Many Reformed pastors were afraid that Nevin and Schaff would in the end join the Roman Catholic Church. Nevin set their minds at ease on this score with an article on “Brownson’s Quarterly Review” which appeared in the Mercersburg Review in January and May 1850. Brownson had been a convert to Rome and had issued his review as an inducement to others to follow him to the bosom of the Mother Church. Nevin used a notice of the appearance of this review as an excuse to express his opinions concerning the Roman Catholic Church. The Roman Church, he objected, glorifies authority and gives no place to individual freedom. Authority is rigid, external, and fixed in Romanism, but to be truly authoritative, said Nevin, all authority must be subjectively appropriated by the individual before it can have any influence on his life. Furthermore, the Roman view does not allow for any historical development whatsoever. It therefore puts the Roman Church outside the pale of history and to be outside of history is to be outside of humanity itself. Romanism runs the danger of becoming nothing more than a magical system in which things take place opus operatum. Romanism views the two worlds, the supernatural and the natural, as wholly disjointed and seperate. Any connection between the two must be merely outward, because the two are separated by an impassable gulf as regards their inward constitution and being…
Nevin was greatly disturbed by the fact that most Protestants who criticized Catholicism had never bothered to go to the sources. They had never read a page of Aquinas, deciding that it was fruitless to read a man who was so much in error. Nevin realized that such dogmatic rejection of all things Roman Catholic could only lead to bad effects for the whole Protestant movement. If we are to deal at all adequately with Romanism, Nevin believed, we must get rid of the notion that there is no truth, no piety, and no religion in the movement.
There are some Protestants who maintain that Protestantism is simply a return to the original religion of the early church. Nevin granted that it is easy to show that there are many points of difference between early Christianity and Romanism, but he denied that we could find the early church to have been Congregational or Episcopalian. Rather, he believed, Protestantism is further removed from the religion of the early church than Romanism. Protestantism is a development beyond Romanism, but it is not a repristination of the religion of the second or third centuries. Catholicism was a logical development of the tendencies in the early church, and Protestantism was a logical reaction against certain abuses in Catholicism. The only connection, therefore, which Protestantism has with the religion of the second and third centuries is through the medium of Romanism. Certainly Romanism is closer than Protestantism to the religion of the third and fourth centuries. Augustine, Ambrose, Jerome and Chrysostom can be understood only as Catholics, not as Protestants. It is a figment of the imagination to believe that before the fifth century we have pure Catholicism, and after that we have corrupt Romanism. The fifth century was as organically connected to the period which preceded and followed it as any other century in human history. As a final refutation of the view held by many Protestants that the Protestant faith is simply a return to the religion of the third century, Nevin cited the fact that the third century had beliefs and practices which were radically different from the beliefs and practices of Protestantism. The early church had a conception of the Church, of the ministry, of the sacraments, of the rule of faith, of doctrine and of miracles which is closer to Romanism than to Protestantism.
Nevin had a very high view of the Christian Church. He believed that it was a supernatural order and that it had a supernatural history in the world. It had a human side, and in that sense it was subject to all the errors and weaknesses of mankind, however, it also had a divine side, in the sense that it was the visible body of its Lord. There has been in the history of the church a progressive victory of the forces of the divine over the merely human. This means that God is present even in Roman Catholicism, and this admission by Nevin subjected him to endless criticism by ultra-Protestant writers.
Luther J. Binkley, The Mercersburg Theology pg. 75-78
