Luther's Large Catechism

Wittenberg · completed in March 1529 and in print by mid-April · published as Deutsch Katechismus, the German Catechism.

his is not a longer version of the Small Catechism. It is a different book for a different reader, and it came first.

The Small Catechism is a set of answers to be memorized by children. The Large Catechism is Luther preaching — unhurried, colloquial, frequently indignant, occasionally very funny — to the men who would have to do the teaching. There is no question-and-answer format. There is a pastor with thirty years of pulpit work behind him explaining what the Commandments actually require, what the Creed actually claims, and why a man who has stopped praying has stopped believing.

Thirty Sermons

The book has an unusual pedigree: it was preached before it was written.

In 1528 Luther took over catechetical instruction at the parish church in Wittenberg and delivered three series of sermons — in May, September, and December — each running to about ten addresses, working through the Commandments, the Creed, the Lord's Prayer, and the sacraments. Those thirty sermons are the raw material of this book, and the reason it still sounds like speech.

The same Saxon visitation of 1528 that provoked the Small Catechism provoked this one. Luther had seen parishes where the pastor could not teach the faith and the people did not know it. His conclusion was that both ends of the problem had to be addressed at once: the people needed something to memorize, and the pastors needed to be taught what they were supposed to be teaching. He finished the manuscript in March 1529, and the first copies came off the press in mid-April.

The Preface

The prefaces are the most quoted part of the book, and deservedly. Luther is addressing pastors who thought themselves past this sort of thing — men who had read the catechism once, mastered it in their own estimation, and moved on to loftier matters. His answer is to describe his own practice:

I am also a doctor and preacher, yea, as learned and experienced as all those may be who have such presumption and security; yet I do as a child who is being taught the Catechism, and every morning, and whenever I have time, I read and say, word for word, the Ten Commandments, the Creed, the Lord's Prayer, the Psalms. And I must still read and study daily, and yet I cannot master it as I wish, but must remain a child and pupil of the Catechism, and am glad so to remain. Martin LutherPreface to the Large Catechism

He is not performing humility. The argument is that the catechism is a short summary and epitome of the whole of Holy Scripture, and that a man who has exhausted it has exhausted the Bible. He also tells fathers to examine their children and servants at least once a week, and to keep them at it if they do not know it.

There is a sharper edge in the same preface. Luther tells pastors who neglect this work that they are not fit to be swineherds, and warns them that they have already fallen. He believed that a minister who would not teach the basics to ordinary people had abandoned his office, whatever else he was busy with.

The Five Parts

A Brief Exhortation to Confession was added to later printings and stands at the end. The proportions are uneven by design: the Ten Commandments take up roughly as much space as the other four parts together, because Luther held that a man who truly knows the Commandments knows the whole of Scripture and can advise, comfort, and judge in any case that comes before him.

What Is a God?

The exposition of the First Commandment contains the definition that has outlived everything around it. Luther does not begin with idols of wood and stone. He begins with the question of what a god actually is, and answers that a god is that from which we expect all good and to which we take refuge in every distress. Then the turn: that upon which you set your heart and put your trust is properly your god.

From there he works through what people actually trust — money first, which he calls the most common idol on earth, then skill, power, reputation, position — and shows that the First Commandment is not a rule about religious observance but a diagnosis of the human heart. Whatever you run to when things go wrong is what you worship.

This is the passage later writers keep returning to, and it explains why the Large Catechism has readers well outside Lutheranism. It is also the theological engine of the Small Catechism's repeated formula about fearing, loving, and trusting God above all things.

The Character of the Book

What strikes a first-time reader is how little it sounds like a confessional document. Luther complains about drunkards and about parents who will not discipline their children. He compares neglectful pastors to men who care only for their bellies. He tells his hearers that the devil is a great deal more interested in them than they are in him. He is warm about marriage, blunt about money, and pastorally tender about the fear of death.

None of this is decoration. It is a book written on the conviction that doctrine is for use — that the Creed is not information but the ground a person stands on when everything else gives way. Read the Third Article on the Holy Spirit and the forgiveness of sins, or the section on the Fourth Petition, and the polemics fall away.

Historic Significance

It is Luther's mature pastoral theology in one volume. Written twelve years after the Ninety-Five Theses, four years after The Bondage of the Will, and the year before the Augsburg Confession, it shows what the Reformation looked like once it had to be taught to villagers rather than argued before emperors. For understanding what Luther actually believed and wanted people to believe, it is more useful than the polemical treatises that made him famous.

It became a confessional standard. Received into the Book of Concord in 1580 alongside the Small Catechism, it binds the Lutheran churches to this day — a rare case of a sermon series becoming a subordinate standard.

It set the pattern of catechetical exposition. The commentary form, in which a teacher works phrase by phrase through the Commandments, Creed, and Lord's Prayer for the benefit of those who must instruct others, runs directly into Ursinus's commentary on the Heidelberg Catechism and the whole later literature of catechism exposition, Reformed as much as Lutheran.

It insisted that pastors keep learning the basics. Of everything in the book, the preface has probably done the most good. A man who says publicly that he recites the Ten Commandments and the Creed every morning like a schoolboy, and is glad to, has said something the ministry has needed in every generation since.

A Reformed Assessment

The divisions are the familiar ones, and they fall in Parts Four and Five. Luther's treatment of baptism attributes to the sacrament a saving efficacy the Reformed churches have consistently declined to grant it, and his treatment of the Supper affirms the oral reception of Christ's body and blood by all communicants — the doctrine that divided him from Zwingli at Marburg and was codified in Article VIII of the Formula of Concord. A Reformed reader will part company with him there, and should say so.

The first three parts are a different matter. The exposition of the Ten Commandments is among the most searching in the sixteenth century and stands comparison with anything the Puritans later wrote on the law. The treatment of the Creed and of the Lord's Prayer is rich, and the account of prayer as commanded rather than optional is worth putting in front of any congregation.

Reformed readers have generally known this. The Large Catechism has been quarried by Reformed pastors for four centuries, precisely because on the law, on sin, on faith, and on prayer, Luther is our teacher whether or not we follow him to the font and the table.

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