Alex Fogleman
Making Disciples

An overview of Alex’s Fogleman new book, Making Disciples: Catechesis in History, Theology and Practice. In this book, Fogleman presents catechesis as a basic but comprehensive introduction to what Christians believe, hope, and love.

Making Disciples
Alex Fogleman
What was Lent like in the Early Church?

A fourth-century pilgrim on Lenten catechesis: “After the Creed has been repeated to the bishop, he addresses them all and says: ‘For these seven weeks you have been taught all the law of the Scriptures and you have also heard about the faith; you have also heard about the resurrection of the flesh and also the whole meaning of the Creed, as far as you can hear while still catechumens: but those things that are of a higher mystery, that is, of baptism itself, you cannot hear, being still catechumens.’”

What was Lent like in the Early Church?
Alex Fogleman
Knowing God in Patristic Catechesis

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.

Knowing God in Patristic Catechesis
Book Excerpt
Alex Fogleman
Catechized by a Peculiar People

David Lyle Jeffrey on his baptism in the Scottish Baptist Church in rural Canada: “A feature of baptism in our tradition that I continue to value is that it makes you think about the meaning of it quite a lot, both before and after the experience. One of the questions that friends would ask me is, “Do you feel any different?” My Catholic friends especially, since they had the luxury of having just a few drops on their heads when they were too young to remember, wanted to know. Actually, I did feel different, though not perhaps in quite the way they may have expected. It wasn’t euphoric. Rather, I felt as though I had entered into the community of grownups in some way.”

Catechized by a Peculiar People
Alex Fogleman
Catechesis and Trinity, Part III: Living the ...

Nicholas Norman-Krause on the Trinity and the Moral Life: “Moral life is not, first and foremost, obedience to a moral law instituted by a distant Lawgiver, but participation in the Triune life by means of deification and sanctification. Law certainly has its place within this Trinitarian moral vision. But, as we will see, law hangs together with other crucial moral concepts within a broader vision of Christian discipleship, of drawing near to the Father, through the Son, by the Holy Spirit.”

Catechesis and Trinity, Part III: Living the Trinity

Gregory of Nyssa

The Filioque and the Greek Fathers

The Filioque and the Greek Fathers

Maspero on the Holy Spirit: Maspero then shows how figures like Gregory of Nyssa, rejecting their claims, turned to focus on the concept of relation—not just nature—to understand distinction and union in the divine nature. And it is precisely this move to relation (which, recall, has been a major focus of Maspero’s theological interests) that spurs the imagining of the Spirit as “between” Father and Son in a way to address and move beyond the challenges of both a strictly linear and strictly triangular pattern.

Just Bread

Just Bread

Gregory of Nyssa on “Give us this day our daily bread”: “For if God is justice, the man who procures himself food through covetousness cannot have his bread from God. You are the master of your prayer, if abundance does not come from another's property and is not the result of another's tears; if no one is hungry or distressed because you are fully satisfied. For the bread of God is above all the fruit of justice.”

The Constraint of the Word: Graham Ward on Gregory of Nyssa

The Constraint of the Word: Graham Ward on Gregory of Nyssa

Graham Ward on Gregory of Nyssa’s Great Catechetical Oration: “The ‘system’ [of catechesis] is not an abstract set of propositions set out by the ministers who preside and to which allegiance is given by those taught. It is, first of all, intrinsic to the word itself as the Logos; the word of faith that teaches. The system is the constraining and necessary logic of the Logos. It is co-relative to both a social and institutional practice (teaching) and an operation (being saved). It is implicated in ‘the mystery of godliness’ or the hidden working of piety. Its aim is salvation through conversion.”