The following is a true story that begins at the start of a taxi journey from Gouda to Utrecht in the Netherlands. “How long will this trip to Utrecht take?” asked the passenger, having taken a seat next to the taxi driver. The driver answered: “About half an hour.” The man then said: “Let us use this time well. Would it be okay with you if I told you what God has done to my soul?” The surprised taxi driver said: “What God has done to my soul? That sounds odd to me. But, okay, go ahead.” The passenger then told him about the wonder of God having entered his life, how he had come to know the Lord Jesus, and how he, since then, lived with God. When the taxi driver dropped his customer off in Utrecht, he said: “This has been a very special ride for me, Sir. I will never forget this.”

To me this is a marvellous example of spontaneous communication of the gospel. The person in the story did that out of deep compassion for the eternal salvation of his fellow man, responding to the call of the Lord Jesus in the mission command in Matthew 28. The topic of my lecture is precisely about this and can be formulated as follows: How can the church communicate the gospel by using missionary catechesis in a secularized culture?

A Fluid Culture⤒🔗

In Western Europe, and certainly in the Netherlands, we live in a culture in which most people do not have a clue what it is to live with the Lord, the God and Father of Jesus Christ, our Saviour. The Jewish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman rightly typifies our culture as a fluid one, its most important characteristic being that it is always in motion and continually changing direction. Fixed and unchanging matters, of course, collide with such a culture, which explains why all that God has revealed in the Bible as his Word, as well as all that constitutes his unchanging truth, is not well received today. To contemporary people, the concept that truth can be true even if it is not always backed up by experience (objective truth) is strange. To them, truth is something that is true because they experience it as true (subjective truth). This belief alone gives meaning and satisfaction to modern individuals. Therefore, belief in an eternal God is more an obstacle than a necessity. An obvious example of this was seen in the advertising campaign on British busses, using the slogan: “There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.”

Tracks Left by God←⤒🔗

On the one hand, therefore, our culture is a fluid culture. Yet, on the other hand, people are still religious. One could even say ‘incurably religious’, quoting the Dutch theologian Prof. Harry M. Kuitert. You could also say: In our culture, we still find tracks left by God. Wim Dekker, another Dutch theologian, recently defended his PhD thesis with the title The absence of God in our culture (2011). He emphasizes explicitly the importance of certain traces or tracks left by God. His view is inspired by the well-known German theologian Wolfhart Pannenberg. The latter maintained that the very absence of God is, in fact, a divine speaking of God, in particular an expression of his wrath. Seen in this way, not being able to find a track left by God is, in itself, a very special track delivered by God. These issues are familiar to Reformed theology, even though they may now be spelled out in a different way. In the first half of the last century, J.H. Bavinck PhD, the missiologist, already said that man is by nature a religious being. Bavinck saw religion as the result of human response to what God has revealed of himself in his general revelation. That is based on the concept of the covenant made by God with his creation. People are therefore not autonomous beings, unattached to God, even though they think they are. No, they are and remain God’s creation. And if they do not want to acknowledge that, creating their own religious world, we may regard that as the sublimation and substitution of the truth. Even then, that is still a response to God’s revelation.

Today we see the remarkable situation of a fluid culture with no room for God on the one hand, and the current flourishing of all sorts of religions on the other. That causes tension, and it is in that strained arena that the church is a living presence and is called to give an “answer to everybody who asks you a reason of the hope, which is in you,” following 1 Peter 3:15. We should be deeply concerned about the salvation of our fellow men, as Christ commands, just like the man in the taxi. We believe – do we not? – that people will be lost without deliverance by Jesus Christ. That they are people after Genesis 3, and that we need his redemptive work for our eternal salvation. For extensive ages Christian baptism has been the sign and seal of that truth.

In this perspective, the church is communicating the gospel within the context I just described. But what, here, are the dos and don’ts? I would like to focus on the practical side of communication next, which brings me to the thesis for this lecture: How can the church today use missionary catechesis for communicating the gospel in a largely secularized culture?

If we look upon catechesis as a learning system, then it can be used according to the cognitive model, in which rational thought plays a central role. Also, it can be used according to the affective model, in which emotions and experience play a central part. To put it more practically: should the church implement her call to communicate the gospel by focusing on the mind of man, or on the affections of man?

Let me address this issue in more detail. In order to gain more perspective on solving this dilemma, I would like, for a moment, to become an apprentice of the catechism of the Reformed tradition, in particular the well-known manual or primer The Heidelberg Catechism (1563). Following that exercise, I will return to our present context and seek factors directing us in missionary catechesis.

The Cognitive Model←⤒🔗

How should the church communicate the gospel with modern man? One approach is to follow the cognitive model, calling upon man’s rational insight. Its advocates prefer to speak about communicating the gospel as apologetics. This is an important point, because also in Christian faith our minds play a large role. Jesus commences his summary of God’s law by saying that we should love the Lord our God with our all our hearts and our minds. We also see that particularly the Early Church emphasized the cognitive element for communicating the gospel in the non-Christian world. They appealed to common sense, which was given to mankind by God. Someone like the philosopher Justin, for example, who lived in the second century, used rational arguments to prove the inferiority of paganism and the truth of the Christian faith. Later, the theologian Tertullian continued in this manner. They made it clear that the Christian faith and belief in the God of the Bible, far from being foolish, was highly reasonable and that it was unreasonable not to so believe. P. Bouter PhD, an expert on the Early Church, informs us that it is noticeable in the apologetics of the Early Church that Christians were not at all inhibited, but quite proud about their faith.

Tim Keller←⤒🔗

A well-known contemporary example is Tim Keller, the author of The Reason for God – Belief in an Age of Skepticism. (2008). Rev. Keller is pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City. He has chosen to communicate the gospel in a typically apologetic manner, according to the cognitive model. His drive is to demonstrate that it is an error and prejudicial to speak of Christian faith as unreasonable. Nothing is further from the truth. In dialogue with sceptics, he is continually trying to remove all sorts of rational barriers. He latches on to the legacy of C.S. Lewis and unmasks the theories put forward by intellectuals like Dawkins, which attempt to show that the Christian faith is deceptive and therefore ought to be opposed as something harmful. The book by Keller that I am referencing at the moment consists of two parts. In the first part, he poses various rational objections against the Christian faith, and in the second part he covers a similar number of reasons for believing in God. With regard to removing objections against Christian faith, he deals, for instance, with the belief that it cannot be true that there is just one true religion. Or, the belief that a good God would never allow suffering. Or, the belief that the Christian faith has been debunked by science, so that the Bible cannot be taken literally. Keller explains that these negative qualifications, concerning the Christian faith as such, are based on presuppositions, which are also based on a personal belief or faith. Every right-minded person has such convictions. By disclosing that background, Keller teaches us that the issue at hand is not the opposition between faith and rational thought, but the opposition between one faith and the other. In the second part of his book, he shows that as far as reason is concerned, there is nothing wrong with the Christian faith. Faith does not oppose reason. To put it even more strongly: disbelief is contrary to reason. Keller uses the example of sin and demonstrates that it is more plausible to regard oneself as a sinner than to consider oneself a victim of circumstances.

To quote Keller:

Many people have the impression that the Christian doctrine of sin is bleak and pessimistic about human nature. Nothing could be further from the truth. When I was brand-new in the ministry a young man came to see me whose wife had just left him. He was feeling angry at what she had done, guilty about his own flaws that had led her to do so, and despondent before the whole situation. I said that what he needed more than anything was hope. He quickly agreed and asked how he could get some. As gently as possible I said that the good news was – he was a sinner. Precisely because he was a sinner, he wasn’t simply the helpless victim of psychological drives of social systems.Keller, The Reason for God. This citation is from the first edition, 2008, p.160

The relevance of the cognitive approach is the fact that Christian faith does harbour an important cognitive element. Exercising the mind, gaining knowledge, using insights, working with cognitions, are all a part of conducting faith. Therefore, it is quite valid to approach people in this way when communicating faith, and it does justice to the gospel.

At the same time, we could say that this approach has a limited focus. In the first place, not everyone is so rationally inclined that he is willing to take part in a determination of what could be rationally true or not. Following Lewis and Wright, Keller’s communication is aimed at highly educated young people. That is the target group, and they do have the best antennae for the cognitive model. But in the second place, there is more involved than reason in being faithful or unfaithful. Even though one would have to recognize and admit that something is reasonable, that does not mean that one will believe it. Nor does it mean that we will come to have a relationship with God. Belief and unbelief are more a matter of will. And, since Genesis 3, our human will is totally different from what God meant it to be. Instead of directing our will towards God, it is directed against him. Our will is bound to evil, and because our mind is ruled by our will, our will has to be set free from evil. Only then can we, by accepting the reasonability of faith, surrender to God. That is what Luther clearly teaches us when answering Erasmus in his book De servo arbitrio. That our mind is darkened does not entail that it cannot be highly developed. Yet our mind, being subject to our bound will, will make the wrong choices. That is what the Bible calls sin, and man himself is responsible for that.

The Affective Model←⤒🔗

Let us now take a look at the second model for communicating the gospel, the affective model, where emotions and experience play a determining role. In this way we are able to find a connecting factor with which to bring people in touch with Jesus and his salvation. In this model, the crux is not rational cognition, but the human need for experience, giving life meaning and security. In this context, truth is not what is rationally true, but what a person finds affectively trustworthy. Truth is what each person personally considers true, with experience as a reliable factor. This belief places us at the very centre of our fluid culture, which in many respects can certainly be called an emotion culture.

Just choose a random channel on Dutch TV on any evening and within minutes one is in contact with the emotional side of our culture. We see people crying boundlessly, people rejoicing profusely or loudly venting their anger, and so forth. Stories portraying the experiences of people score much higher than distantly held discourses on some subject. Gerhard Schultze considers our culture to be an Erlebniszkultur, an experiential culture. The average person of today does not exist because he thinks (Descartes: ‘I think, therefore I am’), but because he feels. The cultural philosopher Aad Verbrugge says in his book A time of disquiet (Een tijd van onbehagen), that the focus on feelings is a reaction to the focus on thinking, the cognitions. Both developments, the emphasis on cognitions and on affections are variations of the Enlightenment in Western Europe. In both cases, this concerns the urge of man to liberate himself from norms he feels subject to and to determine for himself what he wants to think and feel. In this way the emotion culture can be regarded as the individual’s longing for freedom. The fact that this often takes place in collectives, even among the masses, should not confuse us. Imagine it as repeated snapshots being taken through the lens of a camera, which, when seen together, show a splintered range of images. In this way, feelings of individuals are momentarily observed, fixed and shared, only to flow away again, each in its own direction.

On reflection, we must admit that the Christian faith is certainly not against emotions, nor is it against rationality. Moreover, the experience of faith as a relationship with God is the very essence of our faith. Of old, we are familiar with the experiential faith of the Reformed tradition, as expressed in the Second Reformation and the Protestant Reveille in the 19^th century. In the Roman Catholic Church, mysticism also has ancient origins. It is no wonder that the Evangelicals and Charismatic groups these days place much emphasis on the affective side of faith. To many of these believers, for instance, conversion is not so much an ethical happening, but a deeply emotional experience and a radical break with former life. In such circles, one hears of a “wow experience”, a deeply authentic experience of faith. In expressing their faith, particularly in music and song, there is a continual emphasis on affections or emotions. In this affective model, what counts is not so much what one believes (doctrine), but in Whom one believes (the Lord).

At the same time, the advocates of this approach are convinced that, in principle, one’s affections must be subject to the prescriptive function of the Word of God. That is less evident if they claim that what counts is not so much what one believes, nor in Whom one believes, but that the issue is one of a religious atmosphere. In this approach, religious experiences do not have to be tested against a criterion beyond one’s affections. Instead, affections are allowed to seek intuitively what feels good and what does not. In a book by T. van den Berk (1999), (title translated as Mystagogics, Inauguration in the symbolic consciousness), catechists are taught at catechism how to discuss a movie while following one’s affections. It becomes clear that, right from the start, one takes a ‘subjective’ point of view, attributing great value to ‘irrational’ impulses felt while viewing the movie. The insight gained in such a lesson must then be connected to that subjective viewpoint. All one’s knowing is examined according to a measure of experience (pp.167-168). This example shows that the affective model, like that of the cognitive model, is not above critical questioning. According to Biblical standards, affections and experience are relevant to Christian faith. Faith cannot be reduced to rational insight, and neither can feelings and emotions. Also, faith and affections cannot be identified. Here again we see that the will of man is of decisive importance. Feelings may seem to attach themselves impartially to faith, yet that is deceptive. Eventually our feelings also are gratified by what we want. If we want to love someone, then our feelings are filled positively. If we want to hate someone, then our feelings are filled negatively. Our will that has been bound to evil since Genesis 3, needs to be set free from that evil, as does our mind. Only then will we have the right feelings. Not what I feel can be regarded as true and trustworthy, but what God says in his Word – even if that goes against my feelings. We should therefore not speak of experiential faith, but of faithful experiences. Taking the affections as the starting point guarantees a malfunction in communicating the faith. Starting with one’s feeling could just as easily lead to a relationship with Buddha as with Christ Jesus. In this view, religion is as expansive as the many flows of human affections. All kinds of mysticism can just overflow with egoism, the antithesis of faith in Christ.

Our review of the cognitive model and of the affective model has taught us that, as such, these approaches are not wrong. However, when we look at the position of the cognitive and the affective aspects in communicating faith, then our analysis needs an explicit criterion to help us handle these aspects.

The Heidelberg Catechism←⤒🔗

I have good reason to seek certain starting points in our communication of faith in the Reformed tradition. Because these have been tested throughout the ages, we can learn much from them. I am referring to the starting points and characteristics of the Heidelberg Catechism (HC). In its 52 Lord’s Days and 129 questions and answers, this primer of faith offers us a precious synopsis of Christian faith and also a model for communication of faith today. Designed for children who have been baptized, it aims to teach them to respond to their baptism in faith, so that they can be incorporated into the congregation and be allowed to celebrate the Lord’s Supper. The booklet was not primarily written for communicating the gospel with people outside of the Christian congregation, but for those within. Nevertheless, in my estimation, the HC offers us certain tools that could well serve catechesis in a missionary context, in a context of church outreach programs.

Because of the restricted time at my disposal, allow me to name a limited number of learning points. In the first place, the HC spells out a person’s goal in life, characterized as sharing comfort in life and death, living as a comforted person. Here, being comforted means having support, particularly in the midst of difficult circumstances. That is also the learning point. This anthropological angle is functional, as can be recognized by humans of all times, including those of today. The secularized people of our times also need comfort and security. This learning point invites contemporary man to enter a learning environment and discover how one really could live as a comforted person. The church tells us that this comfort should not be sought in an imminent world, but in the relationship with God. This contact with God holds for all situations of life, as well as in one’s death. In the second place, the type of learning demanded by the HC is an existential learning that touches the core of our humanity. It is completely a matter of a relationship, warranted by the concept of the covenant, that is to say, that God himself seeks relationships with people and works at bringing about the response of people to that bond. This learning in the HC, being both relational and existential, matches the need people have for contact, for communication. Humans cannot survive in isolation. We are created to live in association with others, having relationships, living in a covenant. The covenant is a network of relationships, by which man flourishes. That is why learning in the HC cannot be limited to intellectual truths, to be evaluated at a later stage in life. It should be used to learn to live in relationship with God. That surpasses all intellectualism and subjectivism and, therefore, all non-commitment

This sort of learning also has to do with the perspective on knowledge, which we find buried in the HC. The type of knowledge in the HC is very different from the abstract type of knowledge that could be found in the Enlightenment. While, in the latter, knowing is directed towards something, in the HC, knowing is directed towards Someone, namely God. We could call this ‘a Biblical knowing’, expressed in the Hebrew word jada concerning living in communion with the known one, the way in which man and wife ‘know’ each other in the bonds of marriage. This knowing is connected with loving. In the next place, the HC teaches us that man learns fully, ergo it is the whole person, with his mind, with his affections and his will. Not partly rational, not partly emotional, but encompassing and integrating all aspects of being fully human. This is the case because learning of faith involves one’s heart. In our heart, our mind, affections and will all come together, interlinked with each other to form a trinity. A beautiful example of this is found in The Lord’s Day 7 of the HC in which true faith is described as ‘a sure knowledge’ and a ‘wholehearted trust.’ This is a matter of the heart, involving the whole person and the relationships he has. All the daily life of the believer is also drawn into this learning process. Learning involves conversion, and conversion has an impact on all facets of one´s daily life. Faith, command and prayer go hand in hand.

But how can these essential starting points become reality in communicating the gospel? How did that happen in the story of the man in the taxi? Isn’t that beyond our grasp? That may be so, but that is not the perspective of the HC. The entire range of faith communication in the HC is a thoroughly pneumatological event. It is entirely supported by the belief that the Holy Spirit will redirect the will of man, illuminate his mind, guide his affections and in this manner bring him as believer to ‘a sure knowledge’ and a ‘wholehearted trust.’ The learning environment for teaching catechism is in the HC the working space of the Holy Spirit. We should see the method of questions and answers in the HC in this perspective. The teacher poses questions and the child answers. That is not only a functional, didactic happening, but fully a theological happening. By answering – using cognitions and affections – the child learns to appropriate personally and existentially the faith of the congregation. To be sure, by doing so the child learns, and by learning the child practises faith. Learning is not a phase that precedes believing, but learning is the means through which the Holy Spirit brings people to life in the relationship with Jesus Christ, one’s “only comfort in life and in death.” Finally, in this concept the faithful community of the congregation is of crucial importance. The catechism teacher educates as a teacher of the congregation, and the catechism pupil is taught as child of the congregation. In this respect, learning is not individualistic, even though it is personal. The child learns personally while being included in the community of the congregation. It may put into practice what this means, not only as gift, but also as duty.

So far, I have treated several starting points of the HC. Amongst others, these characterize the way the gospel was communicated in the time in which the HC originated, but I am convinced these also hold for our situation today. To be sure, none of these starting points are bound to a certain culture as they originate in and are founded on Biblical principles, and therefore can be transposed to our present-day modern culture, to be of lasting value.

Missionary Catechesis←⤒🔗

Following our apprenticeship of the HC, we now divert our attention to the practice of faith communication nowadays. I would like to focus on what we call missionary catechesis. The Great Commission in Matthew gives catechesis and instruction its own place. Therefore, it is legitimate for us to direct our attention on catechesis as faith communication within the range of various forms of missionary work of the church. I call specific attention to the missionary courses that have spread throughout Western Europe in the last decade, such as the Alpha course. How can such courses be fruitful for communicating faith? My view is that the characteristics of learning I gleaned from the HC can be incorporated in these courses. How this is to be done requires some further explanation.

Several principles can be drawn out of this discussion and I would like to deal with those now. They recognize the specific characteristic of learning as communication of the gospel, whether that takes place in a taxi, or in a Bible study at home or in the lecture hall of a church.

Regarding the first issue, that of the learning goal, the HC teaches us that the truths of Christian faith are not just for people to examine noncommittally. More so, they need to be invited to learn this existentially – not only regarding the content of faith (fides quae), but also the way one believes (fides qua). In this learning, the HC tells us, the crucial factor is that people come to live as baptized people. In my view this is very true for today. Missionary catechesis is baptismal catechesis, even though it is also rightly called confessional catechesis, because it prepares for the confession of faith. Naturally, such learning cannot be limited to just one course. Even stronger: it is a characteristic of this learning that it is a lifelong process. One’s entire life is a course of learning. Only from this perspective can we live as comforted man.

Now the issue, of learning content. The content of learning serves the learning goal. It is the instrument by which we learn to live as comforted, as baptized man or woman. If so, then the content does not originate in man himself, otherwise we would move in circles in our own immanent world. The content we are to learn must come from above. That is the Word of God, with the liberating gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ as its heart.

Now we come across the issue of the teacher instructing the pupils. From the perspective of the HC this person can only be someone who is a living member of the Church, who is convinced of the truth of what is taught, because he or she has learned that only this truth brings us to the goal. I emphasize here that the teacher should be a witnessing Christian, practising what he teaches. At the same time, the teacher remains a lifelong pupil. One never graduates from having a relationship with God. It could even be so that one becomes a true learner regarding faith, when one becomes a teacher. Now the issue of the learner. At the start of my lecture, I spelled out several characteristics of people in our culture. My advice is to take these seriously in carrying out missionary catechesis. Also, follow the maxim that learning is never timeless, but takes place in a concrete learning environment by concrete learning people. The pupil living in Heidelberg of 1563 is not the same as the pupil in Kiev of 2012. One has to research the background of learners, even so far as understanding his habitus in the cognitive and affective climate. This inquisitiveness must lead to taking the learner by the hand to bring him to the learning goal. That is what counts. Prof. Marc de Vries recently wrote a good book on this, entitled: Finding God. In dialogue with seekers (Heerenveen, 2011).

Previously, I dealt with the problems of the rational and the emotional sides to contemporary people. In this regard, I also mentioned Keller as well as the charismatics. Perhaps we now could say, that linking up to both rationality and affections could serve as ‘paths guiding’ us to the one path of discovery.

Emmaus←⤒🔗

That brings me back to the characteristic of learning in communication of the gospel. I would like to invite you to listen with me to the story of the disciples on the road to Emmaus in Luke 24. There we read that Jesus instructs two people in the meaning of his resurrection. They think that Jesus is dead and along with that the faith in him. What do we now see? Jesus connects to their very starting point. That is the way he starts his narrative with them. The paragraph starts with the characteristic of a dialogue. But at a certain point, the dialogue is overruled. A confrontation results: “O foolish ones, and slow of heart, that you do not believe in all that the prophets have spoken.” Then, Jesus not only associates himself with the understanding of the disciples, but he reveals himself to them. This confrontation surpasses the dialogue and forces a decision by the disciples. This happening brought me to argue that despite all the good that can be said regarding dialogical learning for guidance, we cannot do without the confrontational moment in contemporary missionary catechesis. All that is the work of the Holy Spirit, that marvellous Teacher. Let us now say something about the form into which learning is cast. That is, the method followed. The range of possibilities today is wide. One can look for a method in which the entire person, the cognitive, the affective, also the volitional and the human conduct are involved. It is fantastic that nowadays so many didactical tools are available to us. Yet permit me to give a theological warning here, namely that form and content must match. It is highly undesirable that communication of the gospel should use techniques that suggest issues clashing with the learning content. Let me give an example: Perhaps you are familiar with the popular picture “The Broad and Narrow Way.” It is an example of learning in which one should follow the narrow path in order to reach the Kingdom of God. This idea can be called the content of learning. But it should not be so that the content of our catechism is meant to be found on the narrow way, whereas the design of the catechism class shows characteristics of the broad way. That would be a clash of content and form, downgrading the content.

Once again: The Taxi←⤒🔗

In the conclusion of my lecture, I would like to mention three courses such as are used in the Netherlands. Due to time limits, at this moment I cannot go into a detailed analysis: they will be handed out upon request. I refer here to the course Christianity Explored, the course Your spirituality and the Alpha Course.

I started my lecture with the man in the taxi, who spontaneously shared his faith with the taxi driver. More than likely the man had never thought about a fluid culture, about traces of God, about a cognitive and affective model, and so forth. Yet we consider him a paragon of faith communication. He was a man deeply concerned with the eternal salvation of his fellow man. That is the essence.