London · first printed in the Book of Common Prayer of 1549 · headed Confirmacion, wherin is conteined a Catechisme for children.

It is the shortest of the great Reformation catechisms and the most widely recited. Luther's Small Catechism has six parts, Heidelberg has 129 questions, Westminster Shorter has 107. This one has about a dozen questions and can be read aloud in five minutes.

That brevity was not carelessness. The catechism was never meant to stand alone. It sits inside the Prayer Book, between the baptismal service and the order of Confirmation, and it exists to do one job: to establish that a child presenting himself to the bishop actually knows what he is doing. Everything else — the doctrine, the devotion, the moral instruction — the Prayer Book delivers elsewhere, through the daily offices and the calendar of readings.

Inside the Prayer Book

The 1549 Book of Common Prayer was largely the work of Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury, and it was the first time the whole worship of the English church had been set out in the language of the people. The catechism is a small part of a very large achievement.

Its rubric states the point plainly: none shall be confirmed hereafter but such as can say in their mother tongue the articles of the faith, the Lord's Prayer, and the Ten Commandments, and can answer such questions of this short catechism as the bishop shall put to them.

Two things follow from that sentence, and both are Reformation convictions in practice. The first is in their mother tongue. Children had been taught the Creed and the Paternoster in Latin, syllables they could repeat without understanding. Cranmer required English. The second is that confirmation now depends on knowledge rather than on age or custom — and confirmation was the gate to the Lord's Table. The English church, like Geneva, tied admission to communion to instruction.

The Four Parts

The opening is the most distinctive thing about it. Where other catechisms begin with God, or with the chief end of man, or with the believer's comfort, this one begins: What is your name? Then: Who gave you this name? And the child answers that his godparents gave it him in his baptism, in which he was made a member of Christ.

The whole catechism proceeds from that. It is not asking the child to construct a faith; it is asking him to take up promises already made over him and make them his own. Three things were promised on his behalf: to renounce the devil and all his works, to believe all the articles of the Christian faith, and to keep God's holy will and commandments. The Creed, the Commandments, and the Lord's Prayer are then rehearsed as the content of those three promises. The structure is a baptismal vow expanded.

The Shape of the Answers

Two passages repay attention.

Asked what he chiefly learns in the articles of his belief, the child answers in three clauses: to believe in God the Father, who made him and all the world; in God the Son, who redeemed him and all mankind; and in God the Holy Ghost, who sanctifies him and all the elect people of God. That last phrase is worth noticing. In a formulary of 1549, learned by children, the work of the Spirit is tied to election.

The second is the summary of the Commandments as a duty toward God and a duty toward one's neighbour — the two tables restated in the terms of our Lord's own summary of the law. The duty toward neighbour is unusually concrete for a catechism: to hurt nobody by word or deed, to be true and just in all dealings, to bear no malice in the heart, to keep the hands from picking and stealing and the tongue from evil-speaking and lying, and to labour truly to get one's own living. Cranmer's ear for English is audible throughout, and it is a large part of why these phrases lodged in the national memory.

1552, 1604, 1662

The catechism grew in stages, and knowing which stage is which prevents a common confusion.

So the most quoted sentence in the Prayer Book Catechism is not Cranmer's, and is not from 1549. It is Jacobean, added fifty-five years later by a man who was not yet a bishop, at the same conference that gave English readers their Bible.

A Reformed Assessment

This site holds the Reformed confession, and the difficulty here is the one the Puritans raised from the beginning.

The child is taught to say that in his baptism he was made a member of Christ, a child of God, and an inheritor of the kingdom of heaven. Read in the strongest sense, that is baptismal regeneration, and generations of English Puritans objected to it on exactly those grounds. Read in a covenantal sense — as the language of the sign attributing to itself what belongs to the thing signified, which is ordinary sacramental speech in Scripture — it is defensible, and many Reformed Anglicans have so defended it. The ambiguity is real, and it is not accidental. The 1549 book was a compromise document, and Cranmer told Bucer as much.

The other Puritan complaint was simple inadequacy. A dozen questions cannot carry the weight of instruction, and the English church knew it: Alexander Nowell produced a much fuller catechism in 1570 to fill the gap. The Millenary Petition asked for a catechism that would actually teach, and when the Puritans finally got the chance at Westminster they wrote two.

What is genuinely ours in it is not small. Instruction in the vernacular, admission to the Table on the basis of knowledge, the Spirit's work tied to the elect people of God, the law summarised as duty to God and neighbour, and prose that made Christian truth memorable to people who could not read. The English Reformation produced martyrs whom we honour — Cranmer among them — and this catechism is part of what they died defending.

Historic Significance

It was the first official catechism of the reformed English church. Before 1549 the English church had primers and private catechisms; this was the formulary, authorised by Act of Parliament and required of every child before confirmation.

It has probably been memorised by more English speakers than any other catechism. Carried in every edition of the Book of Common Prayer for over four centuries, and exported with the Anglican Communion to every continent, its phrases entered ordinary English in a way no other catechism managed.

Its brevity provoked what followed. Nowell's catechism of 1570, and ultimately the Westminster Shorter Catechism of 1647, exist because the Prayer Book Catechism was judged too slight to bear the teaching of a church. That is an odd sort of influence, but a real one.

It belongs to the story of the English Bible. The insistence that a child must say these things in his mother tongue is the same conviction that drove Tyndale to the printing houses of the Continent. The Prayer Book and the English Bible are two halves of one project: putting the words of God, and the words of the church's response, into the language people actually spoke.

Resources for Study

Catechisms