Teaching God's Children His Teaching: A Guide for the Study of Luther's Catechism

T E AC H I N G GOD’S CHILDREN

H I S T E AC H I N G

A G U I D E F O R T H E S TU D Y OF LUTHER’S C ATECHISM R

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ROBERT KOLB

TEACHING

god’s children his teaching

A GUIDE FOR THE STUDY OF LUTHER’S CATECHISM Concordia Seminary Press Saint Louis

First edition : Crown Publishing Inc., Hutchinson, Minnesota • usa • copyright © 1992 Second edition : Concordia Seminary Press, Saint Louis, Missouri • usa • copyright © 2012

Teaching God’s Children His Teaching: A guide for the study of Luther’s Catechism New Edition Concordia Seminary Press isbn 978-0-911770-79-7 Copyright © 2012 Robert Kolb Concordia Seminary 801 Seminary Place, St. Louis, Missouri 63105 Printed in the United States of America All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of Concordia Seminary, St. Louis. www.concordiatheology.org www.csl.edu About the cover: The artwork depicts Lois and Eunice, the grandmother and mother of Timothy, teaching him the faith before he became a traveling companion of the apostle Paul (2 Timothy 1:5). It is an artistic rendering of a panel of the stained glass window that illuminates the chancel of the Chapel of St. Timothy and St. Titus, Concordia Seminary, St. Louis. Made of a unique faceted glass design, the window was crafted by the Willet Stained Glass Studios of Philadelphia, and a gift to Concordia Seminary by Mr. and Mrs. Rupert Dunklau.

Contents 11

On Using This Book

15

Chapter 1

knowing how to live and die 37

Chapter 2

in whom we put our trust 57

Chapter 3

fearing and loving god so that...

79

Chapter 4

for us and for our salvation 101

Chapter 5

would not prayer alone suffice to exercise faith?

117

Chapter 6

to receive god’s word in many ways is so much better 133

Chapter 7

teach us to pray 139

Chapter 8

called to practice our humanity 155

A Concluding Word

157

Chapter 1 Endnotes

160

Chapter 2 Endnotes

162

Chapter 3 Endnotes

164

Chapter 4 Endnotes

166

Chapter 5 Endnotes

168

Chapter 6 Endnotes

170

Chapter 7 Endnotes

171

Chapter 8 Endnotes

172

Scripture Index

Teaching God’s Children His Teaching Author’s Comment

on using this book This book was written as a reader for catechists. It contains my understanding of how Luther understood the function and the content of his Catechism, as we might read it at the beginning of the twenty-first century. It is designed to assist pastors and others involved in Christian education as they prepare for teaching the Catechism to adolescents. It is also designed for the parents of those adolescents to read so that they might reinforce what the catechists of the congregation are doing as they instruct the children of the congregation.

I hope that it will serve as devotional reading for all who wish to review the Catechism in a slightly different form. Perhaps, too, some pastors will read it as they prepare to preach the Catechism to their congregations.

I completed the final preparation of the first edition of this little volume in 1991. Since its appearance, Charles Arand produced his more extensive commentary on Luther’s Catechisms, That I May Be his Own.1 More recently, Timothy Wengert has published his interpretation of the Catechisms, Martin Luther’s Catechisms.2 These are recommended reading for every reader of this introduction to Luther’s catechetical efforts! For those who read German, the five-volume work of Albrecht Peters, posthumously brought to press by his colleague Gottfried Seebaß, provides an extensive, detailed commentary on the Catechisms of Luther and their place in the catechetical tradition of the church.3 It is beginning to appear in English translation.4 For reading the texts of the catechisms in the context of the best of recent research and study, with up-to-date notes and introductions, readers must turn to the recent scholarly edition of the Lutheran confessional writings in English published by AugsburgFortress Publishers.5 This volume was completed on the five-hundred-eighth anniversary of Martin Luther’s baptism. Although it took a long while for Luther to realize the significance of this act of God, his baptism became for him the heart of his daily life. For God’s promise to him in his baptism—God’s acceptance of him as his child and his commitment to him as his Father forever and without fail—sustained and supported Luther in good days and bad. To convey that kind of life to others Luther composed his Catechism.

It is a marvelous little book. Rightly has it commanded the attention and affection of generations of children and parents. I do not believe that Luther’s Catechisms provide a cure-all for what ails the church or the world, nor do I believe that they alone should be the texts for all Christian instruction. I do believe in taking his Catechism seriously and using it seriously—in the manner in which Luther understood it and its function. I do believe that this catechism, 11

Robert Kolb as a lifelong process of listening to and learning God’s word within the framework of his law and his gospel, is indeed the best basis for genuine Christian piety (which is truly human living). I also believe that Luther’s Small Catechism provides an excellent introduction and guide to instruction in that piety, that way of life.

The Catechism is an adventure, an adventure of faith. God’s richest blessings as you use this book to open another window on God’s revelation of himself and of what it means to be human. That was Luther’s hope as he composed this gift to the church.

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Teaching God’s Children His Teaching

Chapter 1 knowing how to live and die From Norway to Nigeria, from Hamburg and Helsinki to Houston and Hong Kong, in languages from Amharic to Zulu, for more than four hundred fifty years, countless young people have struggled to memorize a small book as they grow up, and countless old people have struggled to pray its words as they lie dying. The little book is Dr. Martin Luther’s Small Catechism.

Why? What’s so special about this one little book of not more than eight thousand words?

Luther himself thought that the chief contribution of his reforming efforts had been that men and women, young and old, had come to know the Catechism. That meant that “they know how to believe, to live, to pray, to suffer, and to die,” Luther could write in 1531: that was the result of what “our gospel”—through its teaching of the Catechism—had accomplished.6 In that description of his Reformation, Luther did not mean what we refer to as his Small Catechism. He used it in the sense of Christians since the early church, the basic instructional program in the Christian faith. But within a generation his students came to define “the Catechism” as Luther’s Catechisms, Large and Small. One of his students compared the Catechism to the product of an alchemist who draws forth the quintessence, the core, power, sap and pith, of a substance for special use. Christoph Fischer stated that God prepared an extract of the Scriptures in the Catechism. Another of Luther’s students, Joachim Mörlin, compared Luther to a “busy little bee who has drawn forth saving honey from all the roses and other lovely flowers of God’s paradise and poured it into the tiny jar of his Small Catechism.” More frequent were descriptions like that of Mörlin’s friend, Nicholaus Gallus, who described Luther’s Catechisms as an “accurate scale, touchstone, level, and plumb line, and unerring and certain compass.”7 But why? Why have so many people found this little book so important? It is because Luther’s Small Catechism is more than a book. It is a way of life. Or, more specifically, it cultivates a world view, out of which we live as believers in Jesus Christ. It creates a mindset which is grounded in the Scriptures and grows out of them. It is a handbook for Christian living.

Martin Marty, writing of the Large Catechism in words descriptive of the Small Catechism as well, stated that the book is not systematic or dogmatic theology, nor an ethical textbook, nor merely a historical document, nor strictly speaking biblical interpretation. It is, in a sense, all of those and yet none. Instead, “it asks, ‘what does the Christ-life look like if I believe in the forgiveness of sin?’”8 15

Robert Kolb Marty concludes his book on the Large Catechism (the title of which describes this catechetical life with the term The Hidden Discipline) by observing that life under the forgiveness of sins is lived out neither under the crushing weight of God’s law nor with an abuse of grace which leads to sloppy—sinful—living. Instead, this forgiven life is lived under God’s liberation from the oppression which each culture brings to those for whom it tries to organize life. The gospel gives an alternative point of orientation to every plan from any culture for the organization of human life. Marty labels the Ten Commandments the “judge” of such a life lived under the hidden discipline which the gospel creates. The “formula” of such a life is the Creed, and its “battle hymn” is the Lord’s Prayer, he continues, and he concludes with the observation that confession and absolution frees the human creature for living responsibly as we move from baptism, the source of our new life, to the fulfillment which is foreshadowed in the Lord’s Supper, dress rehearsal for the eschatological banquet.9 And, we might add, with reference to the second and third sections of the Small Catechism, that life is practiced in family and personal worship or devotions and in the fulfilling of responsibilities in the various callings through which God structures all human life.

But why should the Catechism be such a key document for Christian living?

teaching god’s teaching The Catechism existed long before Luther, long before Luther transformed the meaning of the word into a designation for a book. The Greek word catechism means simply “instruction.” Within it we find the root of the word echo. Catechism has to do with sound, with human speech, with recitation but more so with confession or proclamation. In the process of this catechism or instruction, God’s word bounces off the teacher’s life into the lives of other Christians. This catechism presumes that God is a person, a creator, who creates by speaking—that he is a God of conversation and community. The Apostles’ Creed is an example of an early catechetical tool—although the Creed served other functions as well: among them, of course, the confession of the faith, which is certainly also a function of the Catechism.

Closely related to the concept of catechism, or instruction, is the concept of doctrine, or teaching.10 Luther’s definition of the word doctrine differs from the usual twenty-first century definition in three ways. First of all, he and his colleagues viewed doctrine as teaching in two senses: not just as the content or a summary of belief which might be printed on a page or recited to a teacher but also as the conveying of that content to other people. Doctrine could never exist only for the person who “has” it; doctrine must always be 16

Teaching God’s Children His Teaching in process, in the process of teaching or conveying the content to those who need to hear it, and thus in the process of giving life to the believer, according to Luther and his friend Philip Melanchthon. Doctrine is, in the phrase of Peter Fraenkel, a “verbal noun.” Doctrine must be in action.11 Furthermore, it is not only a verbal noun of which we are the subject. God is at work through the words of our teaching. He examines and judges our lives with the Ten Commandments, and he restores us to life by acquainting us with himself in the Creed. He bestows the words that set our way of life in place through the Lord’s Prayer, as the Spirit groans within us in reaction to his word in all its forms, sacramental as well as oral and written. God sends us into daily life prepared to react to him in meditation and prayer while we fulfill the callings in serving others which he has given us. Our doctrine is his living word, the power of God on the loose. For God’s conversation is engaging, life-giving and life-transforming. Let sinners beware.

Thus, for the Wittenberg reformers doctrine was not “mere words,” for words are not mere. Luther believed that the word of God had established reality as God said, “Let there be...” at the foundation of the universe (Gn 1). The word of the Lord accomplishes what God desires, and it achieves the purpose for which he speaks it (Is 55:11). Luther believed that the words which convey the gospel are God’s very power itself, in action to save his people (Rom 1:16).

Luther and Melanchthon viewed doctrine as the content of the Scriptures which reveals who God is and what he has done for us. They did not use the term for the individual doctrines of that whole of biblical teaching, doctrine.

Instead, they used the term articles of faith for what we call doctrines when they were writing confessions of faith, and they used the term topics [Latin loci] when they were writing doctrinal treatises.

This terminological distinction does not make much difference, and in this book we will refer to biblical teaching as a whole, teaching, and to its individual component parts, teachings. But it is important to note that there are not a given number of biblical teachings or topics or articles. Doctrines are formulated from the biblical teaching as they are needed to meet the world’s need to understand what God wants us to hear.

In 1530, as Melanchthon composed the Augsburg Confession, he decided that there were twenty-one issues of doctrinal importance (and seven on related practical matters) on which the world, as expressed in the established church, was calling for confession. Other confessions written by Lutherans in the sixteenth century had more or fewer articles, doctrines, and they used different language to express the same concept, depending on the nature of the challenge to the faith or the kind of people to whom they were addressing their confessions. The same thing is true of all sorts of other Lutheran literature, 17

Robert Kolb including the many variations on Luther’s Catechism which his successors have composed. The biblical teaching (singular) always remains the same.

The ways in which we organize and paraphrase it in teachings (plural) for our specific audiences sometimes shift with the changing challenge and need of those whom we are teaching.

We formulate our teaching of biblical teaching within definite boundaries, within lines laid down by our picture of the world, by our presuppositions and presumptions, by our conceptual framework for dealing with life. Most of us are unaware of the conceptual framework with which we work. Because we ignore the principles or presuppositions which form the basis of our thinking, our teaching sometimes wanders off in directions in which we do not want it to go.

For instance, all early Lutherans wanted to insist that we are saved by God’s grace alone. Some of them even wrote alone in capital letters to prove the point—but then proceeded to talk about how the human will must accept the grace of God before it can be effective in a person’s life. They made two errors. First, they did not carefully establish and distinguish the specific agendas which in turn they were trying to address: God’s grace (a matter of gospel) and human responsibility (a matter of the law). Second, they did not notice that in using that concept of acceptance, they were grounding their teaching in a conceptual framework which defined the human creature only as a consenting, contracting, responsible adult. Luther, in contrast, had viewed the human creature who becomes a believer as—at new birth—a little infant, a newborn (Mt 18:3). Thus, a non-biblical conceptual framework undermined and prevented their use of biblical words and phrases.

A second example might be taken from the dispute between Lutherans and Calvinists over the real presence of Christ’s body and blood in the Lord’s Supper. Lutherans presumed that God can and does select certain elements of his created order to carry out his saving will. These elements include the flesh of Jesus of Nazareth, human language in which the gospel is conveyed, and the bread and wine which convey to us Christ’s body and blood.

Calvinists presumed that the finite could not bear the infinite. This difference of presuppositions was recognized by sixteenth century theologians, but the dispute often shifted away from the level of presupposition. The argument has raged on because the two presuppositions program Lutheran thinking and Calvinist thinking on two very different wavelengths.

we presume and presuppose Luther formulated and taught biblical teaching within a conceptual framework which can be expressed with several phrases. We will encounter them at any 18

Teaching God’s Children His Teaching number of points during our reading of the Catechism even though they are not to be found, in so many words, in the text. The most familiar element of his conceptual framework is the “proper distinction of law and gospel.” Luther was convinced that God addresses two kinds of sinful human beings with two different messages, law and gospel. The first sets forth God’s expectations for human performance; the second announces God’s re-creative word which he accomplished through the death and resurrection of Jesus. These messages are complementary although they are often seen as contradictory by us. The contradiction does not lie in what God says to us, but in the sin-ridden lives we lead. One kind of sinner, the sinner who feels secure without and apart from God, can only be dealt with in terms of the law. It condemns. The other kind of sinner, who recognizes that life cannot be lived without God, needs to hear, and live, from the gospel. It gives life. It restores the peace of Eden—what the Hebrews called shalom.

Related closely to Luther’s distinction of law and gospel are his distinction of God’s two ways of governing and the distinct though related expression of his anthropology, his way of defining what it means to be human, the two kinds of human righteousness.

In our relationship with him (in what Luther often called the “realm of the right hand”) God deals with us through his gospel, his expression of his unconditional love for his chosen people. In our relationship with other creatures—human to be sure but also animals, vegetables, and minerals—he has structured our actions through the law. Thus, it is important to distinguish the realm in which we are making decisions: the realm in which we relate directly to God or the realm in which we relate to others in his behalf. For in relationship to him, we remain children; in relationship to others we exercise the adult responsibilities which he has assigned us.

Both the proper distinction of law and gospel and the distinction of the two realms are related to Luther’s distinction between two kinds of human righteousness. The distinction of law and gospel describes God, two ways in which God communicates with his human creatures, or two messages he has for them. The distinction of the two realms or governments talks of two spheres for the relationship between human creatures and their creator. The two kinds of human righteousness describe what it means to be human as God’s creature and child. In his 1535 preface to his commentary on Galatians, he called this distinction “our theology.” What makes a human creature “right” or “just” or “truly human” in relationship to God is different from what makes us right or just or truly human in relationship to God’s creatures. In our “vertical” relationship we are righteous because God says we are, because he proclaims us to be so, with and through his creative and re-creative word.

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Robert Kolb Our righteousness rests alone upon his favor in this relationship. His gospel establishes our righteousness by bestowing upon us the righteousness of Jesus Christ.

In relationship to other creatures, in the “horizontal” dimension of our lives, we are righteous in terms of our love for our neighbor. This is the righteousness of action, not attitude; of response to God’s prescriptions—on the basis of his promise, for Christians, to be sure. But Luther’s concept of civil righteousness reminds us that in the horizontal relationships what is first required is the performance of the deed. The gospel motivates this kind of righteousness properly. Nonetheless, in its absence human reason can still produce some facsimile of God’s design for human living. Here righteousness is found in acting out the responsibilities of adults. In the vertical sphere righteousness is found in being the child of God, in receiving this gift of childhood through the faith which God creates and bestows.12 Another element of Luther’s conceptual framework has been designated his “theology of the cross.”13 Early in his career Luther contrasted his theology (“the cross is our theology,” he claimed) with his opponents’ theology of glory.

His concept of cruciform theology matured into a four-pointed compass for all biblical instruction.

First, it contrasted the “hidden God” with the “revealed God.” The hidden God, God as he is in the heavens beyond our reach, is just that: beyond our reach and sight and definition. He is accessible only to our imaginations, which means that he is not accessible at all. As a result, when we try to construct what God would or should be like, we do what the nineteenth century German philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach called “creating God in our own image.” We would like to have a glorious God, and so we depict God as glorious in the terms in which we understand glory.

Luther taught instead that we should never speculate on what God might be like apart from his revelation of himself in Jesus Christ. But, paradoxically, the revealed God, the word made flesh, has hidden himself where the human glory-seekers would never think to look, in a poor and ancient Jew, in the weakness and foolishness of the cross (1 Cor 1:18–2:4). Therefore, the second point of the theology of the cross: God is accessible only to those who do not seek him through the glory of rational proofs or intellectual gymnastics but rather in simple, childlike, trusting faith. Luther was a university professor; he was not anti-rational or anti-intellectual. He embraced reason as a necessary tool for exercising God-assigned dominion under, in service to, his world. But Luther objected mightily to the misuse of reason which tried to shape God rather than simply listen to him in trust and dependence.

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Teaching God’s Children His Teaching Third, Luther’s theology of the cross presumed that God’s power is made perfect in his own weakness as well as ours (2 Cor 12:9). His theology centers around the death of Jesus “for us and for our salvation.” Only God’s incarnation and self-sacrifice can deal with evil effectively and make life make sense in an evil world, Luther was certain. Although he regarded Christ’s incarnation, life of obedience, and suffering as necessary parts of God’s saving actions, he confessed with the apostle that Christ died to take care of our sin and he rose to take care of the restoration of our righteousness (Rom 4:25).

Fourth, God “mortifies our flesh”; that is, he crucifies our sinful desires in our daily repentance and the suffering that causes us to turn to him. The Holy Spirit works away at chiseling down the stone hearts and their practices of defiance against his law, in order to make way for the displacement of the habits of hell in our lives with the habits of heaven.

Fifth, God’s way of dealing with evil has become the way in which his people deal with evil: through submission to other people’s evils and ills, through self-sacrifice and self-surrender, through suffering and serving. The call to follow Jesus, Dietrich Bonhoeffer observed, is a call to come and die, both as a sinner in God’s sight and as a servant in the sight of others.14 Bonhoeffer here captured Luther’s understanding of life imprinted by the cross. We enjoy the privilege of bearing one another’s crosses, even though they bring us sadness and trouble, which war against our joy.

we are taught, believe, teach, and confess—and praise In their public confessions, for example in the Formula of Concord, Luther’s followers frequently used the phrase, “We believe, teach, and confess.” 15 Luther taught that my believing always rests upon someone else’s teaching.

He presumed that there is no such thing as an individual; we are all created for community (Gn 2:18), with God and with others. He presumed that God works through the power of his word and that believers come to new life in Christ when other believers use the gospel—in one form or another—to bring about new birth, a new creation (Rom 10:14–15). Therefore, my faith always rests upon the Holy Spirit’s use of someone else’s using the word.

Believing is always inextricably linked with teaching. God’s people cannot be quiet, precisely because they are God’s children, chips off the old block, imitating—projecting the image of—their heavenly Father as children always are wont to do. The taught teach.

And that teaching is confession of faith (Rom 10:6–10). For the sixteenth century Lutherans “confession” in the sense of confession of faith was another verbal noun. Thus, a “confessional Lutheran” is not one who merely clutches tightly the confessional documents of the Book of Concord. To be 21

Robert Kolb a “confessional Lutheran” means acting upon and out of those documents. It means to stand in the marketplace, in the halls of Congress—as the confessors at Augsburg did—and let the world know that what we believe and what we teach our own children is really for everyone on God’s earth to hear.

Confession blossoms into praise. Confession is already praise of the God whose actions in our behalf we are celebrating by the act of confession. We must remember that the praise of God in life and in liturgy is also inextricably connected with catechism, with instruction and teaching. The teaching of the Catechism must integrate learning with lauding the Lord. Dying and rising, God’s children cannot help but sing a new song. The Holy Spirit has written a new score for their lives by returning them to the harmonies of Eden. Their lives hum. Their eyes sing. Their mouths carry God’s tune into every corner of human life.

the church has always taught God’s word is his instrument of creation and re-creation. Therefore, the church has always instructed its people and offered its teachings to those beyond its own community. The early church used two different genres of instruction: doctrinal and moral. Its people often used the question-and-answer format for conveying their teaching, indicating that the subject matter which Christians learn is designed for a confession of faith, for conversation with other believers and unbelievers alike. Although the moral and doctrinal Catechisms of the ancient church were often kept distinct, they were usually used in tandem with each other.16 For catechism is not philosophy; it is the heart of Christian living.

By Luther’s time the church had developed dozens of catechetical devices.

They included sets of pious formulas for good living, model questions and answers, lists of commands and prohibitions. Young and old alike were urged to learn the seven deadly sins or the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit, the six works of temporal mercy and six works of spiritual mercy, etc. But the core of the Catechism of the medieval church consisted of four items: the Creed, the Lord’s Prayer, the Ten Commandments, and the Hail Mary.

This catechetical core served several functions for the church of the Late Middle Ages. It was the basis of Christian instruction. It was the subject of a specific form of preaching. It offered a means of evaluating the level of competence of parish priests and others who wanted to perform certain ecclesiastical functions. It was a vital part of church life at the end of the fifteenth century.

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Teaching God’s Children His Teaching

the golden jewel of dr. martin luther’s catechism Almost as soon as it dawned on Luther that he was leading an important movement for the reform of the church of his day, it dawned on him as well that the church needed to improve its instruction of the laity (and also the clergy, but that was quite another matter). Following medieval custom for monks, Luther had preached on the Catechism or its parts several times in the late 1510s and early 1520s, and his colleagues in Wittenberg had done the same.

In 1517 and 1518 Luther had presaged the approach he would use in preparing both Small and Large Catechisms in 1529. He published sermons on the Ten Commandments in popular form, in German for lay consumption, and also a version in Latin for pastors. His pastor, Johannes Bugenhagen, had added the sacraments to his preaching of the Catechism in 1525.17 As Luther increasingly realized the usefulness of the printing press for aiding the Reformation of the church and put it to use, he began thinking more and more about the production of a catechetical handbook for use by the laity and their pastors.

He began by conveying his ideas to people and pastors in tracts on specific subjects. He recognized that they first needed a good version of the Scriptures in their own language, and so he translated the New Testament into German in 1521-1522. He knew that good preaching was vital to repentance and reform, so he prepared “postils,” books of sermons which could serve as models for evangelical preaching. He developed liturgies and hymns to give his followers a biblically based form for public worship. But with all that happening, he could not find time to deal with Christian education on the parish level. Furthermore, his colleagues, Johannes Agricola, Justus Jonas, and Philip Melanchthon, all failed to act upon his urging to prepare a satisfactory handbook for instructing children.

Then in 1527 Luther and Melanchthon visited parishes in the Saxon countryside around Wittenberg, a part of an inspection of the churches of his land ordered by Luther’s prince, Elector John of Saxony. The spiritual condition of the villagers shocked Luther, as he reported in the preface of the Small Catechism (paras. 1–3). He found that the common people, particularly in rural areas, were ignorant of basic Christian teaching. This was due, he concluded, to the fact that many pastors were incompetent. He deplored the abuse of Christian freedom which he encountered in the “irrational beasts” who were supposed to be Christians but did not even know the Decalog, the Creed, and the Lord’s Prayer.

So in 1528 Luther assumed the task of composing an Evangelical approach to instruction himself, and he began to work on his handbook (or Enchiridion, as it was first called, using the Greek word) by preaching three series of catechetical sermons, in May, September, and December 1528. Then, probably 23

Robert Kolb with the assistance of a student who had taken careful notes on these sermons, Luther composed his program for Christian education, which his student Johannes Tetelbach called “a golden jewel.”

It took shape in three different forms: first, a wall chart, on which Luther’s explanations of the basic elements of Christian knowledge were printed so that it could be hung on the wall and reviewed in the family circle; second, that same text in book form, for the heads of households to use in teaching the basics to the children and servants in their homes (the Small Catechism); third, a teacher’s manual for pastors and heads of households to guide them in giving catechetical instruction to their charges (the Large Catechism).18 For students he used the traditional question-and-answer form, for teachers something closer to the expository sermon style.

Luther followed medieval usage (for instance the numbering of the commandments) and wording for the most part. But he did change the order of the parts of the catechism. Most medieval catechetical handbooks had arranged the first three parts with the Creed first, followed by the Lord’s Prayer and the Decalogue, until about 1450, and thereafter many placed the Lord’s Prayer before the Creed and Ten Commandments. Probably for two reasons Luther changed the order. First, he believed that all biblical teaching could be summarized in the First Commandment, and so it was a logical place to begin.

Second, in God’s encounter with the sinner, law—the Ten Commandments— precedes gospel—the Creed. Although in his German Mass of 1526, Luther had still used the old order when discussing Christian instruction, as early as 1520 he had already come to understand a natural progression from the Ten Commandments to the Creed and then to the Lord’s Prayer. In a catechetical handbook written in that year, he summarized the first three parts of the medieval catechism by pointing out that it is necessary to know three things to be saved: (1) what we ought to do and what we ought not to do; (2) having seen that we cannot live the good life on our own, where to look for the power to live that life; (3) how to seek that power. The Ten Commandments diagnose our illness. The Creed tells us where the medicine is which will cure us. The Lord’s Prayer expresses the faith which responds to the Creed’s announcement of a cure.19 Luther omitted the fourth part of the medieval catechism, the Hail Mary, from his own Catechism. He revered the Mother of God, as the ancient church had acclaimed the Blessed Virgin, but he objected to the misreverence accorded her in the late medieval church.

Luther also expanded the Catechism. He followed Bugenhagen in adding treatments of the sacraments, and he also added a section on family worship

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Teaching God’s Children His Teaching and a Table of Christian Callings, which could serve as a guide for Christian living within the structures which God had designed for human living.

Three decades later one of Luther’s students, Johann Mathesius, reported that—although it was not the only Lutheran Catechism in use at the time— his Small Catechism had sold one hundred thousand copies by that time, phenomenal sales for a book in the sixteenth century.20 This little book had assumed a number of important roles in the lives of the churches and believers of much of Europe in that time. It guided Christian instruction in the home and was the basis of religious instruction in the school.

Prospective brides and bridegrooms had to demonstrate that they knew the Catechism by memory, for if they did not, they obviously would not be able to perform one of the most important functions of married life, the godly care of one another and above all of their children. Prospective schoolmasters also had to demonstrate a thorough knowledge of the Catechism and how to teach it, for that was one of their most important functions. The Catechism continued to provide a text for preaching, and it cultivated an understanding of the liturgy. It served as a confessional standard and definition for what it meant to be a Lutheran: a digest of the biblical message as Lutherans understood it, and a summary of the way of life which they believed God wanted all human creatures to enjoy and to practice as his children.

However, according to contemporary Reformation scholar Gerald Strauss, Luther’s instructional efforts were largely in vain. Strauss’s extensive studies in archival records of parish visitations and in the sermonic literature of the time led him to conclude that Luther’s Catechisms had not influenced German Lutherans very much at all by the early part of the seventeenth century.

He found in those documents complaints about the same kinds of sin and vice which had troubled churchmen before the Reformation. He therefore concluded that Lutheran catechetical training had not been able to transform the piety of the German people.21 Rejoinders to Strauss’s thesis have come from several directions. Other historians of the sixteenth century have found evidence that the pious practices of Lutheran congregations did change, in the direction in which Luther’s Catechism should have led them. Furthermore, the kinds of evidence which Strauss used naturally stressed the negative; preachers—Lutheran preachers in particular—feel duty bound to condemn sin, and ecclesiastical visitors were looking for the problems afflicting parishes rather than for things that were going well. Also, Luther did not expect to transform the whole of society.

His understanding of the church led him to believe that the faithful people of God would always constitute no more than a remnant among the people of this world.22 25

Robert Kolb It is more accurate to conclude from the evidence at hand that Luther’s Small Catechism did transform the way in which many of his followers conceived of their world, their lives, their God.

the bible of the laity Human living began in that creative process which took place as God spoke all reality into being (Gn 1). Truly human living is possible only when it rests upon the word of the Lord.

God’s word comes to us today in authoritative form in the Holy Scriptures.

Luther believed that the gospel must be “living,” that is, spoken, in its application to the lives of others, but he anchored the spoken word of believers in the inspired word of God, the Scriptures.

But he also recognized that the Scriptures cannot be mastered or digested as a whole all at once. He sensed that the Scriptures can be like that elephant that twelve blindfolded people try to describe. Each of us finds it easy to isolate one portion or another of the Scriptures and to make that favorite gem (which corresponds to our own wisdom) into a tail which wags the whole dog.

Just as parents would not give an infant a whole gallon of milk and say “drink to your heart’s content,” so neither can they expect their children to ingest the whole Bible from cover to cover in one big gulp. They pour the contents of the gallon of milk into a glass, and they take the heart of the pure milk of the word and pour it into the vessel of the Catechism. That is how children—and older, new Christians as well—need to receive the word. And often that is how their parents and elders need to receive it, too.

For the Catechism is intended to be nothing more than a vessel for conveying the fundamental concepts and teaching of the Bible. Actually, nearly one-fourth of Luther’s Small Catechism is quotation from the Bible, and another third of it is direct interpretation of Scripture passages. The remainder is devoted to the application of the biblical message to our lives.23 Luther did not believe, as some modern scholars have suggested, that every Christian is free to interpret the Scriptures in his or her own way. For him Christ had to remain Lord of the Scriptures. Every Christian should be free to interpret the Scriptures as God intended them to be understood, and no earthly authority should be able to divert us from the true meaning of Scripture. That does not mean that we are free to interpret God’s word as we wish it to be interpreted. As the twentieth century German catechetical scholar Herbert Girgensohn has stated, it is not a matter of the individual’s discretion to define the faith. God has done that in the Scriptures, and he has entrusted to the church, his people, the task of teaching the faith. The individual

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Teaching God’s Children His Teaching must still believe, but the faith which we believe is conveyed to us, under the Holy Spirit’s guidance, through the church.24 As the Holy Spirit works through the body of Christ, through other believers, to bring his word to us, one of the instruments which he uses is the summary of the inspired word which we find in the Catechism. The Catechism belongs to the whole church, and Luther’s Small Catechism is an excellent tool for confessing and teaching what believers around the world and throughout the church’s history have recognized as the core of the biblical message.

Luther wrote that to understand the Ten Commandments is indeed to understand the whole of Scripture (Large Catechism, Preface, 17). In one of his catechetical sermons of 1528, he enlarged his summary of Scripture to include the Creed as well. It summarized the Christian faith in God in three persons, in contrast to the Ten Commandments, which teach us about our actions rather than about God’s.25 To understand the whole of Scripture for Luther meant to be able to use it in daily life, in living as God’s child oneself and in confessing the faith to others. Even if a person knows the Catechism perfectly—an impossibility Luther admitted—it would still be very profitable and fruitful to meditate upon it and talk about it each day, he wrote. For the Holy Spirit uses such meditation and conversation to give us both greater understanding and greater zeal for Christian living (Large Catechism, Preface, 9). Fundamentally that means living a life which distinguishes law and gospel and practicing a life which is listening to both.

As a summary of Scripture the Catechism performs the same functions which the Scripture itself performs. Paul summarized these in 2 Timothy 3:15–16.

The Catechism, first and foremost, gives us the wisdom which recognizes and receives our salvation through faith in Jesus Christ. It teaches, and it rebukes us; it corrects, and it trains us in righteousness. The result of the Catechism, the result of the Scriptures, is that God’s people may once again be restored to their humanity and to the practice of it, that is, to be thoroughly equipped for all the good works to which God calls them. The distinction is critical: our practice of our humanity results from the purpose and goal to which our teaching aims; the creation of trust in God, reliance on his power, confidence in his forgiveness. This faith produces peace. This trust restores the sense of harmony and balance (or righteousness) from which alone good works result.

The purpose of instructing others through the Catechism is then to cultivate their faith and life, to expose the heart of the word of God to them in a way in which it makes an impact on their lives. It aids us in turning to God in prayer,

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Robert Kolb in reviewing his goodness to us, in ascertaining his will for our lives. Luther expanded on these functions of the Catechism with a number of comments.

First, he observed, the Catechism aids us in our battle against the devil, the world, and our flesh, those enemies which seek to tear us away from our humanity by tearing us away from God. To teach the faith is to be involved in that ultimate battle with evil in all its persons and forms. For this very reason Luther meditated on the Catechism each day and found nothing as effective in his combat against Satan, the world, and the sinful flesh. Focusing on God’s commandments and words—speaking them, singing them, meditating on them—praises God beyond all other praise and strikes the strongest blow against the devil. For Luther, meditating on the Catechism was the true form of holy water, as a sign which could send the devil fleeing (Large Catechism, Longer Preface, 8, 10–11). The Catechism reminds us of our sinfulness, of God’s goodness to us in his forgiving and restoring love, and of the way which he has prepared for us to come before him in prayer and to serve him in our callings and responsibilities.

Another function of the Catechism is to assist us in carrying out one of the most significant of these callings or responsibilities. The Catechism aids us in transforming the lives of others through the application of law and gospel to those lives. Most specifically the Catechism assists parents and pastors and teachers in carrying out the assignments from God to teach others, particularly children, whom God has entrusted to them (Dt 6:7; Eph 6:4).

Luther was speaking of both rulers and parents when he urged that children be educated: all those to whom God has given responsibility for the care and education of the young are guilty of damning sin if they fail to carry out that education. Neglecting this responsibility undermines both the kingdom of God and human society. Those who fail to provide necessary education are, according to Luther, “the worst enemies of God and human beings” (Small Catechism, Preface, 19). In the shorter preface to the Large Catechism (para.

4) Luther declared that every head of a household had the duty to examine his children and servants at least once a week to determine whether they had learned the Catechism assignment for the week. If they did not know it, parents were to keep them at it with all diligence, Luther insisted.

A few lines later Luther reiterated the point, insisting that the habit of daily recitation of the parts of the Catechism should be instilled in children.

Recitation was supposed to take place in the morning, at meal time, and before bed in the evening. Luther took the matter so seriously that he urged parents to withhold food and drink until the recitation was given correctly. He also urged dismissal of servants if they were unwilling to learn the Catechism (Large Catechism, Shorter Preface, 16–19).

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Teaching God’s Children His Teaching Even a brief glance at the Small Catechism demonstrates that this was not just a pious wish on Luther’s part. He intended that parents use the Small Catechism. Its brief summary of Christian teaching could be taught even by parents who could not read: they could repeat it from memory if they had learned it as children and had continued to recite it in worship services.

For example, each of the six chief parts of Christian teaching in the first section of the Small Catechism, begins in this manner: “The Ten Commandments, in the plain form in which the head of the family shall teach them to his household.” The second section has similar instructions; for example, “How the head of the family shall teach his household to say morning and evening prayers.” “Shall” commands; it sets forth an obligation, a responsibility, an assignment. Luther took seriously God’s command to parents to train their children in the word of the Lord. He believed that God had designed human life to begin in the family and to be based on the family’s exercise of its function and responsibilities, among them the catechism, that is, instructing one another in God’s word.

But that responsibility is shared by the entire Christian community; the whole church aids parents and family members in the instructional process in many ways.

teaching god’s children Few responsibilities which God has given the church and us as individual believers exceed in importance the responsibility to teach one another. The task is always fraught with problems; it brings both frustrations and great joy and delight—as do most human responsibilities.

One reason that frustration sometimes rises in what we often call catechism is that we have redefined the task, specifically the length of the task. We regard the Catechism as a set of words which we must convey to children in the course of two or three years of meetings held once or twice a week, or to adults in twelve easy evening sessions. Luther was not so naive.

He regarded the activity of catechism as a lifelong process. With a doctor’s degree in theology and nearly two decades of experience in teaching the word of God at the university level, Luther could still confess that he had to be childlike in his use of the Catechism. At least each morning, and whenever possible at other times, he reviewed the Lord’s Prayer, the Ten Commandments, the Creed, and some Psalms word for word. He confessed that in spite of this daily use he could not master the Catechism.

He remained a child, its pupil, and delighted in being the little listener of the word of God (Large Catechism, Longer Preface, 7–8).

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Robert Kolb The time we spend—rightfully—with the young in early adolescence is certainly worthwhile and well spent, even if twelve- and thirteen-year-olds, with their boundless energy, can tie their teachers in knots and seem to walk away with nothing in their minds. That time is well spent, not because we teach them all that there is to know, but because they absorb from catechism the foundation and outline of the biblical faith, because they grow in their ability to perceive all of life from God’s perspective. Not merely the inculcating of a set of doctrines or ideas, but the cultivation of a way of life, is what we are about when we instruct the young or the old in the Catechism.

Luther spent his entire life learning the Catechism. Our hearers will, too.

Teaching, according to the contemporary jargon, is really facilitating learning, Facilitating means making it easy, in the literal sense of the Latin root of that word. But little is learned easily that is worth learning. Learning incubates until a time of crisis, when the learning which integrates teaching into life happens.

We must teach the Lord’s teaching, but he must facilitate the learning, and he does that in those crises when other gods refuse to work and he alone is present, when his word alone sounds through the darkness with his call and his comfort.

Our catechetical instruction can give knowledge and cultivate a certain level of understanding. We can deepen that understanding by creating pretended crises, for example in role playing. But the Catechism is not really learned until life strikes, and our instruction may be a long time in coming to fruition for some of our students.

Nonetheless, there are some suggestions from Luther himself which we might consider as we think through the process of our instruction. In his semiliterate society he encouraged memorization of a single text so that the children would not be confused by variations in wording. Our mediafilled world has done away with the need for individual memorization; there is nothing worth knowing, we think, which we cannot look up somewhere. Yet we find ourselves very often in situations where we cannot look up what we need or want to say, and the memorization of the Catechism still is a valuable exercise—even if our culture has largely abandoned memorization.

Second, Luther said, explain the text once it has been learned. There is no necessary chronological order set down here. Our contemporary wisdom says that people must understand what they learn, and on one level that is true. But memorization can be a tool for cultivating understanding, just as understanding can, in a different way, be a tool for cultivating memorization.

Next, Luther insists, do not think that mastery of the first handbook of the Catechism—for most Lutherans today, Luther’s Small Catechism—is sufficient

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Teaching God’s Children His Teaching for your students. Too many of Luther’s heirs have thought so and have been willing to retreat into an intellectual laziness which can change Luther’s concept of faith into a stubborn pride of willful ignorance. Some have even used the phrase Catechism faith for a minimal kind of faith, a concept quite contrary to what Luther understood an ever-growing, ever-exercising Catechism faith to be. Occasional preaching on the Catechism for the entire congregation can assist our people in the proper cultivation of a true Catechism faith.

If we recognize that the instruction of the child or adolescent involves the cultivation of a continuing education mentality—an attitude toward Christian teaching and learning which will always seek more and greater understanding of God’s word—then we will teach so that our pupils will not be satisfied with baby food from a catechetical bottle but will always press on for more solid food at God’s table. We will strengthen their learning teeth so that they will always want to chew hard enough to gain the intellectual strength and the godly wisdom to help other people learn how to gnaw on the meat of God’s word. We will cultivate in them the excitement which comes from genuine engagement with the word. We will help them set aside a longing for a false security which might come from a shallow and oversimplified knowledge of God’s message for his human creatures. We will bring them to rest and peace in the faith which clings alone to Christ.

Luther also instructed teachers to sharpen their presentation of God’s word to pierce their hearers’ hearts. God’s living word comes to us with its own power, but it can be more or less aptly expressed. It is the continuing task of Christian teachers to present the word and to apply its power in ways and in words which are understandable to our hearers. It is always easier to aim instruction against a faraway evil or to use it to depict an abstract kind of salvation than to deal with the tough realities directly before us. We ought not confuse the sharing of information about other people’s sins with the effective confrontation of the sins we practice in our own midst; we ought not confuse an impressive philosophical discourse on God’s goodness with a practical, down-to-earth description of what God is doing for us through Jesus, as the Holy Spirit forgives us our sins and restores our life in him each day.

At the same time we must be certain that we do not try to accommodate God’s word to human impressions or desires. To use the terms of contemporary German theologian Helmut Thielicke, we must actualize what God has really said to us in the Scriptures for our contemporaries, but we must never accommodate the word to a contemporary mode of interpreting reality.26 To perform this task means that we must take Luther’s perpetual question in the Small Catechism, “What is that?”27 very seriously. We must imaginatively

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Robert Kolb and creatively apply the Catechism’s texts to our own lives and the lives of our students. What is it and what does it really mean for me? God does not talk to himself; he talks to us. The Catechism addresses our lives.

We can do that through using Luther’s question-and-answer technique much more broadly than the Catechism’s text does. The questions must hang between the situation in which our pupils are living and the biblical message.

And we must find the best devices for mining the text of Catechism, Bible, liturgy, hymns: dialogue, role-playing, drama, service projects, etc.

The Catechism is a device for opening up the Scriptures and for integrating its message into the lives of our hearers. The liturgy and Christian hymns do that, too, and we should coordinate and correlate the teaching which they receive with the praise which they practice. Our instruction should include use of the hymns which Luther wrote for catechism: “Here Is the Tenfold Sure Command,” “We All Believe in One True God,” “Our Father, Who from Heaven Above,” “To Jordan Came the Christ, Our Lord,” “From Depths of Woe I Cry to You,” and “O Lord, We Praise You.”28 When I teach the Catechism today, I would spend a long time on the First Commandment. All of the biblical message proceeds out of it. I would not spend much time on Commandments Two through Ten. It does not take much time to tell a naughty child she is naughty; telling her only reinforces her naughtiness and maybe even gives her new ideas with the lurid details we offer as we describe sin. It is also important to remember that the point of each of the last nine commandments, according to Luther, is to remind us that the failure at the center of our lives is failing to fear, love, and trust in God above all else. Not only the sins we perpetrate, but also the sins we suffer, point to the brokenness of our world and our lives. Our being victims as well as our being perpetrators of evil and disobedience point us to our need for Jesus Christ. That is the point of the law in this use.

I would spend a good deal of time on the Creed, for it tells us what kind of god God is. Knowing that is vital for living out our humanity and enjoying our existence as God’s children. Our people need to know why and how to pray aright, and so I would work hard to cultivate a proper kind of prayer life (which may be quite different from our neighbor’s attitude toward prayer in this society). The sacraments seem like such a strange idea in our religious culture; I would concentrate on them, for they reveal the breadth and depth of God’s love and the central organizing principles and core of our daily living.

Because we often forget that the last two sections are in Luther’s Catechism, and because they constituted Luther’s goal, toward which he

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Teaching God’s Children His Teaching arranged the chief parts of Christian doctrine, I would certainly emphasize them. For it is vital that Christian homes become again centers of biblical teaching and spiritual care of one another. It is also vital that we come to understand the structure of human life through Luther’s Table of Christian Callings, his concept of the Christian’s calling.

And I would go at the task with a sense of excitement and anticipation, with something of the same spirit with which Luther approached the Catechism: a spirit of hunger for the word and humility about what I think I already know.

For bringing God’s word to bear on human lives, bringing about the forgiveness of sins and the restoration of humanity is more exciting than anything else in the world. As Luther remarked, “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 varying it with anything new or different” (Large Catechism, Longer Preface, 16).

When you’ve said the Ten Commandments, the Creed, the Lord’s Prayer, the Sacraments, and the callings of the Christian life, you’ve said it all.

preaching the catechism From time to time, we wish to say it all in our Lenten preaching. The church has concentrated on teaching the faith in the season of Lent for centuries.

From its inception in the fourth century, Lent was associated with the earlier preparation for baptism, which occurred for adult converts at Easter.

Therefore, Lent fell in that period in which instruction in the faith had been carried on to prepare those converts for their entry into the church through the sacrament.29 In the Reformation period some Lutheran territories, such as the county of Hohenlohe, placed particular emphasis on catechetical instruction carried out in the Lenten season. 30 James Nestingen suggests that Lent remains the most appropriate time for preaching on the Catechism, taking one of its parts each year for a series of years, or “by pushing hard,” covering the Catechism in one Lent.31 Nestingen argues that Luther’s Catechism offers a paradigm for teaching the Lutheran faith and for doing so through preaching. This paradigm, he believes, clarifies and focuses the discourse of those who have it and offers a foundation for conversations with those who are not familiar with it.

Preaching on the Catechism for the whole congregation can refresh the common point of reference which it provides with those who have been nurtured in its cadences. From even the dim memory of its summaries can come the hooks upon which we can hang God’s demands and God’s promises for this day. 32 33

Robert Kolb For this paradigm of the faith, Nestingen asserts, has “both feet on the ground.” It is “an assessment of daily life and the gospel emphasizing the reality of the obligations that confront and the gifts of grace that sustain us.” He adds, “As stoically responsible as it is about the demands of creatureliness—one of its focal points—it breaks into a smile when it sets out the other: the even deeper and more abiding reality of God’s grace in Christ.”33 In preaching or teaching the Catechism, we aim to clarify once again for our people what it means to be God’s beloved human creature— how we have failed to be so—and to smile the reality of God’s grace in Christ into their lives once again.

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New and Revised Edition Robert Kolb, the master teacher, has updated and revised this classic guide into the study and teaching of Martin Luther’s “marvelous little book,” the Small Catechism.

Designed for educators, pastors, parents, and all who are involved in Christian faith formation, this book is an indispensable resource for understanding and teaching the lifelong adventure of faith.

“Bob Kolb continues to demonstrate his ‘teaching heart’ in this work.

He is a teacher’s teacher. Teachers and learners will be affirmed, challenged, and inspired.”

Vernon Gundermann Pastor Emeritus, Concordia Lutheran Church (Kirkwood, Missouri) “Kolb has provided pastors and laity alike with a robust user’s guide to the Small Catechism. Drawing on his rich understanding of Luther’s theology, Kolb has produced a commentary of the Small Catechism that is reflective of the proper distinction of law and Gospel and geared toward Christian confession and vocation in the world.”

John Pless Concordia Theological Seminary (Ft. Wayne, Indiana) “From beginning to end readers will find themselves in the hands of an able guide to this jewel of the Lutheran confessions. Kolb translates his own love for the Small Catechism and a lifetime of experience with it into clear, provocative prose.”

Timothy Wengert Lutheran Theological Seminary at Philadelphia

Robert Kolb is mission professor emeritus of systematic theology and former director of the Institute for Mission Studies at Concordia Seminary, St. Louis.

Cover ILLUSTRATION and BOOK design By P.Berkbigler Design & Illustr ation

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