Hart On Nevin's View Of The Church

D.G. Hart has some very interesting insights into the mind of a unique man in American Reformed theology, John Williamson Nevin:

“The occasion for Nevin’s resumption of disputing with Hodge was the publication in 1856 of the Princeton theologian’s commentary on Ephesians. Whether Nevin felt he had a score to settle with the man who could interpret his Christocentric theology only as Schleiermacher in American guise, the Mercersburg theologian did not hold back his judgment regarding the inadequacies of the Princeton Theology. In his review of Hodge, Nevin vented most clearly his objection to the Calvinist doctrine of predestination and eternal decree. He was not interested in the Arminian resolution to the apparent difficulties of Calvinism’s high doctrine of election. Nevin recognized that the classic fault lines between the Synod of Dort and the Remonstrants was a question of human participation in salvation, with Calvinists stressing rightly in his view divine sovereignty in redemption and the Arminians granting some read power to human agency. The Calvinists had properly, he wrote, defended grace as a ‘power, distinct from nature and above it.’ The problem, however, was that Calvinist teaching on election so emphasized divine agency as to obliterate any role for nature or the human. This became a real difficulty, Nevin argued, in Hodge’s understanding of the church and traditional Presbyterian distinction between its invisible (the elect) and visible (church membership) forms. In effect, Hodge’s rendering of predestination turned Christianity essentially into a ‘scheme of pure abstract spiritualism’ that denied to the church any such ‘powers of a higher world.’ For this reason Nevin boldly asserted that Calvin’s idea of the elect was at odds with the Apostle Paul’s because the Geneva Reformer’s ecclesiology also relied on the visible-invisible distinction. Nevin explained that he did not agree with the metaphysics informing Calvin’s teaching on predestination. Instead, Nevin rejected the way that the eternal decree had been used as a basis for Presbyterian conceptions of the church.

What Nevin has in mind, as he further explained in his review of Hodge, was a notion of salvation grounded in membership in and reliance upon the agency of the church. In Nevin’s scheme Christian salvation played out really and concretely in history, in the form of the church, and was not simply an abstract covenant transacted in the Godhead before all time. With Christ and his presence in the church, a ‘new order of life’ had entered human history. As such, those who were baptized into the church stood ‘in correspondence with the powers of a higher world, the mysterious forces of the new creation in Christ Jesus.’ Nevin used the image of Noah’s ark to explain the way in which he was conceiving of the church. Those outside the patriarch’s family had a chance to be saved from destruction by joining Noah and his family, but their unbelief and disobedience condemned them. Those who entered the ark, however, had availed themselves of the means of salvation from the flood. Their fate was not certain since they could through unbelief and disobedience also frustrate divine mercy. But while on the ark, they enjoyed an estate of ‘glorious miraculous privilege, as compared with the condition of the world at large.’ ‘It placed them in a new order of existence, and brought them into living actual communication with the scheme of grace which God had been pleased to provide for the deliverance of His people.’ In effect, the church of Christ functioned exactly as the ark. It is ‘the necessary medium of salvation for men.’ This was the conception of the church that Nevin believed the Apostle Paul clearly taught and that undergirded all his epistles. It was, however, lacking entirely in Hodge’s rendering of Ephesians, and Nevin blamed the Princetonian’s deafness to the Pauline idea upon the tendency to make predestination the controlling principle of Reformed dogma.”- D.G. Hart, John Williamson Nevin (pp. 188-190)

This is one of the most helpful depictions of the church that I have seen in some time. While I am not willing to go with Nevin in getting rid of the visible-invisible distinction, I am very pleased to stop focusing on predestination and election in matters of ecclesiology (though it cannot be completely removed) and rather build a much more robust doctrine of the church, one that is sacramental in nature and also does justice to the warnings of apostasy in scripture. We are united to the church and Christ in our baptisms in a very real sense. Apostasy is not the same as a sinner outside of the church rejecting the gospel. It is the equivalent of jumping out of the ark and into the flood. There is nothing to return to, no grace to be had, if once joined to the church, you reject the her as a "medium of salvation". In the language of Hebrews, such a person would be "crucifying once again the Son of God to their own harm and holding him up to contempt."

The Westminster Standards call baptism a means of grace and state that in baptism, "the grace promised is not only offered, but really exhibited, and conferred, by the Holy Ghost, to such (whether of age or infants) as that grace belongeth unto, according to the counsel of God's own will, in his appointed time" (WCF 28.6). Presbyterians need to start talking about the efficacy of baptism (and the Supper) and join Nevin in regaining our sacramental theology away from the Hodge-boys.