If you're ever near Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, it's worth taking a few minutes to drive through the charming little village of Mercersburg. The area is best known for its associations with James Buchanan who was born nearby, but for the German Reformed, it was a center of both secular and spiritual education in the 19th century.
Marshall College was based in Mercersburg before its later 1853 merger with Franklin College in Lancaster. The Mercersburg Seminary was chartered in 1836 and would also make the move to Lancaster in the 1870's. And so while the seminary only operated in Mercersburg for less than forty years, it was during this time that it hosted two towering figures in American Christianity - Philip Schaff and the lesser known but equally important John Nevin.
Nevin was from the area and raised in the context of Scots-Irish Presbyterianism. This would lead him to Princeton Seminary (then a bastion of Reformed theology in the United States), and later a professorship at Western Theological Seminary in Allegheny, Pennsylvania. The school was actually located near the waterfront of what is now Pittsburgh's North Shore. While at Western, Nevin received a call from the German Reformed Church (RCUS) - a move that led him to the theological seminary at Mercersburg.
It was timely as Nevin was wrestling with the state of Presbyterianism and American Christianity in general. He was concerned with the revival culture that had emerged in the context of the Second Great Awakening. American pragmatism and its tendencies toward both individualism and ahistorical thinking were opening the door to innovations and an approach to Christianity that was at odds with historic Christianity, historic Protestantism, and (Nevin believed) Scriptural teaching.
He was quickly pulled into various controversies as even many of his Reformed co-religionists had also been influenced by American styles of thinking and in particular the philosophy of Scottish Common Sense Realism - a theory of knowledge that resonates with the simple optimism of both the colonies and the early republic. Indeed, many secular writers have written of its influence on figures such as Thomas Jefferson and other American Founders.
In combatting the revivalism and emotionalism that was sweeping across the American Church scene, Nevin came into conflict with the antecedents of today's Evangelical movement. His 1843 work The Anxious Bench took the methodology of Charles Finney and other revivalists to task and argued they were subverting the gospel and historic Christianity. Today's altar calls and 'seeker' methods are directly descended from Finney's thought.
Nevin also clashed with figures generally esteemed within American Reformed Christianity such as Charles Hodge of Princeton. Nevin argued that 19th century American Christianity was affected by a rationalist tendency and that doctrines such as the Real Presence in the Lord's Supper had been abandoned and even anathematized, even though these were the very doctrines held by Calvin and his successors. Both doctrine and worship had been degraded and individualism had pushed many Reformed believers into a more subjective and even Baptistic understanding of the Church and sacraments. His 1846 work The Mystical Presence: a Vindication of the Reformed or Calvinistic Doctrine of the Holy Eucharist, led to charges of Lutheranism and Roman Catholicism. It must be remembered that this was at the height of Irish immigration and there were real fears of Catholicism throughout the 19th century.
To combat the casual, innovative, and even entertainment-based trends within American Christianity, Nevin and his colleague Philip Schaff attempted to steer the German Reformed into a more 'High Church' direction, with a more elaborate liturgy, including candles and the like. Many resisted this and in 1869 Ursinus College was founded in response.
Nevin and Mercersburg are still debated today and connected to recent controversies. But for most people, he's a forgotten figure. His unvisited grave in Lancaster is a stone's throw from President Buchanan. The buildings at nearby Lancaster Seminary (the successor to Mercersburg) are covered with rainbow flags demonstrating how far it has fallen from the historically-rooted theology of Nevin and Schaff. The seminary buildings still stand at Mercersburg as well as Nevin's house and for the curious, there's a Nevin Memorial UCC north of New Bethlehem.
For those who would learn more of Nevin and his times, I recommend DG Hart's 2005 work, John Williamson Nevin: High Church Calvinist.