EARLY CHURCH CATECHESIS AND NEW CHRISTIANS' CLASSES IN CONTEMPORARY EVANGELICALISM

Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society, Mar 2004 by Arnold, Clinton E

I. INTRODUCTION

For twelve years my wife and I were deeply involved in a ministry to new believers at our local church.1 When we began developing this "assimilation" ministry, we started with an eight-week course that covered many of the basics of the Christian life. We offered the hour-and-fifteen-minute course during the Sunday morning Sunday School time for mixed ages, marrieds, and singles.

The initial idea was for new believers to take the eight-week course as a primer in some of the basics of Christian doctrine and practice and then help them blend into the regular age-graded Sunday School program of the church. A number of constraints prevented this from working well. There was the practical social difficulty of being a newcomer in a Sunday School group that has been together for years, but there was also the fact that these new believers strongly felt the need for more of the same kind of teaching and discussions centered on the basics that they had just experienced.

I had also been doing some reading in the Church fathers about how new Christians' classes were conducted in the early church and came away deeply convicted about the superficiality of what we were doing. There was such a rigorous plan and commitment by church leaders in the first four centuries to ground new believers in their Christian lives. The impact of this reading on my thinking led to some significant changes in our new Christians' ministry, especially the development of a ministry plan and curriculum that would keep them for two to three years.

I have now been away from this ministry for a couple of years, but have continued to reflect critically on what we did in light of Scripture and early church practice. It has become increasingly clear to me that the evangelical church as a whole could benefit from re-examining the testimony of the Church fathers and gleaning insights from how they ministered to new believers.

It may challenge many churches to consider implementing some modifications in philosophy and structure of ministry as they entertain questions such as:

* Is a four-week (six-week, or eight-week) new Christians' class really enough?

* Are we getting new believers adequately immersed into the Scripture?

* Have we downplayed the importance of creed?

* Are we helping new believers repent completely of sinful life-styles and practices?

* Are we taking the spiritual warfare dynamic seriously enough in helping new believers grow?

The time is fortuitous for a re-exploration of the early church practice of training new believers-a practice they called the catechumenate, derived from the Greek word katechein, meaning "to teach" or "instruct."2 Fortress Press has just published a new critical edition of the Apostolic Tradition,3 the earliest source providing us with detailed information about the catechumenate.4 The majority of scholars have associated the Apostolic Tradition with a lost work of Hippolytus of Rome (AD 170-235)5 especially because a statue in Rome included a reference to a work called the Apostolic Tradition in a list of Hippolytus's writings inscribed on the base. The discovery of this document in the last century, first in a Coptic (Bohairic) manuscript and subsequently in a fifth-century Latin manuscript, led scholars to believe that this lost work had now been recovered.6 The Greek original has never been discovered, but many Greek terms from the original can be inferred on the basis of Greek loanwords in the Coptic.

Paul F. Bradshaw and his fellow editors of the Fortress edition, however, question the association with Hippolytus and regard the Apostolic Tradition as an aggregation of material from different sources spanning a variety of geographical regions and dating as early as the mid-second century (with some layers dating as late as the fourth).7 Others, who see Hippolytus as primarily responsible for the document, would also recognize that it does reflect a compilation of early church traditions. In other words, Hippolytus did not invent the material; he simply wrote down the practices and advocated them in his church setting.8

The value of this document, then, is that it preserves many of the traditional ministry practices of churches in the second and third centuries. Although it was known and used in Rome, it may have originated in the East and was certainly widely used there as attested by the fact that it has been preserved in Egyptian (Sahidic and Bohairic), Arabic, and Ethiopie manuscripts. Portions of the Apostolic Tradition were used in the composition of several other church orders, including the Apostolic Constitutions, the Canons of Hippolytus, and the Testamentum Domini.9

For our purposes, we can safely say that it is the most important bearer of traditions and information on how the churches of the Mediterranean world of the second and third centuries organized and conducted training for new believers.

In this paper, I want to glean several insights from the Apostolic Tradition about the ancient church catechumenate that may prove to be instructional for us today. I make no pretension to provide a detailed and comprehensive analysis of the catechumenate. I simply want to make selective observations about the nature and structure of the catechumenate from the Apostolic Tradition in conversation with some other ancient sources giving testimony to this practice (such as the Didache,10 Didascalia Apostolorum,11 the Apostolic Constitutions,12 the Testamentum Domini,15 and from some of the Church fathers). On this basis, I will offer some thoughts on what the contemporary evangelical church can learn from their forbears on this.