Catechesis for the Third Way: Gerald Sittser on the Catechumenate as Bridge-Building and Language-Learning
By Alex Fogleman
In his latest book, Resilient Faith, Gerald Sittser—one of the keynote speakers at the 2020 IRCC Colloquium—has a wonderful concluding chapter on the early Christian catechumenate. It’s actually quite important that the chapter on the catechumenate comes at the very end of the book. After eight chapters explaining the distinctiveness of the “third way” of Christianity—neither accommodationist Roman religion nor isolationist Jewish religion—the final chapter on the catechumenate helps situate the place of catechesis within the broader framework of Christian life and practice.
Catechesis, in other words, is not important in and of itself. It’s only important as an implication of the startling new reality that Jesus Christ is. Catechesis is a practice that depends on the event of Christ.
Sittser begins the chapter on the catechumenate by explaining part of the reason why early Christians developed the catechumenate. “The church demonstrated an unusual capacity to establish meaningful contact with unbelievers and yet maintain high standards of membership, to welcome outsiders into the church and turn them into committed disciples” (156). Christians were in close contact with non-Christians while at the same time maintaining a distinctive identity. This is the difficult balance of the third way. Because there were no pre-existing categories for the kind of thing Christianity was, the catechumenate emerged in order to “bridge” the gap.
Sittser explains catechumenate as a bridge like this:
“The difference between Greco-Roman religion and Christianity was great enough to require the church to create some kind of bridge between the two. Engineers build bridges, of course, to span a physical barrier—a river or canyon—that prohibits convenient and easy crossing. The barrier in this case was the chasm between the old world of traditional Roman religion and the new world of Christianity. The church had to build some kind of bridge that would allow gentiles to transition from one world to the other and thus become established believers.” (156)
“The church in turn created the catechumenate as an institutional bridge to help outsiders move from traditional religion to Christian faith. The church thus erected and maintained what sociologists call ‘permeable boundaries.’ It kept distance from and yet engaged the Roman world, neither accommodating itself to it nor isolating itself from it, but instead immersing itself in the culture until, over a long period of it, it began to reach and win it.” (157)
The catechumenate, then, was a crucial aspect of discipleship but also mission. The catechumenate formed Christians who in turn embodied a unique and winsome way of life to outsiders. As Christianity grew and became increasingly known and recognized in the Roman world, the quality of Christian life was made evident to non-Christians, which was a product of their distinctive form of catechesis.
“The catechumenate enabled converts to become functional disciples and thus helped to form a community of Christians whose example of faith and obedience provided a clear and winsome alternative to Christianity’s major competitors—traditional religion, mystery religions, philosophical schools, and Judaism. Steady growth made the movement increasingly visible, which perpetuated the cycle of success. The relatively high level of commitment among its members, which the catechumenate itself helped to solidify, only strengthened momentum, as if it were a successful farm system feeding a major league club with a steady stream of great players. Not that other religions failed to make demands of adherents. Still, the Christian movement excelled at setting and maintaining high standards of membership.” (157)
Sittser again credits the unique conditions of early Christianity as a catalyst for developing catechesis. He then switches metaphors—from bridge-building to language learning. I like this metaphor as well because, just as there are different size bridges, based on how far apart the two pieces of land are, so also there are different languages, some much more similar than others.
“These circumstances forced church leaders to consider carefully and to plan strategically how to move converts into the fold of Christianity. A simple conversion was not enough, for Romans had to be converted to an entirely different belief system and way of life that was as alien to them as a language like Chinese is to English speakers. This huge gap required time, patience, and purposefulness. Anything short of that would have undermined the very faith that Christian leaders proclaimed, Roman critics opposed, and martyrs died for, a faith rooted in the incarnation, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. To add Jesus to the pantheon of Roman gods and goddesses, as Porphyry advocated, and to present Christianity as just another option in the already crowded field of religion was one thing. A conversion to that kind of religion could have happened quickly and conveniently. Conversion to apostolic Christianity was another thing altogether.” (158)
It's one thing to go from learning a Romance language like Spanish to a similar Romance language like Portuguese or Italian. It’s quite another to go from one of these languages to learning Mandarin, which has a drastically different grammatical, syntactic, and graphical structure. On the surface, learning a new language is equally hard. But it’s easier to learn some rather than others, depending on one’s native language.
The case for Christians today, as for the early church, is that there’s a bigger “gap” between the language of culture and the language of Christianity. And so it will take a bigger bridge, or a more immersive language program, to help non-Christians understand and embrace orthodox Christianity without having Christianity sacrificing its integrity in order to “make sense” to outsiders.
The formational practices of monasticism seem to extend from a similar premise. They emerge because of a presumed gap between the way of the world and the way of Christ. Education comes as a bridge point to learn how to cross these gaps.
I’m excited to hear more from Jerry (along with Greg Peters) at this year’s IRCC Colloquium to learn about the topic “Catechesis as Monasticism.” It should be a rich event! Find out more here.
“The church in turn created the catechumenate as an institutional bridge to help outsiders move from traditional religion to Christian faith. The church thus erected and maintained what sociologists call ‘permeable boundaries.’ It kept distance from and yet engaged the Roman world, neither accommodating itself to it nor isolating itself from it, but instead immersing itself in the culture until, over a long period of it, it began to reach and win it.”