Two historic streams inform what it is to be Nazarene; Increasingly Damned
Like the upper waters of the Missouri and Ohio
Rivers flowing into the mighty Mississippi, so the American Holiness Movement and the European Wesleyan Movement inform the Church of the Nazarene (CoTN). High in the rugged, earthy terrain of the Rockies one can hear shouts of our ancestors celebrating their rough and tumbling passage through the rapids of life as Love poured out upon the individuals gathered. Like an earthquake it shook American Christendom, the Temperance and Womens Sufferage movements in its wake. To these pioneers in frontier faith it seemed an awakening worthy a new nation whose destiny seemed manifest. From across the very waters that Americans were certain kept them safe was born this renewals high-bred version in the likeness of an Anglican priest and his brother. Their methods were scandalous for the day; communal, common, open air meetings about loving God first, as no other and our neighbors? The workers of the docs. Their methodology incorporated smaller gathers, confessional spaces for addictive patterns and opportunities for lay persons of little means to rise as leaders upon whom the Spirit moved. Acts of love were encouraged and seen as making real the unmerited favor of God being given. Europe itself was stricken in conscience ushering in new norms for labor, especially slave labor. Each of these streams one flowing from the east and the other from the West created the Church we all love. The CoTN needs its two multifaceted streams and the sooner we realize it the better!
Like every pastor I’ve had the sorrowful privilege of listening to a couple fracturing, as they each recite a list of grievances about the other. “He never listens.” “She never stops hounding me.” We know what they as a couple have forgotten: it’s never about the list. it‘s about the pain, the discomfort. That’s why lovers split. Too much pain.
Ive been active on a number of Naz pastoral and lay sites in recent years and sense a crescendo in the intensity of divisive feeling between generally conserving and progressive Nazarenes. Increasingly I hear each side declaring “the other” as the very death of the other—ready to divorce, cut the ties and experience a supposed renewal in its wake.
The American Revivalists list:
For those who wish to celebrate a revivalist renaissance the issue of same sex marriage illustrates what’s wrong; a post-modern willingness to embrace The Word as literature, whose authors have agendas, prejudices and historic contexts that need to be considered as part of the inspired revelation. It is the very humanization of Holy Writ that de-legitimatizes the Divine clarity.
With this loss of clarity the sin nature and its resolution in the definitive experience of the Baptism of the Holy Spirit is no longer celebrated as the way of salvation, meaning the personal Christ-likeness and purity of heart that prepares each of us to enter into God’s eternal Presence.
The European Human Making Renewals List:
Awakening to the ‘communal nature of our becoming’ and carried along by The Sacred Texts born of the memories of community and the awareness of the larger narrative in scripture of God as Love seeking companions, these sisters and brothers of a post-modern world see salvation as more horizontal than vertical. It is a Kingdom of Love’s reign breaking in—human making, restoring in the earth the Shalom of Creation, Jesus prayer realized: “May Your Kingdom come, Your will be done.”
The law kills, always. These young and committed Nazarenes see the Twentieth century turn to literalism in Scripture as the wall which must fall if God’s inclusive reach is to be realized. These new holiness leaders see de-construction and re-construction of faith as their prime directive. What good is Mathew’s beatitudes about the characteristics that attend the Jesus follower if we never get to addressing the underlying Lukean concerns with poverty, lack of food, those whose communities still sorrow due to systemic injustic? People of very good heart owned slaves, so Mathew’s spiritualized world-view solves nothing.
Thus, the center of journey Is not in purity of character but in our communal and individual relations. “But I say to you who are willing to hear: Love your enemies. Do good to those who hate you. Bless those who curse you. Pray for those who mistreat you. If someone slaps you on the cheek, offer the other one as well. If someone takes your coat, don’t withhold your shirt either. Give to everyone who asks and don’t demand your things back from those who take them. Treat people in the same way that you want them to treat you. Be compassionate just as your Father is compassionate” (Luke 6:27-31, 36 CEB). This is holiness end, purity is the means to hearing, seeing, valuing.
Inside these communal gaps is our pain—our passion for The Word and The Living Word now a gap across the vast sea between enlightened modernity and the post-modern world views that hold each side captive.
Our communal Wesleyan desire to see God’s love fill the earth and heavens is lost in arguments about Biblical inerrancy, humanism, philosophies of our age and who is in and who is out. So much pain. Voices of “we are better without them” enter the fray. I keep asking myself if there is a third way, a middle way?
I was reminded this week that John Wesley traveled this third way.
The Middle Way:
The middle way is rooted in an attitude of “reverence” for every human and in particular “the sacred” inside humanity. It is about nuance; the ability to hold in tension two logically opposite ideas or theological positions and see how each, in its own context reveals a truth.
An example: A Calvinist begins with God’s sovereignty and human total depravity and says salvation is about election by God, obviously. An Armenian begins with human creation and while God’s image is deeply marred humanity retains freedom of choice which is her/his essential value and along that path is salvation.
Wesley listens to both and using nuance and believing each position carries essential truth concludes.
Salvation is first and foremost about God’s election of all who will; made real in the cross so that though deeply marred such that in isolation from God we not only cannot be saved, we also cannot of our own, do truly self-sacrificing acts of love.
But God has acted in Christ to be present to every human so that even in a fallen state God assures sufficient freedom of conscience and will that genuine human love remains real and is given sufficient grace to respond responsibly in love and by faith to God’s justifying grace, even to the point that loving choices and actions are sanctifying.
Thus the middle way in this example is to take seriously God’s sovereignty, the real marring of the image of God in humans and equally seriously the Presence of God universally given such that no one need live in isolation but can by grace experience real human freedom.
How we emerged as Two Streams:
The Wesleyan renewal in the late 1700’s England and late 1800’s America were built upon two different expressions of theology and religious experience; yet, one heart felt need with very real earth centric outcomes.
European Communal Model:
The European model was Anglican Evangelical if you will. Take it to the streets was radical and assumed working class stiffs and the impoverished poor were longing for both God’s and human love—even more, that loving God first as no other and their neighbor was doable and worth doing.
John and Charles took Anglican catholicity seriously and developed it experientially. Everyone is already in, that is justified in God’s heart from the propensities and wounds of human inter-generational sin (Adamic sin), God looking kindly on every human as broken so that we could not, by ourselves alone, be fixed.This innocence extended was at great cost to the Trinity of God, having now tasted the death inside our human story—in the atonement experienced in the Son.
Justification for personal sin was freely available in the Church in the same kindly heart poured out at Calvary and celebrated in the Eucharist. John agreed with Calvinists about salvation rooted in God’s decision but saw more clearly that God’s decision was made before eternity, the Sacrament being the means by which we partake. So, how do we take the Church to every person and community?
Wesley also held what most Anglicans did; God’s kindly heart had to become our heart in real time or beyond. Stated differently the justifying grace given for Adam’s sin and the wounds that attend and then made relational when we respond in saving faith, needs to become fully realized in us, made real—our own heart aflame with love like God. For Wesley this sanctifying or making real grace always lives inside God’s kindly heart so that every obedience, loving act impresses on us and with our neighbors God’s love made real.
That theology of inclusion and making God real in us and with our neighbors was developed methodically (Methodist) using class meetings, confessional meetings, acts of charity and seeking social justice transforming English law and class strictures. Experience was reinforced by communal gatherings and education. Charles and John’s was a horizontal revolution within Anglican faith.
The American Holiness Model:
In the American experience the horizontal and humanizing experience of faith became vertical! God‘s Spirit was center stage falling freely upon ordinary folk in the wilds that is America. “Pack up the babies and grab the old ladies” of Neil Diamonds caricature in “Brother Loves’s Travil’ng Salvation Show” wasn’t far off; “Cause everyone know’s that brother’s love, shows—hallelujah brother”. In a culture that knew the Christ Story, where guilt is everywhere present, love, especially God’s love, is a tonic worth mixing in. At heart was the assurance that God would not only forgive but would fill us with love and thereby complete our humanity. The condition was trust in God and surrender of our lives to live out a Christ centered love and holiness ethic.
In the American experience the Adamic Sin was front and center, an individualized corruption that needed cleansing; not just a scrub down, but an eradication. The focus in the late 1800’s was about a movement of God’s Spirit transforming individuals, yes, but within the optimism of a country newly confident, having faced down a civil war ending legal slavery and finding its place in a world of nations.
It was the time of President U.S. Grant keeping the hope of Lincoln’s federally enforced reconstruction of the South and the initial gains for African Americans in play only to be set aside under President Hayes in a political arrangement that betrayed the former slaves in favor of national reconciliation. Teddy Roosevelt, very likely the first enlightenment President ushered in modernity and a series of Progressive ideals.
From within this historic context the revivalism of the late nineteenth century would champion womens rights, labor reform, the temperance movement and the institutional formation of the Church of the Nazarene, optimistic that God was acting to usher in a new 20th Century, the Christian Century, wherein love for God and neighbor would permeate the several Churches of Christ, high and low, and through them the nation. Love for God and community were the direct result of communal celebrations, demonstrative in nature and crystallized in the highly inter-active and confessional altar services, complete with tear-laden testimonies. Optimism about God’s love and Spirit filled human potential combined with the rise of new technologies offered a hopeful future.
When Our Optimism Was Crushed:
It was the twentieth century that stopped the forward movement as American revivalism married itself to Calvinist pessimism about planet earth and the Christian Century of Promise became the American Century of salvation from Fascism and Communism. Religious experience became private and transactional, about character formation preparing for an eternity in another place and time, abandoning the restorative God project at the center of Wesleyan theology and experience in the two previous centurIes—not to mention the 16 centuries before.
In the popular unspoken myth driving this fading revivalist sentiment is a simple thesis: Jesus is the Savior of every human soul just as America and its western alies is the savior of the world, keeping chaos at bay. This civil religion is the direct result of fear—about God’s wrath and the encroachment of power-centric regimes threatening freedom of conscience and governance. God frees the human soul of slavery to sin and a renewed entrepreneurial spirit when combined with limited government frees humans to achieve their highest individual aspirations. Both were considered gifts of God. Prosperity on earth and a Disneyland heaven to boot, assuming you were in the privileged of the earth to enjoy.
The Deeper Divides:
Two other divides emerged in the twentieth century complicating the Wesleyan landscape; the Post-modern revolution and the urban verses rural. These two divisions are actually interwoven, reinforcing the separation, both spiritually and geographically.
The enlightenment was nurtured by the Renaissance—one based on the ordered and rational world of the outer senses and the other on the humanizing interior values of community experience, reason, estimation, imagination and memory. The revealed faith of Christians perceived in these ordered ways of thinking, the Creator of all. Truth simply is. Jesus is the Truth and we are made real in him.
In the broad open spaces of the earth such a world view appeared Christian and each individual could rebel in a sea of sin or find herself safe in the arms of a Creator who is both intimate and other.
it is urban America that finds in the curved reality of Einsteinium physics an explanation to the vulnerability and promise that is the city. We are not merely independent, isolated little worlds living in close proximity. We are emerging personalities; persons as a result of a thousand million inter-active experiences. What we do in time and space has greater impact than what we feel, for our doing sets off a chain of actions and re-actions that either bring peace, or disturb it, that serves happiness or disturbs it, that makes a loving environment or a lonely one.
In a post-modern universe we are intrinsically connected and the real enemy is he/she or any belief system that attempts to isolate us into haves and have-nots, those who are inside and the “other”.
My father understood holiness as rooted in God’s law or Creational order and salvation as living with the purpose of my individual creation. Character was the issue and the Beatitudes of Matthew (poor in spirit) is it’s renewed law. Wesley humanizes this salvational perspective by placing love at its center.
My son understands holiness through Luke’s eyes, the Beatitudes a re-imagination of God’s loving reign wherein have and have-nots are no longer—we are blessed as we bless, even those who would do us harm. No one is outside of this Kingdom breaking in upon us. Character matters only as it allows us to see all our neighbors as God’s beloved and we with them.
Neither the renaissance, enlightenment, modernity or post-modernity can lay claim to ultimate reality. Each , in their turn can be preached. Each access a part of the explanation of what it is to be human, image bearers.
What is or should be anathema is to fail our sisters and brothers by ceasing to be curious, to understand ourselves and one another and so live out this good news recognizing just how much we need the other.
I need my revivalist Nazarenes to both testify and evidence love’s reign and ever point us toward being “entirely given over toThe Spirit of God”.
My revivalist friends need awakened to the Narrative of The Word, seeing in the Acts of the Church, the very real desire to flesh Jesus out.
in short we need to bring back together the Written and Living Word and to cease our never ending judgments of the other. To live, as Christ admonished.
Don’t judge, and you won’t be judged. Don’t condemn, and you won’t be condemned. Forgive, and you will be forgiven” (Luke 6:27-31, 36-37 CEB).
Blessings! Terry
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