500 years of Protestant reform
To celebrate the 500th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation, Return to the Gospel will present weekly articles and biographies of several reformers: Girolamo Zachi (January), Theodore Beza (February), Thomas Cranmer (March), Guilherme Farrel (April), William Tyndale (May), Martin Bucer (June), John Knox (July), Ulrico Zuonglio (hay), Joo Calvino (set)
- “If he was prophetic.
- He must have referred to Martin Luther.
- Who arrived about a hundred years later.
- “Thus John Foxe wrote in his Book of martyrs of the sixteenth century.
- Referring to a statement attributed to the bohemian reformer Joo Huss in his Condemned of Heresy in 1415 by the Council of Constance.
- Hus (according to a story born a few years after the events) turned to his executioners just before his sentence was executed and said : “Today you burn a goose.
- But in One Hundred years a swan will come out that you will not be able to cook or roast.
Why did Huss identify himself as “a goose” and why later commentators? Did you think that the legendary Huss prophecy was referring to the German monk whose protest against indulgences started the Reformation a century later?
The first question is easier to answer than the second question. Hus, born around 1372, is originally from the southern Bohemian town of Husinec (literally “Goosetown”), where the Czech Republic is now located. Does your name, derived from your place of birth, mean?in Czech. Understand why Luther and the Protestants later believed that Huss had anticipated, if not foretold, the Reformation is more difficult and requires some consideration of Huss’s life, doctrine, and death.
In 1390, Hus, whose early years are unknown, enrolled at the University of Prague with the intention of forming in the priesthood, and then confessed that the ordained ministry had attracted him by his promise to provide him with a comfortable life and worldwide esteem. He spent a lot of time playing chess in his own faith, Huss taught in his studies and after obtaining his master’s degree in 1396 he joined the faculty of philosophy of the university.
Shortly after he began teaching, Huss experienced, in the words of a biographer, a “radical and fundamental change”, which resulted in a deeper commitment to Christ. This change may have come from john Wycliffe’s exposure to thought, whose ideas were beginning Wycliffe’s reform programme, which included strident criticism of clerical immorality, rejection of the medieval doctrine of transubstantiation, and insistence on lay people’s access to vernacular writings, came to Bohemia thanks in large part to Czech students who studied at Wycliffe’s own Oxford University and returned home with Wycliffe’s wit full of ideas and backpacks full of Wycliffe books.
In 1403, the conflict over Wycliffe’s ideas reached its climax at the University of Prague. Although Huss opposed the rejection of Wycliffe’s transubstantiation, he agreed with much of what the English reformer had said and continued to defend the pro Wycliffe Reform Party. before, Hus had been appointed preacher in the Chapel of Bethlehem in central Prague. His sermons in the Pulpit of Bethlehem increasingly reflected Wycliffe’s concern for corruption within the church.
The preaching of the “little goose of God,” as Huss called, was very popular and attracted crowds of several thousand. Huss was eager to make the scriptures and their message of reform accessible to the people. He not only preached in Czech, but translated parts of the liturgy, as well as several Latin hymns into the vernacular. He himself took advantage of the empty space of the chapel to promote his message, placing murals that contrasted the humility and simplicity of Christ with the vanity and greed of contemporary priests.
In 1409, the papacy, concerned about Huss’s growing fame, ordered the Archbishop of Prague to forbid any new preaching in bethlehem’s chapel, but Hus refused to abandon his pulpit. The following year, the archbishop excommunicated Hus for heresy and soon after fled the city for fear of popular reprisals. Hus continued to preach. In 1411, the papacy, which had then issued a second excommunication of Hus (without effect), forbade the entire city of Prague, thus forbidding the clergy of Prague from offering sermons, marriages, the Eucharist or other religious services. People.
Initially, the Pope’s ban was weak thanks to King Wenceslas IV of Bohemia. Wenceslau (whose name from the 10th century would later become the subject of a Christmas anthem) supported Hus and ordered the Prague clergy to ignore the ban. The circumstances were between Huss and Wenceslau. The papacy began selling indulgences in Bohemia to raise funds for a military campaign. Wenceslau saw no objections to this, largely because he received some of the profits, but Huss, who saw the sale of indulgences as a sign of corruption in the church, protested both from the pulpit and from the stage. The king, eager to maintain his new income, forbade criticism of indulgences. He enforced the ban by beheading several men who spoke out against indulgences. weakening Hus, the king has now ordered the clergy of Prague to comply with the Pope’s ban.
Huss, reluctant to see people deprived of the Word and the sacrament, left Prague in 1412 and moved the two years after voluntary exile in southern Bohemia, writing books that deepened his ideals of reform. In 1414 he was summoned to appear before the Konstanz to respond to the charges of heresy, and Emperor Sigismund, brother of King Wenceslas, promised him a good return to the council. Hus agreed to attend the council, aware that he would not return, but hoped to have the opportunity to promote his vision of church reform. Arriving in Konstanz in November 1414, he was imprisoned and remained in prison until his trial and execution the following summer.
Huss was not simply a Wycliffe impersonator, as some researchers have suggested; as others have pointed out, Protestantism was also not anticipated in all respects; against Wycliffe and the reformers defended the doctrine of transubstantiation, although he denied that the priests themselves had the power to transform bread into the body of Christ. Against the Protestant doctrine of the single fide, he believed that charity plays a fundamental role in the justification of sinners.
However, Hus anticipated a number of key Protestant beliefs. He criticized the one-way veneration of his contemporaries to Mary and the Saints. He also criticized the medieval practice of retaining the chalice of ordinary people (out of fear, apparently, so that they do not unduly treat the blood of Christ) and offer them only bread in the Eucharist. Hus’s insistence that the laity receive bread and wine marked their followers, so that, forced to defend themselves militarily after Hus’s death, they incorporated a chalice into the coat of arms.
Were you also anticipating reformers, and did you reveal the extent of your debt to Wycliffe?In the doctrine of your church. Hus identified the true church with this invisible body of believers from the past, present, and future who were eternally chosen by God for salvation and incorporated into Christ as his head. All members of the church visible, he argued, do not belong to the invisible. church, and when the clergy in particular prove disapproved of their actions, their authority is suspicious. This doctrine founded Hus’s harsh critique of priests and popes alike?Antichrist?and his willingness to ignore papal bubbles when they clearly contradicted the scriptures.
The doctrine of Huss’s scriptures was closely related to the doctrine of his church. Hus rejected any assertion that the visible church, which at any time could be more populated by reprobos than elected, exerted infallibility in its decisions or interpretations of the scriptures. He held in high esteem the traditional voices of the church, especially the parents of the church; In fact, he preferred the interpretation of the scriptures by the fathers of the Church to the interpretation of any individual, including his own, but Huss admitted that even parents might be wrong, so he recognized Sacred Scripture as the only foolproof rule of Christianity. faith and practice, an opinion that reformers would express with the motto scriptura alone.
Huss had a limited opportunity to defend his doctrine at the Council of Konstanz, and ended up being convicted of a mixture of legitimate and misleading accusations about his beliefs. He was asked to deny the teachings falsely attributed to him. well, though he sealed his destiny, because he did not want to perish admitting beliefs he did not have.
On July 6, 1415, Hus was stripped of his office clothes, adorned with a donkey hat with drawings of the devil, tied to a stake and burned to death, according to eyewitness accounts, entrusted his soul to God and sang a hymn to Christ as the flames engulfed him. Once dead, the authorities crushed their remains and threw them to the Rhine to prevent them from being worshipped by their followers. Ironically, Hus probably would have appreciated this last move.
Huss never actually uttered the famous prophecy attributed to him at the time of his death. He expressed, in a letter he wrote during his imprisonment, the hope that “birds?” Stronger than he would emerge to continue his work. In fact, it was Luther, in the writings of the 1530s, who transformed Huss’s words into an oracle that found its fulfillment in him. later work and efforts to reform the church according to the Word of God as a worthy continuation of his own work.