Lex Orandi, Lex Credendi

“Nevin’s theology is systematic but not positivistically systematic. His thinking is a significant departure from much of the American theology of his day. American theology often tended to be either the exposition of a scholastic system or the attempt to place Christian ideas in service to the need for an affirmation of subjective experience. That is to say, in the first instance, theology was done with the assumption that common sense made it possible for the system of Christian ideas about creation, sin, and salvation to be understood as ends in themselves…. However at the other end of the spectrum there could be found varieties of theologizing that sought to affirm the dominant American value of independent private judgment and a belief that the natural order could reveal whatever truth was essential to effective and practical living…. Nevin’s thinking is at odds with both these theological tendencies.” (33)

“Nevin’s American and public theology turns again and again to the failure of perception, to the emerging truncated and one-dimensional character of American thought and action.” (50)

“The radical catholicity in Nevin’s thought may have been too much for his own religiosity in its time, but it was a profound and liberating concept. It challenged the presumptions of Protestantism, Roman Catholicism, and Anglicanism. It reminded the conversionist mentality of American revivalism that its view of the universal was excessively utilitarian and privatistic…” (80)

“John Nevin was an American theologian who discovered history among a people who sought to escape it.” (85)

“John Nevin would have said that the Evengelical tradition was ineffective because it was another form of utilitarian individualism. The principle of Bible and private judgment were both the product and continuing progenitors of religious self-interest. REvivalism as a primary mode of religious advocacy was the maximization of self-interest.” (104)

“Nevin’s rejection of the salvational self-interest present in revivalistic Evangelicalism is of a piece with his denial of abstract Americanism. The Bible-and-private-judgment sectarianism of the former is the same principle at work in a sectarian and utilitarian nationalism that thinks of the Republic as a voluntary association of individuals maximizing their own self-interest and set apart from the rest of the world in collective pride.” (111)

“Nevin’s theology of liturgy is grounded in an understanding of nature itself. Liturgy provides the perception by means of which we may understand the longing to which nature points. Nature is to be understood from the perspective of the Incarnation of Christ’s life and work. Nature’s expectations are fulfilled and reconciled in Christ. ‘Nature’ said Nevin, ‘is a divine liturgy throughout.’ … There is in nature the foretaste of heaven, nature and supernature not being ‘two different systems.’ Liturgy is an act of ascesis that brings together the life of nature and the life of heaven. The Incarnation makes this liturgical, ritual possible.” (131)

“Opponents of the liturgy tend to use worship … even when they accept ‘liturgical’ forms, as incidental to the experiences, commitments, and ideas of assembled individuals. … For them the supernatural remains outside the natural, except as it is resolved into a sppiritual presence, reaching into the minds of humans directly from heaven. … Sacraments then become mere signs of grace absent, not seals of grace present.” (138)

“The individual is not merely a believer who works out a form of private salvation that spends a lifetime trying to keep her holy after her conversion. Rather, the individual is not complete in himself or herself. The self always exists in Christ.” (139)

“It was evident by the time of Nevin’s death in 1886 that the American nation was welle on its way to shaping of a national and a religious life that had substantially ignored his critical assessments.” (144)