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Born of Water and the Spirit
Essays on the Sacraments and Christian Formation
by John Williamson Nevin, Philip Schaff and Emanuel V. Gerhart
Edited by David W. Layman and W. Bradford Littlejohn
Series: Mercersburg Theology Study Series
Imprint: Wipf and Stock
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.
"These provocative essays articulate a potent alternative to revivalism's identification of conversion with a disjunctive psychological crisis. David Layman's magisterial introduction clarifies how the Mercersburg theologians sought to recover a vision of salvation as a process of being shaped by the corporate life of the church, and baptism as the initial insertion of the individual into the life of Christ. Our churches desperately need such an antidote to self-generated and self-aggrandizing forms of spirituality."
--Lee Barrett, Stager Professor of Theology, Lancaster Theological Seminary; Author, Eros and Self-Emptying: Intersections of Augustine and Kierkegaard and Kierkegaard: Foundations of Theology