David Lyle Jeffrey on his baptism in the Scottish Baptist Church in rural Canada: “A feature of baptism in our tradition that I continue to value is that it makes you think about the meaning of it quite a lot, both before and after the experience. One of the questions that friends would ask me is, “Do you feel any different?” My Catholic friends especially, since they had the luxury of having just a few drops on their heads when they were too young to remember, wanted to know. Actually, I did feel different, though not perhaps in quite the way they may have expected. It wasn’t euphoric. Rather, I felt as though I had entered into the community of grownups in some way.”
Catechesis for the Road: A Review of Curtis Freeman's Pilgrim Letters
This kind of ecumenical Baptist viewpoint characterizes this book as well. The publisher rightly describes the tenor of these letters as “evangelical-catholic, free-church-ecumenical, and ancient-future.” Freeman is clearly writing within the Baptist tradition, even as he seeks to help those within the tradition reach out to the broader and deeper roots of the broader Christian tradition. In these pages, Pilgrim meets saints of the Great Tradition, such as Tertullian, Augustine, Anselm, Bonhoeffer, and Romero, as well as leading lights from the Anabaptist and Baptist traditions—Thomas Grantham, Edward Barber, William Carey, and others. We also meet some of Freeman’s own teachers (as well as students), and local churches.
Impressive Catechesis
Gregory of Nazianzus’ credal cardiological calligraphy: “If your heart is written upon in some other way than as my teaching demands, come and have the writing changed. I am no unskilled caligrapher of these truths. I write that which is written upon my own heart; and I teach that which I have been taught, and have kept from the beginning up to these gray hairs. Mine is the risk; mine also is the reward of being the director of your soul, and consecrating you by baptism. But if you are already rightly disposed, and marked with the good inscription, see that you keep what is written, and remain unchanged in a changing time about the unchanging Reality.”
