I would readily admit that the majority members, and even clergy of the Church of the Nazarene, even its governing elders, would deny Christ's real presence in the Eucharist for a memorial view. Attempts to use Paul Tillich's doctrine of symbols does not really help us move beyond the revivalist emphasis on personal, subjective experience as the normative locus for Christ's presence for most of the Church of the Nazarene. I am a minority position as far as "counting heads" is concerned.

Yet it seems to me that this has resorted from a poor understanding of our own heritage -- the insistance of understanding ourselves as a "Protestant denomination to promote the experience of holiness" rather than a disciplined movement within the church catholic for Christian to preserve the faith given to the saints, with a special charism on Christian perfection. Thus, we have not been able to read well our discipline as we shift the locus from which we read.

I'd like to make this argument from comparing the Call to Communion in the Manual of the Church of the Nazarene to an essay written by Benedict XVI. While Benedict is much more elegant and thorough in his explication, I would argue that he explicates what is already present in the Eucharistic teachings found in the Manual's Call.

It should be noted that this call dates back, and has remained unchanged from the original Manual written by Phineas Bresee and the Church of the Nazarene arose out of a Christian love feast, presumably with the Lord's Supper celebrated, as its central act. In the original Manual, Nazarene's were instructed to take the elements while kneeling -- an act of adoration and submission that presupposes Christ's presence, especially when one recognizes that Puritans required the taking of the Supper sitting around a Table in contrast to the Anglican and Catholic practice. While the Eucharist prayer has been changed (and distorted) as the Church of the Nazarene become Protestant evangelicals, the Spirit has kept this call to the table for us. It is one of the few continuities that the Church of the Nazarene has had unchanged throughout its history.

The ritual reads as follows, with emphasis added:

The Lord himself ordained this holy sacrament. He commanded His disciples to take of the bread and wine, emblems of His broken body and shed blood. This is His table. The feast is for His disciples. Let all those who have with true repentance forsaken their sins and have believe in Christ unto salvation, draw near and, by faith, partake of the life of Jesus Christ to your soul’s comfort and joy. Let us remember that it is the memorial of the death and passion of our Lord; also a token of His coming again. Let us not forget that we are one, at one table with the Lord.

I would like to highlight two aspects from the emboldened print. First, the statement has a strong, realistic participatory language. The calls remembers Christ's death and passion, but believers "partake in the life of Jesus Christ." The call does call for faith to be exercised in the reception of the elements, but it is Christ's life, Christ's presence, that one participates within. The only way that I know how to account for this language of participation in Christ in the emblems of the Lord's Supper from within the Christian tradition is to speak in terms of Christ's real presence.

Second, the final clause, what I would like to call the "deLubac clause" in honor of Henri de Lubac, a very important twentieth century Roman Catholic theologian, highlights the catholicity of the participation in the elements that demands Christ's presence in the elements. We are to remember that we are, in the elements, "one at one table with the Lord." The horizontal dimension of unity with each other depends on our personal participation and unity in "the Lord." If Christ is not really present in the consecrated elements, we lose the point of our unity in Jesus. What God has done in Christ becomes reduced to a sociological interest group.

It is interesting to compare this with the eloquence of Joseph Ratzinger, ie, Benedict XVI, in his collection of essays, On The Way to Jesus Christ, particularly the essay, “Eucharist—Communio—Solidarity: Christ Present and Active in the Blessed Sacrament." He is trying to help the post-Vatican II Catholic Church, in reacting against the individualistic "pre-Vatican II" Eucharist teaching, merely reproduce its error in a different direction. He wants to emphasize, like the Manual statement, the personal participation in Christ's real presence in the Eucharist, as the basis for its social implications, ie, catholicity.

Benedict identifies the error of anchoring the significance of the Eucharist on its social dimension, rather than in Christ's real presence: "Communion is still generally understood in a horizontal sense – as a complex network of correlations . . . The horizontal dominates. The emphasis is on the idea of self-determination within a community on a wide scale. Now in all this, naturally, there is much that is quite true. However, the basic approach is not correct" (p. 115). Though he does not use the language, one could say that such a teaching makes the the church catholic a protestant voluntary band of believers. In contrast, Benedict teaches, in the Eucharist, "We all ‘eat’ the same man, not only the same thing; in this way we all are wrested from our self-enclosed individuality and drawn into a greater one. We all are assimilated into Christ, and so through communion with Christ we are also identified with one another, identical and one in him, members of one another. To be in communion with Christ is by its very nature to be in communion with one another as well. No more are we alongside one another, each for himself; rather, everyone else who goes to communion is for me, so to speak, ‘bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh’ (cf. Gen 2:23) (p. 117).

But Benedict will have no privatized Eucharist piety. He recognizes the radical implications of this for catholicity, a genuine catholicity that can only be found in Christ. In a moving passage he writes:In my prayers at communion I must, on the one hand, look totally toward Christ, allowing myself to be transformed by him and, as needed, to be consumed in the fire of his love. But precisely for this reason I must always realize also that he joins me in this way with every other communicant—with the one next to me, whom I may not like very much; but also with those who are far away, whether in Asia, Africa, America, or some other place. By becoming one with them, I must learn to open myself toward them and to become involved in their situations. This is the test of the authenticity of my love for Christ.
Whenever I am united with Christ, I am also united with my neighbor, and this unity does not end at the communion / rail; rather, it is just beginning there. It comes alive, becomes flesh and blood, in the everyday experience of being with others and standing by others. Thus the individual element in my going to communion is inseparably interwoven with my membership in the Church and my dependence upon her life (p. 117-8). Thus, "It is when the Eucharist is understood in the full intimacy of the union of each individual with the Lord that it automatically becomes also a social sacrament in the highest degree" (p. 118).

To read the Manual of the Church of the Nazarene side-by-side with the teachings of a Pope may surprise us -- God is a God of surprises! Yet it should show us two things: the fundamental commitment to catholicity found in the tradition of the Church of the Nazarene and second, the profoundly Christian witness within contemporary Roman Catholicism as it implements and delves ever deeper in the "return to the sources" as a result of Vatican II. Ultimately, God may only mend the unity of the body of Christ as its individual members and its collective branches commitment themselves to personal sanctity, so that God might sanctify us so that we might be one, as Christ and the Father are One.