CATECHESIS: QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS
Catechesis
The question, put to me by a former student of mine, was about catechesis—systematic instruction in the faith. We would not have called it that. We called it “catechism.” We went to catechism. I began going to catechism somewhere around second grade. Our first catechism books were pared down versions of the Heidelberg Catechism, short answers that could later be scaled up to the full catechism.
Catechism met in the church basement on Saturday morning. No one wanted to be there, not the students who would have preferred to be outside doing kid things, nor the elders who taught the classes, nor the parents who had to bring kids to town. My wife fondly remembers walking to McClain Drugs for a root beer float after catechism, but we were a poor family; we didn’t have money for root beer floats.
The classes were taught by rote. Our little books, cheaply printed without illustrations, were lists of questions and answers. The teacher moved down the rows of the students, a question for each child. You could count the number students in front of you and figure out which question would be yours. A glance at the book, and you could commit to short-term memory the prescribed answer. You learned to navigate the instructional system, not to understand the catechism.
So it went through the years of grade school and into high school. At some point, the classes moved from Saturday to Sunday morning before church. The questions and answers got longer. The teachers tried and mostly failed to elicit discussion among us.
I have a few of these instructional books for young students in my library. One is Borstius’ Primer of Bible Truths, subtitled Short Answers for Little Children. Bortius was a 17th century Dutch pastor. He died in Rotterdam in 1680. The version I have was “re-arranged and filled out” and, presumably, translated (it doesn’t say) from the Dutch in 1903 by two Christian Reformed pastors, Henry Beets and Menno J. Bosma. It was reprinted often. My edition is from 1948.
In the Primer, the answers are short and to the point. Question: “Who is your Creator?” Answer: “God.” Question: “What was man’s first sin?” Answer: Eating of the forbidden tree.” Question: “What will God do with all who do not repent?” Answer: “He will punish them for their sin.” Question: “What is the great punishment of sin?” Answer: “Death and hell.” Question: “Who made hell?” Answer: “God the Lord.” Question: “Who . . . shall go there?” Answer: “Bad children and all godless people.” Question: “Who will go to heaven?” Answer: “All God-fearing children and believing people.” Question: “What do they do there?” Answer: “They sing: ‘Holy, holy, holy, is the Lord God Almighty.’” One of the goals of catechesis seems to have been obedient children. (The CRC pastors in re-arranging Bortius did leave out one Q&A about hell. Question: “What punishment do those in hell suffer?” Answer: “They burn in the eternal fire.”)
What accumulates in these little books is a theological system neatly packaged in questions and answers. Learn these questions and answers, and you will have learned a rudimentary form of 17th century Reformed theology. You will have become familiar with a theological vocabulary: covenants of works and of grace, election and reprobation, total depravity and the perseverance of the saints, and, yes, heaven and hell. This was altogether too packaged: no question was asked without a suitable Reformed answer. But it gave us an admittedly shallow but nevertheless working knowledge of Reformed orthodoxy. Even if we discovered later in life that we needed to move beyond the catechism answers, we knew at least what we were leaving behind.
The question with which I began, about catechesis, was put to me by someone who did not grow up in the era of catechetical instruction, as did I. Having come to the faith as a young adult, he did not receive catechesis until recently when he joined an Orthodox church. He wondered whether Reformed churches still did catechesis and whether, even in this belated, nontheological age, they still should. I paused for a moment, unsure of the answer. Or rather, answers. In that one question were several. Is catechesis valuable, even if done badly, as for the most part it was done in my experience? Is there a better way to do catechesis? What should a proper program of catechesis look like?
Identity
Reflecting on those questions at this distance, two answers come to mind. The first has to do with tradition and identity. The catechetical process was aimed at creating in children an identity, a connection to a history, to a tradition. We were, our teachers insisted, above all else, Reformed. Our identity could be traced back to John Calvin and Geneva. It passed through documents like the Belgic Confession and the Heidelberg Catechism. It took a path through Dutch Calvinism, defined by the Synod of Dort and documented in the Canons of Dort. It came through the likes of Hendrik de Cock, Albertus Van Raalte, Hendrik Scholte, and Abraham Kuyper. It included in our own time, if you are as old as I, luminaries like the just deceased Calvin Seerveld.
To lose connection with this tradition, with its considerable virtues and its considerable failings, is to lose a place to stand, a place to push back against the tradition itself and, at the same time, to push against the times in which we live. It is the second generation of those who have stepped away from the tradition that I worry about, those who have not been catechized into its language and perspective (including in all the ways that catechesis happens formally and informally). In losing touch with this identity, they will too often be faced with the choice between a compromised Christianity and a shallow secularism. And as they grow distant from the tradition, their children and their children’s children will lose touch forever with what anchored the lives of their ancestors.
For this reason, catechesis is perhaps more important now than in the past. In the past, catechesis was only one part of a culture that in many other ways communicated what it meant (in that age) to be Reformed: sermons (including catechism sermons), schools, conversations, and more. We need to teach not only children but adults how to grasp a Reformed identity for our own time. This is important work.
This work will not happen if catechesis is no more than the rote rehearsal of old formulas, even if those formulas are found in estimable and time-honored documents like the Heidelberg Catechism and Westminster Catechisms. What we need for this time is a more comprehensive and innovative form of catechesis, what might be called a catechesis of retrieval. What has to be retrieved are not just the stock Reformed answers (to stock questions) but the questions that underlie the catechism questions and answers. If we do not do this work of retrieval, catechesis will cease to connect with life.
The Catechesis of Retrieval
Allow me to conclude with an example of what I have in mind for this catechesis of retrieval. Recently, I had occasion to take a brief look at a characteristic 17th century Reformed theological idea: the idea of divine decrees. The theology of the decrees doesn’t make an appearance in two of the Reformed confessions I grew up with: the Belgic Confession and the Heidelberg Catechism; they are a bit too early. The idea does appear in the Canons of Dort, though only reference to election (I:6,7,8, and 16).
The theology of the decrees does more work in the Westminster Catechisms and Confession from a century later. The Westminster Larger Catechism defines the decrees as: “the wise, free, and holy acts of the counsel of [God’s] will, whereby, from all eternity, he hath, for his own glory, unchangeably foreordained whatsoever comes to pass in time, especially concerning angels and men” (Q&A 12). To many of you, this will seem old and odd language. Everything by these lights is predetermined, “foreordained” in the mind of God. It seems to rule out human choice and the contingencies of life as we know it. In this theology, what God thinks must perforce happen.
But just when you think that the catechism is saying that everything is determined—“foreordained” in the language of the time—the companion document to the catechism, the Westminster Confession, says, not so fast. Here, the Confession: “Although in relation to the foreknowledge and decree of God, the first cause, all things come to pass immutably and infallibly, yet, by the same providence, he ordereth them to fall out according to the nature of second causes, either necessarily, freely, or contingently” (Westminster Confession V.2). What this means, again in the language of time, is that in fact we do freely choose what to do and believe, and as result of those choices and other choices, we make things happen. We live in a contingent universe.
So, for the Westminster divines, it’s not either or; it’s both and. God determines all things by divine decree and, at the same time, things come to us in ordinary human life as we choose (“freely”) and as they are caused by other things (“contingently”). But how can this be? How can God be all powerful, the one who determines everything that happens, and at the same time, we humans (along with other animals) have the power and the responsibility to choose? This is the underlying question that the Westminster Catechisms and Confession are trying to address. They want both eternity—the mind of God—and time—human choice.
The question is not dead. It’s still actively debated, although now typically in terms that do not include God. In 2023, Stanford neuroendocrinologist Robert Sapolsky published Determined: A Science without Free Will. He argued that science rules out free will and argued it in a way persuasive enough that readers come away agreeing with him. (I know this from a friend’s enthusiastic endorsement of the book.) But Sapolsky’s conclusion denies our experience—not only ours but his own. It would appear from the outside that Robert Sapolsky decided in quite an undetermined way to write a book called Determined and in it to argue that free will is a figment of our imagination. He could have—again, so it appears—done otherwise. We have on the one side Sapolsky and the assumptions of his science that behavior is determined by how we are wired; we have on the other our concrete experience of freedom of choice. Need we choose one or other? Does one have to be wrong for the other to be right?
In this way we are plunged into the question that exercised 17th century Reformed theologians: is it all God (the divine decrees) or are we responsible for choosing our salvation? Determined or not determined? The 17th theologian who pursues this question in the most careful detail is Francis Turretin, the Geneva theologian, whose Institutes of Elenctic Theology are a marvel of careful reasoning and fine distinctions.
In the end, in my opinion, Turretin’s theology of the divine decrees doesn’t work. You can’t have it both ways. You can’t have human life as we experience it with all its contingencies and choices and divine decrees determining everything, including and especially who goes to heaven and who goes to hell. The problem with Turretin’s theology of the decrees is that it is based on an underlying assumption that reality is logical. There is more than a little arrogance in it: the notion that Turretin and other Reformed theologians of the time had finally figured it all out. (It would appear that Robert Sapolsky suffers from the same disease. I have not yet read the book but see the review of Determined by Jessica Riskin in the February 13, 2025 issue of The New York Review of Books).
Perhaps the truth is that we need both explanations, both theologically and scientifically. We need the notion of decrees, whether we call them divine or laws of nature. We also need the notion of human choice—“mind” in the philosophical sense. We need to hold both in our theological toolkit at the same time, with one way of thinking appropriate for some parts of life and the other for other parts of life. The mistake is trying to work out a metatheology that puts it all together in a way that makes sense of everything. It requires the humility to say that we lack the capacity to create such a theology.
But my point is not to push a solution to the problem, even the solution I just presented, which is not really a solution at all. My point is that when you begin to understand the questions that underlie theology (or other ways of thinking), you come eventually to questions that we of the 21st century are still asking and have not yet sufficiently answered. What’s important is not the answer but the question because in asking the question we come to those real issues that still engage our thinking and involve our lives. Once we see what the question is, we can evaluate the answer given by those who have preceded us.
Or we can decide that the question is not solvable in the terms it has been presented. In this regard, for the issue that I just raised, the divine decrees and human freedom, one can hardly do better than Old Testament writer we know as Ecclesiastes. His justly famous 3rd chapter (our numbering, not his), begins with the poetic verses that begin, “For everything there is a season. . ..” You, like me, will have playing in our minds the Pete Seeger song, “Turn! Turn! Turn!” The ancient preacher goes on to draw a set of conclusions: First, “God has made everything beautiful in its time.” But, he adds, God “has also set eternity in the human mind.” Time and eternity, human contingency and the divine decrees, scientific determinism and human free will. We sense that both of these are somehow real, but we find it impossible to put them together. As the preacher goes on to say, “What we have not been given is a way to discover what God does from beginning to end” (3:11). We find it impossible to get the whole picture.
Suddenly, in this meeting of 17th century Reformed thought and 21st century neuroscience and the words of an ancient preacher writing in the Hellenistic era, we have the beginnings of a conversation. We can imagine them sitting down to dinner and talking. Catechesis is too often a dreary recitation of answers; it is rarely an acute probing of the questions. It’s rarely conversational. Without the questions—not the put-up questions proposed by the catechisms but the real questions that underlie them—the catechism answers will come to be seen as the dusty residue of old theologies. It’s when we engage these older theologies with our still unanswered questions in hand, we often find in them more than we expect. And we find, in their struggle to answer these difficult questions, spiritual community across the centuries. And in this way, we honor those have gone before us, not by blinding following them but by engaging with them in trying to understand God’s truth and ours.
Or so I think.
Clay
This is really helpful, Clay! I’m preparing to begin a kids catechism class in September, but after reading your article, I think an adult’s class would be good as well!