Such a "kernel" and "husk" understanding of the language of the church has its origins in Romanticism. The Church of the Nazarene has its roots deep within the Victorian Romantic camp meeping movement. Romanticism is deeply embedded in our language and experience -- as it is in all Northern Atlantic Culture. Romanticism was a reaction against the arid Rationalism of the Enlightenment, a rationalism that finds its representatives in the secularists such as Richard Dennet and David Dawkins. The "kernel" and "husk" Romantic understanding tends to place the theological reality within the experience of the individual, an experience that can take a multiplicity of linguistic forms. "Theological pluralism" of various degrees has its anchor, not in a genuine pluralism, but in the Romantic "religious transcendental humanism" where God is experienced within one's self as a means of self-authentication and self-development. In this way, the church's language and worship can be constantly "up-dated" by finding new, more efficient language to express and draw forth what is always, all the time, within every individual human being. It is this "side" of the Church of the Nazarene that has emerged in the last thirty-years to bring the church more deeply in line with the "Age of Authenticity" (to use Charles Taylor's language again) or "The Triumph of the Therapeutic" (to use Phillip Reiff's). Names like Mildred Wynkoop and Ray Dunning and Al Truesdale and Rob Staples come to mind as crucial in this transformation, although they all maintain a transitional point to contemporary manifestations now. While they elicted a response through a type of biblicist Protestant Orthodoxy, they could rightly invoke Wesley against such a move as fundamentally foreign to the Wesleyan heritage of the Church of the Nazarene. Empowered by the tradition "Arminian versus Calvinistic" trope, this position "won" by default.

Yet there is another way in this Romantic reaction to understand our tradition. I'm reading Christopher Dawson's work, The Gods of Revolution (New York University Press, 1972) for a paper that I am giving in a couple of weeks. Dawson rightly understands the Enlightenment as a heretical Christian movement, and traces the "religious" commitments politically embedded in the French Revolution. He thereby notes that the nineteenth century revival of "religion" via Romanticism has its roots in the irrational theological violence of the gods of the French Revolution. No one is more theologically intolerant and violent than those who are committed to "universal" theological tolerance when they encounter those who are committed to a "particular" theological tradition.

As Dawson looks at 19th century Romanticism, he notes: "The movement took two different forms: on the one hand, as in the Catholic revival on the continent, and subsequently in the Oxford Movement in England, it was a movement of return to the tradition of historic Christianity—a Catholic Renaissance—which went back behind the Enlightenment and behind the Reformation to the religious faith and the religious art of medieval Christendom; and on the other hand it was a movement of innovation and change, which proclaimed the advent of a new religion in harmony with the spirit of the new age. . . . In spit of the apparent opposition of these two forms they are far more closely connected than one would suppose" (pp. 144-5).

I want to argue that, via particularly Wesley and H. Orton Wiley, the "movement of return to the tradition of historic Christianity—a Catholic Renaissance—which went back behind the Enlightenment and behind the Reformation to the religious faith and the religious art of medieval Christendom more deeply characterizes the tradition of the Church of the Nazarene than the current Romanticism of "innovation and change" to which the church has moved. As the post-Vatican II Roman Catholic Church (at least the curia) moved beyond the liturgical movements and transcendental Thomism's commitment to "innovation and change" in the years immediately following Vatican II, perhaps the Church of the Nazarene can likewise, if belatedly, make the same discovery, If so, perhaps we could be used by God to be among the first of the Protestant's to heal the tragedy, scars, and fragmentatoin of the Reformation.