Here’s Darryl G. Hart on some of John Williamson Nevin’s ecclesiology and its tension with the revivalistic/pietistic tendencies that were and are prevalent in North American churches:
Here he [Nevin] drew on German idealism and notions of historical development to attribute to the church the ongoing presence of the resurrected Christ. Churches that recognized the continuity of the church through the ages-from antiquity, through the Middle Ages, to the Reformation-were properly Catholic. Sects, in contrast, manifested the spirit of the antichrist by denying Christ’s physical presence in the church and the vital force that invigorated Christian life and witness. Winebrenner clearly fell into the second category when he left the German Reformed Church to form what amounted in Nevin’s estimation to a sect. Second and closely related, Winebrenner’s Church of God was also guilty of the classic crimes of sects, namely, an exalted understanding of sola scriptura that resulted in an endless number of American Christians establishing their own churches according to their own private interpretation of the Bible. In effect, Winebrenner had walked right into the thick of Nevin’s troubled thoughts. While the former was innocently celebrating the Bible Christianity of his own and other denominations, the latter was beginning to doubt Protestantism’s ability to represent the catholicity of the Christian faith.
- Darryl G. Hart, John Williamson Nevin (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R), 83.
