Collected Works of Martin Luther

by Martin Luther

The ignorance of the people in religious things, of which Luther was made aware during the Visitation in the Saxon Electorate in 1527, led him to compose a sort of Catechism, “which should be a short abstract and recapitulation of Holy Scripture.” He was desirous of providing in this way a manual for the “instruction of the children and the simple,” and more particularly of supplying fathers of families with an easy means “of questioning and catechising their children and dependents at least once a week (as was their duty), and seeing what they knew or had learnt of it.”

  Thus, at the commencement of 1529, or possibly as early as 1528, he was at work, first, on the (Shorter) Catechism “for the rude country-folk,” as he writes to a friend, and also preparing mural tablets (“tabulæ”) which set out the matter “in the shortest and baldest way.” Of these tablets his pupil Rörer says, on Jan. 20, that some of them hung on his walls while the Catechism (“prædicatus pro rudibus et simplicibus”) was still in process of making. It was in this form that the “Shorter Catechism” first appeared, but, in the same year (1528) these tablets were collected into a booklet entitled the “Enchiridion.”

  Luther was at the same time at work on a fuller German Catechism which was intended to supply the heads of families, and more particularly the preachers, with further matter for their instructions. This work, under the title of “Deudsch Catechismus,” was finished and printed in April, 1529, and in May appeared a Latin translation of the same. This was what was eventually termed the Larger Catechism.

  In the preface to the Shorter Catechism Luther puts on the shoulders of the Catholic bishops the blame for the fact, that, the “common folk, particularly in the villages, knew nothing whatever of Christian doctrine.” He also admits, however, that, among the Evangelicals, there were “unfortunately many pastors who are quite unskilled and incapable of teaching.” Hence it came about that the people “knew neither the Our Father, the Creed nor the Ten Commandments,” and “lived like so many brute beasts and senseless swine.” “And how can it be otherwise,” he asks the pastor and preacher, “seeing that you snooze and hold your tongue?” He accordingly requires of the ministers, first, that, in their teaching, they should keep to one form of the “Ten Commandments, Creed, Our Father and Sacrament,” etc., and not “alter a syllable”; and “further, that, when they had taught the text thoroughly, they should see that the meaning of it is also understood”; finally, the pastor was to take the Larger Catechism and study it and then “explain things still more fully to his flock” according to their needs and their power of comprehension.

  In spite of all this he has no wish that the particular method and form of his Catechism should be made obligatory; here again, according to his principle, everything must be spontaneous and voluntary. “Choose whatever form you please and then stick to it for ever.”

  Nevertheless whoever refuses to “learn by heart” the text selected is to be treated as a denier of Christ, “shall be allowed not a shred of Christian freedom, but simply be handed over to the Pope and his officers, nay, to the devil himself. Parents and masters are also to refuse them food and drink and to warn them that the sovereigns will drive such rude clowns out of the land,” etc. This agrees with a letter Luther wrote to Joseph Levin Metzsch on August 26, 1529, in which he says that those who despise the Catechism and the Evangel are to be driven to church by force, that they may at least learn the outward work of the Law from the preaching of the Ten Commandments.

  Filled with anxiety for the future of his Church he warmly exhorts the pastors to provide for a constant supply of preachers and worthy officials. They were to tell the authorities and the parents, “of what a gruesome crime they were guilty, when they neglected to help to educate children as pastors, preachers, and writers, etc.... The sin now being committed in this respect by both parents and authorities is quite beyond words; this is one way the devil has of displaying his cruelty.” We see from this that Luther’s solicitude for the teaching of the Catechism had a practical motive beyond that lying on the surface. He wished to erect not only a bulwark but also a nursery for the Church to come; for this same reason, in his efforts about this time on behalf of the schools (see vol. vi., xxxv., 3), what he had in view was, that, with the help of the Bible and the Catechism, they should become seminaria ecclesiarum.

  In the preface to the Larger Catechism of 1530 Luther lashes those among his preachers who turned up their noses at the Catechism.

  Many, he says, despise “their office and this teaching, some because they are so very learned, others out of laziness and belly-love”; they will not buy or read such books; “they are, in fact, shameful gluttons and belly-servers, better fitted to look after the pigs and the hounds than to be pastors having the cure of souls.” To them he holds up his own example. He too was “a Doctor and preacher, nay, as learned and experienced as any of them,” and yet he read and recited every morning, and whenever he had time, “like a child, the Ten Commandments, Creed, Our Father, Psalms, etc.”; he never ceased being a student of the Catechism. “Therefore I beg these lazy bellies or presumptuous saints, that, for God’s sake, they let themselves be persuaded, and open their eyes to see that they are not in reality so learned and such great Doctors as they imagine.”

  The exhortations in this preface, to all the clergy to make use of and teach the Catechism diligently, contain much that is useful and to the point.

  In other passages he nevertheless sees fit to emphasise what he says by false and odious reflections on the Papacy. “Our office is now quite other from what it was under the Pope; now it is serious and wholesome, and thus much more arduous and laborious and full of danger and temptation.” Before him “no Doctor on earth had known the whole of the Catechism, that is the Our Father, Ten Commandments and Creed, much less understood them and taught them as now, God be praised, they are taught and learnt even by little children. In support of this I appeal to all their books, those of the theologians as well as those of the lawyers. If even one article of the Catechism can be learnt aright from them, then I am willing to let myself be broken on the wheel or bled to death.”

  In the plan of both the Larger and Smaller Catechism Luther keeps to the traditional threefold division, viz. the Ten Commandments, Apostles’ Creed and Our Father. To these he appends a fourth part on baptism and a fifth on the Supper, the only two sacraments he recognises. He also slipped in a short supplementary instruction on the new form of Confession before the chapter on the Supper. The Smaller Catechism was provided from the very first with morning and evening prayers, grace for meals and an eminently practical “Household Table of Texts,” consisting of appropriate verses for pastors, for their subordinates and pupils in general, for temporal authorities, for subjects, married people, parents, masters, children and also for the “young in general, for widows and for the parishes.”

  The language, more particularly of the Shorter Catechism, is throughout a model of simplicity and clearness.

  We may find an example of his brevity and concision at the end of the “Creed”; the passage will also serve to show how greatly his teaching differed from that of the Church. After the words: “I believe in the Holy Ghost, the Holy Christian Church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the dead and life everlasting, Amen,” there follows in the Catechism the usual question: “What means this?” and the answer, with regard to the Church, is that the Holy Ghost “calls, gathers together, enlightens, hallows and holds the whole body of Christians on earth in Jesus Christ in one true faith; in which body of Christendom He free-handedly forgives me and all the faithful all our sins daily,” etc. The paragraph ends, as do all the articles on the Creed, in the usual form: “This is true.”

  In spite of all peculiarity of doctrine in the Shorter Catechism all polemical attacks on the olden Church are carefully eschewed. In the Larger Catechism, on the contrary, they abound. Even under the First Commandment, speaking of the worship of God, the author alludes to what “hitherto we have in our blindness
been in the habit of practising in Popery”; “the worst idolatry” had held sway, seeing that we sought “help, consolation and salvation in our own works.” In the explanation of the article on the “Holy Christian Church, the Communion of Saints” it is set forth at the outset, that, “in Popery,” “faith had been stuck under the bench,” “no one having acknowledged Christ as Lord.” “Formerly, before we came to hear [God’s Word] we were the devil’s own, knowing nothing of God or of Christ.”

  On the other hand, several of Luther’s doctrines find no place whatever in either of the Catechisms. For instance, those, which, according to the testimony of Protestant scholars quoted above, necessarily lead to a “Christianity void of dogma” (above, ff.). The people and the pastors learn nothing here of their right of private judgment with regard to the text of the Bible and the articles of faith. Nor is anything said of that view of original sin which constituted the very basis of the new system, viz. that it is destructive of every predisposition to what is good; nor of the enslaved will, which is ridden now by God, now by the devil; nor of the fact that man’s actions have only the value imputed to them by God; nor, finally, do we find anything of predestination to hell, of the “Hidden God” Who quashes the Will of the “Revealed God” that all men be saved, and Who, to manifest His “Justice,” gloats over the endless torment of the countless multitudes whom He infallibly predestined to suffer eternally. The reason for the suppression of these doctrines in catechisms intended for the general reader is patent. The dogmas they embody, in so far as they vary from the traditional, are too contradictory to form a solid theological structure. To what dangers would not the new doctrine have been exposed, and what would have been the bad impression on the reader, had mention been made in the Catechisms of such theories, even though, in reality, they formed the very backbone of the new theology?

  Luther’s Catechisms were well received and were frequently reprinted. Many enactments of the secular rulers, particularly in the Saxon lands, insisted that his Shorter Catechism should be learnt by heart and his Larger Catechism be made the basis of the sermons.

  Mathesius wrote: “If Dr. Luther during his career had done nothing more than introduce the two Catechisms into the homes, the schools and the pulpits, reviving prayers before and after meals and on rising and going to bed, even then the whole world could not sufficiently thank or repay him.”— “Luther’s booklet,” declares O. Albrecht, “became a practical guide to pious patriarchal discipline in the home, and the very foundation of the education of the people in those German lands which had come under the influence of his Reformation.... Even in the Latin schools his Parvus catechismus became, in the 16th century, one of the most widely disseminated handbooks.”

  In the heyday of their triumph the Catechisms were incorporated in the Book of Concord, first in German in 1580 and then in Latin in 1584, and were thus bodily incorporated in the Creed of the Lutheran Evangelical Church. They were accepted “as the layman’s Bible in which all is comprised that is dealt with in Holy Scripture and which it is necessary for a Christian man to know.” Highly as Luther valued his Catechism, still he certainly had never intended it to be enforced as a rule of faith, for we have heard him express his readiness to sanction the use of any other short and concise form of instruction. (See above, .)

  Luther had nevertheless taken great pains over his work.

  He had been thinking of it long before he actually set to work on it. As early as 1526 he had spoken in his “Deudsche Messe und Ordnung Gottis Diensts” of the need of a “rude, homely, simple and good work on the Catechism” for the congregation of true Christians which he was planning; indeed, he had already dealt with certain portions of the Catechism in his “Kurcz Form der czehen Gepott” (1520), and in his “Betbüchlin” (1522). It was probably owing to his influence that Jonas and Agricola were entrusted with the drafting of a catechism for boys. While engaged on this work, in 1528, he, as a final preparation for it, preached three courses of sermons on the Catechism. These sermons were first published in 1894 by G. Buchwald in “Die Entstehung der Katechismen Luthers,” being taken from the notes by Rörer; Buchwald draws attention to the close connection existing between the sermons and the text of the Catechism.

  So well did Luther promote the teaching of the elementary truths of religion, that, in a notice given from the pulpit on Nov. 29, 1528, he was able to speak of a rule according to which it was the custom at Wittenberg four times in the year to preach four sermons on the Catechism spread over a fortnight.

  This custom lasted long and spread to other places. Bugenhagen, so it is said on reliable authority, always carried Luther’s Catechism with him. He declared, in 1542, that he had already preached about fifty times on the Catechism, and he seems to have organised and kept up the practice of the “catechism weeks” when pastor of Wittenberg; at any rate the rules he drew up subsequent to 1528 insist repeatedly on such sermons being preached on the Catechism.

  Luther’s Catechism and Ecclesiastical Antiquity

  In the passage of his “Deudsche Messe” where he speaks of his idea on the teaching of the Catechism, Luther says, that he knew no better way to give such instruction than “that in which it had been given from the earliest days of Christianity and until now, viz. under the three heads: The Ten Commandments, the Creed and the Our Father”; these three things contained all that was called for. Hence he himself was far from sharing the opinion of certain later Protestants, viz. that, in the selection and methodical treatment of these three points he had struck out an entirely new line. He simply adapted the existing form of instruction to his new doctrines, which he cast into a shape suitable for popular consumption.

  The Decalogue, together with Confession with which it naturally goes hand in hand, had assumed, ever since the 13th century, an ever-growing importance in the instructions intended for the people. In esteeming, as he did, the Ten Commandments, the Creed and the Lord’s Prayer, Luther was simply following in the footsteps of the 14th and 15th century. Johann Wolff, the Frankfurt preacher, who is described on his tombstone as “Doctor decem præceptorum,” as his Handbook for Confession of 1478 shows, was quite indefatigable in his propaganda on behalf of the use of the Decalogue in confession and in popular instructions.

  We must here call attention, above all, to the instruction habitually given in the home by parents and god-parents before Luther’s day; this “consisted chiefly in teaching the Creed and the Our Father, two points belonging to the oldest catechetical formularies of the ancient Church.” Luther himself had learnt these in the Latin school with the rest contained in the hornbooks, and on them in turn he based his own Catechism.

  Melanchthon speaks, in 1528, of the “Children’s manual containing the Alphabet, the Our Father, the Creed and other prayers,” as the first school primer which had come down from the past.

  Even Mathesius admits that, “parents and schoolmasters taught their children the Ten Commandments, the Creed and the Our Father, as I in my childhood learnt them at school and often repeated them with the other children, as was the custom in the olden schools”; he adds, however, that the “tiresome devil” had smuggled additions into the Catholic “A.B.C. book” and corrupted it with Popish doctrine, whereby servitors are “turned” towards the Mass; the devil “had also introduced into the school primer the idolatrous ‘Salve Regina’ which detracted from the honour due to Jesus Christ, our one Mediator and Intercessor.”

  In the 15th and 16th century priests were often urged to recite from the pulpit every Sunday the Creed and Our Father, sometimes also the Hail Mary, and the Decalogue was not unfrequently added. A work by the Basle parish-priest, Johann Surgant, which appeared in 1502 and was many times republished, deals exclusively with the expounding of the above points to the people, supplies each with explanatory notes, and requires, in accordance with the existing rules, that the priests should carefully instruct the people in them (“diligenter informent”). It was an old custom to preach on the Catechism during Len
t as Luther also had done in his younger days, taking for his subject the Ten Commandments and the Our Father; this custom, too, had probably been handed down from the time, when, during the weeks preceding the great day for baptism, viz. Holy Saturday, the catechumens were instructed in the Creed and the Our Father (“traditio symboli et orationis dominicæ”).

  The courses of sermons preached four times a year at Wittenberg also had their analogy in the Church’s past. As early as 1281, a synod meeting in London under Archbishop Peckham of Canterbury had required, in the 10th Canon, that the parish-priest should rehearse every three months the principal doctrines of the Christian faith and morals simply and concisely.

  Even in his Confession or examination before Communion of 1523 Luther had merely revived, under another form, an institution of the Mediæval Church, for, in the Confession before Communion, it had been customary to recite the principal articles of Christian faith.

  As to what Luther says, viz. that the instruction given to the people had formerly borne only on the three points named above, and that of the two sacraments treated of in his Catechism “sad to say nothing had hitherto been taught,” it is only necessary to say that numerous prayer-books and manuals on confession dating from the close of the Middle Ages contain abundant matter both on the sacraments and on other things touching doctrine.

  Before Luther’s day the term Catechism had not been taken to mean the book itself, but the subject-matter which was taught by word of mouth and was confined to the points indicated above. It was in this sense that he said, for instance in the Table-Talk: “The Catechism must remain and be supreme in the Christian Church.” It was he and Melanchthon who initiated the custom of applying the term not only to the contents of the volume but also to the volume itself. Hence, it is verbally true, that, before Luther’s day, there existed no “Catechism”; the religious writings dealing with the subject bore other and different titles. Nor was the arrangement of question and answer regarded as essential to the body of instructions which went under the term of Catechism, a circumstance which also seemed to favour the assertion, that, before Luther’s day, no such thing was known. But if question and answer be essential, then, even his own Larger Catechism could not rightly have borne the title, seeing that it has not this form. Nevertheless the system of question and answer had always been highly prized and had sometimes been made use of on the model of the questions put at baptism.