by Keith Bassham
What was the most significant change in Christianity over the past decade? This question was asked by Christianity Today last year among people who research and report such things. In Ruth Moon’s compilation of responses posted in December on the CT website, this one caught my attention:
“A widespread abandonment of Christian doctrinal commitment — even doctrinal knowledge. Forget the rising number of people with no religious identity; the news to me is the vast number of self-identified Christians who have no real knowledge of, or deep commitment to, a specific Christian faith. You could say they were watering down Christianity’s teachings, but I question if they even know those core teachings.”
The responder was Cathy Lynn Grossman, religion reporter for USA Today. I have no idea how many conservative Baptists reporter Grossman knows, but I know many, and her observations describe the condition for more than a few of them.
Amid the calls for humility and prayer in our quest for revival, I propose another item to add to the list: catechism. Now, if you’ve been busy trying to put as much fun into fundamentalism as you can as a church growth vehicle, you are not going to like that word at first. Frankly, it’s an odd word, an old word, but it has solid value. At the center of the long, odd word is the simple, short word echo, and it means giving religious instruction by voice using a system of questions and answers.
Ordinarily, we modern Baptists associate catechism with Catholicism, or Lutheranism, formal liturgical systems, and such. However Baptists used to catechize as a matter course. You can see Charles Spurgeon’s catechism online at www.spurgeon.org/catechis.htm, and other examples are around. I believe Mr. Spurgeon borrowed much of his from Thomas Watson’s Body of Divinity.
The important point is that we cannot afford such a leakage, as A. W. Tozer put it. He wrote:
“Each generation of Christians must look to its beliefs. While truth itself is unchanging, the minds of men are porous vessels out of which truth can leak and into which error may seep to dilute the truth they contain. The human heart is heretical by nature and runs to error as naturally as a garden to weeds. All a man, a church or a denomination needs to guarantee deterioration of doctrine is to take everything for granted and do nothing. The unattended garden will soon be overrun with weeds; the heart that fails to cultivate truth and root out error will shortly be a theological wilderness; the church or denomination that grows careless on the highway of truth will before long find itself astray, bogged down in some mud flat from which there is no escape.”