An Interview with J. I. Packer and Gary Parrett – Thursday, 30 Jun 2011 – original source WhiteHorseInn.org

Throughout the history of the church, young believers and new converts to the faith went through a process called “catechism.” Although this is an ancient practice, it has fallen out of use in contemporary Christianity. In seeking a remedy to this, White Horse Inn talked with J. I. Packer and Gary Parrett, authors of an important book entitled Grounded in the Gospel: Building Believers the Old Fashioned Way. Dr. Packer teaches theology at Regent College in Vancouver, B.C., and is the author of numerous books. Dr. Parrett is associate professor of educational ministries at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, and is also the coauthor of another book on this subject, Teaching the Faith, Forming the Faithful: A Biblical Vision for Education in the Church.

Why did you feel compelled to write Grounded in the Gospel?
GP: In the garden-variety evangelical world I have moved in for most of the last thirty years, there’s very little sense of a catechetical vision or ongoing catechetical ministries. We therefore felt compelled to try to help address this. This has been on my mind for a while, largely because of seeds planted by Dr. Packer when I was his student almost twenty-five years ago.

Those who don’t come from a background in Reformed, Lutheran, or Anglican traditions might say that catechism sounds Roman Catholic. What is the origin of catechism and how do you define this word?
GP: It comes from the Greek word katekeo, which is used in several places in the New Testament and means “instruct.” In some ways, it is a general word for instruction; but very early on in the life of the church, it was a particular form of instruction that focused on the basics via oral communication’give and take, back and forth. There’s a biblical concern for teaching the faith in substantive ways.

When did this practice of catechesis start and when was it revived?
GP: In the ancient church, in the second through fifth centuries in particular, anybody who came to Christ, especially from outside of the Christian community, went through a rigorous preparation for baptism that was catechizing, equipping them in the basics of Christian doctrine, Christian living, and Christian praying’often for many months, up to two or three years of instruction’before they were permitted to be baptized. Then catechesis went underground in a lot of ways for most of the Middle Ages, was revived by the Reformers with great zeal, and was the dominant feature of Protestantism, at least through the era of the Puritans. But as you suggested, ever since the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries, it has been retained largely only in Reformed and Lutheran circles.

Our theme recently on the White Horse Inn was “Recovering Scripture.” Our producer visited a local Bible college, asking students if they were familiar with the book of Galatians. Here are some of their answers to the following questions:

What’s the book of Galatians about? Have you ever read that book or studied it?

I’ve read it, but I don’t really remember.
Um, I haven’t studied it in depth. I’ve read it, but I can’t really recall the one firm message.
I think it’s Paul writing to the church in Galatia. I would say it’s about how a Christian ought to live their life.
Hmm. I read through that a couple months ago, but I don’t recall specifically what that one’s about. I believe it talks a lot about community in the church.
I’m not familiar with it enough to talk a lot about it, I guess.
It comes back to strengthening others in Christ, I believe. I haven’t studied that book. I grew up in the church, but never had a study on that book, not in detail at least.

One of the words that pops up again and again through Galatians is “justification.” Are you familiar with that word?

No. I haven’t looked into it.
I’ve actually only heard of that concept in the last couple of years. I’ve never heard that phrase used in a church, which might just have to do with my church background. I went to one church as a kid and that was it. They never really got very deep.

That’s the same answer I’m getting from everybody. Are churches doing a poor job teaching the basic content of Scripture from kindergarten to college age?

Yeah, I agree with that. I think they need to do a better job of equipping us of how to read the Bible, and less on the topical, like how to do life.
My personal take is that they do a horrible job. Sometimes it could be teachers who don’t really know it themselves. We kind of dumb it down.
I don’t have remotely near the knowledge of the Bible that I feel I ought to have, being able to say, “I was raised in church and went to a Christian college.”
I do think that the church needs to have more in-depth teaching of the Bible, especially starting in Sunday school, because I think a lot of times it’s pretty shallow.

Now what’s striking here is that this is not at a public university campus; this is at a Bible college. Is this exceptional, or is this why you wrote Grounded in the Gospel?
JIP: The conversation you’ve just relayed shows that we today in the evangelical community are far out of sync with Christian discipling in the first century, in the apostolic age. We claim to be Bible people, and we talk a lot about the Bible; but whereas they in the first century drilled people in what now we may properly call Bible doctrine, we simply don’t do that. We go some distance in helping people understand a bit of the historical background and the books of the Bible; but even so, we don’t go very far in encouraging people to soak themselves in the Bible. As C. H. Spurgeon once said, “A Christian’s blood should be bibline.” He was being fanciful; but that is to say, if you prick the Christian with a pin, the blood that comes out should be just oozing Scripture. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Reformers, the Puritans, the evangelicals were literally soaked in Scripture. They seemed to know their Bible backwards. They could quote it appropriately and apply it in relation to anything that came up in conversation. We simply aren’t like that, and yet we think we’re being loyal to the reformational heritage.

We simply aren’t close enough to Bible doctrine, Bible truth, even to the biblical text, really to have the right to even call ourselves evangelical Bible people. In the church this last thirty years, as I’ve observed it, Bible study has come a long way. Thirty years ago, there was even less of it than there is today. That is a very encouraging feature of life today. But just as we are beginning to relearn that we must center our concern on the Bible, its text, its teaching, and its doctrine, we must also center our concern equally on drilling folk in the faith of the Scriptures’that is, catechesis. We are guided in this by the historic creeds and the Reformation confessions. Christians should know their faith thoroughly in the way that Jehovah’s Witnesses know their faith. One knows why it is that Jehovah’s Witnesses are so skilled in presenting their faith. They are taught it and they are drilled in presenting it. We need in our evangelical world something similar to this.

I think of Dorothy Sayers’ wonderful work, The Lost Tools of Learning, where she says, “Across all fields, we’re losing the grammar’the grammar of language, the grammar of music, the grammar of art, the grammar of our faith, because we have this approach to education today that says basically just let them discover the world for themselves.” So when people now get together in those Bible studies’and we have a plethora of study Bibles for every niche market on the planet, and bookstores just brimming with books on how to do this and that’is it really meaningful to get together in Bible studies when we don’t have the grammar to begin with?
JIP: I think you hit the nail bang on the head. Yes, we are losing the grammar of our Christianity, which expresses itself as a life. You can’t teach the life properly, except as you teach the faith properly and show how the living is ground-ed on the believing. To get the believing straight in your mind, you must have the basic grammar. The faith has a basic grammar. The historic creeds and Reformation confessions express this basic grammar, as well as the catechetical pattern of instruction. As Gary said, it took two or three years before folk were admitted to baptism. This was how the early church found it necessary to work because there were so many false and misleading ideas. It took hard work to get Christian minds anchored in truth, and it was called “catechesis” because it was basic instruction. They thought of it as fulfilling the Great Commission. Jesus said, “Go and make disciples of all the nations.” The word “disciples” means “learners.” Learners learn the basics. Catechesis covers both the faith and the life. It’s focused instruction that is intended to disciple people.

We have students from Nigeria come to Westminster Seminary California who are astonished that we’re so lax in some of these areas. They have that ancient church practice of intense catechesis before baptism. They have to because they’re coming out of animism, they’re coming out of ancestor worship, and they’re coming out of Islam. Do we not realize that we’re living in a culture that is every bit as averse to the faith and practices of Christianity as any other culture in the world?
JIP: That is so right and so important that you can’t, I think, stress it too much. The basic trouble in the West is that we have exchanged a God-centered view of life for a man-centered, self-centered, and relativistic view of life, of truth, of wisdom. Christianity immediately gets distorted and pulled out of shape, because we treat ourselves as the central focus of interest in our personal universe, and we think of God simply as there on the edge of our lives, so to speak, to help when we need him, to supply what we feel we lack. But we don’t think in terms of God himself and God’s glory as the goal of everything, and the life of worship as being the true fulfillment of our human nature. All of that has vanished, and instead we talk about satisfaction and peace and joy, understanding all these words in terms of feeling good. And the feel-good version of Christianity falsifies the real thing at just about every point.

And that feel-good version of Christianity means that everything in the church has to be fun. Now what happens when that’s your criterion? Can catechism be fun?
JIP: It’s not fun in the sense in which people use the word today; but it is very satisfying to the mind and heart when you begin to see how everything fits together in the Bible, with God at the center. To learn God centeredness in an orderly way delights the soul, and it makes you want to worship the God who is the source of all this truth and wisdom and beauty’because there is beauty in an orderly understanding of the faith.

A feast will always be more satisfying than a fast-food meal.
JIP: I have been a Christian for sixty-five years, and that has been my experience right through those sixty-five years from start to finish. Well, of course, I haven’t finished yet.

Dr. Parrett, what do you say? You have a doctorate in education from Columbia; you have studied the methods of education, specifically Christian education, so you take them seriously. Have we gotten so caught up in the technique and methods’how to do this, how to do that’that we’re ignoring what it is we are trying to teach?
GP: Yes, definitely. That’s been moving in my mind ever since I joined the field of Christian education. There is much emphasis on process, which can be very helpful; but there’s also this assumption that we already have clarity on what we’re trying to teach effectively, and I think that assumption is not warranted at all. A lot of emphasis is on teaching effectively, on teaching in culturally relevant ways’and I affirm all of that’but it’s a complete lack of attention to what it is that we’re mandated to be teaching: the essence of the faith. We find in Scripture that concept of faith. There is the Hebrews 11 type of faith, which is sort of our subjective faith and response to the great God of the Scripture. But the other aspect of New Testament faith, which is the faith, Jude 3 style, which was once for all delivered to the saints’something objective, revelatory from God’that revelation faith has been wholly neglected in churches and in a lot of Christian education circles.

So, faith as a body of teaching is subordinated to my personal experience of faith. What do you say to people who dismiss catechesis as just head knowledge, not heart knowledge?
JIP: Head knowledge is the highway to heart knowledge. But you don’t have heart knowledge without head knowledge. Truth enters the heart via the understanding. You learn what God has taught us in Scripture about himself and his ways of dealing with us, his purposes, and the great story into which he’s seeking to bring us as an active part of what he’s seeking to work out in the world. That knowledge settles in the heart, and it becomes living truth -truth that makes you want to worship. You praise God for all these wonderful things. You’ve got any number of examples of that being done in the Psalms. And that’s the wavelength on which we should all be tuned in at every generation. We praise God for the glory of his truth and the things that he’s doing and telling us about as he does them.

That’s where it has to start. And if you start at the other end and say, “My heart guides me and I want it to. I shall treat as important the things that my heart responds to,” you are going to end up with a distorted view of reality. The technical name for it is “relativism,” because you are relativizing all the things that God has taught us to yourself and your present focus and field of interest. You are ignoring the things that at the moment aren’t catching your interest, so that you’re left with very few truths that give you the sense that God is there, he loves, and he’s ready to move in and help you whenever you need help, and that’s it. There are many people in our churches for whom Christianity means no more than that.

But when you compare that with the presentation of himself that God gives us in the sixty-six books of the Bible, it’s almost like two religions. The truth is that our subjectivism, as we may properly call it, has strained out of our thinking a great deal of the God-focused truth that ought to be there in our minds. If we had it in our minds, as instruction from God himself, I believe that our hearts would soon find that it was glowing in our hearts, and we are getting excited about it. If we don’t start that way, we are left with a skimpy understanding of personal religion as according to the Scriptures. Most of the key things will have been left out. And of course we treat the half-truths in our minds as if they were the whole truth. We think of ourselves as fully fashioned Christians, when in fact we are simply bankrupt spiritually. We are not honoring and praising God the way we should, and we’re not full grown as his disciples.

You both talk at great length about the center of catechesis being the gospel. I think it was Charles Spurgeon who said, “No one has to be taught to be a Pelagian.” To believe in self-salvation and trusting in oneself is sort of our default setting as human beings. But you have to be taught the gospel. The gospel is completely foreign to us by nature, and we’re certainly not going to get it from Oprah or Dr. Phil or anyone else in the culture. Is catechesis essential not just for knowing the main themes of the Bible, but really for getting to the heart of what the Bible is concerned with’namely, communicating the gospel of Christ? If we don’t have that, are we endangering future generations of not being Christian, even though they go to church?
GP: Sure. Actually, one of the problems I think that has affected contemporary evangelicalism is unintended consequences of the Sunday school movement, where a person could grow up in an evangelical church and feel like they’ve gotten the Bible all their lives. But for a host of reasons, what wound up happening too often in the Sunday school movement was they would pick up pieces of Bible stories, but generally speaking were wholly disconnected from the grand story of which the gospel is the center. So you’ve got the story of Jonah, of Peter, of Mary, but these stories are all disconnected from the glorious gospel. And in some cases, even more tragically, those Sunday school stories were presented in a way actually contrary to the message of the gospel. So you read about Jonah, but it becomes a little moral lesson at the end: “Don’t be a bad rebellious boy like Jonah.” Or you read about Mary and the bottom line is, “We must be good girls like Mary.” Unless we keep the gospel central to our catechetical efforts, we do grave danger.

You talk about ritual – rituals mandated by the Scriptures’as important. What do you say to people who have a fundamental approach to their Christian life and believe that everything has to be spontaneous? “I don’t want written prayers; I don’t want external authorities. I trust what happens inside of me, not what someone tells me.” How do you answer people who resist what you’re saying about catechism?
JIP: I would say, first of all, that those critics ought to review their lives and realize how much ritual there already is in their daily existence: the ritual of breakfast, the ritual of cleaning their teeth. Ritual means simply things that you do over and over again because they are good to do, they are helpful to do. What we from the mainstream Christian world want to say to people is: Can you believe that some of the things that the church has done down the centuries over and over again have been health giving in just the same way? Singing hymns, for instance. I’ve never yet met anybody who says we should never sing the same hymn twice; we should always be making up our songs as we go along’singing in the Spirit or something like that. I think that point makes itself. And Jesus taught us a prayer to use regularly: the Lord’s Prayer. It’s a prayer indeed that starts the mind going; there are any number of lines of meditation and reflection the Lord’s Prayer begins for us. But the verbal formula is there. And in Jesus’ own day, the Psalms were regularly used in the synagogue. Jesus never challenged that. And the Christian church has been using the same Psalms’singing and repeating them and memorizing them’all down the centuries.

So then to say, when it comes to prayer, that we don’t want ever to be tied to a form of words that have been used before seems to me to be thoughtless to the point of goofy. And all of us have had the experience of forms of words becoming more and more precious as we use them over and over again. Think of the words “I love you” as between spouses, used over and over again, but the meaning deepens as the years go by. The idea that prayer to God, which is supposed to be express- ing love and honor and concern for God’s glory, shouldn’t involve any repetition. It shouldn’t, in other words, become ritual.

I’m sure you’ve heard many times from people, and especially in younger emerging church contexts: “Okay, fine, catechisms. But let’s not go back to these dead white northern European drafted catechisms; we need new catechisms, because the gospel is always changing, it’s always addressing new issues, and these catechisms can’t possibly convey to us what we need in our time and place today.” What would you say to that?
GP: I would say, first of all, that I’m personally open to the idea of local catechisms that are culturally contextual and so on, but humility demands we confess that we’re not the first persons to ask these questions or the questions of how to make disciples. Humility demands that we look at what those who have gone before us have done in this area and look at their good work. And I think that humility would demand us to confess along the lines of what Dr. Packer mentioned earlier: that the Christians who developed some of our most noted catechisms simply knew their Bibles much better than most of us do today. I wouldn’t out of hand dismiss the idea that we could find something that would be along the lines of a more culturally appropriate way to say something. The essence of the content in which we must catechize is probably not going to change from culture to culture. That’s scripturally and biblically deter- mined. Historical precedent will be exceedingly helpful; if we look at how others spoke meaningfully into their cultures, we’ll get great guidance how to speak into ours. We are wise to connect ourselves as much as we can to those who have gone before us.

In many ways, our Nigerian students are more attached to the Heidelberg Catechism than most North American Reformed Protestants. In not too much time, it looks like there will be more Nigerian Reformed Christians than North American Reformed Christians. They have this rigorous catechesis, and they see it as outreach and ministry. I wonder if it’s because the Heidelberg Catechism, for example, so richly presents a faith that is across all times and places. It’s still true that Christ is our only comfort in life and in death. It’s still true that the chief end of human beings is to glorify God and enjoy him forever.
JIP: I think the Heidelberg Catechism was more successful than any other of the Reformation catechisms in locking together, uniting the truths by which Christians are called to live’basic Bible truths of the gospel’and the way to live by them; that is to say, the way to take these truths through one’s mind into one’s heart and to shape one’s life accordingly. In the sixteenth century, when the Reformation burst out all over Western Europe, there was a parallel concern for education that was an overspill of the Renaissance; and the catechisms for the most part were put together in terms of question and answer to be memorized by children in the course of their overall education. Most people today when they hear the word “catechism” think of that, if indeed they think of anything at all. They think of a question-and-answer formula children must memorize, and they say, “We’re not children; we’re beyond that. And furthermore, we have not found that memorizing is a very fruitful activity; we don’t do much of it, and we don’t want to be recalled to it.” These are two strikes against the sort of catechizing that Dr. Parrett and I are beating the drum about.

The Heidelberg Catechism is obviously written for thoughtful adult believers. At every point, it maps the road from the head to the heart and the shaping of the life that makes it the most useful of the older catechisms as a model for today. But after saying all that, I agree with what Dr. Parrett said: In principle, a new age, a new era calls for new verbalizing of the old truths in new catechetical forms of instruction. And incidentally, I want to stress that in the earliest Christian centuries, catechesis focused on adult inquirers into the faith rather than on children, and it did take the form of presentations by the catechist leading the discussion to make sure that the listeners had really learned what had been presented. I suspect at this point in history that catechesis should return to that form, rather than developing a new memorizing drill for children. It’s a view you would have to say at present is untested, but it’s a view I put forward for testing and recommend in conversation and in my writing.

It used to be that pastors were the main catechists. Even the Reformers, as busy as they were, saw it as part of their pastoral duties during the week and on the Lord’s Day to lead the children in catechism. Today, a lot of children grow up and never know their pastor. Their pastor is the Sunday school teacher and the youth group director, and they almost really aren’t part of the larger church. They’re in their own generationally sealed compartments. And then, on top of that, a lot of parents say, “They get whatever religious instruction they get at church or at the Christian school.” So even at home there’s a disconnect. Do you think catechism requires the involvement of pastors and parents, rather than just specialists in youth ministry?

GP: I think this is another example of perhaps unintended consequences of the Sunday school movement. It was a lay movement from beginning to end, but adopted by churches though it was initially a parachurch movement, and finally charged primarily with Christian education though it was originally an evangelism and compassion ministry. Part of this outcome was that parents and especially pastors withdrew from educational leadership in these ways. So, lay people who are volunteers on behalf of the church take over a lot of the teaching tasks for the children of the church. Parents wash their hands in too many cases; pastors wash their hands in too many cases. The pastor, who is certainly most theologically equipped, often has already decided in our era that this is just not his job, that’s somebody else’s job. And it puts us in a very sad situation today.