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Jan Hus: Champion of Christian Freedom
By Mr. Dennis Di Mauro
Most Lutherans know the story of how Martin Luther started the Reformation in the sixteenth century, but few are aware that another Reformation led by a Czech pastor named Jan Hus occurred one hundred years earlier.
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In the early 1400s, Hus was the pastor of the Bethlehem Chapel in Prague, the capital of Bohemia (now the Czech Republic). This chapel had introduced many people-friendly changes into its worship, such as the use of the Czech language during services (instead of Latin) and hymn singing among the laity. Hus himself composed a number of hymns. He also used the pulpit of this chapel to rail against the growing immorality in society and the Church itself.
Hus also ardently opposed the sale of indulgences, documents that supposedly waived penances for certain sins. In 1411, the Pope ordered an indulgence sale to raise money to pay for a war that he was fighting against the kingdom of Naples. In Roubiczek and Kalmer’s book "Warrior of God: Life and Death of John Hus,"
Hus denounced the sale, reportedly saying, “By such indulgences the foolish rich are led to cherish vain hopes, the laws of God are held in contempt, the unschooled populace more readily become sinners, heavy sins are acted but light and the people in general are plundered...the Pope cannot possess such a power.”
Despite Hus’s efforts to keep peace, numerous uprisings resulted in response to his preaching. The Pope soon threatened to stop all worship services until Hus was arrested. He declared it illegal to provide Hus food, drink, or lodging. Bethlehem Chapel was ordered torn down. Under pressure, Hus was forced to move to a remote castle.
There he wrote his most famous work entitled On the Church, which espoused many of the doctrines that would later be held by Luther himself. Hus saw the Church as consisting of the Lord’s elect members with Christ himself at its head, not a structure where the Pope was its head and the cardinals its body. He also wrote that forgiveness was not the absolute power of the bishops but a proclamation of God’s own acts of justice according to His biblical promises. Hus believed that much of the Church’s trouble started when it assumed political power and the Pope began taking the role of a secular king. In a later treatise, he also advocated the administration of Communion to laypeople in the form of bread and wine instead of just bread, which had been the medieval practice.
In the spring of 1414, Hus traveled to a church council in Constance, Germany, to answer the Pope’s charges against him. Despite the assurance of safety by the emperor himself, Hus was thrown in jail as soon as he arrived. He was tortured, tied hand and foot, and then exposed to cold winds. At one point, he was left without food for three days.
At his trial, the emperor proclaimed that Hus either had to renounce the theological errors attributed to him (many of which he never held) or be punished as a heretic. Hus refused and was formally convicted on July 6, 1415. At the same time, all of his writings were ordered to be destroyed. He was declared a heretic, defrocked of his authority as a pastor, and forced to wear a crown with figures of the devil and the word Archheretic painted on it. In Joseph Paul’s John Hus at Constance: An Interpretation, Hus is said to have declared, “I wear with joy the crown of opprobrium for the love of Him who wore a crown of thorns.”
Hus was paraded through the streets and tied to a stake. After straw was piled around him, he was once again asked by the council messengers to recant his views. According to Josef Macek’s The Hussite Movement in Bohemia, he replied, “The prime endeavor of all my preaching, teaching, and writing, and of all my deeds has been to turn people from their sins, and this truth that I have written, taught, and preached in accordance with the Word of God and the teaching of the holy doctors, I willingly seal my death today.” The straw was lit, and Hus was burned at the stake.
News of his martyrdom quickly spread. The Czechs quickly began an uprising, demanding the right to receive Communion in the forms of both bread and wine as Hus had advocated. The emperor sent four different crusades in an attempt to defeat the uprising, but the Czechs defeated each one; eventually, they were granted the right to receive both bread and wine during Communion.
Hus is probably best known for inspiring the start of the Moravian Church, which still exists today. He is also famous for his teachings, which stressed the individual’s freedom to worship without undue interference from the Church hierarchy. His biblical beliefs also had a huge impact on the ideas of the Protestant Reformers. According to Bartak, Luther, in fact, later wrote,“We [the reformers] are all Hussites.”
Mr. Dennis Di Mauro is president of Northern VA Lutherans for Life, a doctoral student in Church History, and he lives in Herndon, VA. He can be reached via email at dennisdimauro@yahoo.com