In his work The Anxious Bench, John W. Nevin combats the revivalistic conception of conversion and religious growth which he saw as represented by the “Anxious Bench.” The Anxious Bench was basically an altar call on steroids which was made popular especially by itinerant evangelists like Charles Finney during a period in the nineteenth century commonly referred to in American Religious history as the Second Great Awakening. Nevin viewed the Bench as the symbol (or even the sacrament, though he does not put it this way) of an entire revivalistic religious system which is prone to fragmentation. Nevin set over against this “system of the Bench” what he refers to as the “system of the Catechism.” By this Nevin does not mean simply the catechism as a set of questions and answers to be memorized, but the entire theory of Christian conversion and religious growth that the catechism represents, that is, the churchly, sacramental, organic conception of Christian faith and life. As Nevin articulates it, the system of the catechism is nothing other than the original Reformed and Lutheran understanding on how disciples of Christ are made and how Christian growth is brought about.

Sadly, the words of this nineteenth century theologian concerning what he saw as two competing religious systems are very much applicable to the ecclesial situation in which we find ourselves in the twenty-first century, especially for Reformed folks and other evangelicials who are struggling (as I am) to maintain a traditional Protestant understanding of conversion and spiritual growth in an age so permeated with revivalistic assumptions.

According to Nevin, in the system of the Bench,

False views of religion abound. Conversion is everything, sanctification nothing. Religion is not regarded as the life of God in the soul that must be cultivated in order that it may grow, but rather as a transient excitement to be renewed from time to time by suitable stimulants presented to the imagination. A taste for noise and rant supercedes all desire for solid knowledge.” (Wipf and Stock, 33-34)

But in the system of the Catechism,

Due regard is had to the idea of the Church as something more than a bare abstraction, the conception of an aggregate of parts mechanically brought together. It is apprehended rather as an organic life, springing perpetually from the same ground, and identical with itself at every point. In this view, the Church is truly the mother of all her children. They do not impart life to her, but she imparts life to them… The Church is in no sense the product of individual Christianity, as though a number of persons should first receive the heavenly fire in separate streams, and then come into such a spiritual connection comprising the whole; but individual Christianity is the product, always and entirely, of the Church as existing previously, and only revealing its life in this way. Christ lives in the Church, and through the Church in its particular members; just as Adam lives in the humans race generically considered, and through the race in every individual man. (67-68)

It is also interesting and important to note how the children of believers are treated within these two systems. I find Nevin’s words to be quite perceptive in this regard:

Where [the system of the Catechism] prevails, a serious interest will be taken in the case of children as proper subjects for the Christian salvation, from the earliest age. Infants born in the Church are regarded and treated as members of it from the beginning, and this privilege is felt to be something more than an empty shadow. The idea of infant conversion is held in particular honor; and it is counted not only possible, but altogether natural, that children growing up in the bosom of the Church under the faithful application of the means of grace should be quickened into spiritual life in a comparatively quiet way, and spring up numerously “as willows by the water-courses,” to adorn the Christian profession, without being able at all to trace the process by which the glorious change has been effected. Where the Church has lost all faith in this method of conversion, either not looking for it at all or looking for it only in rare and extraordinary circumstances, it is evidence that she is under the force of a wrong religious theory, and practically subjected, at least in some measure, to the false system whose symbol is the Bench. If conversion is not expected nor sought in this way among infants and children, it is not likely often to occur. All is made to hang methodistically on sudden and violent experiences belonging to the individual separately taken, and holding little or no connection with his relations to the Church previously. Then as a matter of course, baptism becomes a barren sign, and the children of the Church are left to grow up like the children of the world, under general most heartless, most disastrous neglect. The exemplifications of such a connection between wrong theory and wrong practice, in this case, are within the reach of the most common observation. Only where the system of the Catechism is in honor and vigorous force, do we ever find a properly earnest and comprehensive regard exhibited for the salvation of the young; a regard, that operates, not partially and occasionally only, but follows its subjects with all-compassing interest, like the air and light of heaven, from the first breath of infancy onwards; a regard, that cannot be satisfied, in their behalf, with the spasmodic experience of the anxious bench, but travails in birth for them continually till Christ be formed in their hearts, the hope of glory. (Wipf and Stock, pp. 68-69.)

Nevin saw the Bench and the Catechism as two entirely different religious systems which cannot co-exist. As one who in the past spent many years in a thoroughly revivalist tradition myself, but who is now convinced that the New Testament, the early Fathers, and the Reformers all witness with one voice to an organic, churchly, sacramental vision of the Christian faith, I am sorrowfully inclined to agree.