Luther's Small Catechism

Wittenberg · issued as wall charts early in 1529 and in book form that May · Der Kleine Katechismus.

f everything Martin Luther wrote — the treatises that shook Christendom, the German Bible, the hymns, the hundred volumes of collected works — he named two books worth keeping. Writing to Wolfgang Capito in 1537, he said he would be glad to see all the rest perish, excepting The Bondage of the Will and the Catechism.¹

This is that catechism. It is about twenty pages long. It was written for a farmer to teach his children at the kitchen table, and it is arguably the most consequential twenty pages of the Reformation after the Bible itself.

What Luther Saw in Saxony

In 1528, at the Elector's request, Luther joined a visitation of the parishes of Saxony to see how the reform was actually going. What he found appalled him.

Peasants who could not recite the Lord's Prayer. Pastors unable to teach the rudiments of the faith. Whole villages where people considered themselves Christians, came to the sacrament, and knew nothing of the Creed or the Commandments. Luther's preface to the Small Catechism records the shock plainly: the deplorable and miserable condition he had lately seen as a visitor had forced and urged him to prepare this Christian doctrine in a small, plain, simple form.

He had already tried to hand the job off. Justus Jonas and Johann Agricola had been asked to prepare a basic catechism, and Luther was not satisfied with what they produced. After the visitation he stopped waiting and did it himself, drawing on three series of catechetical sermons — roughly thirty in all — that he had preached in Wittenberg in May, September, and December of 1528.

The first thing he printed was not a book. It was a set of broadsheets, large charts meant to be nailed to a wall in a church or a house where children could see them daily. The book came afterward.

The Six Chief Parts

To these Luther appended what turned the book into a manual for daily life: forms for morning and evening prayer and for grace at table, and the Table of Duties — the Haustafel — a collection of Scripture passages addressed to each station of life. Bishops and pastors, civil authorities and subjects, husbands and wives, parents and children, workers and employers, widows, and the congregation generally. Each is given the verses that describe the calling God has placed upon them.

The core three — Commandments, Creed, Lord's Prayer — were not Luther's invention. They were the medieval church's own catechetical inheritance, the minimum every Christian was supposed to know. What Luther did was to explain them evangelically, put them into the hands of ordinary people, and add the sacraments so that the whole of the Christian life was covered.

“What Does This Mean?”

Four words in German — Was ist das? — carry the entire method. Each commandment, each article of the Creed, each petition of the prayer is stated, and then the question is asked, and then answered in one or two sentences a child can hold.

The answers are not definitions. They are almost always about the heart. The first commandment forbids other gods; what does this mean? That we should fear, love, and trust in God above all things. Every following commandment begins the same way: we should fear and love God, so that we do not do this, but instead do that. The negative prohibition is turned into a positive duty, and the whole is anchored in what a person fears and loves and trusts.

That is a theology of the law in a repeated formula a seven-year-old can memorize. It is also why the Small Catechism has never gone stale. It does not tell children what to do. It tells them who God is and what that does to a heart.

As the Head of the Family Should Teach It

Every chief part carries the same heading: as the head of the family should teach it in the simplest way to his household.

That line is easy to read past, and it may be the most radical sentence in the book. Catechesis had been the business of the clergy, conducted in a church, in a language most hearers could not follow. Luther put it in the house and handed it to the father. He told fathers to examine their children and servants at least weekly, and if they did not know it, to keep them at it faithfully.

The consequences ran far beyond doctrine. A household that gathers to learn needs someone who can read, which is why the catechism and the parish school arrived together across Lutheran Europe. Where the Small Catechism went, literacy followed.

Why the Commandments Come First

Luther's ordering is deliberate and worth pausing over, because it is a compressed statement of his whole theology.

The Ten Commandments come first, because until a man knows the law he does not know what is wrong with him. The Creed comes second, because having seen his sin he needs a Savior, and the Creed tells him who that Savior is and what God has done. The Lord's Prayer comes third, because a man who has been given a Savior must learn how to ask his Father for what he needs. Law, then gospel, then prayer. Diagnosis, then remedy, then the life that follows.

The explanation of the Second Article of the Creed is the place to see what this produces. Asked what it means that Jesus Christ is Lord, the catechism does not offer a definition of lordship. It says that Christ has redeemed me, a lost and condemned creature, purchased and won me from sin and death not with gold or silver but with His holy precious blood, that I may be His own and live under Him in His kingdom. The doctrine is personal from the first sentence, and this is a book for children.

Historic Significance

It became the most used book in Lutheran Christendom after the Bible. Received into the Book of Concord in 1580, it has been translated into hundreds of languages and memorized by generations across Europe, Scandinavia, Africa, Asia, and the Americas. Very few books written in the sixteenth century are still being learned by heart by children in the twenty-first.

It set the form for the catechisms that followed. The question-and- answer method addressed to the household, the exposition of Commandments, Creed, and Lord's Prayer, the assumption that ordinary believers can and must be taught doctrine — all of this passed into the Heidelberg Catechism of 1563 and, through it, to the Westminster Shorter Catechism of 1647. The Reformed tradition reached different conclusions at several points; it did not reinvent the method.

It made the home a school of the church. This is the durable contribution and the one most worth recovering. Luther did not build a program. He handed a father six short lessons and told him to teach them at his own table.

Luther himself ranked it above almost everything he wrote. He was not being modest. He thought a book that could put the gospel into the mouth of a plowman's child had done more than a book that won an argument among doctors.

A Reformed Assessment

This site holds the Reformed confession, and two of the six parts state doctrine we do not hold. The Fourth Part teaches that baptism works forgiveness of sins and rescues from death and the devil, language the Reformed churches have never been able to receive without serious qualification. The Sixth Part teaches that the true body and blood of Christ are received under the bread and wine by all who eat, which is the position the Reformed answered at Marburg and again in the Formula of Concord. A Reformed family using this book will want the Heidelberg Catechism at those points.

Everything else is very largely ours. The exposition of the Commandments, the Creed, and the Lord's Prayer could be taught in a Reformed congregation with hardly a word altered, and the explanation of the Second Article is as clear a statement of substitutionary redemption as exists anywhere in the century.

It is worth adding that the debt runs one way. Every Reformed catechism our children learn stands in a line that begins here. Recognizing that is not disloyalty to our own confession; it is ordinary gratitude, and the kind of honesty the Reformers themselves practiced when they cited one another.

Catechisms