John Williamson Nevin

[1] He was a nephew of Hugh Williamson of North Carolina, and was of Scottish blood and Presbyterian training.

[2] But under the influence of Neander, he was gradually breaking away from "Puritanic Presbyterianism", and, in 1840, having resigned his chair in Allegheny, he was appointed professor of theology in the German Reformed Theological Seminary at Mercersburg, and thus passed from the Presbyterian Church into the German Reformed Church.

He soon became prominent: first by his contributions to its organ, the Messenger; then by The Anxious Bench—A Tract for the Times (1843), attacking the vicious excesses of revivalistic methods; and by his defence of the inauguration address, The Principle of Protestantism, delivered by his colleague Philip Schaff, which aroused a storm of protest by its suggestion that Pauline Protestantism was not the last word in the development of the church but that a Johannine Christianity was to be its out-growth, and by its recognition of Petrine Romanism as a stage in ecclesiastical development.

[2][3] Nevin characterized his critics as pseudo-Protestants, urged (with Dr. Charles Hodge, and against the Presbyterian General Assembly) the validity of Roman Catholic baptism, and defended the doctrine of the "spiritual real presence" of Christ in the Lord's Supper, notably in The Mystical Presence: a Vindication of the Reformed or Calvinistic Doctrine of the Holy Eucharist (1846); to this Charles Hodge replied from the point of view of rationalistic puritanism in the Princeton Review of 1848.

With Dr. Schaff and others, he was on the committee which prepared the liturgy of the German Reformed Church, which appeared in provisional form in 1857 and as An Order of Worship in 1866.