Christians, Catechesis, and Contemporary Culture
by Bill Muehlenberg, Culture Watch:
We live in a dumbed-down age in which basic knowledge, understanding, discernment, and reasoning are all but shot to pieces. People seldom think carefully and analyse things, they tend to just emote instead. And sadly this is just as true for far too many Christians as well.
Thus we almost need to begin from scratch to educate an entire generation which has lost the ability for sustained reflection and critical reasoning. And that means going back to basics with biblical truths as well. We cannot assume that all believers today think biblically or have a biblical worldview.
In fact, most don’t. Most are biblically illiterate and think much more like the world around them. Their view of life comes more from pop culture, MTV, and movies than it does the Bible, theological studies and church history. They simply parrot what the surrounding culture says and thinks on most issues.
Thus the need is greater than ever to properly train, equip and teach all believers in the basics of the Christian faith so that they think and speak in terms of a solid biblical worldview, instead of just regurgitating what the secular culture throws at them.
Six years ago an important book on this issue came out by J.I. Packer and Gary Parrett: Grounded in the Gospel: Building Believers the Old-Fashioned Way (Baker, 2010). In it the authors call us back to a long-neglected practice: catechesis.
They offer this definition: “Historically, the church’s ministry of grounding new believers in the rudiments of Christianity has been known as catechesis – the growing of God’s people in the gospel and its implications for doctrine, devotion, duty, and delight.” And they find it to be totally biblical:
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