Born of Water and the Spirit presents essays on the sacraments by the three major representatives of ""Mercersburg Theology,"" John Nevin, Philip Schaff, and Emanuel Gerhart. It focuses on Mercersburgs doctrine of baptism and Christian nurture, attempts to correct putative deficiencies of the major Reformed trajectories (e.g., New England and Princeton), and vigorously critiques the anti-sacramental animus of revivalistic evangelicalism. Mercersburg understood baptism as initiating a person (adult or infant) into the sacramental life of the church. Baptism and Eucharist were objective,...

Description: The Mystical Presence (1846), John Williamson Nevin's magnum opus, was an attempt to combat the sectarianism and subjectivism of nineteenth-century American religion by recovering the robust sacramental and incarnational theology of the Protestant Reformation, enriched with the categories of German idealism. In it, he makes the historical case for the spiritual real presence as the authentic Reformed doctrine of the Eucharist, and explains the theological and philosophical context that render the doctrine intelligible. The 1850 article ""The Doctrine of the Reformed Church on the...

The mid-nineteenth century is a gold mine for contemporary scholars interested in American Protestant ecclesiology. There one will find the extensive writings of John Nevin who came to the notice of the theological world with The Anxious Bench, a critique of the ""quackery"" of Protestant revivalism. Influenced by a critical appropriation of cutting-edge contemporary German theology, he came to believe that the church was not ""invisible,"" but the visible manifestation of Jesus Christs incarnate life. Christians were to pursue unity, not in external institutional arrangements, but as unity...