Worship as catechesis: Knowledge, desire, and Christian formation

Theology Today, Oct 2001 by Murphy, Debra Dean

Christians are those who worship the triune God. What we know and how we know are bound up together in doxology, in the rightful ordering of desire that leads us to the truth of God's own life and love for us.39

ABSTRACT

This essay seeks to develop an understanding of Christian catechesis as a practice, or set of practices, informed, at heart, by doxology. The acquisition of "knowledge" that variously constitutes the catechetical or educative enterprise within Christian communities is bound up entirely with the praise and adoration of God within the eucharistic fellowship of the body of Christ gathered together in worship. To know, in this way, is to be changed, remade, transformed. To know rightly, as Augustine would teach us, is to desire God--just as to desire God is to know rightly. On this view, catechesis occurs, first and foremost, not as exposition apart from the liturgical community, but performatively within it.

1Joseph Dunne, Back to the Rough Ground: Practical Judgment and the Lure of Technique (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1993), 357.

2John Milbank, "`Postmodern Critical Augustinianism': A Short Summa in Forty Two Responses to Unasked Questions," Modern Theology 7 (1991), 234.

3Jeffrey Stout, The Flight from Authority (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981).

4Ren6 Descartes, A Discourse on Method (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1951), 28.

SThe Flight to Objectivity: Essays on Cartesianism and Culture (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987), 5.

6Ibid., 95.

7This phrase comes from Dunne's Back to the Rough Ground.

sFor one of the earliest and most persuasive accounts of the fallacy of objectivism in modern epistemology, see Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958).

9To Know as We Are Known: Education as Spiritual Journey (San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1993), 30.

10 As Dunne points out, under this model, everything essential in teaching can be disembedded from the contexts and traditions that would provide coherence, "as well as from the urgencies and contingencies of the classroom, and made transparent in a neutral model which, by isolating in precise terms the goals of the activity, provides the teachers with guidelines for controlling efficiency and straightforward criteria for evaluating success" (Back to the Rough Ground, 5).

"Palmer, To Know as We Are Known, 40.

12 Although Augustine writes almost nothing about worship-about the doxological per se-cult is, in fact, decisive for creating coherence and context for his treatment of various doctrines. Without cult, for Augustine, there is no Christianity.

13 Back to the Rough Ground, 358. See also Wendell Berry, "Family Work," The Gift of Good Land (New York: North Point, 1981), 99.

14This is Stanley Fish's notion of "situational" or "tacit" knowledge (which he borrows, in part, from Michael Polanyi): "a knowledge already known or dwelt in; it cannot be handed over in the form of rules or maxims or theories" (Doing What Comes Naturally: Change, Rhetoric, and the Practice of Theory in Literary and Legal Studies [Durham: Duke University Press, 1989], 353).