roughly edited copy concordia university education network cuenet lutheran confessions 2-3 dr. robert kolb captioning provided by: caption first, inc. p.o. box 1024 lombard, il 60148 800-825-5234 *** this text is being provided in a rough draft format. communication access realtime translation (cart) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings. *** lc2-3 >> so the kids back then went to class, too. my junior highers will love to learn that. how long did kids have to go to catechism class in the middle ages? do we know how old they were? >>dr. robert kolb: josh, it's not exactly the way things are today if we look back at the middle ages. when luther was young, there was actually instruction for kids in his village. and so he probably did get some classroom instruction. but most people in the middle ages were catechized by preachers rather than by teachers. they didn't have a regular weekly class to go to. they didn't really have specific texts to memorize apart from the ten commandments, the creed, the lord's prayer, and the prayer to mary, the mother of god, the hail mary. the preachers, however, traveling preachers, monks, dominicans, franciscans, came from village to village perhaps only once a year. but they would preach then a series of sermons on the fundamentals of what christians needed to know. and those were those four items in almost all of the reports of the catechism, that is the instruction program. we know that it followed the model of st. augustine in beginning with faith, that is the creed. going onto hope, that is the lord's prayer. and then following up with the ten commandments, that is the -- that is love. and then the prayer to the virgin mary to help them get through the day. and so catechism as instruction was kind of haphazard. it depended on how often the preachers got to your village. that's why luther complains bitterly in the preface to the small catechism about the low state of christian learning. even priests he complained didn't know those fundamentals by heart. so luther came to a situation in which he saw many areas of christian life which needed reformed and needed reformed very badly. but one of his burning concerns from the beginning on was this concern for -- for somehow finding a way to get instruction to the young so that all christians could know the basics of their faith. *** this text is being provided in a rough draft format. communication access realtime translation (cart) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings. ***