Jan Hus

if you were to go to the city of Prague today and go to the town square of the old part of the city you would see standing right in the middle a bit of a interesting statue you see a group of figures clumped together and out in front you actually see a solitary figure who is leaning forward looking out over the city square and in some ways looking towards the great church right there in the middle of the town square that statute though many tourists don't recognize it is a statue to yonghwa's and in this lecture we're going to look at yon hood and we're going to talk about his reform movement in the area of Bavaria which is in the modern-day Czech Republic yon host is an interesting figure many have looked to him particularly in the Protestant world not because he is valuable on his own though he is certainly very interesting in his theology is certainly worth considering from the Protestant perspective but in 1519 just as Luther's Reformation was underway he went to Leipzig to have a disputation with the man who had become his nemesis Eck and it was there at Leipzig that Luther famously said out loud for really the first time yah ich bin who site which is German for yes I am a ha site and the stories we have of the Leipzig disputation tells us that the room really went into pandemonium as a result of Luther uttering these words we are to believe that so a pourraient is the idea of being a ha site that when Luther is willing to identify himself with the hussite movement that the pious in the audience are taken aback well who was yon whose yahuwah's was a preacher an academic the instigator of a religious movement and he was a forerunner to the Reformation and just as the last lecture as we looked at the writings in the life of John Wickliffe in England yon horse sort of stands in this late medieval tradition of challenging not just the authority of the papacy or the authority of the Roman Catholic Church but he actually attacks the theological foundations of the church that even support the papacy or any of the other doctrines of the Middle Ages yon host was born around thirteen seventy two he is again very much a late medieval man and yon host is a humble man he grows up as just a man of the fields he's not really all that wealthy he's not even close to middle-class the city of his birth is actually where he gets his name the city whose a niche actually means goose town and lots of historians have had a little bit of fun making fun of the fact that young host religion sort of means beyond the goose but it was a farming town it was a it was a livestock town whose was very much a man of the people and the fact that he comes from the everyday stock of the Czech people is actually one of the reasons why even down until today his statue stands in the middle of Prague as a symbol of Czech national loyalty and host tells us that though he grew up in relatively meager means that he actually pursued the priests to it not he tells us because he wanted to achieve any degree of moral sanctity or that he wanted to save his soul or that he had a burden for the people rather he tells us he began to pursue the priesthood because he wanted to have a bit of an easy life he thought it would give him a bit more attention and fame and that it would be a way out of a life of goofs raising I suppose and so in 1390 yon enrolls at the University of Prague and the University of Prague really becomes the microcosm of what yon horses Reformation is going to be driven by at this time what we today called the Czech Republic was known then as the country of Bohemia and Bohemia was part of the Holy Roman Empire that great vast terrain of elected leadership that was owned for long periods of time by the German people to be the ruler of Germany often meant that you were the Holy Roman Emperor and Bohemia at this time was ruled by the actual brother of the Holy Roman Emperor the Holy Roman Emperor was Sigismund and his brother at the time was head of bohemia and being of german stock in it seeing bohemia essentially as another part of the german empire the university of prague became embroiled in many ways in a struggle between the locals that czech locals and the german influence from the holy roman empire that was coming to bear on the university of prague we know that there were four sub factions of nationalities they are present at the university and only one of the four was actually check we also know that amongst the faculty it was heavily german german scholars outweighed other faculty in czech faculty by sometimes as many as three to one that number ebbed and flowed but for the czech students who were part of the university they saw the university of prague as their own and in fact Czech students numbered about 50% of the student body so you can only imagine 50% or slightly more than 50% or Czech but the faculty is overwhelmingly German in the focus and the attention was always going towards the German perspective on life and theology etc and host took his degrees just as the 1300s were coming to a close he received a BA and then he received an MA and we are told that in round the year 1400 he is actually finally ordained he begins to study for his doctorate he never finished the process of studying for his doctorate and one of the reason he didn't complete his doctoral work is because very quickly yon host was a rising star as a Czech member of the University in 1402 he is actually named the preacher of the Bethlehem chapel there in Prague you can actually still go and see the Bethlehem chapel to this day and yon host filled a role that a lot of major urban cities in medieval Europe had and that was to be a pastor to the lay people Bingley later in the Reformation fills the same role when he's a Lloyd priester he was a preacher that would preach lay sermons in German as ving Lee would to all of the people in Zurich and yon host is doing the same here in Prague his job was to preach sermons in Czech to the people and he drew large audiences that people found his preaching to be inspiring as well as biblical and that he was a bit of a beacon of hope for the Czech students and for all those who held out the belief that the Czech University the University of Prague should be run by Czechs and here was yon who was a scholar and a preacher who was every bit the epitome of what they wanted and for whatever reason whether it is the nationalism of the Czech students or the natural affinity of some of these students to heretic alai Diaz some point in the early 1400s we see a pretty strong rise in interest amongst the students in the teachings of John Wickliffe of course Wickliffe was dead by now and historians have been divided on this some believe that it was the tension politically between the Germans and the Czech that caused the czech to suddenly begin devoting attention to the writings of John Wickliffe but we have to acknowledge that there is some theological affinity between the biblical vernacular preaching that yon host was doing to the masses to those gathered in Prague and the call by Wickliffe to preach biblically to focus on the message of Scripture and to rely less and less on some of the theological system of the medieval world at some point on or around 1408 or 1409 Janos finally runs afoul of the local archbishop there in Prague and the Archbishop of Prague actually condemned some of the teachings of yon hosts and it would seem that Janos himself was a follower of John Wickliffe though he was not entirely devoted to everything that Wickliffe taught and in fact he was developing some of his own ideas about reform whatever the case finally in 1409 the peas in Pope that is the Pope who was in Pisa during the great papal schism so only one of the three but the peas in Pope actually sides against yunho's now for all we could tell this seems to be really focused on the teachings of John Wickliffe it doesn't seem to be per se that they were going after yon hosts because he was Czech or that they were going after yon hosts because he was so overtly a heretic at this point that he needed to be slapped down rather it was the fact that the Wickliffe movement as we saw in the last lecture was beginning to gain steam and that it wasn't dying out and that it was actually beginning to gain some traction with the Lollards in england that likely led the peace and Pope to try to slap it down in Bohemia before it ever got started and then to back batters up the Archbishop of Prague again comes and excommunicates yon hosts just after the Pope has condemned him now this is an interesting point host at this point is excommunicated for disobedience in other words he has not yet declared to be a heretic and we should remember that in the Middle Ages you could be excommunicated for a lot of things often the belief was that excommunication was a warning at least at the first step particularly for lesser problems the church never really believed that excommunication was a permanent fixture that you were now consigned to hell forever though of course if you died while under excommunication you would actually spend eternity in hell and not even be afforded the rights to go to purgatory and work your way finally up to heaven but huh PSA's excommunicated it it's telling that he's excommunicated for disobedience to the papacy that he will not submit to the ruling and the authority of the Archbishop of Prague all of this in other words seems to be done in order to bring yon hosts to heel to take the Czech voice and bring him down so that Bohemia can achieve a level of equilibrium the problem with this of course less as with any reaction of this kind both then and now is as soon as you condemn something without a full chance to be heard you ultimately propel whether that person or that book or that idea onto the world stage and that's exactly what happened with yunho's to now be declared excommunicated and to have some of his teachings condemned now meant that quite a few particularly those in Bohemia that checked locals began to look at beyond Xhosas teachings with new fresh energy and it's actually telling that the goal of the Archbishop of Prague was not necessarily to kill yon who s as soon as possible because even after being excommunicated yong-ho still takes the pulpit at the Bethlehem chapel there in Prague and he still preaches his message just like Luther who'd be condemned about a hundred years later and only after Luther was condemned that he began to really bolster his language and strengthen it to show what he truly believed about justification yon HUS does the exact same thing now that he's condemned now that he's excommunicated his preaching actually takes on a new inflammatory tone both against the leadership in Prague as well as the papacy itself and all of this came to a head in fortune 11 when the Pope issued another crusading indulgence that is another indulgence designed to give laypeople a plenary indulgence that is to say a full indulgence for all sins committed for all of the pennants that you owed to the Catholic Church in order to escape purgatory and find your way directly to heaven after death in the indulgences sale in late medieval Europe is increasingly viewed with some suspicion if not hostility most people believed and assumed and rightly so in many cases that the crusading indulgences that the full plenary indulgences that were sold were not sold so much for the care or the concern of the spiritual well-being of the lay people throughout Europe but rather they were sold so that those in power could recoup some financial reward and could then apply the funds to whatever project or whatever crusade that they needed funds for its with the rise of the sale of indulgences in Fortune xi that yon host begins to attack the sale of indulgences themselves now again this sounds very much like Luther just a hundred years later in fact one of the comments that yon host makes at this point is identical to one that Luther will make a hundred years later yonghwa's points out the fact that if the papacy actually has power over purgatory and if the papacy can according to its power release those who are suffering in purgatory so they might move on to heaven why yon host asks are we charging money for this if you have the power why don't you just simply do it in fact that very argument shows up specifically in the 95 theses with Luther it seems to have become a bit of a scandalous comment to make about the papacy which is if you can if you have the power why are you charging us money for it that seems extortionate yon host is excommunicated again this time it is certainly for the sake of declaring him to be a heretic to attack indulgences which is one of the main revenue sources for those in power in the Catholic Church at this time is again just like Luther to incur some severe wrath from those in power but yon host was not alone as his preaching had spread and as his role as a Czech national who was standing up against those who are in power both in Rome and in Germany there actually arose a large number of people who became followers of HUS we actually see that there were a number of people who began to riot about the sale of indulgences began to stir up trouble particularly in Prague and two hussies dismay the sedition was put down and many of those who had participated in the uprising were beheaded in HUS at this point decides that he is too much of a firebrand that his role in Prague is too volatile and that he does not want to see bloodshed occur because of his name anymore and so he decides that his best that he leave his post at the Bethlehem chapel and move on and go throughout the countryside as opposed to staying in Prague and that as he goes throughout the countryside that he will begin to preach and teach and connect with the hoi polloi the the average person out there in the surrounding environs of Bohemia and again the the harsh tactics with which the Catholic Church attempted to suppress us and his followers only began to propel the name of yon horse and his followers who are now increasingly being called the Hussites it only propelled them further onto the national stage as well as the international stage as Haas travels he finds sympathy fund supporters and then as he preaches and makes connections in the surrounding regions of Bohemia the movement begins to catch fire it's also wild HUS is traveling that he writes his most famous book which is de ecclesia which is translated as on the church and in de ecclesia yon who lays out some of his vision for what the church ought to be on the biblical foundation of how the church ought to be run as well as his view on the sacraments and other doctrines and it's at this point that we can really notice one of the main doctrines that Yann has taught and defended that actually sets him apart from Wickliffe we noticed in the last lecture that Wickliffe actually still believes in the physical presence of Christ in the Eucharist the the thing that Wickliffe denied was that it was transubstantiated for us it wasn't so much the physical presence of Christ or the morality or the ethical virtue of the one offering the bread and wine rather for hosts it was something different it was actually who gets the wine you see in the late Middle Ages over time the church had decided that the cup needed to be withheld from the laity those of you raised Catholic or those of you who were aware of even modern-day Catholic practice will know that the mass does not have the wine for lay folks if you come forward and you're Catholic and you're there for the mass you only get the wafer the cup is reserved as they say only for the priesthood and there are lots of rationales for this some are somewhat urban legends the rise of this idea appears to have come from a number of different avenues first and foremost there does seem to be an idea that the cup is more holy it is that there's something about the blood element of the wine that caused some to see it as a deeper holiness than even the bread and the body of Christ there are other comments that are made though that the wine was at times spilled or that it was mistreated that it somehow was unsafe to place a cup of wine even just on the lips of a layperson and so the theological rationale that the theological argument of keeping the cup away from the lady was a logical deduction and that logical deduction was that a body has blood in it as well and therefore if you give the body to the lay person you're giving them a little bit of blood as well therefore they are getting both technically and therefore we can reserve the cup just for the priests this issue of keeping the cup from the lady is a theological issue for us but it's also symbolic of the things that horse was standing against the idea of new traditions the idea that the clergy is superior to the laity or that they have sacraments that are just for them and that the lady does have to only get half of the Lord's Supper or the mass and so the view that becomes associated with yon horse is called the ultra Quist heresy food-truck which derives from the latin which means both just means that we want both elements bread and wine at the mass and so at the end of the day you have yon horse who is both a national he very much sees himself as a Czech as someone who is standing up for the people of his nation that he wants Bohemia to have its own church to not be governed by other people whether it's the Holy Roman Empire or the Pope in Rome still host was not the power player in the relationship and in fact the Holy Roman Emperor finally got sick and tired of this heretical nuisance in Bohemia and he called for Janos to come to a council that was being called in 1415 called the Council of Constance now we've already looked at the Council of Constance we looked at the papal schism of course the Council of Constance is the very Council where the schism was healed and the Catholic Church was restored what's also at this council that yon host comes to stand trial plus nobody was up against the council was going to be hostile puss was already excommunicated he was already condemned and he was increasingly volatile in his beliefs and certainly the OOTS requests heresy is one of those heresies that the Catholic Church was just not going to hear any debate on in the Holy Roman Emperor Sigismund attempts to offer yon hosts what's called a safe conduct passage and a safe conduct passage is a document that a Emperor will give somebody or a ruler will give somebody that says yes I want to kill you frankly but if you come to this event and meet with me I promise that your life will not be in jeopardy on the way and often it would be negotiated that on the way back your life would not be in jeopardy either who has decided to take the Emperor at his word and he decided to leave Bohemia before the safe-conduct document arrived he heads to the Council of Constance and he arrives and shortly after he arrives the safe-conduct does arrive and unfortunately it wasn't as complete as yon who had requested so for example the safe-conduct does not say at any point that lists will be allowed to defend himself or that he will be allowed to address the council it also denied that he would be allowed safe conduct back to Bohemia now the verdict of history on this has always sided with hosts and not with Sigismund to give a safe conduct passage is only halfway good that only gives you safe conduct on the way there but not on the way back just means that as soon as you set foot heading back they can just sort of immediately arrest you just outside the city gates hypothetically at least or they could send a band of brigands to sort of offer you on the road on the way back you needed safe conduct both ways for it to even be safe conduct and so people have always excoriated Sigismund and the Council of Constance for breaking at least the good faith of a safe conduct passage people are always shocked when Luther is on trial before the holy roman emperor charles v and charles v has given luther a safe conduct passage and luther thinks just like you on horse it's not worth the paper it's written on and sure enough charles v says no you can go back i'm not going to arrest you now i'll come free later and people always sort of scratch their head it's you know you had him you had him in your hands why'd you let him go but almost certainly there does seem to be some concern by Charles the fifth that he not lived down to the legacy of Sigismund in the Catholic Church in the 15th century who offered safe conduct to a heretic and didn't abide by it and for us within a month of him arriving at the council he is arrested he is not allowed to address the council which could only have been expected he is only asked to answer questions so for example he would be asked is this your teaching do you teach this is this what you believe and in some cases he said no he did not believe in the things that were alleged to be his ideas in other cases though he was very confident to say yes that is what I believe and I'm willing to defend that and of course when you're facing a council and they're giving you the option to say no I do not or that I recant you really only have one option either to say no I do not teach that or I do not believe that or to fully recant to abide by any of these teachings at this point the on who host knows everyone knows is to say that I am condemned and what is going to happen to me is what you could expect in July 1415 HUS is brought into the council and one by one his priestly garments are stripped from him as they continue to ask him will you recant and the answer is now of course this is the symbolic de fracking which means you're literally removing the garments that signify his priestly or pastoral role as part of the church and in 1415 condemned excommunicated recalcitrant yonghwa's is burnt to the stake at the Council of Constance now if you think back to all that preaching in the book that Puss wrote and the followers that he attracted and he play that into also the fact that this is a Czech national a real hero for the Bohemian people that has now been badly treated at least if not lied to by the Holy Roman Emperor what you have now is not just a spark you have a powder-keg that is now on fire and about to explode and back in Bohemia that is exactly what happens the news that yon host had been arrested and then defrocked and then finally burnt the stake that his ashes had been scooped up and thrown into the river so that none of his followers would be able to even bury his bones was beyond the pale for many of us as followers and as a result they militarized the hussite League is formed shortly after the burning of yon hosts and in fact they not only militarized but they organize they become a real strong movement that is both galvanized around this injustice that they believe is done to yon hosts but as well as around the theological ideas of HUS himself and the heresies that are associated with Wickliffe and other late medieval reformers in fact so pronounced is the threat of the hussite League that in 1418 the Pope actually calls now at this point of course it's the restored Martin v now that the papal schism is ended but in 1418 martin v calls a crusade against the Hussites and this however only leads to further rioting in the city of prague a year later 1419 you have what's known as the defenestration of Prague which is a bit of a play on words there because defenestration literally means out the window and in fact that's exactly what happened the Hussites stormed the the main administrative building they grabbed the rulers of the city and they threw them out the window and they died either by hitting the ground from a tall height or the mob finished them off when they hit the ground and were maimed and wounded there and the defenestration of Prague is considered one of these watershed moments for the hussite church because it was the first time they stood up not just theologically for themselves but now politically they stood up against these German rulers in the city of Prague who are trying to impose papal and traditional religion on them when they were not willing to accept it and so good was the hussite League at forming its own unity and organizing and the tactics of war against those who are trying to suppress them that actually the Hussites one to the astonishment of everyone historians included in 1420 the Hussites when in a certain level of peaceful cooperation is imposed on Bohemia that from 1420 on at least well into the 17th century the hussite movement continues and it lives alongside the catholic church and catholic adherence to the faith in the same country and this is why there are many people who believe that Bohemia really is the first Protestant nation it has seceded from the Catholic Church this whole church this whole wing and it achieves a level of recognition from the Catholic Church who essentially realized at some point that they can devote all kinds of resources and troops in effort to suppress this heresy but the more they try to suppress it the quicker it grows now one of the last things theologically to say about the Hussites is they were not united theologically the very reality is is that yon hostess theology was not actually all that well developed his chakras beliefs did not really challenge or bring up anything about the doctrines of salvation his attack on indulgences was more about again the abuse of adult ensues than it was on the actual belief in whether or not indulgences were valid at all Utrecht wisdom in other words is not really much to make a church out of once you have community in both kinds you still have to describe what it is what it's there for what its role is in salvation and all these other doctrines that are significantly important for determining the belief of your church and in fact one of the first things to develop in the hussite movement is you have a split theologically in the hussite church the folks that would be called the each request Church are by any account the moderates they are those who really adhere to yon host directly at least as a forerunner or figure to sort of inspire them their focus is on the ultra chrism doctrines of communion in both kinds they want churches that are autonomous in their own way eh but they are moderate their goal is not to throw everything out that is Catholic but rather to get the Catholic Church to get off their back there's another group of Hussites though and they're called the table rights and the table rights are at an entirely different band of weirdos the Tabor Heights are what we call millenarian they are hyper eschatological they take the name table from the mountain in Israel where Christ is supposed to return when it comes back again the Tabor rights focus a great deal on the Second Coming on whether or not it's imminent what will happen afterwards and as is unfortunate with lots of millenarian movements a lot of the activities and the beliefs in the actions of the table rights just get a little strange actually they don't get a little strange they get a lot strange they are frankly crazy let's just put it that way at some point they decide to practice what we might today call free love the sharing of partners they were communist and in the modern sense of the word they wanted to share everything they didn't want to share their own goods they wanted everyone else's goods to be shared as well and that was one of their main rallying cries is the redistribution of wealth amongst Bohemia and they were pretty blatantly anarchical they just wanted to incite sedition I guess after the free level is over it was time to do some fighting so anybody that they could fight on behalf of the table right movement they would do so and so eventually the table rights become a pox on the it requests themselves and in fact the each requests eventually begin to sort of get in talks with the Catholic Church and efforts to try to figure out a way to deal with these crazy people at the end of the day the legacy of yon hosts and the ho sites would be smaller if it weren't for the fact that in about a hundred years after his death and certainly within a hundred years the success of the hussite League you have arised the Protestant Reformation that Luther himself in 1519 at the Leipzig disputation decides to wrap his own Reformation up with that of yon hood notice he doesn't make any appeal to Wickliffe the Lollards in the Wickliffe movement as we already seen did not have the political strength and the effect that the hussite league in the hussite church managed to achieve in bohemia and it is really because of the success of later Protestantism that yon hosts and his image in the hussite church has endured in our minds not just as as an interesting theological radical during the Middle Ages but in many ways as a forerunner to the Reformation

Channel: Ryan Reeves

Views: 125,644

Rating: 4.8728256 out of 5

Keywords: Jan Hus (Author), Hussite (Military Combatant), Martin Luther, Protestantism (Religion), Protestant Reformation (Event), Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary (College/University), Ryan M. Reeves, Theology (Field Of Study), Religion (TV Genre), Roman Catholic Church (Organization Founder), Pope (Religious Leadership Title)

Id: FUnyz9qFqPg

Length: 31min 48sec (1908 seconds)

Published: Mon May 26 2014