By Alex Fogleman
Knowledge, Faith, and Early Christian Initiation is my first book, which came from revising the dissertation I wrote at Baylor, completed in 2021. The book—in its final form—is about how early Christians taught new believers to know God. There are no cookie-cutter approaches here. What we have, instead, are a variety of “ways of knowing” in early Christian catechesis.
Knowing God, in other words, occurs only through particular “ways” of knowing. This is, as all language about God, a metaphor. A way is, after all, a path, a journey, a road. It is a guide towards a certain destination. Knowing God is not something we can arrive at apart from a way there. And if God is the goal of our knowledge, Jesus Christ—as true God of true God, made flesh for our sakes—is also the way. He, indeed, is the way, as John 14:6 puts it.
As I said, there are many such ways of knowing. The book has separate chapters on many of the great figures of the early church—mostly in Africa and North Italy—like Irenaeus, Tertullian, Cyprian, Ambrose, and Augustine. There are also some lesser known figures from these regions—like Peter Chrysologus, Quovultdeus, Rufinus, and others. Many more were left out, and I hope to return to others—especially those who wrote in Greek and Syriac—in future work. But for now, this is where I started.
Each of the figures that I survey give us insight into different “ways” of knowing. Tertullian helps us see the importance of simple rituals as a means of coming to true knowledge of God. Cyrpian shows the centrality of the church as the social context of knowing God. Ambrose is very interesting with respect to how we think about vision—how we “see”—especially how we see sacraments and liturgical rites as a means of knowing the God. Augustine helps us understand the importance of love in knowing God.
Overall, though, what I wanted to understand was how early Christians approached catechesis—not merely as as a work of pastoral practice but as a theological practice that inculcated true knowledge of God. While catechesis has many aims, knowing God revealed in Jesus Christ remains at the center.
As I put it in the Introduction,
Rowan Williams has famously written that theology as a discipline is “perennially liable to be seduced by the prospect of bypassing the question of how it learns its own language.” My hope is that this project offers a picture of early Christian catechesis that helps us remember, quite literally, how early Christian theology learned its own language. What it means to know God is inseparable from the ways in which such knowledge is experienced; medium and message are tightly linked. In studying early Christian catechesis, we observe how knowing God belongs within a set of ecclesial practices in which the meaning of knowledge and faith are found in – and founded upon – Jesus Christ. Advancing from faith to understanding, from belief in God to the knowledge of eternal wisdom, begins and ends with Christ. (4-5)
This interest in knowledge and “ways of knowing” was only implicit in the dissertation. I received some great feedback that changed the course of the project from one of the outside readers on the dissertation, Dr. Paul Gavrilyuk from the University of St. Thomas. Paul is a brilliant theologian and author of what is one of the best overviews of patristic catechesis (unfortunately, it was written in Russian and has only been translated into French, though a summary article appears in English).
In any case, Paul encouraged me to think more about the place of theological epistemology in catechesis—that is, reflecting on how catechesis constitutes a formative practice that is conducive to knowing God. Paul himself was a student of the late William Abraham, who wrote some of the best work in the field of theological epistemology. (As it happens, Abraham was recruited to Baylor to start a Wesley House of Study at Truett Seminary, and passed away shortly thereafter.)
The overall idea for this book, however, goes back much further than the dissertation. Its origins lie in the same impetus as the Catechesis Institute. In the Preface, here’s what I say about it:
The seeds for this project were sown many years ago when I was a graduate student at Regent College in Vancouver, BC. It was then that the now late J. I. Packer – a self-proclaimed “latter-day catechist” – was hailing a call for the renewal of catechesis. I had no idea what that meant at the time, but I have come to see his call as a prescient one. Over the years, I have heard from many thoughtful Christians who agreed with Dr. Packer’s assessment that several decades – perhaps a century – of catechetical neglect had left many Christians theologically and spiritually famished. But whereas Packer’s interlocuters were English Puritans, I began to take interest in the patristic tradition under the tutelage of another professor at Regent at the time, Dr. Hans Boersma. Hans introduced me to the church fathers and the sacramental ontology that saturated their writings, and I began to wonder if this might have something to do with catechesis.
Whatever fuzzy notions I then brought to doctoral studies at Baylor University were sharpened under the keen supervision of my advisor there, Dr. D. H. Williams. Dr. Williams has written several eloquent invitations for Christians today, especially from evangelical traditions, to recover the patristic tradition as part of their own heritage. But he was convinced, as I have become, that retrieval theology is a difficult labor – a labor of love, to be sure, but a difficult one nonetheless. Good retrieval demands patient attention to difficult and sometimes confusing texts – texts that one may be inclined to dismiss if one is only in search of the quick scintillating insight. Dr. Williams taught me that retrieval theology requires patience, humility, and a willingness to let the fathers speak on their own terms, to ask their own questions, before attempting to make grand claims about what we need to recover. I do not pretend to have acquired these virtues, but I have seen them modeled in a way I aspire to imitate.
One will thus be hard-pressed to find in what follows an explicit attempt at retrieving patristic catechesis. I make few normative claims about what Christians today should learn from this history, or how these sources should be understood as speaking to something in our present moment. I have tried, rather, to attend to a particular aspect of patristic catechesis: how Christians learn to know God. While I am convinced that there is much we can draw from this history, this book’s argumentation belongs not to practical theology but to patristic and historical theology. I hope, nevertheless, that this project, in its own small laborious way, contributes something to Dr. Packer’s call for a renewal of Christian catechesis. (ix-x)
My favorite part of the book, admittedly, is the conclusion. Here is where I step back, and speak most in my own voice, about what I see going on in patristic catechesis.
So, it’s kind of a spoiler, but here you go:
At the end of this study, we are confronted again with the paradox with which we began. Knowledge of God is at once a divine gift and yet an intellectual and spiritual practice that requires training and effort. This paradox in some ways rhymes the age-old question, going back at least to Socrates, about whether true knowledge and virtue can be learned. The figures studied herein readily emphasize that the divine power attendant in baptism is necessary for true knowledge. Whether emphasis is placed on the Holy Spirit or Christ or on the triune God more generally, there is a shared agreement that baptism provides a profound noetic and ontological transformation. And yet without equivocation or irony, these authors repeatedly emphasize the practical training necessary to experience such divine power rightly – often a process that takes many years and a myriad of cognitive and bodily exercises like fasting, exorcism, and prayer. Even a theologian as grace-oriented as Augustine repeatedly emphasizes the moral effort catechumens need to undertake during catechesis to know the triune God truly.
Stepping back, we can see how this study has highlighted the difficulties of imposing modern categories of nature and the supernatural onto early Christianity. It has become all too common in modernity to divide the cosmic order into something called “nature,” a space in which which we can make reasoned arguments about God without a shared faith, and “the supernatural,” wherein divine grace is substantially and effectually operative. We do, of course, see some early Christians using the language of nature and natural knowledge – such as in Tertullian’s treatise De spectaculis, where he describes the difference between non-Christians who know something about the creator only through “natural laws” and Christians who know God as adopted children. More often, however, our authors presume that effectual knowledge of God is both possible and, indeed, demanded before and after baptism. This suggests that a fundamental theological presupposition underlying catechesis is that the natural world is always already graced, and that baptismal instruction is itself a participation in the divine pedagogy of God. To understand the character of early Christian catechesis well, we need a robust account of the relationship between the active training required in preparation for spiritual illumination and the divine power operative in such illumination. Such is one of the theological conclusions reached at the end of this largely historical inquiry into the catechumenate.
What, finally, is meant by the phrase “the knowledge of faith”? I mean by this phrase to signify how catechesis served to guide new members into a way of knowing God in a distinctly Christian register – to perceive and experience the triune God in a way determined by the revelation of God in Jesus Christ that is encountered in the church empowered by the Holy Spirit. A consistent feature of patristic catechesis is the concern to shape new Christians’ understanding of God and the world in a way that holds together both the transcendent nature of divine being and the possibility of knowing this God in the material and temporal conditions of finite being. Catechetical knowledge, on the one hand, entails upholding the ontological gap between God and creation. God is not like other “things” in the created world and so cannot be known in the same way that other created beings are known. On the other hand, patristic catechesis assumes that genuine knowledge of God is really possible because Jesus Christ is the eternal Word made flesh. This dual emphasis, in turn, entails teaching catechumens what it means for the world to be receptive to divine grace while also appreciating the Christian’s radical reorientation within the cosmos that occurs in baptism. Situated between the church and the world – between heaven and earth – catechesis elucidates the alterity of Christian existence in the world without rejecting the world as the product of a malevolent creator. Like the incarnate Christ, catechesis bridges the gap between the divine and the human.
By attending to epistemology in catechesis, in other words, I have tried to explore the implications of the Christian claim that true knowledge of God is found in the revelation of Jesus Christ. The crux of Christian knowledge, simply, is the incarnation. In God’s assumption of human flesh, we can know the transcendent God within the world of space and time without collapsing the creator–creature distinction. More than simply a doctrine to be believed, the incarnation constitutes a mode of attending to the world, to oneself, and to God. It is a habit of being aimed at the Christian’s total transformation through union with God by participation in the Spirit-formed church. The incarnation entails an epistemology whose contours can be observed in the practices of catechesis explored in this book. Echoing the mediation of God and humanity in the incarnation, the catechumenate invites new ways of knowing the transcendent God from within the conditions of creaturely life.
If we today have lost sight of catechesis as a dynamic education in being – a resounding of the incarnation – it behoves us today to consider catechesis anew. More than a program for facilitating new members into a social group, more than a method for teaching basic doctrine to new members, catechesis in the early Christian world involved a transforming vision of reality – a state of being in which everything is reimagined according to the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Catechesis is an aspect of the divine pedagogy in which the eternal wisdom of God – in a real but proleptic fashion – is imparted in the elemental teachings of the faith. And yet precisely here, Christians encounter the fullness of God in a way that initiates the ascent to eternal beatitude – an ascent in which both the journey and the goal is union with Christ, true God and true man. (213–215)