Creeds and definitions frighten us. Once again, Chesterton, in his 1905 work Heretics, offers a very different perspective. Man can be defined as an animal that makes dogmas. As he plies doctrine on doctrine and conclusion on conclusion in the formation of some tremendous scheme of philosophy and religion, he is, in the only legitimate sense of which the expression is capable, becoming more and more human. When he drops one doctrine after another in a refined skepticism, when he declines to tie himself to a system, when he says that he has outgrown definitions, when he says that he disbelieves in finality, when, in his own imagination, he sits as God, holding no form of Creed but contemplating all, then he is by the very process sinking slowly backwards into the vagueness of the vagrant animals and the unconsciousness of the grass.
Trees have no dogmas.
Turnips are singularly broad-minded. And so today Presbyterians and Baptists know little about John Calvin. Catholics know almost nothing about Augustine, Thomas Aquinas , or the last few papal encyclicals. And frankly, Nazarenes may know surprisingly little about John Wesley or Phineas Bresee , and the distinctives which have infused our tradition and given birth to our colleges. Catechism is not a word with much currency in most Christian churches these days, and this includes the Church of the Nazarene.