I’m going to start posting snips from John Williamson Nevin’s introduction to The Principle of Protestantism. Eventually, I’ll complete the text and post it on Theologia.

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Our religious life and practice can be sound and strong only in connection with a living, vigorous theology. But to be thus living and vigorous, our theology must be more than traditional. It must keep pace with the onward course of human thought, subduing it always with renewed victory to its own power. Not by ignoring the power of error, or fulminating upon it blind ecclesiastical anathemas, can theology be saved from death; but only by meeting and overcoming it in the strength of the Lord. Now this requires, in our day, a legitimate regard in this form to the errors of Germany in particular. For it is preposterous to suppose that in the most speculative portion of the whole Christian world these errors stand in no connection with the general movement of the world’s mind, or that they do not need to be surmounted by a fresh advance on the part of truth as being only the dead repetition of previously vanquished falsehood.

In immediate contact with the evil, the friends of religion in Germany itself know the case to be different. There it is felt that theology must advance so as fairly to conquer or die. We may not feel the pressure of the same necessity. But this is no evidence that we stand on higher or surer ground. In the end our theology, to be worth anything as a science, must be carried over this limitation. It may not devolve on us possibly to achieve the work for ourselves. We may trust rather that this precisely is the special commission of the church in Germany itself, the land of Luther and the glorious Reforation. Certainly at this very time the struggle with error may be regarded as most auspicious and full of promise. And if there be one coutnry in the whole compas of church, where at this moment orthodox theology is not dead, but full of life and spirit and power, that country is Germany. We may hope then it will be found sufficient for its own work. This however when accomplished must be viewed as a work properly for the whole Christian world; and we owe it to ourselves at least, to be willing to take advantage of it in its progress and to employ it for the improvement of our own position, if it can be so used.

This much I have thought it proper to say on this point, merely to counteract, if possible, the poor prejudice that some may feel toward the present work, simply because of its German source and German complexion; as if all must needs be either rationalistic or transcendental, that breathes a thought in common with Hegel, or owns a feeling in sympathy with the gifted, noble Schleiermacher.