John Nevin's vision of the church as ""one, holy, catholic, and apostolic"" grew out of his critique of the revivalism and sectarianism that prevailed throughout evangelical Christianity in the nineteenth century. He deepens his perception of catholicity as an expression of Christian wholeness, his response to the parochialism that ruled American religion and life. He grounds congregational life and mission in the Lordship of Jesus Christ, ordered by the whole Christian tradition, which comes into focus in the Apostles' Creed. This edition carefully preserves the original texts while providing extensive introductions, annotations, and bibliography to both orient the reader and to facilitate further scholarship.
The Mercersburg Theology Study Series presents for the first time attractive, readable, scholarly modern editions of the key writings of the nineteenth-century movement known as the Mercersburg Theology. An ambitious multi-year project, it aims to make an important contribution to the academic community and to the broader public, who can at last be properly introduced to this unique blend of American and European Reformed and Catholic theology.

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.