Nevin stressed the fact, however, that we cannot properly view Christianity as concerned primarily with the salvation of individual men. Christianity is equally concerned with the moral salvation of society, for no individual exists alone. An individual man is what he is only because of the social life of which he is a part. The family and state are not to be considered as accidental institutions constituted for the outward convenience of man. These two organisms, the family and the state, belong organically to man’s nature, and an individual can have no complete salvation unless these agencies are also saved. Nevin went further, and pointed out that all the interests of man in art, science and business must also be brought under the influence of Christianity before salvation will have engulfed the whole of our world. All things human are to be saved. “No interest or sphere of this sort then can be allowed to remain on the outside of a system of redemption, which has for its object man as such in his fallen state.” Religion cannot be viewed as dealing with certain areas of life marked off as sacred, while the vast areas of man’s everyday life are designated as profane. Anything really human may be turned to profane purposes by being perverted from its right end and use, but these thins are meant to be sacred and are in themselves sacred. It is not the mission of Christianty to denounce any area of life as intrinsically hostile to God, but rather to appropriate every order of life to itself. “it is fully as needful for the complete and final triumph of the Gospel among men, that it should subdue the arts, music, painting, sculpture, poetry, etc., to its scepter, and fill them with its spirit as that it should conquer in similar style the tribes of Africa or the Islands of the South Sea.” Philosophy also must come under the sway of the redemptive mission of Christianity.
Although Nevin saw the necessity for integrating all of life under the Christian religion, he did not believe that this could be done by a return to the methods of the thirteenth century. He believed that all things human had to be organically related to Christianity, while the Roman method resulted only in outward conformity to the dictates of a hierarchy. The union of all disciplines with the Christian religion would have to be one of free, loving harmony and not of force.
Nevin also recognized that Protestantism had fallen too far on the side of freedom, so that it tended to regard the arts and sciences as independent of the inner control of the Christian religion. The Protestants, in many cases, were encouraging secularism, i.e., the complete dissociation of certain spheres of humanity from the rightful rule of religion. Nevin did not believe that any areas of life could be considered as outside the sway of the Kingdom of God. The State, itself, must not be viewed as completely outside the control of the Church. Nevin used strong language at this point. “The imagination that the last answer to the great question of the right relation of the Church to the State, is to be found in any theory by which the one is set completely on the outside of the other must be counted as essentially antichristian.”
The complete salvation and conversion of the world would not be accomplished, Nevin felt, by simply adding the names of more and more individuals to the roles of believers. It was also necessary to bring the living economy of the world more and more under the sway of Christian love and peace…
The problem of salvation is integrally related to the conception held of the church. Nevin recognized that the true church question is, What part does the church play in the economy of Christian salvation? “Does it belong to the essence of Christianity; or is it something accidental only to its proper being, a constitution made to inclose it in an outward way, and capable of being separated from it without serious damage to its life?” Nevin’s answer was as we might expect, “The life of the Church is the salvation of the world.”
from Luther J. Binkley, The Mercersburg Theology pg. 85,86
