The Curse of Catechesis and Apologetics

Presently falls across the United Methodist theological spectrum. 

Years ago in conversation with a conservative Anglo-Catholic friend of nearly a lifetime I explained something of our curriculum at Perkins. He just shook his head. “The first thing a priest must learn is to say the mass, the second is to care for his members spiritual formation and pastoral needs, the third is to be a catechist. Beyond this seminary should be a time to care for his own spiritual formation through the sacraments of the church. He can learn everything else later.”

A catechist? At Perkins in the late 1970’s the goal was to learn how to “think theologically.” Pastors were trained to be the lead theologians of congregations in the midst of social and cultural change. The root assumption was that we must understand what the creeds meant, not just what they said. Our textbook was taken intentionally from a theological tradition other than that of our teachers, so that we understood theology as a conversation between traditions from which better and sharper articulations of the faith emerged. 

I met apologetics when I went to teach overseas in theological schools that were ecumenical, but consciously evangelical in the Anglo-American sense of the term. Living in a non-Christian environment our students needed to learn how to make the claims of the Christian faith comprehensible and credible to Muslims, Buddhists, and Hindus. They needed to be apologists, and we taught theology using contemporary texts that were essentially apologetic in nature. 

There are social and cultural contexts in which catechesis and apologetics are critical pastoral skills. The former offers coherence to believers and helps unify the church within a stable cultural environment where there is single worldview. The latter gives the church intellectual and moral credibility in a hostile cultural and religious environment. 

There are also times and places when neither can replace thinking theologically.  

A church in internal crisis shaped by external cultural conflicts cannot be led by catechists and apologists. You can’t hem up coherence and unity by a mere appeal to orthodoxy (whether of a traditional or progressive variety.) And treating your theological opponents as representatives of a hostile culture just feeds the wider culture wars.

Yet those of us engaged in United Methodist theological education are hearing demands (through our students and directly) to create catechists and apologists; not because these are effective means for uniting a divided church in a hostile society, but because they have become the weapons to carry out in an internal war. Catechism to unite the troops; apologetics to confront the other in one’s midst.  

Yet catechism and apologetics have the same weakness: they objectify both the faith and its supposed opponents and allow no room for dialogue, no meeting of the minds, no thinking together about roots of conflict, no formulation of new and more relevant articulations of the faith. Whether in a congregation or the larger church they become the tools of division. 

Thinking theologically is the only path to peace. Until church leaders, pastors, and theology students embrace it there will be no peace. No responsible theological educator can, or should, teach a weaponized methodology, however apparently worthy the goal. In the classroom, as in the ministry, students must learn to think theologically together regardless of whether agreement is attained or is attainable. Theological dialogue is the irreplaceable pastoral skill for our time. Pastors need to learn it, and they need to teach it to their congregations. If theology students and their sponsors do not understand this, and theological schools do not teach this, then neither American Christianity nor the United Methodist Church have a future.