Best of 2010

Best CD's on the mellow side:
1. Train: Save Me, San Francisco (released late 2009). Just a lot of fun!

2. Mumford and Sons: Sigh No More. I love the cd, but the language means I can't listen to it at church or with the kiddo's in the care. Makes me want to drink a stout.

3. Zach Williams: Story Time. Best CD of the year for me. I love it. Don't know how to describe it, so just go and listen to it (for free at NoiseTrade)

Best CD's on the harder side:
1. Stone Sour: Audio Secrecy. Good, especially the hard stuff. I can leave the 'ballads'.

2. Stone Temple Pilots: Stone Temple Pilots. Fun. Groovy. Rockin.

3. Pearl Jam: Backspacer (actually released late 2009). There's only an album or two of Pearl Jam that I haven't really liked.

4. Apocalyptica: 7th Symphony. Didn't think I'd like this, but it's great. Cello rockers!?! The guest vocals make the album especially good.

5. 30 Seconds to Mars: This Is War Technically, it came out in Dec. 2009, but I got it in 2010. Great album. Creative


Best Christian CD's:
1. Caedmon's Call: Raising Up The Dead. Good.

2. Red Mountain Music: All Things New. Fantastic! This has some wonderful hymns - some I knew, others I wasn't familiar with. I love it.

Books (Fiction):
1. King Raven Trilogy (Hood, Scarlet, Tuck), Stephenen Lawhead. I loved these books and flew through them. Caleb also liked them very much. Wish there were three more books in the series!

2. Night Angel Trilogy, (The Night Angel Trilogy), Brent Weeks. This series is not in my typical genre. Filled with ninja type stuff, and magic. I loved it. Ok, so I'm not a classics kind of guy - that much we know.


Books (Theology, Spiritual, etc):
1. Counterfeit Gods: The Empty Promises of Money, Sex, and Power, and the Only Hope that Matters, Tim Keller. Really good. Our small group studied through it. We dragged it out too long - it's a book to read in a week or less. We took 3-4 months. Still, great book.

2. Jesus Made in America: A Cultural History from the Puritans to "The Passion of the Christ", by Stephen Nichols. Eye opening. It's witty, insightful, at times very depressing. Very good - wish every Christian in America would read it.

3.American Evangelical Story, The: A History of the Movement, Doug Sweeney (reread). I like history, especially the history of the church. Filled with blunders, heretics (Finney!), and screwballs, but still it's Christ's church and it advances. If you wonder how we, the church in America, got to be how we are, this is a great book.

4. The Pilgrim's Progress: From This World to That Which Is to Come, John Bunyan. Classic. Rereading it, this time with the kids on Sunday afternoons before nap. Thanks Aunt Mary for the gift.

5.The Trellis and the Vine: The Ministry Mind-Shift That Changes Everything, Colin Marshall and Tony Payne. Wonderful, practical, simple. No need to reinvent the wheel of ministry - just keep doing what the church as always done.

6. The Masculine Mandate: God's Calling to Men, Richard Phillips. Manly stuff. Good, not over the top, pound your chest and live wildly crap. Made me want to be a better father, husband and see my boys grow up to be godly men too.

7. The Good News We Almost Forgot: Rediscovering the Gospel in a 16th Century Catechism, Kevin DeYoung. I had little to no exposure to the Heidelberg Catechism till this year. DeYoung writes a great intro to it. We're not done with it, but faithfully plodding along in the mornings.

10. Retrieving the Tradition and Renewing Evangelicalism: A Primer for Suspicious Protestants, DH Williams. We read this as a staff. It was a wonderful reminder of how indebted we are to tradition and how we should embrace it as a way forward.

11.Adolf Schlatter: A Biography of Germany's Premier Biblical Theologian, Werner Neuer. I am in awe of Schlatter - his humble piety and his immense ability as a theologian (among other things). Wish I could find more about him and by him.

12. John Williamson Nevin: High-Church Calvinist, DG Hart). A great intro to Nevin's life and thought. Of the bio type books on Nevin I read, this was the best. Nevin is so out of step with American Evangelical Christianity, his alien perspective is a welcome corrective.

13. Dual Citizens: Worship and Life Between the Already and the Not Yet, Jason Stellman. Ok, I have to be honest here - all the talk about the church transforming the world sound overly triumphalistic (and exhausting) to me now-a-days. The 'steady as she goes' approach to church and ministry; the doctrine of the two kingdoms and the spirituality of the church as won me over. Stellman's book is a great introduction to the two kingdom approach to church and life. I highly recommend it.

14. The Mystical Presence, John Nevin. This is a hard, dense book, but for a rich theology of the incarnation, the church and the sacraments, it's fantastic. If you can get through it, you'll be enriched, big time. You won't (shouldn't) agree with everything Nevin presents, but even where you disagree, you'll be challenged to rethink things you've probably just assumed. Oh, and it's free on GoogleBooks!



Movies (I saw in 2010 - often I'm slow in seeing movies, so most are from 09 or even 08):

1. I Love You Beth Cooper. Childish, and I laughed hard.

2. Hurt Locker. Great movie. I usually hate movies that are up for awards, but his was awesome.

3. ZombieLand. Great movie. Again, laughed hard.

4. Ninja Assassin. Ok, not high art - but people get their skulls cut in two. Makes for a great movie.

5. Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief. I liked this a lot better than HP7.

6. Iron Man 2. As good as the first - and a great soundtrack.

7. Toy Story 3. I liked it better than TS2.

8. Clash of the Titans. Not as good as the original, but still a good movie.

9. Kick Ass. Guilty pleasure. What kid hasn't wanted to be a superhero!

10. Inception. Really cool. Reminded me of Jacob's Ladder from 1990.

Song of the Week

This song is from the latest episode of Smallville - still one of my favorites!

Paul Taneja, "City Lights"

John Williamson Nevin: An Evaluation

Evaluating Nevin and his theological scheme is quite difficult because, by and large, few of his ideas took hold and few have been tested over decades or centuries of church life. However, dismissing them as wrong simply because they did not attract a large following, reshape the evangelical landscape, or “work” would be utterly pragmatic – a way of evaluating truth Nevin warned strongly against. (On the flip side, accepting them because they “worked” would also betray a pragmatism unlikely to gain acceptance by Nevin).

The reasons for Nevin’s tepid reception are many. Several scholars have blamed, at least in part, Nevin’s unpopularity to his German ties. Ironically, Nevin was not German by nationality, but had adopted the German Reformed Church as his ecclesiological home. The German Reformed Church’s institutions were small and relatively non-influential in the grand scheme of American evangelicalism (especially compared to the theological giant Princeton, home of his greatest critic, Charles Hodge). Moreover, “The German influence on Nevin’s thought was one of the largest reasons for the unpopularity of his theological program.”(1) America was enamored with “common sense” as Mark Noll explains,

“Negatively, common sense was one of the few authorities that survived the Revolutionary assault on inherited privilege. Positively, common sense opened up whole realms of verifiable knowledge to ordinary men (and sometimes women) who had previously been considered incapable of discerning truth for themselves…Influence, interests, factional prejudices, loyalty to the clan, respect for experts, the sacredness of traditional churches, eve deference to parents – all had been compromised by the intellectual history of the American founding…almost everyone agreed with what Timothy Dwight told generations of Yale students: common sense was ‘the most valuable faculty…of man.’”(2)

Into such a context Nevin spoke of mystery, historical rootedness in creeds and confessions, and the authority of the church and its ministers. It is little wonder his idiosyncratic blending of patristic thought, sixteenth-century Reformed Confessionalism, and German idealism and romanticism did not receive a warm welcome.

Even in the German context, Nevin’s ideas did not carry the day. This was evidenced by the controversy over the Revised Liturgy for the German Reformed Church. The liturgy was, by and large, framed by Mercersburg theologians sympathetic to Nevin and his theological scheme. D.G Hart points out that “the theological rationale for the liturgy brought all of Nevin’s previous theological writings together and as such revealed that the liturgical controversy was in effect a referendum on Mercersburg teaching.”(3) In the end, a controversy that lasted nearly four decades ended in the failure of the Mercersburg theology to win over the German Reformed Church where it really mattered – worship.

Setting aside his connection to the German church (and theologians and philosophers), Nevin had made enemies with one of the most influential Reformed scholars of his day. The rift between Hodge and Nevin continued till the end of their lives, and that certainly did not help Nevin’s cause. Hodge was the uncontested leader of Princeton and editor of the “strongest theological journal in the English speaking world.”(4) By comparison, The Mercersburg Review was a weak and insignificant.

On the merits, however, there is much to commend Nevin and his theology. Nevin’s diagnosis of the malady plaguing American Protestantism, though it often sounded alarmist, was essentially correct. The American Protestant Church, in the process of disestablishment and democratization was losing its hold on important articles of the faith, especially the church, and becoming increasingly sectarian and individualistic. In this condition, Nevin did not see how the church could last. In 1848 John Winebrenner published his History of all the Religious Denominations in United States. At the time, Winebrenner (a former German Reformed pastor who left to found his own denomination, the Church of God) listed approximately fifty denominations existing in the United States. That number has exploded in the past century(5). While many treated the birth of so many denominations as inevitable or even positive, Nevin considered it a “plague” and “vast reproach to the Christian cause.” In addition, Nevin correctly saw that the system of Christianity represented by the anxious bench was a dangerous slippery slope. By today’s standards, many of the innovations associated with Finney and the New Measures are quite tame. Nevin, it could be argued, would not be at all surprised by that. He understood that “no satisfactory stopping place can be found in the system of the New Measures… [it naturally flows] to the very worst excesses.”(6) He saw correctly that the pulpit was being transformed into a stage and that the people were developing a “morbid thirst for excitement.”(7) Those conditions continue to characterize large swaths of American evangelicalism.

Certainly, Nevin was not alone in his critique of sectarianism and revivalism; however, his prescription was distinctive. Nevin called for a return a church system with deeper roots. This too, I believe, should be applauded. In Doug Sweeney’s The American Evangelical Story, he concludes “…evangelicalism is not enough. We must stay rooted in the ground of Christian tradition. The eighteenth century twist [revivalism] was a boon to Protestant faith and witness, but insofar as we have parted from the rest of the Christian church, and the best of its resources, we have severed our own roots and starved our membership…we simply must sink more and deeper roots in Christian history.”(8) Nevin is another voice calling for the same.

On particular points, Nevin fails to convince me. Nevin’s conception of the incarnation is novel and owes much to his idealism and romanticism, more so than to his Bible or to a reading of church history. This is especially true regarding his notion of the generic principle and the overarching purpose of the incarnation. On the other hand, I believe Nevin was correct in seeing that systems of theology that reduces the incarnation simply to a prerequisite for the atonement slight the doctrine of the incarnation. There is more to meditate upon in the incarnation than its simply being a vehicle for God’s suffering and death.

In addition, I believe Nevin was right that the doctrine of the church must be allowed to play a central role in our understanding of piety and the Christian life. An appreciation of the church as the Body of Christ, his ongoing presence in the world, and the mediator of divine grace has been almost entirely lost in American evangelicalism. Nevin is certainly correct that we cannot hide behind a notion of the invisible church but must rekindle a deep love for the visible church. Furthermore, I agree with Nevin on the sacramental nature of the church and the essential role the sacraments play in the Christian life, individually and corporately. However, I remain unconvinced that a churchly system must be liturgical. In Nevin I found little in the way of solid reasoning on this point and simply a host of dogmatic statements regarding the necessity of a liturgical system.

While most will not agree with Nevin on every point, all would be enriched from a reading of his works. Nevin, through his historical theology and exegesis of passages like John 6, reawakens us to the beauty and mystery of the believers union with Christ. He adds a level of warmth and beauty to a Calvinism that has been seen as cold and merely legal. Moreover, he reminds us that Christianity is not lived in isolation, but in community with others in the Body of Christ. He reorients us away from individualist, “God and me” piety towards the deeper piety of the church and the sacraments. His theology, while at times straying, is robust and historical. It can only be hoped that the lessons Nevin tried to teach the church in the nineteenth century will be learned by the church heading into the twenty-first century.

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1. Jonathan G. Bonomo. Incarnation and Sacrament (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2010),
2. Mark Noll, America’s God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (New York: Oxford University, 2002), 233.
3. Hart, John Williamson Nevin, 217.
4. James Hastings Nichols, Romanticism in American Theology, 1.
5. According to a study cited by Walter Conser Jr. in “Nevin on the Church,” there were 1,347 different religious groups in the United States. Obviously that would include non-Christian groups as well, but the vast majority are Christian denominations. Moreover, that is a pretty conservative number. Other estimates are less credible, but approach ten thousand.
6. Nevin, The Anxious Bench, 107.
7. Ibid, 117.
8. Douglas Sweeney, The American Evangelical Story (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2005), 184-185.

John Williamson Nevin: On The Lord's Supper (part 2)

Several more points of contrast between the old Reformed view and “modern Puritan” view gives us a fuller appreciation for Nevin’s position. First, Nevin points out that in the Calvinistic view, the communion of the believer with Christ occurs which is beyond that experienced in common worship. Believer’s commune with Christ in the Supper in a unique way that is available in no other place. This is denied by in the Puritan view and Christ is held to be present in all aspects of Christian worship equally. Second, in the Reformed view the Supper is a mystery and indeed an actual miracle (11). The Puritan view empties the Meal of its supernatural element, eliminating the mysterious and miraculous.

The third point of contrast is extremely significant. Nevin contended that the old Reformed view held there was an objective force in the sacraments. Nevin explains, “The sacramental union between the sign and the thing signified is real, and holds in virtue of the constitution of the ordinance itself, not in the faith simply or inward frame of the communicant.”(12) The Roman Catholic Church, and to a lesser degree the Lutheran Church, err in merging the sign and the thing signified. Yet, the Puritan view errs in denying the thing signified has any real connection to the sign itself. Nevin is quick to remind his readers that the union of signified and sign only benefits the communicant who partakes in faith; yet, that it remains ineffective in some due to unbelief is in no way an argument against the connection of the signified with the sign. Moreover, the old Reformed position holds that the sacrament is a seal, not just a pledge of grace, and so “makes good the grace it represents, as actually communicated at the time.”(13) Over against this robust view, Nevin labels the elements in the Puritan view “bare signs”.

Despite the harsh critique, even from those within the Reformed tradition and Nevin’s own denomination, Nevin maintained this he was promoting the true Reformed position as articulated by Calvin (with some metaphysical modifications). Moreover, he defended his position stating, “There is no opposition between Christ and the Church, or between individual piety on the one hand and sacramental grace on the other; but just the reverse. Christ becomes full only in and by the Church, and personal experience is made solid and real, only as it rests on grace and appropriated from abroad.”(14) He was not against piety, only piety that disregarded the role of the church and the sacraments (just as he wasn’t against revival, only revival that was manipulative, and false).

In the end, the debate between Hodge and Nevin hinged upon who the Reformed community should look to on the Eucharist question. Many in Nevin’s denomination considered Zwingli the true founder of the German Reformed Church, and so Zwingli carried great weight with those so persuaded. Nevin argued, however, that in Calvin the doctrine of the Eucharist reached maturity, and so, though Zwingli preceded Calvin, Calvin’s thought was superior to Zwingli’s (15). Nevin writes, “It was not the Zuinglian [sic] view of the Lord’s Supper, but the Calvinistic view, in all its length and breadth …which was now recognized as the proper doctrine of the Reformed Church.”(16)

If Calvin is taken as the one to look to with regards to the Eucharist question, it does appear that Nevin had a better handle on Calvin than did Hodge. Doug Sweeney concludes, “Most people who studied the matter concurred that Hodge was more conservative in doctrinal demeanor but the Nevin was closer to Calvin on the Eucharist.”(17)

We can wrap up this series on Nevin soon, with a few concluding remarks by way of evaluating Nevin's theology and legacy.
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11. Ibid, 118.
12. Ibid, 120.
13. Ibid, 121.
14. Nevin, “Wilberforce on the Incarnation,” 189.
15. Hart, John Williamson Nevin, 117.
16. Nevin, Mystical Presence, 85.
17. Sweeney, Douglas A. “’Falling Away from the General Faith of the Reformation?’ The Contest over Calvinism in Nineteenth-Century America,” in John Calvin’s American Legacy, ed. Thomas J. Davis (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 125.

John Williamson Nevin: On the Lord's Supper (part 1)

Nevin’s theology of the incarnation and the church struck many as mystical and Romanist. Those charges were redoubled when it came to Nevin’s view of the sacraments. According to Nevin, the American church, even the Reformed branches, had veered away from a Calvinistic understanding of the Lord’s Supper in favor Zwingli’s memorialism – a move that qualified as a “serious defection from the original Protestant orthodoxy at this point.”(1) While Nevin’s claims and call for a return to the high views of Calvin over Zwingli were controversial, bringing him into sharp conflict with his Princeton mentor Charles Hodge, it was not to Nevin a minor point, but stood close to the heart of genuine Christianity. Nevin writes,

“The Question of the Eucharist is one of the most important belonging to the history of religion. It may be regarded indeed as in some sense central to the whole Christian system. For Christianity is grounded in the living union of the believer with the person of Christ; and this great fact is emphatically concentrated in the mystery of the Lord’s Supper; which has always been clothed on this account, to the consciousness of the Church, with a character of sanctity and solemnity, surpassing that of any other Christian institution.”(2)

For Nevin, the doctrine of the Lord’s Supper was inextricably linked to ones doctrine of the church and the incarnation: “Low views of the sacrament betray invariably a low view of the mystery of the incarnation itself, and a low view of the Church also, as that new and higher order of life, in which the power of this mystery continues to reveal itself through all ages.”(3)

In The Mystical Presence, Nevin defines the Calvinistic view of the sacraments as involving a “real participation” with Christ’s living person. This participation is “not with the divine promise merely, not with the thought of Christ only, not with the recollection simply of what he has done and suffered for us, not with the lively present sense alone of his all-sufficient, all-glorious salvation; but with the living Saviour himself, in the fullness of his glorified person by the power of the Holy Ghost.”(4) Nevin is quick to point out that this fellowship is not merely with the Holy Ghost as Christ’s representative, but through the Holy Ghost a fellowship with the person of Christ. Nevin stands firm on this, “Here Christ communicates himself to his Church; not simply a right to the grace that resides in his person, or an interest by outward grant in the benefits of his life and death; but his person itself…Christ first, then his benefits.”(5) This emphasis on a real participation with Christ’s person Nevin found missing entirely from the “modern Puritan view”, having been replaced with a moral union only.

In addition, and consistent with Nevins understanding of the incarnation, Nevin argued that participation with the person of Christ meant participation with the whole person of Christ, including not only his divinity but also his humanity. “It is,” explains Nevin, “not figurative merely and moral, but real, substantial and essential.”(6) This old Reformed view the modern Puritan view “utterly repudiates, as semi-popish mysticism.”(7)

Despite taking great pains to distance himself from both Lutheran and Roman views of the Supper, the charge was persistent. He states plainly, “The Reformed doctrine admits no change whatever in the elements. Bread remains bread, and wine remains wine.”(8) Likewise, he did not want his view confused with Luther’s consubstantiation – the belief that Christ’s body was corporeally present “in, with, and under” the elements. In rejecting these two errors, the American Church had committed a completely different error – utterly denying the presence of Christ in any real way in the Supper. There is a way between these two opposite errors. The Reformed position that Nevin championed held that Christ’s body remained physically in heaven and that communion with his person was in no way local or corporeal, but spiritual. This does not mean unreal or that the believer’s commune is with the divine nature of Christ only. The believer who partakes in faith (no opus operatum), in the act of eating partakes of the body and the blood of Christ. Nevin unpacks this,

“[The Reformed position] allows the presence of Christ's person in the sacrament, including even his flesh and blood, so far as the actual participation of the believer is concerned … A real presence, in opposition to the notion that Christ's flesh and blood are not made present to the communicant in any way. A spiritual real presence, in opposition to the idea that Christ's body is in the elements in a local or corporal manner. Not real simply, and not spiritual simply; but real, and yet spiritual at the same time. The body of Christ is in heaven, the believer on earth; but by the power of the Holy Ghost, nevertheless, the obstacle of such vast local distance is fully overcome, so that in the sacramental act, while the outward symbols are received in an outward way, the very body and blood of Christ are at the same time inwardly and supernaturally communicated to the worthy receiver, for the real nourishment of his new life. Not that the material particles of Christ's body are supposed to be carried over, by this supernatural process, into the believer’s person. The communion is spiritual, not material. It is a participation of the Saviour's life.”(9)

Nevin makes it clear that Christ’s body and blood are not received orally or mechanically, but by faith.

Still aware that this view would sound un-Protestant to many, Nevin launches into an apt historical defense of the “real, spiritual presence.” Establishing his view in Calvin, Nevin continues to trace it through many of the early framers of the Reformed Church as well as several important confessions, including the Helvetic Confession, the Gallic Confession, the Belgic Confession, and especially the Heidelberg Catechism. Nevin even gives space to John Owen, a Puritan with a low view of the church, yet one who upheld that “Christ is present with us in an especial manner”(10) in the Supper.

More on the Lord's Supper in the next post.
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1. Nevin, Mystical Presence, 53.
2. Nevin, 51.
3. Ibid, 247.
4. Ibid, 57.
5. Ibid, 122.
6. Ibid, 58.
7. Ibid, 125.
8. Ibid, 59.
9. Ibid, 60-61
10. Ibid, 101.