Introduction to the Catechism
I.
When we today give children the Small Catechism we give them nothing short of all of Christian doctrine and life, our entire faith and practice. And thus, as Helmut Thielicke notes in his Little Exercise, when we give children the catechism, this is something like a young lad wearing his father’s suit. The coat is far too big, the pants hang around his ankles, and he can’t help but trip over the shoes which are seven sizes too big. It’s not a particularly beautiful sight, but in time, the boy will grow and will embrace the nobility and grace of a gentleman. This is oddly fitting despite the catethism’s title and diminutive appearance. Our Formula of Concord calls it a “bible of the laity” in which is contained “everything that is treated… in Holy Scripture and that is necessary for… salvation.” Kiris Stjerna names it the “compass” of the Christian because it faithfully guides his reading of the sacred scriptures. Charles Arand calls it a “theological swiss army knife” in view of its endless application and use. John Pless recognizes the catechism as a Christian’s “prayer book.” And Ludwig Ihmels identifies it, “not only as a school book, and not only a confessional book” but as “a life book.”
Luther himself saw his little catechism encompassing all of Christian life. He writes in his Warning to the German People, “But now— praise be to God—it has come to pass that man and woman, young and old, know the catechism; they know how to believe, to live, to pray, to suffer, and to die. Consciences are well instructed… In brief… pulpit, altar, and baptismal font have been restored to their proper place, so that—thank God—the form of a Christian church can again be recognized” (AE 47:52). These items are what Luther saw in the six chief parts of the catechism. How to live (Ten Commandments), what to believe (Apostles’ Creed), how to pray (Lord’s Prayer), how to suffer (Baptism/Absolution), and how to die (Lord’s Supper). And as such whether working or praying, believing or doubting, living or dying, the catechism is the book for it all—a compass, handbook, field guide, prayer book, and life book. It is the foundation for the Christian and the Christian church.
This is similarly expressed by Luther in his preface to the German Mass and Service where he writes, “the German service needs a plain and simple, fair and square catechism. Catechism means the instruction in which the heathen who want to be Christians are taught and guided in what they should believe, know, do, and leave undone, according to the Christian faith… This instruction or catechization I cannot put better or more plainly than has been done from the beginning of Christendom… in these three parts, the Ten Commandments, the Creed, and the Our Father. These three plainly and briefly contain exactly everything that a Christian needs to know [to be saved]” (AE 54:64-65). The catechism is everything. It contains all of Christian doctrine and life and it is therefore a book that a person could spend his whole life with and never conquer.
Luther confesses as much in the preface to his Large Catechism, saying, “But this I say for myself: I am also a doctor and a preacher, just as learned and experienced as all of them who are so high and mighty. Nevertheless, each morning, and whenever else I have time, I do as a child who is being taught the catechism and I read and recite word for word the Lord’s Prayer, the Ten Commandments, the Creed, the psalms, etc. I must still read and study the catechism daily, and yet I cannot master it as I wish, but remain a child and pupil of the catechism—and I also do so gladly. These fussy, fastidious fellows would like quickly, with one reading, to be doctors above all doctors, to know it all and to need nothing more. Well this, too, is a sure sign that they despise both their office and their people’s souls, yes, even the word of God. They do not need to fall, for they have already fallen all too horribly. What they need, however, is to become children and again begin to learn the ABCs, which they think they have long since outgrown” (LC preface 7-8). Elsewhere in this same preface Luther speaks even more forcefully saying, “God himself is not ashamed to teach [the catechism] daily, for he knows of nothing better to teach, and he always keeps on teaching this one thing without proposing anything new or different… Are we not the most marvelous fellows, therefore, who allow ourselves to imagine that, after reading and hearing it once, we know everything and need not read and study it anymore? We think we can learn in an hour what God himself cannot finish teaching, though he were to teach it from the beginning of the world until the end” (LC preface, 16).
These sentences are strong medicine against our inborn tendency toward what the ancients called akedia, or the demon of Acedia, which causes us, like Israel, to groan in the wilderness, to tire of our daily bread, and to consider it “worthless manna.” This demon breeds contempt from familiarity and laziness from security. Apathy and spiritual inertia are ever temptations that haunt the steps of those who take up the word of God, and therefore any Christian who takes up the catechism must be vigilant in prayer against the devil and one’s own sinful flesh. Unfortunately, the demon of Acedia has taken captive most laypeople and pastors today with Luther’s little catechism, and as such the catechism has collected much dust and yellowed greatly in the sun on far too many shelves. More often than not, it is treated as a truly poor and meager little book, and the teachers of the catechism receive little to no honor for their labors. This is a truly sad state of affairs and one I hope to remedy. My invitation as such is to become a child with me and to learn the ABCs; to equip ourselves with everything for salvation; to take hold of our great compass, field guide, and life book; and to learn what God hasn’t tired of teaching his people since the beginning— how to live, what to believe, how to pray, how to suffer, and how to die.
II.
When we first approach Luther’s Small Catechism we incidentally stumble into an entire tradition of Christian instruction and handing down the faith. Catechesis has its roots as deep as the book of Deuteronomy where Moses commands the people to keep the statutes and the commandments that the Lord had given. “Hear, O Israel; the LORD our God, the LORD is one. You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might.” Here in Deuteronomy 6:4 we have the great shema, the essential command and promise given to Israel, which is one of the most widely recognized passages of the Old Testament. What is less known is what God commands immediately following this. That, “You shall teach [the shema] diligently to your children, and shall talk of it when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise. You shall bind it as a sign on your hand, and it shall be as frontlets between your eyes. You shall write it on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.” And later in Deuteronomy 6:20 we hear, “When your son asks you in time to come, ‘What is the meaning of the testimonies and the statutes and the rules that the LORD our God has commanded you?’ then you shall say to your son, ‘We were Pharaoh’s slaves in Egypt. And the LORD brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand.” What we discover here is Old Testament catechesis and from this Old Testament catechetical root we learn three things. We learn that catechism revolves around the central commands and promises of God, or we could say, God’s word of Law and God’s word of Gospel. We learn that catechism happens between the head of the household and his children. And we learn that catechism is done in the conversational form of questions and answers in the context of a family meal. In this way catechism is simultaneously a text, a body of knowledge, and a style of teaching. It is “teaching” in three dimensions.
Beyond the Old Testament, catechism is also shaped greatly by the New Testament and the early church. In Galatians 6:6 we actually hear the Greek word katechoumenos from which we get “Catechumen”. St. Paul writes, “Let the one who is taught [katechoumenos] the word of God share all good things with the one who teaches [katechounti].” In Paul’s usage, catechism is instruction in the word of God according to the revelation of Christ who was “born of a woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law” and who won for us salvation by his cross and resurrection. Within the Greek verb katecho (“to teach”), we hear our English word “echo” which nicely indicates not only teaching, but also the method of teaching which is an “echo”, back and forth questions and answers. Here again, the essential elements of teaching, the word of God, and questions and answers are reiterated, but with the cross and resurrection of Christ at the center and as the basis for catechesis.
In the early church, this is picked up especially by St. Augustine, who is one of our foremost catechists. With the biblical foundation of the Old and New Testaments, Augustine gave catechesis a definite ecclesial shape as biblical instruction prior to baptism and admission to the Lord’s Supper. Being part of Augustine’s catechumenate meant undergoing rigorous training, study, and repentance. The catechumen publicly renounced his old way of life with all its attendant vice, wickedness, and uncleanness, and embraced Christ’s forgiveness and the new life of holiness and purity according to the Ten Commandments. Because of the pagan background and practices of many in the catechumenate, often this time of repentance and training included exorcisms to cast out the unclean spirits and make room for the Holy Spirit. After this preparation, a catechumen would be baptized and receive the words of the Apostles’ Creed and the Lord’s Prayer for the first time and be allowed into the full fellowship of the Sacrament of the Altar. The catechumen was transformed from a “hearer” of the Word into a participant in the “mysteries” of God, namely, the sacraments of Holy Baptism and the Lord’s Supper (Eph 3:6).
Moving into the Middle Ages, the catechesis of the church maintained its central texts, namely, the Creed, the Lord’s Prayer, and the Ten Commandments, but it also added texts and shifted its focus slightly. With the form of the mass becoming more stable, liturgical texts like the “Te Deum Laudamus” and the “Venite” were added. Likewise, with the establishment of the confessional booth and a codified system of Penance, catechisms tended to focus more heavily on preparing people for confession and doing works of satisfaction. Thus, they included prayers like the “Ave Maria” alongside the Lord’s Prayer and the order of the catechism tended to follow Paul’s dictum in 1 Corinthians 13 of faith (Creed), hope (Lord’s Prayer), and love (Commandments) with a special emphasis on the latter.
Thus by the time Luther began his career as a friar in the 16th century, catechetical pamphlets and confessional manuals abounded. Likewise, by the time Luther sat down to compose his Large and Small Catechisms he had already preached on the chief parts of the catechism numerous times as was common for the mendicant orders to do. The catechism was something he had studied, taught, and preached, but it was not something he had set his hand to composing yet. In fact, his writing a catechism came after numerous failed attempts by others and Luther’s pleading that someone take up the task instead of him for the sake of the Reformation. But three chief things can be identified as the catalysts for Luther finally producing his catechisms.
The first is indicated in the preface to Luther’s Small Catechism and that is the Saxon Visitation that occured from 1526-28. By this time, the work of reforming the church had been going on for almost a decade and some of Luther’s best written works had already been produced including his Heidelberg Disputation, Leipzig Disputation, On the Freedom of the Christian, The Babylonian Captivity of the Christian Church, On the Bondage of the Will, Against the Heavenly Prophets, and his famous Confession Concerning Christ’s Supper. Apart from theological work, Luther had also put his hand to reforming and composing the Latin and German Mass so that the mass was purified from papal errors and given back to the people in an Evangelical form and in their own language. In light of this tremendous work confessionally and liturgically, Luther and the other reformers wanted to see the effect that their reformation was having at a congregational level among pastors and laity. Teams of “visitors” were selected to examine the state of congregations of the Evangelical movement and what they discovered is described in colorful terms by Luther in the preface to his Small Catechism. In his preface he describes how the common man lived like swine, abusing his freedom, and living in total license. What was worse, both clergy and lay people didn’t know the basics of the faith like the Ten Commandments, the Creed, or the Lord’s Prayer, and thus they couldn’t rightly be called Christians. In sum, what the visitors discovered was failure. The Reformation had, by all appearances, failed.
The second catalyst for composing the Small Catechism was the failure of Luther’s colleagues, both in successfully producing a catechism, and in faithfully confessing the doctrine of Law and Gospel. Philipp Melanchthon’s catechism was too long and doctrinaire; Johann Agricola’s was shorter than Melanchthon's but contained errors that ended up causing one of the more famous debates in the early Reformation called the Antinomian Disputations. The antinomian error is to be “anti-law”, but this doesn’t mean that they were “against” the law, but rather that they put something “in the place of” the law. What they replaced the Law with was the Gospel. Thus, they still sought to bring people to repentance and good works, but the method was to guilt people with the Gospel; to craft the cross of Christ into a picture of sin, guilt, and repentance instead of righteousness, innocence, and forgiveness. This error principally confuses the Law and the Gospel so that the Gospel is turned into the Law and what is left is, in fact, no Gospel at all. Because of this, what anti-nomianism produces is thoroughgoing legalism. The chief focus is repentance, doing well, and producing good works. The distinction is simply what motivates this sorrow over sin and doing more and doing better. Luther would be forced to confront this error and settle the debate by clarifying, on the one hand, that the Law as summarized in the Ten Commandments is the means by which God accuses and condemns sin and thereby works repentance and, on the other hand, that the Gospel as summarized in the Apostles’ Creed is the means by which God absolves and comforts the sinner and thereby works faith which is a living and mighty thing that can’t help but call on God in the Lord’s Prayer and do every good work according to one’s baptismal identity. Thus, Luther’s address of this issue expresses itself in the very ordering of the chief parts of the catechism and the movement from Law to Gospel.
The third and final catalyst for composing his own little catechism is probably the one nearest and dearest to me and that is that Luther became a father. He married his Katie and soon enough he had a little Hans running around who needed a little catechism. As such, Luther himself was given the great and noble task of taking all the wisdom and glory and majesty of God and communicating it to a four year old. As a reflection of this, the kinds of questions that Luther asks in his catechism are not the erudite questions of a scholar to students pursuing a doctorate like, “What does this mean?” They take the simple German form, “Was ist das?” or “Papa, what is that?” And the answers that Luther gives don’t take a dry or cold analytical tone, but breath with the life and warmth of rhyme and meter. “Du sollst nicht andere Götter haben!” (“You shall have no other gods”) receives the rhythmic and rhyming answer “Wir sollen Gott über alle Dinge fürchten, lieben, und vertrauen” (“We should fear, love, and trust in God above all things”). Luther’s explanation of the first article likewise practically sings and dances with its “Leib und Seele, Augen, Ohren und alle Glieder… Kleider und Schuh, Essen und Trinken, Haus und Hof, Weib und Kind, Acker, Vieh und alle Güter..." There is constant play with words that permeates the text of Luther’s explanations and that makes the catechism positively hum with melodic life and consequently makes it prime material for instruction and memorization. One of the great privileges we have is the great similarity between our English and Luther’s German so that this melody and rhyme can be heard even through a translation, although it is a real treat to hear it in German.
Luther’s Large Catechism was published first in 1528 and his Small Catechism followed in 1529. Within months of it being printed it became the single most published book in Europe. Because of its diminutive size and intended use, the Small Catechism was originally printed as a large poster to be hung in the home or school. It was also published in a pamphlet form to be carried around and read as one went about his or her daily work. The original printings of the Catechism included woodcut illustrations of Bible stories so that each part of the catechism could be explained and learned through art. Luther also composed hymns for each of the chief parts which persist in Lutheran Service Book to this day: LSB 581 (Commandments), LSB 954 (Creed), LSB 766 (Lord’s Prayer), LSB 406 (Baptism), LSB 607 (Confession), LSB 627 (Lord’s Supper). Combined, Luther’s catechetical work enabled his students to hear the faith, see the faith, and sing the faith. He connected the ear, eye, and mouth so that the whole person was engaged in being taught the faith. For this same reason, the Missouri Synod has always worked diligently to produce a bible, a catechism, and a hymnal to be used together as the foundation for teaching and keeping the faith.
III.
The current Synodical Catechism of the Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod, Luther’s Small Catechism with Explanation is, by far, the best catechism she has ever produced. It embodies the spirit of Luther’s own catechetical method and equips the saints to use it as a devotional book, a prayer book, a school book, and a church book. The explanation section has been updated and includes supremely helpful discussions about modern issues such as six day creation, faith and reason, gender and sexuality, religious pluralism, race and culture, etc. Each section of the synodical explanation is broken down into the Central Thought, a Closer Reading of the Small Catechism, and Connections and Applications. Each section also concludes helpfully with an appropriate psalm, hymn, and prayer which lends itself to devotional use and use in the home. The appendix to the catechism also contains useful segments like how to read the bible, what is worship, how to pray, a list of the books of the bible, an outline of the church calendar, an index of churchly symbols and their meaning, and a glossary of churchly terms. The catechism can also be read, learned, and taught alongside a book by John Pless titled, Luther’s Small Catechism: a Manual for Discipleship. Pless was one of two chief drafters for the synodical explanation section and his book follows the catechism’s chief parts and includes helpful discussion questions at the end of each chapter that are keyed to the catechism’s page and question numbers. He is the LCMS’s foremost catechist and has devoted much of his life to writing about and teaching Luther’s Small Catechism. Recently, he worked with Concordia Publishing House in publishing an annotated version of the Large Catechism titled, Luther’s Large Catechism with Annotations and Contemporary Applications. It also serves as a fine companion volume or next step to studying and learning the chief parts of the catechism. I highly recommend both volumes.
-Rev. Philip D. Bartelt
