Theopedia

Westminster Shorter Catechism

Definition

The Westminster Shorter Catechism is a question-and-answer summary of Reformed doctrine produced by the Westminster Assembly alongside the Westminster Confession of Faith and a longer companion, the Westminster Larger Catechism; together the three documents are known as the Westminster Standards.1 Its 107 questions open with: “What is the chief end of man?” “Man’s chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy him for ever.”2

Content and Structure

The Catechism states its own plan in its third question: “The Scriptures principally teach what man is to believe concerning God, and what duty God requires of man.”3 Chen reads this “twofold” division, matched almost verbatim in the Westminster Larger Catechism’s own third and thirty-ninth questions, as the organizing structure of both catechisms.4

Questions 4 through 38 take up the first half, what man is to believe: the being and Trinity of God, his decrees, the works of creation and providence, the covenant God made with Adam, the fall, and the benefits believers receive from Christ in life, at death, and at the resurrection.5 Question 39 turns to the second half, restating that organizing question in its own words: “The duty which God requireth of man, is obedience to his revealed will.”6 That obedience is unfolded first as the moral law summarized in the Ten Commandments (questions 40 through 84),7 then as the “outward and ordinary means” of faith, repentance, the Word, the sacraments, and prayer, closing with a question-by-question exposition of the Lord’s Prayer (questions 85 through 107).8

Historical Origin

The Westminster Assembly, convened by an act of the Long Parliament on June 12, 1643 and sitting until February 1649, produced the Confession and both catechisms together, and all three were “immediately adopted by the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland.”1 The Shorter Catechism was not simply a condensed restatement of the Confession finished at the same moment: Charles Hodge notes William Cunningham’s observation that the doctrine of Adam’s sin being directly imputed to his descendants “is much more explicitly stated in the Westminster Larger and Shorter Catechisms than in the Confession of Faith,” because the Confession was substantially framed in 1646, before a French challenge to that doctrine (by Josué de la Place, Latinized Placaeus) had drawn attention in England, while the catechisms were finished after it had.9

Reception and Influence

Alongside the Confession, the Shorter Catechism became, in Hodge’s words, part of “the doctrinal standard of all the Presbyterian bodies in the world of English and Scotch derivation,” and English Congregationalists gathered at Savoy in 1658 approved the Westminster Catechisms so closely that they “in a manner laid aside the use of” their own Savoy Declaration in favor of the Assembly’s catechisms.1 Waldron judges that among later Reformed churches the Shorter Catechism specifically “exercised an influence equal or superior to” the Heidelberg Catechism.10

Baptist Reception

Particular Baptists produced their own catechism modeled directly on the Shorter Catechism. In 1693, William Collins and Benjamin Keach, wanting to show both their agreement with and their differences from other Calvinistic churches, published a catechism that, in its own closing note, acknowledged its dependence on “the Declaration of Savoy” and “the Westminster Shorter Catechism.”11 The dependence went beyond acknowledgment: question 10 of what came to be called the Baptist Catechism gives the same question and answer, on the being of God, as question 7 of the Westminster Shorter Catechism.12 The catechism is often called “Keach’s Catechism,” though Scheiderer notes no evidence exists that Keach himself authored it.12

Related Doctrines

References

  1. Archibald Alexander Hodge, Outlines of Theology (New York: Robert Carter and Brothers, 1879), chap. 7, “Creeds and Confessions.” ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  2. Westminster Assembly, The Shorter Catechism (London, 1648), Q. 1. ↩

  3. Westminster Assembly, The Shorter Catechism, Q. 3. ↩

  4. Carol Man Fen Chen, A Historical, Biblical, and Theological Interpretation of Covenants: Unconditionality and Conditionality in Relation to Justification and Sanctification (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2019), 158-159. ↩

  5. Westminster Assembly, The Shorter Catechism, Q. 4-38. ↩

  6. Westminster Assembly, The Shorter Catechism, Q. 39. ↩

  7. Westminster Assembly, The Shorter Catechism, Q. 40-84. ↩

  8. Westminster Assembly, The Shorter Catechism, Q. 85-107. ↩

  9. Charles Hodge, “Chapter VIII. Sin.,” in Systematic Theology, Volume II (New York: Charles Scribner and Company, 1872), 207. ↩

  10. Samuel Eldon Waldron, Faith, Obedience, and Justification: Current Evangelical Departures from Sola Fide (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2005), 122-123. ↩

  11. Jared Heath Moore, A Biblical and Historical Appraisal of Concupiscence with Special Attention to Same-Sex Attraction (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2019), 121. ↩

  12. Daniel David Scheiderer, “Trinity and an Eternal Covenant,” in Eternal Covenant: The Trinitarian Shape of an Historic Baptist Doctrine (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2022), 112n65. ↩ ↩2