Dale Johnson: I’m thrilled this week to have with me Dr. Sinclair Ferguson. He’s taught for many years at Westminster Seminary in Philadelphia and is currently Chancellor’s Professor of Systematic Theology at Reformed Seminary and a teaching Fellow with Ligonier Ministries.
He currently serves as an Honorary Associate Preacher at Trinity Church, Aberdeen, Scotland. He’s written over 50 books, varying from titles for children to more academic studies. He and his wife, Dorothy, have been blessed with four children and thirteen grandchildren. Dr. Ferguson, so grateful that you’re here with us today.
Sinclair Ferguson: Thank you, Dale. Glad to be with you.
Dale Johnson: Man, you’ve had a crazy time getting here, but we’re so thankful that you’re here with us, and I can’t wait to talk about the “Catechizing Counselor.” Even the title is intriguing to me, and, you know, we think of catechizing often as this thing from a bygone era. I want you to, first of all, just describe the concept of catechizing and its history and some of its importance for us to consider.
Sinclair Ferguson: Yeah, well, some of the best catechists of the 17th century thought that the incident in which Joseph and Mary, quote, lost Jesus in the temple and then found Him in conversation with the teachers, the way they were impressed by His questions and answers, was probably a catechism class. You don’t find that in the commentaries, and there’s no way of proving it, as the Westminster standards say, by both good and necessary consequence, but it actually makes a lot of sense.
And when you look back into the Old Testament, you can see little hints that fathers would ask their children questions, and the children were actually expected to give an answer that they had been taught. I think there are quite a number of illustrations of that and situations in which it looks as though that’s what was happening, Passover being one of the very obvious ones. But the book of Proverbs also, I think, indicates that in the Old Testament era, never mind the New Testament era, fathers were responsible to give their children wisdom about things they had not yet experienced, so that when they did experience them, they would have the wisdom to deal with them.
And that tradition, I think, you can see partly in, for example, the faithful sayings in the pastoral letters, that these were statements with which all believers were familiar. And that tradition continued basically throughout the whole of the Christian era and came to really blossoming in the Reformation period, even in response to the Reformation, the decrees of the Council of Trent, 1545 to 63, I think it was. They included a catechism. And of course, Calvin Luther famously wrote catechisms. Knox used a catechism. And from about 1560 to 1740 in England, I think there were about 800 different catechisms actually published.
And so one assumes there were many more that were written locally by ministers and parents that were never published. So it was a great era for thinking that the best way to teach children a holistic view of the Christian faith was to do it by what, by and large, children actually like, questions and answers.
So if I can illustrate it, I remember Don Carson telling me that when his daughter was very young, she was sitting, I think she was sitting on his knee and he was teaching her “Mary Had a Little Lamb.” So it’d be Mary had a little, and she would say “lamb,” and then Mary had a, she would say “little lamb.” And then it suddenly dawned on him, what on earth am I doing? He was, in a sense, he was catechizing his daughter with trivial, if lovely, poetry, whereas the catechizing would lead her to grow in grace. Not that Don was not looking after her spiritually, but it was just a thought that struck him.
And it does strike me that in, certainly throughout my lifetime, our evangelical subculture has been very prejudiced against catechizing, while it’s not recognized two things. One, it’s not recognized that they are, the parents are actually catechizing their children, constantly asking questions, constantly telling them what the right answers are. And as one of my friends says, if you’re not catechizing your children, you can be sure the world is. And it’s, it is now, when I was a youngster, the world catechized you, but it didn’t catechize you on your cell phone. You know, it didn’t catechize you on social media. It didn’t, it didn’t catechize you in the same way on television.
And I think that’s one of the reasons why, however we do it, we recover what our spiritual fathers, and I think our spiritual betters, understood was an important thing to do.
Dale Johnson: Now, you talked about catechizing in history, and you brought us up to the 17th, 18th century. And I’m curious to know, yes, we’re still catechizing in different ways, but not the ways, as you mentioned, our spiritual fathers did. What are some of the things that you saw that really detracted from that posture of catechizing that we saw so prevalent in church history?
Sinclair Ferguson: I think it was listening to secular catechists, often pop psychologists, who were saying several things. One was that you shouldn’t teach children anything by rote. And the answer to that is, you know, children learn everything by rote. In one way or another, you’ve got to be told it in order to know it, in order to understand it. Students from a very early age, if they have any examination, they learn things by rote. So I see that as a tremendous lie that was foisted on the church and on parents, who probably didn’t have the discernment to see what was actually happening.
And then I think the other thing was the notion that you shouldn’t talk to children about spiritual things because they’re not ready for it. And I think I found just by observation that often children were actually asking deeply spiritual questions, even if they were unchurched. They’re theological creatures, after all. They’re made as the image of God, however deformed that image may be.
And the response that parents were giving was, you shouldn’t be thinking about that. And, you know, I can imagine a frustrated child saying to his or her parents, but I am thinking about that. Help me. And so that response was really, I think, a disguise for, I don’t want to think about that. I don’t really want to face up to spiritual realities. And I think that became so prevalent. And the church actually became so weak, at least in my own country, it became so weak that what had been standard, fair, and wonderful when it was done well, I grant it can be done badly. But very often, very often the easiest way to damn good things is to point to aberrations of the way in which they’re applied.
If I can give you a humorous example, when I was in Scotland, if people wanted to nix any idea I had, they would say, that’s one of his American ideas. You know, there are cheap and easy ways to deal with things. And I think there are other reasons, but I think these are probably the underlying ones.
Dale Johnson: We saw catechizing utilized so much throughout church history. Obviously, there was a value in sitting down with your children, teaching your children, even used among adults as well, just to enrich the church’s thought on Christ, on good theology, on the realities that the truths of Scriptures give to us. Talk about the value of catechizing and the ways in which, you know, something you think about a lot with the Puritans, how they valued it, why they thought this was an important way to teach and to train.
Sinclair Ferguson: Well, I think there are several levels here, Dale. One actually was a level of basic education. So some of the catechisms were kind of basic educational tools in which even when you were learning the alphabet, you would be learning the gospel. So they were like a very simple form of some of the children’s books you see, A, B, C, D, or 1, 2, 3, 4, where both letter and number are taught to the child, but they’re taught in the context of what is essentially a biblical worldview.
You know, here is Zed as I would say, or Z as Americans might say, and there’s a zebra or a zebra, and God made the zebra. Isn’t this amazing? God made the zebra. Isn’t God’s imagination fantastic? Isn’t He a wonderful God? Isn’t the zebra beautiful? And what we call in the United Kingdom, the zebra crossing. Isn’t that really, isn’t that a great thing that God made a zebra so that there would be zebra crossings so that we would be safe crossing the road?
So there were very basic ones like that. And then as the child grew, one of the things I think very strongly, absolutely convinced of this was, and this is a slightly ethnically prejudiced statement, in Scotland, it taught youngsters how to think and how to think from first principles. So I sometimes say, so you don’t like catechisms, but write one for me, just humor me and write one for me. So now tell me, what is the first question you ask in a catechism? And somebody who’s not familiar with the catechisms, by and large, will be struggling with questions like, do I begin with God? Do I begin with the Bible? Begin with Jesus?
And I think the beauty of the best catechisms was the way in which they asked the right question. And in order to ask the right question, you do actually have to have some sense of the right answer. If you ask the wrong question, you’ll not get the right answer usually. But then to ask the next question, what is the next question that arises from the first answer? So subliminally, without saying, I am going to teach how to think from first principles. The children were learning to think from first principles.
And, you know, as I look back on the 18th and 19th centuries, even in general life, in areas of philosophy and areas of practical science, engineering, you know, the Scots invented nearly everything, you know, and whether that’s true or not, of course, it’s a nice thing to think, what was it that was distinctive in the culture? Because I think an analyst or a sociologist seeing a spike like that, I mean, a medical analyst seeing a spike in certain diseases would say there must be something in, must be something in the water there, you know, something in the air there. But when you ask that question, what was there distinctively there?
And the one thing that was distinctively there was the almost universal use of the catechism. It was used. Scotland did not have Christian schools because of the assumption that the schools would be Christianized by the teachers. And even in the 1950s, when I was in elementary school, my teachers, who I, looking back, I think may have belonged to the church, but didn’t give me the feel of loving Christ. Religious education was rote memorization. So I was unchurched. My family didn’t go to church until after I became a Christian. And I, I mean, my brain is stacked with memories of walking into a class. I was moved from one year to another.
I went into the classroom and the children were all sitting, chanting, and Jesus went up onto a high mountain. And when His disciples came to Him, He sat down, and He opened His mouth and taught them, saying, “blessed are the poor in spirit.” I had no idea what was going on. But we learned Psalm 119, Isaiah 53, parts of Psalm 117 and Corinthians 13 by rote. And now I look back and think, wow, that is still with me, even in the King James Version. So that this was an investment for life.
So it was said of Robert Louis Stevenson, the author, whose parents were devoted Christians, very famous lighthouse builders, that the Shorter Catechism never left him, even when he wanted to leave the Shorter Catechism. And sometimes it’s been thought that even, even the paradigm of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was like almost, in Robert Louis Stevenson’s day, only a possible way of conceptualization for somebody who had been reared in biblical background and the teaching of the Catechism.
Dale Johnson: You think about catechism, you mentioned first principles. I think that’s absolutely critical. We talk a lot in biblical counseling about teaching people a Godward orientation. I know my wife and I have, you know, however feeble, we’ve tried to raise our children in that way to have a Godward orientation. And really that’s what the catechizing does, is it’s getting primary questions that we would raise naturally as we experience the world around us, which God has made, and then learning to answer those as if this is God’s reality.
So I want you to talk about the value of that, not just in children, but even ways that we can use that in the church to encourage understanding of God, Godward orientation, first principles, and really recapturing that. And here’s the reason I asked that, Dr. Ferguson, is what we see, particularly in America, maybe the Western culture broadly, is people are so driven by experience. And that becomes their first principle. And recovering this idea where we have a Godward orientation that’s driven by absolute truth as a foundation that guides the way we think and interpret that which we experience outside, rather than the reverse.
Because I think to your point with pop psychology, it’s taught us to try and understand first principles of life by the things we feel and experience outside rather than the opposite. So describe why you think that that’s important and maybe some of the value by recovering what the Puritans did so well.
Sinclair Ferguson: It’s interesting that the flourishing period of catechism, especially in the 17th century, was actually also the period of the influence of Cartesian theology, Descartes, and the turn to the self that was characteristic of his philosophy. And it’s always intrigued me that against that philosophical background, that eventually, you know, people think that what happens in the universities doesn’t really influence them, but it gets to them eventually. And it really was, the 17th century, for all kinds of reasons, was an era when there was a real turn towards the self.
And we have lived through another period, which for different reasons, has been a turn towards the self, intellectually, morally, psychologically, in terms of self-identification. So that in itself, I think, should make us think, were they onto something that we should be onto? And I think I would say about the catechetical instruction was that, without saying this, without articulating this, it was doing a couple of things.
It was dragging people out of their almost genetic subjectivism into the objectivity of the truth of the gospel, and then being dragged out of it by it. That was then like a drip coffee machine through the questions and answers. It was re-crafting the way they thought. Or sometimes, I think I could put it this way, that the catechism was like a visit to the optometrist when your vision was very, very hazy, and he was prescribing new lenses that would not only help you see the objective world clearly, but would help you relate to it objectively.
So I do see there was a great power in the teaching because of that dragging us out of our self-obsession to a God-centeredness, and then re-orienting the way in which we see the world. And that’s, I often think that’s a paradigm shift. And sometimes when you’re speaking to people, I think there’s almost no point in me disagreeing with you about this, what I need to try and do. And I think this is what the ministry of the Word does over the long period as it begins to chip away and melt the old paradigms, which really are paradigms of this world, and teach us the new paradigms of grace. And in glory, we will get there, but to varying degrees, that is constantly going to be a challenge and a struggle.
Dale Johnson: One final question, and I’m intrigued by this. We have used catechesis in our home. We’ve used one written by Tom Haskell, and it’s Truth and Grace and has been very, very helpful in our home. He does what you were describing in having different ages and stages versus to memorize questions to ask and so on. Of course, the Westminster Shorter we’ve used at times in our home, the Heidelberg, gives some ideas of practical things.
Because I’m thinking of this not just in child rearing, but also even in the counseling room, we have so many people who are coming to churches who did not grow up in church. They don’t have some of those foundational principles. They don’t know where to begin theologically. And sometimes catechesis can be a way to help introduce them to primary truths from the Scripture, stories from the Scripture. What are some of the places where you would say, you know, here’s a good place to start, start getting yourself saturated with the truths that come from these types of catechisms, and maybe even start using them to help people to think?
Sinclair Ferguson: Yeah, I mean, I suppose my default, just because of who I am, is the Shorter Catechism, obviously. I think in many instances, there could be a case for an individual or a group of individuals saying, let’s write a 20-question catechism and say to everyone that we are seeking to give counseling wisdom to, this is your homework. My suspicion often pastorally has been people come, like you’re a spiritual physician, and they come and they tell you what the problem is.
For example, I remember visiting my dentist. I had a toothache, and he’s poking around in the other side of my mouth. And I’d known him for many years. And once he got his hand out of my mouth, I said, actually, the pain’s on this side. He said, I know, but what I’m looking for is the cause of the pain, and the cause of the pain may be on this side. And I think sometimes I’ve found people have come and said, this is my problem. And the beauty of Christian theology is that when you have a grip on the whole body of divinity, you see how everything is connected, and that what the individual presents as his pain because of a particular symptom is not necessarily the cause.
And so I think one of the things that would be helpful for people would be, and I guess you could actually, you could have a whole variety of catechisms geared to particular issues that people had. This, you may think I’m treating you like a child, but I’m really treating you, this is growing up thinking, and ponder these questions and these answers, and work your way through them.
I think that paradigm shift effect is really so important that without it, someone is just going to, as it were, I mean, I don’t live in your world, but I imagine in theory, the goal is, I’m not going to see this person again, you know, that they’re going to be able to function with the help of their fellow believers. And even if they struggle with a growing Christian life, if the paradigm can be shifted, then there’s a possibility of growth. But if not, then a person is going to be kind of hypochondriacal and keep coming back. And if you don’t answer the question, they’ll go to somebody else.
Dale Johnson: And that’s exactly right. To your point, the world is raising the questions we think we should be asking. And it’s leading us in a direction to try and find answers that are away from first principles of Scripture. And I think the points that you’re making are so critical and so helpful for us. And you’re exactly right. What we would do is we want to counsel a person to help them over this intensive issue in their life, re-assimilate them back into the normal care of the body, because that’s the place at which they should get consistent care to help in the things of God, so that as they experience life, they’re going to experience it from those first theological principles and understand it much better. So brother, thank you so much for helping us think through this. I don’t know that we’ve often associated catechizing with counseling, but I think what you’ve done has helped us to see how it was used in pastoral shepherding in the past and how we can recover such a brilliant way of thinking, even in the modern. So thank you, brother.
Sinclair Ferguson: Thank you.
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