Born of Water and the Spirit

Born of Water and the Spirit presents essays on the sacraments by the three major representatives of "Mercersburg Theology," John Nevin, Philip Schaff, and Emanuel Gerhart. It focuses on Mercersburg's doctrine of baptism and Christian nurture, attempts to correct putative deficiencies of the major Reformed trajectories (e.g., New England and Princeton), and vigorously critiques the anti-sacramental animus of revivalistic evangelicalism. Mercersburg understood baptism as initiating a person (adult or infant) into the sacramental life of the church. Baptism and Eucharist were objective, spiritually real actions that made (what Nevin called) the "mystical presence" of Jesus Christ present to Christians, bringing transformative power into their lives. The present critical edition carefully preserves the original texts, while providing extensive introductions, annotations, and bibliography to orient the modern reader and facilitate further scholarship. The Mercersburg Theology Study Series is an attempt to make available for the first time, in attractive, readable, and scholarly modern editions, the key writings of the nineteenth-century movement known as the Mercersburg Theology. An ambitious multiyear project, it aims to make an important contribution to the scholarly community and to the broader reading public, who can at last be properly introduced to this unique blend of American and European, Reformed and catholic theology.

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John Williamson Nevin (1803-86) and Philip Schaff (1819-93) were professors at Mercersburg Seminary of the German Reformed Church, Nevin being among the leading American Protestant theologians of his day and Schaff quickly rising to become the nineteenth century's premier church historian. Emanuel V. Gerhart (1817-1904) was another leading teacher in the German Reformed church, teaching and writing at several denominational institutions from the 1840s until the close of his career. David W. Layman earned his PhD in Religion from Temple University in 1994. Since then, he has been a lecturer in religious studies and philosophy at schools in south central Pennsylvania and has researched and written several articles on the Mercersburg movement. W. Bradford Littlejohn is Director of the Davenant Trust, a nonprofit organization sponsoring historical research at the intersection of the church and academy, and is author of The Mercersburg Theology and the Quest for Reformed Catholicity and Richard Hooker: A Companion to His Life and Work.