CONFESSIONAL SECULARISM: DEVELOPMENT OF THE IDEAS OF €œCONFESSION” AND €œCATECHISM” UP TO THEIR SECULARISATION IN MODERNITY

Abstract

Peculiar − just before and after the 1789 French Revolution secular and even atheist catechisms and confessions appeared. Within a wider project to study these peculiar documents, in this article it is attempted, by way of introduction, to disclose the nature of catechisms and confessions, by returning to the source: the Jewish- Rabbinical pedagogical tradition, as elaborated in the New Testament – the method of question-and-answer and repetition. I argue that the rabbi-talmid relationship was also adopted by Jesus and the apostles and is neglected in translations of the New Testament. The development of this genre is followed in main traits via Augustine and the Middle Ages, and it is indicated how philosophical-theological influences (Platonism, rhetoric) changed catechetical practice into scholarly continuous narratives, that have been simplified again in rosaries into daily ritual recitals, like in Kalde’s Kerstenspiegel just before the Reformation. Luther and Calvin’s recovery of New Testament practice is briefly indicated, as well as the worldview or ontological basis of their type of catechisms. It is summarily argued that the new worldview which made “nature” into origin and the “civil, rational human” into the final end of progress, accepted a new divinity – the natural-historical world – that required new confessional documents: a confession of science, of the state, the fatherland, the economy, labour, and so forth. The new catechisms and confessions expressly focused on these.

Voltaire's Satirical Catechisms: Secular Confessionalism

“…Modernity's "confessions" and "catechisms" on the one hand followed the Luther-Calvin practice of the original direct questions and answers; on the other also emulated the rational philosophical-theological doctrinal confessions that had become practice after Augustine, and again after Luther and Calvin. I analysed traditional catechetic praxis in a previous article (Venter 2016), in which I have shown the characteristics and ways of Christian confessional catechetics in order to outline how Modern secular catechisms fit into this history.…”