Reformation Day & Jan Hus

From the Editors

It’s Reformation Day!

Five hundred and seven years ago, Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses on the Wittenberg church door. Thirteen years ago, we launched this daily blog. Now over 4,600 blogs later, we continue to roll along. 

Thirteen! Gangly but growing up, a few blemishes but radiant — if you look close enough, sometimes erratic but full of life and love. 

Many thanks to our faithful bloggers, our faithful readers, and our faithful supporters over these years. We are pleased with where we are, but still have many hopes and ideas about where the Reformed Journal still could go.

We are also always grateful for the support and participation of those who played key roles in earlier iterations of the Reformed Journal. It feels affirming and connects us to an illustrious past. 

Ron Wells, emeritus history professor at Calvin College, now retired in Tennessee, is one such person. Inspired by a recent poem by Marilyn McIntyre, Ron reached into the archives for this work of his on “proto-reformer” Jan Hus for this Reformation Day. An earlier version appeared in 2016.

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Jan Hus, Czech Hero, Proto-Reformer
Ronald Wells

July 6, 1415 – in the German city of Constance, a Roman Catholic Council declared Jan Hus, a Czech church reformer, to be a heretic. He was turned over to secular authorities to be burned at the stake. Because he was accused, among other things, of being a disciple of the English reformer John Wycliffe, it was oddly-fitting that when Hus was burned, some of the kindling for the fire included the writings of Wycliffe.

A few summers back, in Prague, the Czech capital, my wife and I visited a two-day celebration of Hus. There were concerts, speeches, panel discussions, and a theater production. Recently the Czech people voted Hus to have been the most important person in Czech history. That is extraordinary because in today’s Czechia only five percent of people identify as Protestants. Some 40% identify as Catholics and about 40% as atheists. As to the latter, perhaps after two generations of Communist rule, when church-going was actively discouraged, many Czechs don’t think religion to be a meaningful part of life. So it is all the more remarkable that Jan Hus – a founding father of Protestantism in central Europe – is regarded as the leading person in Czech history.

What shall we make of Jan Hus, now six hundred years after his death? Simply put, we who are heirs of the Protestant movement, for whom religious liberty is taken for granted, should pause from time to time to remember and give thanks for those who stood – with courage and at great personal cost – for the simple truth that the main authority in faith and life lies not in the institutional church but in scripture.

Just before Hus’ death, he predicted that another reformer, perhaps a hundred years hence, would arise to champion the ideas he had advocated. In fact, it was just about a century later that Luther’s 95 Theses were posted, and the Reformation began in earnest. Indeed, at the Diet of Worms, when Luther was condemned, the church authorities accused him of agreeing with the heresies of Jan Hus. Luther replied that he had not read Hus carefully. Later, Luther came back and said he had now re-read Hus and that he was indeed a Hussite!

When we think of Luther and Calvin, the essential Protestant leaders, we are aware that religious reform takes place in specific political and social contexts. There is no way to separate the various strands of human experience to privilege “religion” over other themes like nation, language, and culture. As we can attest here in the United States, religious and political freedom run in parallel tracks. We cannot imagine free churches in a political climate in which the nation established a particular religion by law.

In the Reformation we note the importance of language and nationality. In Luther’s case it was vital that, in 1522, he translated the New Testament into German. Moreover it was a kind of German – vigorous and direct – that appealed to all Germans. He helped create an accessible German literature that, in turn, contributed to German nationalism.

The same was true for Jan Hus — remarkably, a century before Luther. When the new ideas from Wycliffe began to filter into Prague University, Hus was a student. He soon joined other young Czechs in being a champion of those proto-Protestant ideas. This was part of the awakening Hus felt in his call to the clergy. He was ordained a priest in 1400, and then had a meteoric career rise – soon becoming dean of the philosophy faculty and later rector of the University.

In 1402 his career went public, and he became the state preacher in Bethlehem Chapel in central Prague. Even today, we can still sense the power of the “Protestant” ideas preached there (much of which is preserved in a small museum on the second floor). The Chapel itself, is a very large, if unadorned, space that was clearly intended for preaching, not the regular Catholic liturgical worship. On certain occasions when Hus preached it was estimated that about 3000 people were in the Bethlehem Chapel – by then the largest indoor gathering place in Prague. 

In his chapel sermons, Hus brought to public discussion the important ideas that heretofore had been discussed only in the University. Also, Hus preached in Czech not Latin, and in a vernacular usage that ordinary people could understand. Thus, he anticipated Luther in solidifying the acceptance of Protestant ideas in the context of an assertion of Czech nationalism.

Today in Prague, one finds a statue of Jan Hus dominating the Old Town Square in the city center. This immense statue was paid for by public subscription in 1915, for the five-hundredth anniversary of Hus’ death. The artist, Ladislav Saloun, created a Hus in a scale larger than life. For Saloun, Hus was much more than a religious leader; he wanted viewers of the statue to see Hus as the essential Czech person in all of history. On a plaque behind the statue one reads that when Saloun was working, he had to overcome the wishes of many Czech elders, who wanted Hus to be in tune with historical reality. But, the sculptor wanted Hus to transcend reality, so Hus was to be, as he said, “a giant spiritual entity.” 

Over the years, Hus and this magnificent statue have become the central symbol of protest against the repressive regimes that oppressed the Czech people, whether those regimes were centered in Vienna or Moscow. During the near-half-century of Communist rule, Hus’ statue in the Square was the gathering place for dissident elements. It was also the place to be when Russian dominance ended, and Vaclav Havel came to the fore. Thus the dissidents joined the Czech fifteenth-century religious fighters carved into the base of the statue as witnesses to the power of Hus’ legacy.

As noted above, few Czechs today agree with the religious ideas of their great man, who they see in cultural terms. But when visitors like my wife and I see the statue and hear the tributes, we bring our own religious sensibilities to the scene. For us, it was thrilling to be in the presence of Jan Hus, who, a century before the Reformation got underway, stood for the principles that all Protestants over the last half-millennium hold dear: the worth of ordinary believers and the power of the Bible to set them free.