Learning the Scales
Some Thoughts After Reviewing Michael Goheen's New Book, "The Core of the Christian Faith"
In fourth grade, my elementary school music and instruments teacher came to our classroom to offer an introduction to the various musical instruments students could begin learning to play. I remember the excitement that bubbled up within me as I saw these strangely shaped objects make sounds I had only ever heard mediated through a TV or radio. I immediately signed up to begin learning the clarinet. After receiving a rental instrument and a practice book, we were instructed to begin learning the exercises at home so they could be reviewed during class or in a lesson from the band director. We also were given a small blue sheet each on which we were to record our practice durations.
I experienced a striking duality between my practice sessions and my in-school lessons and band class. The former was dull, repetitive, and poorly executed; the latter exhilarating, warm, and inspiring. As time wore on and my proficiency with the instrument grew (I would switch to trumpet the next year and discover jazz), I found myself practicing less and filling my schedule instead with rehearsals and performances..
The lessons in those early books were somewhat cleverly designed teaching exercises intended to help me build the foundational skills necessary to become a serviceable musician. They taught me things like how to properly hold the instrument as I switched between different fingerings, how to form my embouchure (the shape of my lips and mouth as I blew into the instrument), increased my diaphragm strength and lunch capacity, developed an ability to hear tonal differences, and more. These were things that a young musician desperately needs even to become mediocre, let alone excellent.. Now I find myself with less time to play music that I love because of other callings and commitments in life and when I do have time to play, I also discover my need to return to those foundations due to my eroded skills.
Formation and Its Failure
What would it look like to take some of the same insights from learning a skill — like an instrument — and examine the life of faith through a similar lens? On its face, it might sound reductionistic to truncate the life of faith to a series of skills that one can acquire. But this would be to miss the mark entirely! Instead, we can reframe the conversation by considering Christian maturity as a way of being that we are continually growing into, who we are becoming rather than a resume we are developing.
This is the fundamental assumption underlying the historical church’s commitment to catechesis. The English word catechesis is derived from the Greek katecheo, meaning “to instruct” or “to inform by word of mouth.” The implication here is a direct and personal transmission of teaching from one person to another. The focus of the teaching consists of three categories: the Christian faith (what Christians believe to be true about God and the world), Christian spirituality (how Christians pray, worship, and order their internal lives and loves), and Christian moral action (how Christians live in the world). Consider St. Paul’s instructions to Timothy:
What you heard from me, keep as the pattern of sound teaching, with faith and love in Christ Jesus. Guard the good deposit that was entrusted to you—guard it with the help of the Holy Spirit who lives in us. [2 Timothy 1.13-14]
Or another implied connection in his letter to the church in Corinth:
Now, brothers and sisters, I want to remind you of the gospel I preached to you, which you received and on which you have taken your stand. By this gospel you are saved, if you hold firmly to the word I preached to you. Otherwise, you have believed in vain. For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, and then to the Twelve… [1 Corinthians 15.1-5]
Or St. Luke’s evangelistic transmission of the Gospel in the opening of his writ:
Many have undertaken to draw up an account of the things that have been fulfilled among us, just as they were handed down to us by those who from the first were eyewitnesses and servants of the word. With this in mind, since I myself have carefully investigated everything from the beginning, I too decided to write an orderly account for you, most excellent Theophilus, so that you may know the certainty of the things you have been taught. [Luke 1.1-4]
What might sound like a simple instruction or routine evangelistic proclamation, the catechetical tradition invites its audience to both and understanding of themselves and the world which turn shapes their interior and exterior action.
What I hope you see in these descriptions goes far beyond a particularized theological exposition of doctrine. To me, it casts a vision for a way of being that totalizes the whole of a person. As church history will attest, what we believe matters a great deal. But what we believe must never be divorced from our love and worship, for all of our attempts to describe God through theological, poetic, historic, or other means must always be in service of worshipping the God we describe. Our language is limited, and so we use — however desperately or foolishly — the tools at our disposal in order to most faithfully illuminate God as he really truly is for the purposes of communing with him.1
The Christian “project” is fundamentally about working and worshipping alongside God in the beautiful garden-temple that is the earth.2 The story of Scripture describes a people created for a purpose, prevented from fulfilling that purpose because of sin, redeemed to that purpose through the reconciling death of Jesus, and are in the midst of relearning their creational call and capacity. In a sense, the Biblical story anticipates a coming time when the whole of the creation returns to that for which it was created: living in the overflow of God’s generous being alongside him in his temple. In our current moment, we must relearn both what that vision is and how we can inhabit it.
For me, this is precisely why I find this contemporary discussion about catechesis so compelling. The idea is far from new; the earliest Christians picked up catechetical practices from ancient Israel, who were commanded to pass their lived traditions from generation to generation.3 So why does it seem that these ideas and practices are resurfacing in the late 20th and early 21st centuries?
Rehearsing the True Story
I had the opportunity to review Calvin Theological Seminary’s professor of missional theology, Michael Goheen’s, new book entitled, The Core of the Christian Faith: Living the Gospel for the Sake of the World (Brazos Press, 2025) for the Englewood Review of Books (you can read my review here when it’s posted). I’m no stranger to Goheen’s work; I utilize a book he cowrote with fellow NT theologian Craig Bartholomew called The Drama of Scripture: Finding Our Place in the Biblical Story for an introductory bible cohort for our staff. 4 So I was excited to dig into this new book.
What surprised me, however, about this book was the way in which Goheen chose to contextualize his writing. In the opening chapter, Goheen recounts his experience of teaching a group of cohorts for church leaders from 2020-2022, noting that,
“These developments in the life of the country were exposing some enduring and deeply held idolatries in the culture — and in the evangelical church. Division and conflict were rife even among those with a shared faith in Jesus. As the church leaders in our classes had attempted to challenge their congregations about these issues from the Word of God, they were in too many cases discovering that their parishioners’ hearts and minds had been shaped by the idols of Western culture more than by the Bible. Christianity, it seemed, had become to some of their members more of a civil religion than the faith of Scripture.”5
A perhaps dramatic statement to be sure, but his response is what stuck with me:
“Moreover, we [church leaders] are failing in the very role given us in the biblical story — to be what our neighbors glimpse of the new creation, of what God intends for human life. We are here, in the time and place given us by God, not for ourselves but for the sake of the unbelieving world. Our accommodation to idolatrous currents and consequent cultural captivity is failure to live out the vocation God has given us.6
The appropriate response, then, is what he aims to accomplish in The Core, namely to, “send out an urgent appeal to make catechesis, formation, and discipleship a priority in our local congregations.”7
What I find to be so remarkable is the author’s ability to locate the source of the issue as a catechetical failure. I have encountered my fair share of books, sermons, and podcasts which attempt to diagnose the maladies of the contemporary church. It seems to me that for every church reformer Protestants have championed since Martin Luther’s famed theses, we find four times that number’s pathologies within the church. Now, I am not here to claim the ability to see what others have not been able to in regard to “the Church”,8 but the blame Goheen assigns is an internal one. He doesn’t outright say it, but if we can draw on the language others (like Jamie Smith have argued)9 we find that the political projects of civil religion have proven themselves to be more compelling than the orthodox faith.
Whether conscious or not, the absence of formation with staying power have left open the possibility for Christians in America to be co-opted by a more powerful vision for reality and the good life. Goheen believes that recovering a “thicker” formative practice is needed if we are to begin observing Christians acting like Christ once again. Whether they (or we) believe that syncretized civic religion belongs to the historic Christian consensus is immaterial; in this case, intent doesn’t practically matter. What matters is the stories which have shaped the ways in which those who claim Christ understand the world and orient themselves accordingly.
Goheen, along with others like N.T. Wright, argue that formation only happens through rehearsal. Imagine a theatre company advertising a performance of Shakespeare’s Macbeth only to rehearse and then perform Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Cats instead. Perhaps it goes without saying, but there certainly is a story being rehearsed. The question Goheen is asking through The Core is whether that story aligns with the tradition handed down through the generations according to the Apostolic testimony.
I grew up as a musician under the maxim that “practice makes perfect.” While that was a helpful beacon for me as an adolescent, it wasn’t quite as accurate a statement as it could be. I have since come to believe that “practice makes consistent.” If you practice the wrong technique or apply the right technique in the wrong way, you’ve got some unlearning to do before you can get it right. For this reason, having a teacher or mentor to help direct the practicing and training, ensuring that a student isn’t learning the wrong thing at the wrong time is immensely helpful.
A brief word to the Church
I’ll conclude on this note. One practice that developed in parallel to the catechesis of the first four centuries was that of the ‘godparent,’ a mentor who walked closely alongside the catechumen (learner) throughout their journey in the catechumenate (the cohort of catechumen). The godparent’s job was to serve as both the sponsor of the individual and as another sources of help and accountability. As questions arose, complexities of life discovered, temptation crept in, and more, the godparent would serve as a lay mentor and “guardian” of sorts to assist the neophyte. In short, this person served as the teacher/mentor in real time. When it came time for the catechumen to declare for baptism and admission into the mystical body of Christ, the godparent was called upon to testify to the redeeming work of the God in the individual’s life and could sway the process one way or the other.
Goheen addresses my concern briefly in his second chapter on Missional People through the lens of formation. While the nod to formation is needed, the reality is that far more emphasis must be placed on the web of relational structures presupposed by a broader commitment to formation. Goheen’s point is largely about the content of formation: reading the Gospel according to the story of Scripture will produce a missional people who have consistent missionary encounters with the cultures in which they live. But the context of that formation is equally as important. It must require both the kind of leadership who patiently values the slow work and the community of wise, maturely-formed disciples into which the novice can embed. It takes the director and the band together to grow.
My hope in writing this less-than-brief essay is to invite you, dear reader, to begin imagining a way forward in forming people according to this story, or what J.I. Packer and Gary Parrett called Building Believers the Old Fashioned Way.10 Through the frustration and despair, I hope and pray you cling to Christ, the hope of glory. May the God of grace grant us patience, wisdom, and endurance as we seek the way forward, through Christ our Lord.
mds.
For an extensive reading of the whole of Holy Scripture in this list, see L. Michael Morales, Who Shall Ascend the Mountain of the Lord?: A biblical theology of the book of Leviticus (InterVarsity Press, 2015): “Entering the house of God to dwell with God, beholding, glorifying and enjoying him eternally, I suggest, is the story of the Bible, the plot that makes sense of the various acts, persons and places of its pages, the deepest context for its doctrine.” (21)
See, Carmen Joy Imes, Being God’s Image: Why Creation Still Matters (IVP Academic, 2023), Chapter 1: “Pattern of Creation”.
See Deut. 6.1-9, 20-24; 11.16-21.
I would commend this text to anyone who feels as though they don’t have a strong grasp of the whole of the Bible. I think this should be the kind of mandatory reading for just about any membership class for a church, but I digress.
Michael Goheen, The Core of the Christian Faith: Living the Gospel for the Sake of the World (Brazos Press, 2025). 2.
ibid., 3.
ibid., 4.
It must be said that we should all hold a healthy dose of skepticism for anyone that would claim such a wide-sweeping statement about the nature of all church, even in a particular country. For one, we must fall back on the ontological reality that the Church is fundamentally Christ’s Church, not ours. He who was raised from the dead is indeed faithful to see to fruition that work which he has started. Secondly, all of us lack the perspective to accurately speak about such a huge number of people, places, and circumstances. I would caution us toward a potent dose of humility before speaking so broadly, Goheen included in his early chapter.
See, James K.A. Smith, Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation, Cultural Liturgies 1 (Baker Academic, 2009).
J. I. Packer and Gary A. Parrett, Grounded in the Gospel: Building Believers the Old-Fashioned Way (Baker Books, 2010).