The Heidelberg Catechism

By Edwin Walhout

A pastoral and theological critique of a much-loved document from the Reformation era. In short: it is dated.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Edwin Walhout
• Release date: Jun 7, 2011
• ISBN: 9781458018342

Edwin Walhout

I am a retired minister of the Christian Reformed Church, living in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Being retired from professional life, I am now free to explore theology without the constraints of ecclesiastical loyalties. You will be challenged by the ebooks I am supplying on Smashwords.

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THE HEIDELBERG CATECHISM

A Theological and Pastoral Critique

by Edwin Walhout

Published by Edwin Walhout

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2010 Edwin Walhout

Cover design by Amy Cole ([e-mail])

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Biblical quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

PART I: Man’s Misery

PART II: Deliverance

The Apostles’ Creed

The Sacraments

PART III: Man’s Gratitude

The Decalogue

Prayer

Excursus On Revelation

PREFACE

In recent years my theological views have undergone a rather profound change, coming to be much more in alignment with the ancient Hebrew-Christian mindset represented in the Bible. In an attempt to understand more clearly the nature of that theological change, I determined to review the basic creeds and confessions with which I have been nurtured and which I have dutifully represented in my teaching and pastoral ministry.

What we have here in this document, accordingly, is part of the result of that review (along with comparable critiques of the Belgic Confession and Canons of Dort, and, for that matter, of five ancient creeds as well). I do my best to understand both what is of abiding value in the Heidelberg Catechism and what may well be the unrecognized remnants of untenable medieval theology.

In general my conclusion is that this Catechism has been highly useful for its day and for the earlier centuries of the Reformation, but that it is nonetheless only a partial correction of the distorted theology of the medieval Roman Catholic church. As such it should no longer be accepted as definitive of Christian theology.

Question and Answer 1

Q What is your only comfort in life and in death?

A That I am not my own, but belong – body and soul, in life and in death –

to my faithful Savior Jesus Christ.

He has fully paid for all my sins with his precious blood,

and has set me free from the tyranny of the devil.

He also watches over me in such a way that not a hair can fall from my head

without the will of my Father in heaven:

in fact, all things must work together for my salvation.

Because I belong to him, Christ, by his Holy Spirit,

assures me of eternal life

and makes me whole-heartedly willing and ready from now on to live for him.

It should be noted that the Heidelberg Catechism begins with human experience, your only comfort. This is at least partly a reaction against the abstract nature of medieval theology. What difference does all that convoluted scholastic theology make in our daily lives? It would also be even more a reaction against the superstitions of medieval religion, such matters as purgatory, the threat of hell, the sacrament of penance, veneration of saints and sacred objects, all of which combine to set the Christian life in the context of fear of eternal punishment. Are these things really the way to achieve true comfort? How to avoid going to hell when you die?

By reacting against these medieval distortions of Christian faith, the Heidelberg Catechism is providing a fresh personal focus to what it means for a person to be a Christian. No longer simply belonging to the Roman Catholic church and faithfully practicing all its sacramental and related mandates, but, as A1 indicates, finding a much more personal and subjective and experiential comfort directly from the Lord Jesus: That I am not my own, but belong … to my faithful Savior Jesus Christ.

It bears emphasis that the catechism speaks of belonging in the sense of not being my own. Having been liberated from the control of the Roman hierarchy, Christians are not merely on their own to do as they wish without any authority whatever. They belong. They are not free to be their own God. We belong to Jesus and Jesus belongs to God, so that we find the meaning of our lives not in self-indulgence but in obedience and the freedom of the Spirit. This is the way to true human life, being so united with Jesus our savior that we find our comfort, the meaning of life, in him. The catechism will try to spell out in more detail what this means in the later questions and answers.

Accordingly, it is to be noted that the HC begins with soteriology, our salvation. This, in turn, is set within the context, as it should be, of Christology. We belong to our savior Jesus Christ. We become ready and willing to live for Him. This is all well and good.

This being said, however, it should also be observed that the Bible itself does not begin there, that is, on the note of subjective human experience or with soteriology. On the contrary the Bible begins with God and what God is doing. In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The rest of the Bible, including the New Testament and the Christian church, is built upon this foundation. Soteriology and Christology fit within the larger pattern of Theism (or Theology proper).

True enough that A1 does place the matter in the context of my Father in heaven who, it is said, watches over me and makes all things work together for my salvation. But one gets the impression that the sovereignty of God is understood within a still larger context, namely my salvation. God is sovereign, controlling all things, but for the purpose of achieving my salvation, and thus for my comfort in life and death.

We ought not to begin our theology here. That is to say, not to orient our preaching and thinking to our personal comfort in life and death. In its historical context this emphasis did a great deal of good in distancing Christian people from the ecclesiasticism, scholasticism, and sacramentalism of the middle ages. Necessarily so indeed. Yet now, taking another look at the matter from the vantage point of five hundred years later, it should not be too difficult for us to recognize that some additional theological reorientation needs to take place. We should be God-centered, not salvation-centered or even Christ-centered. Certainly not church-centered.

Hence, in terms of the HC, we should find our comfort precisely within the loving arms of our Creator, him who created the heavens and the earth and directs all things, not merely to my salvation, but to the salvation of the entire world. God not only created this world but he loves it to the extent of sending his own son Jesus to redeem it. To redeem not only the world objectively, surely, but all of us humans subjectively. This is, speaking theologically, the process of history, beginning with creation, developing with Christology, and producing soteriology. The creator becomes our savior when he sends Jesus to save us and when the Holy Spirit so moves within our lives as to make us ready and willing to serve him in life and in death.

Hence it is not that the HC is wrong in what it says, but that the context within which it is said is not sufficiently broad. Take what it says in QA1 and set it within the context of Genesis. Make our theology theocentric.

Question and Answer 2

Q What must you know to live and die in the joy of this comfort?

A Three things:

first, how great my sins and misery are;

second, how I am set free from all my sins and misery;

third, how I am to thank God for such deliverance.

The answer to this question is often summarized in the threefold formula: sin, salvation, service; or: guilt, grace, gratitude. Christian comfort comes as the result of this triple process: knowing yourself to be a sinner, knowing that Jesus sets you free from this bondage to sin, and thus being able to live a thankful life.

We must not overlook the major breakthrough being made here in QA2 of the Heidelberg Catechism. Traditional Roman Catholic piety made central the sacramental process of confession, penance, and absolution. What must a person do to live and die in comfort? In the penitential system he must go to confession, articulating the things he has done wrong, he must perform the penitential duties the priest mandates, and he must then hear the priest absolving him of the guilt of his sin. He may then go back to regular life in the assurance that he is right with God, and hence that he may be happy and content in that knowledge.

The Protestant reformers broke out of that mold and tried to find the Biblical way of dealing with sin. They recognized that one does not need to deal with a priest to find forgiveness, one needs only to believe in Jesus Christ, that he died for our sins. Justification then is by faith not by the sacramental system. Afterwards, then, such a believer should find the path of gratitude in terms of doing what God desires in one’s everyday life. Not such matters as saying a Hail Mary, or visiting a shrine, or venerating the relics of the saints, or purchasing indulgences – as the medieval system would have it, but living a godly life in everything one does. The Heidelberger does its best to articulate this new Protestant insight, and we do well to appreciate it deeply.

Theologically, however, the same general critique of QA1 applies also to QA2. It is not defined within a well-rounded Biblical and theistic mindset. More specifically, what is missing is an item that should be # 1, namely, that I am created by God. I am created as a human being designed to image God in the way I live. But not only me, the entire human race. I am one of millions of people, all of whom God created and all of whom God desires to live as a collective image of God. God created the human race to replenish and subdue the earth and have dominion over it, and to do this in such a way as to demonstrate, image, the nature of God himself. That is to say, to develop a civilization that incorporates the divine virtues of justice, truth, love, honor, respect, perseverance, and whatever other attributes there may be in God himself. God wants me to be a part of that, so that I learn how to live as a true image-bearer of God within the civilization that is my cultural environment.

A2 does not begin there. It begins with sin. But in the Bible sin is not first, not primary. Creation is. The image of God is. The cultural mandate is. We do not first of all see ourselves as sinners, but first of all as images of God, created for good works. After we see ourselves as creatures of God, then we can analyze how well or how poorly we reflect the image in which we were created. The doctrine of sin needs to follow and build upon the doctrine of creation, not bypass it, as does the HC.

PART I: Man’s Misery

It would be interesting for some historian of religion to analyze what effect this structure of the HC has had upon those who cherish it most. Note well: the HC begins its first major Part with misery. In this, of course, it follows upon the answer to Q2, the first thing we need to know is how great my sins and misery are. Really now! Is that the first thing we need to know as Christians?

I sense in my reflections upon the community of Christians in which I have lived my entire life that we do indeed tend to go back to this matter as the place to begin. How great my sin is. Not how glorious is my true nature as created by God, but what a mess I have made of my life. Though, to be frank, I sometimes get the feeling that this confession is as much pro forma as it is a genuine outburst of despair. I don’t sense that very many fine Christian people go about continually burdened with a sense of guilt and sin. As, of course, they should not.

However, what does seem to happen, if my own experience is any indication, is that we also tend to see other people in this light. What do we see when we look at other people? Is the first thing we notice about them what is wrong, what is sinful, their bad points? Or is the first thing we see in our neighbors and friends what a fine person he or she really is – surely flawed as we all are, but still manifesting so much of what it means to be an image of God?

I suspect that when this point is analyzed in fine detail it would suggest that we are trained to see the deeds of the devil before seeing the deeds of Christ. Do we see people in general as created good, created by God in his own image, but deeply flawed by sin, or do we see them as basically evil? I suggest that the Biblical point of view is the former, so that we should train ourselves to see the world and people as the potentially beautiful and godly people that God desires and that Christ has come to make possible.

In this respect then the HC, while it is an admirable document for its time, does not inculcate in us a full-orbed understanding of what it means for us to be followers of Jesus Christ. Thankfully, most of us can fill in this gap in the existential process of daily living, but how much better it would be to have our central and formative creed to be explicit in doing so.

Question and Answer 3

Q How do you come to know your misery?

A The law of God tells me.

The answer is: The law of God tells me. That’s fine. We do need to gauge our lives in the light of what God wants for us, namely by his law. Not what I feel I need, or what I think is in my best interest, or blaming other people for the bad things that happen to me. I do need to analyze my life in terms of something greater than me, in terms of what the one who created me desires me to become.

The HC does not carry out its soteriological orientation independently from God, and we can be deeply grateful that it does not. There is an objective measuring stick that determines whether or not we are doing well in the way we live. So misery is, in the HC, more than subjective feeling, as it might well be in much of liberal or fundamentalist theology. It is the result of looking in that divine mirror called God’s law. This is fine and necessary.

A moment’s consideration, next, will expose the question: What exactly is the law of God? Granted that we know our condition in its light, what precisely is that law and where do we find it? So that is where the HC goes next.

Question and Answer 4

Q What does God’s law require of us?

A Christ teaches us this in summary in Matthew 22 –

You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul,

and with all your mind, and with all your strength.

This is the great and first commandment.

And a second is like it, You shall love your neighbor as yourself.

On these two commandments depend all the law and the prophets.

In its answer to this question the HC is moderately surprising. One might think first of all of the ten commandments, the Decalogue given to Moses on Mt. Sinai. This may have been what the rich young ruler had in mind when he asked Jesus what was the great commandment in the law. Jesus’ answer, however, did not prioritize any one of the ten commandments, but looked to other expressions of God’s will in the Old Testament, namely to love God above all and one’s neighbor as oneself. This is also the way in which the HC answers the question. God’s law is the law of love, first for God himself, and second reflected in one’s relationship to other people.

There should be no quarrel with this. After all, the HC has excellent precedent in Jesus! Nonetheless, there is another factor to be considered and made part of the answer. It is the insight of Paul when he writes in Romans 2:14 that there are some people who do by nature the things of the law. There are Gentile people, not blessed with having either the Decalogue or Jesus’ teaching, who in some respects do live by nature in a way that resembles the way God wants them to live, who do love other people as themselves even though they do not know the creator God specifically. There is, accordingly, such a thing as natural law, not meaning here how the universe works, but a natural moral law that appears to be inherent in human nature and that is not completely eradicated by sin. Some people suppress that law more than others, but it can be detected often in the way non-Christian people live.

I am suggesting, therefore, that the failure of the HC to begin with creation,