Holiness Without Sacraments?

I am in mourning. I am mourning over the loss of sacramental living and worship in the Church of the Nazarene. Doctrinally, the C.O.T.N. does not believe in sacraments, we believe in ordinances. What does that mean? It means that our tradition, like many Holiness and Evangelical traditions birthed over the last 200 years, believe that the Eucharist and Baptism are merely symbolic gestures. They are outward signs, rememberances, traditions in the church to help us mark the life of Christ and our own faith. We do not believe that there is any presence or power of Christ, in any direct way, in participation with these elements.

The question is why? Unquestionably the majority of Christians who have ever lived have believed that God is present in the celebration of the Eucharist and works in the life of the believer through baptism. So why have the Nazarenes, like so many other evangelicals abandoned the theology of sacraments? I believe that our theology is rooted in fear in many ways. While the church has believed in God's work and presence in the sacraments, what it believes about the sacraments have long been debated. Is Christ literally in the eucharist? Does it become his blood and body? Are sins really forgiven through baptism? Many have rejected sacraments because of some church teachings that have led to a belief that salvation in its entirety can be found in the participation of the sacraments.

It is good that we reject this idea that salvation requires only baptism or taking communion, what is bad is that we have thrown out the baby with the bath water. Our desire to avoid this theology and to distance ourselves from those who hold to it has cost us deeply. We are now a people who strongly believe in God's previent grace and strive for holiness and have lost one of the basic elements of our faith for both. In our stories of salvation we talk about individual conversion, a crisis moment, a personal decision for Christ. The entire way we view and talk about our salvation is rooted in an American Individualist Modern philosophy that we can't even recognize because we are so firmly entrenched in it. Our salvation is not just about us or some moment and place. Our salvation takes us from being an individual and makes us part of a people, God's people, the body of Christ. The church is together one living breathing organism, not a group of individuals. Our salvation is not just about a moment in time, it is about the constant work of God's grace seeking, restoring, and transforming us. There may be a moment when we are understand what God has been trying to do in our life and we understand his grace, but that does not mean that is the moment it first came upon us. It may well be the moment of or forgiveness, but not the first time God has sought us out or tried to bestow his grace upon us.

This brings us back to the sacraments. The sacraments serve as a basis for our proper understanding of our salvation and an important vehicle for God's grace to be at work in our souls. Through baptism we are buried and raised with Christ and participate in his death and resurrection. In some mysterious way, as we are baptized, Christ is working in us and through us and among us and making us into his people. It is our initiation into the body of Christ. When we say it is merely some outward symbol, we strip it of its place of prominence in our salvation story. I have known Nazarenes who have refused to be baptized, great men and women of God, because they seemed to almost want to prove they could be saved without it. We have sinned as a church when we have led someone to the point of salvation, at least done our part in God's work, and have not then taken them through baptism into union with Christ. Baptism does not save us, but it is clear from Jesus' teachings, and the practices of the early church, that it is intended to be part of our story of salvation.

The Eucharist, like wise, becomes a place where we are reminded of our story, our calling, and filled with the presence of God. I don't believe in transsubstantiation, that is the belief that the bread and cup become literally the body and blood of Christ. But, I do believe that there in the cup and bread, the grace of God, the power of God, and the presence of Christ meet us in some mysterious way. As we join as a people together at the table to feast we reaffirm our connection to one another through the blood of Christ and participate together in the mercy of his sacrifice for us.

So this is a call, a desparate cry, for us to recapture sacramental theology and living as the people of God. We are only depriving ourselves and hurting our churches when we dismiss these elements as "merely symbols". We must relearn what it means to be Wesleyan and find an appreciation for the sacraments. In doing so we will find new calling and understanding of what it means to be a people of holiness.

Blessings-
Greg Arthur

Authentic Holiness

The Church of the Nazarene, like many denominations, is the victim of their own success. The Nazarene denomination grew, and it grew generationally as families brought up their children inside the church. Like I said, this is a mark of success, but it had some unfortunate draw backs. The Church of the Nazarene over time has developed its own culture, a very “churched” culture. This combined with the fact that the church’s cultural heritage was founded on the false notion that “holiness” was about avoiding the “secular” has made the gap between churched culture and the culture of the world we live in even greater.

Jesus prayed concerning his disciples in John 17:15-19, “My prayer is not that you take them out of the world but that you protect them from the evil one. They are not of the world, even as I am not of it. Sanctify them by the truth; your word is truth. As you sent me into the world, I have sent them into the world. For them I sanctify myself, that they too may be truly sanctified.”

Yes, the concept of “sanctification” does carry with it the idea of “being set apart”. Unfortunately, many from a Nazarene heritage have interpreted this to mean that they should distinguish themselves by creating and living in their own sub culture rather than living in the culture around them. People in these churches make distinctions between what they consider "sacred" and what they consider "secular"; and they stay far away from anything they would consider “secular”.

This is not what Jesus meant by “sanctification” when he prayed this because he did not want his disciples to be removed from the world they lived in. What did Jesus want? Jesus wanted his disciples to be protected from the “evil one”. He wanted his disciples to be “sanctified” and set apart by the way they lived their lives and loved others in the context of culture, not by creating a separate culture of their own.

Authentic holiness actively engages culture while pursuing the kind of relationship with Christ that bears fruit of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. The bible teaches us in Galatians that these things go beyond any legal description of do and don’ts. This is because true holiness is always culturally relevant and can be applied even in today’s post-modern context. It is the fruit of the Spirit in our lives that truly sets us apart as disciples as we strive to live as followers of Christ in the context of the world we live in rather than apart from it.

Holiness and Emergent Nazarenes

The doctrine of holiness is considered a “distinctive doctrine” of the Church of the Nazarene. I am a Nazarene because I believe in the life transformation Christ can make in our lives; and if you had to nail me down on a systematic theology I am a Wesleyan. However, I think it is arrogant of us to think “holiness” isn’t a part of the greater Kingdom of God around us. We do not hold the monopoly on holiness and God has been working “sanctification” in His people throughout all of history. I am a bit put off when we try to push our particular “brand of holiness” and our particular models of holiness, as though it is all about our brand and descriptions. I am beginning to understand that many of the systematic and theological models that were refined during the modern age are limited by the modern lens that was being used to examine it. As modern people we want to reduce everything to a system, method, or prescription, and we want to sum everything up with our models, graphs, and flow charts. Unfortunately there is a push from Nazarene church culture to try to draw lines of separation between us and the rest of God’s Kingdom based on these types of limited models; particularly our models of “holiness” and “sanctification.”

While I think our models have helped in some ways put handles on what we see God doing, allowing us to better talk about and explore our experience; we have lost something when we take it too far and reduce everything to a formula and system or think our models are the totality of God’s truth. Perhaps holiness is better described in a narrative, in the context of our stories and lives. Certainly the best example we have of holiness is found in the life of Christ that is given to us in the Bible in a narrative form rather than a systematic theology. Perhaps rather than trying to draw lines of distinction through our models and systematic theology with the rest of the Christian community we should look instead to how we might contribute to the greater conversation of the Kingdom.

The Emergent Church movement is partly about understanding the limitations of and getting past our mental models. We need to continue to try to understand that sometime we find more truth in the conversation and the journey than we do with what we think are the definitive answers. The problem with our models as definitive answers are that they no longer allow you to ask questions and they tell you that there is nothing more to seek. A conversation has more flexibility than that; it allows you to explore the possibilities, to clarify, and to even change your mind. It is not that God’s eternal truth ever changes, but that God’s truth is so big that it can not be reduced to a single model, system, formula, or even culture and language. This is why conversations and narratives are powerful, because they allow us to interact with God’s unchanging truth while not being boxed in by the trappings of limited models or context.

It is my hope that as Nazarenes that identify with the emergent church we will spur on conversations with all Christians across all groups and denominations, as we all together work to engage the world around us in conversations about God’s kingdom. This website and blog are geared to do just that, we hope that Nazarenes that participate here will see themselves also as part of God’s greater Kingdom. This site is not about creating our own “distinctive” emergent Nazarene brand, it about being a part of and contributing to the church as a whole and being effective and relevant in the world we all live in.

James Diggs