In 1843, the first edition of Nevin's The Anxious Bench was published. It has been called the most probing critique of Finneyism ever written. The background to the treatise was Nevin's general dislike of Finneyism, and also a major schism in the German Reformed Church in 1830. In that year a Finneyite revivalist, John Winebrenner, had led a breakaway movement from the German Reformed Church to form a new denomination, the so-called Church of God. Finneyism had made big inroads into the German Reformed Church, much to Nevin's disgust--Banner of Truth.

In 1843, the first edition of Nevin's The Anxious Bench was published. It has been called the most probing critique of Finneyism ever written. The background to the treatise was Nevin's general dislike of Finneyism, and also a major schism in the German Reformed Church in 1830. In that year a Finneyite revivalist, John Winebrenner, had led a breakaway movement from the German Reformed Church to form a new denomination, the so-called Church of God. Finneyism had made big inroads into the German Reformed Church, much to Nevin's disgust--Banner of Truth.

This volume tells the story of a mid-nineteenth-century theological movement emanating from the small German Reformed Seminary in Mercersburg, Pennsylvania, where John Williamson Nevin and Philip Schaff taught. There they explored themes--such as the centrality of the incarnation for theology, the importance of the church as the body of Christ and the sphere of salvation, liturgical and sacramental worship, and the organic historical development of the church and its doctrines--that continue to resonate today with many who seek a deeper and more historically informed expression of the Christian faith that is both evangelical and catholic.

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 Mercersburg's 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, spiritually real actions that made (what Nevin called) the "mystical presence" of Jesus Christ present to Christians, bringing transformative power into their lives. The present critical edition carefully preserves the original texts, while providing extensive introductions, annotations, and bibliography to orient the modern reader and facilitate further scholarship. The Mercersburg Theology Study Series is an attempt to make available for the first time, in attractive, readable, and scholarly modern editions, the key writings of the nineteenth-century movement known as the Mercersburg Theology. An ambitious multiyear project, it aims to make an important contribution to the scholarly community and to the broader reading public, who can at last be properly introduced to this unique blend of American and European, Reformed and Catholic theology.

John Williamson Nevin, architect of the nineteenth-century movement, the Mercersburg Theology, has increasingly gained respect as one of the most important theologians of American history and the broader Reformed tradition. Accompanied by the great historian, Philip Schaff, Nevin faced a headwind of American individualism, subjectivism, and sectarianism, but nevertheless forged ahead in articulating a churchly, sacramental theology rooted in the Incarnation of Jesus Christ. Drawing from the well of German Idealism and Romanticism, Nevin proposed a theological hermeneutic that was greatly at odds with the prevailing methods of his day. Nevertheless, Nevin persisted in his efforts, confident that the concepts of organic unity, catholicity, and incarnation offered a vital corrective to the tendencies of the American church and society. Hence, Nevin's theological polemics, while often focused on matters of ecclesiology and sacraments, also have much to offer in the way of a much broader theology of history, mankind, and culture. In this latest contribution to studies in the Mercersburg Theology, Borneman extracts from the Nevin corpus those writings which speak to the predominant social and political trends of the antebellum era, trends which have endured to the present day. Nevin's efforts toward a liturgically-oriented, unified, prophetic church stood over and against many of these trends. Bringing to the fore the implications of Nevin's efforts, Borneman joins a chorus of recent scholars and theologians who insist that Nevin has just as much to say to the church of the present as he did to the church of the nineteenth century.