With this in mind I want to outline in broad strokes a story in which the Church of the Nazarene becomes fully intelligible. I do not want to claim of the beginnings of a “Protestant denomination” is false; it is obvious that such a story captures what it has become in many, many senses. I want to claim, however, that telling the story in that way is grossly distorting; it does not place the Church of the Nazarene within its most significant narrative framework. To speak of the Church of the Nazarene as the history of a Protestant denomination places it within the market dynamics of voluntary, civil organizations in capitalist countries where various groups compete with each other and with secular groups for adherence to certain “beliefs” embedded within certain organizational structures. When seen, however, within the broader and longer story of the church catholic, certain characteristics emerge that reveals it as the story of a renewal movement for Christian holiness within the church catholic. Only in this sense does its history and contemporary documents become fully coherent and understandable.

To tell the full story I would like to speak of seven “events” in the history of the church catholic through the ages by which we can place the Church of the Nazarene in its “natural” habitat of the historical life of the church. By an “event”, I mean an occurrence that has on-going determinative significance for history. The resurrection of Jesus is the greatest “event” in history; a re-run of Seinfeld is not an “event”, no matter how much the television teasers try to convince the potential viewer that it is. In coming posts I will fill out these events:

(1) The continuation of the apostolic church as into the early church as the pursuit of the life of holiness in witness to the world to the God revealed in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus.
(2) The Constantinian Settlement and monastic renewal to keep the church anchored in the life, teachings, death and resurrection of Jesus through the pursuit of holiness.
(3) Late medieval nominalism and divine voluntarism in which salvation becomes understood as judicial “payment” by God for humans or by humans to God. Salvation occurs by the arbitrary eternal divine will or by human self-determination, rather than participation in the divine life through God becoming human in Jesus, participated in through the Sacramental life of the church for the transformation of human lives “to the image of God” as the life of holiness.
(4) The English Reformation that “strips the altars” and diminishes the on-going work of the Spirit in human lives in order to emphasize the “Word of God” in the apostolic era for church renewal. This movement finds its ultimate expression in the Puritan divines that gut the Church of England of its sense of participation in the divine mysteries through Christ in order to subordinate the church to the crown from the on-going moral ordering of the society.
(5) The Wesleyan Renewal the seeks a return to the pre-Constantinian pursuit of holiness for lay persons and clergy by invoking a monastic type of discipline for Christians who live in the “every day world” as Christians for the pursuit of Christian perfection.
(6) The Holiness Movement Renewal of American Methodism that arises as 19th century Methodism accommodates theologically to its setting within a liberal-democratic society that results in its movement to social impact and influence through a process of embourgeoisment. The emphasis on holiness via participation in the Methodist/monastic discipline gets lost in the emphasis on justification for higher numbers of adherents.
(7) The Church of the Nazarene emerges as the attempt to return Methodism to its early roots in the practices and teachings of Wesley for the sake of “Christianizing Christianity.”

The Church of the Nazarene, therefore, participates in the same stream of the Christian tradition, a return to the sources, at the beginning of the twentieth century that Vatican II participated in at its end. John W. O’Malley has just written, What Happened at Vatican II? (Harvard University Press, 2008). He argues that “the call to holiness” became “one of the great themes running through the council . . . . Holiness, the council thus said, is what the church is all about. This is an old truth, of course, and in itself is not remarkable. Yet no previous council had ever explicitly asserted this idea and certainly never developed it so repeatedly and at length. The genres and vocabularies of those councils, the assumption that they were judicial-legislative bodies, precluded such a theme. The call to holiness is something more than external conformity to enforceable codes of conduct. It is a call that, though it must have external form, relates more directly to the higher impulses of the human spirit, which in the council often got specified in commitment to the service of others in the world” (p. 51).

Obviously this is going to be a complex and even bewildering story. Perhaps I am not the one to tell it in its detail. But the story of the “renewal movement within the church catholic” verses the emergence and growth of a new Protestant denomination has the distinct rational advantage of (1) recognizing that the Church of the Nazarene participates in a long history before it even existed; and (2) its sharing in the call to holiness at the core of its life that emerges as well in Vatican II. I would argue, therefore, that this is a rationally superior manner of telling its history and opens up opportunities for return and its future to a mission that has always been inherent to it, while even awaiting its discovery and implementation.