This led to a series of articles written against Professor Schaff’s view by fellow RCUS pastor Joseph Berg.
Nevin argued for an objective efficacy in the sacrament and that the atonement is brought about by the person of Christ, rather than his work.
This brought about many reactions both from inside and outside the church, with the most famous critiques made by Joseph Berg and later by Professor Charles Hodge of Princeton Seminary, the latter a confessional Presbyterian.
The controversy, which came perilously close to causing a schism between the factions, continued until 1878, when the General Synod established a peace commission.
First, the rise of the strongly Protestant neo-orthodox movement among scholars and some RCUS clergy gained ascendence over the romanticism and metaphysics on which Mercersburg was largely based.
Finally, the RCUS' merger with the Evangelical Synod of North America in 1934 brought a significant pietist constituency to the new denomination, as well as a more mediating approach to doctrine, thereby reducing the polemical style of past generations.
John Nevin summarized the Mercersburg Theology, or Movement, by saying, "Its cardinal principle is the fact of the Incarnation."
In 2012 Wipf and Stock began publishing critical, annotated editions of major works of Schaff, Nevin and their associates in The Mercersburg Theology Study Series.
The result is a thoroughgoing ecclesiology and sacramentology that opposes a number of theological dualisms[8] and heavily forensic soteriologies.