Knowing and Doing (Spring 2019)

The Spring 2019 edition of Knowing & Doing – ‘A Teaching Quarterly for Discipleship of Heart and Mind’ – from the C.S. Lewis Institute is now available online (from here), and contains the following articles:

Joel Woodruff

President’s Letter: It’s About Transformation in Community, not Information in Isolation

Joel Woodruff challenges us to resist the tide of individualism and seek spiritual growth in community. Rather than pursuing “information in isolation,” the C.S. Lewis Institute President urges us to learn from and challenge others as we grow in Christ.

Thomas A. Tarrants, III

Persecution and Suffering for Jesus Christ

Looking at the process of discipleship from the opposite side of most discussions, Tom Tarrants raises the important, albeit disturbing, topic of persecution for the sake of the gospel. Jesus warned many times that his disciples would face specific trials that come from following him. This article helps us prepare for those inevitable trials.

Tom Schwanda

Biblical Foundations for Growing in Intimacy with God

Tom Schwanda steps back from practical considerations about discipleship and begins to explore the Biblical foundations for spiritual growth. This is the first of a three part series that reflects deeply on why we need intimacy with Christ, how scripture sets the platform for it, and then offers suggestions for pursuing that noble goal.

Bill Kynes

How to Read the Bible, Part 1: Introduction and Overview to the Bible

The role of the Bible in spiritual life is often assumed but not as often pursued the way it should be. Bill Kynes begins a four part series that considers how to read, study, and meditate on the Bible. He begins with a reminder that the Bible’s overall storyline must be the context in which we examine any specific passage.

Bryan Hollon

Catechesis and Christian Discipleship

Bryan Hollon points us to a topic that rarely is addressed in contemporary discussions of spiritual growth – the role of catechesis in spiritual formation. Many people don’t even know what that word means. Hollon defines, describes, and encourages systemic training in doctrine and theological reflection.

Joseph Loconte

War, Friendship, and Imagination: How J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis Rediscovered Faith, Friendship, and Heroism in the Cataclysm of 1914-1918

Joe Loconte reveals to us some of the ways C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien found faith in some of the most unlikely settings – the battlefields of World War I. While many people lost faith in God because of the carnage they experienced during those dark days, Lewis and Tolkien were transformed for eternal beauty. And their friendship after those days encourages all of us in profound ways.

Aaron Welty

Modern Mythology Matters

Just as C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien looked to mythology and story as ways to experience the storyline of the gospel, Aaron Welty shines a similar light on comic book heroes and the appeal they draw through today’s blockbuster movies. If Lewis could create Narnia and Tolkien could tell of Middle Earth, perhaps Superman and Marvel movies could point people to a better “savior.”

William Cowper (1731-1800)

Love Constraining to Obedience

C.S. Lewis loved poetry and wished he could be remembered most for his poems. They grab us in different ways than stories or prose. In each issue we feature a poem. William Cowper’s offering tilts our hearts toward obedience and joy.

Dwight L. Moody

Sermon – The Christian’s Warfare

The great evangelist and preacher Dwight L. Moody didn’t shy away from weighty topics. This sermon on spiritual warfare is a welcome reminder of the nature of our experience in a fallen world.

Catalyst Articles (March 2014)

Catalyst, the ‘online newsletter for United Methodist seminarians, pastors, and other Christian leaders’, has posted some articles online:

Evan B. Howard

Beneath the Plan, beyond the Call: The Practice of Discernment and the Mission of God

The practice of discernment enables us to transcend the pitfalls of a mere Plan or Call. Discernment engages the whole person or community in an evaluation of our sincere relationship with God. Thus, by paying attention to God, to our knowing, and to our response, we learn to follow the path (or the range) of both God’s mission and our own authentic vocation.

Tim Meadowcroft

Building an Old Testament Library: Psalms — Daniel

Leicester R. Longden

Resources for the Renewal of Catechesis: Christian Formation and Discipleship

The renewal of the art of catechesis in our time requires a rediscovery and retrieval of the resources of the baptismal catechesis of the ancient catechumenate.

Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen

Holy Spirit and Other Spirits

This is an interim report on the state of the theology of the Holy Spirit in a contemporary pluralistic world.

Henry H. Knight III

A Theology of Faith: Wesley and the Methodists

To know God is to know God’s love for us in Jesus Christ. Faith enables us both to know (experience) that love and to trust in that love. We begin to love God in response. Our desires become increasingly centered on God, and our motivations on worshipping and serving God. And the love we then know by faith makes its home in our own hearts, where it begins to shape our lives and relationships.

Gerald J. Mast on Catechism in the Worshipping Community

Gerald J. Mast, ‘Catechism in the Worshipping Community’, Christian Reflection: A Series in Faith and Ethics (2007), 86-91.

Taking a cue from Kevin Vanhoozer’s proposal about doctrine being ‘a stage on which the enactment of Scripture unfolds in the life of the Church’ (86), with the church as a ‘theater of the gospel’ and its members a ‘company of performers’ (87, citing Vanhoozer), Mast provides a short but helpful review article exploring the significance of worship, liturgy, and everyday practices in ‘shaping the hearts and minds of growing believers’ (86).

He marries three suggestive points about catechesis with three significant books.

1. Catechesis through Worship

Simon Chan, Liturgical Theology: The Church as Worshipping Community (Downers Grove: IVP, 2007).

Chan seeks to correct what he sees as a weak evangelical doctrine of the church ‘by highlighting the neglected arts and habits of Christian worship that make the body of Christ visible in time and space’. Habits of worship, cultivated by the church, ‘are themselves the doxological fulfilment of the Church’s mission’ (87). Mast notes that Chan’s approach raises questions about conventional practices that separate the worship of God from the mission of the church (87-88).

Worship, according to Chan, should be shaped by the Word and the sacraments, where ‘the Word proclaims the coming reign of God’, and ‘the Eucharistic meal makes that reign visible in the present’. The incorporation of new members into the church via catechism must ‘prepare candidates for membership to participate rightly in worship’ (88).

Catechism has focused on three elements: confession of the triune God in the creed, following the Ten Commandments, and praying the Lord’s Prayer. Chan maintains that such a framework allows issues of discipleship to be addressed – the creed helping us ‘to address a world of religious pluralism’, the Commandments speaking ‘against the grain of market-centered consumer capitalism’, and the Lord’s Prayer challenging ‘an exchange-focused economy that breeds poverty and homelessness’ (88).

2. Catechesis in a Countercultural Community

Debra Dean Murphy, Teaching That Transforms: Worship as the Heart of Christian Education (Eugene: Wipf & Stock, 2007).

Murphy critiques religious education programmes that ‘abstract the values they inculcate from the particular faith traditions in which they had been embedded’, as well as the kind of public theology that ‘seeks to reduce Christian particularity to commonly held civic virtues such as freedom and justice’. Instead, she ‘establishes an agenda for Christian catechesis that instead of making church members into polite and contributing citizens will rather identify them with the countercultural community of the Church and with alternate ways of knowing that are rooted in the counter-story of Jesus’ (89).

Both Chan and Murphy assume that church members will be best formed through recovering the ancient traditions and habits of the church. Mast considers it unlikely that these can do so by themselves, suggesting that ‘for Christians to be truly shaped into the life and mind of Christ, they must break down not just the division between basement education and sanctuary worship but also the barrier between the gathered and the scattered body’ (89).

3. Catechesis through Embodied Discipleship

Sara Wenger Shenk, Anabaptist Ways of Knowing: A Conversation about Tradition-Based Critical Education (Telford: Cascadia Publishing House, 2003).

Here a case is made ‘that practices of discipleship are as significant, if not more so, than the classical liturgical habits in developing countercultural Christians’. For Shenk, ‘theological knowledge cannot be abstracted from embodied discipleship; yet the embodied practices... are not so much the recitation of classical creeds or the weekly Eucharist but such mundane and practical acts of Christian discipleship as rejection of the sword and oaths, reading and discussing Scripture, faithful family life, and voluntary service’ (90).