“Are You Smarter Than A Fifth Grader?” I’m not speaking of the television show; I’m speaking of a well taught and catechized covenant child of God of that age. I suggest that if adults on a television program struggle with a 5th Grade response to “What was the 49th state admitted to the Union?” it is doubtful they would know the answer to “What is God?”
Christian and non-Christian alike bemoan the “dumbing down” of America. Sadly the Church did not escape the “dumbing down.” This intellectual decline reduced the Christian faith from a biblical, historic, objective, cognitive religion into a cultural, contemporary, subjective, feel good experience – Christian faith went from “I believe” to “I feel.”
Let me get back to 5th graders. If Christian parents are increasingly unable to articulate their faith imagine how this adversely effects the communication of biblical faith to children. Children learn to pray “Now I lay me down to sleep . . .” which is only one word away in meaning from “Twinkle twinkle little star . . ..” Children are told that Jesus wants them to be “good little boys and girls.” The “gospel” for children is singing “Jesus loves me this I know . . ..”
The Church has not helped the problem. Children often spend their early and teen years in segregated Sunday School hearing the same stories of Noah and the Ark, David and Goliath, and Zacchaeus up in the tree, over and over and over again. Then we move them to Children’s Church to hear moral stories from the Bible and that Jesus loves them after which they color, play and eat snacks. It is uncommon today for children to sit in worship under the preaching of the Word and the administration of the Sacraments during their formative years.
The Christian faith “once for all delivered to the saints” is not being passed to the next generation. We have lost the language, the grammar if you will, of the Christian faith. God’s people do not know the words of God – creation, sin, covenant, law, atonement, grace, justification, sanctification and gospel, to name a few. To reengage God’s people with God’s Word is at the heart of another Reformation. To do so is to go against the culture and return to the “ancient paths.”
Every family of God (men, women and children) each Sunday must join with the forever Family of God in corporate worship immersing themselves in the language of their faith; reading, preaching, singing, praying and seeing the Word, with everyone hearing and speaking the covenant language of God. Every covenant believer and family must then learn the definitions of what they hear and speak in God’s house on the Lord’s Day. There is no better way to define what one believes than through “catechesis” - learning the faith through questions and answers in the Westminster Shorter Catechism. Before you think the WSC is too hard for you, remember it was written as biblical grammar for children.
Consider the following story related by the American theologian B. B. Warfield –
We have the following bit of personal experience from a general officer of the United States army. He was in a great western city at a time of intense excitement and violent rioting. The streets were over-run daily by a dangerous crowd.
One day he observed approaching him a man of singularly combined calmness and firmness of mien, whose very demeanor inspired confidence. So impressed was he with his bearing amid the surrounding uproar that when he had passed he turned to look back at him, only to find that the stranger had done the same.
On observing his turning the stranger at once came back to him, and touching his chest with his forefinger, demanded without preface: ‘What is the chief end of man?’ (the first question in the Shorter Catechism). On receiving the countersign, ‘Man’s chief end is to glorify God and to enjoy him forever’ (the Catechism’s answer) –‘Ah!’ said he, ‘I knew you were a Shorter Catechism boy by your looks!’ ‘Why, that was just what I was thinking of you,’ was the rejoinder.
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