Vindication of the Revised Liturgy: Historical and Theological

WORSHIP, in the use of prescribed forms, is not a new thing in the Reformed Church. Liturgies, of some sort, have had place within it from the beginning. They belonged to its church life in Europe, and they came over with the same church life to this country. At the same time, they were held to be a fair subject all along for change and improvement. No Liturgy was considered to be of perpetual force, even for the particular country or province in which it was used; much less for other countries. The liberty of primitive times here was practically asserted, as the proper liberty of the Protestant Church. The old Swiss Liturgies in this way changed. The old Liturgy of the Palatinate became antiquated, even in the Palatinate itself. There was a movement all along, in other words, towards the realization of something in worship, which it was felt had not been fully reached in existing forms. The grossly unliturgical tendencies of later times (Rationalistic in Germany, Methodistic in this country), belonged themselves to this movement. But they had no power to bring it to rest. They only served to urge it onward in its course, by deepening the sense of a want which they had no power to satisfy, and by causing it to be felt, that the true satisfaction for this want must be sought in some other way. Hence, among the "pious desires" of the Reformed Church in America, we find at work all along, very sensibly felt, the wish for a satisfactory Liturgy. The old Palatinate service was not satisfactory; and none of the services brought over from Europe, during the last century, were satisfactory. At the same time, the deeper consciousness of the Church refused to settle into contentment with the modern innovation of totally free prayer. Such worship had, indeed, forced itself into use on all sides; but the true genius of the Church, at bottom, resented it as something foreign and strange; and its voice was still heard, though in more or less smothered accents, calling out for a Liturgy that might be worthy of the name.

About the Author :
John Williamson Nevin (February 20, 1803 - June 6, 1886), was an American theologian and educationalist. He graduated at Union College in 1821; studied theology at Princeton Theological Seminary in 1823-28, being in 1826-28 in charge of the classes of Charles Hodge. He soon became prominent; first by his contributions to its organ the Messenger; then by The Anxious Bench-A Tract for the Times (1843), attacking the vicious excesses of revivalistic methods; and by his defence of the inauguration address, The Principle of Protestantism, delivered by his colleague Philip Schaff, which aroused a storm of protest by its suggestion that Pauline Protestantism was not the last word in the development of the church but that a Johannine Christianity was to be its out-growth, and by its recognition of Petrine Romanism as a stage in ecclesiastical development. To Dr. Schaff's 122 theses of The Principle of Protestantism Nevin added his own theory of the mystical union between Christ and believers, and both Schaff and Nevin were accused of a "Romanizing tendency." Nevin characterized his critics as pseudo-Protestants, urged (with Dr. Charles Hodge, and against the Presbyterian General Assembly) the validity of Roman Catholic baptism, and defended the doctrine of the "spiritual real presence" of Christ in the Lord's Supper, notably in The Mystical Presence: a Vindication of the Reformed or Calvinistic Doctrine of the Holy Eucharist (1846); to this Charles Hodge replied from the point of view of rationalistic puritanism in the Princeton Review of 1848.[citation needed] In 1849 the Mercersburg Review was founded as the organ of Nevin and the "Mercersburg Theology"; and to it he contributed from 1849 to 1883. In 1851 he resigned from the Mercersburg Seminary in order that its running expenses might be lightened; and from 1841 to 1853 he was president of Marshall College at Mercersburg. With Dr. Schaff and others he was on the committee which prepared the liturgy of the German Reformed Church, which appeared in provisional form in 1857 and as An Order of Worship in 1866. In 1861-66 he was instructor of history at Franklin and Marshall College (in which Marshall College had been merged), of which he was president in 1866-76. He died in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, on June 6, 1886.