Almost fifty years ago I was in my first semester of seminary, beginning my pastoral education. One of the first books I read was “Values for Tomorrow’s Children” by Episcopal priest and professor John Westerhoff. His basic premise is that learning to be a Christian is profoundly different from learning to be an historian, or a biologist, or an auto mechanic. In most of those fields it’s about learning the facts and practices. If you know it, and can do it, you’ve learned it.
Religion in general, and Christianity in particular, are very different. Simply put, intellectual information is a far second to Spiritual formation in Christian Education. To Westerhoff, Christian Education is about shaping “cruciform” lives, lives that conform to the life of Christ, lives that consistently, daily, naturally, take up a cross and follow. The “facts of the faith,” the theological information, is therefore only useful in terms of how it helps us shape our lives in the imitation of Christ.
In the Early Church, Lent developed as a period of Pre-Easter instruction in the faith for recent converts. As a group they studied and prepared together, culminating on being baptized by immersion on Holy Saturday and taking their First Communion together at dawn on Easter morning.
By Medieval times, though Mass was celebrated each day in the church, people were only required to commune once a year, preceded by confession. Then, as now, people have a tendency to gravitate toward the minimum, so Easter Communion was the norm. Since by this time, most people had been baptized as infants, Lent stopped being a time to prepare for baptism and instead become the main period of Christian instruction and formation for adults as they prepared for their Easter Confession and Communion.
Various “Catechism Books” were prepared for the clergy to use as they guided the people in preparation. At first, these were a list of the Ten Commandments, with examples, so that people could figure out what they needed to confess. Eventually the Lord’s Prayer and the Creed, IN LATIN, were added for the people to memorize so they could participate in the Mass more easily.
At the time of the Reformation, various reformers used the already familiar Catechism form to teach the new Reformed or Evangelical faith. The main differences were that it was now in the language of the people (German, French, English, etc.) not Latin, and the focus of teaching had shifted from the Ten Commandments and the Confession ritual to the new Protestant doctrine of justification by grace through faith. All instruction was aimed more at a change of the heart and a post-conversion change of lifestyle than the previous emphasis on cleansing oneself of all possible sins. In the process, Christian “education” became a matter of soul formation rather than religious in-formation.
This year, on Wednesday nights in Lent, I will lead short Soul Formation sessions based on the form, but not the content, of Reformation Catechisms. We will examine the Ten Commandments, the Creeds, The Lord’s Prayer, the Sacraments, and yes, Confession (or more properly “Absolution”) as a way of going deeper in our personal and congregational efforts to follow Jesus more closely on the Way of the Cross.
Peace, Delmer