Church of the Nazarene Beliefs

1. Who the Church of the Nazarene Is

The Church of the Nazarene is an international Protestant denomination in the Wesleyan-Arminian tradition, formed out of the nineteenth-century Holiness revival and organized in its present form in 1908. Nazarenes confess the Trinity, the full deity and full humanity of Jesus Christ, his bodily resurrection, salvation by grace through faith, and the personal return of Christ. What sets the denomination apart from the wider evangelical world is its insistence that God intends to make the Christian actually holy in this life, and that he does so in a definite work of grace called entire sanctification.

The denomination is the largest of the classical Wesleyan-Holiness bodies on the denominations' own reported membership, and its congregations are organized into districts across a large number of world areas, with the denomination's own annual reporting showing its strongest growth outside the United States. Its Global Ministry Center is in Lenexa, Kansas, in the United States, and its doctrine, polity and rules of conduct are gathered in one book, the Manual of the Church of the Nazarene, revised by each quadrennial General Assembly. When a Nazarene wants to know what the denomination teaches, the Manual is the book that settles it.

Statements of Nazarene doctrine on this page follow the Articles of Faith as printed in the Manual of the Church of the Nazarene, the denomination's own governing text. Membership, congregation and district counts, and the comparison with other Wesleyan-Holiness bodies, rest on the denominations' own annual reporting, which each publishes itself and revises every year. No figures are given here, because the reported totals differ between denominational reporting and independent surveys and neither can be checked from this page.

The Name

The name points at the obscurity of Nazareth. Phineas F. Bresee and Joseph P. Widney, who began the first congregation in Los Angeles in 1895, wanted a name that identified the church with the working poor and with the lowliness of the town Jesus grew up in, the town Nathanael dismissed in John 1:46 when he asked whether anything good could come out of it. The founders meant the church to be a mission to people the respectable congregations of the day were losing.

One clarification before anything else

The Church of the Nazarene has no connection to the various Hebrew Roots and Netzarim groups that call themselves Nazarene or Nazarene Israel. Those groups hold that Christians remain bound to the Mosaic law and Sabbath observance, and several of them are non-Trinitarian. The Church of the Nazarene is orthodox on the Trinity and on the person of Christ, and shares nothing with them beyond a word. For that separate movement see our guide to the Hebrew Roots movement.

2. Where the Church of the Nazarene Came From

The Church of the Nazarene came out of a nineteenth-century argument inside American Methodism about whether John Wesley's teaching on Christian perfection was still being preached. Wesley had taught that God can and does perfect a believer in love in this life, and by the middle of the nineteenth century many Methodists believed their own church had quietly dropped the doctrine in favour of respectability. Camp meetings, holiness associations and independent missions grew up to press the point, and when relations with the parent denominations soured, those associations began to organize as churches of their own.

The nineteenth-century history of that revival, its camp meetings, its transatlantic reach and the whole family of denominations it produced, belongs to the story of the Holiness movement as a movement, which our guide to the Holiness movement covers, and this guide keeps to the denomination. What follows is the specific line that produced the Church of the Nazarene.

Bresee and Los Angeles, 1895

Phineas F. Bresee was a Methodist Episcopal minister of long standing, a former presiding elder and pastor of prominent congregations, who left the Methodist Episcopal Church after his conference declined to appoint him to an urban mission he wanted to serve. In October 1895 he and Joseph P. Widney, a physician and educator, began a congregation in Los Angeles under the name Church of the Nazarene. The first meetings were deliberately plain and deliberately aimed at the poor.

Pilot Point, Texas, 1908

The denomination as it now exists was formed by merger. In 1907 the Church of the Nazarene from the West joined with the Association of Pentecostal Churches of America, a body drawn largely from New England and the Middle Atlantic states, taking the name Pentecostal Church of the Nazarene. At the General Assembly held at Pilot Point, Texas, in October 1908, the Holiness Church of Christ, a southern body, joined them. Nazarenes treat Pilot Point as the birthday of the denomination, and further groups in the British Isles and elsewhere came in over the following years.

Dropping the word Pentecostal, 1919

At the General Assembly of 1919 the denomination removed the word Pentecostal from its name and became the Church of the Nazarene. The word had meant one thing in 1908 and something else by 1919. Older Holiness usage called entire sanctification a Pentecostal experience because of the descent of the Spirit at Pentecost in Acts 2. After the Azusa Street revival, which began in Los Angeles in 1906, the word came to mean the movement that treats speaking in tongues as the evidence of Spirit baptism. The Nazarenes changed the name to make the distinction plain, and section 9 below sets out what the difference actually amounts to. For the movement they were distinguishing themselves from, see our guide to Pentecostalism.

Relationship to Methodism

Nazarene theology is Wesleyan theology, and the denomination understands itself as the keeper of a Methodist doctrine that Methodism let slip. The Church of the Nazarene belongs to the World Methodist Council, and its Articles of Faith read in large part as a condensation of Wesley's teaching on grace, free will, assurance and perfection. Our guide to Methodism and Wesleyan theology covers the parent tradition, including Wesley's own sacramental practice and his relationship with the Church of England.

3. The Articles of Faith in Outline

The Articles of Faith are the doctrinal core of the Manual, and they run in a deliberate order from God to the last things. A Catholic reading them will recognize most of the content immediately and will find three or four places where the wording carries a specific Protestant and Wesleyan commitment. The list below follows the Manual's own sequence.

God, Christ and the Spirit

The opening articles confess one eternal God, infinite in holiness and love, sovereign creator and sustainer, revealed as Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Jesus Christ is the eternally begotten Son, joined to human nature in the incarnation from the Virgin Mary, truly God and truly man in one person, who suffered, died, rose bodily and ascended. The Holy Spirit is the third person of the Trinity, present in the world convicting of sin, regenerating those who believe, sanctifying believers and guiding the Church. Nothing in these articles departs from the faith of Nicaea.

Scripture

The article on Scripture affirms the sixty-six books of the Old and New Testaments as given by plenary inspiration, and it phrases inerrancy in a specific way: the Scriptures reveal without error the will of God concerning us in all things necessary to our salvation, so that whatever is not contained in them is not to be enjoined as an article of faith. Two things follow. The Nazarene canon excludes the deuterocanonical books that Catholic Bibles include, a difference we set out in our guide to the deuterocanonical books. And the inerrancy claim is framed around salvation rather than around every statement of any kind, which places the Church of the Nazarene at some distance from strict fundamentalist formulations.

Sin, atonement and prevenient grace

The Manual distinguishes original sin, the corruption of the nature of every descendant of Adam, from actual or personal sin, defined as a voluntary violation of a known law of God by a person who is morally responsible. It teaches that Christ's atonement is sufficient for the whole human race, for infants and for those incapable of moral responsibility, and that it is efficacious for those who repent and believe. Prevenient grace, the grace that goes before, is given freely to all and restores enough capacity to allow a person to turn toward God, so that no one is saved by unaided free will and no one is excluded by a decree.

Repentance, justification, regeneration, adoption

Conversion in Nazarene teaching involves repentance, which is a sincere change of mind about sin joined to a voluntary turning from it, and then a single divine act described under three headings. Justification is the gracious judicial act by which God grants full pardon to the believing sinner. Regeneration is the new birth by which the pardoned are made spiritually alive. Adoption is the act by which the believer is received into the family of God. These happen together, by grace through faith, and the Holy Spirit bears witness to them.

Entire sanctification

The article on entire sanctification is the denomination's distinctive contribution and gets its own section below.

The Church, the sacraments, healing and the last things

The Church is the community of all who confess Jesus as Lord, called to worship, to the ministry of the Word, to the sacraments and to mission. Baptism and the Lord's Supper are the two sacraments. Divine healing has an article of its own, affirming that God heals in answer to believing prayer while also affirming the proper use of medical means, which is a deliberately balanced statement. The closing articles confess the personal return of Christ, the bodily resurrection of the dead, final judgment, everlasting life for the righteous and everlasting punishment for those who die impenitent.

The summaries above paraphrase the Articles of Faith as printed in the Manual of the Church of the Nazarene. Article numbering and some wording have been revised by successive General Assemblies, so check the current Manual for the exact text of any article you intend to quote.

4. Entire Sanctification: The Central Doctrine

Entire sanctification is the teaching that God performs a definite work of grace in a believer, after the new birth, by which the heart is cleansed from original sin and the whole person is set apart in devotion to God and filled with the Holy Spirit. The Nazarene Articles of Faith describe it as wrought instantaneously by faith, following a full consecration of the whole self to God, attested by the witness of the Holy Spirit, and followed by a lifetime of growth in grace. Everything else in Nazarene spirituality organizes around this claim.

The article gives the doctrine a stack of names that all describe the same reality: Christian perfection, perfect love, heart purity, the baptism with the Holy Spirit, the fullness of the blessing, Christian holiness. The multiplicity is inherited from Wesley, who reached for several vocabularies because each one carried part of what he meant.

The two works of grace

Nazarene teaching describes two distinct crises in the Christian life. The first is conversion, in which sins committed are forgiven and the person is born again. The second is entire sanctification, in which the inherited corruption that remains in the believer, often called inbred sin or the carnal nature, is cleansed away and the believer's love is made whole. The logic behind the second work is straightforward: forgiveness deals with what a person has done, and something further is required for what a person is.

Nazarene preaching therefore asks the converted Christian a second question. A person may know that sins are forgiven and still know the pull of pride, resentment and self-will operating underneath. Wesleyan theology names that residue and says God has provided for it now rather than only at death.

The Scripture the doctrine rests on

Wesleyan writers build the case from a set of texts that any Christian tradition has to account for.

Alongside that text stand the command in Matthew 5:48 to be perfect as the heavenly Father is perfect, the warning in Hebrews 12:14 that without holiness no one will see the Lord, the prayer of Jesus in John 17:17 that the Father would sanctify his disciples in the truth, the promise in Ezekiel 36:25-27 of a cleansing from impurity and a new heart with God's Spirit placed within, and the summary of the law as whole-hearted love of God and neighbour in Mark 12:30-31. Wesleyan theology reads the last of those as the definition of the perfection in question: perfect love means loving God with everything a person has, which is what the law commands and what grace supplies.

Consecration and faith

The human side of entire sanctification, as Nazarenes describe it, has two parts. Consecration is the deliberate handing over of the whole self, ambitions, relationships, money, future and reputation included, with nothing held back. Faith is then the act of trusting God to do what he has promised. The article insists that the work is God's and that faith receives it, so a Nazarene will resist any suggestion that the experience is achieved by effort. Consecration removes the obstacle, and God performs the cleansing.

The witness of the Spirit

Nazarene doctrine holds that the Holy Spirit bears witness to entire sanctification, so that the believer has an assurance of it. This is Wesley's doctrine of assurance applied to the second work. In practice it makes the experience datable for many Nazarenes, who can name the service or the evening when it happened, and pastoral writers in the tradition are careful to say that the reality matters more than the memory of a date.

Growth afterwards

Entire sanctification is not the end of the Christian life in Nazarene teaching, and the article says so explicitly by requiring growth in grace after it. Nazarene writers distinguish purity from maturity: God can purify the intention instantly, and the shaping of judgment, habit, wisdom and skill in love takes the rest of a person's life. A newly sanctified believer is still ignorant of a great deal, still capable of poor decisions, and still in need of formation.

5. What Entire Sanctification Does Not Claim

Entire sanctification is misread more often than almost any doctrine in American Protestantism, usually as a claim of sinless perfection in the ordinary sense of those words. Wesley himself spent decades correcting the misreading, and the Nazarene tradition inherited both the doctrine and the corrections; our guide to the Holiness movement sets out Wesley's own qualifications in his own words. Any fair account has to state the qualifications as loudly as the claim.

It does not claim freedom from ignorance or mistake

An entirely sanctified person, in Wesleyan terms, remains ignorant of many things and continues to make errors of judgment. A mistaken decision made in good faith, made out of a defective understanding rather than a defective will, is a consequence of finitude and of a damaged world. Wesley called such things infirmities and refused to file them as sin.

It does not claim freedom from temptation

Temptation continues after entire sanctification, and Wesleyan writers point to Christ himself as tempted in every way and without sin, per Hebrews 4:15. Bodily appetite, fear, exhaustion and the ordinary difficulty of loving difficult people all continue.

It does not claim a state that cannot be lost

Nazarene doctrine is Arminian throughout. Entire sanctification can be forfeited by deliberate sin or by drifting unbelief, and a person who has lost it may be restored. The doctrine describes a relationship maintained by continuing faith rather than a permanent acquisition.

It rests on a narrower definition of sin

The load-bearing qualification is the definition. Nazarene teaching defines sin proper as a voluntary transgression of a known law of God by a morally responsible person. Given that definition, the claim that an entirely sanctified believer does not sin means that the person is not deliberately choosing what they know God forbids. Many actions and omissions that Catholic moral theology would call venial sins fall outside the Nazarene definition entirely and are classed as infirmities, mistakes or shortcomings.

This is the single most important thing for a Catholic reader to grasp before responding. When a Nazarene says a sanctified Christian does not sin, and a Catholic hears a claim of impeccability, the two are talking past each other because the word sin is doing different work in each mouth. Section 11 takes up whether the narrower definition can be sustained.

6. Sin, Free Will and Prevenient Grace

Nazarene doctrine on sin and grace is Arminian, which means it holds that the fall left humanity genuinely unable to turn to God unaided, and that God supplies to every person a grace that restores enough freedom to respond or refuse. That grace is called prevenient, the grace that comes before, and it is the hinge on which the whole Wesleyan system turns. Without it, Wesleyan theology would collapse into either Pelagianism or Calvinism, and the tradition is careful about that.

Original sin as Nazarenes describe it

The Manual describes original sin as the corruption of the nature of every descendant of Adam, by which everyone is far from original righteousness, is inclined to evil and continually so, and stands in need of the Spirit's renewal. Nazarene teaching holds that no one is condemned for inherited depravity alone, and that guilt attaches to personal sin freely chosen. Children below the age of moral responsibility are covered by the atonement.

Against Calvinism

The Church of the Nazarene rejects unconditional election, limited atonement, irresistible grace and the perseverance of the saints. Christ died for all, election is conditioned on foreseen faith, grace can be resisted, and a believer can fall away. Nazarene preaching commonly presses this as a pastoral point: a doctrine of guaranteed perseverance can leave a Christian assuming that the interior state of the soul no longer matters. Our guide to the five points of Calvinism lays out the position being rejected, and our guide to free will and grace gives the Catholic account.

The Catholic Church stands with the Nazarenes on several of these points and reached them by a different route. The Council of Trent taught that grace can be resisted and that justification once received can be lost by mortal sin and recovered through repentance, and the Catechism of the Catholic Church treats human freedom as real and as the condition of merit and fault (CCC 1730 to 1732). A Nazarene and a Catholic disagreeing about sanctification will often find themselves on the same side of an argument with a Reformed Christian about perseverance.

Assurance

Nazarene teaching holds that the Holy Spirit witnesses with the believer's spirit that they are children of God, reading Romans 8:16 directly, and that this witness attends both conversion and entire sanctification. Assurance in the Wesleyan sense is an experiential confidence that can be strong, weak or temporarily absent, and it differs from the Calvinist doctrine of the certainty of election. Catholic teaching is more reserved still, holding that a person cannot know with the certainty of divine faith that they are in a state of grace, while also rejecting any counsel of anxiety, since God's mercy is certain even when one's own state is not transparent.

7. Sacraments, Healing and Worship

The Church of the Nazarene holds two sacraments, baptism and the Lord's Supper, and calls them sacraments rather than ordinances, which is a Wesleyan inheritance and marks the denomination off from much of the Baptist and free-church world around it. Nazarene worship in most congregations is informal, with contemporary or gospel music, extemporaneous prayer, a substantial expository sermon and a public invitation, and it retains an altar rail at the front where people come to pray at the close of the service.

Baptism

Nazarene doctrine treats baptism as a sacrament signifying acceptance of the benefits of the atonement of Jesus Christ, administered to believers who declare their faith in Christ as Saviour. The denomination also permits the baptism of young children on the profession of believing parents who commit to raise the child in the faith, and it provides a rite of infant dedication for parents who prefer to wait. Mode is left open: sprinkling, pouring or immersion, at the choice of the candidate or the parents.

The significant difference from Catholic teaching lies in what baptism does. Nazarene doctrine treats the rite as a sign and a means of grace within a covenant relationship, without holding that the washing itself regenerates. Catholic teaching holds that baptism actually takes away original sin and all personal sins, makes the person a new creature and an adopted child of God, and confers an indelible character (CCC 1263 to 1266, CCC 1272). Our guide to baptism and what it does works through the Catholic case from Scripture and the Fathers.

The Lord's Supper

The Nazarene article on the Lord's Supper calls it a New Testament sacrament declarative of the sacrificial death of Christ, through whose merits believers have life and salvation, and it is a communion feast for those who have faith in Christ and love for the saints. Nazarene teaching describes Christ as present to the believer by the Holy Spirit and treats the Supper as a means of grace. Communion is open to any Christian in fellowship with Christ, and Nazarene congregations commonly celebrate it monthly or quarterly rather than weekly. The elements are ordinarily unfermented grape juice, in keeping with the denomination's abstinence commitment.

Nazarene teaching therefore affirms a spiritual presence of Christ to the believer, and it does not affirm that the bread and wine become the body and blood of Christ. Catholic teaching holds that the whole substance of the bread and wine is changed into the body and blood of Christ, soul and divinity, a doctrine the Church calls transubstantiation (CCC 1373 to 1377). That difference is set out in our guide to the Eucharist and the Real Presence.

Divine healing

The article on divine healing affirms that God heals in response to believing prayer, and in the same breath affirms the proper use of medical science. The balance is characteristic of the denomination and distinguishes it from bodies that treat medicine as a failure of faith. Nazarenes anoint the sick and pray for healing, and they run hospitals and clinics and send medical missionaries.

Order and freedom

Nazarene worship draws on Methodist inheritance and free-church practice at the same time. Some congregations use the Christian year, structured liturgy and a printed communion rite; many are wholly informal. The altar call, the testimony, and the mourner's bench inherited from the camp meeting remain common. A Catholic visiting a Nazarene service will find the sermon long, the singing warm, and the invitation at the end pressing for a decision.

8. Government, Ordination and the Covenant of Conduct

The Church of the Nazarene governs itself through a representative polity that sits between episcopal and congregational government. Local congregations call their own pastors and run their own boards, districts group congregations under an elected district superintendent, and the General Assembly, meeting every four years, is the supreme doctrine-making and law-making body. General superintendents are elected by the General Assembly and exercise oversight across the whole denomination without holding the sacramental office a bishop holds in episcopal churches.

Ministry and ordination

The denomination has two orders of ordained ministry, elder and deacon. Elders preach and administer the sacraments; the order of deacon is for those who are called to ministry without a call to preach. Ordination requires a course of study, a period of licensed ministry and district approval. Nazarene ordination is understood as the Church recognizing and authorizing a call rather than as a sacrament conferring an indelible character, which differs from the Catholic doctrine of holy orders set out in our guide to the priesthood and holy orders.

Women in ministry

The Church of the Nazarene has ordained women since its earliest years, and Bresee ordained women in the first Los Angeles work. The Holiness movement generally held that if the Spirit sanctifies and calls a woman, the Church has no standing to refuse her, and the denomination has never adopted a complementarian restriction on the pastorate. This is one of the sharper contrasts with the Catholic position, which holds that the Church has no authority to ordain women to the priesthood.

The Covenant of Christian Conduct

Membership carries specific behavioural commitments, gathered in the Manual under a Covenant of Christian Character and a Covenant of Christian Conduct. Total abstinence from alcoholic beverages and from tobacco is required of members, a position rooted in the nineteenth-century temperance movement and defended today on grounds of witness and of harm. The covenant also addresses gambling, entertainment that degrades, sexual conduct outside marriage, the sanctity of human life, honesty in business, and stewardship, and it calls for generous giving.

Catholic moral theology treats alcohol as a good thing capable of abuse and requires temperance rather than abstinence, and the Church uses fermented wine at Mass by requirement. A Catholic reading the Nazarene covenant should notice the shared substance underneath the differing rule: both traditions hold that the Christian life makes concrete demands on money, appetite, sexuality and speech, and both refuse to leave holiness at the level of sentiment. Our guide to virtue and the moral life sets out the Catholic framework.

Education and mission

The denomination runs a network of liberal arts universities and colleges in the United States and abroad, along with Nazarene Theological Seminary in Kansas City, and it maintains a substantial global missionary and compassionate ministries operation. Nazarene higher education has produced a body of serious Wesleyan scholarship, and Nazarene theologians engage patristic sources heavily, since the early Fathers give them a doctrine of transforming grace that sits closer to their own than sixteenth-century Protestant scholasticism does.

9. Why Nazarenes Are Not Pentecostals

The Church of the Nazarene and the Pentecostal denominations share a grandparent and diverged over what the baptism with the Holy Spirit does. Holiness teaching, which came first, used the phrase to mean the Spirit's cleansing of the heart in entire sanctification. Early Pentecostal teaching took the phrase and attached it to an empowering experience evidenced by speaking in tongues. The Nazarene name change in 1919 was the formal act of separation, and the distinction is doctrinal rather than merely historical.

The three differences that matter

• What Spirit baptism is for. Nazarenes say the baptism with the Holy Spirit cleanses the heart from inbred sin and fills the believer with love. Classical Pentecostals say it empowers the believer for witness and service, and many hold it is a third work distinct from sanctification.
• Whether tongues is the evidence. Classical Pentecostal bodies teach that speaking in tongues is the initial physical evidence of Spirit baptism. Nazarene doctrine attaches no such sign to the experience, and the denomination has consistently discouraged the practice in its services.
• Where the emphasis falls in worship. Nazarene services are warm and informal without expecting manifestations. Pentecostal services often expect them.

Nazarenes will also point out that the Holiness movement predates Azusa Street by decades, so the word Pentecostal in an 1890s Holiness text does not mean what the same word means in a 1930s Assemblies of God text. Reading the older usage through the later one is a common error in popular accounts of both movements, and the wider split between the two families is traced in our guide to the Holiness movement.

Catholic readers should hold a further distinction. Catholic Charismatic Renewal, which arose after 1967 and has been repeatedly encouraged by the popes, uses the language of baptism in the Spirit for a release of grace already given in the sacraments of initiation. That is a different claim again from both the Nazarene and the classical Pentecostal one, and it is compatible with sacramental theology in a way neither of the others is.

10. Where Nazarene Holiness Runs Close to Catholic Grace

Nazarene entire sanctification and Catholic sanctifying grace agree on the thing that most divides both of them from classical Protestant orthodoxy: grace changes the person. Catholic teaching holds that justification is not a legal fiction laid over an unchanged sinner. The Council of Trent taught that justification involves the renewal of the interior person by the voluntary reception of grace, and the Catechism defines sanctifying grace as the gratuitous gift of God's own life, infused by the Holy Spirit into the soul to heal it of sin and to sanctify it (CCC 1999). A Nazarene reads that sentence with recognition.

Four convergences are worth naming before the disagreements.

Holiness is really given

Both traditions refuse to reduce salvation to a change in legal standing. Wesley pressed this against the Protestant scholasticism of his own day, and Catholic teaching has pressed it since the sixteenth century. The Catechism describes grace as a participation in the life of God that introduces the Christian into the intimacy of Trinitarian life (CCC 1997). Nazarene theology describes the same reality as the heart made whole in love. Neither will accept a Christianity in which nothing actually happens to the person.

Every Christian is called to perfection

The Second Vatican Council devoted a chapter of Lumen Gentium to the universal call to holiness, teaching that all the faithful of whatever rank or state are called to the fullness of the Christian life and to the perfection of charity (Lumen Gentium 40, quoted at CCC 2013). A Nazarene will say the Catholic Church wrote that in 1964 and the Holiness movement had been preaching it since the 1830s. The convergence is real, and both are reading Matthew 5:48 as addressed to everyone.

Grace can be resisted and grace can be lost

Both traditions teach that a person can say no to God, that a believer in grace can fall, and that repentance restores. Both therefore reject unconditional perseverance. The Nazarene calls this Arminianism and the Catholic calls it the doctrine of mortal sin and the sacrament of penance, and the pastoral upshot is the same: what you do with your life after conversion determines something.

Consecration has a shape

The Nazarene practice of full consecration, laying the whole self on the altar with nothing withheld, has close Catholic analogues in the act of abandonment, the total consecration of Louis de Montfort, the Ignatian Suscipe, and the vows of religious life. Catholic spirituality has spent centuries on the interior structure of surrender, and a Nazarene reading Teresa of Avila or John of the Cross on the purification of the will finds a tradition doing the same work with a different vocabulary. Our guides to Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross introduce that literature.

11. Where It Parts Ways from Catholic Teaching

The Nazarene and Catholic accounts of holiness diverge at four points: how holiness arrives, what remains in the holy person, how sin is defined, and what carries the grace. Each of these has consequences, and the fourth one produces the largest practical difference between a Nazarene and a Catholic life.

A second crisis, or a lifelong process

Nazarene doctrine locates the decisive cleansing in a datable second work of grace received instantaneously by faith. Catholic doctrine locates sanctifying grace at baptism, where it is genuinely infused, and holds that it is increased through the sacraments, prayer, charity and suffering across a whole life. Catholic teaching knows conversions and decisive moments well, and it treats them as points within an ongoing process rather than as a distinct category of divine act. The Catechism puts the process in a hard sentence: the way of perfection passes by way of the Cross, and there is no holiness without renunciation and spiritual battle (CCC 2015).

The Catholic objection is that the New Testament language of sanctification is more often continuous than punctiliar, and that the states-of-grace scheme risks dividing Christians into two classes. The Nazarene answer is that a definite offer requires a definite response, and that a doctrine of gradual improvement is exactly what allows a Church to stop expecting anything.

Concupiscence: removed, or remaining

This is the sharpest doctrinal disagreement. Nazarene teaching holds that entire sanctification cleanses the heart from original sin, the inherited corruption itself. Catholic teaching holds that baptism removes original sin and its guilt, while an inclination to sin remains in the baptized, which Tradition calls concupiscence, left for us to contend with (CCC 1264). The Council of Trent taught in its decree on original sin that this concupiscence, which the Apostle sometimes calls sin, is not sin in the true and proper sense in the baptized, and that it remains for the struggle.

Catholic doctrine therefore holds that the interior struggle continues for everyone until death. Saints are people in whom charity has become dominant and habitual, and none of them was exempt from the struggle, and the saints' own writings are the evidence. Nazarene theology holds instead that the disposition itself can be healed now, and that continuing struggle in a sanctified believer is temptation from outside rather than a divided heart within.

What counts as sin

Everything in the previous paragraph depends on the definition of sin, which section 5 introduced. Nazarene teaching defines sin proper as a voluntary transgression of a known law of God. Catholic teaching defines sin as an offence against reason, truth and right conscience, a failure in genuine love for God and neighbour (CCC 1849), and distinguishes mortal sin, which requires grave matter, full knowledge and deliberate consent, from venial sin, which is real sin and does not destroy charity in the soul (CCC 1855 to 1857). Venial sin covers a very large territory that the Nazarene definition excludes: impatience, small vanities, uncharitable thought, negligence, the failure to love when love was possible.

Trent addressed the question of whether anyone can avoid all sin, and taught that no one can avoid all sins, even venial ones, throughout an entire life apart from a special privilege of God such as the Church holds concerning the Blessed Virgin. Catholic teaching therefore knows exactly one human person free from all sin from the beginning, and it identifies her, and it treats that as a singular privilege rather than as an offer made to every believer. Our guide to original sin works through the doctrine behind that judgment.

The Tridentine references above are to the Decree on Original Sin (Session V, 1546) and the Decree on Justification (Session VI, 1547) of the Council of Trent, and to the Catechism of the Catholic Church paragraphs cited inline. Nazarene positions are from the Articles of Faith in the denomination's Manual.

What carries the grace

Catholic teaching holds that Christ gave the Church seven sacraments as the ordinary means by which sanctifying grace is given and increased, and that the Eucharist and the sacrament of penance are the engine of the ordinary Christian's growth in holiness. The Church says the sacraments confer the grace they signify by the power of Christ's action itself (CCC 1127 to 1128), so growth in holiness is objectively fed rather than dependent on the intensity of an experience. Nazarene practice holds two sacraments, celebrates one of them monthly or quarterly, and locates the decisive transaction in a moment of consecration and faith.

The practical consequence is a different weekly life. A Catholic pursuing holiness confesses regularly, receives the Eucharist, examines conscience daily, and keeps a rule of prayer, expecting incremental transformation over decades. A Nazarene pursuing holiness seeks the second work of grace, and afterwards keeps a life of obedience, prayer and accountability to guard it. Our guides to confession and the Eucharist describe the Catholic machinery.

The rest of the Protestant difference

Beyond sanctification, the Church of the Nazarene holds the ordinary Protestant positions: the sixty-six book canon, Scripture as the sole binding rule of faith, no papacy and no magisterium, no invocation of the saints, no purgatory, no Marian dogmas, and ordination understood as authorization rather than as a sacrament. Those differences are covered on their own pages, including our guide to Catholic and Protestant differences, our guide to purgatory, and our guide to the saints and their intercession.

12. Nazarene and Catholic Side by Side

The table sets the two positions against each other on the questions people actually search for. Both columns state the position as the tradition holding it would state it.

Nazarene column from the Articles of Faith and Covenant of Christian Conduct in the Manual of the Church of the Nazarene. Catholic column from the Catechism of the Catholic Church at the paragraphs cited and from the Council of Trent. Local practice varies in both communions; ask the congregation or parish in front of you.

13. Questions Worth Asking in Either Direction

Argument between these two traditions goes better when each side asks the question the other has actually thought about. The four below are the ones that produce movement.

What a Catholic should ask a Nazarene

Ask what happens to the sanctified believer who is impatient with a spouse on a Tuesday. If that counts as sin, the claim that sin has ceased needs qualifying. If it does not count as sin, ask what it is and whether the New Testament's own vocabulary supports putting it outside the category, given 1 John 1:8 and the warning it carries about claiming to be without sin. The answer a thoughtful Nazarene gives will involve the distinction between the disposition of the heart and the imperfection of its execution, and the conversation from there is worth having.

What a Nazarene should ask a Catholic

Ask what the Catholic Church actually expects grace to accomplish in a person, and whether a doctrine of remaining concupiscence functions as an excuse. The honest Catholic answer names the saints, points to a doctrine of transforming union that Catholic mystical theology has developed in enormous detail, and says that the Church has canonized thousands of people precisely as evidence that grace finishes what it starts. The Catholic answer also insists that transformation runs on sacraments and years rather than on a single decision.

What both should ask about presumption

Both traditions have a pathology to watch. The Nazarene one is claiming an experience one does not have, or despairing because one cannot locate it. The Catholic one is treating the availability of confession as permission to remain as one is. Each tradition's pastors have written about its own failure mode, and neither failure mode is the doctrine's fault.

What a searcher should do next

Read the Nazarene Articles of Faith in the Manual for yourself, in the current edition, rather than in anyone's summary, including this one. Read the Catechism of the Catholic Church on grace and justification, paragraphs 1987 to 2029, and on the call to holiness. Then judge which account better explains what you know about your own interior life and what Scripture says God is offering to do about it.

14. The Bottom Line on Nazarene Belief

The Church of the Nazarene teaches historic Christian doctrine within a Wesleyan-Arminian frame, and its distinctive claim is that God cleanses a believer's heart from original sin in a definite work of grace after conversion, received by faith after full consecration, and followed by lifelong growth. The denomination holds two sacraments, ordains women and men, governs itself through a representative polity under elected general superintendents, requires abstinence from alcohol and tobacco of its members, and separated itself formally from Pentecostalism in 1919.

Catholic teaching agrees with the Nazarene conviction that grace really changes a person, that every Christian is called to the perfection of charity, and that grace can be resisted and lost. Catholic teaching locates the infusion of sanctifying grace at baptism, increases it through seven sacraments over a lifetime, holds that concupiscence remains in the baptized without being sin in the proper sense, and defines sin more broadly than the Nazarene formula does, so that the Nazarene claim about ceasing to sin and the Catholic claim about lifelong struggle are partly a disagreement about words and substantially a disagreement about what grace does now.

What neither tradition permits is a Christianity in which the question is closed. Nazarene and Catholic teaching both hold that a person can be lost, that today's dispositions matter, and that no one is told the day or the hour (Mark 13:32). Whichever account of sanctification you find persuasive, the obligation it names is the same one, and it starts today.

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