The Interior Sense of Scripture: The Sacred Hermeneutics of John W. Nevin

John Williamson Nevin (1803-1886) was, with Philip Schaff and others, a progenitor of the "Mercersburg Theology." In The Interior Sense of Scripture, William DiPuccio unfolds for the first time Nevin's vision of a biblical hermeneutic based on the centrality of the Incarnation. For Nevin, the Incarnation is the transcendental (or top-down) archetype of all hermeneutics and philosophy. And it is as true today that the decay of American culture and religion lies in its widespread adoption of a Common Sense Realism (a bottom-up paradigm) which values the material above the spiritual, the actual above the ideal, and the particular above the universal. Thus Nevin's transcendental/incarnational hermeneutics is as appropriate for the current worldview situation as for his own time.