A Brief Explanation of the Ten Commandments, the Creed, and the Lord’s Prayer

In 1520, the same year he published his three great Reformation treatises, Martin Luther also issued a small pastoral work in German for ordinary people who could not read Scripture for themselves. A Brief Explanation of the Ten Commandments, the Creed, and the Lord’s Prayer gathered and reworked material Luther had already preached and printed in Wittenberg over the preceding two years: his treatment of the Decalogue, his exposition of the Lord’s Prayer for simple laypeople, and a fresh treatment of the Creed. The occasion was not controversy but catechesis. The late medieval church had long expected the laity to memorize these three texts; Luther’s concern was that they be understood, and understood in a particular order.

That order is the heart of the work. Luther opens by observing that these three things contain everything a Christian needs to know from Scripture, and he explains their relationship with the image of a sick person. The Commandments teach a person what he ought to do and so reveal the illness, showing that he cannot do it. The Creed shows where the remedy lies, in the grace of God given in Christ. The Lord’s Prayer teaches how to seek and obtain that grace. Law, gospel, and prayer thus become a single movement from diagnosis to cure. The treatment of the Commandments follows a simple pattern, setting out for each what transgresses it and what fulfills it, so that the reader learns to examine his own life rather than recite a formula. The treatment of the Creed makes a quiet but consequential structural choice: instead of the customary twelve articles assigned to the twelve apostles, Luther divides the Creed into three parts, corresponding to Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and expounds each as a confession of what God does for the believer. The exposition of the Lord’s Prayer proceeds petition by petition, treating each as a confession of need addressed to a Father who has already promised to hear.

The work mattered because of what it became. Luther incorporated it into his Betbüchlein of 1522, the prayer book that displaced older devotional manuals in evangelical households, and its threefold structure, its diagnosis-and-remedy logic, and its trinitarian division of the Creed passed directly into the Small and Large Catechisms of 1529. Readers of those catechisms are reading the mature form of what first appeared here. For students of the Reformation, this treatise shows that Luther’s program was from the beginning as much about forming consciences as about reforming doctrine, and that the theology of justification was meant to be learned at a kitchen table.

Who should read this: pastors, catechists, and parents who want to see the pastoral architecture behind Luther’s catechisms in its earliest form, and readers curious how Reformation theology was translated into language for the unlettered. It is not for those seeking Luther’s polemics or a systematic treatment of justification; the work assumes those convictions and simply teaches people how to live from them.