Alex Fogleman
2023 Year in Review

2023 in Review: John Behr on theological anthropology; Michael Cameron on Augustine; Catechesis and Liturgy at Iona House with the Anglican Catechist Training School; Curtis Freeman's Pilgrim Journey; Hanna Lucas' Sensing the Sacred; Alex Fogleman's Knowledge, Faith, and Early Christian Initiation.

2023 Year in Review
Alex Fogleman
Knowing God in Patristic Catechesis

Rowan Williams has famously written that theology as a discipline is “perennially liable to be seduced by the prospect of bypassing the question of how it learns its own language.” My hope is that this project offers a picture of early Christian catechesis that helps us remember, quite literally, how early Christian theology learned its own language. What it means to know God is inseparable from the ways in which such knowledge is experienced; medium and message are tightly linked. In studying early Christian catechesis, we observe how knowing God belongs within a set of ecclesial practices in which the meaning of knowledge and faith are found in – and founded upon – Jesus Christ. Advancing from faith to understanding, from belief in God to the knowledge of eternal wisdom, begins and ends with Christ.

Knowing God in Patristic Catechesis
Book Excerpt
Alex Fogleman
Catechized by a Peculiar People

David Lyle Jeffrey on his baptism in the Scottish Baptist Church in rural Canada: “A feature of baptism in our tradition that I continue to value is that it makes you think about the meaning of it quite a lot, both before and after the experience. One of the questions that friends would ask me is, “Do you feel any different?” My Catholic friends especially, since they had the luxury of having just a few drops on their heads when they were too young to remember, wanted to know. Actually, I did feel different, though not perhaps in quite the way they may have expected. It wasn’t euphoric. Rather, I felt as though I had entered into the community of grownups in some way.”

Catechized by a Peculiar People
Alex Fogleman
Catechesis and Trinity, Part III: Living the ...

Nicholas Norman-Krause on the Trinity and the Moral Life: “Moral life is not, first and foremost, obedience to a moral law instituted by a distant Lawgiver, but participation in the Triune life by means of deification and sanctification. Law certainly has its place within this Trinitarian moral vision. But, as we will see, law hangs together with other crucial moral concepts within a broader vision of Christian discipleship, of drawing near to the Father, through the Son, by the Holy Spirit.”

Catechesis and Trinity, Part III: Living the Trinity
Alex Fogleman
Catechesis and the Trinity, Part II: Praying ...

Nicholas Norman-Krause on the Trinity and Prayer: “the Lord’s Prayer is only fully intelligible when understood within a larger Trinitarian account of our participation in the divine life. By the Holy Spirit, we are united to Christ, adopted into his sonship, and so enabled to address his Father as ours. And thus, to pray the Lord’s Prayer is to come to participate in the Triune life of God. For this reason, reflection on the Trinity properly belongs to the catechesis of prayer in general, and to the study of the Lord’s Prayer in particular.”

Catechesis and the Trinity, Part II: Praying the Trinity

Catechesis and Contemplation

Catechesis and Contemplation

Matthew Lee Anderson on contemplation: Yet we should speak about rest within the intellectual life, as well—and by ‘rest’ I do not mean having obtained an answer. The vision of contemplation is a much more leisurely depiction of what we do when we think. In contemplating, we hold the object before our minds and turn it over without any pre-set determination of what we are searching for. The person who contemplates cultivates an openness to the unbidden: in contemplation, we consider something without needing a question about it—a thing that must hold some considerable value to be worth it.

Tim Keller on Catechesis for a Secular Age, Part II: A Moral Ecology

Tim Keller on Catechesis for a Secular Age, Part II: A Moral Ecology

More from Tim Keller on the need for a “counter catechesis”: “The amount of time we spend on our phones in a day—the number of images and videos and repetitive slogans we see—makes the most immersive set of practices ever. It engages the imagination with narratives. It makes the influence and consumption of TV (already a concern a generation ago) look tiny by comparison. Those consuming digital content are being deeply catechized for far more hours in a week and far more effectively than anything the church is doing. It would not be going too far to call it brainwashing of the purportedly benign type seen in George Orwell’s 1984.”

Tim Keller on Catechesis for a Secular Age, Part I: Counter Catechesis

Tim Keller on Catechesis for a Secular Age, Part I: Counter Catechesis

Tim Keller on the need for a counter-catechesis today: “The problem is that, as indispensable as the best of the catechisms are still (Heidelberg, Westminster, and Luther’s Short and Large), they are insufficient. The main alternative to being a Protestant Christian is now some form of Western secularism. The secular age has a very definite catechism of its own, and while our current instructional modes and catechisms may be biblically accurate, they do not present the truth in a way that clearly dismantles secular narratives and undermines secular beliefs.

Bibliotheca Catechetica: Thomas Bray on the Good of Good Books

Bibliotheca Catechetica: Thomas Bray on the Good of Good Books

Thomas Bray on catechetical libraries: “And this is the sole Occasion of the following Address to such as are piously disposed, especially if they be Rich, and without Children. Such Persons, Providence seems to have designed to be public Benefactors to Mankind; and there is none so Noble, so Compendious, so Immediate, and (in our present Circumstances) a Method of doing good so much wanted, as that of fixing Libraries of necessary Books for such of the Clergy, as cannot possibly Buy them.”

Catechesis for the Road: A Review of Curtis Freeman's Pilgrim Letters

Catechesis for the Road: A Review of Curtis Freeman's Pilgrim Letters

This kind of ecumenical Baptist viewpoint characterizes this book as well. The publisher rightly describes the tenor of these letters as “evangelical-catholic, free-church-ecumenical, and ancient-future.” Freeman is clearly writing within the Baptist tradition, even as he seeks to help those within the tradition reach out to the broader and deeper roots of the broader Christian tradition. In these pages, Pilgrim meets saints of the Great Tradition, such as Tertullian, Augustine, Anselm, Bonhoeffer, and Romero, as well as leading lights from the Anabaptist and Baptist traditions—Thomas Grantham, Edward Barber, William Carey, and others. We also meet some of Freeman’s own teachers (as well as students), and local churches.

Mystery of Light: Augustine's Christmastide Catechesis

Mystery of Light: Augustine's Christmastide Catechesis

St. Augustine on the Sacrament of Christmas: “Because even the day of his birth contains the mystery of his light. That, you see, is what the Apostle says: ‘The night is far advanced, while the day has drawn near; let us throw off the works of darkness and put on the armor of light; let us walk decently as in the day’ (Rom. 13:12-13). Let us recognize the day and let us be the day. We were night, you see, when we were living as unbelievers. And this unbelief, which had covered the whole world as a kind of night, was to be diminished by the growth of faith. That is why, on the day we celebrate the birth of our Lord Jesus Christ, the night begins to be encroached upon, and the day to grow longer.”

Catechesis in the News

Catechesis in the News

James Ernest on Evangelicalism’s discipleship failure as a failure of catechesis: “The mission of the church (read the end of the Gospel of Matthew again) is to “make disciples, teaching them to observe everything that I have commanded you.” That teaching is catechesis. It is indoctrination, though we are wary of that word because we often see it used in negative ways. New Christians have to be taught to observe, which means not just to be aware of what Christ did for them according to some particular doctrinal slogan, but to become observant in the sense of putting Christ first, ahead of every other loyalty. Key elements in catechesis would include knowing scripture and doctrine and practicing the sacraments and prayer—all in a way that purges away all contradictory and competing gods and spirits and loyalties and enables an integrated life of faith.”

Impressive Catechesis

Impressive Catechesis

Gregory of Nazianzus’ credal cardiological calligraphy: “If your heart is written upon in some other way than as my teaching demands, come and have the writing changed. I am no unskilled caligrapher of these truths. I write that which is written upon my own heart; and I teach that which I have been taught, and have kept from the beginning up to these gray hairs. Mine is the risk; mine also is the reward of being the director of your soul, and consecrating you by baptism. But if you are already rightly disposed, and marked with the good inscription, see that you keep what is written, and remain unchanged in a changing time about the unchanging Reality.”

Just Bread

Just Bread

Gregory of Nyssa on “Give us this day our daily bread”: “For if God is justice, the man who procures himself food through covetousness cannot have his bread from God. You are the master of your prayer, if abundance does not come from another's property and is not the result of another's tears; if no one is hungry or distressed because you are fully satisfied. For the bread of God is above all the fruit of justice.”

Recent Books on Patristic Catechesis

Recent Books on Patristic Catechesis

The patristic catechumenate has been the subject of several monographs over the past few years—and mostly, it seems, not for any interest in renewing contemporary catechesis but as an interesting historical subject in its own right. New Testament and Early Christian scholars are realizing—even apart from its significance for the church today—that catechesis was central to early Christianity. Here are summaries of five books from the past decade on patristic catechesis/catechumenate: Daniel Schwartz’s Paideia and Cult; Benjamin Edsall’s The Reception of Paul in Early Christian Initiation; David Voprada’s Quodvultdeus: A Bishop Forming Christians in Vandal Africa; and Matthieu Pignot’s The Catechumenate in Late Antique Africa; Donna Hawk Reinhold, Christian Identity Formation According to Cyril of Jerusalem.

The Joy of Teaching

The Joy of Teaching

Augustine on the “cheerful giving” of catechesis: “Our greatest concern is how to make it possible for those who catechize to do so with joy (gaudens). For the more they succeed in this, the more appealing they will be. For if God loves a cheerful giver (2 Cor. 9:7) in matters of material wealth, how much more is this true in matters of spiritual wealth? But for such cheerfulness (hilaritas) to be present at the opportune time depends on the compassion (misericordiae) of the one teaching.”

Recovering the Art of Memory

Recovering the Art of Memory

Memory is a key aspect of learning, and especially of catechesis. However, it is downplayed or neglected in contemporary culture, and even educational culture. Teachers lament “rote memory” or having to implore students to memorize “facts and dates” from history. Yet, I’ve become convinced that memory is one of the most important aspects not only of the Christian life but of human life itself. We are constituted by our memories; it is critical to who we are and how we live. How and where we choose to focus our attention will have an extraordinary bearing on the kinds of people we become.

Origen and the Wilderness Catechumenate

Origen and the Wilderness Catechumenate

Origen on crossing the Jordan, not the Red Sea, as baptism: “Indeed you who long to draw near to the hearing of the divine law have recently forsaken the darkness of idolatry and are now for the first time forsaking Egypt. When you are reckoned among the number of catechumens and have undertaken to submit to the precepts of the Church, you have parted the Red Sea and, placed in the stations of the desert, you daily devote yourself to hearing the Law of God and to looking upon the face of Moses, through which the glory of the Lord is revealed. But if you also have entered [p. 53] the mystic font of baptism and in the presence of the priestly and Levitical order have been instructed by those venerable and magnificent sacraments, which are known to those who are permitted to know those things, then, with the Jordan parted, you will enter the land of promise by the services of the priests. In this land, Jesus receives you after Moses, and becomes for you the leader of a new way.”

Rufinus of Aquileia's Pro-Nicene Catechesis

Rufinus of Aquileia's Pro-Nicene Catechesis

Lewis Ayres on Rufinus of Aquileia’s Commentary on the Apostles’ Creed: “Rufinus wishes his catechumens to hear scriptural discussion of Father and Son as inviting the deployment of a notion of mystery shaped by pro‐Nicene principles. Rufinus attempts to shape his catechumens' imaginations to hear the words of Scripture both in the light of pro‐Nicene principles and as a text comprehensible only in the light of a particular spiritual transformation. Thus it is not precise enough to say that Rufinus wishes the text to be heard as pro‐Nicene in theology: he wishes the text to be heard and read as a particular type of text, a text whose meaning is intertwined with a spiritual ascent that it itself teaches.”

Getting Catechesis Back On Track

Getting Catechesis Back On Track

Fr. Lee Nelson on restoring catechesis: “Lastly, we can see in the ancient catechumenate the expectation that God’s prevenient grace moves sinners to growth in holiness and ultimately maturity, and that the Church is responsible for feeding and equipping. There is also not the presumption that we can baptize the uninstructed and let God take care of the rest. No! The Ancient Church believed that they had been given a sacred task, and that even though the instruction was basic and elementary, they had a duty to convey it with passion and joy. Saint Augustine remarked that the most important thing for a catechist is that he “enjoy catechizing.” May we find that joy in this remarkable vocation yet again!”

Cyprian On Mortality

Cyprian On Mortality

Cyprian of Carthage: “What a significance, beloved brethren, all this has! How suitable, how necessary it is that this plague and pestilence, which seems horrible and deadly, searches out the justice of each and everyone and examines the minds of the human race; whether the well care for the sick, whether relatives dutifully love their kinsmen as they should, whether masters show compassion to their ailing slaves, whether physicians do not desert the afflicted begging their help, whether the violent repress their violence, whether the greedy, even through the fear of death, quench the ever insatiable fire of their raging avarice, whether the proud bend their necks, whether the shameless soften their affrontery, whether the rich, even when their dear ones are perishing and they are about to die without heirs, bestow and give something! Although this mortality has contributed nothing else, it has especially accomplished this for Christians and servants of God, that we have begun gladly to seek martyrdom while we are learning not to fear death. These are trying exercises for us, not deaths; they give to the mind the glory of fortitude; by contempt of death they prepare for the crown.”

The Constraint of the Word: Graham Ward on Gregory of Nyssa

The Constraint of the Word: Graham Ward on Gregory of Nyssa

Graham Ward on Gregory of Nyssa’s Great Catechetical Oration: “The ‘system’ [of catechesis] is not an abstract set of propositions set out by the ministers who preside and to which allegiance is given by those taught. It is, first of all, intrinsic to the word itself as the Logos; the word of faith that teaches. The system is the constraining and necessary logic of the Logos. It is co-relative to both a social and institutional practice (teaching) and an operation (being saved). It is implicated in ‘the mystery of godliness’ or the hidden working of piety. Its aim is salvation through conversion.”

Fear as Lack of Faith?

Fear as Lack of Faith?

From an article by Alex Fogleman published at Church Life Journal:

To live—to live well—is an act of supernatural grace. In order to embrace both Lent and Easter, then, we need a deep habituation in the Church’s way of being, a way infused with sacramental grace through the sacraments, even if received spiritually. Though most of us are, for the time being, cut off directly from participation in the life-giving sacraments, that does not stop the church from being herself—in her members—a sacrament of Christ, formed from the bleeding side of the New Adam during the sleep of his passion. We celebrate life amidst death, then, because we have been catechized into Christian existence. To be an Easter people and to sing Hallelujah, we must have our entire frame of reference aligned towards a transcendent order, the supernatural mystery of Christ our creator and redeemer.

Catechesis for the Third Way

Catechesis for the Third Way

Gerald Sittser explains why the catechumenate emerged as a result of the “gap” between Christianity and Roman culture: “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.”