Other than my personal biography, why is this important for anyone but myself?

I am convinced that my primary educational background fundamentally distorted our background in the Wesleyan-Holiness movement -- one cannot be committed to holiness and sanctification as an "evangelical-mainline Protestant denomination" -- holiness and sanctification belong necessarily within the context of the church catholic, or the concepts are merely caricatures. We have to come into conversation, shared traditions and readings, and shared life with our Roman Catholic brothers and sisters. This is an intellectual agenda, but not merely an intellectual agenda. If the failure of the World Council of Churches shows anything, it shows that when ecumenical discussions and events take place among a bureaucratic elite formed by an academic elice separated from the faithful in the world, such institutions will be coopted by political forces other than the church.

Personally, I plan to continue reading and begin to write in such areas, particularly about the relationships between the rebirth of "Wesleyan studies" and Vatican II and the opportunities that provides for persons in the Church of the Nazarene and the holiness movement to understand ourselves within the faith given to the saints rather than as an American denomination with a worldwide franchise. But pastorally this is important for us as well at Mid-City.

Our mission statement concludes by highlighting three practices as the core of our nature as the church: (1) the preaching of the Gospel; (2) the sharing of the Sacraments; and (3) service with and among the poor. The obvious parallel to Benedict XVI's statement in Deus Caritas Est that "The Church's deepest nature is expressed in her three-fold responsibility: of proclaiming the word of God (kerygma-martyria), celebrating the sacraments (leitourgia), and exercising the ministry of charity (diakonia). These duties presuppose each other and are inseparable. For the Church, charity is not a kind of welfare activity which could equally well be left to others, but is a part of her nature, an indispensable expression of her very being" (sec. 25). If I read this parallel correctly, it is precisely those who take Benedict's teaching most seriously will be those among whom we will find the deepest partnership for the journey. The parallel is not accidental, but comes from the shared font of the faith given to the saints between the Wesleyan-holiness movement as a movement always necessarily within the church catholic. This is also why it is no accident that members of our congregation have found such a hospitable home in working with and among Catholic Charities.

Yet we have obstacles to overcome. One is that we tend to segment our threefold practices from each other, and thus, find affiliation in common works distinct from the particularity of the Gospel of Jesus Christ and joint participation in the sacraments. Second are deep historical and cultural barriers that keep this commonality from coming to bear.

It is here that the relationship of thought and life between Karl Barth and Hans Urs van Balthasar have much to teach us. I have begun reading, at the exhortation of my friend, Ken Oakes, Balthasar's book The Theology of Karl Barth in order to understand the deep conversations in which Barth, represented to me in my education as the "Reformed theologian par excellance" with mid-twentieth Century Roman Catholicism. Balthasar's book was written in 1951, but it describes very well the situation today between American evangelicals and "conservative" Roman Catholics. Balthasar speaks as a Catholic to Catholics in Chapter 2 of the book, admonishing those to an openness in conversations with Protestants. He reminds us that "If all heresy is a form of one-sidedness, this forces the Church to reply with an emphatically one-sided counterstatement of her own" (p. 13), but that this is not good. He quotes Yves Congar, "When faced with a one-sided distortion of the truth, the Church must do more than simply emphasize the other, equally partial, side of the same truth" (p. 13).

Yet Balthasar says important things that accurately, and negatively, define Protestants relationship to Roman Catholics, even after over 50 years that he has written. He writes, 'Protestants are convinced that they have seen through Catholicism once and for all; and if it should so happen that they discover a presentation of Catholic views that they do not find absurd, this must surely be due to the Catholic habit of countenancying "Jesuitical' arguments, hiding the Church's true esoteric features behind politically shrewd and seductive masks" (p. 17). He concludes his observations, "And the result is that, if sloth and inattention hinder conversations on the Catholic side, mistrust and suspicion cripple it on the Protestant" (p. 18).

Yet Balthasar states that "perhaps today we are beginning to move beyond the era of stale antithese -- Reformation and Counter-Reformation -- with Catholics trying to be more catholic and not 'anti-Protestant' and the Protestants more biblical and 'evangelical' and not 'protesters'" (p. 19). Fifty years later we still await this to fully materialize, despite tremendous movements on various fronts. Yet for it to come to full fruition, such a movement must have a base in the common life of the faithful, rather than in ecclesial bureaucracies or the isolated reflections of an academic elite speaking to each other who do not shirk from the fundamental commitment to the fact that "the Church's deepest nature is expressed in her three-fold responsibility: of proclaiming the word of God (kerygma-martyria), celebrating the sacraments (leitourgia), and exercising the ministry of charity (diakonia). These duties presuppose each other and are inseparable."