The final question related to God the Son acts as a kind of pivot point for the Catechism. The rest of the Catechism serves as a kind of exposition of this answer, with it taking the position that the Christian life inaugurated at Baptism is indeed participation in, rather than merely anticipation or an earning of, Christ’s victory.

The Apostles’ and Athanasian Creeds both affirm that after being crucified Christ descended to the dead—or even into Hell if you go with older translations. While such an affirmation can seem an easy one to gloss over, this article of faith actually offers us that hope that there is truly no place that is too far gone to receive the power of God’s love and the possibility of redemption.

Along with the death of Jesus, the resurrection forms the core of the Gospel proclamation from the earliest days of the Church. This post explores the contours of the Christian claim about Jesus’ resurrection and conquering of death—as well as its implications for the rest of creation—while affirming the limits of our capacity to provide a detailed positive description of resurrection life.

The most universally recognized sign of the Christian faith—the cross—has also been, since its inception, one of the greatest sources of scandal. However, the centrality of the cross and the scandal it generates is unavoidable, emblematic of the scandal of Grace, of a perfectly just God unwilling to abandon God’s creation. Through the cross, God both takes on the penalty of all of humanity’s turning away from God all while condemning those humans who will wield the forces of Death to oppress and harm.

The Ascension is both elevated a central tenet of the faith, central in the Creeds, Catechism, and commemorations of the Church, while also seemingly being one of the more eyebrow-raising, seemingly mythic events described in the New Testament. This post looks into the underlying significance of Jesus departing to fully inhabit the New Creation after his resurrection as well as how we may, even while remaining adherents to a modern cosmology, affirm the possibility of a historical Ascension as described in the Bible.

Explore the reason why the Catechism looks at the incarnation primarily through the lens of facilitating our adoption as children of God, a premise with much richer and more expansive connotations in the first-century mediterranean vision of adoption.

The 1979 Catechism places human nature in the context of the image of God. It sees the image of God in line with the classic understanding of Augustine as related to specific human cognitive capabilities. In this post, we explore where this sits in the larger Anglican consideration of the image of God and what problems this construal may raise for our understanding of our relationship to God as humans.

Here’s a chance to enter into the 1979 Book of Common Prayer’s first section of the catechism on human nature. Included is an explanation of why human nature may be the first section as well as a description of what it means that human beings are part of creation.

Here begins a series on each of the questions from the catechism from the 1979 Book of Common Prayer. This first post gives a little background on the hope of the series and then an overview of catechisms in general.

Worship is hard in the stimulation saturated world we live in. But this, and the possibility of boredom it entails, is precisely why it’s so important for us to attend to have our desires reformed so that we can be disposed to the worship of God—because that’s a lot of what our hope is oriented toward.