Theopedia

Heidelberg Catechism

Definition

The Heidelberg Catechism is a question-and-answer statement of Reformed doctrine, written by Zacharias Ursinus and Caspar Olevianus and adopted by the Synod of Heidelberg in 1563.1 Philip Schaff, quoted by Waldron, calls it “the most catholic and popular of all the Reformed symbols,” noting that “the German Reformed church acknowledges no other.”2 Its 129 questions are grouped into 52 “Lord’s Days,” one to be taught each Sunday of the year, and fall into three parts following the catechism’s own opening question: man’s misery, his deliverance from it, and his gratitude for that deliverance.3

Historical Development

Ursinus was born in 1534 into a Lutheran family and enrolled at the University of Wittenberg at fifteen, where he became a close student of Philip Melanchthon. After Melanchthon’s death he traveled through the Reformed world, meeting John Calvin, Heinrich Bullinger, and Peter Martyr Vermigli, the last of whom influenced him most; he then studied further with Vermigli in Zurich before his appointment as a professor at Heidelberg in 1562.4 There, at the request of the Elector Palatine Frederick III, Ursinus and Olevianus produced the catechism, with a supporting team playing a lesser role.5 The Synod of Heidelberg approved it in 1563, and it was established by civil authority as the doctrinal standard, and the instrument of religious instruction, for the churches of the Palatinate.1

The catechism spread well beyond the territory that commissioned it. It was indorsed by the Synod of Dort and became one of the Three Forms of Unity, alongside the Belgic Confession and the Canons of Dort, that still define the Continental Reformed churches.51 It became a doctrinal standard of the Reformed churches of Germany and Holland and of the German and Dutch Reformed churches in America, was used to instruct children in Scotland before the Westminster catechisms were adopted there, and its use was sanctioned by unanimous vote of the first General Assembly of the reunited Presbyterian Church in the United States in 1870.1

The catechism also served as a live doctrinal standard against which departures from Reformed orthodoxy were measured. After Jacobus Arminius accepted a professorship at Leiden in 1603, his most aggressive opponent there, Franciscus Gomarus, a student of Beza and of Ursinus himself, charged that Arminius’s theology violated both the Belgic Confession and the Heidelberg Catechism.6

Content of the Catechism

Of Man’s Misery

The catechism opens not with a definition but with a confession: “That I with body and soul, both in life and death, am not my own, but belong unto my faithful Saviour Jesus Christ.”7 From there it turns to human sinfulness: man was created “good, and after his own image,” but through “the fall and disobedience of our first parents” human nature has become so corrupt that, apart from regeneration by the Spirit, man is “wholly incapable of doing any good, and inclined to all wickedness.”8 Ursinus’s own Commentary on the Heidelberg Catechism, quoted by Hodge, explains that this corruption passes to Adam’s descendants “not through the body, nor through the soul, but through the impure generation of the whole man, on account of the guilt of our first parents.”9

Of Man’s Deliverance

The catechism’s longest section states the classic Reformed doctrine of justification by faith alone. True faith is “not only a certain knowledge… but also an assured confidence, which the Holy Ghost works by the gospel in my heart,” that God freely grants remission of sin, righteousness, and salvation “merely of grace, only for the sake of Christ’s merits.”10 Believers are righteous before God “only by a true faith in Jesus Christ,” not on account of “the worthiness of my faith,” but because “only the satisfaction, righteousness, and holiness of Christ, is my righteousness before God.”11 Waldron places these answers alongside Calvin’s formal definition of faith in the Institutes.12 The catechism anticipates and answers the standard objection that such a doctrine breeds moral carelessness: “it is impossible that those, who are implanted into Christ by a true faith, should not bring forth fruits of thankfulness.”13

The catechism then treats the sacraments as the means by which the Spirit confirms this faith. Berkhof cites Question 65 to argue that word and sacrament are “continuous” and “official” means of grace rather than occasional aids.14 On baptism, the catechism grounds infant baptism in continuity with the old covenant’s circumcision, since infants “are included in the covenant and church of God” no less than adults.15 Berkhof cites Question 69 to argue that baptism’s essential meaning is purification rather than a picture of dying and rising, a reading he then presses directly against “Baptist circles” that hold immersion to be the only proper mode.16 On the Lord’s Supper, the catechism denies that the bread and wine become Christ’s literal body and blood, insisting believers are nonetheless “as really partakers of his true body and blood by the operation of the Holy Ghost” as they receive the visible signs.17 It states the contrast with Rome sharply: the Mass teaches that Christ must be daily offered again by priests and is bodily present under the forms of bread and wine, “so that the mass, at bottom, is nothing else than a denial of the one sacrifice and sufferings of Jesus Christ, and an accursed idolatry.”18

Of Gratitude

The catechism grounds good works not in earning salvation but in gratitude for it already received: believers do good works “that so we may testify, by the whole of our conduct, our gratitude to God for his blessings.”19 It expounds the Ten Commandments toward that end, reading them, as Moore documents through Ursinus’s own commentary, as forbidding not only outward acts but every sinful inclination of the heart. On the seventh commandment the catechism forbids “all unchaste actions, gestures, words… thoughts, desires, and whatever can entice men thereto,” and on the tenth it requires “that even the smallest inclination or thought, contrary to any of God’s commandments, never rise in our hearts.”20 Ursinus himself, quoted by Moore, argued that such inclinations are genuine sin because “the law also requires of men” perfect love of God and neighbor, because scripture itself condemns evil inclinations, and because infants who die before committing any actual sin still die, which proves that sin reigns in them apart from any act of the will.21 The catechism closes with an exposition of the Lord’s Prayer as the pattern for a thankful people’s requests to God.22

Comparison with the 1689 LBCF

Theopedia’s confessional standard, the 1689 London Baptist Confession, was not written to respond to or depend on the Heidelberg Catechism, but the two documents agree on much of the ground the catechism covers: total depravity, justification by faith alone, and a rejection of the Roman Mass. On the Lord’s Supper the 1689 arrives independently at nearly the same judgment as the catechism’s Question 80, calling “the popish sacrifice of the mass” “most abominable, injurious to Christ’s own sacrifice.”23

The clearest point of divergence is baptism. Where the catechism grounds infant baptism in the covenant continuity between circumcision and baptism,15 the 1689 confines baptism to “those who do actually profess repentance towards God, faith in, and obedience to, our Lord Jesus Christ,” and requires that it be by immersion.24 This is not a question on which the wider Reformed tradition is silent: Berkhof’s own defense of the catechism’s paedobaptist reading, pressed directly against credobaptist practice, shows the disagreement is engaged from both sides rather than merely asserted past one another.16

Related Doctrines

Further Reading

References

  1. Archibald Alexander Hodge, Outlines of Theology (New York: Robert Carter and Brothers, 1879), 124-25. ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4

  2. Samuel Eldon Waldron, Faith, Obedience, and Justification: Current Evangelical Departures from Sola Fide (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2005), 101-102, quoting Philip Schaff. ↩

  3. Heidelberg Catechism, Lord’s Day 1, Q. 2. ↩

  4. 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), 102. ↩

  5. Moore, Concupiscence, 102-103. ↩ ↩2

  6. Matthew Michael Barrett, “Monergism in the Calvinist Tradition,” in “Reclaiming Monergism: The Case for Sovereign Grace in Effectual Calling and Regeneration” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2011), 69. ↩

  7. Heidelberg Catechism (1563), Lord’s Day 1, Q. 1. ↩

  8. Heidelberg Catechism, Lord’s Day 3, Q. 6-8. ↩

  9. Hodge, Outlines of Theology, 355-56, quoting Zacharias Ursinus, Commentary on the Heidelberg Catechism, Quest. 7. ↩

  10. Heidelberg Catechism, Lord’s Day 7, Q. 21. ↩

  11. Heidelberg Catechism, Lord’s Day 23, Q. 60-61. ↩

  12. Waldron, Faith, Obedience, and Justification, 102-103. ↩

  13. Heidelberg Catechism, Lord’s Day 24, Q. 64. ↩

  14. Louis Berkhof, Systematic Theology (London: Banner of Truth Trust, 1969), 591. ↩

  15. Heidelberg Catechism, Lord’s Day 27, Q. 74. ↩ ↩2

  16. Berkhof, Systematic Theology, 613-14. ↩ ↩2

  17. Heidelberg Catechism, Lord’s Day 29, Q. 78-79. ↩

  18. Heidelberg Catechism, Lord’s Day 30, Q. 80. ↩

  19. Heidelberg Catechism, Lord’s Day 32, Q. 86. ↩

  20. Heidelberg Catechism, Lord’s Day 41 and 44, Q. 109, 113. ↩

  21. Zacharias Ursinus, Commentary on the Heidelberg Catechism, quoted in Moore, Concupiscence, 103-104. ↩

  22. Heidelberg Catechism, Lord’s Day 45, Q. 116. ↩

  23. Second London Baptist Confession (1677), 30.2. ↩

  24. Second London Baptist Confession, 29.2, 29.4. ↩