Continuing my parochial posts on the Church of the Nazarene, hoping they are not only on the Church of the Nazarene:
1. The Church of the Nazarene came together in 1908 as a confluence of various "Holiness" streams. Each of those streams carried with it a theology and a culture. Those cultures were varied, but not so much that reconciliation seemed impossible. Those theologies were also varied, though perhaps not as much, and they, too, sought reconciliation.
2. The denomination hammered out on the way to, in, and from a little town in North Texas, with its Home for Unwed Mothers, was a collection of bodies with family resemblances, but not identity, a collection that never quite got over its non-identity. The "Pentecostal Church of the Nazarene," as it was called for a while, believed that the movement that had given rise to it need not die, but could in fact be fostered, and fostered by a single organization, with organizational officials and organizational departments. This change may have been incompatible with the spirit that had stirred the movement from which it came, as if wind could be put in a jar, but it was hoped that the organization might serve the spirit. And so, frequent "revivals" were held in its churches and "prayer meetings" and other "services" were scheduled to "keep the fire burning."
3. There was a theology to all of this, but what was most evident was a culture that was much more interested in "experience" than "doctrine." (It was very much a modern phenomenon in that sense. Cf. Romanticism.)
4. Of course, "theology" is cultural, too, but the theology of the American Holiness Movement and of the Church of the Nazarene works really hard not only to be cultural, that is, it works to bear witness to something that calls all cultural artifacts and experiments into question. That is the apocalyptic heart of the Church of the Nazarene, a heart that might also be compared to apophatic theology and illustrated by the lives of the saints and especially the martyrs of long ago and of our time. The recurrent call of Nazarene evangelists of half a century ago and more was all about "dying to self," "putting your all on the altar," "cleansing the heart of all but love," "having the mind of Christ," etc. If baptism is to be understood as dying and rising with Christ, that is, being crucified with him and resurrected with him, then its language of "baptism with the Holy Spirit" is a martyrial discourse. And the preaching that was commonplace in the Church of the Nazarene of long ago was a clarion call to every hearer to live a life toward and through death, that is, a martyr's life and death. All that was missing was the *word* "martyr."
5. If the Church of the Nazarene wishes only to be its culture (with global variations), then it had better alter the way it hires teachers in the Religion Departments of its universities and in its seminaries and bible colleges. There are ways of teaching toward the prolongation of a culture, but they are ways that do not concern themselves with a God whose ways are not our ways, a God who is other than any culture that any body of people, no matter how pious, might hammer out. If the task of "theological education" were to prolong the life of a culture (with global variations), then the gospel (and its "authorities," such as "the Bible" or "tradition") would be tools or raw material used to an internal, institutional end. Interpretations of its "authorities" would be forbidden, if deemed by persons in power as contrary to the culture and especially if deemed contrary to the likelihood of the survival of the culture.
6. But that is not how teachers have been chosen, at least not in most places in the Church of the Nazarene, as far as I can tell. They have been chosen, because of the pool of candidates, these have seemed most likely to take students into the heart of "the Bible," or "tradition," or to guide students in the rigors of the disciplines of interpretation, of understanding, of hearing what *was* said and what *is to be* said. And, through it all, teachers have been hired who have given themselves to the martyrial life that knows in its bones that no institution and no scholar and no member of a local church need survive. All this involves quite an array of studies, but all of it has to be performed without concern for the longevity of any institution.
7. It may be that a close martyrial study of the "authorities" to which the Church of the Nazarene claims to defer would lead to the conclusion that a faithful Church "don't want no queer people 'round here" (to use a phrase almost from Randy Newman). But it may be otherwise. It is not enough to point out that other ecclesiastical bodies have not found a way through this particular issue. Holiness people used not to think that the failures of other churchy organizations meant that they would fail, too. They used to think that if we put our all on the altar that God would provide a way, even if that way were the way to our demise.
8. Woe to those who would shut the mouths of the stones who cry out in this troubled time in order to preserve an institution barely a century old!