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COPYRIGHT 1995 University of Illinois Press
Q. What is the chief end of man?
A. Man's chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy Him for ever.(1)
For perhaps many modern readers of English literature, this famous first question and answer from the Westminster Shorter Catechism of 1648 is among the few remembered vestiges of what in the century following the Reformation was one of the most pervasive and influential forms of writing and instruction. Although the Church from the earliest times concerned itself with the preparation of children and of converts for participation in its sacraments, it was the Reformation that forged the catechism as a distinct written genre and widely used tool of religions education.
Like the Reformation itself, catechism was European in its scope. Its beginnings and development, particularly in Germany, are well documented.(2) The word was first used as the title of a book in 1528 with the publication in Nuremberg of Andreas Althamer's Catechismus in Frag und Antwort. In this and in the massively influential Kleiner Katechismus (Small Catechism) of Martin Luther (1529), both catechism as the name of a printed thing and its association with the simple question-and-answer form became firmly established.
The impulse for Reformation catechizing flowed directly from Luther's teaching regarding the priesthood of all believers: if all are priests, all must have direct knowledge of the essentials of the faith - these essentials being defined verbally, not merely pictorially or ceremonially. And the spread of catechisms themselves resulted largely from the invention of printing not many decades before the beginning of the Reformation, as well as from the fact that catechisms, at least the most successful, were small and thus cheap and portable. Both Luther and Erasmus called their little catechisms enchiridia, and these were indeed intended to be "little books" that could be carried in the hand. Luther wanted his to be a "brief survey and precis of the entire Holy Scripture."(3) The same aim was declared by Johannes Brenz, who called his catechism "a brief compendium of the entire Holy Scripture, in which is contained all one needs to know for true and eternal salvation . . ., so that the Catechism really can be called 'a little Bible.'"(4)
It would be unfair, however, to emphasize only catechisms' function as static distillations of faith or doctrine. In spite of their potential misuse as mere instruments of rote learning, they were intended as tools that would enable a greater authenticity and dynamism of faith, faith that must continuously be exercised. What Luther says of this normative process or progress in the Christian life is of a piece with his purposes in catechizing: "the Christian life consists not in being but in becoming, not in victory but in struggle, not in justice but in being justified, not in having comprehended but in stretching [one's mind], not in purity but in being purified."(5) And this declaration may also stand, I believe, as a fit epigraph for John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress, whose catechetical dimension can be seen to contribute significantly to Christian's, and perhaps also the reader's, progress. In spite of Stanley Fish's well known and in many ways brilliant thesis that "The Pilgrim's Progress is antiprogressive,"(6) I shall suggest that the process of catechizing which Bunyan writes into the heavenward journey may model a true progression, or at least serve as a vehicle for authentic spiritual advancement, even when Christian's literal progress along the road fails, as Fish has shown, consistently to mark true progress. But before presenting the evidence for progressive catechesis in The Pilgrim's Progress, I need to add a few more words about catechism's nature and its growth into the seventeenth century.
THE PROGRESS OF CATECHISM
The extent and influence of catechism in England itself is only now beginning to receive the recognition it deserves. From the beginning of the English Reformation, catechetical or semi-catechetical books played a significant role. The so-called Bishops' Book, published by Archbishop Cranmer in 1537, and his Catechismus of 1548 both show strong Lutheran elements with additions of Reformed teaching on the matter of images and the second commandment.(7) Under Edward VI, John Poynet's Short Catechism was appointed by the king "for all Scholemaisters to teache."(8) The much shorter "Church Catechism," which appeared in the first Edwardian Book of Common Prayer in 1549,(9) became established as the official catechism of the Church of England with its inclusion in the Elizabethan Book of Common Prayer in 1559. The Injunctions given by the Queens Majesty which appeared in the same year commanded that "upon every holyday, and every second Sunday" ministers should "heare and instruct all the youth of the Parish, for halfe an houre at the least . . . and teach the Catechisme set forth in the booke of publicke prayer."(10) Beginning in 1570, Alexander Nowell published a series of graded catechisms - larger, middle, and smaller - in English and Latin, with some parallel translation in Greek, based on the catechisms of Poynet and of the Prayer Book and officially sanctioned for use in schools.(11) And in the reign of James, an even greater use of catechisms was prescribed in the Constitutions and Canons Ecclesiastical of 1603, which stipulated that "all Schoolemasters shall teach in English or Latine, as the children are able to beare, the larger or shorter Catechisme heretofore by publike authoritie set foorth," and that every minister shall "upon every Sunday and Holy day . . . instruct the youth and ignorant persons of his Parish in the ten Commandments, the Articles of the Beliefe, and in the Lords prayer: and shall diligently heare, instruct, and teach them the Catechisme set forth in the Booke of Common prayer."(12)
Official catechisms, however, were only a part of the overall catechetical picture in England. Numbers of catechisms multiplied in keeping with the differing abilities of persons catechized, with the varying experience and educational approaches of those who catechized, and (especially in the seventeenth century) with the increasing theological and sectarian differences that divided English Christians. Ian Green, in his recent introduction to catechizing in the Tudor and Stuart periods, says that "in the period from 1549, when the short catechism of the Prayer Book first appeared, to 1646, the year before the appearance of the Westminster Shorter Catechism which was designed to replace it, over 280 different catechetical forms known to have been published or used in England can still be identified." Green goes on to conclude, based on numbers of catechisms published (including repeat editions), that "over three-quarters of a million copies of these works were in circulation by the early seventeenth century, in addition to perhaps half a million copies of the official forms. When set against a population of about four million, figures such as these not only demonstrate the ubiquity of the catechism in early modern England but also suggest that a reappraisal of its role in the dissemination of Protestant ideas in that country is long overdue."(13)
My own interest in catechism, in connection with Bunyan as well as generally, concerns its role not so much in disseminating ideas as in mediating a process and describing (or prescribing) a kind of cognitive...
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