A Tool for Spiritual Formation in a Secular Age

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0:00:00 – (Trevin Wax): What’s gone wrong with the world is you find, you know, it’s either ignorance, it’s injustice of some sort, or it’s the failure to be true to ourselves. And so we wanted to demonstrate that the Bible doesn’t deny that those things can be problems, but actually takes us deeper to say sin is the big problem with the world. Sin, evil and the death that then results.

0:00:34 – (Collin Hansen): At the end of my class on cultural apologetics that I teach at Beast and Divinity School, I assign a group exercise that students need to compose 10 questions and answers to form a modern day catechism. Historically, catechisms have emerged during times of cultural transition as well as confrontation of the gospel, such as in our own, in the aftermath of Christendom and the Enlightenment on awaiting whatever develops, whatever awaits us in post liberalism.

0:01:03 – (Collin Hansen): So catechisms are not merely a relic of our past, but a vital resource for the present that prepares us for the future. I’m delighted with how the New City Catechism, especially our devotional, still serves readers. And I’m especially delighted by a new volume, the gospel way 50 truths that take on the World, published by Harvest House and written by my friends Trevin Wax and Thomas West. Tim Keller said this we need a counter catechism that explains, refutes and re narrates the world’s catechisms to Christians.

0:01:36 – (Collin Hansen): And that’s what Trevin and Thomas have done in the Gospel Way Catechism. Trevin is vice president of Research and Resource Development at the North American Mission Board. Thomas is the pastor of Nashville First Baptist Church and they join me now on Gospel Bound. Welcome, gentlemen.

0:01:51 – (Trevin Wax): Colin, great to be here.

0:01:52 – (Thomas West): Hi Colin, thanks for having us.

0:01:54 – (Collin Hansen): Thomas, how much pushback do a couple of Baptists such as yourselves get to writing a catechism? A comment we’ve heard over the years, no creed but the Bible, we don’t need anything but Christ. You hear that from restorationist movements and sometimes also from Baptists. So what kind of pushback do you guys get?

0:02:12 – (Thomas West): To be fair and perhaps to pick on Baptists just a little bit when word was getting out and even when it came to press, most non denoms charismatics or Pentecostals would say, catechism, what is that? And the Baptists would have a wonder. Ooh, catechisms, can we do that? And a few Presbyterians and knowing Anglicans would nod, ah, catechism, good man. So I think people, a lot of Baptists are, wait, where are we with this? And of course, when you dig into it, Keach and others, Baptists have a long legacy of good catechesis, at times borrowing and emulating a little more.

0:02:53 – (Thomas West): And it’s been a joy to partner in this with Trevin, were there any.

0:02:57 – (Collin Hansen): Specific historical catechisms, maybe especially from Baptist, that stood out, Thomas and you guys preparation or were instrumental in forming this project?

0:03:05 – (Thomas West): Tried to keep an eye on the big ones that are there. Keech was there. Spurgeon has some work around it. Heidelberg, Luther, Calvin and Westminster were the big ones that we try to have a look at whenever we came across a question.

0:03:23 – (Collin Hansen): Now, Trevin, what do you think is the most controversial truth in, in this book? Where do you see most of the confrontation with our secular world today?

0:03:34 – (Trevin Wax): You know, I’m, I’m, I’m tempted to just go to the what is sexuality? Question because that’s not typically one that you find in some of the classic catechisms because they weren’t having to deal with some of the issues that we’re.

0:03:47 – (Collin Hansen): Having to deal with wasn’t contested in the same ways.

0:03:49 – (Trevin Wax): Yeah, it wasn’t contested. You can still find teaching on marriage and the family and sexuality in some of the larger catechisms, but you don’t find it in this sort of countercultural pointedness that we needed to do today. So I’m tempted to say that’s the one. But honestly, thinking about it, I think actually there’s a couple of places where we just very much on the nose talk about a God oriented view of life versus a human or a me first oriented view of life.

0:04:19 – (Trevin Wax): And frankly, I think that’s the fountain of where you get all the different kinds of cultural narratives that take us away from the scriptures and away from the vision that we have in the gospel. And so I think a couple of those questions are probably actually more countercultural because they’re underneath some of the presenting issues of sexuality or the transhumanist desire to want to extend your life forever or some of the other things that we might look at.

0:04:51 – (Collin Hansen): Well, let’s take a step back then and think about what the world’s alternatives are to what you guys are offering here. Trevin, question 16 is what has gone wrong? Now let’s say you guys are walking down the streets of Nashville, right outside of First Baptist Church, right there on Broadway. You ask the question, what has gone wrong? What are the answers we’re going to hear from the world? What do you guys expect people, other people would say?

0:05:16 – (Trevin Wax): In my experience, when people talk about what has gone wrong with the world, they’re generally you’re going to be able to Tell what they think has gone wrong, even if they don’t articulate it in these terms by the solution they think is going to fix whatever has gone wrong. So, for example, there are some that believe, you know, the real problem is ignorance. We don’t know the right thing to do, or we don’t know the best way forward. And so we need education.

0:05:41 – (Trevin Wax): That’s right. That’s right. Education becomes the solution. Other people are going to say the deepest problem is social injustice, right? That you can see that all around the world. That’s the problem. So what is the solution? Whatever movement that you’re a part of that’s going to lead to some kind of social justice, some kind of social activism, need better government.

0:06:02 – (Collin Hansen): We need better government in that case.

0:06:04 – (Trevin Wax): That’s right to pass the right laws, get the right people elected, or, you know, root out whatever is wrong in whatever systems and structures there are in society. And then you’ve got the more individualistic sort of. A lot of people, when they hear the question of what’s gone wrong with the world, they immediately think of the world holding us back as individuals from being our truest selves, right? That I need to be true to myself, and I’m not able to be because of the society around me. And sometimes that overlaps with the education component or the ignorance component or the social justice one. But that’s the expressive individualist answer is the world’s keeping me back.

0:06:45 – (Trevin Wax): Back from being able to reach my full potential and is stifling me. So those tend to be the responses that what’s gone wrong with the world is you find it’s either ignorance, it’s injustice of some sort, or it’s the failure to be true to ourselves. And so we wanted to demonstrate that the Bible doesn’t deny that those things can be problems, but actually takes us deeper to say sin is the big problem with the world. Sin, evil, and the death that then results.

0:07:14 – (Collin Hansen): Trevin, how are we supposed to, in one catechism, let alone in other aspects of our ministry, be able to address all of those different answers? Because that could go from person to person, that could go from moment to moment. It feels like all these problems are popping up and we’re just having to sort of whack a mole them down in there. How did you guys approach that within this catechism, or how do you see that playing out in our broader ministry?

0:07:43 – (Trevin Wax): Well, I think our goal was to give Christians. And fundamentally the catechism is for new Christians or even Christians that want to have a tune up, you know, of sorts. And the way to think more biblically, to see the world more biblically. Our idea was to give Christians handles so that they’re able to then to then spot some of the superficial solutions that will be out there because of the superficial diagnoses that we have of the problems that are out in our society.

0:08:10 – (Trevin Wax): So it’s not so much of trying to, you know, Elvis, sort of whack a mole all the problems we see in society, but to connect them and to go one level deeper to show the Bible giving us the greater diagnosis, the deeper diagnosis of what’s gone wrong. And the great thing is in conversations with unbelievers or even Christians, that may be superficial in their approach to some of the problems we see in our society.

0:08:39 – (Trevin Wax): What’s beautiful about this is that you actually can start where the person is. You know, lack of education or ignorance can be a problem, right? We wouldn’t deny that there is injustice in society. We also wouldn’t deny that there are forces that could help stifle your individuality of some sense. But you take whatever that diagnosis is, superficial that it may be, but you’re able to begin to walk deeper, to take the person from the starting point and not just come against that view, but to lead to a position where that view is then explained and then deeper deepened because of the Bible’s richer diagnosis, deeper diagnosis of what’s wrong.

0:09:15 – (Trevin Wax): So that’s the idea is we really want Christians to come away with handles so they’re able to not only see the world through a richer biblical lens, but then also help other people trace their discomfort in the world, their sense that something is wrong, their disorientation to the Scriptures, to where we find the greater answers.

0:09:37 – (Collin Hansen): Thomas, I think this will be fairly similar, at least run along some similar lines. You write in this book about how Western culture is inherently self centered. Part of that is clearly a sin, and then part of that’s merely being descriptive about the way Western culture uniquely centers on the individual and centers on the self. But at least in terms of the problematic iteration of this, you offer this tool, this catechism as an antidote, really, not just an alternative, but a cure for this.

0:10:08 – (Collin Hansen): Tell us a little bit more about what you mean. And I’m wondering if you guys see this inherently self centered problem as a particular manifestation of Western culture or Western culture today, or do you see it as more of a problem going back to the origins, to Adam and Eve themselves?

0:10:25 – (Thomas West): I think Luther spot on when he talks about how sin essentially makes us Incur this day, we’re curved in on ourselves. We become navel gazers. All we can do is pay attention to ourselves and our wants and our. And our longings. I think there’s even more helpful content there about how we actually become trapped where that’s all we can want and we can’t even escape those. Those abilities to want. The big, I think is clearly the. The big mood of our modern cultural moment, but it’s not really new to now.

0:11:04 – (Thomas West): This is a problem as old as time that we have on our hands here. Many of late have done a really fine job of pointing out how this is a unique problem in our cultural moment. Colin, even you’ve written about how we’re moving towards the other wall of the hurricane now. This is a unique issue to now and from social media, the influence on self secular, moving post secular. There’s lots of reasons that it’s here and it’s so pronounced for us, but it’s not really new and unique to us.

0:11:40 – (Thomas West): You’re asking Trevin, how do you narrow it down? And there’s a sense to where it’s like, do we want to try to put together a catechism for the world at large or for tighter population? So with that, we did try to fix our focus more acutely on Western culture and really, really zone in for this specific cultural moment. We try to draw attention to the problem, though, by beginning with popular cultural stories and cultural narratives that people are likely to believe or have been tempted to believe, and then from there move towards the Scripture.

0:12:24 – (Thomas West): I would say that’s probably a unique approach to this catechism attempting counter catechesis, following the prompting of Keller there to say, yes, there is a world story, you have heard it said, but the Gospel says so. Attempting to draw attention to the story of self by beginning with the story of self and all of its different offshoots, and then leading out towards the biblical story from there.

0:12:48 – (Collin Hansen): Trevan, what kind of inspiration did you guys seek when you were composing this catechism? Tell us a little bit about the writing process, what that looked like for the two of you.

0:12:58 – (Trevin Wax): We talked about this for several years before we actually got going with it. Both of us remember where we were, different locations, different times. When we first heard Tim Keller talk about the need for counter catechesis and where Tim would always say, every catechism is counter catechesis. And that in the sense it. Even if you look at the great Reformation catechisms, they were always. They were pushing back against the common errors of the day.

0:13:23 – (Trevin Wax): At that point, it was the excesses and errors of medieval Roman Catholicism for the most part. But they were consistently pushing against problems that they saw in their own society, but that we needed that as well for today’s cultural narratives. And so I remember where I was. Thomas remembers where he was when we first heard Keller talking about this, then we wound up talking together about this when Thomas was planting a church in London at the time.

0:13:48 – (Trevin Wax): And I actually had a. The origin story is a little fun in that I had a writing leave at a study leave at the Kilns, the home that C.S. lewis lived in for more than 30 years. And I was staying there. Thomas took the train down from London, and we spent the day in the common room of the kilns, just talking, walking, pacing back and forth, typing, jotting things down, saying, okay, if we were to take the basics of the faith and want to present them in a way that has this countercultural element, what are the questions and answers we just have to have? And for them, Sometimes it’s similar questions that you’re going to get in any catechism, but the answer has a not this, but that, or you have heard it said, but the Bible says something different element to it. Sometimes the questions themselves are different.

0:14:41 – (D): I mean, having a question about what.

0:14:42 – (Trevin Wax): Is freedom, for example, to talk about.

0:14:44 – (D): The Bible’s vision of freedom versus a.

0:14:48 – (Trevin Wax): Cultural vision of freedom, that comes about differently because the question that is raised.

0:14:53 – (D): By our current cultural moment. So we had a great time mapping.

0:14:59 – (Trevin Wax): Out what we wanted to cover. And then for an entire year, we worked this out in the context of.

0:15:05 – (D): A local church there in London. We worked on one question a week.

0:15:09 – (Trevin Wax): Kind of working our way through this.

0:15:11 – (D): Sending it out for feedback with friends, pastors, other theologians, other people that could speak into it. And then we spent roughly the next part of the next year going through and then revising based on all of that feedback. So this really was put together in the throes of local church ministry and struggle and challenge in a very secular context. And we hope that that part of the origin, how it came together and then how we kept refining it is going to mean that the tool is just that much sharper for chur churches to use today.

0:15:45 – (Collin Hansen): Talking with Thomas west and Trevin Wax about the Gospel Way Catechism, 50 Truths that Take on the World, published by Harvest House. Thomas. What kind of response would somebody give to say, we don’t need this? Thanks, guys for the effort. Sounds like a really fun story. Hanging out in Oxford. That’s pretty cool. Tim Keller contributed Some things, but we don’t really need this. Would that be because maybe some would argue that we already have a cultural narrative that we can inhabit, therefore it’s already pushing, it’s already taking on the world. It’s always pushing on the world. Or we have Scripture itself, therefore why would we need some kind of supplement like this?

0:16:32 – (Collin Hansen): But what would be the dominant criticism at. No, I’m not sure that we do need this today.

0:16:38 – (Thomas West): Yeah, A lot of the people that I interacted with during the day before going home to write in London certainly thought we didn’t need this. The world gathered there in the globe’s capital from, from, from Aussies to posh North Londoners to Irish Catholics draw all sorts of puzzling looks. I’m sorry, you’re doing what, if anything, didn’t a few people try that? And those books are old and dusty and they don’t have a whole lot of relevance and traction today.

0:17:18 – (Thomas West): So we don’t need it in the sense that it’s been tried and found lacking, hasn’t it? Others around. It was interesting having church, having, having friends in the Kingdom, you know, the Pentecostals over here and High Church Anglicans over there would draw some wonderings, but wouldn’t draw any wonderings like from, you know, your High church Anglicans, you know, like, well, it’s not Westminster. I’m like, well, of course it’s not Westminster. We’re not, we’re not trying to be Westminster. We’re trying to do something that Westminster wasn’t really trying to do. We’re trying to take on the popular cultural stories and this leans upon the great catechisms that have, that have gone before us and with there. That has become a very interesting part of the project.

0:18:11 – (Thomas West): The appetite and the reception for being people who are either steeped in catechesis and interested in like the good work that you and Tim Keller did together provide an entry and a gateway through New City or others. Really appreciating part of the unique offer here. Not to say, you know, this is what separates the Baptists from the Presbyterians and on and on and on. This is what a lot of like TGC Christianity could have in common.

0:18:45 – (Thomas West): That really helps us take the gospel to a missionary encounter with popular cultural stories. That’s been a rallying cry for many.

0:18:55 – (Collin Hansen): Tim Keller did an explanation. I think he borrowed it from Harvey Kahn or had learned about it engaging with Harvey Kahn. He talked about why do we need something after Westminster if Westminster is pure undistilled doctrine and we’re all Baptists here. So we would say there’s some reasons you might need to change that. But just say, okay, if we have Westminster, we have all these great, we have Heidelberg, why would we need something else?

0:19:19 – (Collin Hansen): And he pointed out how your cultural frame of reference dictates a very different outcome. So he said, well, flip through Heidelberg, flip through Westminster. See what it says about how you’re supposed to treat your parents. Okay, now let’s head to talk to Presbyterians in Korea. And what would be one of the first questions they would ask when they come to Christianity? How am I supposed to treat my ancestors? How am I supposed to treat my parents?

0:19:42 – (Collin Hansen): It’s a perfectly relevant question. It’s one that scripture addresses in a lot of different ways, yet it’s not one that’s addressed by the catechisms. So it was his way of explaining, we need to keep updating these not because the theology is wrong, but because the cultural situation changes not only through the centuries, but of course across cultures. And now, as you guys have been explaining here, even within Western culture, the prevailing pluralism we see all over the place. Not only in London, but also downtown Nashville and even over there in suburban Murfreesboro.

0:20:18 – (Collin Hansen): Thomas, you’ve studied and written about the 20th century Missionary Leslie Newman, and he famously saw his native Great Britain differently when he returned from the mission field in India. You’re back in the United States after planting a church in London. How do you see the United States differently now?

0:20:36 – (Thomas West): First to acknowledge the massive gap between New Begin and West. And the other one, just to say, you know, he was really benefited from, you know, a full missionary career overseas where the Lord only gave us a short five year journey. The, the top two, they come to mind straight away. I do think that return trip to the American south, it’s with all due respect, oh my goodness, the prevailing wealth and oh my goodness, all the waste and the systems, the allocations, the structures.

0:21:15 – (Thomas West): Very much a what could be church planting. You know, try to plant with an abundance mindset, but aware of the resources that are available to you. Yeah. As a Baptist sent out by a coalition of Baptist churches to go plants of church in northwest London and then you return and it’s oh my goodness, like all, all the resource, all the money, all, all the potential. It’s also the value of having moved out of your hometown, the value of moving out of your home state, the value of having lived in another region in your country, the value of having spent some time overseas.

0:22:01 – (Thomas West): It does help translate to where you can enter back in perhaps some Other time we could just even talk politics and all the ins and outs of it. But being right there in London, it’s just so different with a 3, 4 party system at times and all the different contingencies and how Christians really wouldn’t go in a block, but very diverse compared to the South. Just to acknowledge a big point of difference as well.

0:22:32 – (Collin Hansen): Yeah, a lot of substantial differences there. Going back to the course that I teach in cultural apologetics, one of the first exercises actually we do in there is a personal narrative. It’s using some of the perspectives of disenculturation to help people understand that to be an effective teacher, let alone an effective missionary, let alone an effective cultural apologist, you need to be able to see yourself in your own culture from the outside.

0:22:58 – (Collin Hansen): And so I know Thomas, you and I have talked about this before, but a lot of Americans have a hard time in Great Britain because they think the culture is basically the same. Same language, same ethnicities, a lot of shared history. Therefore it’s going to be pretty, going to be pretty similar than the culture shock really gets them. I think a lot of it’s because they’ve never learned to see their home territory as an outsider. They’ve always been an insider, so they just don’t understand what it’s like.

0:23:26 – (Collin Hansen): And I think that’s especially true of a lot of American missionaries who come from the south, where it’s a very different experience than it is in a lot of other parts of the country outside of certain pockets within the Midwest. So no doubt when you’re engaging in a project like this, it’s helping people to see where the Scriptures, where the Christian tradition will confront their own culture that they’ve inherited, or while also affirming elements of common grace in there. But that’s something we all have to do as missionaries, but something we increasingly, because of the pluralism you guys are talking about here, have to do wherever we are in the United States, even coming back to the American South, Trevin, you have a whole chapter devoted to what we can learn from Israel’s sacrificial system.

0:24:13 – (Collin Hansen): Now, Leviticus is not exactly what I associate with our secular age. Why give one of 50 chapters to explaining that Old Testament book?

0:24:22 – (Trevin Wax): Well, I don’t think you can make sense of the storyline of the Bible without it. So one of the reasons, even though I do realize a lot of people in their ambitious plans to read through the Bible in a year, start to trudge a little bit when they get to Leviticus, some of the sacrificial Details and things with the temple and whatnot. This is one of those places where though, as Thomas and I were discussing the breadth of what we wanted to cover, you’re still constrained by the Bible, right? Like you, the Bible storyline still has to be a constraining factor.

0:25:00 – (Collin Hansen): That’s the norm.

0:25:01 – (Trevin Wax): There are certain things you’re going to have to address. That’s right. That’s right. There are certain things you’re going to have to address because the Bible makes you address them. The Bible puts this in the, in front of you as you know, sometimes you’ll hear people say this. Colin, I know you’ve heard this as well and I appreciate the sentiment of, you know, find out what questions the people in your culture are asking and then answer those questions with the gospel.

0:25:31 – (Trevin Wax): The reality is though, that is true, that’s a great starting point. But the Bible presses upon us questions that the culture may not even be asking.

0:25:39 – (Collin Hansen): Right? Yeah.

0:25:40 – (Trevin Wax): That still we have to, to drive toward Leviticus. Though I don’t think this one’s as hard as it may. It may seem if you’re thinking about the sacrificial system and the need for a perfect sacrifice and a mediator, we actually have all kinds of, there’s all kinds of cultural resonance with this question. You see, you see it in, you know, the need for sacrifice, the exemplary sacrifices in some of the great stories of our time that we continue to go back to. Even the secular people, you see scapegoating take place where, you know, all the sort of guilt or blame for a particular injustice or problem is put on somebody who’s then sort of driven out.

0:26:25 – (Trevin Wax): We see that in with the merciless, moralistic cancel culture that you have on social media, the mob mentality and whatnot. So it’s all still here, whether people recognize the relevance of it immediately or not. Thankfully, the Bible puts this on the table as something that must be incorporated in order for us to be faithful to the biblical storyline. But it’s not really that difficult to move from the sacrificial system of Leviticus to modern day idols and the things that we sacrifice for.

0:26:59 – (Trevin Wax): Idols always demand blood sacrifice. Right. And we are part of that sort of sacrificial ethos even, even today and even non Christians or close to being Christians. We hope people like Jordan Peterson and others are demonstrating the relevance of that. And so this is one of those areas where I think the biblical storyline presses us into a particular area. But then you dig deep enough, you realize culturally it’s just as relevant as it always has.

0:27:28 – (Collin Hansen): Been helping us to see what Gerard had pointed out, helping us to understand the timelessness of this, that whether it’s Leviticus, whether it’s today’s cancer, cancel culture or anything in between, there are always these dynamics. Sin requires a sacrifice. Trevin, you straddle the worlds that don’t always align between spiritual formation on the one side and then confessions and catechisms on the other side.

0:27:59 – (Collin Hansen): How do you see the spiritual formation movement playing out? I know something you and I have talked about together on your podcast. But how might you want this resource to be able to inform that spiritual formation movement that’s especially popular today, especially among Gen Z?

0:28:16 – (Trevin Wax): Yeah, you know, it’s interesting you’re talking about me straddling that. I didn’t really think about that until about a year or so ago. I was maybe a year and a half or I was meeting with an editor, a mutual friend of ours, who said something to the effect of Trevin, do you recognize how this is all coming together? You’ve got the big storyline of the Bible and the Gospel project, but then you’ve got this focus on creedal truth and the thrill of orthodoxy, and you got these prayer guides that take you through, you know, the Bible. So you’re praying through the Bibles, you’ve got the formational part.

0:28:48 – (Trevin Wax): Now you’re doing the catechism. I hadn’t thought about sort of those elements all coming together, but at the end of the day, my heart is to help the church with tools, as whatever tools that I can help with that will be sharp for particular use. And I think that returning to catechism, something that Tim Keller was talking about in the last years of life, also something that JI Packer talked a lot about the last decade of his life as well, this need for catechesis.

0:29:25 – (Trevin Wax): It is an ancient tool that, if dusted off and used in the right way, can help train our minds, can be part of the spirit’s renewing of our minds so that we’re able to see things correctly, we’re able to see the Bible afresh, but then also see our world through a biblical lens. I’m glad there’s the spiritual formation conversation happening among Gen Z. Some of it’s eclectic, some of it’s sort of all over the place. Some of it’s pulling from whatever you can find. That that simply demonstrates, I think, the hunger for handles and tools and things that you could put together.

0:30:07 – (Trevin Wax): There is always the danger there. I think of thinking that a technique is going to be the silver bullet that brings about Spiritual growth. Just get the right catechism or the right prayer guide or the right prayer practice or the right Bible reading plan or whatever it might be. That emphasis on technique.

0:30:34 – (D): Is one that.

0:30:34 – (Trevin Wax): We have to avoid because the Spirit’s.

0:30:37 – (D): Work in us does not happen just by having the right tools. Tools can be useful in the hands of the Spirit, but tools are not what are determinative in that the word of God is what matters, communion with God is what matters. Communion with God in the context of his people is what matters. And so those are the non negotiable elements. And I think it’s important for Gen Z listeners to recognize the centrality of.

0:31:06 – (Trevin Wax): The Word in this.

0:31:07 – (D): I think Matthew Bingham’s book is a good contribution in this direction. Just simply demonstrating the amount of word centered spiritual formative practices that are already in the evangelical tradition that we need to be aware of, we need to be coming back to. And I hope that this, this catechism tool is one tool of many that could be used as people are seeking to, to see themselves renewed, see themselves changed by the gospel over time.

0:31:38 – (Collin Hansen): I love that. Trevin. We got a couple more questions here with Thomas west and Trevin Wax talking about the Gospel Way Catechism 50 Truths that Take on the World. Thomas, since the book has been published, but out a little bit, how have you been encouraged by its usage?

0:31:52 – (Thomas West): It’s been great hearing from people. Hey, this is helpful. Wow, this is useful. One of the early reviews came in through a friend of the kids parents here in Nashville where she said I didn’t know how much of that cultural story I was wrapped up in and working through the catechism. It helped flag that for me. I’ve also noticed it’s almost like some synthesizing is taking place. Some doctrines get too high and others too low. So some cultural narratives mixed in, they’re getting filtered out through this which is really, really encouraging and others synthesizing. Oh, I had way too much stock here.

0:32:38 – (Thomas West): It’s not going to be that big of a deal. And this one’s, I didn’t know we need to bring that up as well. It’s really special. I mean for me first published book in this fashion, it’s just been a joy to work with Trevin and learn from him in this. But getting to see a written word out there encouraging and helping people along is really rewarding. But I’d say the cultural narratives getting filtered out and the doctrinal synthesizing, those have been particularly encouraging.

0:33:09 – (Collin Hansen): Trevin, let’s close on this. Let’s say you guys revisit this project in 20 years. You will still look like a very young, vibrant man.

0:33:18 – (Thomas West): There’s no doubt about it.

0:33:19 – (Collin Hansen): But you and I will be getting ready.

0:33:21 – (Trevin Wax): Let’s hope so.

0:33:21 – (Collin Hansen): You and I will be getting ready to retire. What questions do you think we’ll need to be prepared to answer then?

0:33:31 – (Trevin Wax): Oh, such a good question. I think we’ve got a few things that are pointing in a direction that actually came about through this conversation. And the transgender ideology was sort of. Gender theories were all the rage when we were in the middle of this, and we were at the peak of that when we were working on this. It’s probably subsiding at some level, but I really think the other trans conversation is a big one, and it’s one that we had to address in this, which was transhumanism, the idea of extending life and consciousness.

0:34:09 – (Trevin Wax): Some of what is happening with that movement. I do Wonder if in 20 years, looking back, one of the things that will need to be pressed upon in catechesis is some of the questions about bioethics at a more granular level than what we have here. Oh, you know, the. The dignity and the value of human life is here. But I do. I do think that some of the questions around, you know, just around different reproductive technologies and things.

0:34:42 – (Collin Hansen): Mutual assistance and dying.

0:34:44 – (Trevin Wax): Oh, yes, that as well.

0:34:45 – (Collin Hansen): Things like that.

0:34:46 – (Trevin Wax): Yeah. And. And all these things are. Are pressing against us in a way that may actually require their own questions at some point, rather than just sort of being nestled in some of the principles. I don’t think you’re going to find many principles 20 years from now that didn’t cover some of these things. But I think in more detail, this is the way it always is. Right. As cultural narratives rise and fall, you find you’ve got to take the biblical truth and you have to use the sharp edges of biblical truth in different places at different times, based on whatever’s manifesting in the culture.

0:35:24 – (Trevin Wax): But overall, the human heart is. Human nature is the same. The human heart is prone to different kinds of straying, but always prone to wander. And then we need the gospel. And the solution of the gospel is always relevant as we look at sin, death, evil, and the evil one. So I’ll be curious to see if we revisit this conversation in 20 years looking almost the same, the three of us. Hopefully.

0:35:54 – (Collin Hansen): I will not. But you will. Somehow. The healing powers.

0:36:00 – (Trevin Wax): I may or may not be in possession of the ring of power.

0:36:04 – (Thomas West): It’s true.

0:36:06 – (Collin Hansen): It’s funny. I think about that guys, and I just wrote down a couple questions. I said, I bet in 20 years we’ll be asking the question, what is human? You know, what is humanity and what is truth? You think? Hmm. Yeah, that’s basically just Genesis all over again and the whole rest of the Bible. So I go back to the question I was asking you, Thomas, earlier. Is this new stuff or is this old stuff? Well, it’s really new iterations of old stuff.

0:36:39 – (Collin Hansen): And the Bible still has the answers. They just have to be applied in some different ways. And different truths need to be brought to bear at different times. Well, I thank you guys for the interview today. Thanks for writing this book, the Gospel Way Catechism, published by Harvest House. Wonderful resources for you, your family, your church. Thanks for writing it, guys. Thanks for joining me on Gospel Mount today.

0:37:02 – (Trevin Wax): Thanks so much for having us, Colin.

0:37:03 – (Thomas West): Thanks, Colin.

0:37:13 – (Collin Hansen): Thanks for listening to this episode of Gospel Bound. For more interviews and to sign up for my newsletter, head over to tgc.org gospelbound Rate and review gospelbound on your favorite podcast platform so others can join the conversation. Until next time, Remember, when we’re bound to the gospel, we abound in hope.