Six years ago, my home denomination last held its global gathering, at which we discuss and vote on several issues, ranging from small to large changes. Sometimes, we have trouble seeing what is small and what is large. For example, it was at our last gathering that we voted to change our statement on The Lord’s Supper, moving us from a Zwinglist ‘memorial’ position (Christ is not present at the table, but we ‘remember’ or ‘memorialize’ him there) to something far closer to Luther’s affirmation that Christ is really and truly present in that sacrament. It was a huge win for theological coherence in our tradition, though there wasn’t a single question asked or word of debate raised, signaling to me that the delegation wasn’t quite aware of how theologically monumental such a vote was. I’ve spoken on this several times in the years following, and the response is largely the same: “I didn’t know we did that! That’s a huge change!” Indeed, it is!
This time around, I thought I’d offer some brief reflections on the theological issues at stake in our resolutions. To be clear, this isn’t my advice on how anyone should vote, but having a clearer picture of the theological issues may help inform us. I’m also not a voting delegate (our district considers only those members of the clergy who are serving as senior pastors, so full-time professors usually aren’t considered for election) so, as the saying goes, “I don’t have a dog in the fight.” Well, except for the burning desire for a church I love to reflect the kingdom Jesus establishes more faithfully! This is just one theologian’s insights that I hope you’ll find interesting or helpful. I can’t touch on them all, and I’m sorry if I didn’t get to one of your favorites, but I’ll update this post with more as I’m able. If there’s a particular resolution you’d like me to discuss, feel free to let me know and I’ll do my best to speak to the theological issues it touches. Let’s get to it.
This resolution offers a wide-ranging change to the Covenant of Christian Conduct, bringing it into harmony with a Wesleyan vision of the human person, a life filled with love, sin, and the holy life. Its setting of ‘behaviors’ within the motif of new creation is
the theological key to this resolution. One of the central themes of Wesleyan theology, new creation is more than an update of an outmoded world. It is, rather, the affirmation that God is active in the world, making all things new in accordance with God’s purposes for creation.
Importantly, the language expands from a fairly (and narrowly!) personal view of morality, situating moral behaviors within the larger narrative of God creation and redemption. “Scripture begins with God good work of creating, though the appearance and ever-increasingly devastating effects of sin followed.” In this sentence, our behaviors aren’t only abstractly ‘good’ and ‘bad’ things but are caught up in the theo-drama of creation, fall, and redemption. A reference to one of my favorite biblical passages follows: “If anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: the old is gone, the new is here!” (2 Cor. 5:17-19), and with it, the theological table is laid: this is about new creation! Or, perhaps, it signals that this is a statement more about God’s new creation activity in the world than it is about our willing ourselves to make moral choices under our own steam.
Vitally, the proposed changes use the word ‘response’ multiple times, a word that doesn’t appear at all in the original. What does that mean? It means that whatever behaviors it names will be understood as “commitments and choices in response to God’s transforming grace.” Those italics are mine, because I want to highlight how vital this is for the Christian life in the Wesleyan tradition. John Wesley’s lively image of the human heart being filled with love, excluding sin comes to mind, as does the entire vision of Mildred Wynkoop’s A Theology of Love. Flowing in the same stream as Wesley and Wynkoop, this language refreshingly reminds us that we don’t will ourselves to the kind of life described in this statement; it is a gift of grace. Or, to put it another way, this isn’t a list of rules that allow us to live a holy life; this is what a holy life looks like as it’s being transformed by God’s grace. This language moves the Covenant to become more descriptive than prescriptive, such that the behaviors it names flow out of a heart gracious filled with love for God and neighbor. In other words, while taking moral behaviors seriously, it theologically locates them in a way that makes the life of holiness one of joy, rather than a legalistic set of rules to be followed. To my reading, this statement is summoning us to take another step down the pathway toward theological coherence, making our central message even more joyful.
Should someone be baptized if they are to be taken into local church membership? To my knowledge, this has never been a requirement for membership in the Church of the Nazarene’s history, though it does have a longer historical precedent. Some of the earliest documents we have (I have Hippolytus’ On the Apostolic Tradition in mind here) describe baptismal practices that call for three years of preparation, largely because for the early Christians, baptism was far more than a ‘spiritual’ sign that left the rest of our lives unaffected. Hippolytus described the jobs people would have to leave to be able to enter the waters of baptism and the allegiances that must be shattered. In essence, anything that stood in opposition to the lordship of Jesus had to be denied. Only then would someone be considered a full member of the church.
The early church took these vows incredibly seriously because being a follower of Jesus was a way unto itself; it wasn’t compatible with other commitments. It wasn’t possible to be a good Roman and a good Christian because being a good Roman involved vows to Caesar as lord, and to walk in the ways of Rome. We modern people don’t have a category for this kind of religious life, because nearly everyone reading this was born into a world where being an upstanding citizen came with the territory of being a Christian. Our earliest ancestors in the faith, however, couldn’t perceive of life like that, and so when one was baptized, it signaled a death of the old life (political, national, economic, etc.) and new birth into a completely different way of life. That way of life was membership in the body of Christ, the church.
Many of these practices live on today in various forms of Christianity. Orthodox communities, for example, still follow this ancient pattern, dividing worship into the liturgy of the Word (which anyone can attend, usually involving the reading of Scripture), and the liturgy of the faithful (where only the baptized are invited to partake of the Lord’s Supper). This might sound offensively exclusive to contemporary ears, but it’s meant to help us steward the treasures of the faith well, and to create a community in which faith isn’t treated like an extracurricular activity, but is as the core of who we are, commitments and all.
What, then, does this mean theologically for Nazarenes? On the one hand, it moves us more toward a sacramental approach to membership. That is, membership isn’t simply a ‘voluntary association’ like joining the Lions Club or a softball team. In this resolution, we are saying that there is divine activity undergirding membership in a local congregation. Ecclesiologically (having to do with the study of the church), this moves us away from volunteeristic visions of church life where we think of ourselves as making up a church because we’ve decided to join, and more toward embracing a theology where the church is a miracle of grace, because we are a body who have entered through the waters of baptism, where we were really and truly met by God and transformed by grace.
On the other hand, many ‘baptism first’ traditions are far more comfortable in practice with infant baptism than the Church of the Nazarene has tended to be. Though our Manual names infant baptism as a valid form of the sacrament, a strong majority of our congregations lean in practice toward ‘believer’s baptism’ in which the person being baptized actively confesses faith in Jesus. There is, of course, a theological question to be asked: Is baptism more about my public testimony to God’s grace, or God’s grace that has acted before I was aware of it? Put more succinctly, is it about what I’m doing, or is it about what God’s doing?
A Wesleyan view of this sees it as both, that God acts first in grace, and we humans respond to that grace. This is why I’ve long said that for congregations who practice infant baptism, we should also take very seriously the need for humans to actively respond to the grace they received in their baptism. Often, that looks like something called confirmation, but considering this resolution, I’m wondering if church membership could take on the shape of offering people the opportunity to respond to the grace at work in their baptism by joining a local body that God is gifting to the world as an expression of new creation.
A statement on the goodness of creation is a welcome addition to the Manual, especially, since the Bible begins with its own affirmation of the goodness of creation from the first two chapters (Gen. 1, 2). I strongly suspect this resolution will be headed for referral to a study committee to work out some of the finer theological points, as is the case with most of these kinds of resolutions, so I’m not going to spend a lot of time parsing its language, but there are some important considerations.
First, the affirmation of the goodness of creation is a vital theological move and will help across the spectrum of doctrines. Additionally, it’s truer to Wesley’s own vision, as evidenced in one of his earliest sermons, “The New Creation,” which opens with an affirmation of the goodness of creation.
Many of the most challenging moral and theological questions of our time stem from whether or not we think creation is good. There are many Christians who consider Genesis 1 and 2 as an interesting and truthful backstory, but ultimately affirm that creation and humanity really is essentially described in Genesis 3. But the Wesleyan tradition (tracing a line of thought going back to early Christianity) encourages a view of creation where the effects of sin are real and eating away at the goodness of creation. In other words, creation really is good, but it’s being afflicted by a disease: sin and evil. Creation itself isn’t evil, but it is being afflicted by evil. This resolution helps us see that theological vision more clearly.
I’m also struck by the opening sentence, stating, “the Triune God created the heavens and the earth and everything in them out of nothing but love.” Historically, the Christian tradition has affirmed creatio ex nihilo, mean ‘creation out of nothing.’ It was a philosophical and theological safeguard against a vision of the universe that begins with ‘God and something else.’ That is, if we affirm that God created out of nothing – real nothing! – that we are on different theological ground from the other religious traditions of the world (particularly those in the ancient near east around the time of Judaism’s rise) that made meaning of their world by telling creation stories about gods who create out of a struggle against one another. Rome’s creation myth, for example, does a lot to tell the Roman people who they are by saying that they are the product of divine conflict between gods. Israel, by contrast, wanted to tell a different story altogether about the One God who has no rival and creates by speaking.
More recently, some theologians have suggested another approach to understanding creation, namely creatio ex amore. This is to say that the Christian doctrine of creation is better understood as God creating out of love, rather than out of nothing. The former, they argue, is a clearer reflection of the biblical narrative (what was that ‘formless void’ God spoke to if there was nothing?), and better sets us up to see God’s activity through the rest of the biblical story.
I’m risking going back on my earlier claim that I wouldn’t parse the language of this resolution too carefully, but the wording is like philosophical and theological catnip. What, exactly, would we mean by “nothing but love”? My friend, colleague, and former professor Michael Lodahl has done a lot of this work in his 2004 book, The God of Nature and of Grace: Reading the World in a Wesleyan Way, and you can look there if these questions interest you as much as they interest me.
Dealing with the theological beauty and complexity of the Atonement is far more than I can do in a few meager paragraphs. The resolution before us, adapting our Article of Faith on the matter, touches on a host of theological issues, most of which I won’t be able to engage adequately in a blog post, but several points of particular interest jump out.
First, the theological theme of new creation finds its way into the language, locating the Atonement in the larger theological narrative of redemption than simply reducing it to the suffering of Jesus. That is, Atonement is more than Christ’s suffering.
Additionally, the language of reconciliation, absent from the current version, represents a step forward toward theological coherence for Nazarenes. ‘Atonement’ is one of the few words in theology that stems from English roots. Greek, Hebrew, and Latin are the usual sources for the language we’ve used to describe God and God’s activity, but the term ‘atonement’ is, at its etymological root, ‘at-one-ment.’ That is, it has to do with making one of something that has been separated. In this case, Christ’s work of Atonement reconciles the broken relationship between God and creation, renewing creation by connecting it to its source. The fact that reconciliation language is absent our current Article is a tad troubling on that front, and so I’m glad to see that shift in this resolution.
Finally, I’ll mention that our Article is broad enough that it doesn’t overtly endorse a particular ‘atonement theory,’ as we often refer to them in theology. The various atonement theories seek to describe what was happening, especially with Jesus on the cross and his suffering. Interestingly, the global Church (across denominations) has never agreed on one theory that sufficiently describes what was happening in Jesus’s crucifixion, so there is a wideness open to Christians on the matter. Some gravitate toward theories like penal substitution, in which the punishment for sin is taken on to Jesus, shielding us from it ourselves. Anslem’s satisfaction theory generally frames Jesus’s atoning work as restoring the justice between God and humanity that was violated by human sin. Gustaf Aulen’s Chrisus victor approach names the Atonement as Christ winning a victory over sin, death, and evil as the primary substance of Jesus’s atoning work, decentering ‘punishment’ motifs in favor of God’s direct engagement with evil.
Nazarenes aren’t overtly called to endorse any of these (or the others I haven’t named). For the sake of theological coherence, however, I usually encourage Wesleyans to consider which of these theories resonate with the God we have come to know in the person of Jesus. In other words, what kind of God is revealed to us in the whole life of Jesus? What if the crucifixion wasn’t Jesus shielding us from a God bent on retribution, but the very revelation of divine nature? Genesis 15 tells the story of God’s willingness to endure the consequences of Israel’s eventual breach of faithlessness, rather than inflict those consequences upon Israel. In entering into covenant with Abraham, God’s own presence ‘walks the gauntlet’ of splayed-open animal carcasses that the weaker of two parties usually would walk, signaling their own willingness to end up like the animals if they violate the covenant. It can shock us, then, that God is the one who walks the gauntlet, having to Abraham in a deep sleep. God is willing to endure the consequences of Israel’s potential violation of the covenant.
To my reading, this resolution – through its appeal to reconciliation, new creation, and resurrection language – helps us approach the Atonement through God’s self-sacrificial love.
I teach an entire course on the content of this Article, both at Trevecca and our denominational seminary, so needless to say, a few observations aren’t going to cover everything issue that surfaces in this wide-ranging rewrite of what Nazarenes often refer to as a cardinal doctrine. Gladly, this resolution is accompanied by an extended and thorough phrase by phrase commentary, offering historical, biblical, and theological background on this particular proposal. Rather than repeat any of the fine work that’s been done there, I’ll simply mention that this resolution offers a vision of entire sanctification that resonates deeply with John Wesley’s own synthesis of eastern and western theological themes.
It’s too simplistic to paint the eastern and western streams of the Christian tradition as starkly distinct, though there are themes that each offer. The western metaphors are the ones we tend to be more familiar and comfortable to us: legal themes of guilt and pardon, stemming from Augustine and then being passed to us through Luther and Calvin. This is the stream of the tradition where we get terms like ‘original sin,’ which is a phrase used in the current Article, and it's the stream that usually tended to give us notions like original sin as being basic to the human being, such that we’ll never be free from it in this life.
The eastern stream, dating back to the work of Clement of Rome, Ignatius of Antioch, and Polycarp of Smyrna – and then later developed in the work of the so-called Cappadocian Fathers (Gregory of Nyssa, Basil, and Gregory of Nazianzus), tends to draw upon metaphors of healing to describe Christian salvation, and what we’d refer to now as entire sanctification. Gregory of Nyssa, more than his older brother Basil, or Gregory of Nazianzus, emphasized a kind of dynamic and constant growth in grace. Extrapolating this metaphor for our current context, we could say that the life of entire sanctification is responding to God’s grace with one’s entire self, such that there is no part of is that is not constantly growing in grace. It doesn’t mean we’ve ‘arrived’ at a kind of static place precisely because there’s limit to divine grace – it carries us deeper into the infinite.
The resolution before us reaches back into the western and eastern streams, just as Wesley did. To my reading, it gives more careful biblical and historical attention to what we’ve come to refer to as ‘entire sanctification,’ helping us to see that this doctrine isn’t something that was invented in the 19th century, but has deep historical roots. Of course, since the Church of the Nazarene’s inception, there has been a contingent that appeals to the vision of sanctification that emerged in the 19th century, often referred to as American holiness, which tends to work out of western metaphors. Whether our global body will embrace this synthetic, historically rooted resolution will be interesting.
Another change to one of the Articles of Faith is bound to get attention, and rightly so. The Article under consideration here catches my attention on a few points.
First, this resolution sets the final coming of Christ within the larger narrative of God’s creation. I often remind students that there are two ways to end something. You can either stop it in its tracks, or you can bring it to a fitting conclusion. When we talk about the ‘end of the world,’ Weselyan theology wants to do so in terms of a good and fitting conclusion, rather than stopping it in its tracks, and this resolution goes a long way toward that theological goal.
The theme of new creation is here as well! “As the Triune God first created the heavens and the earth,” the proposed language states, “God will renew them in the new creation where He will dwell eternally with his redeemed people.” Not only is this precisely how Revelation 21 and 22 portray the fitting ‘end’ to creation, but it also renews theological emphasis on new creation, which is helpful on a number of fronts, including how we understand the goodness of creation, the purposes of human redemption, and so on.
Finally, this resolution appeals to the words of Scripture to conclude not only this particular Article, but the Articles of faith since this is the last one. “God, who in the cross triumphed over all evil powers, will complete His loving purposes for creation. There will be no more suffering, injustice or death, and God will wipe away every tear.” I’m struck by the theme of Christus Victor in this wording, which isn’t explicitly present in the resolution on Atonement, but is, to my mind, largely consistent with a Wesleyan approach to Christian theology. This language also concludes the Articles of faith by reflecting the way the Bible concludes, with an image of God dwelling with creation in a communion that is uninterrupted or uncorrupted by sin, evil, and death. It not only helps our Articles reflect Scripture’s narrative more fully, but it also allows us to proclaim the good news more consistently, precisely because this helps us be more theologically coherent from creation to new creation.
Very helpful! It would be extraordinary if something like this were sent out with all the new manuals to explain the changes that were taken and, in some cases, rejected. It provides insight into where the deliberative body is/ways pointed us. Thank you! Peace and Grace. Tammy Herbert
Thanks so much Tim! Super helpful. Very well done. Peace to you. Nathan Oates