The Mercersburg movement

While a graduate student I became intrigued with a 19th-century movement in American church history that is not very well known today, particularly among evangelicals but even among confessionally Reformed Christians. This was the Mercersburg movement in the German Reformed Church in the United States in the decades before the Civil War. It coalesced around the persons of John Williamson Nevin (1803-1886) and Philip Schaff (1819-1893) at the German Reformed seminary in Mercersburg, Pennsylvania.

It might be called a high church movement bent on recovering a liturgical emphasis in the Reformed churches, including Calvin's doctrine of the sacraments (both baptism and the Lord's supper), a scepticism towards the revivalistic "new measures" so dominant in the protestant churches of the time, and a catholic understanding of the church. Remarkably, Mercersburg managed to have both a confessional and ecumenical emphasis. There was a special love for the Heidelberg Catechism, one of the confessional standards of the German Reformed Church and easily the jewel of the Reformation-era confessional documents.

The downside of Mercersburg was its Hegelian approach which assumed rather too easily the inevitability of progress, especially that of the various churches towards a higher ecclesiastical unity. Hegelianism properly emphasized the importance of history, but without adequately taking into account the dangers of historicism.

Yet Mercersburg might well be understood as a valuable corrective to the revivalist strain playing such a huge role in American protestantism. As Mark Noll puts it, "the works of the Mercersburg men remain a guide-post for Christians who share their convictions: that the person of Christ is the key to Christianity; that the Lord's Supper, understood in a classic Reformed sense, is the secret to the ongoing life of the church; and that study of the church's past provides the best perspective for bringing its strength to bear on the present."