The Heidelberg Catechism

Frederick III of the Palatinate, elector Palatine, sent the catechism to the pastors and schoolmasters of his territory with a preface dated at Heidelberg on 19 January 1563. He writes that he found the young taught “without any established, certain, and clear catechism”, each teacher following his own plan, and that he had therefore had one prepared in German and Latin “with the advice and cooperation of our entire theological faculty in this place” and of the superintendents and leading ministers (Frederick III, Preface to the Heidelberg Catechism in Richards, pp. 183–199).

The preface names no author (Frederick III, Preface to the Heidelberg Catechism in Richards, pp. 183–199). An old tradition credits Zacharias Ursinus and Caspar Olevianus. The introduction that the Christian Reformed Church prints with the catechism today calls it the work of a team of ministers and university theologians, with Ursinus probably the chief writer and Olevianus in a lesser role (Heidelberg Catechism introduction to the edition of the Christian Reformed Church).

The first question asks, “What is thy only comfort in life and in death?” The answer begins: “That I, with body and soul, both in life and in death, am not my own, but belong to my faithful Saviour Jesus Christ” (Heidelberg Catechism question 1). The second question sets out the plan of the whole in three parts: how great my sin and misery are, how I am redeemed from them, and how I am to be thankful to God for that redemption (Heidelberg Catechism question 2). In his lectures on the catechism Ursinus says that the question of comfort stands first because it contains the design and substance of the whole (Ursinus, Commentary on the Heidelberg Catechism p. 17).

Question 80 contrasts the Lord’s Supper with the mass. The mass, it says, teaches that the living and the dead do not have forgiveness through Christ’s sufferings unless he is still offered for them daily by priests, and is therefore “a denial of the one sacrifice and passion of Jesus Christ” and “an accursed idolatry” (Heidelberg Catechism question 80). The question was absent from the first printing and was added and then enlarged in the two that followed, by the elector’s command (Heidelberg Catechism question 80, Schaff’s note). The Council of Trent had taught in September 1562 that in the mass the same Christ who offered himself on the cross is offered in an unbloody manner, and it condemned the claim that the mass takes anything from the sacrifice of the cross (Council of Trent Session 22, chapters 1–2 and canon 4).

In 2004 the synod of the Christian Reformed Church in North America declared that it could no longer hold the question in its existing form as part of its confession, and its edition prints the condemnation in brackets, as not reflecting the present teaching and practice of the Roman Catholic Church; the Reformed Church in America keeps the full text as a statement made in its historical setting (Heidelberg Catechism question 80, notes of the Christian Reformed Church). The same church’s introduction notes that the Synod of Dort approved the catechism in 1619 (Heidelberg Catechism introduction to the edition of the Christian Reformed Church).