Sinclair Ferguson

We create nothing.

We are engineers, always engineers.

using what God has embedded in the world that he's made.

And I think of some stories I know from just my own experience in life of what a remarkable instrument it's been in the lives of people who have, even if they've not memorized the Shorter Catechism, they've learned how to think theologically and logically by using the Shorter Catechism.

Yeah, in my lifetime, so I would say at home in the United Kingdom, evangelical Christians suffered at the hands of secular psychologists who taught two things.

One, if children learn things by rote, that's not a good way to instruct them.

And B, to teach them a system of theology is a very bad thing.

And yet having said that, that's what was happening in the secular world.

The way people learn baseball statistics, cricket statistics, they may not notice it, but they learn these things by rote.

The way people learn computer languages.

And so there was a default here between how people thought in secular terms and how they thought about the spiritual and intellectual nourishment of children.

And so introducing catechism

back into the lives of evangelical Christians was like one of the most difficult selves in the world.

And I think there was therefore a whole generation that suffered pretty badly

because it reared young people who weren't able to out-think their peers and who thought, if I can use the same verb, that thinking was no part of the Christian life.

You know, I remember the late John Stott saying, you know, that he thought he lived in a generation where evangelicals thought that when you come to church, you take your head off.

And the big thing is how you feel and what you like.

And you can see how that way of thinking

And people who didn't think that thinking was important were thinking to think that all the time reared a generation of Christians for whom what I like and how I experience is the big thing and not what God likes and what God says.

And into that generation, I think it was a pretty hard sell to say, you know,