The Heidelberg Catechism! That's what we will be looking at this year - 52 Lord's Days will give us ample material to study, and this is the introductory post. In our first session we looked at some of the historical background, the structure and style of the catechism (and reasons for it), and a brief discussion of the theology of the catechism. We barely scratched the surface! There is a massive amount of material on the Internet about this time period, the Reformation, and even the Heidelberg Catechism. Delve into the Additional Resources in the column to the right if you are so inclined. I will use the rest of this post to present information from some of these resources, in some cases copying paragraphs directly from the sources - I do not intend or pretend to have this taken as my own research or even words. In places I have provided sentences or slightly modified text to improve the flow for the reader, and I will try to accurately indicate where information is taken from so that the reader can dig deeper on their own (hover your mouse over the number in parentheses at the end of the paragraph to get identify the article in the Additional Resources from which the information was taken).
Historical Background:
The Reformation did not happen all at once or in all places at the same time. Luther lit the fuse with the nailing of his 95 theses on the Wittenberg church door in October 1517. Soon after, in April 1518, Luther traveled to Heidelberg for a debate (disputation) at the annual meeting of the Augustinian monks. Here he presented his Heidelberg Theses which called for a clear and sustained focus on the cross of Christ as the only means of salvation.
While relatively small, Heidelberg, was the seat of one of seven electors who held the responsibility of choosing a new emperor when that was necessary. In addition, the Elector of the Palatinate also served as the interim emperor, or imperial steward, whenever there was a vacancy in the imperial office due to death or other tragic circumstances. Therefore the city of Heidelberg was not only a prominent city within the Palatinate, but given the weighty responsibilities of its Elector within the Holy Roman Empire, its influence far outstripped its size. (3)
Luther's Heidelberg Theses do not appear to have had much of an immediate effect on the city or citizens of Heidelberg itself. This was probably due to the fact that the Elector at that time, Ludwig V (1478-1544), was noncommital on the whole matter of spiritual reform in his territory. He was more interested in politics and hunting than doctrine and sanctified living.
The evangelical writings of Luther began spreading quickly as early as the 1520s. At this time Protestant churches were already being established throughout the Holy Roman Empire.
During the 1520s some reformed-minded leaders in Heidelberg began to call for change. Some of the faculty at the University of Heidelberg began to teach from a Protestant perspective.
In the 1530s the Reformation continued to spread with apparent relentlessness, so that by the end of the 1530s the north and the east of the Empire had become extensively Protestant.
At the beginning of the 1540s the ecclesiastical prince elector, Archbishop Hermann von Wied, requested that Martin Bucer, the Reformer of Strasbourg, come to the Electorate of Cologne to reorganize this princely territory according to Reformation principles. This development seemed particularly threatening to Charles V, since the whole northwest of the Empire threatened to fall to Protestantism through the Electorate of Cologne. That would have meant that the Habsburg Netherlands would have been cut off from the Catholic territories in the Empire. Because of this, the emperor reacted vigorously, first by instigating a “battle of printed pamphlets”. This was followed soon after by preparations for a military campaign against the Protestants. In 1546 the so-called Schmalkaldic War broke out. On April 24, 1547 the Protestants were thoroughly defeated. The leaders of the Schmalkaldic League, Elector Johann Friedrich of Saxony and landgrave Philipp of Hesse, were taken prisoners. (3, p. 17)
While the Interim was a setback for the Reformation, it certainly did not stop it. Resistance to the Interim finally culminated in the Peace of Augsburg (1555). This decree allowed each local prince to decide the religious direction of his region.
The peace of Augsburg in 1555 was the immediate pre-condition for an area-wide introduction of the Reformation in the Electoral Palatinate. There had previously been several isolated attempts to put Reformation ideas into practice. For example, in 1545 Prince Elector Frederick II (Elector since 1544) took communion in both kinds and enacted the first church ordinances which included the mass in German, emphasis on the Bible and restrictions on the veneration of saints. Nevertheless, he tried to assume a mediating position between the Emperor and the Protestant princes (Schindling/Ziegler 1993:9-24; Wolgast 1998:17-32). These incipient attempts to introduce the Reformation were discontinued after the defeat of the Protestants in the Schmalkaldic War. The Augsburg Interim of 1548 imposed upon the Protestants a religious law which rolled back the achievements of the Reformation extensively. Only communion in both kinds and clerical marriage continued to be allowed, but this was only until a council would enact definitive regulations. (3)
Elector Ludwig V's successor, Frederick II, was far more open-minded to the Reformation. In 1546 he even promoted a number of religious reforms in the Palatinate. However, even though Elector Frederick II was an influential man, he was not nearly as powerful as the emperor himself, Charles V, who was staunchly Roman Catholic. Especially after an alliance of Protestant princes, called the Schmalkaldic League, lost a battle against the imperial army, Charles V ensured that the Reformation would be suppressed, both in the Palatinate and elsewhere. In 1548 he enacted the Augsburg Interim which essentially required all territories under his rule to return to the teachings and practices of Rome.
The following year, in 1556, Elector Frederick II was succeeded by Otto Henry (Ottheinrich). He was a stronger supporter of the Reformation. Not only did he bring in a new church order and promote the use of the Württemberg Catechism for education, he also sent a church visitation team around to all the local congregations to determine what the actual, spiritual state of affairs was in his territory. The results that came back were not encouraging. Ministers were not well-trained; congregations were not well-fed; superstitions and traditions were more prominent than the knowledge of Scripture and holy living. Elector Otto Henry was eager to change all of that. Influenced by Philipp Melanchthon (1597–60), Otto Heinrich had collected representatives from a variety of Protestant traditions: confessional Lutheran (e.g., Tileman Hesshussen 1527–88) and Reformed (e.g., Pierre Boquin, 1518–82), and Zwinglian (e.g., Wilehelm Klebitz, c. 1533–88). (4)
There was theological tension and confusion within the University and the church when Frederick arrived. The tensions forced him him to study and come to conclusions. As he did he called confessionally Reformed theologians to the University and the church, and commissioned the catechism in 1562. His noble efforts were cut short, however, when he died only three years after becoming elector. It was left to the new Elector, Frederick III, Otto Henry's nephew, to continue what his uncle had begun.
Friederich, however, was not a Lutheran but Reformed. Under the terms of the Peace of Augsburg (1555) the ruler’s religion was the peoples’ religion. So the people were going to change religions for the third time in just a few years.
The Palatinate church had been through two revolutions in the previous twenty years. In 1543 they were Roman Catholic. By 1553 they were Protestant and ten years after that they were about to become confessionally Reformed. The churches needed a clear, unambiguous articulation about what Scripture teaches concerning the most important questions of the Christian faith and life.
The state of the Reformed confession in the whole of Europe was also in a state of confusion. Three years after the abdication by Charles V, Ferdinand I (1503–64) became Holy Roman Emperor until his death eight years later. Philip II (1527–98) acceded to the throne in Spain and began a violent suppression of the Reformed there resulting in the martyrdom of thousands of Reformed Christians. The reign of “Bloody Mary” Tudor in England, which drove English Reformed Christians to Geneva, Frankfurt, and Heidelberg, the outbreak of the First French War of Religion (1562–63), which would continue intermittently and end with the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre (1572), in which no fewer than 30,000 French Reformed Christians would be slaughtered in the space of week, combined to justify his sense that the Reformed were a persecuted people who needed a safe haven outside of Geneva and who needed to be able to articulate the Reformed confession in a way that made sense to fellow evangelicals and that demonstrated the real common ground that existed between the two principal Protestant traditions, Lutheran and Reformed as well as explaining clearly the basis for the Reformed dissent from the the Lutheran theology on Christology, the sacraments, and the practice of worship to name the major areas. (1)
For his part Frederick III professed not to be a “Calvinist” (an expression created by Lutheran critics of the Reformed) and never to have read Calvin. Whether this is true is open to debate but it illustrates his tense relations with the other electorates in the empire. Nevertheless, almost from the moment he became Elector Palatinate in 1559 he came under scrutiny by the other electors because of his religion. For his entire reign Heidelberg was under threat of potential invasion by Lutheran and Roman Catholic electors because the Reformed confession had no official status under the Peace of Augsburg (1555). The tensions created by the Pax Augustana were not relieved until 1648 and then only after the brutal and destructive Thirty-Years War. (1)
Now for a little story that illustrates the seriousness that these issues could take during this period. I'm sure that a good time was had by all...
So far we have spoken of polemics in Heidelberg in several places (the Augustinian monastery, the university and the Church of the Holy Spirit) in the form of disputations, lectures, sermons and books, involving church and state, town and gown, and the loss of position and excommunication. Now we turn to a formal debate on the Lord’s Supper in Latin in Heidelberg between the Palatinate’s Reformed and Saxony’s strict Lutheran theologians in connection with, of all things, summer wedding festivities!
Frederick’s third daughter Dorothea Susanne’s union to strict Lutheran Johann Wilhelm of Saxe-Weimar might seem to have presented an occasion for irenics but instead people were invited to five days of polemics, the famous “Wedding Debates” (3-7 June, 1560). These debates at his daughter’s nuptials indicate how serious the second sacrament was for Frederick not only spiritually, ecclesiastically and politically but also within his own family. So far as we know, no one changed sides through the arguments and counter arguments but the Elector, more clearly than before, saw the errors of the strict Lutheran view, despite the arguments of, and pressure from, his Lutheran wife and in-laws. (2)
In the sixteenth century substantial changes were taking place, not only in the churches, but also in the schools. For a long time, formal education was predominantly a privilege of the rich. The teaching in these schools was done in Latin. However, as the sixteenth century progressed there was a growing awareness that education should not be restricted only to the Latin language or simply to the rich. As a result, many German schools were started. At these German schools both boys and girls had three main components in their curriculum: reading, writing, and... catechism!
Considering the religious and educational reform that was taking place in the Palatinate, it is not surprising that there was a demand for a good, solid catechism. Such a catechism could unify and solidify the religious reform, while at the same time fill a basic need within the curriculum taught to the young citizens – and future leaders – of the Palatinate. (4)
Therefore in 1562 Frederick III, prince of the house of Simmern, commission the writing and publication of the Heidelberg Catechism. The confession of the Gospel by the magisterial Protestant churches was clear enough but the picture on the ground was not so clear. (1)
The Heidelberg Catechism was intended to explain the Reformed faith to those who were unsure of what Reformed people believed and how the Reformed faith related to what they had learned before, Romanism and a version of Lutheranism.
Thus, the Heidelberg Catechism was produced in a controversial and turbulent context. The Reformation achievements, the recovery of the doctrine of justification by God’s free acceptance alone (sola gratia), through trust, resting, receiving alone (sola fide), and the principle of Scripture as the sole magisterial authority (sola Scriptura) were all under attack at the very moment the Reformed Church was being established in the Palatinate. The catechism was was written to preserve the gospel of justification by grace alone, through faith alone, on basis of the imputation of the finished work of Christ alone in a time when that gospel was being questioned. (1)
The Heidelberg Catechism was published in three editions with the third and final edition appearing in 1563. It was commissioned by Frederich III upon becoming the elector (governor) of the Palatinate in what we now know as Germany. Heidelberg was the capital city of the Palatinate (political district in the Holy Roman Empire). When he became elector,
Thus, Frederick gathered in Heidelberg a group of scholars and pastors to implement a Reformed Reformation. The two best known of this group were Zacharias Ursinus (1534-83) and Caspar Olevianus (1536-87). These two men were the principal authors of the Heidelberg Catechism, though it was edited by a committee. Frederick did not want it known who wrote the catechism because those responsible for the preparation of the Catechism were attacked severely in their own day and at great risk defended the Catechism. In 1566 some princes attacked Frederick at the imperial Diet of Augsburg insisting that the Catechism taught doctrines that were illegal in the empire. Frederick replied that he upheld the Augsburg Confession and therefore was in conformity with the laws of the empire. He also stated that he would rather die than abandon his Catechism. His position was upheld by the diet.
Frederick died in 1576 he was succeeded by his son Lewis. Lewis was a strict Lutheran and began to exile from his territory the Reformed leadership of the church. Olevianus was dismissed early and Ursinus was the last to go in 1578. Ursinus withdrew to the city of Neustadt, under the protection of Prince Casimir. There he spent the last years of his life teaching theology and lecturing on the Catechism. After his death in 1583 his student David Pareus gathered and edited his lectures for publication as Ursinus' Commentary on the Heidelberg Catechism. This commentary remains an invaluable resource for the study of the Catechism.
As a result we don’t know exactly who wrote which questions in every case. A great deal of research has been done to try to sort out the “source-criticism” of the catechism.
Source criticism of the catechism is difficult but some things are relatively clear. Ursinus was the major author of the catechism. He prepared two documents prior to the catechism, a Summa or a large catechism and a Catechismus Minor. There is a strong genetic relation between these two documents and the Heidelberger. They certainly drew from a number of existing Protestant catechisms including Luther’s small catechism, Calvin’s catechisms, and many others. Some nineteenth-century accounts of the catechism attributed much of it to Caspar Olevianus, but it appears now that he was primarily an editor and contributed perhaps the text of question and answer 80 to the third and final edition in 1563. There are similarities between the catechism and his popular catechetical work 1567 Vester Grund (Firm Foundation) but it is most likely that work was a commentary upon or an aid to the catechism rather than a source for it.
The first draft of the catechism was complete by 1562. It was revised by a synod in Heidelberg in January, 1563 and there the ministers subscribed it (i.e., they wrote their names underneath it as a sign of their affirmation of its doctrine). The first edition had some peculiarities. The questions and answers were not numbered. They were numbered in a subsequent edition. The third edition added the current question and answer 80, likely in response to the Council of Trent (which adopted canons and decrees on the mass in 1562) and that edition was translated into Latin, which became the version used in schools and by churches and schools across Europe and the British Isles. It was the Latin edition that was adopted by the Synod of Dort (1619). In the fourth edition, the division into 52 Lord’s Days was introduced. The catechism has been translated into English, Greek, Hebrew, Japanese, Korean, Spanish, and many other languages and has been used by millions of Christians to confess the faith since its publication.
Once the Heidelberg Catechism was complete, Frederick III attached his own, personal preface to the document. This preface sheds some interesting light on why he was so keen on having a top-quality catechism for his territory. In this preface, the Elector highlights the following:
Governing officials not only have the duty to maintain good order and peace in their territory, but “also and above all, constantly to admonish and lead them to devout knowledge and fear of the Almighty and His holy word of salvation.”
Although his predecessors had planted seeds of reform in the Palatinate, these efforts never resulted in the bountiful spiritual harvest that many were hoping for.
One key reason for the lackluster results was that insufficient attention was paid to the youth who were either “careless in respect to Christian doctrine,” “entirely without Christian instruction,” “unsystematically taught,” or “perplexed with irrelevant and needless questions”—in many cases, it might have been all four.
Therefore, in order to address the aforementioned problem—which, to be sure, was not restricted to the youth—Elector Frederick III commissioned “the preparation of a summary course of instruction or catechism of our Christian Religion, according to the word of God.”
This new catechism was to be used both in “churches and schools” by “Pastors and Schoolmasters.” In this way there would be consistency in teaching, rather than teachers and preachers who “adopt daily changes, or introduce erroneous doctrine.”
Thus, with the youth of his city and the future of Christ’s church at heart, Elector Frederick III commissioned the writing of the Heidelberg Catechism. With it he expressed the hope “that if our youth in early life are earnestly instructed and educated in the Word of God, it will please Almighty God also to grant reformation of public and private morals, and temporal and eternal welfare.” (4)
Structure and Style: