of over twenty books and numerous articles on American Catholic life and thought.

These essays by John Nevin, theologian of Mercersburg Theology, are united by two primary themes: Part 1 documents Nevin's noteworthy and innovative application of idealist philosophy to Reformed theology in antebellum America. American Christians largely rejected any inherited philosophical discipline or categories, claiming the right to invent moral and religious reality without attention to Christian tradition. The paradoxical result was authoritarian rationalism: religious doctrines imitated scientific reasoning (""common-sense"" philosophy) but were imposed by ecclesiastical fiat. In contrast, Nevin summoned his fellow theologians to pay fresh attention to the Idea: the rational unpacking of transcendent truths in being, moral right, and revelation. Part 2 then documents his criticism of the predominant Christian alternatives in the mid-nineteenth century. Such alternatives were deeply flawed, Nevin thought, as they necessitated that supernatural reality be experienced through an external authority demanding assent and obedience--the pope, a body of bishops, an authoritative Bible. But for Nevin, ""supernature"" is Jesus Christ himself who generates and sustains the reality of which the church speaks. Thus the highest Idea was Jesus Christ, now incarnate in the history and sacramental and liturgical life of the church.