Dr. Martin Luther's Small Catechism Explained in Questions and Answers - Dietrich

Ken McGuire
Ken McGuire Member Posts: 2,074 ✭✭✭
edited November 20 in English Forum

In 1529 Luther wrote the Small Catechism for parents to teach their young children.  But somehow it turned into a book for Pastors to teach adolescents. To get more age-appropriate and to include issues of the day, "Explanations" were added to it.  There were multiple "families" of these explanations and earlier I posted one that came out of Denmark and Norway.  This document is from a German stream.

Johann Conrad Dietrich (1575-1639) (all three names do have variant spellings) was a 17th Century Lutheran who wanted to improve confirmation instruction and so wrote his Institutiones catecheticae. As the title suggests, they are in Latin and a brief examination of 2 different editions on Internet Archive and Google books shows that they are massive, detailed comments on just about everything that could come up in catechizing.  Or rather what could come up THEN.

Somehow there was a briefer German Catechism that is from Dietrich that was used in Dresden among other places, which was taken across the Atlantic to the New World, which was used by Missouri, Wisconsin, Buffalo, and Joint Synod of Ohio, among others...  As a living document the exact contents did vary a bit over time and over place.

There was a need for an English Catechism too, and at least by 1872 Joint Synod of Ohio published one.  According to http://www.worldcat.org/title/dr-martin-luthers-small-catechism-explained-in-questions-and-answers/oclc/38867098/editions?referer=di&editionsView=true that 1872 edition has the same number of pages as this 1902 edition.  In addition, the debated phrasing of question 321 appears to be the same as the 1872 version...

Even after the "replacement" catechism was written by Heinrich Christian Schwann in 1896, there was still a demand for the Dietrich catechism in the Missouri Synod, and this work is listed as a major source for the catechism we use today.

Source for the text was http://archive.org/details/Dr.MartinLuthersSmallCatechismExplainedInQuestionsAndAnswers This one took a bit more work since the OCR was not that clean.  In addition, there is a fair amount of referencing between questions, which I have tried to link. I have added Milestone references based upon the Tappert Book of Concord, which means that there are no links for the section on the Office of the Keys, Table prayers, or Christian Questions and their Answers.

I compiled mine as a Commentary and used the subject from worldcat, linked above.

SDG

Ken McGuire

The Gospel is not ... a "new law," on the contrary, ... a "new life." - William Julius Mann

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