Want to Make Jesus Known? Use a Catechism

Trevin, could you remind us: What is a catechism?

Yeah, the word catechism comes from the word catechesis, which just simply means instruction. But when we talk about a catechism today, we are referring to a simplified, accessible presentation of the basics of Christianity in a question-and-answer format.

You’ve co-authored a new catechism called “The Gospel Way: 50 Truths that Take on the World.” Given that we already have a number of ancient catechisms, why do we need new ones?

When you see these catechisms, especially the ones from the Reformational period, they arose as a way of presenting the basics of the Christian faith, as opposed to what they were seeing as the errors and the corruptions that were on display in the medieval Roman Catholicism of the time.

So, all catechisms have a little bit of that countercultural element…. The reason we continue to need them is because the cultural context changes. And the way that we explain the Christian faith as opposed to some of the dominant cultural narratives is going to change depending on context.

What are some of the dominant cultural narratives shaping the way we think?

Yeah, I have to always start off with expressive individualism. That’s the term that comes from Robert Bellah and a number of sociologists who, almost 40 years ago now, wrote Habits of the Heart.

Expressive individualism is a way of saying the purpose of life is to look inside yourself, discover whatever it is that makes you unique — that unique essence that you have — and then you express that to the world and expect the world’s affirmation.

Meaning and significance are reduced to the individual, and they come from inside yourself. It’s not something that can be granted to you from outside yourself…It’s the look-in approach to life: The purpose of life is to look in first to discover and define who you are by your deepest desires.

That’s in opposition to what’s often the case in many traditional societies: the look-around approach to life. The community tells you who you are, and the community is upheld by a sacred order, maybe connection to ancestors, or ancient traditions, and then you come last—and you kind of figure out who you are within that framework.

Whereas, I think Jesus actually cuts against both of those ways. He says in the Gospels: “Unless you hate your father and mother…” And, “you’ve got to let the dead bury their own dead.” You know, those kinds of statements are radical in the first century, when it comes to that communal, look-around-first approach to life.

But Jesus also has a lot to say against the expressive individualist: “If you would follow me, you must deny yourself, take up your cross, and follow me.” That’s cutting against the you-first understanding.

And so, biblically speaking, obviously, we look up first to God and His design, then we look to others, the church, the people that God has placed us with—and then we are most ourselves when we are most conformed to Christ.

The concept of identity comes up a lot in this catechism. You talk about how God created us in his image, and how we are meant to receive meaning, instead of creating our own. That certainly cuts against the grain of the culture. Why is that good news?

Because the givenness of our bodies and the givenness of creation is something to be respected and enjoyed. And the reason why it’s good news is because this is the way that God designed the world to work.

And so to work against it, or to push against it, is exhausting. The idea that you have to look deep down inside yourself and discover and define yourself by your deepest desires? At the end of the day, it doesn’t work. It doesn’t work because, number one, your desires are changing constantly. They’re constantly in flux. Most of the time, you have competing desires.

So when it comes to the givenness of creation, we have this opportunity to tell an exhausted world that is trying to constantly invent and reinvent themselves: You can get off that treadmill. You can receive an identity that you don’t have to achieve, that you don’t have to press for. You can receive an identity from the Lord. You’re already made in His image. As a Christian, you’re redeemed by the blood of the Lamb.

And then you do have you do have a personal betterment project, but it’s not a self-help project, it’s a Spirit-help project, in which the Spirit is conforming you into the image of Jesus to make you not less yourself, but more yourself and more like Christ than you could ever imagine.

The most yourself you will ever be is when you are most like Christ.

In the section on the Bible, you also talk about how we’re called to know God as He presents Himself in His Word, not how we imagine Him to be or would like for Him to be.

Which brings us to other doctrines that get sharp pushback, particularly the doctrines of judgment and hell. What do we lose when we are reluctant to accept those doctrines and talk about them?

One thing we lose is the authority of Scripture to calibrate our understanding of the end times. And the reality is when it comes to judgment, you can’t love Jesus in the Gospels without having to encounter the fact that he talks about judgment a lot. You lose the authority of Jesus himself, and the warnings he issued, when judgment is not really a factor grounding this part of the Christian story.

You also lose the joy of the psalmist in rejoicing that judgment is coming. Now, that sounds crazy, because you’re like, what do you mean we’re rejoicing? Because if you really long for justice in the world, you do long for judgment. You long for God to make things right. So, you lose that as well.

You also lose grace. Because if you’re not saved from eternal judgment, and you’re only saved, from temporary misery or to have a better life…your thankfulness for salvation is going to be commensurate with what you’re saved from.

We have done our best with the catechism to help people understand that the anger of God flows from His love. His love for his own glory and his love for creation. And why he hates sin is because he hates what sin does, how it offends his glory, his majesty, but also how it defaces us as his image-bearers.

And so we’ve sought throughout the catechism, when we have to talk about judgment, to do so in ways that are true to the Scriptures, but also to help people understand this is not just an extra add-on or something from the past that we’re just throwing in here. You have to deal with this if you’re going to deal with the Bible faithfully. You have to reckon with these words that Jesus himself speaks, and to recognize that the eternal stakes that we see in Scripture are part of this great adventure of faith that we’re a part of.

And, so yeah, there’s no way of shying away from that. No matter how many people in the church today, I’m afraid, are functionally universalist—even if on paper they would probably check the right doctrine. If you really look at our evangelism and our passion, I say we all have room to grow in that area.

When it comes to sharing Christ with others, you make this important point: “Christians don’t market the gospel, because the gospel isn’t a product. Christians announce the gospel because the gospel is news. We’re not promoting a brand of church or a brand of Christianity, we’re proclaiming the message of salvation from sin and death.”

Could you talk about what that means and what it looks like in practice?

What I think happens in the kind of day and age we live in, where everywhere religion is personalized and spiritualized and privatized, is the gospel gets heard as a product you’re marketing, even when you announce it as news.

It’s going to be received as: “That’s something nice that works for you.”

So, even when you call someone to believe in Jesus, a lot of times what other people will hear you saying is, “I have a spiritual hobby that’s been good for me, I hope you’ll try it.” That’s what they hear.

And that’s because of the secular age that we live in, the kind of the Enlightenment influence in the air we breathe…I think even when we seek to announce the gospel, it gets received as marketing because of the consumer society that we live in.

Which means we have to go above and beyond simply speaking of the gospel in terms of only its benefits, and we have to really talk to people at the heart level, at the soul level, to really get to the questions Jesus asked the disciples: “What are you seeking?”

You know, I think that’s one of the most fundamental, foundational questions that anyone can ask another human being: “What do you want?” Not, what do you think? Not, what do you feel?

“What do you want? What do you desire?” To really understand what someone desires, and then to be able to connect the gospel to those desires, but in a way that shows how those desires are leading people. Those misdirected desires are leading people into all kinds of sin and idolatry—the way Augustine would say that sin is misdirected love, misdirected desire.

That’s the task of a good evangelist that really listens carefully to someone. Not so they can market the gospel as a product, but then so that when they do proclaim and share the good news, they do so in a way that leads to it being the balm to the soul that people are really looking for.

The last question I wanted to ask you about is this one: “What is Union With Christ?”

Can you talk about why that doctrine is so central to everything about the Christian life?

Yeah, so the answer we give is: “Union with Christ is our participation in the life, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus. Because Christ is in us, and we are in Christ, our identity is defined by our relationship with Him.”

So, this goes back to that central identity question: Who are you? The bigger question, even more than that, is whose are you, right? Who do you belong to? And I think

this question, coming where it does in the catechism, is there primarily to make sure that we don’t take the benefits that we receive from salvation and separate those from Jesus himself, who is the great benefit. He is the gift.

Yes, there are all these other gifts, but the greatest gift of the gospel is that you get the giver himself, right? It’s that you get him. And union with Christ is one way of reorienting us to that—our being united to him, participating in him. It’s the glorious reality of our participation in the divine… I mean, that Peter talks the way he does, that Paul talks the way he does—it’s a stunning statement that you find throughout the New Testament that deserves a larger prominence in our theological understanding than it typically gets.

And it’s one of the reasons we wanted to make sure we devoted an entire question to that, because it’s the beauty and the glory at the heart of the gospel.