The Heidelberg Catechism
The catechism of the church of the Palatinate, issued at Heidelberg in 1563 in 129 questions and answers. The Synod of Dort approved it in 1619, and Reformed churches still hold it as a confession.
Read the text at ccel.org ↗The text as published today by the Christian Reformed Church in North America, with its introduction and its notes on question 80 ↗
The catechism was published by the elector Frederick III, whose preface is recorded separately as Preface of the Elector Frederick III to the Heidelberg Catechism. It is arranged in three parts, announced in its second question: human misery, redemption, and thankfulness. Under these heads it expounds the Apostles’ Creed, the sacraments, the Ten Commandments and the Lord’s Prayer. Its first question asks for the believer’s “only comfort in life and in death”.
The text was not fixed at once. Question 80, which contrasts the Lord’s Supper with the mass and calls the mass “an accursed idolatry”, was not in the first printing. Schaff’s note reports that it was inserted by the elector’s order, in part in the second edition and in full in the third, which carries the remark that what had been overlooked was now added “by command of his Electoral Grace”. The churches that hold the catechism now differ over that question: the Christian Reformed Church in North America prints its last paragraphs in brackets with a note that they are no longer binding, and the Reformed Church in America keeps the full text as a statement of its time.
The catechism states the Reformed faith of its authors and their prince. On disputed points, such as the Lord’s Supper, it is evidence for what they taught and for how they described the teaching of others, not a neutral account of that teaching.
Cited in
- AD 30 or 33, estimated date
- 19 January 1563, firm date
- 25 June 1580, firm date